Seeing Evacuation Logistically

Abstract

Chapter 7 engages evacuation’s entanglement with liberal humanitarianism and the logistics of evacuation in the viapolitical angle of two disasters: the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Libyan civil war of 2011. Both events were preceded and followed by crisscrossing migration flows that paralleled and sometimes came into contact in a confluence of evacuative and displaced mobilities. The chapter focuses on international humanitarian and logistics efforts, and on the legacy of neocolonial policies of trade and global extractive, infrastructural, and logistics pathways that came together to unevenly evacuate citizens, enrolling particular valued bodies and citizens, some deemed highly vulnerable—such as adopted children. The two cases gesture toward the possibility of more civil and less state-directed forms of evacuation.