‘The form made us focus on the form’, Eveline complained, ‘instead of on sensical things!’ Sweat trickled down her face in the relentless heat and humidity of the late afternoon sun as she used the last copy of an empty disaster needs assessment form to fan herself. The phrasing of the form's questions and its multiple-choice categories had sparked discussions about who counted as ‘affected’ and, consequently, who qualified for assistance. Hushed murmurs changed into loud discussions and Joseph, the disaster management officer of this district in southern Malawi, had to raise his voice to address the civil servants attending the emergency meeting. All of them were exhausted, having spent the entire day doing rapid assessments in areas affected by Cyclone Idai. Wading through the mud and speaking to displaced and distressed citizens, they had tried to fill out the information requested on the assessment forms, but with limited success. People did not know how many water points or hectares of land were submerged: they just wanted help. Eveline's call to focus on ‘sensical things’, rather than the form, echoed this sentiment. As the responsible officer, Joseph agreed but also insisted on the need for information: if filled out, the forms would enable him to request resources for relief. Clarifying the relative importance of the forms, a Malawian colleague from Red Cross exclaimed, ‘It is not about having a form or a figure. It's about a feeling!’
After heated discussions, the civil servants in this meeting deemed a feel for the situation more important and more useful than filling out a form and strictly following bureaucratic procedures. Drawing on an affective and emotional experience of the situation, having a “feel” for something exceeded the realities to be recorded on paper, emanating from an almost tangible tension between feelings and forms. Michael Herzfeld addressed this tension by challenging ‘explanations of bureaucratic indifference as the more or less automatic outcome of bureaucratic structures’ (1992: 159). Arguing ‘that bureaucracy is, in practice, very much a matter of social relations’ (ibid.: 180), he concluded that ‘indifference is socially created through the selective deployment of a kin-based discrimination between selves and others’ (ibid.: 172). Although Herzfeld refuted that bureaucracy inherently produces indifference, he clings to the idea that it somehow does, complicating or nuancing rather than dispelling the myth of the indifferent bureaucrat. Following conceptualisations of the state as a ‘relational setting’ (Thelen et al. 2014), I seek to show in this article how a focus on affect, feelings and emotions is more fruitful when trying to understand everyday practices of ‘street-level’ bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980).
Mateusz Laszczkowksi and Madeleine Reeves have argued that ‘affective states’, which they use to refer to ‘a range of affects, feelings, and emotions’ together,1 are a valuable perspective to study the ‘emergency, transformation, endurance, or erosion’ of the state (2015: 2). Following this, I suggest that this is particularly the case in a context of humanitarian relief, where affective states, such as suffering and compassion, play a more prominent role (Bornstein and Redfield 2010). Anthropologists have studied how being affected by a disaster can refer to physical damage as well as affective states and emotions, showing how ‘feelings are central to people's experience of catastrophes and recovery’, even long after they happen (Barrios 2017: 3; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). These feelings and affects can even be transformed ‘into a source and resource of fiscal profit’, as happened in the outsourcing of recovery interventions after Hurricane Katrina (Adams 2013: 187). Other studies have shown how affect, emotions and feelings are a central part of humanitarian work, focusing their studies mainly on expatriate aid workers (e.g. Malkki 2013, 2015; Napier-Moore 2011). I contribute to this literature by zooming in on the ‘affective states’, feelings, affects and emotions, experienced by state actors of the disaster-affected state itself.
Civil servants like Joseph and his colleagues are central to understanding relief interventions in Malawi: they make the state ‘work’ (see Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014) in both regular and relief contexts. They are themselves part of the society they help govern and ‘the state cannot exist without this subjective component, which links its form to the dynamics of people and movements’ (Aretxaga 2003: 395). I build on the ‘new anthropology of bureaucracy’ (Bear and Mathur 2015) in conceptualising the labour of the state as being ultimately rooted in an imagined social contract that is linked to the provision of the public good (Mathur 2020: 118). Liberating bureaucracy from Weber's famous iron cage and returning to its utopian underpinnings, the focus on rationality, routine and rules then shifts to include feelings, affects and emotions that equally form part of the decisions bureaucrats make, even though they are supposed to do their job ‘indifferently’, as in, indiscriminately (Assor 2021; Billaud and Cowan 2020; Herzfeld 1992). Indifference is thus not inherently negative: appearing or acting indifferently is valued in both bureaucratic and humanitarian contexts, but in this article, I suggest that its centrality has been overstated. This has obscured how feelings, affects and emotions shape civil servants’ everyday practices and how a focus on these throws the state itself into relief, enriching our understandings of its functioning.
