This paper argues that a new transnational humanitarian subjectivity plays a large part in defining the ethics of international peace and development programmes today. Based on fieldwork in the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Sierra Leone the paper argues that this subjectivity is defined in three distinguished and often contradictory ways of relating to the Other of the Global South: in humanitarianizing practices of making them become like us, in securitizing practices of Othering, and, interestingly, also in ways of identification; becoming like them. These somewhat contradictory practices, I argue, are reflective of the ambivalence of the encounter and signify larger political issues at stake when intervening in poorer and less secure countries. In particular, they expose how the implementation of human security installs dichotomous subjectivities of a modern liberal subject threatened by the illiberal subjects of the Global South.
