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The political potential of responsibility in domestic humanitarianism

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Operation Sovereign Borders

Even on a frozen winter’s night, the queue snaked around the corner. Taking seats in the Melbourne warehouse for the prospective volunteer information evening, the chatter died down as the charismatic CEO spread his hands and proclaimed: “Our volunteers fill this building with a tsunami of compassion that is so thunderous you can’t imagine there is another world out there. People connected to the idea that we can make a great Australia, that when we sit disillusioned by our political leaders we go bugger them. We don’t need cowards with empty hearts and hack ideas. We can be the moral compass for the society that we want.”

This stirring address was met by applause. It resonated against a wider climate of hostility towards people seeking asylum attempting to reach Australia by boat(1). Since 2013, they were subjected to Operation Sovereign Borders, Australia’s deterrence policy. Spearheaded by a brutal advertising campaign that decried “NO WAY. YOU WILL NOT MAKE AUSTRALIA HOME” to targeted “source countries,” deterrence policy garnered bipartisan and majority voter support. It involved punitive militarized methods such as boat turn-backs by the Australian Navy and indefinite incarceration of people seeking asylum on Nauru and Manus Island.

The queuing masses on this night in Melbourne were looking for a way to help, but also for somewhere to place their faith in an alternative. They expressed frustration and dismay at the trauma inflicted upon people seeking asylum by the Australian government’s deterrence policy. Many volunteers delivered aid to nearly 30,000 people living in Australia on temporary visas. Though not incarcerated, these people seeking asylum could wait for years for their asylum claims to be processed, in precarious conditions with inconsistent work/study rights and a meager government stipend valued at 89 per cent of the lowest welfare benefit. They were structurally forced to rely on informal personal networks and charities. Unlike those in detention who received sustained media coverage, or with conferred refugee status in Australia’s official “humanitarian intake,” these temporary visa holders were almost invisible in public discourse. In policy terms they were deemed “non-persons” “undeserving” of humanitarian aid or permanent residence due to their “unauthorized” arrival (McMillan 2017).

The domestic humanitarian

This piece focuses on domestic humanitarians within Australia providing aid and imagining alternatives to Operation Sovereign Borders. My notion of the “domestic humanitarian” is a fusion of a “humanitarian subject” characterized by a “need to help” (Malkki 2015) or “impulse to give” (Bornstein 2012) to a distant suffering stranger; and a “responsibilized subject” (Rose 1996) impelled by the state to look after their community as a duty and condition of citizenship (Muehlebach 2012). The domestic humanitarian combines a universalized humanitarian impulse with feelings of duty or responsibility tied to citizenship: providing “humanitarianism at home.” I want to consider this relationship between the domestic humanitarian and responsibility. Does the volunteer as a domestic humanitarian feel responsible or “answerable” (Hage and Eckersley 2012) for the punitive policies of their own state that are affecting an “Other” who is also their neighbor? In asking this I join other anthropologists questioning and analyzing distinctions between “home” and “elsewhere,” “citizens” and “non-citizens” (Fassin 2012, Malkki 2015, Brković 2016, Cabot 2018).

My contribution to these efforts has analytic and political import for the anthropology of humanitarianism, within Australia and more generally. Analytically, considering how humanitarian responsibility may manifest domestically is a question not only of scale, but on what happens when scales intersect, and how this may produce new—and multiple— forms of social and moral action. But the most important way in which I hope to contribute is by suggesting that domestic humanitarianism presents the possibility of a more accessible and inclusive political alternative. I turn to two ethnographic examples to elaborate this point.

Political register of fairness and justice

“We’re pushing the reset button!” exclaimed the endlessly energetic facilitator to the roomful of volunteers gathered for a campaign training session.“We’ve been subjected to a national discourse that dehumanizes people! Can I get examples?”

Volunteers called out in rapid fire:

“Illegal” “Fear” “Terrorism” “Queue jumping” “Stop the boats.” “This has been the dominant frame for my lifetime. But how do we want to have this conversation?”

The responses came back more thoughtfully:

“A fair go” “Compassionate” “Responsibility” “Empathy” “Dignity.” “We need to set this up to be stronger than the national interest frame! How are we going to make policies based on our shared values?”

An NGO campaign was launched before the 2016 Australian Election, introducing new humanistic language to change the national conversation about people seeking asylum. This campaign was based on research that found the antagonistic and reactive language of activists was not effective in capturing “the persuadables,” swing voters comprising 60 per cent of the voting population. In the past, in retort to those arguing “it is illegal to seek asylum” activists responded, “it is not illegal,” unintentionally reinforcing the dominant narrative in their rebuttal. Now they practiced a kind of prefigurative politics (Maeckelbergh 2011) by speaking the change they wanted to see, using words that emphasised agency rather than suffering such as hope, freedom, and fair process. They then put this in policy terms, arguing for changes to the refugee determination process that included the introduction of permanent visas, fairer legal review, and family reunion.

Shifting from values to policy required a careful balance whereby volunteers both took and demanded responsibility. Volunteers both felt a sense of collective responsibility to correct wrongs committed by the state, and saw themselves and people seeking asylum as owed political and civic rights(2). But they would no longer wait for a morally corrupt state to change—they would demonstrate what a moral compass looked like. Rather than the state responsibilizing citizens, citizens sought to responsibilize an immoral state.

Cultural register of neighborliness

Half-melting baked goods heaved under home-sewn bunting at a local street festival stall. Women sat taking coin donations for slices of cake and selling branded tea towels. On them, an angel spread wings emblazoned with letters spelling out “Welcome.” Among the letters nestled bikes, books, toys, food, fridges, shoes, houses, and other domestic items of material aid.

 Also in Melbourne, a community group of mainly working-age mothers framed their volunteering as “the support of a neighbor to a neighbor.” They delivered material and food aid to the homes of people seeking asylum, and their fundraising evoked the home and neighborhood through sausage sizzles, garage sales, bake sales, and raffles. This was often married with the domestic arts—sewing, baking and gardening. The code of neighborliness became a way of mobilizing a sense of moral duty in the Australian public to help their neighbor in need, drawing on an established historical and cultural framework of mateship and mutual aid that Oppenheimer (2008) has noted informs a distinctively “Australian way of volunteering.”

Making people seeking asylum into neighbors in need equalized the relationship and reinstated their deservingness of assistance. Although imposing this on a structurally unequal relationship posed potential concerns—such as whether it could be a form of taming the “Other” into the cultural norms of the national space (Hage 1999); or whether everyone could perform the duties of neighborliness, when they did not all have the same rights or secure living conditions—domestic spaces could still be powerful sites for integration (Larsen 2011). This entailed a reconfiguration of the “asylum seeker issue” into a different register: from international to domestic, politics to community, stranger to neighbor, fear to trust. It offered a counterpoint to the “fear-mongering” of politicians and mainstream media. It also gently raised public awareness that people were living in these conditions next door, not only in far-off conflict zones or detention centers.

Towards an accessible “arts of government”

Political, ethical and cultural registers of responsibility coalesced in these domestic humanitarian practices. The new humanistic language of the NGO campaign spoke about fairness and justice. This was not abstracted to a universal moral sentiment but linked to clear policy demands upon the state, yoking an ethical to a political register. Meanwhile, the community group drew on a culturally embedded sense of moral duty to help one’s neighbor in need, rooted in Australian traditions of mateship and mutual aid.

James Ferguson (2009) has noted that the global Left has failed to launch a successful “arts of government.” This is especially pertinent in a time when xenophobic populist movements are experiencing increased success in many parts of the world. In thinking about future directions for the anthropology of humanitarianism, steering away from a “swinging pendulum”-type debate about whether or not humanitarianism is depoliticizing is crucial for remaining open to the political potential within humanitarian methods. What are the political implications of operating across multiple registers of responsibility? The responsibilities generated by domestic humanitarianism may speak across traditional left/right political binaries. Though at first glance my examples may seem quite different, they share a similarity in seeking to make their cause accessible to people of all political persuasions. Unlike more radical activist techniques, pairing political, ethical and cultural registers of responsibility could provide the basis for a more inclusive progressive politics. This may have broader appeal to persuadable voters unsure of their views, and encourage more humane attitudes to “Others” in climates of hostility.

