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Speculative Humanitarianism; Political Economies of Aid and Disputed Notions of Crisis Manuel Schwab Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2015 © 2014 Manuel Schwab All rights reserved ABSTRACT Speculative Humanitarianism; Political Economies of Aid and Disputed Notions of Crisis Manuel Schwab This dissertation is based on two years of field research in Sudan, in Khartoum; the three capitals of Darfur; and Bentiu, Unity State, at the border between North and South Sudan. Building on a now substantial literature in critical humanitarian studies, my work focuses on the emergence of new economic forms, circuits, and entitlements that accompany humanitarian aid. These include the influx of ration cards, trade routes that deliberately shadow humanitarian convoys and draw in aid recipients, and entitlements based on kinship ties to injured or displaced victims of conflict. For well over a decade anthropologists have studied the social and political work humanitarianism does in excess of its stated intention to relieve the suffering of civilians in regions of national and political disasters. As numerous scholars have shown, humanitarian discourses and practices intentionally and unintentionally transform local and regional political values and institutions by altering the social relations that subtend them. I pursue how these transformations intervene into core categories of how people understand themselves to have status in a social world. The manuscript focuses on the one ways in which people and events are evaluated as having status within humanitarian logics. It explores the nexus between this logics and the creation of novel economic subjects, values, and institutions that are neither foreign nor local, neither neoliberal nor traditional. They are, rather, a glimpse of something the manuscript refers to as humanitarian economies, with all dimensions of the economic intended. These include new forms of dependency and altered structures of political authority. But they also include new strategies of local speculation based on humanitarian rubrics of recognizing need. For instance, I track the circulation and resale of objects of material necessity, such as grain, cooking oil, or work tools distributed by aid agencies. I demonstrate the ways in which such objects begin to function as general equivalents; they become a form of currency, and a vehicle for the storage, accumulation and transmission of wealth. But on the other hand, the manuscript is just as focused on the circulation of universal values of protection, and their transformation as local actors pick them up and deploy them in their social worlds. In other words, as local actors come to understand how humanitarian actors assess crisis, they produce a second order assessment of where aid is likely to go and thus what would be a profitable investment. They also produce second order deployments of how injury and livelihood is evaluated. Such practices transform basic dynamics of social entitlement. And they also change how people think of themselves and their neighbors as economic and political subjects. Meanwhile, critical infrastructures – from irrigation channels to pharmacy supply routes to radio transmitters – become the objects of heightened ethical scrutiny. Infrastructure comes to stand in for good governance, stability, and sustainable political relationships. What we witness is the emergence of what I call a speculative investment in crisis that binds crisis, livelihood, and life-value into a troubling knot. Table of Contents Acknowledgements………………………………………………….. ii Introduction…………………………………………………………. 1 Chapter 1: Still Life…………………………………………………. 20 Chapter 2: Interrupting the Future…………………………………. 74 Chapter 3: Never Again. Here and Now…………………………… 130 Chapter 4: Ungovernable Unity…………………………………… 163 Conclusion: Where to Begin………………………………………. 197 Bibliography……………………………………………………….. 207 i Acknowledgements It is true, of course, that we incur immeasurable debts in doing any piece of work. This thesis is no exception, even if the bulk of the work for which I am indebted fell out of the frame of these pages. Whether the work shows up in this manuscript or not, my debts are more likely to be a mark that I will continue to chase after than one I will become equal to. If that continued deferral is frustrating, at least it is a guarantee that the shortcomings are entirely my own. I trust that much of what has fallen by the wayside will make its way back. Much of what has made its way here will, I hope, work itself out. Perhaps once I have made this text into a manuscript, I will be able to thank everyone who deserves it. But this provisional list would necessarily include far too many gaps. To no pretend exhautiveness, let me just reserve these acknowledgements for those who helped me on the ground in Sudan. My debts in New York are insurmountable and continue to grow, my debts in Berlin from another world, my debts to the family I have and the family I choose spread the world over and at depths I cannot