The book critically analyses the changing role and nature of
post-Cold War humanitarianism and how we can make sense of it,
using Foucault's theories of biopolitics and governmentality. While
it is widely acknowledged that, since the 1990s, the nature of
humanitarian action has been changing, and much effort has been
invested into producing various accounts of these changes, there is
a lack of serious theoretical engagement with a view to making
sense of the policies and practices associated with new
humanitarianism, their conditions of possibility and their
implications. At the same time, the complexity of the post-Cold War
developments and associated changes in the humanitarian enterprise
call for an approach that would pay close attention to the
constellations of power relations driving these changes and help us
understand their effects at different levels.Using Michel
Foucault's theorising on biopolitics and governmentality, the book
interprets the policies and practices associated with the new
humanitarianism in general, as well as the dynamics of two specific
international assistance efforts: the post-2001 conflict-related
assistance effort in Afghanistan and the post-2000
Chernobyl-related assistance effort in Belarus. The book thereby
demonstrates that it is possible to generate a powerful and
insightful interpretation of the changing role and nature of
humanitarian action, and, in so doing, to better understand
contemporary humanitarianism, as well as identifying resistances to
it and envisaging alternative ways of addressing humanitarian
concerns. The book makes an important contribution to several areas
of scholarship: on humanitarianism and the changing nature of
post-Cold War humanitarian action, on Foucault's theorising on
biopower, biopolitics and governmentality and its applications, and
on the conflict-related assistance effort in Afghanistan. Not only
does it offer an analysis of the nature, role and effects of
contemporary humanitarian governing, but also analyses them at
different levels (i.e., global and local).It is also be one of the
first works to engage critically with Foucault's later theorising
and the 'corrections' offered to it by Agamben and Esposito to
better understand the relationship between sovereignty and
biopolitics as technologies of governing and the ability of
biopolitical governing to produce negative, and even lethal,
effects, something that it then uses to identify and analyse such
effects prevalent in humanitarian governing, for example, what is
termed in the book 'biopolitics of endangerment, invisibility and
abandonment'. This book will be of much interest to students of
critical security studies, humanitarianism, governmentality, and IR
more generally.
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