Between

Emergency and Emergence: Humanitarian Action and the Politics of Becoming. Simon Addison
Marie Curie Research Fellow, School of Environment & Development, University of Manchester Visiting Fellow, Center for Place, Culture & Politics, City University of New York simon@simonaddison.com DRAFT WORK IN PROGRESS DO NOT CITE

My paper attempts to tackle some of the problematic political ambiguities that arise from the ontology of emergency which guides most humanitarian action at the current time. Much of the ambiguity, I suggest, arises from the incipient dichotomy that persists within the notion of emergency between the moment that is codified as an exceptional crisis on the one hand in relation to the supposed norm on the other. Much has been written about the nature of this relation in recent years, particularly in light of Giorgio Agambens work on the nature of the state of emergency as it relates to sovereignty. My thoughts are very much rooted in that literature, but take a different tack, which has been suggested in part by the recent work of Michael Dillon of Lancaster University on the evolving nature of the emergency as a category not of sovereign power but of the more diffuse and more apparently beneficient power of biopolitics, of which humanitarian action, broadly defined, is very definitely a component. My thoughts arise out of a series of discomforts with the state and nature of contemporary humanitarianism, none of which, I admit, are novel. Indeed, it never ceases to astonish me how many of the most important debates of the humanitarian sector seem constantly to circulate without apparent resolution. Many of my discomforts were well rehearsed fourteen years ago at a meeting hosted by the University of Manchester in 1997, where a number of the leading voices of todays humanitarian studies discipline got together to debate the politics of emergency. Many of the major themes from that debate reverberate to this day without resolution: the need to acknowledge the inherently political nature of humanitarian action; its tendency to depoliticise situations of powerful political dynamism; its failure to address the real political-economic causes of emergency as they relate to historical and geographical processes of uneven development; the problem of permanent emergencies in the global south and the merging of development and emergency in approaches to humanitarian intervention.

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

 As people like Mark Duffield and David Keen and Alex de Waal have counseled us for a long time, the humanitarian desire to address these important issues by doing more better does not seem to resolve them. One way of considering this problem, I suggest is to follow the trail down into the roots of emergency thinking itself, to consider how it is that within our socio-political constitution we have come to consider particular moments of socio-economic and political-ecological transformation in the language of emergency in the first place. How does this ontology of emergency shape and structure humanitarian responses in ways that are not necessarily apparent, and how can we use a deeper understanding of the operations of this ontology to shape responses in a manner that allows humanitarian actors to free themselves of the conceptual shackles in which they have bound themselves by thinking about emergencies and emergency responses in radically different ways? To begin with it helps to state a few concrete examples of the problems that I am trying to think through at the moment. The first is the apparently permanent nature of complex emergencies in certain parts of the global South, whether Congo or Somalia or Afghanistan, the chronic nature of which and the apparent absence of obvious solutions beg the question of whether or not the distinction between norm and emergency has any purchase in those situations whilst also raising the implications of merging humanitarian action with development in an attempt to build human security. The second, which is linked to the first, relates specifically to the situation of humanitarian emergency that took place in northern Uganda up until 2006, where again the ambiguous and contradictory manner in which humanitarian relief operations were mobilized in relation to development planning and military discipline brought into question the emergency/norm distinction and raised serious questions about the manner in which humanitarians think through emergency. Thirdly, I have been thinking about the way in which the political revolution in Libya has been transformed into a humanitarian emergency governed by international humanitarian intervention and am considering the implications that this shift in discourse and action has for the nature of such moments of proper politics as Slavoj Zizek would call them. Fourthly, and directly related to this, I am struck by the curious emergency that has been declared in Italy as a response to the influx of Libyan refugees since the revolution began. And finally I have been thinking about the apparently or potentially global and universal emergencies that are now thought to threaten humanity as a whole, whether they are