Acknowledgements

My grateful thanks to everyone who participated in this research during my doctoral fieldwork during 2015-16 in Melbourne.

Notes

(1) I use the term “people seeking asylum” rather than “asylum seeker” to emulate best practice in the refugee sector in Australia.

(2) This included the wrongs of settler colonialism, as enacted in solidarity rallies with Indigenous Australians

References

Bornstein, Erica. 2012. Disquieting gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brković, Čarna. 2016. Scaling humanitarianism: Humanitarian actions in a Bosnian town. Ethnos 81(1): 99-124.

Cabot, Heath. 2018. The European refugee crisis and humanitarian citizenship in Greece. Ethnos: 1-25.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ferguson, James. 2009. The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode 41(1): 166-184.

Hage, Ghassan. 1999. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Sydney: Pluto Press.

Hage, Ghassan and Robin Eckersley. (Eds.). 2012. Responsibility. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Larsen, Birgitte. 2011. Drawing back the curtains: The role of domestic space in the social inclusion and exclusion of refugees in rural Denmark. Social Analysis 55(2): 142-158.

Malkki, Liisa. 2015. The need to help: The domestic arts of international humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2011. Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice in the alterglobalization movement. Social Movement Studies 10(1): 1-20.

McMillan, Chris. 2017. Who gets a fair go? A Žižekian reading of representations of asylum seekers in Australia. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 22(1): 33-51.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The moral neoliberal: Welfare and citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oppenheimer, Melanie. 2008. Volunteering: Why we can’t survive without it. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Rose, Nicholas. 1996. Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies. In A. Barry & T. Osborne (Eds.), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism and  rationalities of government (pp. 37-64). London: University College London Press.

 

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Anthropology of humanitarianism: between new vocabulary and critique

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Emergent humanitarian forms of life

Sixteen-year old Marija was a money-keeper during one humanitarian action organized in her high school in a small town in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In many former Yugoslav countries, the words “humanitarian action” (humanitarna akcija) refer to a specific local practice of raising aid and saving lives. In this case, humanitarian action meant that high school pupils gave a few Euros to Marija to raise money for medical treatment abroad. Marija did not make a list of givers and she did not make note of how much each student gave, because, as she said, “everyone gave as much as they could, and making a list would create unequals”. Marija and her classmates raised one hundred and fifty Euros, which the school officials transferred to the personal bank account of the father for whose son the humanitarian action was organized. It was only then that Marija found out the money was raised for a five-year old boy whose mother was a teacher in another high school. Before that, Marija thought that the sick child was a teenager, a fellow pupil. This could have happened because Marija misunderstood what her school director said when she asked Marija to collect money for a sick child.

Humanitarian actions first appeared after the fall of the socialist state as welfare systems in former Yugoslav countries underwent a profound transformation. In addition to raising small amounts from pupils in schools, humanitarian actions often include concerts, sport games, art auctions, humanitarian telephone donation lines – usually organized by friends and family of the person in need. They also often include a direct (and substantial) financial humanitarian donation from the municipal government and/or another state institution.

How can we understand this practice of raising money from hundreds of people and institutions to help a sick person access medical treatment abroad? Was this an instance of charity? Philanthropy? Humanitarianism? If we want to analyze it anthropologically, should we approach it as a practice that speaks about citizenship and welfare? Activism and engagement? New sort of public and moral communities?

There is no single answer to this question because there is simply no clear conceptual box in which post-Yugoslav “humanitarian actions” fit. This practice of giving aid and saving lives of people close to you perhaps presents an “emergent form of life”, here understood as an ethnographic fact “that life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained” (Fischer 2003: 456). Humanitarian actions are a post-Yugoslav experiment that blurs the boundaries between humanitarianism and welfare.

Similar small-scale experiments with humanitarian-cum-welfare support mushroomed throughout Europe in the last years as a response to the so-called long summer of migration. However, they have been taking shape longer – at least since “the collapse of the Mediterranean border regime in the wake of the Arab Spring 2011 and the ensuing controversies around issues such as the perceived partiality of the refugee distribution mechanism of the Dublin system…” (Hess and Kasparek 2017: 47). These experiments in giving and helping are very diverse, organized through the federal and regional state agencies, municipalities, or private companies, humanitarian organizations, as well as through self-managed neighborhood-based citizens’ associations and grassroots networks of volunteers. Some of these practices include helping refugees with administration, paperwork, and general orientation in the host society; professional and volunteer-provided language classes; kitchen projects where volunteers and refugees cook together; projects of living communally in shared residential spaces; and so forth (e.g. Hamman and Karakayali 2016). Are these emergent forms of life a topic for an anthropology of humanitarianism?

Large-scale international humanitarianism and anthropological critique

Anthropology of humanitarianism is mostly focused on the practice of transnational organizations of giving aid from the West to the “Rest” and saving lives across the globe. When anthropologists speak and write about humanitarianism, we usually have in mind global actors who strive to practice neutrality and impartiality when they help in the name of universal humanity – e.g. we study organizations such as MSF, Red Cross, UNICEF, Oxfam, Care, World Vision, and so on. This focus has generated a large and thriving body of critical analysis. Ethnographic research has demonstrated that, in practice, humanitarian organizations often fail to follow the foundational assumption of humanitarianism – that all lives are equal and that people should be helped regardless of their gender, age, nationality, race, or class (Fassin 2007). Critical anthropological approaches demonstrate that humanitarianism presents a new form of governmentality that operates on a global scale (De Lauri 2016). It explains why displaced people seem to be continually ungrateful to those who help them and why they describe substantial humanitarian aid as “nothing” (Dunn 2018). And so forth.

Important social critique that anthropology has articulated about humanitarianism has been made possible by the fact that most people know what it is that we talk about when we talk about humanitarianism. Large-scale international humanitarianism is a “migrant sovereignty” – a body of institutions, knowledge, and practice that move from crisis to crisis, changing very little as they move across the world (Pandolfi 2003: 369). Due to its global reach and importance, this form of humanitarianism is well-known. The large-scale international humanitarianism has been in the focus of anthropological research perhaps partly because it offers a new ground for articulating one of the most powerful anthropological arguments – the criticism of Us and our (humanitarian) practices as those who fail to understand Them, to hear Their voices, and to respect Their needs (Fassin 2010). (Please note that “Us” here more or less refers to “the English-speaking West”).

However, we should remember that this is just one possible form of humanitarianism – and that there are many other local, grassroots and vernacular forms of giving aid and saving lives in the name of common humanity. Post-Yugoslav humanitarian actions are one such vernacular form of humanitarianism. These other forms of humanitarianism ask for different kinds of anthropological engagement and argumentation.

Experiments with humanitarian aid and a need for new vocabularies

It makes no sense to write about the post-Yugoslav humanitarian actions from the same critical direction that the large-scale humanitarianism provokes. Here, the whole humanitarian practice depended on whether the organizer would listen to the voices, expectations, and opinions of other people and establish social relations in many different directions. To work out how to frame it, I first had to explore what was going on and how this form of giving aid and saving lives actually worked. I also had to make decisions on whether to relate my ethnographic experiences to literature on humanitarianism, charity, citizenship, or something else – and to explain and defend my decision in front of peer reviewers who had their own ideas about what to do (for more details, see Brkovic 2014; 2016). My ex-Yugoslav interlocutors called this practice a “humanitarian action” – yet it helped fellow-citizens, not strangers a world over. It looked like “charity”, in that aid was primarily financial – but it was donated by the impoverished as well as the well-off people. It evoked state welfare, since municipal governments and other state institutions gave substantial amounts of money – but usually as a humanitarian donation to a personal bank account of the family in need, not as a standardized program blind to the social positions and individual needs of the citizens. Emerging during simultaneous post-war and post-socialist transformation of former Yugoslav countries, “humanitarian action” was a grassroots social experiment that blurred boundaries between domains characteristic of a welfare state – this is how it opened a space to think about the need for a new vocabulary of giving and saving in humanitarianism.

I could start articulating a critique of inequalities created by this “emergent form of life” only once I decided what to call it and with which bodies of literature to link it. Importantly, although it was grassroots and local, it was not fairer than the large-scale international humanitarianism – it was unjust, but in a different way. As a specific instance of “adhocracy”, or a “form of power that creates chaos and vulnerability as much as it creates order” (Dunn 2012: 2), humanitarian actions increased people´s vulnerabilities. They deepened precarity of those who needed help, making their survival and wellbeing dependent on the helpers´ mood and goodwill.

