In this paper we intend to critically conceptualize the relationship between humanitarian aid and the War on Terror through their discourses and practices of what we call ‘spatial-moral ordering’. Both are bio/geo-political modes of governmentality which depart from the spatialized diagnosis of a ‘state of exception’. They find expression in the reduction of human beings to their naked or ‘bare life’, separated from their political and cultural ties. We will show how humanitarian aid – via its universalistic inclusive standpoint – and the War on Terror entail particular spatialized moral logics: ‘the refugee camp’, ‘the fortified aid compound’, and ‘Ungoverned Spaces’. These spatial-moral orderings mirror each other negatively, one allowing bare lives and the other disallowing them. Against this background we will seek to explore how one can understand the role of humanitarian thought in the context of the ever-widening logic of the War on Terror. Here our argument is that the current territorial conceptualization of the War on Terror (Ungoverned Spaces) in combination with a securitization discourse undermines humanitarian aid and brings to the fore its internal theoretical tensions. Wherever they spatially coincide, humanitarian aid cannot escape the logic of the War on Terror. Any way out of this predicament will involve walking a fine line between leaving behind its – in effect depoliticizing – claims to neutrality without becoming subsumed under the logic of ‘othering’. Instead humanitarian aid could be re-politicized beyond the logic of securitization through a process of self-reflection.
