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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Eva van Roekel Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela

Image 1: Banknote of 5 bolívar soberano issued in 2021. Photo by author Eva van Roekel

A few months before the Covid-19 lockdowns were implemented globally I travelled to the border between Venezuela and Brazil for a stint of ethnographic fieldwork about the complex humanitarian crisis. By that time more than five million Venezuelans had left the country, and hyperinflation was mindboggling. Inflation had reached more than 9500%, making living and working with the national currency impossible. The steep currency breakdown not only intensified the exodus of millions of Venezuelans, but also a gold rush in the Venezuelan South. At the border with Brazil, many Venezuelans were going back and forth with fuel, food, gold, and foreignbanknotes.

When Covid-19 lockdowns were temporarily lifted in October 2021, I arrived in Caracas for another short field trip. The new bolívar digital had started circulating only five days previously—the digital was the third new analogue currency since 2008 to get rid ofyet anothersix digits. I have only ever once seen a bolívar digital, including during an additional six months stay in 2023. Venezuelans I spoke with over the years did not really care about their national currency anymore. The bolívar digital appeared to concentrate only in subsidized exchanges, tax payments, and public transport. Instead, US dollars, Brazilian reais, Colombian pesos, crypto currencies, and gold are now largely being used for ordinary trade and subsistence. These de facto currency substitutions during the period of Covid-19 lockdowns gave a significant boost to the crashed economy, at least temporarily. With so many different currencies in circulation, I became interested in the way the disappearance of the bolívar as accepted currency also seemed to involve a form of moral loss.

Since 2020 Venezuelans have found multiple ways to get hold of digital dollars through the steep increase of using new electronic payment systems, like Zelle which is – now I paraphrase their website: ‘an easy and quick way to send small amounts of money directly to almost any U.S. bank accounts with just an email or US mobile phone number.’ Without such linkages to the US finance system, Venezuelans were largely excluded from receiving cambio (spare change) at any shop in Venezuela. I have witnessed innumerable conflicts at shops and gas stations around lack of cambio, becauseone is simply forced to top up purchases or receive a bunch of unwanted candy.

Using multiple currencies is not only helpful for payments. Being new to the field of finance and economics, I quickly learnt that inflation is big business. Some of my friends had a remarkable knowledge of which banknotes and cryptocurrencies to trade and when to trade them. I must admit that I found these new businesses a bit of a sour promise from which very few really benefited, and far outweighed the daily frustrations of chronic lack of cambio and the utter confusion of constantly using different banknotes.

These everyday experiences of hyperinflation seem to be embedded in entrenched cultural and historical meanings attached to money and natural resources. What promises and everyday frustrations do people encounter in abandoning their national currency? What can the rapid shift to a multi-currency economy tell us about local ideas of autonomy and self-government? How does present monetary loss relate to previous economic bonanzas in people’s experiences of money? Ultimately, I am interested in what the moral, political, and economic critiques and assessments of “ordinary” Venezuelans around the complex humanitarian crisis can tell us about the moral loss and extinction of certain life forms.

A brief history of hyperinflation and de facto currency substitution in Venezuela

Between 2013 and 2019, Venezuela lost more than 60 per cent of its GDP (Bull and Rosales 2020, 2). The minimum wage plummeted far below the United Nations standard of extreme poverty ($1.25 a day) and, in 2019, nearly 90% of the population was poor or extremely poor. Although any statistic about Venezuela is unreliable, hyperinflation in 2018 was estimated to reach the incredible figure of ten million percent. That is 8-digit inflation.

Venezuela’s economic climate and its national currency is intimately tied to critical natural resources, and oil in particular. As a petro-state since the early twentieth century, Venezuelans are used to steep boom and bust cycles, but the recent runaway inflation has been on a scale unseen even by Venezuelans. It is even said to be the most significant economic collapse-outside of war-in over four decades (Corrales 2019). Yet, the current crisis shows clear parallels with economic crises in the 1990s, when Venezuela also faced the highest inflation rate of the continent (“only” 70 percent) (Coronil 1997).

Since 1983, soaring inflation has heavily affected Venezuela’s economy and its national currency the bolívar. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to another oil boom, inflation became temporarily manageable but was still in the double digits. Governments from this period implemented various new currencies. In 2008, the bolívar fuerte (the strong bolívar) saw the light of day, getting rid of three zeros. The government pegged its value to the US dollars creating immediately a parallel exchange rate market. In 2012 another abnormal inflation started which lasted for more than a decade. This prompted the introduction of another currency in 2018, the bolívar soberano (the sovereign bolívar), getting rid of another five zeros. And in 2021, the government introduced the already mentioned bolívar digital getting rid of six zeros. Formally, both the soberano and the digital were circulating until August 2024 when the government issued a decree removing from circulation bolívar soberano banknotes with denominations of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, and 200,000. But in practice most analogue transaction happen in foreign currencies or gold.

Conjuring the morality of money

After more than forty years of experiencing inflation, it is fair to say that Venezuelans are used to navigating monetary volatility. The bolívar went from the strongest currency in the region in the 1970s to the world’s least-valued circulating currency in 2018. I do think there appears to lie a difference in degree when it comes to how people experience and assess inflation on their own terms. Double digit inflation is clearly something other than eight-digit inflation for Venezuelans. Ongoing loss of value for the bolívar had caused a form of ‘socially constructed perplexity’ as Matt Wilde (2023, 162) poignantly argues in his recent ethnography on oil politics and the Bolivarian Revolution. Given the chronic history of inflation, worthless money was perhaps still imaginable for some of my Venezuelan friends, but that their oil nation was facing such extreme levels of poverty and hunger baffled almost everyone.

How people position themselves to their currency and relate to money in general is culturally situated as Martin Holbraad (2017, 92) argues for the Cuban case: monetary relationality is also subject to moral change. Like the oil boom of 1973, when norms about money changed due to the immense flow of petrodollars into Venezuela (Coronil 1997, 11), the recent experience of hyperinflation is resignifying how Venezuelans value and use their currency, as part of a larger process of changing social and affective relations with the state and society. It is here where I want to conjure the moral value of oil money. The recent turn in moral anthropology is particularly supportive for exploring questions of moral loss and ethical being in times of runaway hyperinflation because it provides analytical space to explore, as James Laidlaw argued a decade ago (2014, 15), “the role of ethical thought and practice in understanding phenomena that span the range of anthropological topics and ethnographic contexts.”

