Humanitarianism as a politics of life

Public Culture

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 499-520

  Fassin, Didier ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 36448957280     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2007-007     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. On the distinction between politics of life and biopolitics, see Didier Fassin, "La biopolitique n'est pas une politique de la vie" ("Biopolitics Is Not a Politics of Life"), Sociologies et sociétés 38 (2006): 35-48.
2. For Michel Foucault, biopolitics correspond to the technologies defining, studying, counting, controlling, and, more generally, "normalizing" populations. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
3. See Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926 (1921; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1996).
4. As formulated by Peter Redfield, "Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis," Current Anthropology 20 (2005): 328-61. Redfield's aim is rather to consider humanitarianism as "an array of particular embodied, situated practices emanating from the humanitarian desire to alleviate suffering of others" (330). I, however, think that critical thinking can and must emerge from within the analysis of these practices and this desire.
5. See, for instance, "Reflections on the U.S. Military's Provision of Assistance during and Immediately after Conflict with Iraq" (draft internal paper, MSF, February 18, 2003).
6. From the minutes of the meeting of the administration board of the MSF, March 28, 2003 (hereafter cited as MSF minutes). These sessions are always recorded and afterward transcribed and summarized.
7. MSF minutes.
8. MSF minutes.
9. MSF minutes. Subsequently, however, in a retrospective evaluation of his organization's activity during this period, Jean-Hervé Bradol, president of MSF, was to comment: "On the whole, Iraq has been a small emergency for us" (Bradol's internal report: MSF, "Rapport moral 2003").
10. MSF minutes.
11. MSF, Messages: Journal interne de Médecins sans frontières, no. 124 (May 2003): 2.
12. Rony Brauman and Pierre Salignon, "Irak: La posture du missionnaire" ("Iraq: The Missionary Position"), in A l'ombre des guerres justes (In the Shadow of Just Wars), ed. Fabrice Weissman (Paris: Flammarion, 2003), 287.
13. References are taken from Brauman and Salignon, "Irak: La posture du missionnaire," 275-91; and from an interview with Bradol in Le Figaro on March 24, 2004. These comments may be contrasted with the analysis of the postwar situation by Médecins du monde (Doctors of the World), in "L'Irak en plein chaos" ("Iraq in Full Chaos"), Médecins du monde: Le journal destiné aux donateurs (September 2003): "Despite the end of the military conflict, Iraq finds itself in an alarming situation. The consequences of war are numerous: insecurity, shortages, risk of epidemics, technological backwardness. The international network of Médecins du monde has massively responded to the Iraqi emergency" (2).
14. MSF, "La charte de Médecins sans frontières" ("Charter of Médecins sans frontières"), www.paris.msf.org/site/site.nsf/pages/charte (accessed June 14, 2007).
15. The assessment of failure comes from the desk officer in charge of the program, Pierre Salignon, in an interview in Le Monde on May 8, 2003: "For those who have tried to achieve an independent humanitarian action, difficulties have been overwhelming and, in the end, we have failed."
16. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, trans. Marilène Raiola (Paris: Seuil, 1997);
17. published in English as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998).
18. See Didier Fassin, "L'ordre moral du monde: Essai d'anthropologie de l'intolérable" ("The Moral Order of the World: Toward an Anthropology of the Intolerables"), in Les constructions de l'intolérable (The Construction of the Intolerable), ed. Didier Fassin and Patrice Bourdelais (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 17-50.
19. Note the evolution from Michael Pugh, "Military Intervention and Humanitarian Action: Trends and Issues," Disasters 22 (1998): 339-51 (on the war in Bosnia),
20. to Susan Woodward, "Humanitarian War: A New Consensus," Disasters 25 (2001): 331-44 (on the bombing of Kosovo).
21. On the notion of humanitarian government, see Didier Fassin, "Humanitarianism, a Nongovernmental Government," in Non-governmental Politics, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 149-59.
22. See Rony Brauman, L'action humanitaire (Humanitarian Action) (Paris: Flammarion, 2000), 61. He recognizes, however, that " humanitarianism cannot be considered apolitical" (61).
23. See Agamben, Homo sacer: Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue, 145.
24. See Liisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995);
25. and Michel Agier, Aux bords du monde, les réfugiés (Refugees at the Margins of the World) (Paris: Flammarion, 2002).