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

the prospect of terrorism, of catastrophic climate change, of new pandemic diseases, of exponential increases in urbanization, of chronic food insecurity and the like. These situations are all, of course, very different from one another, but they all raise difficult and important questions about the manner in which situations of emergency are defined, identified, prepared for and responded to at the current time. They provide coordinates if you will, that allow us to mark out a small part of a general political economy of emergency that operates across and in no small part governs the terrain of human existence these days. In particular they raise a couple of key issues. The first is the apparent normalization of emergency in the current moment. We live, it often appears to me, in a permanent state of emergency, in which the far distant crises faced by rural communities in African and Asian countries collide with terror attacks on London buses, the economic crisis, tornados and floods experienced today in the US, the prospect of global food crises over the next twenty years and the eventual inundation of most major coastal cities in the world. Furthermore, it appears that where emergencies occur, they often become permanent, enduring, recycling moments of catastrophe that take decades to be resolved. Emergency, it appears, is everywhere and always, if not now, then maybe tomorrow or at some indeterminate but too distant moment in the future, and as such, emergency thinking has gradually come to govern a significant part of political thinking, not only in states and within the international systems of global governance that have made it their concern to monitor the life and health of the human population, but within the fabric of civil society itself. So, the threat of emergency is inescapable, its event horizon having stretched so far and wide in time and space as to encompass almost all life itself. The state of emergency has become, to some degree at least, even if only in its catastrophic potential, the norm. The second issue, which is in fact an adjunct to the first, is the question, raised by Dillon, that in recent years a situation has developed in which, increasingly it is the dynamic, unpredictable nature by which human and other forms of life evolve that now poses the threat of emergency. According to this analysis as technological developments evolve and as the connections between people, places and things proliferate, generating new modes of being in ways that often exceed the regulation of life and population that have been developed to administer them, as the circulations of people and things speed up and encompass more and more of the world, they come to be judged as dangers, as

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

threats to the established norms of the good life, particularly where they are assessed and adjudicated to be different or exceptional to the established norms of life under liberal capitalist democracy. Thus, my concern with this paper is to enter into the ambiguities and complexities of thinking about how it is that in the past twenty or thirty years we have been brought to a pass where not only is the threat of emergency no longer particularly exceptional, but normal, and where it is the burgeoning emergence of life itself in all its multiplicity comes to be understood, as Dillon puts it, as dangerous-becoming. To my mind, what we face here is a complex and contradictory situation in which the norm and the exception, in which the immanent processes of lifes emergence and the intentional dynamics of the state of emergency are collapsing in upon one another, producing a zone of indistinction not dissimilar to that described by Agamben in his discussion on the nature of sovereign power. But Agambens analysis is insufficient, I believe, to provide an adequate understanding of what is going on here. This aporia between emergence and emergency is not a mere function of the sovereign decision to adjudge the distinction between justified and bare life and the calling into being of the inclusive exclusion that binds them together in a contradictory fashion though it certainly plays its part. I believe there is a more substantive problem at play, one that reflects Nietzsches contemplation of the fundamental but indeterminate relation between being and becoming and the way that this has been taken up in the post-foundational political thought of theorists like Ranciere, Badiou and Nancy. What we might say, to begin with, is that in order to fully understand the import of the ontology of emergency and its implications, we must first strip it away and consider how to conceive of these situations radically differently. From the perspective of an ontology of emergence, a flat ontological perspective of manifold becoming, then an emergency, whether it is a flood or a situation of mass population displacement caused by conflict, can be understood as a particular conjuncture of forces in place and time, a moment of dynamic unfolding and interaction in which multiple, manifestly different entities bestowed of variegated capacities and natures articulate to produce a new reality that may have either positive and negative outcomes for them, depending upon their position within the conjuncture and in relation to the other entities they encounter. Interconnections and articulation produce new entities and unities, and as those

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

connections and articulations increase in frequency and intensity, more and more different entities, more and more forms of life and living emerge, while others recede or dissolve, and these new entities and unities assume, for a period of time, durability and stability and become beings. This, we might say is a processual ontology of the becomingbeing of things, an always dynamic processes of fluid creative destruction in which new beings and situations emerge from contested processes of becoming to constantly reform and reshape the constitution of the norm in an unstoppable process of what Cowen and Shenton might refer to as immanent development. From an ontological perpective of being, however we see an utterly different world before us. This is the world not of emergence and ever-becoming, but a world in which efforts of reason and conscience, of politics and of law attempt to ground the moment of emergence in the terms of the norm, to found a space of social and political stability through the calculations of mind and the application of technologies of government. This is an ontology that understands being as coherent, indivisible and bounded, of divisions between inside and outside, of us and them, of norm set in relation to exception. It is the realm, as Cowen and Shenton once again might put it, of intentional development, of sovereignty and territory and the government of things. It is also the source of the ontology of emergency, which establishes a state of exception in contrast to the norm. This is the process by which being seeks to secure itself against the dangerously contingent becoming of emergent life, which threatens to overwhelm it and mobilizes all the resources at its disposal to regulate and manage the excessive life force which confronts it, even those which are exceptional themselves. As such, it represents a way of conceiving existence that inevitably parses the flux of becoming, establishing boundaries of norm and other in an effort to secure the eligible life of the normative order against the dangerous-becoming of emergent life which is cast in the terms of exception. The emergency is that new form of life which emerges in exception to the norm, and which the norm must either normalize and bring to order, or bound and contain and abandon to itself in a place where it can do no harm. Emergency thinking, then, represents a manifestation of the ontology of being. It is rationality for governing life itself, in the interests of life itself, but which still possesses the powerful potential to bound particular situations and forms of life as exceptional. As such, it is another face of the sovereign power expounded by Agamben, that which decides the right to take life or let live. But this aspect of the power of the exception may

