The geopolitics of militarism and humanitarianism (original) (raw)
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Geographies of Humanitarian Violence
Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence-not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman's notion critiquing "lesser evil" solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and "moral technologies" that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in "need." At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses-often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility, and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.
Introduction: Geographies of Humanitarian Violence
Violence and humanitarianism are conventionally understood to be in opposition to one another. And yet, humanitarianism is also deeply entangled with violence—not only in tending to the after effects of human or natural catastrophe, but, at times, also (re)producing and perpetuating ongoing conditions of violence. Taking up Weizman’s notion critiquing ‘lesser evil’ solutions to human suffering, we extend the exploration of humanitarian interventions to the structural and symbolic violences enacted through the institutions, mechanisms, instruments, and ‘moral technologies’ that are mobilized in the governance of people and spaces deemed in ‘need’. At the same time we attend to the thresholds within humanitarian forms of engagement where slippage into assaultive violence condenses—often through the spatial policing of circulation, the drive toward legibility and/or opaque processes of conditional vetting. These moments and spaces shed light on the multiple, hierarchical visions of humanity that animate humanitarianism.
The Narratives of post-Cold War Geopolitics; The Geopolitical Narrative of ‘Humanitarianism’
The Narratives of post-Cold War Geopolitics; The Geopolitical Narrative of ‘Humanitarianism’, 2021
In this essay, I will be talking about the formation of new geopolitical imaginations in the period after the end of the Cold War. This I will do on the hand of the following research question; “How have representations of ‘chaos’ and ‘crisis’ structured post-Cold War geopolitical visions? In your answer, please engage with at least one specific geopolitical vision or ‘scribe’.” I think that this question is extremely relevant due to the fact that it offers us the opportunity to contemplate how our current “narrative” understanding came about in the post-Cold War period through the “chaos” of vertigo. Thereby I also hope to shed some light upon the spatial dimension of connectivity that was an important factor in this creation of a new “narrative”. In the process of answering this question, I will be taking a “discursive” approach centered on “narrative”, thereby methodically arguing about the research question. To be structural I have subdivided this essay into three paragraphs of discussion, having written and handled this middle part I plan to repeat the most important findings in my conclusion before finally giving an answer to the initial question. In the first paragraph, I will give an understanding of discourse and the influences of “chaos” and “crisis” in their subsequent structuring of possibly “hegemonic” post-Cold War “narratives”. As for my second chapter, I will continue by explaining the discursive reality of the post-Cold War period as influenced by the feeling of “vertigo” and the “narrative” attempts to make sense of this new era. In the last paragraph before the conclusion, I intend to give examples of influential “scribes” and their geopolitical “narrative” visions. In this essay, I will be taking on the subject of humanitarianism by exploring its potency and looking into the subsequent “narrative” paradigms of humanitarian reason to find out what kind of actions and visions they support. The main source of literature that supports this subject, will be of the author Didier Fassin with his book "Humanitarian Reason, A Moral History of the Present". I will be taking on this topic on the hand of the following research question; “Didier Fassin (2012) argues that “humanitarianism is the most potent political and geopolitical force of our world”. Discuss, with reference to at least one specific example, how that which Fassin refers to as ‘humanitarian reason’ structures contemporary international interventions and geopolitical visions?” Although humanitarianism is of great importance to how we picture our contemporary world there is little attention to such a banal practice that shapes our everyday lives. Therefore there are a lot of misunderstandings in regards to our conception of depicted morality and the deeper meaning behind the actions taken in its name. To successfully answer such an intricate question it is important that I take a structural approach, I will do this by subdividing the middle part into three paragraphs, followed by a subsequent conclusion in which the most important matters are repeated before a final answer is given. In my first paragraph, I will be taking on the reason behind the dominance of humanitarianism by focusing on its discursive qualities as the raison d'etre behind its potent force. As for the second paragraph I will continue with exploring Fassin's concept of humanitarian reason so as to find out about its “narrative” workings and the societal paradigm of morality it is built upon. Having done this I hope to give concrete examples of how Fassin perceives the moral structuring of contemporary geopolitical visions and military interventions on the basis of humanitarian reason in the third paragraph, before coming to the last part of my discussion and conclusion.
Review of International Studies, 2012
What can critical geopolitics contribute to an understanding of the political dynamics of humanitarianism within International Relations? This article demands a reconsideration of the concept of humanitarianism by examining the spatial ordering of international society and the geopolitics of international law that condition our understanding of humanitarian agency and conduct within IR. The focus on critical geopolitics seeks to identify the normative structure of humanitarianism and how humanitarian claims – which are seemingly universal – are constituted through specific geopolitical discourses that structure agency and conduct within international life. Considering how humanitarianism is discursively structured as a geopolitical concept involves taking humanitarianism beyond its methodological privileging of impartiality, neutrality, and universality in making sense of humanitarianism. Critical humanitarianism does not accept the grounding of humanitarianism within an intuitive m...
Hotspots and the geographies of humanitarianism
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2018
This article focuses on the humanitarian geographies of the hotspots. It argues that hotspots are humanitarian in both idea and practice by raising two fundamental questions that form the basis for the article: what is humanitarianism, and who is it for? The article understands humanitarianism as a logic of government that is more expansive than the mainstream ideal that emerged in the 20th-century. Instead humanitarianism is understood as concerning logics developed to both effectively manage disaster and to secure (in both senses of the word) imminently mobile populations for the maintenance of liberal order alongside and through the securing of life. The article takes an expansive view of humanitarian government to consider genealogies of caring and population security logics in the establishment of modern, western and liberal states. The article unsettles some of the traditional geographical understandings of humanitarianism as care for distant strangers and considers the ways c...
A Microscopic Insurgent: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2009
Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone, but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. But the commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice.
Leveraging the idea of 'Humanitarian War'
In attempting to bring the frame of war more directly into the discussion over humanitarian intervention in the early 1990s, Adam Roberts quipped that '"humanitarian war" is an oxymoron that may yet become a reality'. No longer was humanitarianism only meant to restrain the means of warfare, but the violent and political logic of war was now supposed to serve the caring and universal dictates of humanitarianism. This essay takes the chance to theorize the idea of humanitarian war further to help improve our understanding of the reality that has become of it, where not only humanitarian interventions or coercive enactments of the 'Responsibility to Protect' feature humanitarian casus belli, but even more geopolitically motivated wars often do as well. It notes how scholarship on such phenomena often rests on overly restrictive and sometimes only implicit notions of how a humanitarian justification can and does influence the practice of war. It then offers a deeper and more plausible theorization of humanitarian war, laying out a range of possible forms and a central tendency that ties them together. This essay closes by discussing some of the benefits of grounding future analyses of humanitarian war in the theorization on offer.