Article: Flattening the Map: How Human Movement is Turned Into a Logistical Problem; the Cases of Asylum and Humanitarian Relief
Abstract
Why is human movement increasingly conceived of as a
logistical problem? Global
forms of human movement have been occurring for centuries, but popular dis-
course and policies often construct contemporary human movement as excep-
tional: an unprecedented global problem that requires new techniques of
management and logistics. Scholarship situates logistics as a site that articulates
social relations of power and differentiates human worth. In this paper, we ask
how human movement becomes transformed into a logistical matter in the first
place. Following calls within critical logistics scholarship to not just follow contain-
ers but also techniques like
containment, this paper considers mapping techniques that transform human movement into problems viewed through a logistical lens.
We explore these mapping techniques in the context of transnational humanitari-
an response operations and EU asylum procedures. We find that mapping tech-
niques visibly construct humans on the move as issues of circulation and distribu-
tion: a logistical framing which invisibilizes the figure(s) of the human(s) situated in
these circulations and distributions. At the same time, we find that mapping tech-
niques both make and unmake human movement because mapping imbues (and is
imbued with) ambivalent, ever-changing directional and hierarchical assumptions
and logics related to the configuration and organization of social relations. We ar-
gue that it is this very differentiation of humanity that logistification – through
techniques of mapping – produces and enacts: the value and attention to certain human lives versus others based on logistics.
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