Paper details

Paper authors	Vivian Solana
In panel on	Rethinking Violence in Humanitarian Research
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Following the 1991 UN-mediated ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario Front, Sahrawi refugee camps started receiving support from the humanitarian aid industry that has expanded its presence worldwide from the end of the Cold War onwards (Hyndman, 2001 xix). Influenced by Foucault (1991) and Agamben (1998), scholars have argued that humanitarian interventions, entrusted with a narrow bio-political mandate to save lives, dangerously reduce human bodies to forms of life devoid of “society” (Agiers, 2008), categorized into the ahistorical category of “refugees” (Malkki, 1996) who survive thanks to an apolitical global compassion (Feldman & Ticktin, 2010). In contrast to these analyses, the Polisario Front has effectively circumvented this neo-colonial model of humanitarian governance, by using the humanitarian aid it receives to strengthen its own governmental capacities and its ability to reproduce Sahrawi history in exile. Nevertheless, 30 years after the peacekeeping humanitarian mission MINURSO was dispatched to Western Sahara, the referendum for the self-determination of the Sahrawi people has not yet taken place and, on November 13 of 2020, the movement of anti-colonial national liberation resumed its armed struggle against Morocco. Understanding the failure of humanitarian peacekeeping in Western Sahara requires taking seriously the invisible forms of violence that waiting for this elusive right to self-determination has exercised over Sahrawi lives. Drawing on material from fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Sahrawi refugee camps (2011-2015), this paper argues that accounting for the symbolic violence that is inherent to contemporary humanitarian regimes (Asad 2008), requires broadening our notion of humanitarian “governmentality” as mediated through the control over time and not just through the management of bodies and subjectivities.

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