In what follows, I show empirically how feelings, affect and emotions play key roles in the production of bureaucratic facts and the ways in which Malawian civil servants instantiated the state in relief interventions in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai. My claims draw on twelve months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in a rural, disaster-prone district, from January 2019 until January 2020. I studied civil servants’ everyday practices of governing with a focus on Joseph,2 the officer from the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA). I also conducted fifty-seven semi-structured interviews with humanitarian actors, (I)NGO and UN representatives, civil servants and disaster-affected citizens. My command of Chichewa, Malawi's national language, allowed me to interact with people without the need for an interpreter, and all translations in this article are my own. Because affect, feelings and emotions are experiential and felt, they can be studied ethnographically, but they also tend to escape language. This is why I provide detailed descriptions in an attempt to ‘evoke’ and communicate them (Jansen 2016: 59).
Civil Servants in Humanitarian Interventions in Malawi: The State in Relief
The emergency meeting with which I started this article took place in early March 2019, shortly after Malawi was hit by Cyclone Idai. Days of heavy rains and strong winds led to large-scale flooding, affecting more than a million Malawians: sixty people died, and the official Post-Disaster Needs Assessment report detailed that 86,976 people were internally displaced (GOM 2019). The impact of Cyclone Idai also had far-reaching consequences because it destroyed crops in a country where the majority of the population is dependent on rain-fed subsistence farming (Chinsinga and Chasukwa 2018). Malawi has known a long history of disasters, but in recent years the occurrence of extreme weather events has increased, worsening their cumulative impacts. As an aid-dependent state, Malawi's response capacity is limited (Kita 2017). Thus, as per the Disaster Relief and Preparedness act (1991),3 the occurrence of a disaster tends to lead to a declaration of a ‘state of disaster’ to open up the country for humanitarian assistance. Different from a state of emergency because it does not suspend the constitution, this allows and urges humanitarian organisations to intervene more extensively in what would have otherwise been Malawi's internal affairs (see Fassin and Pandolfi 2013). Its sovereignty intact, the state department where Joseph worked, DODMA, is in charge of coordinating the ensuing relief interventions and facilitating collaborations between state and non-state actors.
Even though relief interventions have become almost seasonal events, their regularity has made them no less challenging. Collaborations between the state and its non-state partners are complicated due to several recent (high-level) corruption scandals that severely reduced donors’ faith in Malawi's institutions and the efficacy of its civil servants (see Anders 2009; Anders et al. 2020; Banik and Chinsinga 2016; Hendriks and Boersma 2019; Wroe 2012). Disaster relief interventions thus take place against a background of profound dependency and inequality. The work of Didier Fassin reminds us that ‘this tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance’ is what characterises humanitarian action (2012: 3). In this sense, relief interventions arise from ‘a radically unequal order’ (ibid.: 253), the roots of which they fail to address: DODMA's—and Malawi's—ongoing reliance on donor funding illustrates this.
Although officially responsible for all disaster-related activities in the district, Joseph did not have a dedicated budget line at his disposal at the time of my fieldwork.4 In attempting to live up to the utopian social contract and ideal of caring for citizens in crisis, he struggled in practice with the reality that very often he could not, due to a lack of resources. In this sense, paradoxically present in absence (Geissler 2015; Masquelier 2001), his profound dependence on non-state actors was constant and not something confined to the context of relief interventions (Kita 2017). This became even more salient because the 2019 relief interventions coincided with campaigns for the contested national tripartite elections on 21 May 2019.5 In addition to the government's insistence on contributing to the relief interventions ‘in kind’ through the provision of maize, DODMA's activities became highly politicised due to its access to relief: the ability to distribute goods, particularly maize, is central to political power, legitimacy and authority in Malawi (Chinsinga and Chasukwa 2018: 149; Mpesi and Muriaas 2012). Navigating the influence of donors, humanitarians, politicians, his bosses, and the everyday realities of relief provisions made 2019 an extraordinarily stressful year for Joseph and his colleagues.