account for. I am immeasurably grateful to the members of the Department of Anthropology at the university of Khartoum for their generous and patient support of my work throughout my project. In particular, I should mention the institutional and intellectual support of Dr. Musa Adam Abu-Jalil, and Dr. Munzoul Assal. They were two remarkably generous academic supporters in an immeasurably generous atmosphere in Khartoum. I cannot thank those to whom I have personal debts, as the acknowledgements would become a small volume. But for those who were always more than colleagues but also offered me the mentorship of that always partakes in true friendship, I would be remiss not to mention Noha Hamza, Moritz Mihatsch, Taha Sharif, Ingeborg Denissen, Uli Mans, ii Yassir Hassan, Agnes de Geoffry, Einas Ahmed, Ismail Kushkush, Eman Eltigani, and many many more. Before I move forward, I would have been absolutely lost without the extraordinary generosity, and the friendships, of two people in particular: Noah Salomon and Barbara Casciarri. To both of them, I just say you have humbled me. All others I owe thanks to here, I can only say, without those around me I lack both form and substance. I hope I can thank each of you in some way as I bring this work to fruition. The research for this thesis was supported by a generous grant from the Wenner- Gren foundation. iii For Grace and Amanil… iv Introduction: Objects of Humanitarianism David Scott has observed that; “It may be one of the paradoxical features of conceptual antagonisms that the determined rival to an existing hegemon, beginning with a bold and dramatic sense of contrast, and of critical distinctiveness, grows over the long course of seeking to overcome its nemesis, to much look like it” (Scott 2003). Before its own ascent to hegemon, the human, as a political concept, took its current shape against many rivals. By Hanna Arendt’s estimation it was forged, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to ensure that; “Man, and not god’s commands or the customs of history, should be the source of law” (Arendt 2000). This guarantee becomes necessary, so Arendt, at the moment when the social and biological protections on which people had historically relied where inserted into the political order and thus, subject to political modifications. The figure of the human is thus arrayed in conceptual antagonism against both transcendental authority and contingent legal protections. It is forged to wrest the grounds of legal authority away from both commandment and from contingency – from discontinuous histories that leave people vulnerable to the interpretation of custom, to the logics of citizenship, to circumstance. But from this inception to its contemporary instantiation in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and its elaboration in legal and political instruments, the itinerary of the idea has not only taken its own place among the hegemonic concepts of art but has also, in doing so, borrowed copiously from the transcendent grounds it once did combat with, and deferred just as often to the caprice of its own historically unfolding – changing, according to need and expedient what protections and privileges might mean. In response to these developments, and the practices of humanitarianism that they underwrite, this thesis sets out to account for the consequences of a political project with 1 the human as its central and axiomatic political object. More specifically, this manuscript gives an account of the world-making force of humanitarian practices as I observed them at work in Sudan. It is organized around qualitative empirical accounts of the rapid transformations brought about by rights interventions and endeavors to shore up “the human” against the myriad crises with which it is faced. The argument is built out of concrete accounts of the transformation that this defensive humanism entails. It treats rapid and uncontrolled expansions of cities in the centers of aid’s circulation. It traces the emergence of questions about what bodies are made to count, where, and under what conditions their death or disappearance is recognized. It tracks the changes in personal status that surreptitiously accompany the expansion or contraction of critical infrastructures. And finally, it challenges core assumptions of the contemporary humanitarian construal of how the life world of crisis is materially arranged, and asks whether these assumptions are adequate for understanding what is at stake in humanitarian activities. Coming to think about humanitarian practices in Sudan in particular was not always an obvious choice from the framing of the larger question this project stakes out. But the particulars of Sudanese history proved it to be a felicitous place to pursue these inquiries. When I began to concern myself with Sudan, the country was a few years into fulfilling the terms of a shaky peaces agreement that had ended roughly three decades of civil war between the Northern government and a Southern rebellion.

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