Paper details

Paper authors	Pedro Silva Rocha Lima
In panel on	Rethinking Violence in Humanitarian Research
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper examines the sensorial and moral uncertainties that arise from uses of risk management as a humanitarian technique to address the effects of armed violence, and the paralysis that ensues when danger becomes indeterminate. In Brazil, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) implements a program called Safer Access to Essential Public Services (SA), an immaterial form of humanitarian action. SA consists of a risk management technology that trains public healthcare workers on how to manage everyday risks related with armed violence that they might encounter in their daily work. However, as workers were asked to classify risk in their surroundings, uncertainties about the nature of armed violence that could be heard but not seen sometimes contributed to make danger indeterminate. Moreover, moral uncertainties emerged when workers pondered what kinds of violence counted as grave enough to warrant the interruption of services. Combined, these uncertainties created states of paralysis, showing how risk management, as a way of governing lives affected by violence, engenders both governability and ungovernability. This paper is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, where I followed the daily enactments of SA by workers at a favela public clinic.

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