Similar interweaving of humanitarianism, charity, and welfare takes place in many contemporary experiments with helping people in need throughout the world. As anthropologists, we sometimes need to invent new words to describe what’s going on in such experiments (for an account of what some of the new vocabulary on giving aid and saving lives could be like, see Drotbohm’s contribution to this blog series). Perhaps ethnographic accounts could offer new vocabulary to describe the emergent humanitarian forms of life, without losing social critique from sight.

 

References

Brković, Čarna. “Surviving in a Moveopticon. Humanitarian Actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Contemporary Southeastern Europe 1, Nr. 2 (2014): 42–60.

Brković, Čarna. “Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town”. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81, Nr. 1 (2016): 99–124.

De Lauri, Antonio, ed. 2016. The Politics of Humanitarianism. Power, Ideology and Aid. London: I.B.Tauris.

Drotbohm, Heike. 2018. Navigating the blurred boundaries of aid. On the Pitfalls of Post-Humanitarian Encounters. Public Anthropologist 25 September 2018. Available at: http://publicanthropologist.cmi.no/2018/09/25/navigating-the-blurred-boundaries-of-aid-on-the-pitfalls-of-post-humanitarian-encounters/

Dunn, Elizabeth, C. 2012. “The Chaos of Humanitarian Aid: Adhocracy in the Republic of Georgia”. Humanity (3)1: 1–23.

Dunn, Elizabeth, C. 2018. No Path Home. Cornell University Press.

Fassin, Didier. “Another Politics of Life is Possible”. Theory, Culture and Society 26, Nr. 5 (2009): 44–60.

Fassin, Didier. “Ethics of Survival: A Democratic Approach to the Politics of Life”. Humanity 1, Nr. 1 (2010): 81–95.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Fischer, Michael M J. 1999. “Emergent Forms of Life: Anthropologies of Late or Postmodernities”. Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 455–478.

Hamann, Ulrike, and Serhat Karakayali. 2016. “Practicing Willkommenskultur: Migration and Solidarity in Germany.” Intersections. East European Journal of Society and Politics 2 (4): 69–86.

Hess, Sabine, and Bernd Kasparek. 2017. “De- and Restabilising Schengen. The European Border Regime after the Summer of Migration.” Cuadernos Europeos de Deusto 56: 47–77.

Pandolfi, Mariella. 2003. “Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Government and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo”. Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10(1): 369–381.

 

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The circular logic of humanitarian expertise

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Experts, as paradigmatic figures of modernity (Mitchell 2002), occupy a central place in contemporary policy making. They embody the human drive for governing the world via the use of rational reason. The term finds its origins in the Latin ‘experitus’, from experior, which means ‘to test’ or ‘to prove’.  Most dictionaries agree on the knowledge-based dimension of such experience, which characterizes an expert and puts emphasis on the technical and scientific nature of expert knowledge.

Expertise is also associated with decision-making processes (Rabier 2007). Indeed, expertise generally consists of establishing a diagnosis of knowledge in a problematic situation, as part of a mission integrated into a decision-making process that is not controlled by the expert. The lack of control over the political motivations behind the request for expertise and over the presentation, interpretation and use of the final results are other elements that distinguish the work of the expert from the one of the researcher (Théry 2005). However, the notion of expertise also refers to the value of excellence, widely shared across professional spheres. The position an expert occupies at the intersection of citizens, policymakers and scientists, and the implicit link between knowledge and values, are important sources of tension which make the production of ‘expertise’ a highly ambiguous task.

However, the confidence in experts seems to have gradually eroded over time. Expertise has been criticized for silencing local knowledge and for adhering to the preferences of those able to determine the political agenda (Domènech 2017). Ironically, in spite of these critiques, appeals to expertise is growing as never before because of the increasing reliance on techno-scientific evidence in modern governance practices (Limoges 1993).

In the context of humanitarian policymaking, the systematic use of experts to inform decision-making has gone hand in hand with the watering down of the meaning of ‘humanity’ – a central motive of humanitarianism. Indeed, the techno-legal devices mobilised by the bureaucratic processes of expertise tend to keep the meaning of humanity ‘within the brackets’ (Riles 1998), referring to both ‘nothing’ and to an infinite number of possibilities within the limits imposed by the specific linguistic genre of ‘expert reports’.

Furthermore, the bureaucratic artifacts of expertise are not essentially meant to achieve clarity on a specific issue but rather serve to nurture a network of professionals bound together by a concern for ‘the aesthetics of logic and language’ (Riles 1998, 386). Therefore, the main purpose of expert knowledge production is not to ‘provide evidence’ but rather to materialise a sociality organised around aesthetic form. In other words, the documents are ‘boundary objects’, acting as the social glue through which expertise is authorized and an epistemic community is created and maintained.

Humanitarian expertise can therefore be conceived as a sort of performance. It is less something a professional has acquired through experience (even though this is undeniably the case too) than something (s)he has come to excel at through repetitive performances. In other words, it is through the mastery of conscientiously choreographed practices of document production and bureaucratic rituals of authorization (embodied in meetings, conferences and workshops) that one qualifies as an ‘expert’.

This emphasis on ‘processes’ and ‘forms’ as effective carriers of ‘evidence’ denotes a commitment for action for lack of a concrete vision of the future. The tasks forces, working groups and conferences that humanitarian expertise relies on to achieve legitimacy tend to maintain ‘the reality on the ground’ that is supposed to inform policy ‘within the brackets’, to use the title of Riles’ 1998 American Anthropologist article (Riles 1998). Indeed, the ‘humanity’ embodied by the ‘people’ that such activities are ultimately meant to serve remains hidden from view, behind the documents and the processes that lead to their collective production. Expert knowledge, as a fragile product of negotiations, implicitly requires “the co-production of ignorance” (Mathews 2008).

The “parrhesiastic contract” (Foucault 2001) which authorizes expertise is therefore essentially contingent upon aesthetic practices of document production and technocratic performances. Such performances are anchored in repetitions and necessitate fluency in complex aesthetic registers. An expert, to be acknowledged as such, has to develop a command not only of the rules and modalities of these bureaucratic rituals, but also of the language of the artifacts they generate. While enabling a greater diversity of actors to engage in the process of knowledge production, such procedures simultaneously tend to tame dissenting voices by subtly coercing actors to adopt the standards and dispositions of experts. To become audible and ‘be part of the parade’ (Schia 2013), actors have to adopt the ‘mindset of the template’. From an anthropological perspective, expert reports may not be interesting for what they say but rather for the sociality they enable to nurture and maintain. As ‘boundary objects’, they ‘allow dialogue but preserve a certain structure of institutional power’ (Mosse 2011, 61).

Sources cited

Domènech, Miquel. 2017. ‘Democratising science’. Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances 11, N°2 (2)

Foucault, Michel. 2001. Fearless Speech. Edited by Joseph Pearson. Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents).

Limoges, Camille. 1993. ‘Expert Knowledge and Decision-Making in Controversy Contexts’. Public Understanding of Science 2 (4): 417–26.

Mathews, Andrew S. 2008. ‘State Making, Knowledge, and Ignorance: Translation and Concealment in Mexican Forestry Institutions’. American Anthropologist 110 (4): 484–94.

Mitchell, Timothy. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. University of California Press.

Mosse, David. 2011. ‘Politics and Ethics: Ethnographies of Expert Knowledge and Professional Identities’. In Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power, Berghan Books. Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Pero.

Rabier, Christelle. 2007. Fields of Expertise: A Comparative History of Expert Procedures in Paris and London, 1600 to Present. Cambridge Scholars Pub.

Riles, Annelise. 1998. ‘Infinity within the Brackets’. American Ethnologist 25 (3): 378–98.

Schia, Niels Nagelhus. 2013. ‘Being Part of the Parade – “Going Native” in the United Nations Security Council’. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36 (1): 138–56.

Théry, Irène. 2005. ‘Expertises de Service, de Consensus, d’engagement : Essai de Typologie de La Mission d’expertise En Sciences Sociales’. Droit et Société 60.

