Papers by Fiona Gedeon Achi
As we hear about how the world -especially Europe -is currently experiencing the "second wave" of... more As we hear about how the world -especially Europe -is currently experiencing the "second wave" of the coronavirus pandemic, many countries are enacting new lockdowns as well as border closures and restrictions. Public announcements exhort travelers to carefully follow local restrictions, including to submit themselves to thorough quarantine and testing. In various countries, government agencies have devised strategies to incentivize compliance including the threat of fines, the need to produce sworn statements to attest of being COVID-19 free, and making testing obligatory for passengers from risk areas upon entry.
This short piece focuses on the anthropological quality of the RCT research design to understand ... more This short piece focuses on the anthropological quality of the RCT research design to understand the current appeal of experimental approaches to poverty alleviation. Drawing on ethnographic material, this essay discusses how the specificity of RCTs stems from artificially creating an ''embodied counterfactual" as the possibility of a different life. It details how the RCT identifies not only a descriptive comparison between two groups but generates parallel realities: what happens with the program and its counterfac-tual. The counterfactual and the double-present are a trick but, as discussed by several scholars in the social sciences, counterfactual reasoning has long been an important normative tool. Overall, this paper shows that the RCT is a powerful means to imagine and guide the future because it sketches what I conceptualize as ''the better life", in contrast to the good life: improvements which perhaps try to make up in certainty and immediacy the ambition they lack in scope.
SLIDE] The United Nations document titled "The Future We Want" outlining the post-2015 developmen... more SLIDE] The United Nations document titled "The Future We Want" outlining the post-2015 development agenda posits again poverty eradication "as the greatest global challenge facing the world today" (2014). Indeed, the past two decades have solidified poverty, and its global alleviation, as the object of development. Whether tackled by NGOs or governments, by economists or activists, and through microfinance or health campaigns, the reduction of income poverty has become the key goal of development and the world's poorest its key target. [SLIDE] Here, a particular threshold, living with less than 1.25$ a day, comes into sharp relief, serving as a specific condition to bind together on a planetary scale the bottom 40 percent of the global population around what anthropologist Ananya Roy has called "a sense of a common fate" (2010: 7). A global condition that must be, if not fully eradicated, at least constantly targeted and improved uponhalved by 2015 in the words of the Millennium Development Goals, reduced to no more than 3% globally by 2030 in the World Bank framework (World Bank 2013).
Over the five last years, crisis mapping has gained wide popularity in the humanitarian world wit... more Over the five last years, crisis mapping has gained wide popularity in the humanitarian world with collaboration between crisis mappers and the UN on several emergency projects. Crisis mapping relies on interactive maps to monitor both incidents and resources in settings undergoing a "crisis" (political, environmental, etc). Focusing on one case study (the monitoring of violence during the 2011 elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo) and building on several interviews conducted with leading crisis mappers and project coordinators, this paper shows that the deep significance of crisis mapping cannot be grasped through an understanding of the goals and success or failure of its projects. It is rather to be found in the space of collaboration brought forth by the coordination of the deployments which generates a new manner of "being in crisis"-understood both as being in a crisis and the state of crisis.
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Papers by Fiona Gedeon Achi