Social movements and biopolitical states: A study of humanitarian aid in Cape Town 2008

In May of 2008, a wave of xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa resulting in the displacement of thousands of ‘refugees’ who ended up in government-established ‘safety camps’. Due to the lack of an adequate response by government and the United Nations, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African AIDS activist organisation, began providing relief to the displaced population. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the ‘biopolitical technologies’ used by the TAC in their response to this crisis. We argue that the TAC's approach to providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Cape Town drew on both the organisation's own archive and repertoire of activist techniques and practices and the biopolitical toolkit deployed by international agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The outcome of this cross-fertilisation, we argue, was a hybrid assemblage of tactics and techniques that did not conform to the characterisation of humanitarian aid as simply another kind of bureaucratic antipolitics. The case study draws attention to the ways in which the TAC sought to ‘empower’ refugees and non-nationals as well as pressure and leverage the South African state into responding to the crisis, and thereby fulfil its pastoral role as ‘the watchful shepherd’ and the protector of human life.