Humanitarianism - Benjamin Meiches - Animal Minds, Humanitarian Designs: Interventions with Nonhuman Others

Animal Minds, Humanitarian Designs: Interventions with Nonhuman Others

Benjamin Meiches

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Apopo Mine clearing demonstration with rats. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Humanitarianism
November 2025










Notes
1

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: NYU Press, 2020); Joanna Bourke, What It Means to Be Human: Historical Reflections from the 1800s to the Present (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2011).

2

Daniel Bertrand Monk and Andrew Herscher, The Global Shelter Imaginary: IKEA Humanitarianism and Rightless Relief (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2021).

3

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Picador, 2015); Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of Civilization (San Francisco: City Lights Publishing, 2015).

4

David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3–15.

5

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 137.

6

Kelly Oliver, Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017, 10–12.

7

Costas Douzinas, “The Many Faces of Humanitarianism,” Parrhesia 2 (2007): 1–28.

8

Diana Pardo Pedraza, “Sensory Co-laboring: Mine Detection Dogs and Handlers in Humanitarian Demining in Colombia,” Environmental Humanities 15, no. 3 (2023): 30–51; Sheila J. Bryant, “Pay It Forward: The Heifer International Story,” Journal of Agriculture & Food Information 5, no. 3 (2003): 5–9.

9

“Where We Work,” APOPO, .

10

“Our History,” APOPO, .

11

“Mine Detection Rats: Efficiency and Effectiveness Study Using MDR Capability,” Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, June 2016, 4, .

12

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 208–9.

13

Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Boston: The MIT Press, 1989), 17.

14

Didier Fassin, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life,” Public Culture 19, no. 3 (2007): 499–520.

15

Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 7–11, 212–19.

16

Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Teju Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex,” The Atlantic March 21, 2012, .

17

Liisa Malkki, The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015): 15–18; Danielle Celermajer, et al. “Multispecies justice: theories, challenges, and a research agenda for environmental politics,” Environmental Politics 30, nos. 1–2 (2021): 119–40.

18

Eva Meijer, “Global injustice and animals: towards a multispecies social connection model,” International Relations 37, no. 3 (2023): 497–513.

19

Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 32.

20

Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: Granta, 2016).

21

Benjamin Meiches, Nonhuman Humanitarians: Animal Interventions in Global Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023); “Who We Are,” Veterinarians Without Borders, .

22

Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 193.

23

David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue, 3–15; Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 137; Kelly Oliver, Carceral Humanitarianism, 10–12.

24

Frans de Waal; Joanna Makowska, and Daniel M. Weary, “Assessing the Emotions of Laboratory Rats,” Applied Animal Behavior Science 148 (2013): 1–12.

25

Vinciane Despret, “Thinking Like a Rat,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 20, no. 2 (2015): 121–34.

26

Darcie DeAngelo, “Demilitarizing disarmament with mine detection rats,” Culture and Organization 24, no. 4 (2018) 285–302.







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