Predatory Humanitarianism: Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and the Manhunt

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the US government has deployed an intense strategy for finding undocumented migrants: the manhunt. Using everything from armed patrols and ground sensors to aggregated social media data, agents from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) have been tracking and capturing migrants, both as they cross the border and in the interior of the country. This is consistently defined as a “humanitarian” response to a “humanitarian crisis.” Using Gregoire Chamayou’s (2012) theory of cynegetic power, I show how the logic of what I call “predatory humanitarianism” has become a fundamental part of governance in authoritarian populist regimes. 

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn’s work focuses on forced migration. For more than a decade, she has worked with refugees and internally displaced people. In her latest book, No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement, looks critically at the refugee camp as a space of both bureaucratic regulation and existential crisis. Using an ontological approach, she shows that displaced people become stuck in camps not only because of war, but because of the logic of humanitarianism, which traps people in states of uncertainty, extreme pressure, and eventually abandonment. No Path Home is based on more than 16 months of ethnographic work in the Republic of Georgia, where Dunn lived and worked in a camp for victims of ethnic cleansing.

Most of Dunn’s work has been done in the former Eastern Bloc. Her early work, which culminated in Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor, focused on the transition from socialism in former Warsaw Pact states. Beginning in 2001, she focused on the former USSR, particularly on the non-Russian republics. In addition to her work in Georgia, she has also conducted research on displaced Chechens in Kyrgyzstan.

SEMINARIA NAUKOWE IEiAK - w trakcie seminariów badania prezentują pracownicy instytutu, a także antropolodzy i przedstawiciele pokrewnych dyscyplin z kraju i ze świata. To okazja do zapoznania się z najnowszymi badaniami i swobodnej dyskusji w kameralnej atmosferze. Spotkania są otwarte dla publiczności. Serdecznie zapraszamy wszystkich zainteresowanych: zarówno badaczy, jak i studentów, absolwentów oraz wszelkie osoby, którym bliska jest tematyka seminariów. Więcej o seminariach

Antropologia dziś - otwarte seminaria naukowe – zadanie finansowane w ramach umowy 973/P-DUN/2018 ze środków Ministra Nauki i Szkolnictwa Wyższego przeznaczonych na działalność upowszechniającą naukę. Projekt jest realizowany przez Stowarzyszenie Pracownia Etnograficzna im. Witolda Dynowskiego we współpracy z Instytutem Etnologii i Antropologii Kulturowej UW.