The omnipresence and centrality of all these different (non-state) actors in making the Malawi state ‘work’, gives rise to messy encounters between ‘actors “doing the state” and “seeing the state” from multiple perspectives’ (Bierschenk and Olivier de Sardan 2014: 30). These do not always neatly align, which is reflected in the often rather strained relationship between DODMA and those it relied on for resources. A consultant who worked for a big UN agency described the working relationship as ‘like a cold war’ when he tried to find words for the constant undercurrent of tensions, oftentimes left unspoken, but nevertheless felt and thus shaping relations and governing practices. Similarly, Joseph emphasised the necessity of “swallowing pride” to ensure good relations and gain or maintain access to resources: ‘For the sake of progress you just have to swallow your pride and make sure that things are still OK on the ground’. In the next section, I explore ethnographically what this attention to feelings, affect and emotions means for understanding disaster relief in practice.
Forms, Figures and Feelings in the Field: Disaster Relief in Practice
When the rains of Cyclone Idai began to increase the water levels in the rivers within the district, it became clear that large-scale flooding was imminent. Joseph had called for a meeting of the District Civil Protection Committee (DCPC), which consists of a mix of district-based civil servants and NGO-workers with Joseph as its secretary, coming together to coordinate disaster relief activities in the district. Although district-based civil servants provide most of the labour power, the funding for their activities—if any—largely comes from non-state actors. The DCPCs first priority was to create an overview of everyone in the district affected by the disaster. To this end, DCPC teams spent several days conducting rapid disaster needs assessments, as referred to earlier. They would go into the field in the morning, walk around, speak to displaced people, traditional authorities and the area or village based civil protection committees, and return to share the information they gathered on the forms in the late afternoon. Presenting about water levels and likely damage to flooded areas, even if these were still inaccessible, they mainly focused on the number of displaced people they met, where they had set up camp, the conditions in these sites, the number of available latrines and the type of shelter. Based on the team's knowledge of the district and the credibility ascribed to the source, the DCPC would debate which numbers were deemed correct, and after some (heated) discussions, these were entered into an Excel sheet referred to as ‘the database’.
Although at some sites team captains said that people had lined up for counting, at others the teams had simply written down the numbers mentioned by people they met, without the means to verify them. Based on their impression of who they spoke with, they decided how trustworthy the information was. Citizens were emotional when asking for help, at times angry or disappointed that assessment teams only came to ‘take’ information rather than bring relief. In areas that had called ahead to share the number of affected households, people would try during visits to convince Joseph of higher figures than they had initially (self-)reported. During a late afternoon DCPC meeting, a team captain shared that they had received a carefully written list of affected households directly from the chief of an area. The team seemed happy to have an official-looking list, but Joseph's response was rather annoyed because chiefs were not supposed to be involved: ‘It is the work of the [village civil protection] committee!’ While not following procedures was one thing, he mainly worried because there had been an earlier incident in this same area: ‘in January they also lied to us’, Joseph reminded the others. As he noted down the totals of the list he said: ‘we will do door-to-door!’ implying the need to verify every single household. Even though other areas also reported very high figures, Joseph was particularly sceptical about these ones.
After the meeting, Joseph explained to me that his verification exercise in this area after localised flooding in January 2019 had led to the discovery that many names on the beneficiary list were fake: some people were unaffected, while others had multiple people from the same household listed separately. Doing this verification had earned Joseph the nickname ‘Saddam Hussein’, indicative of disgruntled citizens’ complaints that he was not giving them what they believed they were entitled to. The experience had made Joseph wary of figures coming from this area, and although he chuckled about the incident (‘Saddam Hussein, imagine!’), he was a little hurt because of it too. He had sustained what Jakimow refers to as an ‘affective injury’, ‘a metaphorical slap in the face’ (2018: 551), in the process of doing something he considered not just good but morally correct: ensuring that scarce humanitarian assistance went to those in need. ‘It hurt me’ (zinandipweteka), Joseph said about this, referring to instances where he felt misunderstood, his efforts overlooked by citizens. He made no effort to hide this sensation or pretend that it did not affect him.
