Colonial grids, exhausted bodies: Humanitarian energy's politics and temporal entanglements

Abstract

Humanitarian crises reverberate globally, impacting basic yet essential infrastructures that sustain lives, especially energy infrastructures. This is true in Lebanon, where decades of conflict, refugee influxes, and corrupt government have exacerbated a state of prolonged polycrisis. Such conditions have led to unreliable, costly, and dysfunctional energy infrastructures that have stifled access to electricity and fuel across the country. Drawing upon a multisited ethnography of aid workers' adaptations to overlapping crises, this article centres empirical data on the experiences of humanitarians in Lebanon as they navigate, make sense of, and feel the effects of energy deprivation. Data are analysed using insights from science and technology studies (STS), particularly postcolonial technoscience's attention to colonial entanglements with material infrastructures and bodies. In combining these perspectives, our article advances two claims about humanitarian energy. First, material energy infrastructures, which are required for everyday humanitarian action, are intrinsically political. They are used as political weapons in longstanding settler colonial contestations and are tied to ongoing postcolonial power formations, political dysfunction, and donor dependency. Second, these infrastructures are experienced in the present through embodied reactions like heat and fatigue and affective orientations like hope and hopelessness. Our findings reveal humanitarian energy's “postcolonial entanglements,” signalling formative temporal connections between pasts, presents, and futures. This paper therefore marks an empirical and theoretical contribution to humanitarian energy studies. It demonstrates how STS illuminates postcolonial, temporal, and embodied dimensions of energy crisis, while offering empirical insights into humanitarian actors' experiences of energy deprivation. Show more