In the 1990s, the humanitarian charities finalised their entry into the development mainstream. They became partners in a humanitarian-development complex associated with military intervention, liberal governance and permanent emergency. As they followed in the wake of more powerful agencies, they also adopted the rhetoric and discourses of official aid. Following the collapse of both communism and apartheid, human rights were confirmed as the guiding principle of international governance. Charity regulation had previously prevented the advocacy of human rights. But after the Declaration on the Right to Development in 1993, the charities all signed up to a ‘rights-based approach’. This was a human rights framework more individualised, more focused on basic rights and less targeted at the inequalities arising out of structural injustice. Rights allowed the humanitarians to depoliticise their work and for charity to be accepted as a part of the common sense solution to poverty at home and abroad. This was a type of charitable humanitarianism that emerged ‘after empire’ and which was palatable to both governments and mass donating publics.