The construction of the district's database of disaster-affected citizens was an arduous task that took a lot of Joseph's time: not just to compile it but also to keep it updated. The database kept expanding, containing more than forty-two displacement camps, many unverified due to lack of funding and accessibility. Most of the verification of the figures consisted of conversations with chiefs and committee chairs over the phone. When making these phone calls, the atmosphere was charged because there was a lot at stake. Whenever the number of affected people mentioned differed from the number in the database, a heated discussion ensued. Depending on how well he knew the area and the person on the other end of the phone, Joseph probed either by threatening to send a verification team (which usually made the number drop significantly) or by insisting they tell him ‘the truth’ (chilungamo). If they argued that the higher number was correct, Joseph listened to their explanation. If he felt they were being fair and spoke the truth, he consoled them, promised support and adjusted the number in the database. Harmonising the different lists and numbers was thus extremely laborious but also induced great stress and anxiety: Joseph worried a lot about changing the figures he had earlier communicated to his superiors at the national level: ‘they can say we misappropriate[d]!’ A decrease would mean he received too much relief for previous distributions, while an increase would mean he had left some people without.
Clearly, these type of ‘practices of legibility are not detached but invested with affect’ (Aretxaga 2003: 404). The negotiations surrounding the numbers that made it into the database show that these are products of relations and encounters between people, shaped by affects, and emotional on-the-spot decisions (see also Biruk 2018). Feelings, just as much as (partially) filled out assessment forms, are thus central to the production of what subsequently become bureaucratic facts in a database. The database itself, as a digital document, was also imbued with affect and the focal point of anxieties around inclusion and exclusion in the implied forthcoming distributions of relief (Carswell and De Neve 2020). And much like the database, they continued to change throughout the response to Cyclone Idai, as did the distribution plan.
In addition to coordinating NGO and UN contributions, Joseph's department was responsible for providing food to all displacement camps, as this was what the government contributed to the largely donor-funded disaster response. DODMA faced many logistical challenges in terms of the food supply chains: the long distances between warehouses and distribution areas, compounded by the limited number of available trucks and the state they were in, as well as the poor conditions of the (dirt) roads, particularly in the (recently) flooded areas. Due to the regular delays and breakdowns that ensued from all this, Joseph often felt forced to make last minute, impromptu decisions on where to send relief.
When he received a phone call from the driver of a truck carrying relief items, Joseph would consider where to send what the truck was carrying, making sure it would fit within the truck's fuel-range and the quantity of aid it carried in relation to the number of beneficiaries at the destination. The distribution plans were thus malleable and based on the availability of relief items. One day, a distribution team of civil servants had followed Joseph's distribution plan to the letter, which meant they returned to the district's warehouse with undistributed bags of maize. When he heard, Joseph was very upset. He feared this would spark rumours of corruption, giving an opportunity for the campaigning councillors in the district to increase political pressure on him to influence future distribution plans. After he briefly gathered his thoughts, he told his team to use their own judgement in deciding where to distribute if they had relief items left over, as long as they did the necessary paperwork afterwards: ‘We have trust in you, so long as there is that documentation. Please, don't come back with items while people are suffering. It is also costly on our part to keep moving commodities. Just give it to other camps, but document it!’
Invoking the humanitarian idiom of suffering, Joseph actively encouraged his colleagues to put the needs of citizens before procedures or paperwork. Several days later, Joseph promptly put his own advice into practice when stumbling upon an unregistered camp. On his way to a distribution at a different camp, a passer-by told him about a group of people a little further down the road. They had built makeshift huts using plastic sheets, reeds and ropes. The driver parked and Joseph and his colleagues were welcomed by spontaneous singing and dancing women, visibly relieved to see help arrive. After briefly speaking to the chief, Joseph announced to the crowd that he would offload all the relief items right here, as he was touched by their situation. Shortly after the distribution, Joseph called his colleague Mary from Red Cross and told her the location of the camp, asking for more help: ‘They are staying like refugees! It is tragic’. From this moment on, this particular camp began to receive relief, sometimes even double what other camps received.
