Abstract
Beginning in the late twentieth century a strong wave of published research has been using the frame of social suffering, which is the broadest and deepest form of human suffering. Social suffering as a social movement promotes the concept as capturing the essence of how peoples’ suffering is produced and conditioned by society. Social suffering researchers use a wide variety of evidence to capture the catastrophic burden of those trapped by the human plight of tormenting perplexity. Implicitly if not explicitly, social suffering has come to represent a call to moral responsibility and humanitarian care. After briefly reviewing the history of the acceptance and rejection of humanitarianism as a moral compass for social science research, I argue that this wave will return the social sciences to again recognize the moral power of humanitarianism. This argument is followed by recent developments that operate to make some researchers revise earlier judgements in which humanitarianism was dismissed as a misguided fanaticism that had no part to play in academic life. Removal of these conceptual and methodological barriers will make possible a wide range of research that will help guide the design of social changes that have the potential to greatly alleviate suffering locally and globally.
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Wilkinson, I. (2017). Social Suffering and the Enigma of Humanitarianism. In: Anderson, R. (eds) Alleviating World Suffering. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 67. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51391-1_4
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