There are 3,418 occurrences of humanity in the HE Corpus. Several organisations and programmes have names containing humanity, e.g. Humanity First, Agenda for Humanity, Humanity Road and Humanity Crew. These proper nouns are included in the total count. However, they were excluded for the purposes of collocational analysis.

In humanitarian discourse, humanity is used to refer to four distinct but connected concepts:

1. the collective of human beings;

2. the human condition;

3. the quality of being humane; and

4. a humanitarian principle.

Humanity as a collective

When used as a synonym for mankind, humanitarians mainly refer to humanity in order to:

• assert their raison d'être as an organisation, i.e. to serve humanity;

• state the ultimate goal of their activities, i.e to help and safeguard humanity; and

• describe the problems they work towards overcoming, i.e challenges facing humanity.

Humanity as a condition

Humanity is also used to refer to the state of being human: the human condition. In humanitarian discourse this notion is best exemplified by the expressions common humanity and shared humanity with 40 and 24 occurrences, respectively. We humans have at least one thing in common—we are all individuals of the same species.

Humanitarians appeal to the notion of a common shared humanity as a justification for the activities they engage in. No matter how different humans can be among themselves, there seems to be a common denominator for the human experience. Humanitarians help vulnerable humans because they are simply human.

The concept of dehumanisation emerges from this understanding of humanity. Groups of humans may fail to relate to other humans on the most basic level to a point where they do not identify themselves with someone else's suffering. With 25 occurrences of suffering humanity in the HE Corpus, it may be therefore argued that acknowledging suffering in others is one of the driving forces of humanitarian action. Humanitarians are compelled to help other humans affected by situations that cause suffering. This may be why humanitarians describe certain groups of people as being denied or stripped of their humanity when their suffering is ignored.

Humanity as a common denominator (seeing others' suffering and felling compelled to help) gives rise to an understanding of humanity in terms of dignity. i.e. what it is considered to be an acceptable human existence.

The excerpt above summarises this notion of humanity with a set of three components, i.e. health, freedom and humans rights. If one of these components is disregarded, then a person's humanity is denied or disrespected. A human without freedom, health and rights is no human at all.

Humanity as being humane

Humanity can be conceptualised as something that can be removed from an individual by either active objectification or passive disregard. On the one hand, a person is dehumanised when she or he is stripped of their humanity. i.e. they are considered to be less human. On the other hand, when a person's suffering elicits compassion in another, one may feel compelled to help improve that person's situation. The third notion of humanity is therefore centred on the idea of alleviating human suffering through actions.

Here, helping can be conceptualised more precisely an act of humanity. One sets out to help someone vulnerable because, in principle, it is usually in one's nature—or rather one's humanity—to recognise someone else's humanity in their suffering. This is also known as compassion.

In essence, humanitarian action consists of activities aimed at helping people. Treating humans with compassion implies respecting their humanity (in its sense of human condition). This meaning of humanity can also be expressed with the adjective humane, which accounts for 370 occurrences in the HE Corpus.

Humane combines mainly with nouns signifying:

• activities and codes regarding the treatment of people (e.g. humane treatment, humane policy, humane immigration, humane management, humane standard, humane reform); and

• life conditions of people (e.g. humane conditions; humane life; humane existence).

Humanity as humanitarian principle

The notions of humanity as a condition and humanity as compassion inform what is known as the principle of humanity in the humanitarian domain. It can also be found described as a value.

Below are the only three explicit definitions for humanity as a principle that were found in the HE Corpus.

In conclusion, humanity is a principle that rests on the two following dimensions:

• respect for everyone's life in that every person is an individual that deserves an acceptable human existence (dignity and health); and

• prevention and alleviation of any human suffering.

Frequent words that accompany a term are known as collocates. A given term and its collocates form collocations. These can be extracted automatically based on statistics and curated manually to explore interactions with concepts.

Comparisons over time between organisation types with the greatest contribution (NGO_Fed, NGO, RC, IGO and WHS organisations) proves to be meaningful. Below is an histogram for the top yearly collocation for each of the five organisations with the greatest contribution as well as across all organisation types.

Most multi-word expression containing humanity were found as part of proper nouns, which were excluded from the analysis. Collocational analysis revealed only one conceptual combination formed by humanity.

• crime against humanity

This conceptual combinations can be further examined on demand. Please use the Discussion form at the bottom of this LAR.

Occurrences of humanity were highest in 2016. However, 2009 saw the highest relative frequency with 1,119%.

Europe generated the greatest number of occurrences with a relative frequency of 63, which puts this region in sixth place in terms of relative frequency. With the second greatest number of occurrences, North America recorded the highest relative frequency with 164%.

The top 5 organisation types with the highest relative frequency of WHS, Project, NGO_Fed, RC and C/B.

Activity_Report provide the greatest number of occurrences. However, humanity obtains the highest relative frequency in Strategy documents with 184%.