The Liminal Figure of the Civilian and the Necropolitics of Protection

Abstract Recent literature on contemporary humanitarian governance brings to light complex rationales of care and control that give expression to the ongoing coloniality of power. This paper examines the protection of civilians (PoC) from a similar vantage point. Over the past few decades, the goal of protecting civilians has produced a broad assemblage meant to guide military, police, and humanitarian operations in conflict environments. This paper argues that to “protect civilians” is to rationalize human life along a narrow biopolitical continuum grounded in the liminal figure of the civilian, a figure that in war can appear alive or dead. While the goal of protection is evidently to keep civilians alive, the rationality at work in the PoC assemblage has also given way to a particular form of necropolitics that enmeshes life and death. Following a familiar colonial profile, but one that functions to obscure racialization, the necropolitics at work in PoC begin with a quantificatory episteme of accounting for, and a counting of, civilian casualties. This has led to the establishment of civilian casualty tracking and mitigation cells as a model meant to generate lessons learned from civilian casualties. At work in the PoC, therefore, is a political theory of life that enmeshes a form of biopolitics and necropolitics: a politics of life and a politics of death.