Man\power and violence at the thresholds of humanitarian and anthropological reason

To what question is “humanitarianism” the response? Why do you help someone who is not like you, who is also far away from you? What are the logics, the rationale, underlying the imperative to organize help for distant others, to try to alleviate their suffering? When the question is posed this way, “the human” underlying much theorizing about humanitarianism merely “conjures communities that include some people while treating all others as theoretically capable of incorporation” (Li, 2021, p. 235). In this formulation, as Rizvi puts it in her contribution to this forum, humanitarianism rests on a politics of “compassion for the suffering Other—a model enmeshed in global hierarchies and dependent on the sentimental feelings of the powerful.” Rizvi's interlocutors, British Muslim aid workers in Syria, challenge this ethical calculus: “For believers attuned to conceptions of Islamic ethical community, the question of why British Muslims would travel to Syria may make less sense than the question Why wouldn't they?” Rizvi's provocative question unsettles the binaries—compassionate self/suffering Other, foreign/native, narrators/narrated, charity/violence—emanating from both humanitarianism and the anthropological critiques of humanitarian reason. Solana, in her account of Sahrawi self-determination after nearly three decades of symbolically and structurally violent “humanitarian peace,” calls attention to the regimes of temporality operating within humanitarian governance. Both authors lay bare humanitarian regimes of mobility that “privilege the movements of some as … they stigmatize or forbid the movements of others” (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013, p. 188). For nearly 10 years now, I have been studying and writing about the 2014 West African Ebola pandemic, focusing on the intergovernmental and regional responses to this public health crisis via the racial, social, and cultural logics of humanitarian intervention. I have done so with the intention of moving beyond arguments that critique humanitarianism's “politics of life” and its representational politics, as well as its biopolitical management of life. Among the many sites for this work are museum collections and exhibits. To my knowledge, the 2014 Ebola outbreak is the only pandemic to have spurred museums to so prolifically create and exhibit collections about the crisis, as it was still unfolding, in London, Atlanta, Njala, and Conakry, among other places. Together, these exhibits offer a fruitful site for understanding how the humanitarian impulse to collect, contain, enclose, and showcase is simultaneously fashioned as a practice of charity, care, and concern for the suffering Other. From these exhibits, alongside my other ethnographic material, I am learning much about the organizations that are building historical narratives and institutional memory related to their contributions to the international mission to halt Ebola transmission in West Africa. These organizations reveal that humanitarian intervention is enacted and experienced as a securitizing process, one that is subtended by a global, racial-capitalist (imperialist?) order. Both Rizvi's and Solana's articles called to mind an exhibit featured in my study, Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS, which opened in London at the Imperial War Museum in November 2015, just as the Ebola epidemic was winding down in Sierra Leone. An installment in the War Story Project series, which highlights modalities of contemporary warfare, the small, one-room exhibit recounted the British military's involvement, beginning in August 2014, in two nominally humanitarian operations: Operation Gritrock (Ebola in Sierra Leone) and Operation Shader (ISIS in Iraq and Syria). The exhibit's two “extremes” were distinguished chromatically—blue-green backgrounded all Ebola virus-related material; a warm orange tone underlaid materials related to drone warfare against ISIS and the humanitarian delivery (also by drone) of supplies to displaced Yazidis and other religious and ethnic minorities. According to the exhibit's curator, Matt Brosnan, using complementary colors to offset the two operations helped forestall any facile association between “religious extremism” and a deadly viral disease. (Whether the curation team succeeded in dissociating virality and terrorism, while also juxtaposing them in the exhibit, is up for discussion.)1 On a wall near the exhibit room's entryway, a word-cloud diagram offers a semantic map of the military missions’ organizing concepts. The diagram is split in two along a diagonal, one side filled with keywords for Operation Gritrock, and the other for Operation Shader. THREAT, capitalized in boldface, sits atop the diagram. “Command and Control,” “Reconnaissance,” “Training,” and “Manpower” edge into the two sides, demonstrating the relevance of each of these keywords for both operations. Yet, of the overlapping concepts presented there, only “manpower” neatly straddles the two. “Man” and “power” are divided by the diagonal line, drawing attention to each component. Man\power's position in the war-museum exhibit's semantic map is apt, for at the root of the critical study of humanitarianism is also a critique of “man” and universalist conceptions of the human, which ostensibly form the basis of humanitarian principles and action—and the social relations of power prefiguring and engendered through the ethical, legal, political, professional, and organizational deployment of humanitarian reason. “Humanitarianism,” notes political theorist Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2021, p. 98), “is animated and made possible by white supremacy.” She continues by quoting Rodríguez's (2009, p. 11) definition of white supremacy: “a logic of social organisation that produces regimented, institutionalised, and militarised conceptions of hierarchised ‘human’ difference.” “Humanitarianism,” Pallister-Wilkins continues, drawing on W. E. B. DuBois and Sylvia Wynter, and my work in Sierra Leone (Benton, 2016), “plays a historical and contemporary role in the creation and consolidation of … ‘whiteness’ and … veils the racial hierarchies within universalist understandings of the ‘human’” (p. 98). Rizvi's and Solana's articles sketch the brief contours of how the “securitized present,” in which humanitarian action unfolds, draws on, organizes, and produces hierarchies of difference—how, as legal anthropologist Darryl Li (2021, p. 232) writes, a “complex idiom notionally directed at all of humanity [is] put into practice in the face of lived differences.” Man\power also gestures toward humanitarian labor and the legitimate use of force. Operations Shader and Gritrock are both glossed as military humanitarianism, as if