Paper short abstract:

This presentation draws on humanitarian healthcare professionals’ accounts of morally distressing encounters with death and dying, and Nguyen’s work on therapeutic citizenship (2010) to unpack the politics of palliative care in humanitarian emergencies.

Paper long abstract:

Rescue is central tenet of humanitarian healthcare in practice. For some, this is a practical reality of response. For others, such as Redfield, the rescue imperative is also political: a refusal of dominant biopolitics and its grossly unequal distribution of life and death across the globe (Redfield 2012, 2013). There will always be, however, some individuals in contexts of humanitarian crises whose lives cannot be saved. The recent Ebola crisis, so obviously challenging the intentions of healthcare professionals to offer curative assistance, has foregrounded this inevitability. Can and should humanitarian healthcare providers be responsible for ensuring a certain standard of care to those likely to die in humanitarian crises? This is an ethical, practical, and political question our research group (Humanitarian Healthcare Ethics Research Group) is currently working on in collaboration with members of the World Health Organization initiative to strengthen palliative care. In this presentation, we draw on our interviews with humanitarian healthcare professionals and Nguyen's work on therapeutic citizenship (2010) to unpack the politics of palliative care in humanitarian emergencies. A key question we ask is: How is providing palliative care in emergencies similar or different - in terms of its moral, political, and lived implications - from the broader biopolitics of life and death that determine whose lives are prioritized and whose are not in humanitarian practice?