We present six original papers in this issue.

Kennedy Opande and Washington Onyango-Ouma focus on notions of the cosmo-juridical as a domain in which connections between human life and natural phenomenon might be forged. The cosmo-juridical is presented as the means not only through which human interventions might ward off deleterious impacts of natural forces, but practices of co-constitution where diverse agencies attempt to negotiate their interactions with each other as a means of transforming life processes. 

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with aid organizations working with Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, Malay Firoz explores how increasing datafication–including innovations in humanitarian vulnerability indexing of refugees in humanitarian action–generates questions about the limits of quantitative ontologies and their transformative impact on institutional humanitarianism itself. 

Based on twenty months of participant observation and interviews with Eritreans in northern Italy, Fiori Sara Berhane analyzes Eritrean migrants’ experiences of violence in Libya as a “country of transit” to Europe as well as the efforts of Eritrean activists to bring this violence to light and to aid recent refugees. Berhane analyzes this overarching situation in a framework of the “paradox of humanitarian recognition.”

Based on extensive fieldwork on a car assembly shop floor of Mexico where autoworkers stand next to logistics workers, Alejandra González Jiménez illuminates intersections of  gender and age in a tiered labor system shaped by the historical triadic social contract between organized labor, the state, and multiple corporations in the post-NAFTA era.

Drawing on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Rebekah Plueckhahn shows how “effective cynicism” helps residents pragmatically decipher relations of power shaping the difficult circumstances of their lives and to find alternative pathways forward.

Following the environmental sustainability initiatives of Tobacco Board experts in the Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh in India, Amrita Kurian investigates experts’ affective responses attending technoscientific management of agriculture, asking, ultimately: who gets to be the experts’ public and who does not. 

Cover and table-of-contents image by Amrita Kurian.