2024/06/01 by M Petro · 1 voice
Environmental Science · Social Sciences · #Geographies of human-animal interactions #Rangeland Management and Livestock Ecology
paper · doi:10.1353/hum.2024.a953060
openalex publication_date 2024/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract: Moving beyond focuses on humanitarian extensions of biopolitics, recent scholarship has begun to explore techniques of resistance in practices of aid, development, and relief. While these shifts are welcome, they often leave undertheorized the processes by which such resistances actually undermine biopower, particularly at the level of organizations’ ethico-political efforts to form their subjects, resistant or otherwise. This article offers “pastoral power,” a medieval form of conduct-shaping and individualizing power in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality, as a resource for theorizing humanitarian practices as resistance. Drawing on the documentary artifacts—training materials, published interviews, and web presences—of two religious humanitarian organizations on the US-Mexico border, this article examines the engagement between the visions of salvation, practices of knowledge production, and processes of subjectivation that enable their work. This article contends that their exercises of pastoral power destabilize the objects of knowledge and systems of conduct that undergird border biopower, fostering resistant communities and interrupting lethal abandonments. Ultimately, the framework of pastoral power appears as a resource for theorizing humanitarian resistance, capable of engaging alternative ethics, practices of refusal, and possibilities for political formation in certain humanitarian organizations.