In Chris Marker’s short film La Jetée (1962), an unnamed protagonist is being held prisoner by scientists in a bunker. The world outside is in ruins, following the catastrophe of World War III—an imagined nuclear holocaust. During his time underground, the prisoner is subjected to a series of experiments in time travel by his captors, who hope to “seek help” from the past, to open a pathway to a different future, one where the war had never occurred. Though he manages to reach the past, the “future was better protected,” and at the film’s end, the protagonist witnesses his own death and slowly realizes that “one cannot escape time.”1
As an industry, humanitarianism is a similar series of quasi-scientific experiments in time travel. It imagines that the ethico-political righteousness of its basic principles can open up a utopian future that will redeem a failed world. A future in which politics is not poisoned by millennia of violence, of a history that has been designing for violence, for killing, for suffering. A less catastrophic, less painful future. The precise content of these experiments varies—mixing legalism, medicine, science, infrastructure, ethics, and more in different doses—each hopefully (or cynically) designed to dull the inhumanity of the past and usher in a new world.
But, so far, these experiments have always failed.
Take the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has been subjected to these humanitarian experiments for decades. When open war reappeared on the streets of the eastern city of Goma in January 2025, a familiar scene occurred. As the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation to the DRC describes:
At the height of the fighting, they [the ICRC staff] were locked down in a bunker we had established there [in Goma]. We could hear the shelling. We could hear the gunshots… As soon as the fighting started to diminish, they [the ICRC staff] were the first to come out, and collect wounded with the Congolese Red Cross … [which has] buried over 550 bodies.2
The ICRC (who have been present in Goma for over three decades), and other humanitarian organizations, are always confronted with the same pattern of events. Across the world, they descend into their bunkers when things get a little too difficult, before returning to ground to help bury the bodies, and begin experimenting with time again, hoping that a new policy initiative here, a new advocacy program over there, or a conference somewhere else will allow for an overcoming of the historical weight of violence and open to a future written in the Geneva or the Hague long ago. This is a future in which descending into bunkers is no longer necessary, for them or for others. But they are unable to open a pathway to get there, unable to escape time.
These repetitions are a form of mise en abyme—a set of recursive dreams within dreams, a set of mirrors reflecting on other mirrors, until only darkness remains. Humanitarianism, put differently, is stuck in an endless Droste effect: a visual phenomenon in which an image contains a smaller version of itself, which in turn contains an even smaller version, creating a recursive, picture-within-picture effect that loops infinitely—a form of time travel into the abyss. In the case of humanitarianism, it is death after death, catastrophe after catastrophe, bunker after bunker. The humanitarian industry loops infinitely, until it is too distorted to be of any value: the humanitarian mise en abyme.
Interestingly, when Droste Cacao was first introduced in 1904, it was marketed as a nutritious and healthy drink, served by a nurse with a red cross on its white arm band. However, over time, the ICRC asserted legal protection of the emblem under the Geneva Conventions, and commercial companies were not allowed to use the red cross for branding or advertising. The Droste effect has thus literally been reconfigured by humanitarianism. By refusing its branding on this mise en abyme, it also symbolically negates its complicity in the never-ending cycles of violence in which they evolve.
