Le souci de soi: The Duty of Care and the Humanitarian Politics of Life

The care for the humanitarian self is moving into the centre. This chapter focuses on the place of one specific dispositive, tracing one particular process that has deepened the aporia of humanitarian work and reason. The voluntary guidelines even suggested that humanitarian organisations needed to create a “security culture” for themselves. The Duty of Care (DoC) fashions the evaluations and meanings that make up Fassin’s humanitarian politics of life tilting it toward the care for the security of the humanitarians. The DoC becomes a dispositive inscribing hierarchies of priorities, including a duty of obedience toward security professionals, in the technology of through which humanitarian works can realise themselves as ethical and moral subject “with the help of others” to retake Foucault’s terms. Humanitarians circulate in armoured vehicles and confine themselves to well-guarded compounds and hotels serviced on an international level.