However, these type of emotional on-the-spot changes to the distribution plan did not always play out in favour of citizens. One chief had visited the district offices regularly, complaining that her people were not being assisted: ‘People are receiving, but we are not’. Every time she came, Joseph spoke patiently with her, asking her to report the camp by sharing a beneficiary list and promising that they would be included when relief became available. One day, prompted by her latest visit, Joseph added her camp to the distribution list and then called the chief to inform her when the maize would arrive. ‘Maize? Our friends are receiving good things!’ the chief responded. She proceeded to ask for buckets and blankets. This angered Joseph and he subsequently debated removing the camp from the list entirely: disappointed, he argued that if people genuinely needed assistance, they would simply be happy to receive, rather than demand other things. In this case, although Joseph had included the camp for a distribution out of compassion, the chief's response made him regret this, almost leading to them not receiving anything at all.
The foregoing examples show how figures are created and become facts in a database or distribution plan not by rigorous form filling alone; feelings and having a feel for the situation are a central part of this process. Joseph does not appear indifferent, nor does he strive to do so. Rather the opposite: he is very willing to adapt procedures or paperwork in order to meet needs. A focus on feelings, affects and emotions renders Joseph's everyday practices intelligible as pragmatic attempts to instantiate the utopian social contract between a state and its citizens, even in the absence of sufficient material resources to solidify it. As such, the previous examples underline the need to move beyond the understandings of bureaucratic indifference or trajectories towards self-enrichment that predominate accounts of African bureaucrats in action (Brown 2016: 599).
Beyond Indifference: Feeling Like a Civil Servant
During a DCPC meeting two weeks into the response, Joseph relayed a message from Malawians in an area close to the Mozambican border. The area had not flooded, but the incessant rains had caused a lot of damage and more than seven hundred people had moved to displacement camps. Joseph worried about this far off and hard to reach area: going there would be costly and time-consuming and the political situation was tense due to a conflict between the incumbent MP and one of the currently campaigning candidates. Both had links to the (then) ruling party, DPP, which meant Joseph was under pressure ‘from above’ to visit the area and supply it with relief. ‘They say they are also Malawians’, he sighed, troubled. These citizens were actively claiming their right to assistance. A few days later, when a large supply of relief maize arrived, Joseph decided to make the four-hour long trip to the area. Hundreds of men, women and children had gathered in an old school building close to an abandoned government hospital. Joseph knew that Red Cross had distributed items such as cooking pots the week before, and he insisted on touring the camp. In front of the school building, several women were busy cooking and explained that it took a long time because they all had to share the same pots. Joseph shook his head and after having inspected the classrooms where they slept, insisted on speaking to the camp committee and the chief of the area.
From his posture, it was clear to see that Joseph was very upset: ‘just walking around people will feel sorry for you,’ he told the chief and chair. There was hardly anything in the camp, so the situation looked bad. ‘And you don't even disclose that you have received [items]!’ Joseph exclaimed. He grilled the committee on whether they had received blankets and pots from Red Cross or not, showing he was aware they did. Initially nobody answered, which only made Joseph angrier. Pretending to walk away, he asked whether people were even staying in the camp, and if so, how long were they planning to do so? The chief answered: ‘I don't know. Aren't you the government? You are the one who knows’. Joseph responded sternly: ‘It is not good just to sit, to get fat and rely on government for you to receive food’. Annoyed, he insisted that they should leave the camp as soon as possible: after all, their area had not even flooded. They should stay with their families if they still needed to repair their damaged houses. When the camp committee protested, Joseph asked rhetorically ‘How do you expect the government to take pity (chisoni) on you when your own family is apparently not taking pity on you?’
Nervous laughter from committee members broke the ice, and Joseph continued joking with them, mainly about how good it would be to be at home again and have some private time with their wives. As everyone relaxed and the tension diffused, they reached an understanding, and the chief and camp committee subsequently helped convey Joseph's message in the plenary meeting: people should leave the camp, go home and rebuild. To help them do so, they would receive double rations today. The crowd cheered and when the camp chair was invited to do the final speech, he teased Joseph by saying: ‘We, we are Malawians. But we started to think that it might be better to go to Mozambique. Now that our government has come, we have seen that we are indeed Malawians!’ Rather than indifference or an attempt to move the burden of care to the Mozambican state, Joseph engaged with their claims for assistance and fulfilled his obligations as a civil servant to the best of his ability. Centralising feelings, affect and emotions thus ‘provides insights into how the state interchangeably materializes and disappears—contingently yet consequentially—in everyday interactions’ (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2015: 10).
