Innocence

Calls for humanitarian interventions are often based on the urgent need to protect “innocent lives”. As a moral and ethical concept, innocence refers to the absence of guilt, moral wrongdoing, and responsibility. Either as a sinless, pre-fall, Garden-of- Eden condition in Judeo-Christian theology or as the pre-social “state of nature” in modern Enlightenment philosophy, the notion of innocence that historically shapes humanitarian sensitivity designates an apolitical status of “epistemic and moral purity”, uncorrupted and uncontaminated by power, and best epitomized by children. This dictionary entry questions the cross-cultural universality of the concept and its supposed apolitical character, y drawing on historical and anthropological scholarship on the subject across the global South