Life-Making Under Humanitarian Law

This review explores both the profound limits and the far-reaching effects of humanitarian law, including both international humanitarian law and refugee law. Life-making under humanitarian law—meaning both how this law apprehends, disregards, and directs life and how people navigate in, negotiate, and engage this law—happens in conditions of regulated, directed violence. The paths along which humanitarian law directs violence are shaped by colonial orders and racialized hierarchies and elaborated through temporal and classificatory schemas concerned with distinguishing among forms of life and managing threats. The delineation and proliferation of ever-shifting status categories (such as civilian, combatant, and refugee) are at once the product of and grounds for operational decisions in humanitarian law. Tracing the frameworks for decision-making in this law, we highlight the centrality of indeterminacy, erasability, and conjecture in a legal order and practice that frequently increases vulnerability, even as it is meant to offer protection.