Journal
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Volume 20, Issue 3, Pages 328-361Publisher
SOC CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
DOI: 10.1525/can.2005.20.3.328
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The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans frontieres [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF's operations that express concern for human life in the midst of humanitarian disaster and the group's self-proclaimed ethic of engaged refusal. Adopting the analytic frame of biopolitics, I suggest that the actual practice of medical humanitarian organizations in crisis settings presents a fragmentary and uncertain form of such power, extended beyond stable sovereignty and deployed within a restricted temporal horizon.
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