Manuel Schwab works on how value behaves under different practices of determining what (and who) matters (and why). Working at the nexus between economic and political anthropology, he addresses how value operates under regimes of both humanitarian protection and the exercise of military force. His work offers accounts of objects, ideas, texts, bodies, acts and beliefs that travel across space and time and in the process come to matter differently. His first book treats emergent economic subjectivities in Sudan and how humanitarian attention channels affect and builds life worlds around events of spectacular violence. The book aims to make sense of these phenomena by treating them as economies of attention, with all the implications of scarcity, redistribution, and transaction these carry in tow. Having conducted multisite fieldwork in Sudan, the forthcoming book places localized phenomena of fiercely contested value under the dual rubrics of aid and war in the context of other historical moments of humanitarian attention. Prior to coming to AUC, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Makerere Institute for Social Research. He holds a PhD from Columbia University. When he is not writing on value and circulation, he is working on a manuscript about a manuscript seeking asylum in the world.