To explore the ‘local ethos’ around the bolívar and experiences of its loss of value, I am for instance considering what is called a ‘moral exemplar’ in moral anthropology. A moral exemplar is, roughly speaking, not a set of ethical rules but an admired figure through which people cultivate themselves as ethical subjects (Humphrey 1997, 25). Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan independence warrior, can be seen as such a moral exemplar for many Venezuelans. His exemplarity stands for autonomy and self-rule, and the Venezuelan national currency bolívar is named after him (see image 1). However, exemplars do not escape moral change. In the last two decades, Simón Bolívar’s figure has been coopted by Chávez’ twenty-first century socialism. Naming his movement the Bolivarian Revolution, twenty years of chavismo came to symbolize both the region’s rejection of postcolonial forms of oppression and neoliberal dependence (Wilde 2023, 6).

In 2024 Venezuela’s dependence on natural resources has not disappeared, it has instead diversified into other networks of power and oppression, while the process of coopting Simón Bolívar resignified popular cultural attachments to him as a moral exemplar and may have made it easier to abandon a once highly valued currency.

Money and nature

Ethnographically exploring the moral experiences of worthless oil money in Venezuela benefits from a local ethic in how Venezuelans experience and make sense of a powerful myth of a regional abundance of natural resources and tremendously rich subsoils (Peters 2019; Socorro 2021; Strønen 2017). The photo I took of an artwork of a high school student in Caracas in 2023 is insightful here (see image 2). It signifies the current expanding zones of gold mining that are disrupting vital parts of the Venezuela Amazon. The use of worthless bolivares is wrapped around jumper cables as, in the words of the artist, “an intentional critique of the mining activities and the plundering that this area suffers, in the knowledge that there is an eminently economic purpose.”

Image 2: Highschool art project with Venezuelan banknotes, Caracas 2023. Photo by author

This direct connection between land and money is critical to many Venezuelans. Fernando Coronil (1997, 88) has shown, for instance, how during the consolidation of the petrostate in the twentieth century, Venezuela came to be constituted not only by its people but also its main source of wealth—oil was what constituted venezolanidad. Bolívar’s liberalism became likewise grounded in Venezuela’s natural abundance and revalorized the national economic structures and social relations: citizens were not only to participate directly in national politics, but also in its natural wealth. When economies go bust the reverse appears to happen. Not only economic value, but also the moral value and affective attachment to a currency change in times of ruin. After a decade of hyperinflation, Venezuelans are now rebuilding and reevaluating their economic structures and moral relations, an outcome that is still in the making.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Eva van Roekel is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is author of the monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press) and the edited volume A Collection of Creative Anthropologies. Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories (Palgrave MacMillan).

References

Bull, Benedict and Antulio Rosales. 2020. “The crisis in Venezuela: Drivers, transitions, and pathways.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 0 (109), 1-20.

Coronil, Fernando. (1997). The magical state: nature, money, and modernity in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Corrales, Javier et al. 2019. “Responses to the Venezuelan Migration Crisis: A Scorecard.” Americas Quarterly July 11, 2019.

Holbraad, Martin. 2017 “Money and the Morality of Commensuration: Currencies of Poverty in Post-Soviet Cuba.” Social Analysis 61 (4): 81-97.

Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, edited by Signe Howell. London: Routlegde.

Laidlaw, James. 2012. The Subject of Virtue. An Anthropoogy of Ethics and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press.

Peters, Stefan. 2019. “Sociedades Rentistas: Claves para Entender la Crisis Venezolana.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 108, 1–19.

Socorro, Milagros. 2021. “El emblema de la abudancia.: Prodavinci (September 19). Available at: https://prodavinci.com/el-emblema-de-la-abundancia/ Accessed December 21, 2022.

Strønen, Iselin Åsedotter. 2017. Grassroots Politics and Oil Culture in Venezuela. The Revolutionary Petro-State. Cham: Palgrave McMillan.

Wilde, Matt. 2023. A Blessing and a Curse. Oil, Politics, and Morality in Bolivarian Venezuela. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cite as: Van Roekel, Eva 2024. “Money and ruin: hyperinflation and moral loss in the complex humanitarian crisis in Venezuela” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/eva-van-roekel-money-and-ruin-hyperinflation-and-moral-loss-in-the-complex-humanitarian-crisis-in-venezuela/

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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation

Image 1: Milei in the Casa Rosada. Right next to him is Federico Sturzenegger’s book published in 2021. Photo by Irina Werning for TIME Magazine

The election of Javier Milei, a chainsaw-wielding anarcho-libertarian, to the Presidency of Argentina promises to cement Argentina’s status as a prime experimental site for inflation-tackling policies; it also highlights how experiences of inflation can prompt electorates to turn to radical political alternatives. The country has a long history of inflationary crisis, dating back to the 1970s, with the worst episode occurring in 1989 when hyperinflation led to an annual rate of 5 digits. Argentina has changed its legal tender 4 times since the 1980s as a response to inflationary tendencies and the US dollar has become increasingly important for the economic lives of ordinary people (Luzzi and Wilkis 2023). So much so that the market for real estate has been in dollars since the 1970s and some estimate that 2 out of 10 US dollars in circulation outside of the United States are in Argentina, 10 per cent of the total amount of dollars in use worldwide.

By October 2023, a crucial time in the presidential election campaign, annual inflation had reached 140 per cent. News reports described daily price markups in supermarkets and increasing volumes of products being left at the till (an indication of the difficulties customers had in estimating the purchasing power of their money). The US dollar had more than 15 different exchange rates (official and unofficial, for different commodities, credit cards, tourist rates, and so on) and the government capped the number of dollars that could be legally purchased each month, in an attempt to prevent the continuous diminishing of national reserves, deeply affecting people’s capacity to save in the only stable store of value they trust. 

