Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (Mit Press) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1935408003 ISBN 13: 9781935408000

Publisher: Zone Books, 2010

Synopsis

The new form of “humanitarian government” emerging from natural disasters and military occupations that reduces people to mere lives to be rescued.

From natural disaster areas to zones of political conflict around the world, a new logic of intervention combines military action and humanitarian aid, conflates moral imperatives and political arguments, and confuses the concepts of legitimacy and legality. The mandate to protect human lives―however and wherever endangered―has given rise to a new form of humanitarian government that moves from one crisis to the next, applying the same battery of technical expertise (from military logistics to epidemiological risk management to the latest social scientific tools for “good governance”) and reducing people with particular histories and hopes to mere lives to be rescued. This book explores these contemporary states of emergency. Drawing on the critical insights of anthropologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and practitioners from the field,

Contemporary States of Emergency examines historical antecedents as well as the moral, juridical, ideological, and economic conditions that have made military and humanitarian interventions common today. It addresses the practical process of intervention in global situations on five continents, describing both differences and similarities, and examines the moral and political consequences of these generalized states of emergency and the new form of government associated with them.

About this title

About the Author:

Didier Fassin is James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and Director of Studies in Anthropology at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. His recent publications include When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa. Mariella Pandolfi is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Montreal.

Review:

[This book] brings together an extraordinarily broad range of scholars and activists, writing on a very wide range of topics which are framed by Fassin and Pandolfi's impressive legal survey of the gradual development of 'the state of emergency' as an example of Agamben's (1995) notion of the 'state of exception.'

―Somatosphere

About this edition

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1935408003
• ISBN 13: 9781935408000
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 408
• Editor: Fassin Didier, Pandolfi Mariella