Humanitarians are not passive victims of these recurring nightmares; they are active participants. For example, the ICRC’s Water and Habitat unit (WatHab) has operated in the eastern part of the DRC for thirty years. One of its flagship projects is the construction of a new technical infrastructure for Goma’s water system. As part of that project, it has been drilling wells in the hills above the lakeside city. The hope is that they can provide clean water for the residents of Goma, water that would otherwise need to be pumped upwards from the lake. Yet even this seemingly win-win humanitarian project has encountered problems. Drilling into the ground, in Eastern Congo, is more usually associated with the illicit search for gold and cobalt. Conspiracy theories have thus circulated about the true motives of the ICRC, who now invite local residents to observe their activities, trying to persuade them that their motivations are good and pure.3
But Congolese skepticism is hardly unfounded. “Neutrality, independence, and impartiality”: few believe in these dictums of international humanitarian law outside Geneva. Why would they? After all, the plunder of the Congo’s natural resources by its former dictator, Mobutu, was achieved with the neutral facilitation of Swiss banks, which helped store billions in its own bunkers, nestled safely in the Swiss Alps.4 Mobutu’s replacement, Kabila, had similar dealings with Geneva, just as, no doubt, the current regime does. Moving further back in time, the ICRC’s co-founder, Gustave Moynier, actively facilitated King Leopold’s massacres in the Congo, even serving as his consul general in Geneva. For a while, the colonial “consulate and the ICRC shared the same premises.”5
Escaping the Humanitarian Mise en Abyme
How can one escape this humanitarian mise en abyme and its impure histories, its entangled and recurring nightmares? What would a differently designed form of humanitarianism look like? One that, according to Hito Steyerl, generates a “type of creation that assists pluriform, horizontal forms of life, and that can be comprehended as part of a shared humanity?” One that “doesn’t grow via destruction” but cultivates a certain “cooperative autonomy?”6 One that abandons the clean and cynical hypocrisy of “International Geneva” in favor of something more radically honest?7 A humanitarianism that might eventually be able to abolish itself?
These questions are not new. But they have typically been answered by dwelling on the spatialities of humanitarianism, on the fact that its contemporary working logic of “compassion across boundaries” reproduces the geopolitics of a territorially fragmented and racially stratified world order.8 This is the logic with which humanitarianism operates through its spatial bunkerization, literally and metaphorically. In this, a better humanitarianism is purported to be found in “going local”—on socio-politically separating from the Euro-American world order. There is much of importance in this. Nonetheless, it neglects the temporal sedimentation of these stratifications. It neglects the fact that oppression, killing, and death have been designed into the world across time, across history.9 And without dealing with time, no future can open.
Getting to a more radical humanitarianism thus also requires a more precise understanding of time, one that specifies the temporal origins of humanitarianism’s recurring nightmares. Such an understanding can be found, simply enough, in our own lives. When we are born, the future (if we imagine an open slate, uncontaminated by social status, circumstance, etc.) is an open field of possibility—it is undetermined. As we progress, we make choices, and things become determined. Options are limited. Our past smothers the futures we imagined when we were young. In this everyday understanding, the future comes first, and risks disappearing over time. The order of the world’s temporality is thus future, past, present, with the future becoming ever more distant—“better protected”— the more our lives continue. In the more philosophical terms of Tristan Garcia:
One could think of any present event as the top of an infinite pile of leaves. The future is the bottom, the soil on which the pile of leaves rests. The present is the leaf which finds itself at the top. Each time a new leaf covers the previous, any “past leaf” located in the middle of the heap is distanced from the top, which rises more and more high.10
Escaping the mise en abyme of humanitarianism requires a journey into this pile of leaves. A journey towards the lowest level of the Droste effect: the future that escapes us. Put differently, getting to the future requires going through the past, not radical imaginaries of what could come after the present. No communist Year Zero. No dark capitalist accelerationism. No humanitarian dreams of respect for a stillborn international law. Instead, for humanitarianism to create a future—for it to become “just”—it must return to the weight of history. It must not dream of “superhumanity,” because “humanity as such would perfectly do.”11 But getting there also requires different companions who can help us in the task of nourishing the soil that is the future; fertilizing it and cultivating it. This work of imagining a more radical humanitarianism is already being done, albeit far from Geneva, New York, or the other humanitarian metropoles. In each, people are experimenting with time, memory, and history in an attempt to design a path towards a different future.
