Peter Redfield

Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods

One of the key features marking “failed” states in contemporary political discourse is their incapacity to serve the needs of their respective populations, to govern as well as rule.1 Amid the ruins of bureaucratic infrastructure (which in specific historical terms may have existed only in imagination) lies a sense of moral as well as political duty: a sovereign power that does not foster life loses a basic claim to legitimacy. We expect that people — even small children — will live. Furthermore, as a legacy of the biopolitical welfare provisions, we now attribute responsibility for their wellbeing to their respective nationstates or, failing that, to international agencies. Ordinary existence has become not only a matter of expert concern but also a thoroughly normative one, as taken for granted as the political form of nationstate or the condition of citizenship itself.

The Half-Life of Empire in Outer Space

This paper addresses an intersection between postcolonial studies and science studies, examining the greater colonial context of space exploration. In response to Chakrabarty’s call to ‘provincialize Europe’, I ask what it might mean to ‘provincialize’ outer space, considering locality relative to extra-planetary distance, and the asymmetries of history next to the symmetrical methodology advocated by Latour. By way of a brief reading of fictional texts that played an important role in the technical imagination leading up to spaceflight, I sketch the colonizing impulse that underwrote space exploration through and beyond the age of empire. I then turn to the French/European launch site at Kourou, French Guiana, where a sparsely populated former colony became a preferred launching ground for communication satellites into equatorial orbits. Here the representation of outer space as a final frontier crosses the remains of older colonial projects, uneasily confronting the landscape of their human legacy. In opposition to the space centre’s focus on adventure, political focus within French Guiana stresses development and strives to confront the space project with the local legacy of colonial failure. A conflict over the closing of a stretch of road provides a situated moment to illustrate these contrasting understandings of the place of outer space. In this conflict, I suggest, the very length and orientation of the space centre’s network affect the locality of its representation, revealing after-effects of earlier formations of geography and history. Thus, in resituating outer space against the ground, it remains important to distinguish between local knowledges and techniques that are more or less expansive, and keep in sight the different spatial and temporal frames within which ‘the local’ takes shape.

Beneath a modern sky : Space technology and its place on the ground

In delineating a trajectory of human history, anthropology and other social sciences have tended to describe traditional life in particular geographic terms while leaving modem experience universal in scope. Studies of science and technology, while helping to locate and describe centers of modern practice, have less frequently explored their edges. Using a case study of the location of the primary French/European space launch site in French Guiana, this article examines technologies associated with the development of space beyond the atmosphere by evaluating the impact of rockets and satellites on the construction of human space on the ground. Exploring the social significance of a modem sky and its transformation of one tropical margin into a technical center, the question of where things are becomes one of how they are defined. The modem appears less a placeless universal center and more a moving boundary, one dividing humans, nature, and technology into less stable domains.

Fluid technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and microworlds of humanitarian design

Over the past decade, many ingenious, small-scale gadgets have appeared in response to problems of disaster and extreme poverty. Focusing on the LifeStraw ® , a water filtration device invented by the company Vestergaard Frandsen, I situate this wave of humanitarian design relative to Marianne de Laet and Annemarie Mol’s classic article on the Zimbabwe Bush Pump. The LifeStraw shares the Bush Pump’s principle of technical minimalism, as well as its ethical desire to improve the lives of communities. Unlike the pump, however, the straw defines itself through rather than against market logic, accepting the premise that one can ‘do well while doing good’. Moreover, it does not share the assumed framework of de Laet and Mol’s Zimbabwean socio-technical landscape: a postcolonial state happily en route to national self-definition. Nonetheless, it clearly embodies moral affect, if in the idiom of humanitarian concern rather than development. My aim is to open up three interrelated lines of inquiry for discussion. First, I consider aspects of a postcolonial condition at the micro-level of immediate needs, including assumptions about nation-state politics and markets. Second, I emphasize science and technology in the form of infrastructure, the material frontline of norms. Third, I return reflexively to love, and the complicated allure of engagement in academic work.