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Of refugees and states: how vernacular humanitarianism draws together disparate scales of statecraft

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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“He [Pero] is a refugee person [izbegličko lice], we have to help him. Pero received a small flat consisting of a room, a kitchen and a small WC. An electric meter was installed in the flat and he only has to pay the electricity bill” (Zlatan, 29.8.2013).

This is how the clerk of the self-governmental unit of the Local Council (šef kancelarije Mesne Zajednice) of Donje Selo explained his institution’s support for Pero Krajišnik, a former Croatian refugee and a Serbian citizen since 2003. In 2008, Pero had begun to “fall through the cracks” of the non-encompassing scales and spaces of the Serbian welfare state – too young for a pension, apparently not sick enough for social aid (though treated in hospital for alcohol abuse), too-long-term unemployed for benefits. Instead, Pero became the subject of local community attention to ‘our refugee’. Vernacular humanitarianism (Brković 2017b), drawing from the displaced experiences of the 1990s, became the vehicle of care by Donje Selo’s actors on- and off-state (Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 1998). Local Council supervisor Miro especially exercised his yearning for social and ethical citizenship by pushing for support. Villagers gave Pero food, beverages, work, firewood, and informal credit, and the Local Council provided free housing, subsidized electricity, and repeatedly selected Pero for public works. This made Pero visible as a “social case” and bridged the divide with the municipal welfare sector. By 2012, Pero’s neediness and deservingness were affirmed through the monthly payment of 6500 Dinar (55 EUR) by the municipal Centre for Social Work.

Tracing Pero’s extended case of local state care, I began wondering about the link between humanitarian reason and statecraft. The anthropology of the state has recently moved towards a relational approach analyzing how multiple modalities of statecraft are mediated by social relations (Thelen, Vetters, and Benda-Beckmann 2017; Thiemann, n.d.). In Europe, with its long-standing public-private dichotomies, the state is seen as public and defined in contradistinction to its supposedly private other – civil society, domestic space, or kinship (Weintraub 1997; Thelen, Thiemann, and Roth 2017). This divide is nonetheless bridged by concepts like embeddedness, belonging, and citizenship. Relational boundary work – the reproduction of hegemonic discourses – reinstates the divide (Thelen and Alber 2018).

Here, I focus on vernacular humanitarianism (Brković 2017b) as a bridging concept and an emerging modality of local statecraft. Andrew Gilbert (2016) has recently highlighted the entanglements of non-governmental refugee aid with local state politics . In 2002, seven years after the end of the war, Bosnian NGO activists convened meetings in a Local Council and convinced Councilors to distribute humanitarian aid irrespective of the internal ethnic divides of their community. Such practices complicated the public claims of NGO apoliticism, through which non-governmental organizations derived international funding by performing civil society “at the frontiers of the state” (Mikuš 2018). To maintain that positionality, pragmatic declarations of being “apolitical” constituted the boundary work that (re)produced the local (European) compartmentalization of social process and channeled widespread discontent with the neoliberalising state into ambivalent critiques of state corruption and yearnings for a functioning state (Jansen 2015; Brković 2017a). In Serbia, apoliticism even reorganized local democracy building. It legitimized USAID state funding of democratic, apolitical local community leaders who ironically turned into political elites, translating their enhanced personal capacities into symbolic capital by standing for election in their Local Council (Vetta 2009). In my fieldwork in rural central Serbia, I analyzed the boundary work of such apolitical Local Councils (Thiemann 2016, chaps 2–4).

Two decades after the Yugoslav civil wars, the refugee question in Serbia has long become decategorized as a field of political activity. As the humanitarian project cycle closed and international and local NGOs largely left, new forms of integration fostered hybrid “refugee-citizens” (for Tchad, Behrends 2018). Humanitarian reasons only resurfaced in Pero’s crisis situation (for Bosnian working class politics, see Gilbert). I argue that the local state is emergent at the (lack of) intersection between scales and spaces of statecraft. Scales of statecraft do not encompass each other like Russian dolls (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), and at the heart of local politics – at least in my view – stands the agency to realign the state scales and spaces for local state projects from below. Between 1995 and 2002, Donje Selo had provided some 50 refugees with food, shelter and asymmetrical integration, but then the local branch of the municipal refugee camp was closed by the Local Council President to pressure the municipality to cover the electricity bills that clogged the Council’s budget. By 2009, the largest chunks of the Council’s budget were still earmarked for infrastructural development and for sports and culture. While there remained a small space of discretion for “emergency expenditures”, welfare appeared a municipal and central state responsibility, a scale or two removed.

In the intervening years, the welfare state net drifted apart, as austerity-induced budget freezes hit an increasingly dispossessed population. In a “moral neoliberal” move, the local community was interpellated by the state to care (Muehlebach 2012). The vaguely defined and underfinanced duty of care led to conflict, deteriorating medical and social services, and humanitarian actions in which unstable networks of citizens collected emergency monies (Brković 2017a). But in Serbia, it surprisingly also led to a re-legitimization of the (since 1990) customary, “post-communist” Local Councils (Šević 2001; Vetta 2009; Vukelić 2009). By the mid-2000s, the Local Councils were revalued (Gadjanova 2006) and received new statutes (SMZ 2005).

The case study of Pero then illuminates the local mobilizing potential of yearnings for social citizenship. Refugeeness was appropriated by the Local Council as an apolitical claim for moral neoliberal care, but ironically (self-)addressed at the local state. Far from agonistically challenging the status quo, however, the ensuing humanitarian reason (Fassin 2012) drew together and “encompassed from below” disparate scales and spaces of statecraft. Echoing Yugoslav claims for popular solidarity, the emerging modality of apolitical statecraft highlighted the openness and in-betweeness of a local self-governmental process rife with ambivalent exclusions and inclusions.

References

Behrends, Andrea. 2018. ‘On Categorizing. Doing and Undoing “refugees” in the Aftermath of Large-Scale Displacement’. Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography 6. https://www.academia.edu/35650840/On_categorizing._Doing_and_undoing_refugees_in_the_aftermath_of_large-scale_displacement.

Benda-Beckmann, Franz von, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann. 1998. ‘Where Structures Merge: State and Off-State Involvement in Rural Social Security on Ambon, Eastern Indonesia’. In Old World Places, New World Problems: Exploring Issues of Resource Management in Eastern Indonesia, edited by Sandra Panell and Franz von Benda-Beckmann, 143–180. Canberra: Australian National University Press.

Brković, Čarna. 2017a. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientelism, Citizenship, and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Oxford: Berghahn.

———. 2017b. ‘Introduction: Vernacular #Humanitarianisms’. Allegra (blog). 25 September 2017. http://allegralaboratory.net/vernacular-humanitarianisms/.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason : A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.]: Univ. of California Press.

Ferguson, James, and Akhil Gupta. 2002. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’. American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002.

Gadjanova, Elena. 2006. The State of Local Democracy in the Western Balkans: A Study of Local Democratic Processes and Institutions in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

Gilbert, Andrew C. 2016. ‘From Humanitarianism to Humanitarianization: Intimacy, Estrangement, and International Aid in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina’. American Ethnologist 43 (4): 717–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12386.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. Oxford: Berghahn.

Mikuš, Marek. 2018. Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia. First published. Dislocations. – New York [u.a.] : Berghahn Books, 2006- 22. New York, NY: Berghahn.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago [et al.]: University of Chicago Press.

Šević, Željko. 2001. ‘Local Government in Yugoslavia’. In Stabilization of Local Governments, edited by Emilia Kandeva, 417–69. Budapest: OSI/LGI.

SMZ. 2005. ‘Statut Mesne Zajednice’.

Thelen, Tatjana, and Erdmute Alber, eds. 2018. Reconnecting State and Kinship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Thelen, Tatjana, Andre Thiemann, and Duška Roth. 2017. ‘State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs’. In Stategraphy. Towards a Relational Anthropology of the State, edited by Tatjana Thelen, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, 107–23. Oxford: Berghahn.

Thelen, Tatjana, Larissa Vetters, and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, eds. 2017. Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. 4. Oxford: Berghahn.

Thiemann, Andre. 2016. ‘State Relations: Local State and Social Security in Central Serbia’. PhD thesis, Halle: Martin Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg. urn:nbn:de:gbv:3:4-18049.

———. n.d. ‘Caring States: How Serbian Social Workers Commit Bureaucratic Error to Forge Modalities of Statecraft’. Unpublished manuscript.

