Mark Duffield

University of Bristol | UB · SPAIS

This paper provides a critical analysis of post-humanitarianism with reference to adaptive design. At a time when precarity has become a global phenomenon, the design principle has sidelined the need for, or even the possibility of, political change. Rather than working to eliminate precarity, post-humanitarianism is implicated in its reproduction...

With humanitarian disaster management as its background, this article takes a critical look at some recent changes in the nature of security governance; especially, the withdrawal from face-to-face engagement on the ground in favour of techniques of distant sensing and remote management. Despite the optimism and affirmatory policy claims surroundin...

The Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. This special volume opens up with a selection of nine of the most influential articles published in the journal. JISB's editorial team has asked the authors for their reflections on their original articles, telling us more about the writing process at that tim...

Utilizando la gestión de desastre humanitario como ejemplo, este artículo analiza con una mirada crítica algunos cambios recientes que se han producido en la naturaleza de la gobernanza de la seguridad. Sobre todo, la desaparición de la participación directa en favor del desarrollo de técnicas de detección y gestión a distancia. La rápida evolución...

Using Sudan as a case study, the focus of this essay is the changing nature of fieldwork in the Global South. More specifically, it concerns the methodological shifts in how the South has been approached as an object of knowledge in the contemporary period. Drawing on the author's own varying engagement with Sudan since December 1973, it was prompt...

Despite the widespread perception of danger, the aid industry continues to expand within challenging political environments. As a way of reducing risk, this expansion has been accompanied by the ‘bunkerization’ of international aid workers. While this development is largely viewed by the industry as an unfortunate response to a decline in external...

The fortified aid compound is now ubiquitous throughout the global borderland. Following the local backlash against the politicisation of aid, the aid industry is bunkering itself. In examining these developments, this essay first looks at the spatial turn, or rather its absence, in the field of international assistance. The potential for UN field-...

The politicisation of aid has made helping others increasingly dangerous. The fortified aid compound is now ubiquitous throughout the global borderland. It has become the signature architecture, for example, of the UN integrated mission. In examining these developments, the article first looks at the potential for UN field-security training to norm...

As the rising death toll among humanitarian aid workers suggests, saving strangers has become a dangerous occupation. In addressing the consequences of this increase, this article begins by placing the development—security nexus in its historical context. While it has long been associated with liberalism, two factors distinguish this nexus today: f...

It is now commonplace for policy-makers to assert that ‘if we help people who are less fortunate than ourselves, not only is it good for them, it is also good for us’ (see Blair, 2001). This enlightened self-interest summarises how the current relationship between development and security is understood. That is, in fostering ‘their’ development, we...

Famines can result from the conscious exercise of power in pursuit of gain or advantage by the politically strong. This article is an attempt to analyse the process of political survival in the context of permanent emergency. Through examples of local asset transfer, and indicating how this process articulates with a wider regional parallel economy...

Durante los últimos años, un número de ideas relacionadas con el trabajo en �entornos difíciles�, o que implican países descritos como �malos actores� o �estados frágiles� han entrado en el discurso político. Tratan de describir el reto del desarrollo en una época de inestabilidad global y de extendido fallo estatal. Estas ideas son similares en co...

The focus of this paper is a global civil war being fought not between armies but at the level of existence itself. In order to explore such a war, development and underdevelopment are reinterpreted as a distinction between insured and non-insured life. That is, between populations supported by regimes of social protection as opposed to those expec...

As a liberal relation of governance, development has a long genealogy spanning the colonial and postcolonial periods. This article attempts to uncover these interconnections. Development is first examined in terms of its singular ability to constantly reinvent itself as a “new and improved” formula for sharing the world with others. After discussin...

Human security is commonly understood as prioritising the security of people, especially their welfare and well-being, rather than that of states. Rather than examining human security as a measurable or specific condition, however, the focus here is how ideas of human security facilitate the way that Southern populations are understood, differentia...

Using Foucault’s conception of racism and sovereign power as a point of departure, this paper examines an expansive and centralizing security architecture that interconnects the policing of international migration, the promotion of domestic social cohesion and the search for overseas development. Emerging with decolonization, the basis of this inte...

