Winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2024

The winner of the Public Anthropologist Award 2024 is Maria-Theres Schuler for her book Disability and Aid. An Ethnography of Logics and Practices of Distribution in a Ugandan Refugee Camp (Brill, 2023). Maria-Theres Schuler is a social anthropologist, journalist, and filmmaker with expertise in global inequality, corporate responsibility and social movements. Disability and Aid is an important book written with a …

The Black Holes of Lesbos: Border Violence, Asylum and Racism at Moria Camp

Introduction   Following the historic summer of 2015, when nearly 1 million people transited through Greece and overcame multiple border barriers within Europe, Lesbos was rapidly reconfigured as one of the main epicenters of a renewed violent phase of mobility control and militarization through the implementation of the “hotspot approach”. Introduced by the European Agenda on …

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”. ———————————————– “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 …

An essay on the anthropology of humanitarian shame

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”. ———————————– Humanitarian pluralism What are the cultural and historical forces and the physical dynamics that shape contemporary human displacements in the Middle East and the humanitarian efforts that follow? In this essay, I want to focus …

Inquiring and writing about migration and smuggling: an interview with Peter Tinti

Luigi Achilli (L.A.): You belong to the most prolific reporters covering conflict, security, human rights, and organized crime issues. I read in your personal website that, in 2013, Action on Armed Violence included you in its list “Top 100: The most influential journalists covering armed violence.” What is it about violence, crime, and conflict that …