The Lives of Others: Political Economies of Security and the Gifts of Empire

It has become commonplace to observe that we live in dark times. With the proliferation of irredentist wars, ethno-nationist patterns of organizing violence, and the revenant racial logics by which risk and protection are distributed, it seems we are living through a kind of Gramscian interregnum, redolent of the “morbid symptoms” of his time. But when did this crisis really begin? Like with all caesuras, the focus on the spectacular symptoms occludes the continuities by which historical techniques of governance are adapted to new conditions of social domination. Rather than understanding our historical moment as the breakdown of prevailing orders, and hence a return to violence, this talk will propose that what marks our time is an experimentation with the organization and localization of violence in the everyday.

Thinking with Sudan and Gaza as two places where the moral and ontological status extraordinary violence remains hotly debated, this talk proposes a larger set of questions about what it means that over the last decades, we have seen what Manuel Schwab calls the “enclosure of the everyday” by various globally distributed economies, from humanitarian assistance, which will be my main topic, to communications platforms, remittance networks, and payment spaces. As civil infrastructures that sustain pedestrian practices, these have not traditionally been seen as the focal point for understanding how violence is organized. Nevertheless, the talk will propose that the “enclosure of the everyday,” which entails significant and intimate-yet-speechless entanglement with the lives of others, constitutes a central driver of the “new new wars,” even as they descend into extraordinary depths of annihilating force. With an eye towards debates unfolding in Germany today, it will be shown that public memory must also be seen as one of these infrastructures.

Please register for the lecture through this Google form.

Manuel Schwab is a writer and professor of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. Working at the nexus between Economic and Political Anthropology, his work is concerned with valorization and securitization and their relation to humanitarian practice and the logics of military force. Drawing from seemingly unrelated social fields like public memory, practices of care, and accusations of supernatural force, he is interested in how these come to shape temporal and ethical imaginaries. He has worked in Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Germany, and the US. In addition to his work on value in the Sudanese context, he is in the early stages of a new research undertaking on the relationship between extractive economies and the new politics of “post-humanitarian” crisis management. Manuel’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. In addition to his academic research, Manuel is finishing a Manuscript of speculative fiction in with an artist from Guinea, where he works at the nexus between experimental ethnography and fiction proper. The work began when he was a Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude 2019-2020.

---

For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 7:00 pm – 9:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: Lecture Hall

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File