context of instrumentalisation of humanitarian rhetoric, best illustrated by the Ethiopian government’s June 2021 announcement of a so-called ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ in Tigray, all the while continuing to hamper aid delivery. Apart from the intended or unintended negative side-effects presented so far, there is a number of ways in which humanitarian corridors have been blatantly manipulated in history. Occasionally, supply routes opened on humanitarian grounds have been abused by armed groups to smuggle weapons and munitions or recruit and repatriate troops. More often
visa regime, as well as the consequences on people’s ability to seek safe and legal routes into the EU, becomes invisible. Indeed, if the governance of migration is reduced to a humanitarian question of saving lives and to a question of combating the smugglers, its technocratic management appears to be beyond politics. In spite of the humanitarian rhetoric often employed or the declared aim to target
all the uprisings had been quelled and a great number of Serbs, Bulgarians and Russian (the volunteers) had been killed. He argued that the Tsar had in fact started a war not in order to save human beings but for his honour and fame, not as the representative of the Slavs but as the leader of a great European power poised to show resolve and power; in other words, the humanitarian rhetoric was simply a smoke-screen for political and other tangible interests. In a series
to the liberal-humanitarian rhetoric of empire, which cloaked the more brutal reality that often lay beneath the surface, to demand their rights as imperial citizens and loyal subjects of the Queen. While the failure of Britain to fulfil the promises of imperial citizenship or the rising socio-cultural dominance of imperial ‘whiteness’ (see Chapters 3 and 5 ) may have pushed these communities away