Dark Rooms of Hope
The Serranía de Perijá is a Colombian mountain range that runs along the border with Venezuela. Somewhere in these mountains lives a small community of ex-FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army) combatants. Around a grid of colored six-by-four-meter houses, analog photos dry in the sun after former combatants hole up in a dark room with chemicals and blood-red lights to develop them. At the same time, kids run around doing pinhole photography with old cans, while other members of the community learn how to produce films or curate exhibitions. These activities are all taking place in the wake of the 2016 Peace Accords, which demobilized the FARC, whose combatants thereafter became firmantes (“signatories”). After leaving the mountains where they had fought their lucha, or struggle, for decades, they were resettled in twenty-four Territorial Spaces for Training and Reincorporation (ETCRs) across Colombia. While these spaces were designed to support their reincorporation into society, their transition to civilian life through political and territorial promises such as comprehensive rural reform has been marked by disillusionment and frustration, one of the only shared sentiment among them ten years later. Indeed, in this past decade, not even a fraction of the promised land redistribution has been completed and promises of security after the de-armament process have failed, leaving many dead. Negative images have yet to develop into positives.
Garcia’s metaphor of time—of the leaves of the past decomposing and leeching their nutrients into the soil to overdetermine the trajectory of the future—reflects the complexity of cyclical violence in Colombia. Around 500 firmantes have been assassinated since 2016. Unemployment is rife. And stigma, as well as mass displacements, remain commonplace.12 Instead of swapping their rifles for a “safe civilian future,” the ex-combatants have themselves now become a new “vulnerable population”—some sort of internal political refugee, albeit one that does not neatly fit into humanitarian categories. Still, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and other agencies include firmantes as “beneficiaries.” Every year, new urgent alerts are issued, emergency appeals for funding. Yet the mise en abyme continues, the recurrent nightmares of its own Droste effect.
Given the impotence of humanitarianism to effect change, people have taken things into their own hands. For example, the audio-visual arts collective La Rotativa, situated in Tierra Grata—an old ETCR in the northern department of Cesar —was founded by ex-combatants who swapped their guns for cameras, seeking to memorialize the demobilization of their own revolutionary organization.13 Today, the collective has expanded to include the children and relatives of the firmantes, as well as other young people who support the peace process. La Rotativa is a space for visual experimentation and artistic production, one that sees creative expression as a tool for transformation and combatting stigma. It seeks to reappropriate the peace process through symbolic repair, re-signifying histories, and making social reincorporation processes visible. It escapes Colombia’s mise en abyme through radical “re-composting.”14
These artistic dreams are not utopian. They do not seek to “escape time,” but instead work to compose its layered leaves differently, in ways that might allow various nutrients to enact the future differently. For example, one collaboration between La Rotativa and researchers involved a group of firmantes from the community carrying out a film re-enactment of their lives as guerrilla fighters. For the first time in ten years, the firmantes dug out the old guerrilla military vests that they had kept buried since they demobilized and wore them for the camera. The vests had been literally hidden under leaves for years, forgotten—abandoned mementos. By spending the afternoon with the vests, making coffee on a mud stove they once used in the mountains, the firmantes embodied a past version of themselves, reflecting on the memories and evolution of their current selves. Some laughed as they put the vests back on, referring to it as something habitual, like riding a bike. Others said they were pleased they did not have to carry their whole home, from toothbrushes to ammunition, on their backs anymore. While they reminisced on the collective Marxist-Leninist reading sessions, the laughs, the dance parties, the big shared meals, and the profound sense of solidarity that marked their time as rebels, they all expressed, in a collective sigh, how relieved they were to have left their guerrilla lives. Peace is now the only future they hope and fight for.
This little moment of collective travel into the past is ambivalent. It reflects the unerasable legacy of violence—the military fatigues that lie under leaves across the world, the designed-for violence that shapes the future. But it also represents a different way of composing that legacy—an attempt at pausing the mise en abyme of violence by reinvesting the present with the active re-enactment of the past. This deliberate act of making the past present again allows for the hope of different futures. In Marker’s La Jetée, the goal of scientists “was to send an emissary into time to summon the past and future to the aid of the present.” The firmantes were doing something similar—revisiting what once was to shape what is to come. They played with temporality to adjust the future and pause the cyclical vortex of humanitarian crisis they usually exist in. At the same time, and unlike in the experiments in time travel of the scientists in La Jetée or the humanitarians in Geneva, these efforts at time travel are not hoping to develop a “tranquillized future.”15 Like the blood-red dark rooms where pinhole photographs taken by kids are developed, the future sought here is one that requires a careful mix of care to be exposed—one that does not erase the past, but develops it differently.
