scholarly journals The racialization of expertise and professional non-equivalence in the humanitarian workplace

2022 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Junru Bian
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Racial Discourse ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Humanitarian Space ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Power Hierarchy

AbstractThis paper aims to explore the ways which expertise is covertly racialized in the contemporary humanitarian aid sector. While there are considerable discussions on the expat-local divide among aid professionals, such dichotomization is still inherently nationality-based, which may be an over-simplified explanation of the group dimensions within aid organizations. This study seeks to uncover that professional categorizations of “expatriate” and “local” are not race-neutral and, instead, colorblind. Organizations within the contemporary humanitarian aid apparatus have come to appeal to what Michael Omi and Howard Winant would characterize as a new racial discourse—one that does not require explicit references to race in order to be perpetuated, as racial subordination has been reconfigured to rely on implicit references to race woven within the everyday social fabrics of the humanitarian profession. The research suggests that embedded under the contemporary professional structure of the liberal humanitarian space is a covert power hierarchy fueled by perceptions of expertise and competency along racial lines—particularly around one’s whiteness.

scholarly journals The humanitarian protectorate of South Sudan? Understanding insecurity for humanitarians in a political economy of aid

2017 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-370
Author(s):  
Bram J. Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
State Building ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Conflict Situations ◽  
The Everyday

ABSTRACTThis paper aims to contribute to debates about humanitarian governance and insecurity in post-conflict situations. It takes the case of South Sudan to explore the relations between humanitarian agencies, the international community, and local authorities, and the ways international and local forms of power become interrelated and contested, and to what effect. The paper is based on eight months of ethnographic research in various locations in South Sudan between 2011 and 2013, in which experiences with and approaches to insecurity among humanitarian aid actors were studied. The research found that many security threats can be understood in relation to the everyday practices of negotiating and maintaining humanitarian access. Perceiving this insecurity as violation or abuse of a moral and practical humanitarianism neglects how humanitarian aid in practice was embedded in broader state building processes. This paper posits instead that much insecurity for humanitarian actors is a symptom of the blurring of international and local forms of power, and this mediates the development of a humanitarian protectorate.

scholarly journals Refugees Hosting Other Refugees: Endurance and Maintenance of Care in Ouzaii (Lebanon)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Batoul Yassine ◽  
Howayda Al-Harithy ◽  
Camillo Boano
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Urban Setting ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Social Infrastructure ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Spatial Mechanisms ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The City

Abstract This article examines the socio-spatial mechanisms that emerge when refugees host other refugees. It argues that there is an underlying social infrastructure of care that impacts the refugees’ choice of destinations and modes of survival. When refugees host other refugees from close networks of relatives and neighbours, they create their own spatial clusters. In the process, the social infrastructure of care offers one mode of security to vulnerable refugees. Care as a concept and an approach is related to ideas of endurance and maintenance. It facilitates multiple dimensions, from space, to affection and to the everyday. It is able to reconfigure a life possible, life-enduring and a life meaningful in an urban setting. We focus on Ouzaii in Beirut, Lebanon. Ouzaii has been a destination for multiple displaced groups over different periods of time. Ouzaii currently hosts an approximate 10,000 Syrian refugees. They chose Ouzaii as their destination after they were helped by existing refugees who offered shelter and access to jobs. The resultant socio-spatial practices, flourishing businesses and leisurely facilities are evidence of successful social networks that form an infrastructure of care. They also play a role in the reconstitution of Ouzaii itself. We conclude with reflections on how urban informality may offer refugees an alternative right to the city while allowing them to escape the gaze of the humanitarian-aid apparatus that can signify their vulnerability by reducing them to only being aid recipients. Instead, they form protective socio-spatial networks that have proved to be powerful in sustaining their livelihoods, guarding them from possible social discrimination or political threats.

Humanitarian Responsibility and Committed Action

1999 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 29-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joelle Tanguy ◽  
Fiona Terry
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Fundamental Principle ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Political Preference ◽  
Primary Responsibility ◽  
Humanitarian Space

Far from rejecting the classicist approach, as Thomas Weiss claims, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) follows the fundamental principle of providing aid in proportion to need and without discrimination. Actions that on Weiss's political continuum would be termed solidarist are less an expression of political preference than a determination to claim and operate within humanitarian space as well as to maintain accountability to international civil society through testimony (témoignage) regarding mass violations of human rights. Although providing aid in conflict is implicitly political, involving humanitarian actors and aid in conflict resolution initiatives, as Weiss advocates, risks diluting the primary responsibility of humanitarian aid to alleviate suffering. It also further shifts the responsibility for conflict resolution and the respect of international legal conventions from accountable political institutions to the private sphere. Is this where we want to lead humanitarianism?

