Description
Schmitt famously declared that “whoever invokes humanity is cheating.” In contrast, IR scholarship tends to approach humanity as self-evidently normative, and its politics as an antidote to state-centered logics. In contrast to these blunt assertions, this paper attends to the productive politics of humanity. In doing so, it begins at the 19th century, where visions of humanity were, in their hierarchical iteration, part of the logic of civilizing missions. Next, it analyzes the post-WWII liberal-international visions of humanity, which dispensed with these formal hierarchies. And yet, in adopting a universalist vision of humanity, these post-WWII iterations overlooked, and in doing so, reproduced global political hierarchies that course through humanity. Finally, the paper proposes that while these frames afflict the more recent politics of humanity, put forth by China under the rubric “the shared destiny of mankind,” uneven narratives of humanity that emerge from its global political margins and foreground its enduring hierarchies open up the possibility of reparative futures.
