Tag Archives: humanitarianism

AAG 2013 CFP: On the Question of Violence in the Humanitarian Present

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Lisa Bhungalia (Syracuse University) and i are organizing a paper session for the AAGs:

April 9-13, 2013 – Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting: LOS ANGELES 2013

On the Question of Violence in the Humanitarian Present

Organizers: Lisa Bhungalia (Syracuse University), Tish Lopez (University of Washington)
Discussant: Craig Jones (University of British Columbia)

Humanitarianism has long had its place within colonial legacies serving often, as Derek Gregory (2012) puts it, as the “velvet glove wrapped around the iron fist of colonialism.” The recent emphasis in U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine on non-kinetic and humanitarian measures as a means of undermining insurgency would appear to confirm this point. Indeed, the lines between humanitarian and military are increasingly rendered indistinct. But more than simply a blurring or collapse we should ask: What is the relationship between humanitarianism and violence? Moreover, in what ways does humanitarianism serve as a means of managing and modulating violence? This inquiry has been at the fore of Eyal Weizman’s (2011) recent work in which he suggests that an “economy of violence is calculated and managed” through various humanitarian, moral and legal technologies that legitimate and underwrite the continued operation of violence. It is the collusion of these humanitarian technologies with military and political powers that form what he calls the “humanitarian present.”

This paper session invites theoretical and/or empirical research that engages the “humanitarian present” from a diverse range of approaches and perspectives. It explores the ways in which humanitarianism is mobilized discursively and materially as a means for modulating contemporary violence and for governing the displaced. What are the specificities and limits of the concept of the “humanitarian present?” How are displaced populations or those living in zones of ongoing war and occupation negotiating the humanitarian regimes that govern their lives? We invite papers that engage such questions through a broad range of approaches and lenses that may include but are not limited to:

-       Empirical or theoretical engagements with the relationship between humanitarianism and violence

-       Humanitarianism, modern war and biopolitics

-       Post-World War II legal regimes, international humanitarian law and human rights

-       Genealogies of humanitarianism

-       Economies of violence

-       Counterinsurgency

-       Constructions of conflict, crisis and zones of intervention

-       Geopolitics of aid

-       Colonial and post-colonial governance

-       Militarism and everyday life

Please submit abstracts of 250 words to organizers Lisa Bhungalia  (lbhungal@maxwell.syr.edu) and Tish Lopez (maoquai@uw.edu) before October 10, 2012.

 

 

Diss intro

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First attempt at the less-than-exciting opening paragraphs of my introduction…comments welcome

On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti laying bare the immense infrastructural inadequacies of the tiny island nation. In the weeks and months that followed, international coordination efforts focused on managing the devastation and carrying that management into rebuilding the country. For many international observers, the calamity offered an opportunity to “build back better” – a trope often bandied but seldom elaborated beyond administrative organizing.  The central focus of this dissertation is to ask, “Build back better than what?” More particularly, this dissertation is interested in how some bodies (particularly Haitian bodies) become essentialized and depoliticized through an imaginary of disease and the ways in which these processes are mobilized in the pursuit of political and economic agendas that are couched in humanitarian  and development frames.

Throughout this dissertation, I illustrate that the relatively new mantra of “build back better” is short sighted in multiple ways. It is historically short-sighted in that its understanding of the history of Haiti is encompassed in the near-recent past, and does not take into account the deeply embedded historical legacy of American military and philanthropic interventions that reach back nearly 100 years. It is politically short-sighted in its refusal to engage with the Haitian people as truly political subjects of a sovereign nation. And finally, that it is epidemiologically short sighted in its consideration of how Haitians are engaged in their own health management.

Each of these short comings are dependent upon a failure to recognize the citizenship of Haitians themselves – both specifically in relation to their nation-state and more generally in relation to global political processes. I argue that it is through the lens of health citizenship that we can begin to unravel the imaginative geographies of Haiti that have been transnationally constructed. And while I am not claiming that it is the only lens through which to come to understand these processes, this lens does offer a unique insight across multiple scales and between historical periods in the way that bodies become particularly marked and managed through the guise of health and disease management.

By situating the examination through the lens of health citizenship, I am pointing to the ways in which global processes of intervention enter into and are enacted upon the bodies of Haitians. I am re-centering the body as the site of political enactment, particularly from the top down, not because the lived messiness of everyday existence is not important, but because it is precisely the invisibility of that messiness that informs grand schemes in humanitarianism and development through health.