Most striking was the way that inflation, its alleged causes, and proposed solutions dominated public debate and every political party’s platform. But it was Milei who came through with the most extreme discourse, declaring that he would tackle what he defined as a ‘monstrous monetary disarray’ (Milei 2023) by dollarizing the economy and closing down the Central Bank. His rhetoric worked, and although as President he has subsequently been forced to backtrack on a number of his early propositions, including dollarization, he has not held back from what feels to many Argentines like a painful, extreme, and tragic adjustment in their economy and polity. His government has fired over 26,000 public sector workers, kept higher education budgets stable, and refused to increase salaries and pensions even though inflation remains stubbornly high, at a 271 per cent annual rate in June 2024. His focus on ‘deficit zero’ is a classic monetarist recipe for managing inflation and the state, and the IMF and foreign exchange markets seem reasonably content – although they haven’t (yet) given him any actual money.

Meanwhile, in the first half of 2024, poverty levels increased to over 50 per cent, with extreme poverty (‘indigencia’) at about 18 per cent, both significant increases since Milei assumed power. People of all classes have dampened down their everyday consumption, and many are very worried indeed about how they will reach the end of the month. September 2024 saw some early signs of the dollar stabilizing, even going down against the peso (from a high of about 1500 pesos per ‘dólar blue’ illegal rate a few months ago to about 1210 pesos at the end of September). Prices don’t appear to have reduced in the same timeframe, though. And many remain fearful of losing their job. Demonstrators, including pensioners, who protested the government’s refusal to bring the state pension up by an additional 8.1 per cent were tear-gassed, and university teachers and students are mobilizing to demand sufficient budget to keep buildings open and salaries enough to live on. 

Milei does not seem to care too much about the opposition on the streets: university scientists are, he says, members of ‘la casta’ (the political caste), the political establishment that he railed against as a candidate and continues to stigmatize as morally corrupt. Meanwhile, the 87 Congress deputies who voted against the rise in state pensions celebrated with a barbeque at the Presidential residence. The push and pull of a Congress majority that seeks to overturn or blunt the effects of his austerity decrees, street level mobilization (and repression of that mobilization), and continually wild rhetoric from the President is making for a hugely complex and quite inflammable political situation. The need to address inflation has opened up rhetorical and political space for an extreme version of neoliberalism, and at this point we can’t tell where that will end up. If it is successful in bringing down inflation, it will be evident to policymakers elsewhere that monetarist policies can work (to that end at least) but also that they bring with them a significant social cost.

The Return of the 1990s

The situation of painful inflation in 2023 opened voters’ minds to a very colorful character. On a number of occasions during the campaign Milei delivered speeches holding a chainsaw with which he said he would destroy the Central Bank and eliminate ‘la casta’. His followers produced cardboard versions of the chainsaw to wield at rallies (Vásquez 2023). He has described himself as a libertarian and an anarcho-capitalist, and aligns himself with extreme market fundamentalism. He admires Donald Trump and Margaret Thatcher and named his cloned English mastiffs after the US libertarian thinkers Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas. According to some news commentators, he discusses economic policy with his dogs. His speeches during the campaign and since are brash and – to many – vulgar, for example when he recently made an offensive gesture with his right hand during a speech about reducing public expenditure. Not everyone feels the same way about him, though. Depending on who you talk to, he’s an embarrassment, a disaster, a breath of fresh air, or a response to really fundamental exhaustion with business as usual. To many, it is very appealing that he sets himself aside rhetorically from the political establishment. 

Image 2: Carlos Menem campaign photo in 1989 and Javier Milei in 2024

Yet, Milei’s self-fashioning as a charismatic leader is also based on an aesthetic and narrative citation of the figure of Carlos Menem, President from 1989 to 1999. One of Milei’s early acts as President was inaugurating a bust of Menem in the presidential palace with the presence of his daughter, Zulemita, as a front row guest at the official ceremony; he has described Menem as ‘the best president in the history of the country’. Milei even has a similar hairstyle to Menem, a kind of visual intertextuality (Lazar 2015) that we should not overlook from this most symbolically-conscious of political actors. That all matters because of Menem’s relation to earlier periods of inflation. Menem is the main figure associated with neoliberal small-state ideologies and their implementation in Argentina, the ‘strong man’ who controlled the hyperinflation of 1989-1990 through an exercise of neoliberal shock therapy celebrated by the IMF as one of the most drastic in the world. Together with his Minister of the Economy, Domingo Cavallo, he brought both economic stability (via the Convertibility Plan that kept the peso at a 1:1 exchange rate with the US dollar during the 1990s) and its subsequent collapse, in one of the most acute economic crises the world has seen this century (in 2001). By associating himself with Menem, Milei is making the claim that he will be similarly successful; that his economic policies will usher in a similar period of stability and consumption. He is quiet on the subsequent collapse, of course, but that remains at the forefront of his opponents’ minds.

Terminator in Office

The invocation of the 1990s is combined also with a claim to novelty, to breaking with past assumptions, especially about the role of the state. In his first speech as president in December 2023, Milei addressed Congress and the population stating that it was the beginning of ‘a new era in Argentina’. Symbolically, he did not deliver the speech inside the Congress, but rather outside and turning his back on it. After the official speech, he addressed his supporters more directly, saying something that has by now become his trademark: ‘There is no money’. He added: ‘There is no alternative to adjustment and shock’ to the loud cheers of thousands of supporters.

But, despite the emphasis on a radical new approach in terms of the political responses to the crisis, non-linear continuities with the past also became noticeable. And while in rhetoric Milei condemned ‘la casta’, many prominent political figures from the past populate government ranks, including several members of the Menem family –or ‘Menem clan’ as journalist Gabriela Vulcano described them – who were given important political positions.

More important to the way Milei has addressed inflation are the leading economists in his team. Federico Sturzenegger and Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo were both key figures in economic policy-making (both presidents of the Central Bank) during Mauricio Macri’s administration (2015-19) and they are now both Ministers (of Deregulation and the Economy, respectively). In their hands, monetary policy has been focused on reducing the deficit and reaching ‘fiscal order’, terms that are supposed to ‘stabilize’ the economy. Milei also emphasizes privatization as a flagship policy, with arguments that could have come directly out of the early 1990s: that public companies drive deficits, drain public funds, and provide bad services. In a TV interview shortly after winning the elections, he claimed: ‘Everything that can be transferred to the private sector, it is best that it is in the hands of the private sector (…) Because it has been proven that everything that the public sector does, it does badly’. That said, while Menem had been swift in selling state assets and companies, Milei is having less success and experiencing far more opposition to those particular measures. To this day, no sales have actually been agreed.

