Geographies of humanitarian violence

Patricia J Lopez, Lisa Bhungalia and Léonie S Newhouse

Environment and Planning A, 2015, vol. 47, issue 11, 2232-2239

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Humanitarianism; humanitarian present; lesser evil; “humanitarian violence†(search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X15613330 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:47:y:2015:i:11:p:2232-2239

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X15613330

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().