Humanitarian Innovations and Material Returns: Valuation, Bio-financialisation and Radical Politics

Abstract

This article critically examines the global humanitarian innovation movement by conjuncting it with the stem cell biotech sector to trace how in the assemblage of matter and code conflicts emerge about notions of suffering, pain, enhancement as well as markets that alter the very material forms of life and economy. In the first section, I look at two things simultaneously: a bio-humanitarian project—the Cypriot search for and DNA identification of the post-war missing—and clinical trials performed by the biotech corporate sector. I trace their respective methods of value and valuation as not only dependent social molecuralised practices but also as translation technologies of kinship, creation of new notions of life and death and governance. In the second section, I take a close look at the emergence of humanitarian and clinical labour as a global assemblage to show how humanitarian organisations and transnational corporations orient themselves towards certain labour assemblages in the search ‘anywhere’ to learn about, borrow and translate technologies supporting the ‘business’ of empire. I finish with broader theoretical implications of the humanitarian work post war and the clinical labour of patients in stem cell therapies.