It’s not clear how far Milei and his allies will be able to proceed in their goal of reducing the state as far as possible to its security apparatus and that which is needed to promote their own electoral goals (a strategy familiar to politicians well beyond just Menem and Milei). The debate has moved slightly on from inflation per se into a broader attack on the very concept of state care and of the public. In an interview given to the US media outlet The Free Press, Milei claimed that he would ‘destroy the state from within’ and compared himself to the sci-fi character Terminator who comes from an ‘apocalyptic future to prevent the advance of socialism’. This destruction is underway through a constant attack on the notion of the ‘public’ and the workers who bring it to life as de facto socialist and therefore evil. It’s a more aggressive version of the attitude revealed in the 1990s comedian Antonio Gasalla’s affectionate caricature of the ‘empleada pública’ (state employee) who extracts a bribe, exerts her authority, and sips mate while citizens queue up outside her office to put through a tramite (bureaucratic task), only for the piece of paper they bring to be ripped up and thrown into the trash once they turn their backs, while their 100 pesos is carefully pocketed.  

While Menem could reduce the fiscal deficit by moving national state expenditure on health and education to provincial budgets, Milei has less room for maneuver. A number of the people around him are instead promoting a more familiar transfer of resources from the middle/lower-middle classes to elites, via taxation concessions. His attempts to block labor rights are currently stalled due to a legal case brought by the General Trade Union Confederation (CGT), and his government’s refusal to meet its legal obligation to provide food for communal kitchens is also being challenged in the courts, with judge after judge ruling against the government. Not many are optimistic about the chances of inhibiting Milei’s worst excesses, but those who are optimistic point to the Legislature elections coming up next year, which might reduce his political legitimacy. Yet, it’s the attack on the state – and on public sector workers and politicians in particular – from which Milei derives much of his popular legitimacy, and it’s that which sounds so familiar to the debates about adjustment and privatization of the 1990s. It is a long-embedded way to understand politics and the state, but even that probably won’t last much longer into the future if prices continue to rise. 

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is How we Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (Pluto Press).

Dolores Señorans is Departmental Lecturer at the Oxford Department of International Development. Her research focuses on popular economies and collective labour politics in Argentina.

References

Lazar, S. (2015). ‘“This Is Not a Parade, It’s a Protest March”: Intertextuality, Citation, and Political Action on the Streets of Bolivia and Argentina.’ American Anthropologist, 117: 242-256. 

Luzzi, M., & Wilkis, A. (2023). Dollar: How the US Dollar Became a Popular Currency in Argentina (1930-2019). University of New Mexico Press

Milei, J. (2023). El fin de la inflación. Eliminar el Banco Central, terminar con la estafa del impuesto inflacionario y volver a ser un país en serio.Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Planeta.

Vázquez, M (2023) ‘Los picantes del liberalismo. Jovenes militantes de Milei y ‘nuevas derechas’’’; in Semán, P. (ed) Está entre Nosotros. ¿De dónde sale y hasta dónde puede llegar la extrema derecha que no vimos venir?. Buenos Aires: siglo veintiuno

Cite as: Lazar, Sian and Señorans, Dolores 2024. “Argentina: inflation, monetary disorder, and political experimentation” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/sian-lazar-and-dolores-senorans-argentina-inflation-monetary-disorder-and-political-experimentation/

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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Harry Pettit Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy

Image 1: Drivers waiting to deposit money at BOB Finance, photo by author

In October 2023, I sat with Hameed in a café in Hamra in Beirut, nearby his flat. He had just collected his salary, a stack of green 100,000 notes of Lebanese lira that amounted to 12 million (around 130 dollars): “look,” he said despondently, “this is not going to last more than two weeks, the company are thieves.” I asked him how he would survive. Rather than saying out loud, he preceded to sheepishly get his phone out and start typing on the calculator how much money he owed to friends, 42 dollars, 38 dollars, 180 dollars, 72 dollars, he kept going. It came to 500 dollars, but these were only the amounts he remembered at the time.

Hameed had come to Beirut from Syria with his family in 2011, after the civil war broke out. He had worked multiple jobs, without a work or residence permit, in Beirut’s service economy. For the last 3 years he had worked as a driver for the Lebanese food delivery app Toters. Toters has grown rapidly in Lebanon in recent years. Its rise has been stimulated by the multiple crises that have crippled the Lebanese economy: the financial crisis of 2019 and subsequent economic downturn led to its competition exiting the market; the Covid-19 pandemic dramatically increased home delivery; and the Syrian war provided an army of cheap, undocumented Syrian labour.

The financial crisis has had other consequences. One has been the dramatic surge in Lebanon’s cash economy, which went from 14 per cent of GDP in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2022. This has rapidly produced a new set of infrastructures, actors, and practices for storing and circulating money – at a time of rapid currency devaluation and increased dollarization. Companies began operating in cash due to exorbitant bank fees and distrust, money transfer and exchange services with links to political parties have boomed, and new digital wallets (like the company Purpl) are trying to fill the void left by banks.

When I was following the lives of Syrian drivers working for Toters between January and October 2023, I became interested in the ways in which cash was moving around the mini-economy created by Toters, between customers, delivery drivers, team leaders, money storers, and the company itself. What I want to argue is that, by following cash around, we can see how infrastructures of money circulation become a terrain of struggle between different actors (Scott, 2022). In this instance, the circulation of cash became a way for Toters to extract extra value from its racialised workforce and customers. But it also opens up the possibility for fractured forms of resistance and survival for workers.

Theft through depreciation

Between January and April 2023, the value of the Lebanese lira plummeted. It lost 61 per cent of its value to the dollar. Customers ordering food on Toters had to pay in lira – although sometimes drivers accepted dollars and exchanged it themselves for a small extra fee, without the company’s knowledge. Customers paid in cash directly to the drivers as they delivered orders. When a driver collected three million lira, their account was automatically blocked and they could no longer take orders. To reopen it, they had to go to their team leader who waited at the same spot every day to deposit the money, or use BoB, a Lebanese money storage and transfer depository. This took time away from doing more orders. Any missing money – due to theft or miscalculation – always had to be made up by the driver. Once in BoB, this money was converted into dollars and transferred to a bank account in Dubai where Toters’ official headquarters is located.

