Khalili and Ferguson

Professor Naber once mentioned the political collapse of humanitarianism with the celebration of neoliberal ideologies when we discussed tactical humanism in class.  Khalili's readings touch this topic. Khalili discusses how liberal warfare uses ideals of human rights as "techniques for socially engineering the people and place they conquered" (p. 3) while it enacts more coercive violence. She notes that "humanitarian discusses is supplemented with a language that insists on the urgency of a civilizing, or democratizing, or modernizing, or improving mandate" (p. 5). She examines these liberal counterinsurgencies focusing on the practices of confinement and detention they employ. Ferguson calls this practice as"the uses of neoliberalism" to emphasize how some aspects of neoliberalism work with certain forms of humanitarian politics (p. 170). He points out that neoliberal ideologies can be indexed to rationality "linked less to economic dogmas or class projects than to specific mechanisms of government, and recognizable modes of creating subjects" (p. 171). The  neoliberal subjectivities helps not only diverting attention from "the increasing inequality, insecurity, loss of public services, and a general deterioration of quality of life for the poor and working classes" associated with forms of domination (p. 170), but also commodifying humanitarianism as a privatized concern that runs "like a business" (p. 172). 

The national states build dense networks of international institutions and organizations that generally designed to promote neoliberal global norms and policies on world peace and prosperity. Ferguson asks "what happens when the key implementers of poverty policy are not national states at all, but transnational NGOs, or private transnational foundations?" (p. 169). I am interested in the pervasiveness of neoliberal governance paradigm that facilitates to shift public responsibility and accountability of the government to protect human rights to transnational and non-state actors. The growing involvement of humanitarian organizations eventually helps to create environments for neoliberal imperialism.