As a district-based civil servant, Joseph is the one who decides whether people are ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the group of people that he has to care for ‘indifferently’. Following Herzfeld, this would make doubting peoples’ claims for assistance into a central point where indifference can be produced: ‘The client tries to insist on that service as a citizen entitled to it; the bureaucrat, if recalcitrant, responds by questioning the reality of the citizen's claims (or even questioning the citizen's claims to be a citizen at all)’ (1992: 176). Yet, as the previous examples showed, Joseph did not try to appear indifferent or question citizens’ claims to this extent: he often went to great lengths to include them in his plans—even if it was only for one distribution (cf. Eggen 2012). In creating and verifying the quantitative rendering of the disaster's impact, in making changes to distribution plans, and in deciding how to respond to citizens’ claims for help, feelings, affect and emotions were central to shaping Joseph's decisions.
Ultimately, in attempting to shed light on ‘what African bureaucrats actually do’ (Anders 2009: 3), this focus beyond indifference shows what it feels like to be a civil servant and ‘what makes their action[s] intelligible to themselves’ (Mbembe 2001: 8). When asked, Joseph described being a civil servant as ‘a calling’, saying it required one to have ‘a special heart’. This reference to the heart (mtima), an organ often associated with emotions, also figures in the work of Claire Wendland: in her book A Heart for the Work, she describes how medical students in Malawi considered ‘attachment and love’, rather than distance and neutrality, ‘as key to doing good work in a situation of suffering’ (2010: 180). She writes about the sense of personal crisis that students go through in their journey to becoming doctors, in learning to navigate their resource-poor working environment. One of Joseph's senior colleagues once told me over lunch: ‘I wear a tie because I have been chosen for this position, but my bosses are the people without shoes’. Despite his high-ranking position and wealth seemingly far removing him from the lives of the majority of Malawians, this senior officer claimed that in his efforts to serve the people, rural villagers were always on his mind. Attention to affects and emotions thus helps us see beyond stable state-society relations, enabling a focus rather on ‘the state in an African society’ and the many ways in which those who instantiate it also occupy positions within it (Anders 2009: 150; see also Brown 2016; Graham 2003; Thelen et al. 2014).
In the words of Yael Navaro-Yashin: ‘the work of the civil servant makes a lot of noise, but unable to achieve results, it often feels fruitless’ (2006: 291). Joseph believed that his special heart helped him to continue doing his work, even in difficult circumstances: ‘this [2019] is the most challenging year ever since I have joined the department’, he would often say. ‘If I had a heart that cracks, then I think we would see a lot of blood oozing’. The response to Cyclone Idai coincided with the intense politicisation of relief and recovery efforts due to the disputed national tripartite elections of May 2019. It is this politicisation that caused Joseph to feel immense additional pressure from his bosses at the national level but also from citizens, who were claiming more assistance than he would be able to provide but which his seniors would promise to give them anyway in order to gain political mileage. Where previous relief interventions had also pushed Joseph's resolve to his limits, this year, he had been unable to turn to his seniors in the capital for help:
So sometimes you would even want to take the matters to your bosses. And then you would also wonder that, even your bosses, at that other level, they are also saying: ‘no, call someone up there’. But no! Our hierarchy is—I don't have to! To be in touch with the most top guy when you are also there, it is like I am also bypassing you! But they are also even afraid to be associated with these issues of [disaster] response.
In this loaded quote, Joseph explains how his direct bosses would shy away from sticking to procedures when political pressure mounted, urging him instead to call even higher up the chain to the politically appointed top-level civil servants ultimately running the department. It is due to this politicisation that Joseph ended up needing to navigate not just the multitude of claims for assistance from (affected) citizens but also the politically motivated decisions taken by his own colleagues, department, and the national level government.
What at first glance may appear as either a preoccupation with paperwork and procedures or the opposite, a disregard for both, in essence stemmed from and gave rise to ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2005), like anxiety and frustration. Joseph was anxious about the volatile political context in which he operated and frustrated that he would never be able to reach all the areas that he had to assess, nor would he receive sufficient resources to remedy or reduce the suffering he did manage to document. A narrow focus on the precise production of disaster data or the following of preconceived distribution plans could easily lead to accusations of indifference or corruption levelled at district-based civil servants. Instead, a focus on affect, feelings and emotions troubles these interpretations of their everyday practices and brings to the fore their attempts to live up to a (utopian) social contract. Disaster relief interventions in this sense helped the Malawi state to do what Chahim refers to as ‘governing beyond capacity’; attempts by governments to deal with the unpreventable impacts of climate change, in contexts of very limited state resources (2022: 12). As relief brought solace to the affected citizens selected to receive, it allowed Joseph to instantiate the state and its relation with (affected) citizens in relief interventions, while he himself relied on donors to receive this same relief to be able to do so.
