life to calculability”.^133 Edkins arrives at this point by drawing on continental
philosophy with unquestionable rigour. But there is a strong sense in which the
acceptance of this kind of philosophical worldview ultimately involves a leap of faith
that it provides the best route towards supporting “the suffering”, a goal that seems
still to underpin the final sentence. That is a worldview that ultimately, this thesis
does not share. Moreover, the initial “practical political aim” of this thesis is rather
different, if not diametrically opposed to Edkins’. To take an extremely relevant
example, she argues that Sen’s work on famine fails to go far enough in
acknowledging the problem of seeing famine in a technical sense as a “failure”.^134
Famine as failure, as disaster, produces victims. Victims need welfare
provision or aid, not a political voice. Vulnerable or at-risk households are
produced as subjects on whom data can be collected. They are then
controlled by administrative mechanisms of food distribution or food aid.
This process depoliticizes famine and constitutes it as a site for intervention
and control.^135As we will see in the course of the thesis, this raises legitimate concerns. But it is
unsatisfactory for one fundamental reason. There are a number of false choices
presented here: why not welfare provision and a political voice? Indeed closer to
the core of Sen’s work than the generalisability of Sen’s account of famine, which
Edkins disputes, lies precisely that: a concern that a political voice, a presence in
public deliberation, will be the crucial enabling factor for the most marginalised
people. It may not be a solvable “failure”, but that does not mean that we cannot
legitimately see starvation as a failure of an ambition to curtail suffering, and a
comprehensible injustice. David Rieff has written that in fact, “even at its best,
133
Edkins, Whose Hunger? , 159. My concern here is that this kind of stance unnecessarily
undermines the possibility of critical international theories yielding practical insights, a
possibility that remains central to, say, the work of Andrew Linklater, whose work is
referred to in chapters 2 and 3, or to the kind of research agenda set out in Mark Hoffman,
"Agency, Identity and Intervention", in Political Theory, International Relations and the
Ethics of Intervention , ed. Ian Forbes and Mark Hoffman (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1993). In
the specific context of humanitarianism, the critical insights of figures like Alex de Waal
retain a strongly applied focus. 134
135 Edkins, Whose Hunger? , 53.
Ibid., 54.