The study of humanitarian intervention typically focuses on the human victims and saviours in armed conflict and natural disasters. Moreover, explanations of the virtues of humanitarian norms and ethics emphasise the importance of the university of suffering and the empathic nature of humanitarian efforts. In contrast, this article explores the neglected world of ‘non-human humanitarians’. Specifically, the article outlines three cases of non-human actors that expand and complicate international humanitarian practices: dogs, drones, and diagrams. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman literatures, the article argues that non-humans possess distinct capacities that vastly expand and transform humanitarian efforts in ranging from relief, to medicine, to conflict resolution. Highlighting non-human humanitarians thus offers a new perspective on the resources available for redressing mass violence and conflict, but also complicates existing definitions of humanitarian norms. To the contrary, the article demonstrates that non-humans often maximise humanitarian services to a degree greater than their human counterparts, but have also introduced changes into humanitarian practices that have problematic unintended consequences. Non-human humanitarians reveals previously discounted participants in international politics and the key roles they play in various international interventions.

This essay partakes in the dialogue between history, anthropology, and social theory on the topic of debt as a social relation. Drawing on sources from nineteenth-century Switzerland, it examines everyday routines of debt collection in liberalism by taking the seized collateral object to the center of historical analysis. It is shown how the attached goods in a debtor's household became an object of knowledge for nineteenth-century framers of law as well as for ordinary debtors. I make use of anthropological theory in order to describe the legal techniques of delineating and extracting collateral, and show how these legal techniques implied specific knowledge practices. I then look at two borderline cases of collateralization: the pawning of mobile goods and the imprisonment of insolvent debtors. Further, I discuss how, by the 1880s, the limits of debt collection were debated, when certain goods were exempt for seizure in a projected federal law. Overall, on an epistemological level, debt collection appears as a double movement: it provided basic tools to untangle property relationships, yet all the while it created new, unpredictable complications. Thus debt collection was a distinctive arena in which the uneasy conceptual relationship between people and things in nineteenth-century liberalism unfolded. From this conceptual node I propose a historical epistemology of the collateral object.

This paper links the ideas of Norbert Elias to the conceptualisation of power and subjectivity that has developed in British industrial and organisational (I/O); sociology. It examines the relevance of power and subjectivity to British I/O sociology and reviews theoretical positions that have influenced this field. Elias's work is examined in some detail, exploring his approach to power, agency, the self, individualisation and discourse. His work is then applied to a re-examination of the perspectives on power and subjectivity contained within labour process, Foucauldian and actor network theory. The paper attempts to show how Elias's work re-frames our understanding of power and subjectivity through a stress on interdependencies and their asymmetry, the ‘networked’ nature of agency, and the interwoven form of human and socio-political development. It argues that Eliasian analysis maintains the critical concern with power asymmetries witnessed in labour process theory, yet avoids some of the difficulties in conceptualisation of power and subjectivity that are apparent in labour process, Foucauldian work and actor network theory. Elias's work also illustrates the need for a lengthier historical perspective than is typically observed in industrial and organisational sociology, and points to the value of studies which look beyond the context of the workplace. Finally, attention is paid to some of the limitations of Elias's work.