Race and racism in humanitarian assistance in Haiti

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Since the earthquake, i have avoided a subject that makes me (and really most people) terribly uncomfortable: racism. I thought i might write about it in my generals, but got cold feet as it seemed that i could read about race, racism, critical race theory till my dying days and never have gotten through half what i needed to to be able to speak with any kind of clarity of possible expertise. But today i opened my inbox and found the email from Lawrence Berg, founding editor of ACME: An international E-Journal for Critical Geographers, with the contents for the latest issue. The very first article was Fear and Loathing in Haiti: Race and Politics of Humanitarian Dispossession in Haiti, by Beverly Mullings, Marion Werner, and Linda Peake. Attached to that email was a very nice email from my chair pointing me to read it.

I’ve started it. It’s incredibly well-written (as one might expect) and has, in the first few pages, managed to neatly unravel my fears of writing about race and securitization. It has also already had me in tears. I’ve (very rudely, and without permission) inserted the abstract:

The response by Western governments to the earthquake that devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010 throws into sharp relief the connections between racism and dispossession in times of humanitarian crisis. In this article, we take the 2010 earthquake as a point of departure in order to examine the purpose that circulating discourses of black criminality serve in narratives of humanitarianism and development in Haiti. Through an examination of debt, financial colonialism and neoliberal adjustment we explore the deep associations between racism,
humanitarianism and ongoing capitalist processes. We conclude by outlining what it would take to dismantle the dispossessions that racialized discourses of blackness, criminality and failed development facilitate in Haiti.

When the earthquake happened, i, like so many others, was appalled and dismayed by the rush to re- and further-militarize Haiti before allowing humanitarian aid to get through. In the first few days, there were reports of Médecins Sans Frontières planes being turned away from the airport that had been taken over by military troops – not Haitian military – there is no Haitian military. Sean Penn, however, was able to get his planes in – but this isn’t about Sean Penn – i’ll save that discussion for later. What i did not realize, and what is mentioned in the article, is that it is estimated that 20,000 more people were dying each day, waiting for the “securitization” program to be in place to allow humanitarian aid in. Eighteen days in, as many as 600,000 people still had not received food assistance.

I remember the day the assistance arrived all that time after the earthquake. There were reports of rioting and violence. That was the headline – not that people were starving to death waiting for help. So why the long wait? Mullings et. al point to the climate of fear promulgated by the US military (construction of high security red zones) and internalized by aid agencies.

In the days after the earthquake, i antagonized myself by reading reader comments to articles about the earthquake and the subsequent horror. What struck me was the vitriolic hatred that was spewed from anonymous internet fingers about the backwardness, the blackness, the inhumanness of the Haitian people – as understood by the American public. I recognize that “the American public” is a bit harsh and broad reaching. Those people with so little to do that they can roam freely in the internets to spread their hatred could and should hardly be considered The Public – they are a special breed, i suppose. But where did their perceptions come from?

Historically, the fear stemmed from two places. I’ve been reading a collected edition of essays, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Atlantic World, (ed) by David P. Geggus. In it Robin Blackburn (in his chapter, The Force of Example) states:

It is worth stressing, however, that it was the new-post slavery order, born out of revolution, not the bloodshed of revolt as such, which eventually won over significant sectors of metropolitan opionion in the antislavery cause. The figure of Toussaint Louverture served as a hugely influential symbol of responsible black power throughout the nineteenth century and beyond…Haiti was a symbol of black power and authority, not of desperate rebellion, that that is why it could inspire or terrify (17).

It was the image of ordered black bodies that inspired or terrified people. Because ordered black bodies can attain power – the kind of power that had been reserved for white men for all of the hegemon of Europe. At the same time, as Mullings (Et al) point out:

Popular discourses of black violence should be understood as historically rooted in expressions of fear, racialized fear of the threat that autonomous communities of poor black people potentially pose to contemporary notions of progress, civilization and the economic and social institutions at the heart of capitalist liberal democracy.

The U.S. and other economic powers of the 19th century crushed the tiny Haitian nation, placing embargoes, imposing restrictive taxes and occasionally invading the island. To what end, exactly?

There is a prevailing discourse that the black nation, so close to the U.S. and so unwilling to bow to the pressure of the neoliberal world order (though, as Peter Hallward points out, Haiti’s economy was 4 times as open as the US’s in 2008), is a threat to world order. Job #1: keep the Haitian people on the island. #2: order and control Haitian people according to “acceptable” economic and social orders that benefit the elite and non-Haitians, only.

Underpinning all of this, Mullings (et al) point out, is the racialized discourse of disorder that incites fear. Fear. But more on that in a day or two.