Vetta, Théodora. 2009. ‘“Democracy Building” in Serbia: The NGO Effect’. Southeastern Europe 33 (1): 26–47.

Vukelić, Jelisaveta. 2009. ‘Citizen Participation at the Local Level of Government in Serbia’. Sociologija 51 (3): 291–312.

Weintraub, Jeff, ed. 1997. Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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The Taliban and the humanitarian soldier

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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2001 is often considered a major historical turning point, marking a shift from a ‘before’ to an ‘after’ in modern history. Following the attacks of 9/11, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan through the military Operation Enduring Freedom, global phenomena such as terrorism, war, counterinsurgency, securitization, aid and border control have changed drastically . In Afghanistan, the attacks triggered a series of military operations by foreign forces and thus the creation of one of the largest humanitarian theatres in the world. Expressions of a transnational geopolitical force, notions such as reconstruction, rule of law, and democratization became humanitarian imperatives, not only for the sake of Afghanistan, but also for the world at large. In this context, two key figures emerged: the Taliban and the humanitarian soldier. These figures condense two crucial features of modernity: first, the capacity to concretely mobilize universal narratives; second, the intention to transform the world through using force. But while the Taliban are generally seen as the pre-modern expression of a local doctrinaire form of Islamism, the humanitarian soldier appears as a global moral agent who embodies both the ‘humanitarian spirit’ and the military ethos expressed in contemporary humanitarian interventions. Rooted in the political and cultural universe of Pashtun’s territory, the Taliban movement is, instead, a specific product of modernity, a political actor capable of enhancing a distinct global message. The humanitarian soldier, on the other hand, is an embodiment of the international coalition and its moral and political corollary. The perspectives offered by these two figures serve as an entry point to explore the relationship between the different configurations of freedom and humanity that became prevalent in post-2001 Afghanistan, with effects reverberating globally.

The Taliban and the humanitarian soldier – as paradigmatic figures of contemporaneity – do not simply speak and act in the name of humanity. They actively participate in configuring humanity in specific – often contrasting, sometimes overlapping – ways, in producing it as part of a radical intervention into the history of the present.

All forms of political violence in post-2001 Afghanistan (by coalition forces and the Taliban, among other armed actors), have destroyed both the physical world and the ‘abstracted humanity’ (F. Devji, 2009, “The terrorist as humanitarian”) they targeted. However, destroying is never the final goal of political violence, which aims, rather, to forge categories of people and life and new visions of the world. That is to say, to forge another abstracted humanity. As key agents of this attitude of producing humanity through war, the Taliban and the humanitarian soldier embody the complex, ambivalent and anguishing dynamics such a process involves. The forms of humanity that these figures of contemporaneity manifest constantly move towards and away from each other, eventually appearing as two roads of the same path.

Read the full article here: The Taliban and the humanitarian soldier: Configurations of freedom and humanity in Afghanistan | Anuac (unica.it)

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Worker experiments in humanitarian politics

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Over the last decade and a half, labor politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become humanitarianized. By humanitarianize I mean the increasingly common deployment of moral sentiments in worker actions and political campaigns, particularly the “emotions that direct our attention to the suffering of others and make us want to remedy them” (Fassin 2012: 1).  While moral sentiments were long part of syndicalism in socialist Bosnia, suffering was not one of them.  Such a shift in sentiments is a testament to the precarious position in which the workers find themselves and the new tactics this requires. In this short essay I draw upon my research with unemployed workers in the northern Bosnian city of Tuzla for what it can tell us about the relationship between labor politics, humanitarian reason, and mass publicity.

Most of the workers that I worked with came from companies that were once socially-owned mass employers, but which had been idled by debt, mismanagement, corruption, disinvestment, and other effects of state-run privatization. Thus while Tuzla has a nearly century-long history of syndical activism, recent worker struggles have been less about control over labor conditions or the profits of production.  Rather, workers agitate to restart production, to have the obligations of a socialist-era social contract fulfilled and thus to restore the work(er)-based model of human flourishing and emancipation that underwrites that contract.  As disemployed or idled workers, they are unable to use the tactic of withholding their labor, and this meant that the workers’ struggle has been marked by a spirit of tactical experimentation. Sometimes they were confrontational, blocking major transportation routes or clashing with the police outside government buildings.  At other times they presented themselves as miserable and suffering—even suicidal—subjects, staging hunger strikes or marching in protest for four days in the dead of winter.  In all cases, workers enacted a demand for care before a media public, ostensibly to instigate state action by embarrassing (or enraging) governmental authorities.

In my research I have been struck by the fact that workers usually failed to provoke the desired government reaction, but in so failing they also animated the (caring) actions of others, often in unpredictable but consequential ways. Take, for example, a letter written in desperation and published on a local web-based news portal. It detailed the suffering of protesting workers whose demands for years of unpaid salaries and social insurance contributions had been without effect.  Although the writer expected little to come from her letter, it caught the attention of some students who had recently occupied offices at the local university and were looking to expand their activism. In fairly quick order these activists gathered some other friends and university faculty, purchased some food, and visited the workers at their small tent encampment located at the entrance to their factory.  That first visit initiated a set of relationships that over time succeeded in making socioeconomic inequality in Tuzla a regular focus of local and national news reporting, turned the plight of these workers into an international story, and helped (re)establish these workers as relevant political subjects.

In another instance, a group of about 200 mostly middle-aged unemployed workers left Tuzla in late December 2014, setting out on foot for the state border. Union leaders claimed that it was neglect by the cantonal government that had triggered their exodus.  Over the course of four days, a political drama played out over the airwaves, with news channels reporting from alongside the marchers, then broadcasting statements from the government in Tuzla, and returning for commentary from union leaders on the road.  These reports were also filled with scenes of suffering and spontaneous acts of compassion. By undertaking this march, workers self-consciously placed themselves in positions of risk and vulnerability that proliferated participant roles of giving and receiving care.  By receiving care publicly—from fellow citizens along the road, Red Cross volunteers, individual municipal officials—they underscored both the legitimacy of their demand to be able to “live from their work,” and the illegitimacy of the cantonal government which refused to secure their capacity to do so.

On yet another occasion, the owner of a local web news portal caught a TV report which showed the strike leader at one factory confronting a government-appointed bankruptcy lawyer and demanding that he commit to not selling-off the factory’s assets but rather to restarting production. The portal owner told me that this image of defiance from an otherwise destitute worker inspired him to track down the strike leader, a woman he did not otherwise know, with an offer of support. He subsequently drew upon his social connections and social media networks to build a national media campaign that cost the workers nothing but which created enough publicity and demand for the factory’s products that it remained a viable company.

I want to emphasize two points that flow from these brief descriptions of worker actions and their unexpected effects. The first is that we need to revisit the role of the mass media to better understand the possibilities and limits of humanitarian worker politics.  Boltanski (1999) and Malkki (1996) have explored the role that images of “distant suffering” by cultural Others can play in shaping national and international responses to far-off disasters. Yet I would argue that images of suffering by fellow citizens is mediating a different set of relationships with distinct stakes.  The humanitarian politics of workers presupposes an evaluating public before whom government officials will feel sufficiently ashamed, embarrassed, or otherwise provoked to respond to worker demands. Hence the reliance on mass-mediated forms of publicity to conjure that public, and the necessity of staging events of suffering or confrontation that will gain that kind of attention.  For this reason most workers described and experienced media attention itself as a form of care (in the double sense of caring for workers by caring about them). Publicly creating and circulating images of worker suffering was risky, however, because there were multiple ways to interpret them.  Rather than take up the interpretive framework proposed by workers—that their suffering was an unacceptable indignity that obviously had to be rectified—it was also possible that observers would see suffering workers as just another social category of needy subjects, alongside war widows, wounded veterans, single mothers and other more typical “welfare cases.” One strike leader complained to me how often the workers’ struggle was publicly misrecognized as asking for money from the state, rather than demanding the right to work and to be paid for their labor.

