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enable safe circulation to continue unhindered as opposed to simple containment and the
swift restitution of law and order (Reid-Henry, 2014: 422).
This shift from containment and the restitution of law and order to a concern with
managing the risks of circulation and securing the population in the most efficient and
life-enhancing way possible is identified by Foucault as two differing forms of sovereignty.
The first is the sovereignty of the intra muros, the king within the walls, contrasted with the
second, the sovereignty of the shepherd or pastoralism (2009). For Reid-Henry, this changing approach from containment to the effective management of disaster is the distinction
between the pre-modern state and the emergence of a modern-liberal state. In its concern for
the effective management of risk and thus the effective management of life, Reid-Henry
recognises ‘a humanitarian form of intervention concerned with maintaining – not only the
population’s well-being – but maintaining the state’s own security and as importantly its
efficacy’ (2014: 422, italics in original).
Thus, the management of disaster by the emergent modern state made use of instrumental and normative technologies and spatial arrangements concerned with the regulation of
human life. Here categories of life recognisable to political geographers (Jones, 2009) and
known to critical scholars of humanitarianism as both biopolitics and the politics of life
(Fassin, 2012) regulate the security of the population more generally. Thus, specificity of
control and the creation of particular governing instruments went hand-in-hand with, or
were contained within, particular governing rationalities and a universal concern for (the
good) life that we can recognise as humanitarian. Here, a humanitarian logic, or what
Fassin (2012) would call a humanitarian reason, developed with modern states as a technique to manage populations and the social, economic and political risks that they faced
(Reid-Henry, 2014: 422–423) while also ensuring the state’s security through the effective
management of disaster. However, as a technique of government in the emerging modern,
liberal state humanitarianism itself became subject to processes of effective management or
rationalisation.
The rationalisation of compassion
Hannah Arendt is perhaps the scholar most well known for a critique of what she terms the
passion for compassion (2009). However, long before Arendt called attention to the potential problems of political action guided by the affects of unchecked compassion, the modern
liberal state was itself developing ways to ‘render compassion party to liberal forms of social
regulation and control’ (Reid-Henry, 2014: 423). This worked in a variety of ways, ensuring
that humanitarian ideals came to be incorporated into more instrumental forms of government from colonialism (see Lester, 2002; Lester and Dussart, 2014); to the civilising laws of
conflict; to the present day management of global relations (see Calhoun, 2008) and the
limits and legitimation of violence itself (see Weizman, 2012). Thus, according to ReidHenry, by the early 20th-century this meant, ‘humanitarian endeavour was quite clearly a
part of liberal political rationality more broadly, wherein it served as both an enabler and a
limit on state powers’ (2014: 423, italics in original).
The modern, liberal state has thus rendered compassion into an effective instrument for
the management of disasters that sees care and control as co-constitutive parts of a process
of rationalisation. As humanitarians, driven by compassion for distant strangers
have sought to mobilise resources for action designed to relieve suffering, there are others
– economists, engineers, etc. – determining how such action can be made as efficient as
possible. As Thomas L. Haskell (1985a, 1985b) discussed in his seminal study on humanitarianism and the emergence of capitalist market logics, moral sentiment only came to be