The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies

Abstract

This article develops an analysis of a partial, albeit I argue very powerful, strand of contemporary humanitarianism. In analyzing an interdisciplinary literature combining theoretical and practice-based perspectives on humanitarianism, I trace the development of a shift in interest from classical humanitarian concerns for the saving of bare life of humanity to the securing of the biohuman. In the development of humanitarianism post-1989, concepts and theories of adaptation, deriving heavily from innovations in the life sciences, are being applied to determine why some societies are supposedly more prone to humanitarian disasters than others in the form of ‘adaptive failures’: how such societies can avert disasters from occurring in the forms of ‘adaptive responses’, as well as how they can recover from them when they do occur by learning ‘adaptive behaviors’. Theories of adaptation and other concepts relating to the evolutionary powers of the biohuman such as ‘information exchange’ and ‘resilience’ are also being applied to conceive the frameworks in which responses to disasters can best be organized. Within the domains and practices of humanitarianism a biologized conception of the human conceived in terms of evolutionary capacities and properties, and the idea of being able to deliver humanity from its various forms of insecurity through its promotion, has taken hold. The humanitarian emergency, as this article details, is today conceived as the primary locale for the transformation of ungovernable peoples into governable populations. Emergencies represent sites of global danger and disorder vested with renewed political significance because they occur where life is said not only to have failed to perform its adaptive functions in securing itself, but where the very failure of life to adapt is construed as a threat to the security of world order. Thus the failure of maladapted populations is said to threaten not only themselves, but the biopolitical foundations of global governance since their suffering produces economic dislocation as well potentially of political violence. Thus they become subject to the strategies of intervention through which global governance seeks to make populations more fit for liberal rule.