Abstract
As Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin, the editors of this volume observe, today “one finds humanity mobilized in a remarkable array of circumstances.” Governing in the name of humanity is not altogether new, having roots in the sensibilities and ethics of humanitarianism that arose among the elites of Europe and European-North America at least as far back as the eighteenth century. But today they seem to be breaking out of their exceptional moments and metropolitan strategies to emerge as central to the government of everyday lives across the world, including the post-colonial emerging powers. What we need to know is what governing in the name of humanity means, to the people being governed, to the state agencies and NGOs that do much of the governing, to “citizens” who once participated with some effectiveness in the democratic social welfare states of the wealthy west.
The answer, of course, may differ depending on what situations we have in mind. The authors, mostly anthropologists drawing on years of ethnographic research in places like Brazil, Central African Republic (CAR), Northern India, and the United States, and in fields that include international criminal tribunals and AIDS, present a necessarily variegated answer. Although there is no strict division, most of the book’s chapters relate to one of three themes, humanitarian crises, the environment, and health.
Humanitarian crisis forms the focus of chapters by Richard Wilson (on the international war crimes trials involving Rwanda), Lisa Malkki (on the figure of the child in humanitarian discourse), Allen Feldman (on the role of animality in civil wars), and Didier Fassin (on humanitarian medical organizations, although his chapter also relates strongly to the health theme, where I will discuss it).
Wilson’s chapter documents the difficulties faced by the tribunal in applying the law of genocide to the Rwandan situation, expressing fundamental tensions within the humanitarian legal vision. Genocide, which following the Nazi mass murders became a foundational crime for international human rights law, includes as an element of the crime the destruction, or attempt to destroy, a group based on its nationality, race, or religion. But in attempting to apply genocide to the murder of Tutsis, the tribunal found itself reluctant to accept that the Tutsis fit this description, since their racial, cultural, and national characteristics were contested. Wilson suggests that behind the controversy is a fundamental tension between Romantic and even racist ideas about racial and ethnic groups as authentic and objective elements of humanity, and a postholocaust humanitarian ideal which views group status as always constructed and contested.
Malkki’s chapter analyzes the central role that children play in the global articulation of humanity. Malkki identifies five roles that children ubiquitously play in these discourses: (1) as exemplars of human goodness, (2) as subjects of suffering, (3) as truth tellers, (4) as champions of peace, and as (5) embodiments of the future. One of the clearest examples is Anne Frank, who diary was published after her murder at Auschwitz and has become perhaps the best known symbol of the holocaust. Perhaps because her writings so powerfully express all five of Malkki’s roles, Anne Frank has been the model for numerous subsequent publications, both fictional and autobiographical. Less clear is what this child centeredness of humanity means. As Malkki acknowledges, the historical “discovery” of childhood long predates the modern era of governing through humanity and children have served as the expressions for a variety of governing projects including socialism and the welfare state.
The problems of governing the environment, and nonhuman biological resources are addressed in chapters by Rebecca Hardin (on forest governance in the Central African Republic), Arun Agrawal (on forest governance in India), and Charles Zerner (on weaponized insects).
In her chapter, Hardin offers a reading of Le Silence de la Foret (The Silence of the Forest), published by Etienne Goyemide in the early 1980s. Goyemide, described as a “national” writer of the CAR patriotic novel of the immediate postcolonial period, became a senior government minister in the 1990s. The novel presents a story of an educated African man transformed by his experience as a civil servant in the forest. If, as Hardin points out, the discourses of humanity today have become part of the framework for governing the forest resources of postcolonial societies like the CAR, and constraining the activities of human practices like hunting and fishing, it is important that this concept of humanity already embodies an imagined relationship to nature, the forests, and the people who live there and are often reduced to the status of nature rather than humanity.
