Reimagining Hosting

Speaker: Annelise Riles, Professor of law and anthropology, Associate Provost for Global Affairs, Northwestern University.

Annelise Riles new book, “Gig Diplomacy” argues that global governance is undergoing a transformation of form: the multilateral institution, the template through which post-war order was organized, is giving way to the platform, a fundamentally different mode of coordinating action. Drawing on nine years of participant observation surrounding the Treaty on the Prohibition of nuclear weapons, and ethnography in the Pacific and in Nagasaki, the book offers the first sustained anthropological account of this transition, one that takes seriously both the possibilities the platform opens and its limitations and exclusions.

I respond to this condition in a modality learned from ethnography in the Pacific: by layering onto the platform (as in women’s layering of mats (Riles 2001) the perspective of bombed peripheries. In particular, I argue for global governance in a “postapocalyptic” modality—what I term a politics of hosting.