Image 2: A driver’s account being blocked, photo by author

By doing this, Toters was able to protect itself from the currency devaluation of the lira. However, this was not the case for drivers. Drivers received a basic fee for each order, plus an extra fee based on distance. In addition, when fewer drivers were on the road, delivery competitions were organised by the company: e.g., if a driver did six orders in two hours, they got an additional amount. On a day of no interruptions drivers did 20-25 orders, which produced ten to twelve dollars (500,000-600,000 Lebanese lira) in earnings. The fees were accumulated, recorded on the mobile app and distributed to drivers in Lebanese lira at the end of each month. This delay meant they had to watch helplessly as the value of their labour plummeted over the month – for example in January 2023 drivers lost a third of the value of their earnings. Meanwhile, their expenses such as rent, electricity, internet, food, and petrol were either paid in dollars or went up with the dollar very quickly.

For Hameed, this induced much frustration, as he described while we sat in a café in mid-March 2023:

“I’m tired, I’m tired. The dollar reached 100,000 lira today, it will reach 200,000 as well. [He pointed to his pack of cigarettes] look, 50,000, the coffee 40,000, then petrol is now 400,000 a day, you spend 600,000 easily, and you don’t even make that from orders. I don’t understand why all the expenses like rent and electricity, even coffee goes up straight away when the dollar goes up, but the only thing that doesn’t go up is the salary. The company just makes extra money, the restaurants can raise their prices, but the workers paid in lira are just losing.”

Image 3: A call out on TikTok for drivers to participate in the strike, screenshot sent to author by Hameed

This depreciation was also a problem for restaurants, who had to wait two weeks before getting their revenue from Toters, which at times led to a 20-30 per cent devaluation of the money. As one restaurant owner told me: “[Toters] are worse than Riad Salameh (the former Lebanese Central Bank Governor), all this playing with money, they have an amazing cash flow…you know they told me ‘we are partners’, I said you are my partner in profit only.”

The way in which cash circulation was set up enabled Toters to extract extra value from the drivers and the restaurants. As Hameed mentioned, restaurants were at least able to raise their prices or start pricing in dollars. The organisation of a percentage fee between 20-25 per cent – with the restaurant paying the costs of VAT and discounts – ensured the platform’s income went up automatically. To keep pace with lira devaluation, drivers’ order fees would have had to increase by 155 per cent between January and April. However, for the month of January the fee did not change despite drivers’ complaints. Drivers demanded their salaries and fees be calculated in dollars. At the end of January, they organised a two-day strike through WhatsApp groups, word of mouth, and TikTok. While impossible to know the scale exactly, at its height 900 people were in the main WhatsApp group, and the Toters app was effectively shut down.

Toters tried to break the strike by punitively firing strike organisers and by sending messages telling drivers they had to do a minimum amount of orders or face firing. But eventually, as Toters’ reputation took a hit on critical media channels, it gave a 38 per cent increase in lira with very modest increases following later as the lira continued to rise. However, to compensate, Toters used its digital infrastructure to rapidly increase the delivery fee charged to customers, the vast majority of which went to the platform. Drivers complained that this had the cruel effect of suppressing tips as customers considered the fee the tip. Furthermore, after the order fee increase, for a while Toters stopped organising competitions for additional income, thus further suppressing driver wages.

Borrowing cash to survive

Amidst devaluing incomes, drivers were constantly pushed into situations where they could not pay expenses. Monthly incomes never reached more than 200 dollars, and were more often around 120-160 dollars. This was just about enough to afford food and rent – but the sickness of a child, a broken or stolen motorbike, or an issue at home, as one driver described, would easily break the delicate balance they were living with. One of the biggest issues they faced were the checkpoints set up by the ‘darak’ (Lebanese internal security forces) which, according to drivers, particularly targeted Toters workers because they were known to be undocumented Syrians – thus making them an easy target for bribes. Officers asked for a work permit, then confiscated the bike, which was only reclaimable upon payment of a fine – anything between 10 and 50 dollars.

Image 4: A driver being stopped by the ‘darak’, photo sent to author by Hameed

In this context, drivers needed to constantly borrow money to sustain their livelihood. I was introduced to this situation when I met Hameed in late-February after his account had been closed. I accompanied him to an online gaming shop. He went up to the man at the desk and took 900,000 lira (15 dollars at the time). Hameed then went straight to the coffee shop across the street where his team leader was waiting and handed over 3 million lira. When he came out, he explained how he had taken money collected from the customers to buy a new gas canister. He therefore needed to borrow from his friend to return the money to his team leader. After getting his account reopened, he would work for an hour and then pay his friend back, again from the customer’s money. When I responded in shock, Hameed shrugged and said: “one borrows from another and then one borrows from another, the money just goes around. That’s how it is here” (this is similar to the circulation of debt found by Isabelle Guérin (2014) in South India).

It was very common for drivers to use the cash from customers to pay for both daily expenses and emergencies. The salary disappeared quickly on rent, electricity costs, and food, while tips were highly unpredictable. As a result, the customer money was an immediate source of cash. If depositing this money in a money transfer service such as BoB, drivers would not have to return the whole amount they owed, just make sure they remained beneath the threshold of three million.

While team leaders were also there to collect customer cash for the company, they sometimes helped drivers out. This could be through raising their cash threshold, or reopening their account, but it also included more personal practices. One described such an occasion to me: “one of my drivers hurt his leg, and needed a gel. He came and gave me the customer’s money, but said he can’t work. I asked why he didn’t buy the gel, he said he has no money. So I gave him 250,000 from my personal money.” This team leader described how his positionality helped him act in this way: “management just think the drivers lie, but I know what they go through, so I can help them out. This was a friend situation, not a work situation, in work I am professional. I understand the company can’t become soft, drivers do lie, they can’t give exceptions to people.”

This practice of survival is directly enabled by the fact that money circulation took the cash form. Another delivery company actually formalised this practice of borrowing by lending money directly to drivers, but taking collateral such as a car, bike, or piece of jewellery in case they did not repay, and deducting directly from future salaries. But borrowing from Toters was not enough to meet monetary needs. On some occasions I heard about drivers who had stolen money from the company when they had just collected a huge order. These drivers earned heroic status among others. However, it was extremely risky as the company could mobilise their close connections with the police to locate drivers. For the most part, drivers relied on a network of communal support. This reflects what others have found especially in communities where formalised banking is not preferred (Wig, 2023). This took multiple forms, from borrowing electricity, internet, or food from neighbours, taking products from shops and paying back later, or borrowing small amounts from friends and other drivers. But it also took the form of taking larger amounts of several hundred or thousands of dollars – often from a relative abroad or a driver who had no dependents.