Architectures of Trauma
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rather far from the center of its capital city, Kinshasa, a large piece of land is populated by lush trees that offer shade from the scorching sun. A series of small structures with central courtyards dot this landscape, where people mill about. If you were approaching one of these structures, you would be greeted by a woman gesturing somewhat frantically, asking what you are doing there, holding a tangle of keys that lock and unlock their metal gates. That woman lives in the courtyard, where she is a patient of this village-like piece of land, which is in fact Kinshasa’s Neuro-Psycho-Pathology Center (Centre Neuro-Psycho-Pathologie, CNPP): a mental health hospital. The woman is actually a patient who suffers from intense psychological distress. Abandoned by her family a long time ago, she guards the entrance as part of her treatment. As a doctor explains: “it gives her control over something.”16
In the DRC, what in the West is generally called “mental illness” is widespread. How could it not be in a territory that has witnessed the genocidal predations of colonialism, the neo-imperial degradations of capitalist modernity, and unceasing war, poverty, and disaster? In the words of the Congolese author Sony Labou Tansi, most of the DRC’s population are forcibly rendered “rag-humans”—obligated to inhabit both “the world of the dead and the world of the ‘not entirely living.’”17 Faced with this crisis, humanitarian actors have become increasingly preoccupied with providing mental health and psychosocial support services (MHPSS) in the DRC and places like it. Yet, these are typically implemented by international humanitarian organizations as “emergency” services, targeting immediate trauma caused by armed conflict or sexual violence. These actors also tend to embrace a strategic universality, in which the nature of mental suffering is generalized across time and space, separated from the soil of its genesis.18 The mise en abyme here is more literal, with each new outbreak of conflict causing new nightmares and emergency mental health services to be offered. The nightmares are recurring, as is the treatment. But there is no future.
One doctor at the CNPP analogously explained the difficulty with this humanitarian approach:
Why do you smoke? Why does that little “stick” have so much power over you? Why can’t you give it up? The answers to questions like that are not just technical. Physical addiction, that’s true, but what about the journey of how you got to start smoking? This is our problem here [in the DRC]. We have never left colonialism. We have never been independent. If you want to talk about mental illness here, you need to realize that everyone is ill: the patients here, yes, of course, but also ordinary people in the streets, and the politicians who rule us. The Congo has not dealt with its past, with the trauma of the Belgians—which you can see in people’s everyday behavior; the trauma of the dictatorships, the trauma of the war. The problem here is not individual but historical. Until we take that into account, and come to terms with it, there is no way out.19
In technical terms, the doctor here glosses a “psychohistoriographic” understanding of mental health, one that couples together biomedical concepts (addiction), historical trauma (colonialism), and state abuse (the dictatorships).20 Each element distances the DRC from a different future unless, as the doctor insists, a way is found of “coming to terms” with them. But this is not simple. The classic disciplinary logics of power explored in European social theory, which connect, say, the logic of the school, the prison, and the hospital, are more complex outside the colonial metropole. The architectural design of the CNPP, a village-like model of distancing the mentally ill from the sane, was directly influenced by the architectural logics of the Belgian colonialists. Its “pavilion” typology was adapted from European architecture by the Belgians for the design of hospitals, prisons, and plantations, which specifically enforced racial segregation, capitalist plunder, and biomedical oppression.21