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

better be conceived, in Foucaults terms as the biopolitical power to make live or let die. It is the power of medicine, of public health, of social planning, it is the power through which humanitarians and emergency managers, whether within the state or without it, assume to themselves the authority and the right to identify and declare states of emergency. It is perhaps not necessary here to give an overview of the way that this ontology of emergency, this biopolitical ontology of being that understands the emergence of new forms of life as permanent potential emergency, informs and shapes contemporary humanitarian practice and the political effects that this produces. Writers like Mark Duffield and Jenny Edkins have done this some justice in recent years and space does not allow it. I will perhaps raise a few pertinent issues that relate to a factor that Duffield has highlighted as being particularly significant in recent years, and that is the notion of human security. Firstly, I think it is fair to say that human security thinking has played a very significant role in problematizing the entirety of the human condition in the terms of emergency. The discourse and policy of human security elevates the issue of the contingency of human existence to a central place in the political calculations of liberal humanism in a manner that effectively securitizes the human simultaneously at the level of the individual and species. By bringing together violence, human rights abuse, poverty, underdevelopment, governance and more under a single rubric, the emergent nature of human being itself is construed as radically contingent, as an emergency to be managed at all scales simultaneously, bringing the permanent emergency of contingent human becoming to fruition in the idea of human security. The life of the human species, of each and all, becomes the governmental preserve of those who would secure it against all threats, even those that emerge from the emergence of life itself. But this is no neutral project. While the dictates of humanitarianism state that relief must be provided on the basis of need alone, and emergency needs are determined through ostensibly apolitical techniques of counting and calculating and apportioning in the interests of the best possible outcome for each and all, none of these practices is neutral. Each derives from and is sustained by the very ontology of emergency that determines the distinction between the exception and the norm in the first place, which seeks to establish the norm wherever they lay their humanitarian gaze. Each carries with it the deeply biased legacy of an episteme that establishes the bounds of eligible

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

and worthy life and judges the nature of the political system that produces its other. While, as Michael Barnett usefully reminded us, there are multiple humanitarianisms at play in the world, and always have been, each defines and calculates its response and mobilizes its operations in line with a particular rationality of government, which has at its heart a particular understanding of the nature of the relation between the norm and the exception. Each operates with a particular view of the normative end in mind, even if each operates with the avowedly universal object of human suffering as its target, and in striving to secure the human in its own particular manner, in striving to secure its particular normative vision it bounds the reality of life in all its becoming in an attempt to secure and produce the norm of being. As such, each acts in a manner that defines the boundary of a distinctly political community, and I would vouch that even when humanitarians seek to retreat to the supposed purity of humanitarian principles, it remains impossible to escape the gravitational field of emergency politics. As we well know, the major hegemonic force in the humanitarian sector, the force which defines by and large the terms of the ontology of emergency, and which has defined and operationalised human security thinking is that of liberal humanism with its ideals of liberal capitalist democracy. And it is these ideals that, if not explicitly, at least ontologically and epistemologically underpin the vast majority of humanitarian policy and practice, both as it is determined by states and intergovernmental organizations as well as NGOs. We well know many of the problems associated with this mode of governmental rationality in seeking out positive humanitarian outcomes, but two are of particular importance, discipline and depoliticisation. The problem of discipline has been well examined by writers such as Jenny Hyndman, Jenny Edkins and Liisa Malkki with reference to refugees camps in particular, but more generally discussed in a wide ranging literature that describes the manner in which humanitarian interventions, even in their most apparently innocuous and technical programmes serve to discipline emergency-affected populations, bringing them in line with a determined norm but using the objectives of emergency relief and human security as their justification. Mark Duffield has highlighted in particular the tendency of humanitarian programmes informed by development methodology to promote and inculcate modes of practice which emphasise personal responsibility and individual coping strategies in the face of disaster over broader programmes of social insurance, thereby disciplining populations into the modus operandi of the liberal capitalist market place. Similarly my own research in northern Uganda exposed the manner in which the