Governing through paperwork

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie Nakueira
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Global North

Documents play an important role in the lives of refugees. However, little is known about the extent to which documents regulate the everyday lives of refugees and the anxieties of obtaining relevant paperwork for refugees seeking resettlement in the Global North. Although their lives are regulated by paperwork, refugees also use documents strategically to legitimise various claims and entitlements. This article shows how refugees interface with the administrative processes that seek to regulate their stay. Therefore, documentary practices become important tools through which processes and objectives of migration governance can be examined. This article seeks to contribute further insights on how the deployment of documents entrenches discourses of vulnerability, the role that paper regimes play in (re)producing processes of exclusion through administrative processes in humanitarian aid contexts and the revelations of documentary practices or paper regimes about those who govern and those who are governed by these practices.

scholarly journals From policies to lived experience and back: the struggle for reintegrating returnees of human trafficking in Goiás State (Central West Brazil)

2013 ◽  
Vol 21 (41) ◽  
pp. 163-187
Author(s):  
Runa Lazzarino
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Human Trafficking ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
Social Actor ◽  
Return Migrants ◽  
National Policies ◽  
Brazilian State ◽  
Good Protection ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Intimate Life

This article is based on a fieldwork research conducted mainly in the Brazilian state of Goiás, with a focus on the returnees of human trafficking (HT). The text is funnel-shaped: from the international and national policies, to the relevance of Goiás state as a hotspot area for investigating both the phenomenon and the measures to counter it, to the voices of some key governmental and non-governmental operators directly assisting and caring about the needs of the ex-victims, up to the everyday more intimate life of an emblematic case of a social actor. The aim is to let emerge the complexities of the standpoints around the issue of reintegration of the returnees of HT. The return is conceived not only as a mere geographical displacement, as a simple homecoming or as a matter of good protection policies and programmes. It is also approached as a deep, long and tortuous resettlement of the subjectivities undertaking it. Indeed, through the story of Sabrina, I intend to point out the value of good policies, state measures, humanitarian aid services, but also the distance between these last ones and the actual conditions of the psychosocial suffering of the return migrants, their families and communities.

scholarly journals Zapatista autonomy and the making of alter-native politics

Focaal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 (72) ◽  
pp. 51-63
Author(s):  
Sabrina Melenotte
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
Everyday Practices ◽  
Economic Dependency ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Good Government

Since 1994, the Zapatista political autonomy project has been claiming that “another world is possible”. This experience has influenced many intellectuals of contemporary radical social movements who see in the indigenous organization a new political alter-native. I will first explore some of the current theories on Zapatism and the crossing of some of authors into anarchist thought. The second part of the article draws on an ethnography conducted in the municipality of Chenalhó, in the highlands of Chiapas, to emphasize some of the everyday practices inside the self-proclaimed “autonomous municipality” of Polhó. As opposed to irenic theories on Zapatism, this article describes a peculiar process of autonomy and brings out some contradictions between the political discourse and the day-to-day practices of the autonomous power, focusing on three specific points linked to economic and political constraints in a context of political violence: the economic dependency on humanitarian aid and the “bureaucratic habitus”; the new “autonomous” leadership it involved, between “good government” and “good management”; and the internal divisions due to the return of some displaced members and the exit of international aid.

scholarly journals Desafíos a la seguridad y protección de los trabajadores humanitarios. El compromiso de los donantes

2017 ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Ignacio Martín Eresta
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Basic Premise ◽  
European Consensus ◽  
Humanitarian Space ◽  
Operational Practices ◽  
Operational Integration ◽  
Personnel Policies ◽  
The Eu

<p>The safety of humanitarian workers is a basic premise for the access of victims of disasters to aid; both international humanitarian law and other national and international legal measures specifically protect them. But this security is gradually deteriorating in increasingly complex scenarios, where organizations face those adopting different strategies that combine acceptance, protection and deterrence. The operational challenges are structured on personnel policies, the degree of development and operational integration plans and systems, and operational practices of each organization. In this context, donors have made commitments to the explicit defense policy of humanitarian space and access to affected populations, basically around the Good Humanitarian Donorship, and the European Consensus on humanitarian aid at the EU level. The recent Spanish public policy illustrates some of these commitments.</p><p><strong>Published online</strong>: 11 December 2017</p>

Video Games and Emotion Regulation

GeroPsych ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 205-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn L. Ossenfort ◽  
Derek M. Isaacowitz
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Emotion Regulation ◽  
Video Games ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Interactive Media ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Media Usage ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Media Preferences

Abstract. Research on age differences in media usage has shown that older adults are more likely than younger adults to select positive emotional content. Research on emotional aging has examined whether older adults also seek out positivity in the everyday situations they choose, resulting so far in mixed results. We investigated the emotional choices of different age groups using video games as a more interactive type of affect-laden stimuli. Participants made multiple selections from a group of positive and negative games. Results showed that older adults selected the more positive games, but also reported feeling worse after playing them. Results supplement the literature on positivity in situation selection as well as on older adults’ interactive media preferences.

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