26. See the testimony of Bernard Granjon, then in charge of Médecins du monde's mission in Rwanda, about his discussion with François Mitterrand, "Quatre-vingt minutes avec François Mitterand" ("Eighty Minutes with François Mitterand"), in "Le génocide des Tutsis du Rwanda: Une abjection pour l'humanité, un échec pour les humanitaires" ("The Tutsi Genocide in Rwanda: Abjection for Humanity, Failure for Humanitarianism"), special issue, Humanitaire: Enjeux, pratiques, débats, no. 10 (2004): 37-42.
27. See Jean-Hervé Bradol, "L'ordre international cannibale et l'action humanitaire" ("The Sacrificial International Order and Humanitarian Action"), in Weissman, A l'ombre des guerres justes, 32.
28. This dichotomy is of course destabilized when military and humanitarian agents become one, as described by Sherene Razack, Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair: Peacekeeping and the New Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
29. "Necropolitics" is a concept proposed by Achille Mbembe as a corollary to Foucault's biopolitics; see Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics, " Public Culture 15 (2003): 11-40.
30. See Jean-Hervé Bradol, "Le camp des victimes" ("The Side of the Victims") in "1971-2001: 30 ans d'action humanitaire" ("1971-2001: Thirty Years of Humanitarian Action"), special issue, Infos Médecins sans frontières 89 (2001): 2.
31. See Laurence Hugues, "Liberia, là où la vie ne vaut pas une guinée" ("Liberia: Where Life Is Not Worth a Guinea"), Messages: Journal interne de Médecins sans frontières, no. 124 (2003): 3-4.
32. On the process of constructing victims, see Didier Fassin, "La cause des victimes" ("The Cause of the Victims"), Les temps modernes, no. 627 (2004): 73-91.
33. See the analysis proposed by Michael Ignatieff, "The New American Way of War," New York Review of Books 47, no. 12 (2000).
34. See the estimate suggested in Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Gilbert Burnham, "Mortality before and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Cluster Sample Survey," Lancet 364 (2004): 1857-64.
35. In the organization's internal critical journal, significantly called DazibAG (no. 125 [2003]: 27), François Calas, the head of the MSF team in Iraq and one of those who had been abducted by the Iraqi police, publicly expressed his frustration as the organization left the country: "The decision taken by the French section to leave Baghdad seemed to me very precipitate and has been justified after the fact on fallacious grounds. Rather than qualifying the crisis, we disqualified it. Ironically, one could say that we've come full circle and because we failed to anticipate events, haste prevailed from beginning to end of our intervention."
36. The financial conditions of Arjan Erkel's release in Dagestan in 2004 have been publicly exposed, with the Dutch government claiming €1 million from the Swiss section of MSF to reimburse the ransom it paid to the kidnappers. See Philippe Ryfman, "Humanitarian Action on Trial," Messages: Journal interne de Médecins sans frontières, no. 137 (2005): 16.
37. The decision to give free antiretroviral drugs to national staff was finally reached by the board of directors in 2003. Nevertheless, Bradol notes that during his field visits, local staff members "were not usually aware of this decision." See MSF, "Rapport moral 2003."
38. The epidemiological study is Mani Sheik, Maria Isabel Gutierrez, Paul Bolton, Paul Spiegel, Michel Thieren, and Gilbert Burnham, "Deaths among Humanitarian Workers," British Medical Journal 321 (2000): 166-68. Between 1985 and 1998, 382 deaths were reported among staff of United Nations and nongovernmental bodies, of which almost a third occurred during the genocide in Rwanda. However, Bradol, who conducted a mission for MSF in 1994, comments: "If we asked humanitarian organizations for the list of their employees who died during the genocide, 90% would be unable to give it. And this gives an indication of what has or has not been done to help people when they really needed help."
39. See Bradol, "La commémoration amnésique des humanitaires" ("The Amnesie Commemoration of Humanitarian Actors"), Humanitaire: Enjeux, pratiques, débats, no. 10(2004): 12.
40. Historically, the emergence of the second age of humanitarianism, with the "French doctors" returning from the war in Biafra, was a reaction to the silence of the Red Cross, wedded to its principle of neutrality. Testimony in favor of the victims becomes, for MSF and even more for Médecins du monde, a key dimension of their action. See the six volumes of the series Prises de parole publiques de MSF (Public Positions), ed. Laurence Binet (Paris: MSF, 2003-7), on Ethiopia 1984, El Salvador 1988, Rwanda 1994 and 1995, and refugees from Rwanda 1994-97.
41. On the testimony of MSF and Médecins du monde, compared with that of the local organizations Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) and Natal, the Israel Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War, see Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, L'empire du traumatisme: Enquête sur la condition de victime (The Empire of Trauma: Inquiry on the Condition of Victims) (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 281-319.
42. On life as "a story with enough coherence to be told," see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 85.