Conclusion: A State of Relief?
The day after the emergency meeting described in the introduction, the assessment teams prepared themselves to go into the field to assess more disaster-affected areas. Mary, from the Red Cross, encouraged the teams: ‘[We need to] come up with workable figures. There are so many donors who will give something once they have that, but without….’ Handing out the freshly printed rapid disaster needs assessment forms, she repeated not to get stuck on the paperwork, and her colleague added: ‘Ask [the questions from the form], but also (komaso) just have a feeling’. With these words, the assessment teams left. As I have argued in this article, this choice of words points to more than just the time pressure under which they were uttered. The quote shows everyone's awareness of the fluid production of figures as bureaucratic facts and the role of affect, emotions and feelings in this process. The quote also returns us to bureaucracy's utopian underpinnings (Bear and Mathur 2015) by reiterating the ultimate purpose for which the procedure of filling out these forms was originally devised: to inform governance processes meant to alleviate suffering and save lives.
In this article, I have suggested that feelings, affects and emotions are part and parcel of bureaucratic procedures and that they profoundly shape the production of bureaucratic facts. Rather than indifference, feelings are central to shaping civil servants’ everyday practices of governing in relief interventions. I illustrated this by showing how the creation of disaster data, the adaptation of distribution lists, and the allocation of resources were bureaucratic processes shaped by affect and emotions that stem from district-level civil servants’ embeddedness in the society they serve. I subsequently argued that Joseph's instantiations of the state are not fuelled by (feigned) indifference but rather by his attempts to realise obligations he shows and feels as he tries to fulfil an imagined, utopian, social contract. Where relief interventions help instantiate this contract, enabling the Malawi state to—in a way—govern ‘beyond capacity’ (Chahim 2022), being a civil servant in Malawi is simultaneously shaped by the visceral awareness that many more do not receive what they need and are entitled to.
A state of disaster in Malawi is not exceptional nor does it constitute a state of exception. To highlight the central role of feelings, affect and emotions, I suggest conceptualising it as ‘a state of relief’. Its meaning is multiple, as it refers to the solace provided to citizens affected by a disaster and assisted in relief interventions. It also refers to the material relief items themselves, brought to alleviate needs that in many ways predate and persist beyond the time of disaster. Ultimately, it refers to the Malawi state itself, which manages to be materially present in the lives of its citizens partly because of the regularity of these relief interventions. As such, instantiating the Malawi state in a time of disaster itself invokes a particular affective state that highlights the difficulties civil servants experience when trying to balance resources and responsibilities while they themselves are reliant on donors. Moving beyond the social production of indifference, a focus on feelings, affect and emotions thus helps throw the everyday instantiations of the Malawi state itself into relief.
Acknowledgements
My PhD is part of the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa (ANTHUSIA) programme and funded by the European Union, grant agreement no.764546. I would like to thank Gerhard Anders, Cecilie Baann, Sam Farrell, Wenzel Geissler, Charline Kopf, the editors, reviewers, and the members of the Southern Africa Writing Group at the African Studies Centre Leiden, for their comments on earlier versions of this article.
Notes
I refer to each explicitly throughout the article, without conflating them. All three are felt but definitions are contested: I follow Laszczkowski and Reeves in using affect to ‘highlight the domain of feeling that comes before or beyond its narration as emotion’ (2015: 5).
All names are pseudonyms.
Section 32. Available in full here: https://www.ecolex.org/details/legislation/disaster-preparedness-and-relief-act-cap-3305-lex-faoc117893/ (retrieved 9 April 2022).
DODMA is in the process of decentralising, making budget lines available at a district level.
The elections were marred with irregularities and nullified by the constitutional court on 3 February 2020. New elections, which were lost by the then ruling party, were held on 23 June 2020.
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