to distance political violence from a conventional form of humanitarianism and humanitarian work—which, in Rizvi's article, is understood as transnational, intergovernmental emergency aid delivered by foreign agents. In Rizvi's case study, British charity regulations insist that “violence is categorically distinct from charity,” enabling the British government to cast suspicion on British Muslim acts of charity and criminalize British Muslim aid workers and volunteers. As Solana and Rizvi show quite poignantly, violence and humanitarian intervention rarely operate independently, and they often coproduce and instrumentalize each other. Solana, describing the plight of Sahrawis living in exile under the “humanitarian peace” that never gives way to Western Saharan sovereignty, reveals the “structural and symbolic violence … that recognizes rights for all humans yet systematically postpones their materialization for many forced migrants.” Over those decades of waiting, the Polisario Front built its nation-state using humanitarian aid and eventually resumed armed struggled against Moroccan occupation after nearly three decades of cease-fire. In the case of British Muslims providing aid in Syria, Rizvi argues that “military violence underpins many state projects of ‘care,’” in which “bloodshed is not just tolerated but often viewed as a lesser evil that is proportional and necessary to secure the greater good. In this sense, it is not violence itself but the telos of violence that characterizes it as humanitarian or not” (emphasis in the original). Rizvi thus raises the question of who legitimizes particular acts, actors, and organizations as humanitarian. In light of my writing about the relationships among white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and humanitarian governmentality, I have been drawn into a subset of scholarly conversations about qualified humanitarianisms—another register in which the legitimacy of humanitarian aid and actors is assessed. Qualified humanitarianism, in other words, consists of organized emergency assistance activities that arise not from liberal, secular Western foundations or large international organizations but from politico-ethical traditions located elsewhere and based on affinities and solidarities beyond the human (or the liberal conception of the human criticized by Wynter [2003]). In the scholarly and gray literature, these forms of humanitarianism might be called “vernacular,” “demotic,” “from below,” or “grassroots,” often with an eye toward (1) provincializing or decentering the large, international (racialized) organizations that have defined, professionalized, and operationalized humanitarian principles, and (2) making room “to imagine [humanitarian] alternatives” (Brković, 2017). Yet I wonder whether the hegemony of capital-H humanitarianism is reinforced by the ever-expanding typology of humanitarianisms and by the affixing of qualifiers like “from below,” “vernacular,” or even “diasporic” (Brković, 2017; DEMAC, 2016, 2022; Fechter & Schwittay, 2019; Kloos, 2020). In these formulations, does humanitarianism remain the standard against which all other aid in crisis is measured, into which all emergency assistance must be subsumed? Both Rizvi and Solana tackle these questions about the political, epistemic, and intellectual utility of qualified humanitarianisms. Their discussions linking violence and humanitarianism raise the question of legitimacy, not only that of certain forms of violence, but also that of specific acts of care, charity, and aid vis-à-vis humanitarian agendas. For Solana's interlocutors, humanitarian peace coexists with military occupation; Sahrawi activists “are routinely harassed by the police, arbitrarily detained, tortured, subjected to military trials, and … still live with unresolved ‘disappearances.’” This all takes place this even as they wait for the architects of the peace process to deliver on their promises of a referendum. Rizvi, meanwhile, cautions against efforts to assess whether Muslim volunteerism constitutes a “genuine” humanitarianism; assessing authenticity “reinscribes a hierarchy by which Muslim volunteers must assimilate their practices of care within the criteria of either the state or the social scientist.” Perhaps most powerfully, through a careful reading of her case material, Rizvi shows how her interlocutors’ “efforts at practicing iṣlāḥ, though not immune from the hegemony of humanitarian reason, are not merely humanitarianism by another name.” They engage in charitable giving, in volunteerism, even taking up arms against oppressive regimes. In doing so, they base their action in their relation to God and in “ethicopolitical struggle over generic empathy.” British Muslim volunteer and the beneficiaries of charitable aid are not in an asymmetrical relation, as would be assumed in anthropological critiques of humanitarian aid. They are, rather, both subject(ed) to the global war on terror as putative threats to British national security. This has implications for any examination of humanitarian regimes of mobility, which are addressed in Rizvi's article in terms of whose movements are legible to and sanctioned by the state; scholars working in this domain must attend to humanitarian regimes of temporality, whose governmentality is undergirded by constant vigilance for security threats, ongoing risk assessment, and preparedness discourse (and thus, the politics of preemption, forward deterrence, and forecasting). Solana offers additional food for thought regarding the temporal regimes of humanitarian governmentality. Time and its management become the ethical and political terrain on which Sahrawi revolution and self-determination plays out. Decolonization is deferred during a period of humanitarian peace, in what she calls “the imperial meantime”—a caesura in which Morocco has captured and exploited “the political advantage of time” to urbanize and settle Western Sahara's land, extract its resources, and use it as a diplomatic bargaining chip with the United States and its other Western allies. I began by asking: To what question is “humanitarianism” a response? The two authors here propose and answer a different, but complementary, set of questions: For what types of problems is humanitarianism—as an ethos, as a political practice, as a set of legal norms—presumed to be the solution? What symbolic, material, and political resources does humanitarian governmentality mobilize and draw on? What are the boundaries of humanitarian reason, space, and time? The two articles show how humanitarian governance/governmentality, in a “securitized present,” often embodies, draws on, organizes, and (re)produces hierarchies of difference, as it also shapes regimes of mobility, space, and time, and as it dictates the legitimacy of certain forms of violence and care.