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Short abstract:

Drawing on empirical research in South Sudan, this paper follows the making of humanitarian headcounts to show how displaced bodies are recognized, counted, and turned into ‘target populations’ for humanitarian intervention, assigning differential value to aggregate life in spatial terms.

Long abstract:

Ever since the humanitarian community started responding to ‘internal displacement’ in the 1990s, the effectiveness of such responses has been cast as an information problem: If only humanitarians had access to reliable data about the needs of displaced persons, then they could better identify and deliver aid to assist them. Today, displacement data are collected and circulated on a massive scale and through a range of methods to improve data quality, or how accurately the data collected reflect the needs of displaced persons. Yet, while this process might appear seamless, quantifying mobility is contested terrain, population headcounts sites of frequent debate amongst humanitarian actors. Drawing on 13 months of empirical research on the humanitarian data collection infrastructure in South Sudan, this paper traces how displaced bodies are recognized, counted, and turned into ‘target populations’ for humanitarian intervention. Approaching quantification as both a relational and spatializing practice (Day et al. 2014), I read headcounts as enumerative geographies to argue that the techniques through which ‘need’ and ‘displacement’ are made calculable enable, rather than prevent, their politicization. The paper shows how headcounts come to assign differential value to aggregate life in bounded spatial terms through their making, terms of evaluation that reveal how, where, and whose lives are made to matter in the process of aggregation.