As with several other of the strongest chapters, Agrawal combines her fieldwork on forest governance with a historical analysis. The emergence of the human as a logic for governing the forest emerges quite early and under imperial conditions. The British began introducing rigorous new procedures on forest use by ordinary Indians, and centralized its own role in governing the forest as a specific long-term resource for the economic and strategic interests of the empire. However, in the face of substantial political resistance, including widespread burning of the same forest by aggrieved villagers, the British began a new approach based on local institutions of participation and control of forest regulations (including enforcement). If Agrawal is right in characterizing the British approach to governing forests as one grounded in the human, it raises really interesting issues about historical sequencing of governing in the name of the human (which is often treated, indeed in some of these other chapters, as happening largely today and in a postcolonial rather than colonial context).
Health and the medical treatment of human illness forms the subject of chapters by Joao Biehl (on AIDS in Brazil), Didier Fassin (on humantarian medicine), S. Jain Lochlann (on cancer medicine), and Adriana Petryna (on the global commerce in random control experiments).
Biehl’s work examines the role that NGOs have played in conjunction with global pharmaceutical companies and governments in one of the most positive rights stories of globalization, the achievement of access to expensive AIDS drugs by impoverished populations in the global south. The achievements of AIDS treatment in Brazil raises new questions about the meaning of the state’s universal aspirations in an age of neoliberal limits on direct government welfare. By using both international human rights law and the residual power of governments to act in the name of health emergencies over global property rights regimes, the AIDS NGOs were able to force the pharmaceutical industry to make AIDS drugs accessible and to create an institutional infrastructure to deliver them. This story also opens a window in the future of public health, once a core area of state-based social welfare. Beihl’s study, and the other chapters on health, revisit some of the most important issues raised by both Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben in their respective critiques of biological governance.
As Fassin shows in his chapter, medicine has long been a point of emergence for humanitarianism as distinctive legal and political framework. In the nineteenth century, the Red Cross created one of the first humanitarian practices through its practices of relieving suffering of the military wounded on the battlefields of Europe. In the late twentieth century this went through a further development with the emergence of new medical rescue organizations like Doctors without Borders (Medicins sans Frontieres). The new medical humanitarianism is equally concerned with documenting the lives and experiences of the victims, but the work of documentation imposes familiar hierarchies, with some victim accounts privileged over others (children for example, as suggested by Liisa Malkki) and rescuers operating as editors of the narrative. This new politics of rescue and narration, however, has further exacerbated the tension between the universality of the human that justifies rescue and documentation, and the hierarchies of security and judgment that appear whenever such humanitarian intervention is enacted.
Two chapters focus on “random controlled experiments” as a new kind of human governance. In her chapter, Jain shows that modern cancer medicine has replaced the individualizing gaze of classical clinical medicine, with an actuarial focus that breaks cancer patients down into a few variables like cell type, stage, and treatment regime. Her critique suggests that this approach extends treatment not lives. Petryna examines “experimentality” as a new mode of global governance. Once anchored in the scientific powerhouses of the wealthy West, experiments are now run by global contractors who search the world for “treatment-naïve” populations. Along with Biehl, Petryna sees these new global actors as creating a new model of public health, one in which private industry replaces classic state actors as a source of treatment. The public health tactic of demarcating disease by spatial location is now used to carve out new catchment areas of human subjects who are targeted precisely because they lack both public health and strong legal protections.
Most of the chapters in In the Name of the Humanity, raised more questions than answers, but this makes it an ideal book both for courses on human rights and globalization and for scholars working on human rights, humanitarian interventions, and globalization more generally. The accounts are remarkably balanced, neither cheerleading for globalization under the name of humanity nor pushing a relentlessly bleak image of globalization as neoliberalism. Rather, like Michel Foucault’s later work on governmentality and liberalism, which many of the chapters draw on, there is an empirical openness to what recent transformations in governance under liberalism mean combined with a grounding in critical social theory that highlights the ways that long-term inequalities reproduce themselves under new forms of governance. At their best, the chapters bring powerfully developed local examples to the discussion of a topic that inevitably pulls toward the universal.