This leads me to my second point, which proceeds from the recognition that these worker tactics usually failed to move the government in desired directions — restoring unpaid salaries and insurance contributions and re-starting production. However, as the above examples suggest, in so failing workers could animate the support of fellow citizens, often in unexpected and unpredictable ways.  This created openings to relations and collaborations that were improvisational and fugitive, sometimes as brief as handing a worker a piece of bread, or joining arms to march against police, or filming an advertisement to be circulated through social media.  No matter how fleeting, however, these relations and collaboration could produce novel forms of value and public events that renewed the political relevance of workers, sustained their struggle, and helped them to achieve real victories, both large and small.

Many of us are familiar with the political common sense that the structural forces that shape our lives, like capitalism or nationalism, are so difficult to disturb or overcome that it seems foolhardy to even try. Documenting improvised relations and unexpected victories, particularly those that are transitory, fleeting, and experimental, can move us away from this conviction and its attendant political pessimism.  Instead it can enliven our political imagination by allowing us to rethink what matters, what is possible and how things might be otherwise.

References

Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering. Morality, Media, and Politics. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. “Speechless Emissaries. Refugees, Humanitarianism, Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology. 11(3): 377-404.

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Interrogating asylum from containment to care: the penitential ethics of policing Haitian refugees

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Haiti provides fertile ground for excavating the foundations of the contemporary humanitarian regime in capitalism, imperialism, and racialism. Historical racial conceptions of Haiti and Haitians have deeply influenced contemporary policies and forms of assistance that have been directed toward the nation and its citizens. Through analysis of two examples from the 1990s involving organizational aid extended to Haitian survivors of political violence, I argue that humanitarian practices—with their deep roots in 19th century anti-slavery movements for abolition and the 20th century rescue of European populations subjected to human rights violations and genocide—can also be racial projects (Omi and Winant 1994) that have penitential dimensions.

In this paper I suggest that anthropologists must extend the temporal, spatial, and political frameworks by which humanitarianism is conceived. Humanitarianism has been defined as obligatory action to assist others in need by virtue of their common humanity and possession of inherent rights to safety and security. Humanitarian interventions are typically imagined as occurring across sovereign borders in response to an emergency—whether in the form of failed or failing states, political conflict, environmental disasters, infectious disease outbreaks, or other catastrophes. In practice, moral and political consensus on the part of an imagined community is a prerequisite to acknowledging a crisis, recognizing the worthiness and rights of “victims” to receive assistance, and intervention to aid others.

“Humanitarian” action does not occur solely in response to recognized states of calamity across transnational boundaries in part because the lines between ruptures of routine and routines of rupture cannot be clearly drawn, whether within or across the borders of a nation-state (James 2010). Similarly, populations experiencing ontological insecurity also may not fall neatly into circumscribed categories of need or victimization. The precarities of everyday life mean that the temporality and boundaries of care, its provision or exchange directly or at a distance, and the moral foundations of aid from secular to religious, can vary immensely over time and lack distinct margins. Depending on the temporal framework in which a crisis is identified and defined, populations may become the objects of multiple forms of aid simultaneously and in succession, such as faith-based charity, humanitarian relief, human rights activism, international development, and assistance arising from corporate social responsibility, among other interventions. All of these forms of intercession typically aim to restore order of some kind and to “rehabilitate” persons perceived to be deprived, displaced, defenseless, damaged, or even disordered. However, a common perception of such negative conditions, and also of the individuals and populations enduring them, is “undesirability.”

In his analysis of the plight of refugees and the history of camps, Michel Agier (2011: 32-33) argues that “[The] management of undesirables … draws on at least two combined forces, humanitarian and police, [and] forms part, whether they like it or not, of the same mechanism of control.” Agier (2011: 4) describes the emergence of “forms of camps that make up a mechanism for keeping away undesirables and foreigners of all kinds—refugees, displaced, ‘rejected’” to define further two reified domains: “on the one hand, a clean, healthy and visible world; on the other, the world’s residual ‘remnants’, dark, diseased and invisible.” In outlining the institutional forces required to consolidate such a separation between worlds, he asserts that humanitarian organizations have claimed expertise and power over the management of these spaces and the separation and containment of undesirable persons within them.

In addition to the compassionate and policing forces Agier identifies in the apparatus of humanitarian governance, racial formations can also contribute to the containment and management of undesirables through compassionate care. Racial formation refers to “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed,” through “historically situated projects in which human bodies and social structures are represented and organized” (Omi and Winant 1994: 55). In the case of Haitian refugees, race and racism conjure a specter of undesirability that refracts through humanitarian policing projects. What is now called the “international community” has more often than not viewed Haitians through the lens of “undesirability.” From their unlikely achievement of independence from French colonizers in 1804—which prompted 19th century slaveholding and imperial nations to view black liberty as cancerous or a contagion—to the fears of their religious practices, health status, and poverty, Haitians, especially those seeking asylum in the US, have also been categorized as national security threats.

In the early 1990s, after political upheaval in Haiti produced tens of thousands of “undesirable” refugees in search of sanctuary across borders, two temporary programs were founded to contain, manage, and even police displaced Haitians. Each project demonstrates the slippages between care and policing, but also how conceptions of race (and racism) were embedded in the rationales for intervention. The first program, sited in greater-Boston, Massachusetts, mobilized Catholic charity to recover and rehabilitate “unaccompanied refugee minors” held in detention camps in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The second program, located in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, mobilized the norms of secular human rights to rehabilitate victims of organized violence.

Although the care provided in these two “spaces of security” (James 2010) contrasts with the so-called humanitarian space of the Guantánamo camp, I show how even in sites intended to rehabilitate and repair the logic of encampment remains. Humanitarian policing thus cannot be limited to a material structure of confinement in geographic space but extends into the domains of development, human rights activism, social welfare, and human services.

A final level of analysis for which supporting documentary evidence is uneven between the two cases concerns the role of humanitarian action to mitigate harm to an institution’s corporate image. Both programs arose in the context of organizational scandals on the part of the institutional provider of aid. I suggest that these two projects raise questions of whether aid is ever solely disinterested for the donor or provider, whether on the part of individuals or institutions. These examples also suggest that for both the provider and recipient of assistance, charitable action can also be penitential. As evoked here the term penitential is used in its sense as “rehabilitative” and fulfilling a need for penance, but also in an archaic sense of being penal, disciplinary, and corrective. I explore in this paper, therefore, the knotted relationships among race, humanitarianism, policing, and scandal. Overall, this analysis suggests that aiding the undesirable represents the quintessence of humanitarian action as compassionate care, but also as control or policing. However, aiding the undesirable is not solely neutral or impartial; it may also serve as reparation for past institutional harms as a form of penance.

References

Agier, Michel. 2011. Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity.

James, Erica Caple. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

 

 

 

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The complexities of hope: writing about volunteering at Lesvos

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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“We will bring you to safety” an American 23 year old woman tells an Afghan woman who lives with her children in Moria Camp. Moria Refugee camp, located on the Greek island of Lesvos, is built for 2 000 people but today hosts around 7 – 9 000 people. The Afghan mother is two months pregnant and has taken a long journey to reach Europe. A journey which now has reached a state of indefinite waiting at Lesvos due to the containment policy of the EU and the Turkish – EU deal. Asylum seekers who reach the island, regularly on small floating boats from the Turkish shore, are usually not allowed to leave it before their asylum application has been processed. The Afghan woman speaks little to no English and has turned up for the Mini drops – a new offer for children and women that the NGO “Drops in the Ocean” has set up in a rented house in Moria village, a village close to the camp. Volunteers from the Drops in the Ocean were at the camp’s gate at 5pm as promised to take her and other women to this new place, a 20 minute walk in the hot summer sun. However, rumors say that there will be hard fights between the Arabs and Afghans in the camp that evening. , One hour from now and we see rows of people leaving with all their belongings in their blue UNHCR rucksacks. Some bring their children in their trolley, carry them on their hip or the children walk behind their parents wearing too-big sandals. The American young woman from Drops in the Ocean continues telling the Afghan woman: “There will be problems here and we will take you down there to safety.” She turns frustrated to the rest of the group, including me, saying: “She does not understand!” No one says anything. Finally, I intervene because I don’t want us to trick the Afghan woman into coming with us. I don’t want to part her from the rest of her family or men, if she has any, because I am sure that she can take much better care of herself than what we can. The American only arrived by plane to Lesvos yesterday and is living at the Hotel Blue for 100 EUR a night, and the rest of us come to the camp in rented cars with our yellow vests. I tell the Afghan woman that the café at the village is ‘cancelled today, tomorrow open’. She seems to understand and says ‘ok’. The demonstration in front of the entrance gate that morning is over – the police are present, but no more than usual. I go into Maria café to buy us some extra water since the plan has completely changed. There are only a few men in the café this afternoon.

This was the first encounter with the voluntary organization A Drop in the Ocean from my fieldwork in Lesvos this July . A Drop in the Ocean was created specifically to sponsor volunteer activities. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase of these types of organizations (Lasker 2017). While some organizations are non-profit and do not require a fee for volunteering, others are for-profit commercial firms that offer fee-paying “voluntary work” placements. As short-term international volunteer programs have become more popular, they have been the target of criticism, sometimes called “slum tourism”, “drive-by humanitarianism”, “voluntourism” (Lasker 2017:13) or on a more positive note “solidarity humanitarianism” (Rozakou 2017) and “volunteer humanitarianism” (Sandri 2018).

There is much to be said about this, and other similar organizations, that set out with the ‘hope to help’ (Malkki 2015). Researchers have questioned whether short-term missions are helpful or harmful to host communities. Knott (2017) has discussed how volunteers at Lesvos have a limited ability to help because they lack knowledge of the language, have no specially required skills and have incomplete knowledge of the situation. The idea that “doing something is always better than doing nothing” contributes to restraining critical thinking concerning how they carry out the help (Knott 2017). Others have called attention to the power dimension that the voluntary organizations and volunteers find themselves in. NGOs and humanitarian organizations are so linked to governmental functioning of power that the two become contingent upon each other: the control function (including asylum policies and management of refugees) is accompanied by a function of protection (Agier 2011). Both the controlling and caring hand frequently claim to pursue humanitarian interventions, partly for legitimating reasons, although the latter tries to distinguish itself from the former. Yet, volunteering organizations become unwillingly and unwittingly entangled in the politics of control, containment and management and contribute to a politics of control, i.e. by humanizing actions that they morally reject (Agier 2011).  Another strand of research examines the meaning of volunteering from the point of view of the volunteers. Malkki’s (2015) research on practices of humanitarianism among the Finnish Red Cross workers (professionals and volunteers) is important here. She suggests that their practices are driven by a form of self-escape, and that care for the other is a situational care for the self.

The importance of doubt

The role of volunteers, their positionality and the question of doing good or doing harm are important aspects of the politics of international volunteering. During my fieldwork I had moments when I was hesitant about the ethics of practices that I, as a participant observing anthropologist, contributed with during my fieldwork. Doubt was, however, not only part of my anthropological positioning. Other volunteers expressed uncertainty about their positioning and practices. Emilie, for example, an American student in her early twenties continuously contemplated what she was doing and whether her presence contributed to something positive during her stay in Lesvos. She told me:

“I think that maybe my fear is that I am hurting rather than helping, and hurting is also an action and if you provide people with false hope, if you make promises that you cannot keep, all of this is ultimately hurtful to the community that you are trying to help. And I have no doubt about the good intentions that most people have and that most organizations have, but intentions are very different from what actually improves the lives of people in the long term, you know. Especially if you think about the complexities of hope.”

Being with volunteers during some intense weeks while doing fieldwork, listening to their stories concerning why they had come to Lesvos, participating in their everyday practices of trying to do something good, I found it dissatisfactory to remain within an anthropological critique of good intention. It does no justice to my fieldwork encounters and experience. Is there a way out? Are there ways to understand the practices of doing good which situates volunteers in the humanitarian field of practices and all their pitfalls, as differently constituted than merely part of unwittingly and unconsciously part of doing wrong, merely being a tourist or even doing evil? Is there hope for ethical practice in the field of international voluntarism? Can we think of their practices in a different way while simultaneously recognizing the power imbalances at hand, and the gendered, class, and race dynamics?

The complexities of hope, which I have named this intervention, is not only about the complexities in which the volunteers are finding themselves, or the constant interchangeable position of doing harm and doing good. It also refers to my own position of writing: while recognizing that “volunteering for refugees” is entangled in ethical and political power dimensions, there must be space to recognize that for many volunteers their experience was shaped by their mode of being in the world before arriving and would shape the ways in which they continued to inhabit the world in the future, as by no means flawless, but as ethically concerned human beings. This recognition, I believe, without dismissing critique or to become lured to romanticism, provides the chance to investigate afresh the possibility of actions as movement of international solidarity, hospitality and potentially ethical citizenship.

 Reference

Agier, Michel (2011). Managing the undesirables. Refugee camps and humanitarian government. Cambridge: Polity

Knott, Alexander (2017). Guests on the Aegean: interactions between migrants and volunteers at Europe’s southern border. Mobilities, 13(3): 349-366.

Lasker, Judith N. (2017). Hoping to help. The promises and pitfalls of global health volunteering. Cornell: IRL Press

Malkki, Liisa. H. (2015). The need to help. The domestic arts of international humanitarianism. Durham and London: Duke University Press

Sandri, Elisa (2018) ‘Volunteer Humanitarianism’: volunteers and humanitarian aid in the Jungle refugee camp of Calais. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1): 65-80.

Rozakou, Katerina (2017). Solidarity #humanitarianism: the blurred boundaries of humanitarianism in Greece. Etnofoor, 29(2): 99-104.

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Teaching the anthropology of humanitarianism

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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Since the 2000s anthropological studies of humanitarianism have multiplied, producing a multifaceted critique of humanitarian action. Humanitarianism, even Western humanitarianism which seems to attract most attention, has a long history. Yet, it seems that it was only relatively recently that anthropologists saw it as an adequate topic of study. It is no coincidence that some of the first and most cited studies were conducted by people who were actively involved in the humanitarian world as humanitarians themselves (see, for example, Fassin 2006). But how did anthropologists “discover” humanitarianism? When and why did humanitarianism become a popular sub-field in anthropology? Of course, I cannot answer these questions thoroughly here. Instead, in this short intervention, I will try to approach them by drawing on my own experience as a teacher of the anthropology of humanitarianism. I will reflect on the course I have taught on humanitarianism and the uneasiness it generated to some students. This way I hope to shed light to the same uneasiness that I trace in the anthropology of humanitarianism in general. Inspired by Liisa Malkki (2015), I will refer to the “need” to study humanitarianism as driven both by a moral imperative to do good and as a self-formative ethical citizenship process.

For two years, between 2016 and 2018, I taught the course “Doing good? Anthropological perspectives on humanitarianism” at the University of Amsterdam. The course was a demanding thematic module offered to third-year undergraduate anthropology students as well as exchange students at the University of Amsterdam. Many of the students enrolled to the course to gain some insight into the humanitarian world where they aspired to work in the future. I realized that anthropologists have discovered a fertile field of study, the humanitarian field is seen by many of our students as a potential employment arena. However, I watched my students become more and more unsettled.

When we discussed the literature, the students became familiar with the critiques of humanitarianism, largely inspired by political philosophy and the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. It was not (or, perhaps, not only) the opacity of philosophical language that produced their feelings of discomfort and dissatisfaction but the sudden realization that doing good was far more complex and, despite any benevolent intentions, humanitarianism is embedded and reproduces regimes of power. Somehow our discussions became technocratic. “Is there an alternative?” was the constant refrain. This question echoed the need for some practical solution to the humanitarian problem, to the inherent aporias of humanitarianism, the imbalance of power and the neo-colonial elements enacted in contemporary humanitarianism. I felt that the students were in an urgent need for an ethically sound humanitarianism, and a catharsis where doing good would be restored and a recipe available to follow step-by-step. Similar questions have occupied anthropologists of humanitarianism (Malkki 2015: 101-104).

Part of the students’ anguish was a common ill in anthropology, largely caused by the relativism that is so central in the discipline. For some reason, however, when it had to do with humanitarianism, this relativism proved to be even more painful. Foucault’s definition of critique provided some comfort to them (Foucault 1988: 154). Indeed, the Foucauldian critique does not refer to a simplistic aphorism, but rather to the process where assumptions are challenged and taken-for-granted truths are put under scrutiny. Yet, some students still faced difficulties providing critical accounts of humanitarian actions and explicitly refused to do so. Furthermore, the collapse of assumptions is not a simple nor painless process. Especially if these assumptions are so sound in the self-formation of your own self.

