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11 Cleaning Up the Cold War: Global Humanitarianism and the Infrastructure of Crisis Response Peter Redfield Sven Lindqvist’s book A History of Bombing grimly details the brutal fantasies and colonial violence accompanying the advent of aerial warfare. It also incorporates counterpoint themes: growing concern for civilians and fitful claims to common humanity.1 Sudden attack from the skies produced dramatic destruction, after all, creating a new theater for suffering. Once rendered visible, and matched with the proper structure of sentiment, scenes of broken bodies and panicked refugees could inspire moral response. Between the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the planet saw no shortage of dramatic human tragedy, particularly in the geopolitical margins where most of the Cold War’s actual conflicts took place. Innovations in communications technology allowed the international transmission of images in close to real time by the middle 1960s. Among other things, the technical fact of satellite broadcast extended the potential range, speed, and intensity of war journalism . Whereas Guernica had been the exception to a rule of silence about civilian agony, especially in colonial settings, television audiences could now peer through screens to witness suffering at a distance.2 In the metropolitan centers of former empires, the anguish of physically remote populations now flickered—still intermittently but more graphically—into public view. The contemporary drama known as “humanitarian crisis” emerged as a variation on the theme of charity, often amid the very colonized peoples Lindqvist’s more extreme sources once hoped to eradicate. After World War II, a globally oriented humanitarian infrastructure gradually came into being. Alongside “sharper” instruments (such as the AK-47) that refocused power through the threat of death amid proxy wars, a set of tools emerged to respond to human suffering, together with new international agencies and organizations to wield them.3 Sharing a longer lineage with military and industrial logistics, as well as common circuitry of international mobility and expertise, this humanitarian apparatus represents a 268 Redfield form of technical mutation and reconfiguration as much as innovation. By the final decade of the Cold War, it had coalesced enough to offer stable objects and routines designed for emergency settings. Although hardly a remedy for the upheaval and inhumanity accompanying geopolitical contestation , humanitarian equipment offered a means of temporary relief in particular locales, and thus literal, as well as figurative, sanitization. In this essay I examine the emergence of this humanitarian infrastructure by focusing on the development of one significant component: mobile medical supplies. I do so primarily through the example of the nongovernmental organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The case of MSF is particularly germane to this endeavor for three reasons. First, although emergency response is no longer the group’s only form of action, it remains its trademark of technical expertise. Second, MSF’s ideology of outspoken independence means that it has often played the role of self-appointed humanitarian critic, commenting on humanitarian shortcomings while also seeking to provide aid. Thus MSF can serve as a barometer of sorts for the general state of the field. Third, MSF emerged during a geopolitical period that featured proxy wars between superpowers and significant crises along the borders of the state socialist bloc. The group’s focus on civilian suffering and truth telling thereby exemplifies an internationalism of moral engagement amid political disillusionment, in marked contrast to earlier internationalisms committed to utopian politics. Here I sketch the outlines of MSF’s techniques for rapid medical intervention in adverse circumstances, including pre-assembled, standardized “kits” of equipment, guidelines for responding to varieties of public health crises, and minimal forms of health evaluation. Tracking the general story of the kit through a series of examples drawn from specific settings, I illustrate the manner in which the kit emerged amid a broader standardization and professionalization of humanitarian action. The product of modest inventors, and often engagingly simple in design, this technical assemblage nonetheless sustains the expansive ambition of reaching and stabilizing a population almost anywhere in the world within 48 hours. Although geographically mobile it is a temporally restricted set of instruments. Defined for a state of emergency, these tools remain limited by a concentrated concern for an uncertain present rather than an expansive future. In this sense they are, by their very design, not “sustainable,” no matter what greater hopes they might absorb or how lengthy their actual use life might prove. Considered from the perspective of...

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