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 Conclusion highlights that the book fills two gaps in the literature. It aims to situate Turkey’s EU trajectory within the structural dynamics of the global political economy. It also aspires to go beyond discussing Turkey–EU relations around the ‘form of enlargement’, the question of whether Turkey will become a member or not. Rather, it discusses socio-economic content and the power relations of Turkey’s ongoing integration with Europe by uncovering the position of social forces and presenting it as an instance of class struggle in the last two decades by generating empirical data with interviews. It does so by drawing on historical materialism with reference to two analytical categories: hegemony, and uneven and combined development. After presenting a critique of post-Marxism, the research discusses contradictions around patriarchy, the environment and human rights as instances of class struggle against capitalist discipline in the nexus of the social factory of capitalism. The book argues that there was not a single pro-membership project and a single alternative project in the 2000s. Instead, the contours of Turkey’s struggle were much more complex. The pro-membership project was hegemonic in the 2000s as its representatives transcended their economic corporate interests and took on a role of moral and intellectual leadership by posing the questions on a universal plane. It was contested by two rival class strategies – neo-mercantilism and Ha–vet – and neither provided an overall alternative. Neo-mercantilism ended up supporting ‘membership on equal terms and conditions’ while Ha–vet articulated struggle at the European level.
Chapter 5 revisits the struggle within the conjuncture of global capitalism in the 2010s characterised by deglobalisation, populism and the crisis of neoliberalism. Scholars often describe the political landscape of the 2010s as authoritarian neoliberalism in which the state takes the upper hand to restore capitalist forms of social relations of production. What are the structural factors behind authoritarian neoliberalism and the contradictions of the accumulation strategy of financialisation? The chapter considers coordinates of dependence between the core and periphery and how EU–Turkey relations is redefined in the 2010s. The pull factors of EU membership (political and economic arguments in favour of membership, democracy and economic growth) are increasingly questioned following the 2008 Great Recession in tandem with rising far-right politics in Europe and socio-economic disparities between Europe’s core and periphery. In such a context, what arguments do social forces offer to continue sustaining the pro-membership project? How are Turkish industry’s competitive sectors in manufacturing, such as textiles and the automotive industry, influenced by changes in the global supply chain following the COVID-19 pandemic and rising geostrategic rivalry between China and the West? Has labour’s ‘yes, but’ stance changed? Is pro-membership still hegemonic? How have social forces within Ha–vet and neo-mercantilism revisited their position in the last decade? Can they form an alternative within the context of the crisis of liberalism?
Chapter 3 examines the class struggle between Turkey’s capital and labour in the 2000s. Was there a pro–European hegemonic project in the 2000s and, if so, which social forces supported it? Was the pro-membership project hegemonic with capital groups able to lead society by presenting the project on a universal terrain in civil society? Could the labour movement come up with an alternative to the neoliberal pro-membership perspective? If not, how can we account for their failure? The book argues that internationally oriented capital promoted EU membership to stimulate competitiveness, whereas nationally oriented capital either adapted to globalisation by promoting national champions or gave their consent as they were already integrated with the global economy, mostly via outsourcing. The pro-membership project was hegemonic with capital groups able to present membership on a universal terrain with arguments transcending the economic-corporate phase in the hegemonic struggle. Turkey’s labour movement was split on the membership question and contested the pro-membership project through two rival-class strategies, namely Ha–vet (No–Yes) and ‘membership on equal terms and conditions’. Internationally oriented labour accepted globalisation as ‘irresistible’ and therefore advocated an international struggle. Thus, they defended the EU membership perspective under the motto, ‘Another globalisation and Europe is possible’, with a different rationale than capital groups. Nationally oriented labour was concerned with deindustrialisation caused by liberalisation through membership. Nevertheless, they supported membership on ‘equal terms and conditions’ so long as Turkey would benefit from the EU’s structural funds and European Social Model.