The ambivalence of seeking to cultivate a historically sensitive and ecologically appropriate form of mental health care within the walls of a space built to enforce white supremacy, like that of the earlier cohabitation of the ICRC and Belgian colonialists in Geneva, cannot be erased. Instead, doctors and nurses at the CNPP form an organic part of a wider movement towards developing a decolonial form of psychiatry that works through these pasts with the hope of escaping the humanitarian mise en abyme. In this, the goal is not a banal form of de-linking from history, of ignoring it, but instead the kind of hybrid opacity that Édouard Glissant advocated for: a moving towards the future that rejects “all the ways of reducing us to the false clarity of universal models.”22 Or, as the late Jamaican psychiatrist Frederick W. Hickling put it in an echo of Frantz Fanon, it works towards an attempt at “promoting individual actualization and self-reliance within the crucible of collective ownership … [so as to] create the knowledge base to decentralize state power, syncretize self and society, and take control of our own madness. Collectively we will negate the psychosis of Europe.”23
Pessoptimistic Humanitarian Futures
Escaping the humanitarian mise en abyme is not easy. To return to Chris Marker and La Jetée, the future is better protected than the past, however one approaches it. Nonetheless, the contemporary moment, in which humanitarianism as an industry is being actively disassembled by neo-fascist forces across the globe, represents a moment of possible change. Or, rather, a moment in which a subversion of humanitarianism’s historical trajectory becomes imaginable. Ex-combatants sitting in dark rooms developing negatives. Kids running around with pinhole cameras. Patients in hospitals holding keys. Doctors insisting on a radical historiography of madness situated in place. All are working through the layered leaves of the past in order to open up more just and humane futures. In doing so, each accepts that one cannot escape time. And so there is no reactionary descent into bunkers, no righteous imaginaries of a future separated from the past, no naive universalism. Instead, humanitarianism is redesigned here “pessoptimistically,” to use the term of the Palestinian novelist Emile Habibi. There is optimism in the little gestures of solidarity that flow across time, in the mycelia of possibility, and the hope of tenderly fertilizing the soil of the future differently. But there is pessimism too, at the continued “psychosis of Europe” and suspicion that Geneva and New York will be tempted to continue doomed experiments in time travel towards a “tranquillized future.”24
La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker (Paris: Argos Films, 1962).
Dominique Maria Bonessi, host, Intercross podcast, “Humanitarian Dispatch from the Congo: Violence Grips Goma,” ICRC, February 20, 2025, ➝.
ICRC officials in Goma, interviews with the author, December 2024.
“Swiss Find Only $3.4 Million in Bank Accounts for Mobutu,” The New York Times, June 4, 1997.
Paula Dupraz-Dobias, “Geneva’s Early Double Standards on Colonialism,” Swissinfo, May 23, 2024.
Hito Steyerl, “How to Kill People: A Problem of Design,” e-flux Architecture, December 2016, 2024, ➝.
This term is part of the self-branding of the canton of Geneva, which actively presents itself as a force for global humanitarian good. See “Discovering International Geneva,” The Swiss Mission, ➝.
Barnett describes the modern humanitarian imaginary in these terms. See Michael Barnett, “Humanitarianism Transformed,” Perspectives on Politics 3, no. 4 (2025): 733.
Anne-Marie Slaughter et al., Design and Violence, ed. Paola Antonelli et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2015).
Tristan Garcia, “Another Order of Time: Towards a Variable Intensity of the NOW,” Parrhesia 19 (2014): 10.
Steyerl, “How to Kill People.”
Armed Conflict and Mass Displacement in Colombia | Situation Report #1, January 22, 2025 - Colombia, ReliefWeb, January 23, 2025, ➝.
La Rotativa Tierra Grata, ➝.
Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker.
Fieldnotes from research conducted in Kinshasa in 2025.
Sony Labou Tansi, Life and a Half (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 9.
Trauma, depression, psychosis, or any other elements are tactically framed by mental health professionals as having universal etiologies across the world, despite the historical plurality of experience, in order to make standardized treatment possible. China Mills, “Strategic Universality in the Making of Global Guidelines for Mental Health,” Transcultural Psychiatry 60, no. 3 (2023): 591–601.
Fieldnotes from research conducted in Kinshasa in 2025.
Frederick W. Hickling, Owning Our Madness: Facing Reality in Post-colonial Jamaica (Mona: University of the West Indies, CARIMENSA Press, 2016).
Simon De Nys-Ketels, “A Hospital Typology Translated: Transnational Flows of Architectural Expertise in the Clinique Reine Elisabeth of Coquilhatville, in the Belgian Congo,” ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, no. 19 (2021).
Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World (Liverpool University Press, 2020), 16.
Hickling, Owning Our Madness, 205. Italics mine.
La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker.