La biopolítica racial del humanitarismo en África : examinando la construcción de la resiliencia europea en el Sahel y en la cuenca del lago Chad

It addresses how recent humanitarianism has moved away from top-down interventions which sought to either intervene to save those that have been rendered as “bare life” (Agamben, 1998: 4) by their own governments or improve the state’s —especially “fragile” and “failing” ones— capacity to govern, towards society-based projects which seek to produce resilient subjects.

While previous accounts of security and development emphasized why fragile states and authoritarian regimes could constitute a threat to their people and the international system, society, or community, where justifications for interventions were based on their flouting of specific international norms and conventions. In contrast, recent humanitarianism has become less targeted at regime change as was evident with the reluctance that followed the unproductive cases in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya where assumptions that regime change, or democracy promotion could achieve or promote the ends of liberal governance.