Probing the humanitarian securitisation approach to great-power wars: from Bush's 'war on terror' to Putin's invasion of Ukraine

How do great-power leaders instrumentalise humanitarianism in sustaining the institutional and public mandate demanded by their war agendas? We examine the 'humanitarian securitisation' approach adopted by powerful state leaders as the domestic credibility and popularity of their war efforts become increasingly more difficult to guarantee over time. We define humanitarian securitisation as a discursive-hermeneutic process through which powerful initiator states frame the humanitarian crises arising from the terrorism and internal conflicts confronting less powerful target states as existential threats to the former's own survival to bolster and justify their agendas further. Using Bush's 'war on terror' and Putin's Ukraine invasion as empirical cases, we argue that the humanitarian securitisation resulting from the artificial insertion of humanitarianism into the securitisation process becomes a double-edged sword that reinforces the legitimising and mobilising powers required by great-power leaders to pursue their narrow self-interests, but at the risk of being entangled into long drawn-out wars that damage genuine humanitarian efforts. In framing these 'extraterritorial' humanitarian crises as collective borderless existential threats that all parties affected must decisively defeat, this ad hoc and predatory process of humanitarian securitisation alters the form and substance of contemporary humanitarianism in a way that ultimately exacerbates existing power hierarchies.