Drivers were therefore always in the process of paying someone back. Sometimes lenders were flexible because they were family or long-term friends. But this flexibility was precarious and open to sudden change. For Alaa, a 21-year-old driver who carried financial responsibility for his whole family, this veneer of stability was lost when several events occurred at the same time. It began with a bike accident that left him unable to work. This meant he was unable to pay the rent. Soon after the man from whom he had borrowed to buy his motorbike demanded repayment. To avoid the threat of arrest or violence, Ahmed gave the bike back until he could find the 500 dollars required. During this period, Ahmed complained about how Lebanon’s economic crisis was reducing generosity: “people are holding on tighter to their money nowadays”, he lamented. Eventually he did manage to scrape together the cash needed, only to quickly meet another request for money; this time from the police regarding a bike he had sold two years before but was still registered in his name – which had now accumulated various fines.

Conclusion

The stories described here demonstrate the vastly different means different actors have to control the circulation of cash. In a context of rapid inflation and currency devaluation, Toters was able to arrange this circulation in a way that enabled them to extract extra value from drivers and customers. They used temporal techniques and flexible digital infrastructures to control the flow of cash to their benefit. To counter this, the undocumented Syrian drivers had little room for manoeuvre – other than risky, arduous tactics such as borrowing, theft, and collective action. Instead, their liveability, and therefore the extractive operation of the company, relied on material and social networks of communal support to acquire the cash they needed.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Harry Pettit is an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is interested in researching the new forms of extraction and livability opening up within late-capitalist systems, with a focus on the MENA region.

References

Guérin, I. 2014. ‘Juggling with Debt, Social Ties, and Values: The Everyday Use of Microcredit in Rural South India.’ Current Anthropology, 55 (9), pp. 40-50.

Scott, B. 2022. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets. New York: Penguin.

Wig, S. 2023. ‘Infrabanking: Mobilizing capital in communist Cuba.’ Economic Anthropology 11 (1)l, pp. 59-70.

Cite as: Pettit, Harry 2024. “Theft, resistance, and the struggle over cash circulation in Beirut’s platform economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/harry-pettit-theft-resistance-and-the-struggle-over-cash-circulation-in-beiruts-platform-economy/

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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Alexandrine Royer ‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations 

Image 1: Food vendors at Kigali’s central Kimironko market, photo by author

I encountered the phrase ‘in Kigali, life is expensive’ everywhere during my 15 months of fieldwork within the tech ecosystem of Rwanda. Official government figures stated that the price of common food staples had increased by 35% but residents estimated it to be much higher. Gas, electricity and housing prices were also soaring. My interlocutors asked whether I knew the cost of potatoes, bus transport, and rent, wondering if as a muzungu (white foreigner), I was shielded from these economic pressures. In Rwanda, where politics is an uneasy and potentially threatening topic, inflation was a shared device through which individuals across social classes could comfortably voice critiques of rising social and class inequality. I build on Amri’s (2023) concept of ‘inflation-talk’ to argue that small talk on the rising cost of living, with its outward apolitical nature and indefinite causes, provided a safe discursive space for disclosing class and political frustrations.

When I asked around the tech ecosystem why life in Kigali was getting so expensive, responses generally converged around the hypothesized causes of inflation, such as the war in Ukraine, low local agricultural productivity, and the continuous devaluation of the Rwandan franc. As one person commented, ‘there’s huge inequality now. The rich get richer, and the market follows the haves’. The rising inequality in Rwanda sat awkwardly with the Government of Rwanda’s confirmation of the country’s teleological trajectory towards becoming a prosperous ICT-based economy as outlined in the guiding policy document Vision 2050. During tech conferences, held in nicely air-conditioned halls with swanky Afro-fusion decorations, international delegates and heads of state would praise President Paul Kagame for his vision in transforming Rwanda from a country once torn apart by genocidal violence towards becoming a continental leader for ICT development. Yet, outside such spaces, interlocutors commented on how the rising cost of living made their participation in this tech universe more difficult. Founders let go of staff, cancelled their coworking memberships and confessed their worries about possible consequences for their social and business reputations.

In the economic literature, financial crises and a rapid rise in food prices are frequently correlated with civic action and social unrest (see Bellemare 2015). But very few of my interlocutors in Kigali openly criticized the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda’s ruling party for the past 30 years. Returnee diaspora, which made up a sizeable portion of the tech ecosystem, would actively participate in the online defence of president Kagame, most virulently on X, with hashtags such as #TeamPK. Following the announcement on 15 July 2024 of Kagame’s re-election with 99% of the vote, Rwandans were quick to defend the results after Human Rights Watch reported a lack of genuine political competition. As one tweet stated, “Rwanda is a sovereign country and its President doesn’t have anything to answer to Western colonisers trying to impose their so called order on it…”. The RPF’s post-genocide ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ (Kinyarwanda for ‘I am Rwandan’) strategy of national reconciliation criminalized references to ethnic identity and further obliged Rwandans to reject all forms of social division (Purdeková & Mwambari 2022) to embrace a front of unity. Lists of permissible and forbidden citizen behaviours were pasted on the walls of schools and at the entrance of villages. Talking negatively about the country was identified as subject to discipline and punishment. Publicly voicing political critiques could result in accusations of anti-patriotism or worse, of harbouring genocidal ideologies.

In studies of Rwanda, scholars, most notably Thomson (2013), have sought to identify through James C. Scott’s ‘weapons of the weak’ (1985) instances of resistance towards the Rwandan state. Yet, as Rollason (2019) underscores, such studies pre-suppose defiance in citizens’ engagements with authorities and reify a division between the ruling and the ruled. Yet, many of my interlocutors, like Rollason’s, navigated the same social circles as government functionaries and held varying levels of political privilege gained through patronage or familial connections. In private conversations, they expressed an ambivalence towards the country’s politics rather than a stark opposition or deference to power. Some Rwandans expressed continued indebtedness to Kagame for allowing their families’ return, whilst other African nationals saw restricted political freedom as part of a trade-off for government effectiveness, saying ‘here at least you know where the money is going’. Paul Kagame’s presidency was part of an accepted order that could just as easily be toppled over. As a friend related, ‘everyone here says that they are for the president. But the last president, before the genocide, he also got 99% of the vote’. There was a longer history of dissimulation in Rwanda and maintaining an image of stability in contrast to its more turbulent neighbours.