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

implementation of water delivery programmes in IDP camps reinforced neoliberal economic policies that emphasized principles of demand management, cost-recovery and community management of water resources in a situation that could not support such an approach. As Michael Dillon has put it, hidden behind the apparently pure operationality of technologised intervention for the securing of human life, lies a particular mode of governmentality that is deeply and inescapably political. Yet this political undercurrent is generally disavowed, obscured by the apparently common sense necessity of saving human life and defending human rights from the threat of emergency, and by cleaving to the apparently rational and empirical certainties of technical expertise and codes of best practice, statistical assessments and minutely planned and engineered solutions. Thus, on the one hand, humanitarian action operating from within the liberal humanist ontology of emergency depoliticizes itself, wearing discourses of common sense action and necessity, the humanitarian imperative and the surety of empiricism as fig leaves to hide its shameful political nature. On the other hand, it also often serves to depoliticise its object, the emergency itself, in much the same manner, reducing complex situations of political turmoil into technical problems of facilitating human survival, obscuring the deeply historical and contemporary process of uneven development that not only structure the vulnerability of individuals, households and populations to shocks, but which feed the processes of conflict, resource degradation and labour exploitation that produce situations of emergency in the first place, or rendering moments of purely political becoming such as spontaneous political revolutions or the armed uprisings of insurgent groups either into criminal moments of aberrant and intolerable exception deserving of eradication, or as opportunities for the application of liberal humanist discipline through military humanitarian intervention, peace building and state reconstruction. In doing so, liberal approaches to humanitarian action serve to render emergent forms of life as liberalisms other, as exceptions to be normalized through discipline or abandonment. The discourse, policy and practice of human security thus exhibits the two key issues that I identified at the beginning of the paper as the key problematics of the ontology of emergency, for on the one hand human security doctrine not only transforms the entirety of human being into a potential emergency, thereby normalizing emergency as a state of being. In this respect it reflects the manner in which the norm of being confronts the emergent life force of becoming, rendering it exceptional and dangerous and generalizing the state of emergency across the entirety of life itself and producing a

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

zone of indistinction between being and becoming, norm and exception, emergency and emergence. So, herein lies the final paradox. By seeking to secure the integrity of human being in the face of lifes becoming the declaration of emergency across the field of life itself produces its own dissolution by precipitating a zone of indistinction in which the boundaries of norm and exception collapse, which is just as Nietzsche projected. Beings encounter with becoming precipitates, inevitably, beings dissolution, for it cannot secure itself indefinitely against the rising tide of history. Twenty years ago Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history as it appeared that liberal capitalist democracy had triumphed, ushering in era in which the tenets of liberal humanism would prevail across all of the peoples of the world, and in doing so he exposed the political ambitions that lie behind the liberal humanist ontology of emergency to bring an end to history itself, when the field of the political is swept clean and reformed in its own image. Fukuyama, it turns out, was somewhat premature. Properly political moments still occur and they often do not appear to be palatable from a liberal humanist perspective. They emerge, often at the margins as excessive forces of becoming as will to power, newly emergent life forms that are more often than not cast in the terms of emergency, as exceptions that must be normalized or neutralized, for the center must hold. Yet it can only hold for so long. Transformation must occur and according to Nietzsche, the inevitable end of beings efforts to hold the center in the face of becoming is nihilism as being loses sense of its self and its place in the world. But the answer, I would suggest to combat this, is not to hold on more firmly, it is not to identify, plan for and respond to an ever proliferating array of emergencies that assault the norm of our being. Rather, we need to think through this aporia from a persective of radical becoming that does not codify contingency as an emergency, but which is able to take into account and respond to human suffering and the danger of modernity through a politics of solidarity and cosmopolitanism that exceeds the state and other modes of government. In many respects the humanitarian movement has begun this project, yet there are many problems with the ontology of emergency that is mobilized by it particularly in its failure to reimagine the political seriously in a manner that is both fully reflexive in its understanding in the politics of humanitarianism and which can then align itself fully

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

with a liberatory trajectory that truly exceeds state based, liberal politics and which fully empowers people without operating from within a neo-liberal politics of paternalism, that envisages human life as a true becoming-together which actually embraces the potentially becoming-dangerous of emergent life and of political life in particular. This is not a call to ignore the urgency of human suffering or the need to provide sanctuary and succor quite the opposite it is a call for a humanitarian politics beyond emergency or development a humanitarian politics of emergence that does not reduce political revolutions to depoliticized moments of technical salvation of a population rendered as a flock in need of a good shepherd Ends SA

Simon Addison: Between emergency and emergence DRAFT DO NOT CITE

10