Moving beyond focuses on humanitarian extensions of biopolitics, recent scholarship has begun to explore techniques of resistance in practices of aid, development, and relief. While these shifts are welcome, they often leave undertheorized the processes by which such resistances actually undermine biopower, particularly at the level of organizations’ ethico-political efforts to form their subjects, resistant or otherwise. This article offers “pastoral power,” a medieval form of conduct-shaping and individualizing power in Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality, as a resource for theorizing humanitarian practices as resistance. Continue reading → Continue reading →