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) in Africa. It addresses how recent humanitarianism has moved away from top-down interventions which sought to either intervene to save those that have been rendered as “bare life” (Agamben, 1998: 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. While previous accounts of security and development emphasized why fragile states and authoritarian regimes could constitute a threat to their people and the international system, society, or community, where justifications for interventions were based on their flouting of specific international norms and conventions. In contrast, recent 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 achieve or 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, adapt and self-transform their own the broader social milieu.

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 historical claims concerning “liberal” and “illiberal” subjecthood. These imperfections have historically been reserved for non-whites and non-Europeans since the Enlightenment, i.e., 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: 9), especially in 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 target 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 racial biopolitics and by decentring the state and instead looking at assemblages, i.e., 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,” i.e., a multiplicity of actors, rationalities, and technologies which attempt to interpellate subjects within these spheres of influence. This paper shows how resilience-building 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) within 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 these regions. Engaging with humanitarian activities in the Sahel and LCB, the paper argues that through racialised and exclusionary racial biopolitics which function through racialised assemblages, European humanitarian aid and assistance through upstreaming border control management such as biometrics, exploit and sustain colonialities that seek achieve European outcomes abroad. 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 are facilitated through development aid, such racialised discourses and practices 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 could be found in recent attempts to interpellate persons and communities in the Sahel and LCB as “vulnerable” and “poor”, and states as “fragile” or “failing” to highlight their deficient resilience and how this could impact on other developed populations or countries who have achieved better resilience. For example, attempts to regularize various forms of desirable movements and criminalise others within the Sahel and LCB could be viewed as attempts to control those viewed as potentially risky 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). This paper shows how these all constitute racialised biopolitical assemblages which attempt to govern complexity within the African context which is a continuation of various historical colonialities where their inherent infantilizing tendencies assume the incapacity of full self-governance, and self-transformation; they perpetuate colonialities which within the Sahel, may stifle other possibilities of non-Western resilience such as those associated with human relationality where the definitions of the human and the environment may be different and their relationship may be more complex. It becomes necessary to problematize the various resilience projects, including those that have explicit humanitarian dimensions such as “assistance” and “aid” by asking critical questions about what they do which could expose the ways in which those that experience them may resist these attempts. Further research should investigate the l ways in which individuals and communities in the Sahel interact with these resilience projects and how various so-called African partners —state and non-state— who play integral roles in facilitating and implementing them become positioned and how they position themselves. Such research could adopt focus groups, in-depth interviews, or ethnographic methods to capture ways in which resilience projects are engaged with, modified, or even resisted by those who emerge as targets of European post-interventionist racial biopolitics.