It is in this climate of ‘quiet insecurity’ (Grant 2015) that conversations about the cost of living, first described in apolitical economic terms as concerns over rising food prices or other essentials, became an avenue by which people voice political and class frustrations. When housesitting for friends in a predominantly expat neighbourhood, I was approached by their cleaner, Hope, who asked whether I was looking for additional house help. I awkwardly replied no but promised to keep an ear out. Mopping the floors of the study, Hope would occasionally pause to volunteer bits of her familial history. She narrated the loss of her father and siblings during the genocide, with herself and surviving members fleeing to Uganda before eventually settling back in Kigali in the early 2000s. Hope struggled to cover her monthly rent and feared eviction. As usual for discussions on politics in Rwanda, she began with praise for the President to avoid reproach before delving into frustrations. She said, “I like Kagame because he saved many people, but Rwanda has too many rules…working three days a week is not enough, the cost of food in Rwanda is now very high. I support my mother…. It’s very difficult being poor in Rwanda, the genocide was not nice, very sad. In Uganda, the poor can sell food on the street, the women can make money, but in Rwanda it’s illegal, you can get into big trouble…” Hope was referring to the RPF’s criminalization of hawking, petty trading and street food vending (Finn 2017). Such measures aimed at making Kigali a ‘clean and modern city’ constrained the urban poor’s ability to multiple hustles and weather rising costs.

More privileged Rwandans also felt government policies were often out of touch with the socio-economic realities of most Kigalians. I met up with a founder friend over lunch, Shema, who recounted how his startup had experienced some recent financial setbacks. He mentioned that the new school budgets introduced by the Ministry of Education were barely adjusted for inflation, leaving little room for schools to spend on ed-tech products. School directors were more concerned with retaining quality teaching staff than investing in e-learning. As Shema explained, “the cost of Irish potatoes for one 1kg has now gone up to 1500 Rwf [approx. 1.50 USD] but the average salary for a teacher in Rwanda is now 70 000 Rwf [approx. 70 USD], how can people afford that?”

Being the youngest child of a single-parent household, Shema was proud of how he had risen from kitchen staff to managerial positions in the hospitality industry before dedicating himself to his startup. He felt the city’s rich kids, who often occupied key positions in the Presidential office, would likely not understand his, or his clients’, financial struggles: “It’s almost as if these guys are not Rwandans, they can sometimes barely speak Kinyarwanda and in their summers, they go on vacation to France or the US or Canada…these guys have probably never shopped at Nymirambo market, they go and get their groceries from Sawa Citi or Simba [supermarket chains]… They are the ones who then go study abroad and come back and make policies, but they don’t know what life is like in Rwanda. You know Claire Kamanzi [CEO of Rwanda Development Board], she wasn’t even in Rwanda before, how can they know the country, they only know about it from reading reports…”. Picking up on his comments, I inquired further as to what needs to change in Rwanda, to which he replied, “it would be if the system was for the masses, here it is the elites who in charge”. As reflected in the conversation with Shema, talk on the felt effects of inflation opened a portal to discussions on middle-class and elite urban divides and how such schisms mapped onto political decision-making.

The rising cost-of-living further hindered my interlocutors’ aspirations to attain or preserve middle-class living in Kigali and its accompanying social norms. Like Nairobi’s peri-urban population studied by Lockwood (2020), current socio-economic inequalities in Kigali were not seen as a permanent condition, but as part of a challenge to ‘make it’ and achieve the standard of living possessed by others. Foreign entrepreneurs from the Global North could weather the franc’s continuous devaluation and primarily resided in upmarket neighbourhoods.

But local young founders, predominantly men, complained about how it was now impossible to save for a house within your twenties, adding that girls now were more interested in dating older men with money. Male homeownership in Rwanda remained a prerequisite for marriage and the social transition to adulthood. Many mentioned how their irregular incomes had caused issues with their girlfriends, as they cynically joked that ‘it was becoming too expensive to adult’. Some were equally forced to relocate to neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Kigali and expressed feeling squeezed out of the city. Economic pressure further caused a series of aches and pains, as colleagues and entrepreneurs complained of burnout, fatigue and anxiety.

In a context where politics is laden with couched terms, speaking on inflation and its felt effects allowed interlocutors to share pointed political critiques and reveal class-based social tensions. The cost-of-living crisis threatened the aspirational livelihoods of my predominantly middle-class interlocutors and undid the image of a prosperous nation that the government endeavoured to maintain. For my interlocutors, commentary on inflation did not stand alone; it provided a means of contextualizing and reflecting on the socio-economic, gendered and political make-up of life in post-genocide Kigali and its resultant inequalities. It further opened questions on who would ultimately profit from the country’s push towards modernization.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig. 

Alexandrine Royer is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work centres on digital economies, startup culture and development practices in East Africa, with a focus on Rwanda.

References

Bellemare, M. F. (2015). Rising Food Prices, Food Price Volatility, and Social Unrest. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 97(1), 1–21.

Grant, A. M. (2015). ‘Quiet Insecurity and Quiet Agency in Post-Genocide Rwanda’. Ethnofoor 27(2): 15-36

Finn, B. (2017). Quietly Chasing Kigali: Young Men and the Intolerance of Informality in Rwanda’s Capital City. Urban Forum (Johannesburg), 29(2), 205-218.

Lockwood, P. (2020). The Greedy Eaters: A moral politics of continuity and consumption in urbanising central Kenya [Apollo – University of Cambridge Repository]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.65545

Purdeková, A. & D. Mwambari (2022) Post-genocide identity politics and colonial durabilities in Rwanda, Critical African Studies, 14:1, 19-37, DOI: 10.1080/21681392.2021.1938404

Rollason, W. (2019) ‘Motorbike People Power and Politics on Rwandan Streets’. Lanham: Lexington Books. 

