ABSTRACT
This chapter critically examines the post-2000 Chernobyl-related assistance effort in Belarus (with a focus on the health consequences of the accident) in terms of the dominant problematisations (e.g. absence of serious health consequences) and systems of knowledge underpinning such problematisations; strategies and technologies of governing (e.g. responsibilisation, psychologisation and mentality change); and the ways in which people in need of assistance were constructed (e.g. dependent, passive and irresponsible victims). The chapter argues that the dominant problematisations of the accident were crucial for facilitating its ‘forgetting’, and that the related assistance effort was profoundly informed by a biopolitics of invisibility and abandonment.