Much like humanitarian workers, anthropologists who study humanitarianism travel from the Global North to the Global South out of professional ambition, but also in a process of self-formation as ethical cosmopolitans. They are global citizens enabled by their privileged mobility, their -most often- (white) color, citizenship (passport and visas) and capital materialized in research funding. Often, researchers of humanitarianism and displacement follow the itineraries and the infrastructures created by international humanitarianism (Pascucci 2017). These parallel routes ought to be at the epicenter of a self-reflexive critique and an analysis of the common roots of both humanitarianism and anthropology. The similarities in terminology are also striking as both anthropologists and humanitarians refer to their “field” of study or humanitarian intervention with the same terms and even “tragic tropes” (Cabot 2016). But the similarities go far beyond vocabulary. Like the symbolic geography of humanitarianism, the anthropology of humanitarianism is grounded on specific and enduring geographies of imagination (Trouillot 2003); the there (field) and the here (Western academia), the them [(suffering) “other”] and the us (scholars in the West).

It was these geographies of imagination that I found most hard to unsettle when I was teaching my course. Some of my students already had some involvement as humanitarian volunteers. Yet, our discussions shed new light on these experiences. Suddenly they started to question their plans to volunteer abroad, or felt uncomfortable recollecting their volunteer experiences in countries of the Global South. Although a few students started to question their self-evident mobility, it was harder for them to question their agency, their ability both to “do harm” and to “do good”. Wondering about their entitlement, potency and at the same time the causality that linked them (as potential humanitarians) to the distant suffering “other” was a far harder process.

References

Bornstein, E., 2012, Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cabot, 2016, ““Refugee Voices”: Tragedy, Ghosts, and the Anthropology of Not Knowing.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 45(6): 645-672.

Fassin, D., 2007, “Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life”. Public Culture 19(3): 499-520.

Foucault, M., 1988, “Practicing Criticism”. In L.D. Kritzman (ed.), Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, 152-158. New York: Routledge

Maalki, L., 2015, The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Pascucci, E., 2016, “The Humanitarian Infrastructure and the Question of Over-research: Reflections on Feldwork in the Refugee Crises in the Middle East and North Africa”. Area 49(2): 249-255.

Trouillot, M.R., 2003, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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The anthropology of humanitarianism: rethinking the role of the apolitical and private in humanitarian space

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”.

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This essay briefly revisits the current critique of humanitarianism and discusses alternative approaches to public humanitarian space, to anthropologists-humanitarians, to political in humanitarianism, and to the anthropology of the suffering. I use the recuperation of the Chernobyl children from Belarus in their Italian host families as an example(1).

From Public to Private Humanitarian Space

A humanitarian space is usually understood as a refugee camp or a detention center. Its inhabitants are refugees and immigrants (suffering subjects) and international and local organizations (rescuing subjects). This understanding has been criticized in practice for creating unintended negative consequences of humanitarianism which ‘produce the misery of meaningless lives’ (Ticktin, 2014: 278). Can a family home, a private rather than public humanitarian space, become a more humane solution to humanitarian problems?

A family home consists of a host family (rescuing subjects) and invited guests (suffering subjects). The invited guests can stay for a limited period of time, on a repeated basis. While refugees in refugee camps are isolated from the local population, the invited children in family homes are welcomed by the society. In the case of Chernobyl, children travelled to Italy every year for one-two months until they turned 18 years old. Host families provided children with non-radioactive food, clothes, school stationary, medicine, and cash.

Being welcomed into a society impacts the consequences of humanitarianism. For some Chernobyl children, staying in a family home resulted in migration to Italy in later life, for education, work, or marriage. Some chose professions connected to Italy (i.e., interpreters) or were baptized as Catholics and still keep coming to Italy as grown-ups. A family home represents a space that starts with a short-term objective to alleviate suffering, but might later develop into a long-term project of sustaining human relations and impacting life choices.

Beyond the Anthropologist-Humanitarian

Ticktin asks: ‘[W]hat moral position does one occupy to critique a morally driven movement’? (2014: 277). While Ticktin supports the position of the anthropologist-pragmatic who uncovers ‘unintended or unexpected consequences of humanitarian interventions’ (2014: 278). This standpoint does not rescue anthropologists from their privilege of being academics from the Western institutions travelling to less privileged places and studying less privileged people.

There are still subject positions that are underrepresented in anthropology, such as an anthropologist-survivor, an anthropologist-auto-ethnographer, and an anthropologist-subaltern. In my own work, the anthropologist-survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has emerged from my personal experience of being recuperated in Italy in childhood. Not every survivor from a developing world can become an anthropologist though. How can we cultivate possibilities to become anthropologists for people who lived through a catastrophe, especially for those with a less privileged background?

Another kind of the anthropologist-survivor – the anthropologist-auto-ethnographer – has emerged in Shahram Khosravi’s (2000) work. Khosravi writes about his experience of illegal border crossing from Iran all the way to Sweden during his youth. Compared to the anthropologist-survivor who does not include their own traumatic experiences when writing research, the anthropologist-auto-ethnographer combines their personal experiences with experiences of other survivors in research writing.

The Apolitical in Humanitarianism

The denial of politics in humanitarianism has been shaped by the principles of neutrality and impartiality. Yet, humanitarianism has been criticized for its links with capitalism, militarism, and the self-serving interests of neoliberal governance. Recent research has pointed out that, rather than totally rejecting humanitarianism, one can rescue it. The question becomes not about what structure humanitarianism can reproduce (e.g., capitalism, militarism), but how it can challenge this structure.

Recuperation of the Chernobyl children from Belarus in Italy has been an apolitical enterprise. It was crucial to continue this project despite political turmoil linked to the post-communist transition, where both Russia and the Western powers tried to influence the country’s direction. Belarus chose to keep close ties with Russia. This resulted in a geopolitical conflict with the West from the mid-1990s. While state-to-state cooperation has frozen at the EU level, people-to-people ties have been flourishing between Belarus and Italy. Delinking from big politics allowed Italian (and other Western) charities to run people-to-people interactions for years.

The Italian language has become the third widely studied foreign language in Belarus, after English and German. In the contaminated areas, young people speak better Italian than English. This helped to develop Belarus-Italy cooperation at the state-to-state level, particularly in economic and cultural spheres. The question remains whether these initiatives can help solving the geopolitical conflict between Belarus and the EU and whether the relations established in the economic and cultural spheres can transform relations in political sphere (i.e., participatory citizenship).

Towards the Anthropology of the Good

The anthropology of humanitarianism has been read through the lenses of the anthropology of suffering (Robbins, 2013). Ticktin (2014) argues that humanitarianism can be “moved” to the anthropology of the good and become a new kind of moral anthropology. While Ticktin focuses primarily on morality and well-being, Robbins (2013) also looks at empathy, care, hope, and change. How can issues raised in this essay – a family home, underrepresented subject positions of anthropologists, and the apolitical – be understood through the anthropology of the good?

Empathy and care are related to ‘how people work to create the good in social relationships’ (Robbins, 2013: 457). A family home is a private humanitarian space where social relations are created, maintained, and transformed. Theories from the anthropology of humanitarianism such as biopower (Foucault, 1978) and “bare life” (Agamben, 1998) become less relevant to understand the dynamics of a family home. Other theories are needed to study this phenomenon.

The anthropology of the good also gives attention to ‘time, change, and hope’ (Robbins, 2013: 458). Placing the anthropology of humanitarianism into the anthropology of the good implies that the unintended consequences of humanitarianism are not always bad, and hence, the task of the anthropologist is to research the constitution of the good and bad in humanitarian projects rather than their contradiction. Acknowledging the human vulnerability and interdependency of all participants of humanitarianism may transform politics (geopolitics and participatory citizenship) in the long-run.

Note

(1) The Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in 1986 in the Soviet Union. The most affected country was Belarus (35 per cent of its population). 500,000 children were among the Chernobyl survivors in Belarus. Italy recuperated more than 460,000 Belarusian children during 1990-2015.

 References

Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage.

Khosravi, S. (2000) ‘The “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto‐Ethnography of Borders’, Social Anthropology 15(3): 321–334.

Robbins, J. (2013) ‘Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good’, Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 447–462.

Ticktin, M. (2014) ‘Transnational Humanitarianism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 273–289.