Mark Duffield analyzes how the conventional understanding of the new wars establishes both a justification and legitimacy for external intervention. He argues that the encounter of global liberal governance with resistance is shaping the post-Cold War reuniting of aid and politics. Development (2005) 48, 16–24. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100...

Development today is a radical and intrusive endeavour. Reflecting the interest of homeland security, it is embarked upon transforming societies as a whole within the global borderland. In attempting to secure the future, however, it is reaching backwards to reconnect and rejuvenate earlier colonial modes of governing the world of peoples. This art...

That democratic societies do not fall into conflict has become an axiom of contemporary international relations. Liberal societies, however, do not properly exist along the troubled margins of the global order. This absence has lent urgency to present efforts at social reconstruction. Whereas a couple of decades ago the principle of non–interferenc...

Incl. abstract and bibl. The paper is concerned with the unintended consequences of aid as a relation of governance: in this case, the failure of aid agencies to improve the lot of displaced Southerners living in North Sudan after more than a decade of engagement. It is argued that aid, as a governance relation, is complicit with wider forms of opp...

This article examines aid practice, that is, the public-private contractual networks that link donor governments, UN agencies, military establishments, NGOs, private companies and others, as a relation of global liberal governance. In order to fulfil this function, such networks embody what could be called the 'securitisation' of international assi...

Abstract This essay addresses the new,phenomenon,of network,warfare as a realisation of modernity’s inner potential and surprising capacities rather than its failure. A feature of the complex capillaries of global governance, network warfare has been endemic for some time in many,border regions of the world,and reflects an increasing conflation of...

This article examines aid practice, that is, the public-private contractual networks that link donor governments, UN agencies, military establishments, NGOs, private companies and others, as a relation of global liberal governance. In order to fulfil this function, such networks embody what could be called the ‘securitisation’ of international assi...

This paper provides a critical alternative to two key aspects of conventional wisdom in international policy. First, the prevailing notion of internal or intra‐state war as bounded by traditional views of the nation‐state. Second, the development model of conflict which regards so‐called internal war as originating from poverty, scarcity or weak in...

The aim of this chapter is to explore the West’s humanitarian response to what the UN calls ‘complex emergencies’. That is, protracted and often conflict-related political crises usually involving large-scale population displacement, non-natural death and social disruption. Moreover, in relation to UN and other relief agencies, a system-wide respon...

The concept of the ‘relief‐to‐development continuum’ has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years. Concerned by the rise in relief budgets over the past decade and the absolute fall in development aid resources, support has been growing for the concept of developmental relief. In the context of complex political emergencies, it has been...

Relief in war zones provides a metaphor for the post-Cold War era, which is part of its complexity. It signals and reflects some of the most profound historical changes of our time. Although often associated with Africa or the Balkans, the modus operandi of war relief also reflects the essence of social change within industrialized countries. Exter...

This paper concerns the manner in which the West is responding to protracted political crises beyond its borders. It examines the conceptual world-view that aid agencies bring to complex emergencies and which shapes action. The paper provides an analysis of developmentalism. That is, the currently dominant idea of development which is an adapted fo...

This article takes complex emergencies and the humanitarian response to them as its point of reference. It provides a critique of relief, development and the linking debate. Rather than being autonomous, relief is a developmental idea. However, development concepts have proven incapable of explaining permanent emergency. They also underestimate the...

The emergence of two-tier welfare in Africa has been defined by two interconnected developments. Firstly, a growing understanding that ‘African famine’ is a complex and deep-seated problem, a problem which, in many cases, combines political, environmental-economic and conflict factors. Secondly, in response to this situation a world historic intern...

In the first part of this article I examined the crisis of subsistence in Sudan resulting from the commercial development of the North and the war in the South. An attempt was also made to relate the deepening impoverishment that this represents to a decay in governance. There is a tendency amongst donor and government officials, which is reflected...

This is the first part of a two-part article which stresses the need to move away from short term emergency measures to a more general system of social security. A weakness in much of the thinking on food security in Sudan is its conception of a normally self-provisioning peasantry which is pushed into distress only as a consequence of exceptional...