This article explores how adfāl al shawāri’ (street children) receive international medical aid in Cairo, the Middle East and North Africa’s largest and most populous city. Based on ethnography conducted between 2007 and 2009 in one French-funded children’s shelter, it argues that western-based international aid organizations increasingly approach children as “biological sufferers” and that this depoliticizing approach eclipses children’s gendered agency and the structural violence shaping their lives. Drawing on the life histories of two homeless children, the research demonstrates how international medical aid can sometimes produce paradoxical effects in the lives of child humanitarian subjects in the global south.
AmarP (2013) The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexual Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
2.
BhabhaJ (2005) The child—what sort of human? In: StantonDCBhabhaJBarghoutiOet al. (eds) The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics. New York: Modern Language Association and Graduate Center, City University of New York, pp. 1526–1535.
3.
BiehlJPetrynaA (ed.) (2013) When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
4.
BornsteinE (2005) The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
5.
BornsteinERedfieldP (eds) (2010) Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism Between Ethics and Politics. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press.
CheneyKE (2007) Pillars of the Nation: Child Citizens and Ugandan National Development. Chicago, IL; London: The University of Chicago Press.
8.
CheneyKE (2011) Children as ethnographers: Reflections on the importance of participatory research in assessing orphans’ needs. Childhood18(2): 166–179.
9.
DahlB (2014) “Too fat to be an orphan”: The moral semiotics of food aid in Botswana. Cultural Anthropology29(4): 626–647.
10.
DahlB (2015) Sexy orphans and sugar daddies: The sexual and moral politics of aid for AIDS in Botswana. Studies in Comparative International Development50: 519–538.
11.
DewachiO (2015) When wounds travel. Medicine Anthropology Theory2(3): 61–82.
12.
EcksS (2005) Pharmaceutical citizenship: Antidepressant marketing and the promise of demarginalization in India. Anthropology & Medicine12(3): 239–254.
13.
EnglundH (2006) Prisoners of Freedom: Human Rights and the African Poor. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
14.
FahmiK (2007) Beyond the Victim: The Politics and Ethics of Empowering Cairo’s Street Children. Cairo and New York: The American University of Cairo Press.
15.
FassinD (2001) The biopolitics of otherness: Undocumented foreigners and racial discrimination in French public debate. Anthropology Today17(1): 3–7.
16.
FassinD (2012) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
17.
FassinD (2013) Children as victims: The moral economy of childhood in the times of AIDS. In: BiehlJPetrynaA (eds) When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, pp. 109–129.
18.
FassinDPandolfiM (eds) (2010) Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. New York: Zone Books.
19.
FeldmanITicktinM (eds) (2010) In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.
20.
FergusonJ (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine: “Development,” Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press.
21.
FergusonJ (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.
22.
FoucaultM (1991) Governmentality. In: BurchellGGordonCMillerP (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104.
23.
FoucaultM (1997) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976. New York: Picador.
24.
GhannamF (2013) Live and Die Like a Man: Gender Dynamics in Urban Egypt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
25.
GuptaA (2012) Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
26.
HechtT (1998) At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
27.
HeidbrinkL (2014) Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
28.
HonwanaADe BoeckF (eds) (2005) Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa. Trenton, NJ; Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press.
29.
HunlethJ (2013) Children’s roles in tuberculosis treatment regimes: Constructing childhood and kinship in urban Zambia. Medical Anthropology Quarterly27(2): 292–311.
30.
JamesEC (2010) Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
31.
KleinmanA (1988) The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition. New York: Basic Books.
32.
LeFrancoisBA (2006) They will find us and infect our bodies: The views of adolescent inpatients taking psychiatric medication. Radical Psychology5. Available at: http://www.radicalpsychology.org/vol5/LeFrancois.html.
33.
LeFrancoisBA (2007) Children’s participation rights: Voicing opinions in inpatient care. Child and Adolescent Mental Health12(2): 94–97.
34.
LeFrancoisBA (2013) The psychiatrization of our children, or, an autoethnographic narrative of perpetuating First Nations genocide through “benevolent” institutions. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society2(1): 108–123.
35.
MalkkiLH (2015) The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.
36.
MaussM (2000 [1925]) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
37.
MillsC (2013) Psychotropic childhoods: Global mental health and pharmaceutical children. Children & Society28: 194–204.
38.
MontgomeryH (2001) Imposing rights? A case study of child prostitution in Thailand. In: CowanJKDembourM-BWilsonRA (eds) Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 80–101.
39.
MontgomeryH (2009) An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
40.
NadaKHSuliman elDA (2010) Violence, abuse, alcohol and drug use, and sexual behaviours in street children of Greater Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt. AIDS24: 39–44.
41.
NguyenV-K (2010) The Republic of Therapy: Triage and Sovereignty in West Africa’s Time of AIDS (Body, Commodity, Text). Durham, NC; London: Duke University Press.
42.
PandolfiM (2003) Contract of mutual (in)difference: Governance and the humanitarian apparatus in contemporary Albania and Kosovo. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies10: 369–381.
43.
PetrynaA (2002) Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
44.
RedfieldP (2013) Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors without Borders. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
45.
RoseN (2006) The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty First Century. Princeton, NJ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
46.
RoyA (2010) Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development. New York; London: Routledge.
47.
ScottJC. (2009) The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.
48.
SheplerS (2005) The rites of the child: Global discourses of youth and reintegrating child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Journal of Human Rights4: 197–211.
49.
SinervoA (2013) “No somos los pobrecitos”: Negotiating stigma, identity, and need in constructions of childhood poverty in Cusco, Peru. Childhood20: 398–413.
50.
SkeltonT (2008) Research with children and young people: exploring the tensions between ethics, competence and participation. Children’s Geographies6(1): 21–36.
51.
StephensS (ed.) (1995) Children and the Politics of Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
52.
SweisRK (2012) Saving Egypt’s village girls: Rights, embodiment and gendered vulnerability in a global youth initiative. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies8(2): 26–50.
53.
TicktinM (2006) Where ethics and politics meet: The violence of humanitarianism in France. American Ethnologist33(1): 33–49.
54.
TicktinM (2011) Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA; London: University of California Press.
55.
TrappMM (2016) YOU-WILL-KILL-ME BEANS: Taste and the politics of necessity in humanitarian aid. Cultural Anthropology31(3): 412–437.
56.
TsingAL (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
57.
WolsethJM (2014) Life on the Malecon: Children and Youth on the Streets of Santo Domingo. New Brunswick, NJ; London: Rutgers University Press.