An index of waste: humanitarian design, “dignified living” and the politics of infrastructure in Cape Town

This article develops a framework for thinking about waste as an index that signals a relational position within contested, historically layered conceptions of human order. It follows two contrasting frameworks for thinking about sanitation infrastructure: a quest to redesign the toilet at a global level for underserved populations, and popular conceptions of rights, citizenship and dignity grounded in the materiality of infrastructure in post-apartheid South Africa. By integrating highly abstract understandings of value with intimately embodied qualities of experience, the problem of sanitation simultaneously connects and divides human populations. It unites them at a species level, only to distinguish them at a social one. From this perspective, human waste is hardly a neutral substance, defined by its chemical properties. Rather, waste actively registers relational human status and position within a political ecology of needs.

Clinic in Crisis Response: Imagined Immunities

Military forces have long targeted medical facilities. In blog posts following the attack on the Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, historians Bertrand Taithe and Eleanor Davey offer examples of parallel atrocities past and present, from German bombardment of Parisian hospitals in 1871 to recent attacks on MSF run facilities in Syria and Yemen. As their sobering list makes clear, legal protections have provided uncertain refuge in the years since the ink dried on the agreements of the initial Geneva Convention. Moreover, even this thin shelter has extended unequally, rarely including colonial confrontations. In his unconventional chronicle of death from the air, Sven Lindqvist (2000) underscores how laws of war effectively delimited perceived frontiers of civilization; Italian airplanes inaugurated aerial bombing in 1911 outside of Tripoli, and two decades later destroyed Red Cross Ambulances in Ethiopia. In Lindqvist’s (2000:2) acid summary: ‘‘When is one allowed to wage war against savages and barbarians? Answer: always. What is permissible against savages and barbarians? Answer: anything.’’

Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (review)

Michael Barnett has written an ambitious and highly useful book. Already the author or editor of numerous insightful works related to humanitarianism, he has long displayed discernment and diligence in ample measure. An energetic organizer with an omnivorous sense of curiosity, he has likewise demonstrated a cosmopolitan willingness to cross the borders of his native discipline, nurturing relations with practitioners, policy analysts and academics well beyond political science. Now he has harvested these long fields of association, gathering together and sifting through the collective work of many scholars and the records of multiple organizations. The result is a wide-ranging survey that chronicles the general sweep of humanitarianism and summarizes key issues, all in a relatively compact 239 pages of text. As such, it offers not only a particular perspective on the rise of contemporary concern for the suffering of others, but also an array of access points into the debates that have accompanied it. Empire of Humanity displays a tidy architecture, divided into three parts and ten chapters as well as an introduction and conclusion. At the outset, its author announces his intention to move beyond the received wisdom of potted histories, and on the very first page he sets about dethroning the mythic moment of Henry Dunant’s vision that led to the founding of the Red Cross. Barnett’s real target is the “semi-tragic narrative” of abbreviated conventional accounts, which skip quickly forward from Dunant to the 1990s, bemoaning an era of innocence betrayed. Such moral fables suggest that whereas once humanitarians might have counted on clear guidelines and welldefined roles, the present offers only a confusing morass of uncertainty, political manipulation and Faustian bargains with the interests of states. Barnett rejects the allure of retroactive romanticism and casts a more skeptical eye on the supposed innocence of the past. At the same time he resists the ahistorical temptation to view moral compromise as a timeless constant, or dismiss humanitarian action as simply a naïve delusion. Connecting this recent tale of disillusionment to a longer and more turbulent history, Barnett seeks to place humanitarianism into a global context of shifting political conditions, framed between forces of empire, capitalism and ethics. Within this historical landscape he identifies a set of enduring tensions related to the worldly nature of this idealized, civilizing project, emphasizing its plurality; its long gyrations between principles and circumstances, its mix of emancipation and domination, and its attempt to satisfy the desires of donors when administering to the needs of recipients. Barnett also establishes clear limits for his endeavor. Here the term humanitarianism describes compassion enacted across boundaries, increasingly organized in relation to governance. His is a selective history, not a universal “theory,” and tilted towards Western forms. At the same time it circumvents the topic of human rights by focusing instead on appeals to human needs, and does not restrict itself to the contemporary form of the nongovernmental organization. By avoiding conflation on both those fronts, the author makes a case for viewing humanitarianism as a distinctive “revolution in the ethics of care.”1 At the same time