Politics
I interrogate the ‘host’ label within refugee studies, taking into consideration multiple scales of analysis from international rankings of states to individuals and communities. Critically examining who counts as a host – and who counts the hosts – has important implications for practitioners and scholars. Critiques of big picture assessments of ‘host state’ rankings invite scholars to consider how geopolitics shape recognition and erasure, in turn influencing broader understandings of global displacement and reception. The findings also draw from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in Jordan with refugees, citizens and residents. I describe how individuals confront the refugee/host binary in their daily lives. I introduce the concept of humanitarian fiction to explain contemporary limitations of the ‘host’ designation. Analogous to the socio-legal examination of ‘legal fiction’, humanitarian fiction recognises that there is a gap between aid-informed knowledge production and empirical contradictions in studies of refugee displacement and reception.
This paper critically explores the role of voluntary labour in refugee-led responses to displacement. Despite the wide celebration of volunteering in response to crises and community needs, refugees and displaced populations tend to be depicted as passive beneficiaries of support. This paper engages with critical literatures challenging this assumption and provides an analysis of refugee volunteering experiences in Uganda, interrogating the uneven spaces of articulation between dominant humanitarian thinking and action on displacement, and volunteering by refugees. The analysis draws upon data collected as part of a large mixed methods investigation of volunteering by young refugees in Uganda, exploring its impacts on their skills, employability, and experiences of inequality. We explore narratives of volunteering in relation to service-delivery and self-reliance, and how different understandings of voluntary labour emerge from and against the precarities experienced by refugees navigating employment and livelihood strategies. We conclude by arguing that volunteering connects with responses to displacement in ways that are shaped by refugee subjectivities and livelihoods in particular places, and that its potential to de-stabilise existing systems is ambivalently situated between self-reliance strategies and the perpetuation of dependencies.
The Turkish city of Adana is renowned for its cosmopolitan landscape and relative success in hosting, and governing, large numbers of Syrian refugees since 2011. This article offers a comparative analysis of Northern influence in the humanitarian approach that works with refugees as ‘projects’, as opposed to local intimate encounters that seek to embody non-transient and local social and solidary forms of relatedness with and between refugees, particularly refugee women.
Through a dual focus on non-governmental organisations’ livelihood and social integration projects and on refugee-led organisations, I examine the ways in which projects that are mostly funded by international donors have become the ‘norm’ of relatedness with Syrian refugees in Turkey and in turn interrogate the possibilities of refugee involvement and emergent forms of solidarity beyond humanitarian aid projects in Southern Turkey. Through an ethnography of Syrian refugee-led, international and national NGOs operating in the field of humanitarianism in Adana, I problematise the notions of humanitarian aid and NGO ‘empowerment’ and livelihood projects – which are written, conducted and funded by international actors – and gender in displacement. Presenting alternative modes of responses and social solidarity by analysing a refugee-led organisation, I argue that refugees’ positioning as the ‘beneficiaries’ of projects creates a ‘cycle of dependencies’ and that the lack of intimate encounters prevents a peaceful conviviality in the borderlands, which also creates a false sense of refugee needs and heterogeneity. Finally, I propose that, in order to go beyond the humanitarian colonial gaze and to create a space of non-transient relations and dialogues, it is necessary to articulate disjunctures in humanitarian responses to displacement and to increase the number of interactive domains throughout.
We come to the question of the extent to which the decolonisation of humanitarianism and refugee-related research is meaningful or tokenistic, and to what effect, as two co-authors from different backgrounds, contexts and upbringings. In this article, we present three points for consideration for practitioners and scholars engaging with critical humanitarian and refugee-related research based on our experiences. First, we propose that decolonial discourse has become co-opted but remains a catalyst for more significant conversations. Second, we argue that most scholarship that seeks to decolonise aid is not being generated by people who are at the margins, despite these people having lived experience of forced displacement. Third, we call on practitioners and researchers working in the field of critical humanitarian studies, and wider refugee research more broadly, to move towards what can be conceptualised as ‘constructive complicity’. This means ceding and redistributing power. As academics, aid practitioners and teachers, we wear multiple hats and put forward ideas to address issues we see in refugee-related research. However, we recognise that there is a need for a plurality of voices, contestations and critiques; our ideas are ever-changing, and we write this in the spirit of welcoming further conversation.
During forced displacement following war or disasters, foreign states often implement measures to either provide aid and services to displaced people in receiving countries, or allow for refugee resettlement to a third country. In the Middle East context, presently ridden by overlapping human-made conflicts, ‘Southern’ states have mostly engaged with aid provision in indirect ways, financing pre-existing programmes or entities which have already been operating on the ground. In addition, they often opt to provide resettlement opportunities in their own territory. This article specifically explores the role of Brazil in refugee and migrant reception, in the framework of unclear policies and lack of concrete support, which weaken its resettlement system. Based on one-to-one interviews conducted in February and May 2019 in Beirut with Syrian nationals who intended to resettle in Brazil, and with representatives of the Brazilian Consulate-General, the article explores the potential and paradoxes of Brazil’s humanitarian schemes. We argue that aiding refugees cannot involve crossroads-based strategies involving either resettlement or aid provision. Considering the role of political geography in producing the imagination of life in Brazil, the article shows how the country’s eligibility measures for resettlement are understood, contested and/or welcomed by refugees from Syria and Brazilian citizens themselves.
The September 2023 Special Issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs (5.1) encourages both academics and practitioners to critically engage with humanitarian numbers. The editors cogently enumerate the qualities and limits of these numbers in their issue introduction. Throughout the introduction, however, there is an underexamined notion that numbers drive humanitarian decision-making. This assumption indeed permeates logics of datafication in humanitarianism yet in practice remains more aspiration than modus operandi. This op-ed proposes an eleventh talking point to the growing critiques of humanitarian numbers: Decisions are driven by more than numbers.
Data-driven humanitarianism is changing the face of aid. More data potentially enables quicker and more efficient evidence-based responses to situations of conflict and disaster. Yet the proliferation of data also challenges traditional lines of accountability, exacerbates the drive toward extractive relations and processes while deepening communication barriers and asymmetric relations between humanitarians and affected communities. This article reflects on critical data literacy as a transformative method in the context of the datafication of the humanitarian sector. It draws on research carried out with internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Nigeria and South Sudan as part of a collaborative international project examining the practice and ethics of data collection and use. The article discusses the project’s participatory ethos, its engagement of IDPs with the project over time and the importance of developing co-produced tools of critical data literacy together with IDPs. Reflecting on the significance of our findings for humanitarian practitioners as well as for academics working in the field of humanitarianism and displacement, the article argues for a collective commitment to engaging with affected communities while cautioning against viewing data literacy as an easy fix to empowerment challenges, both in the conduct of humanitarian work and in the implementation of research.