The racial biopolitics of humanitarianism in Africa: examining European resilience-building in the Sahel and lake Chad Basin

Abstract

This paper examines humanitarianism in the Global South through engaging with resilience projects in the Sahel and Lake Chad Basin (LCB). It addresses how recent humanitarianism has moved away from top-down interventions which seek to either intervene to save those that have been rendered “bare life” (Agamben, 1998, p. 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 through addressing the broader social milieu. While previous accounts of security and development emphasized why fragile states and authoritarian regimes could constitute a threat to the international system, society or community which thus serves as justification for interventions, sometimes militarily, which such regimes flouted specific international norms and conventions. However, 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 promote the ends of liberal governance. Moving away from these statist focus, post-intervention has moved towards strengthening the capacities of communities to withstand shocks, but this is merely a pre-requisite for the objectives of the resilience project. My contention is that the move towards resilience is not only an acknowledgement of the cognitive imperfections of the liberal subject but more importantly (Chandler, 2013b), it raises questions —about liberal subjecthood. These imperfections have historically been reserved for non-whites and non-Europeans since the Enlightenment, for example, issues related to (ir-)rationality and (un-)reason; the homo economicus is a myth after all (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009; Chandler, 2013a). By moving away from humanitarian activities that require intervention to post-intervention, which involves claims about the subject’s internal capacity to “self-govern” (Chandler, 2012; Chandler, 2013a), migration, development and security have become closely intertwined with some suggesting a migration-development-security nexus where humanitarian aid serves the purpose of accomplishing global governance of complexity (Stern and Öjendal, 2010; Truong and Gasper, 2011; Deridder et al., 2020). While useful, this paper problematizes this understanding of resilience which concerns itself with the biopolitics of enhancing life’s capacity to self-govern by unpacking the various ways in which “resilience processes are marked by inequities and by the consequences of a history of the coloniality of power, oppression, and privilege” (Atallah et al., 2021, p. 9), which manifest when these projects are implemented within contexts or on bodies from the Global South. In particular, the move towards resilience has entailed further incursions into people’s lives such that various rationalities and techniques of governmentality are directed at the population which may raise further questions when these populations are those of other countries or within regions that have a history of colonisation and subjugation. By reconceptualising biopolitics as a racial biopolitics and by decentring the state and instead looking at assemblages, that is, a multiplicity of actors and rationalities and technologies, and practices which function as totalities and produce passive or active agents with or without capacity for resistance, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of agencement which is translated to English as “Assemblages”, is useful to capture the rationalities and techniques of resilience projects in the Sahel and LCB. I reconceptualise this powerful concept as “racialised assemblages”, made up of a set of “racial components” that produce “racialised ensembles”, that is, a multiplicity of actors and rationalities and technologies, this paper shows how resilience projects by Western state and non-state actors such as the United Kingdom, France and the EU and other humanitarian actors such as the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the Sahel and the LCB are both exclusionary and raced and how these attempts seek to exploit the historical infantilization of the non-white subject or subjectivity within the Sahel and the LCB. Engaging with some humanitarian activities in the Sahel and LCB, the paper argues that through a racialised and exclusionary racial biopolitics that function through racialised assemblages, European humanitarian aid and assistance through upstreaming border control management through biometrics, exploit and sustain colonialities that seek achieve European outcomes. While projects such as migration and border control in the Niger-Nigeria border through biometric management and development projects that seek to address the root causes of insecurity, underdevelopment and forced displacement are promoted as humanitarian issues and facilitated through development aid, such racialised discourses are a continuation of racist historical depictions associated with whiteness and non-whiteness which made assumptions about humans, the environment, and the relationship between the two. For those who emerged in European discourse as lacking the capacity to transform their environment, Access to full personhood was either denied or delayed which remerges in claims that attempt to interpellate persons and communities in the Sahel as vulnerable, poor, fragile, failing to highlight their deficient resilience and how this could impact on others who have achieved better resilience. For example, the attempts to build resilience through border control and management in the Sahel and LCB through the regularization of some types of desirable movements and criminalisation of irregular movement within the Sahel and LCB, especially where these are viewed as potentially constituting a risk to European security interests. For example, border policing and management posts in Konni-Illela and Eroufa in the Tahoua region of Niger which both seek to manage and control movement across the Niger-Nigeria border are promoted as enhancing Niger’s own border management policy while it was set up through collaborative humanitarian efforts of various actors and was funded by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) of the U.S. Department of State (IOM, 2023). In addition to the other actors, these all constitute racialised biopolitical assemblages which attempt to govern complexity within the African context which is a continuation of various historical colonialities. Finally, in addition to the various infantilizing tendencies of racialised versions of resilience where the subject is viewed as incapable of full self-governance, and self-transformation, these projects when enforced on non-Western contexts such as the Global South perpetuate colonialities and within the Sahel, may stifle other possibilities of non-Western resilience such as those associated with human relationality. It becomes necessary to problematize the various resilience projects, including those that have apparently explicit humanitarian dimensions such as assistance and aid by asking critical questions about what they do which could also expose the ways in which those that are exposed to these rationalities and technologies resist these attempts. Further research should investigate the various ways in which individuals and communities in the Sahel interact with these resilience projects and also how various so-called African partners —state and non- state— who play integral roles in facilitating and implementing them are positioned and how they position themselves. Such research could adopt focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic methods to capture ways in which these attempts may be reproduced, modified or even resisted by these people that emerge as targets of European post-interventionist biopolitics.