Midwives and Humanitarian Bureaucracy

Managing Migration at a Postcolonial Border

Bibliographic Data

ID2236595
AuthorsN Sahraoui (0000-0002-0014-7489, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume15
Issue2
Pages272-290
Publication date2021-04-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Political Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1749-5679 • E-ISSN: 1749-5687
DOI10.1093/ips/olab001
OpenAlexW3136627180
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited42

Drawing on Foucauldian biopolitics, Max Weber's and Hannah Arendt's understandings of bureaucracy, and Achille Mbembe's theoretical insights into necropolitical power, I propose the notion of humanitarian bureaucracy to account for the involvement of medical personnel in the summary deportations of pregnant Comorian women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. In addition to their usual consultations, hospital midwives are asked to assess the health of pregnant women arrested at sea in order to state whether they can be lawfully detained, while deportations happen within hours owing to the specificities of this postcolonial migration regime. The notion of humanitarian bureaucracy traces how a series of bureaucratic acts, duly sanctioned by qualified professionals, performs a minimal and fragmented biopolitical surveillance that neutralizes the question of responsibility and rejects the racialized Other into a liminal space between failing to 'make live' and avoiding to 'let die.' The article argues that humanitarian bureaucracy represents an ambivalent power, stemming from biopolitics yet producing necropolitics through processes of racialization. The article draws on three months of fieldwork conducted in Mayotte in 2017 and analyzes midwives' discourses and bureaucratic practices as materialized by the medical certificates they deliver in the context of these assessments

Ambivalence · Archaeology · Biopower · Bureaucracy · Humanitarian aid · Liminality · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Racialization · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Identity, and Health · Psychology · Public Administration · Sex work and related issues

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