This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as: How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques? How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act? How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things? In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences? How does the search for 'hidden' connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life? Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon? As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew? Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike.

This book critically explores forms and techniques of calculation that emerge with digital computation, and their implications. The contributors demonstrate that digital calculative devices matter beyond their specific functions as they progressively shape, transform and govern all areas of our life. In particular, it addresses such questions as: How does the drive to make sense of, and productively use, large amounts of diverse data, inform the development of new calculative devices, logics and techniques? How do these devices, logics and techniques affect our capacity to decide and to act? How do mundane elements of our physical and virtual existence become data to be analysed and rearranged in complex ensembles of people and things? In what ways are conventional notions of public and private, individual and population, certainty and probability, rule and exception transformed and what are the consequences? How does the search for 'hidden' connections and patterns change our understanding of social relations and associative life? Do contemporary modes of calculation produce new thresholds of calculability and computability, allowing for the improbable or the merely possible to be embraced and acted upon? As contemporary approaches to governing uncertain futures seek to anticipate future events, how are calculation and decision engaged anew? Drawing together different strands of cutting-edge research that is both theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this book makes an important contribution to several areas of scholarship, including the emerging social science field of software studies, and will be a vital resource for students and scholars alike.

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.