Thomson, S. 2013. Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Cite as: Royer, Alexandrine 2024. “‘In Kigali, life is expensive’: how everyday inflation talk gives voice to political and class frustrations” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/alexandrine-royer-in-kigali-life-is-expensivehow-everyday-inflation-talk-gives-voice-to-political-and-class-frustrations/

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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Steffen Köhn Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy

Image 1: Screenshot of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024

Cuba is currently facing one of its most severe economic crises in decades. The island nation is contending with the compounded effects of a global pandemic, tightening U.S. sanctions, and its own mismanaged monetary reforms, all of which have created a perfect storm of high inflation, scarcity, and social unrest. As the Cuban peso (CUP) loses value at a rapid pace, Cubans are increasingly turning to alternative currencies and unconventional economic activities to survive. Among these, play-to-earn crypto games like Axie Infinity have emerged as an unexpected source of income, offering a connection to the global digital economy for those who do not have access to remittances from abroad. However, the game’s economic model, which requires significant initial investment and relies heavily on exploitative “scholarship” arrangements, ended up reinforcing pre-existing social inequalities rather than addressing them. Moreover, Axie Infinity faced severe inflation issues itself, with the in-game currency devaluing rapidly due to an oversupply. Over time, its structure began to resemble the characteristics of a Ponzi scheme, where new investments were needed to sustain returns for existing players. This forced players to navigate an increasingly unstable digital economy, where opportunities for profit were outweighed by rising risks.

To understand the emergence of play-to-earn games as a significant economic practice in Cuba, we must first grasp the current economic landscape. Cuba’s economy has been hit hard by several overlapping crises. The Covid-19 pandemic brought tourism—the country’s economic backbone—to a near standstill. Concurrently, U.S. sanctions, particularly those tightened under the Trump administration, restricted remittances, cut off access to international financial systems, and further isolated Cuba from global financial flows.

Internally, the Cuban government’s decision to implement the Ordenamiento Monetario in January 2021—intended as a comprehensive monetary reform—eliminated the longstanding dual currency system that had kept the economy afloat. Before this reform, the Cuban peso (CUP) was used for domestic transactions and salaries, while the dollar-pegged convertible peso (CUC) was used for tourism, luxury goods, and international trade, which allowed the government to control access to foreign currency and manage economic disparities. By making the CUP the sole legal tender and devaluing it against the U.S. dollar, the reform triggered runaway inflation. The artificially low exchange rate of the CUP against the dollar could not be sustained, leading to a spiraling devaluation of the national currency.

Amid the financial turmoil, many Cubans are turning to alternative currencies to protect their savings in more stable forms and to manage everyday transactions. Cryptocurrencies, particularly USDT, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar and (theoretically) backed by dollar reserves, have gained significant popularity as a tool for receiving remittances and facilitating cross-border payments. Meanwhile, digital credits—ranging from balances on apps like Zelle and Tropipay to phone credits—emerged as vital tools within Cuba’s expanding informal economy. During the pandemic, the Cuban government introduced its own digital currency, the moneda libremente convertible (MLC), pegged to the dollar and meant to serve as a substitute for foreign currency in state-run stores selling essential goods. The MLC was specifically designed to capture hard currency for the state, as it could only be acquired through foreign currency deposits or remittances. However, as its acceptance became limited to a shrinking number of outlets and a thriving black market developed for exchanging MLC into other currencies, its value eroded, declining sharply against both the U.S. dollar and digital credits denominated in dollars on payment apps.

The Currency Black Market: A Disorderly Landscape

This monetary disorder has led to a burgeoning informal market for currency exchange, which operates largely through digital platforms like Telegram and WhatsApp. Here, Cubans negotiate the value of dollars, euros, MLC credits, and various cryptocurrencies, often using intermediaries to facilitate exchanges. elTOQUE, an independent news outlet based in Miami, has become a key player by publishing the informal exchange rates of these currencies daily. These rates are determined by bots scraping buy and sell offers from major Telegram groups, yet they remain contentious, with frequent accusations of manipulation, particularly from the Cuban government.

Image 2 : Screenshots of elTOQUE’s daily listing of average exchange rates for various currencies and cryptocurrencies on the informal market as of August 28th, 2024.

In this chaotic environment, cryptocurrencies offer another refuge from the collapsing Cuban peso, but they also introduce new complexities, particularly in converting digital assets into usable cash. Many Cubans now use stablecoins like USDT to preserve value and facilitate international payments, while digital platforms have become essential tools for managing remittances and cross-border transactions. However, the real challenge lies in bridging the gap between these digital currencies and local cash. On platforms like Telegram and Revolico, brokers facilitate exchanges from digital tokens to cash, often charging high fees and adding another layer of volatility and risk to an already unstable financial landscape.

Image 3: Listings of currency exchange offers posted in various Telegram groups

Gaming the System: How Axie Infinity Became an Economic Lifeline

Amid Cuba’s ongoing inflationary crisis, an unexpected means of accessing digital tokens emerged: play-to-earn crypto video games like Axie Infinity. Developed by the Vietnamese company Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity allows players to breed, battle, and trade digital pets known as Axies, which are unique digital assets or non-fungible tokens (NFTs) stored on the blockchain, enabling players to own, trade, and speculate with their in-game holdings. The game broke into the mainstream in many low- and lower-middle-income countries in the summer of 2021, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It became a widespread phenomenon across much of the Global South, permitting players to earn substantial income in the game’s cryptocurrency, Smooth Love Potion (SLP). As global lockdowns cut off traditional jobs and informal income opportunities, the game (at least for a while) enabled players in countries like the Philippines, Venezuela, and Indonesia to earn hundreds of dollars per month—often well above their local median wage—and offering economic opportunities that their physical economies could not.

Image 4: Screenshot of a battle in Axie Infinity’s arena mode, where players from around the world compete using their Axies.

For thousands of Cubans, especially those without access to remittances, Axie Infinity quickly became a potential economic fallback. With traditional income sources disrupted by the pandemic and ongoing inflation, the game offers a rare opportunity to earn cryptocurrency, which can then be traded on the black market for pesos or other more stable currencies. However, participating in Axie Infinity is not without its challenges, and many Cuban players have had to navigate a complex landscape of intermediaries, scams, and volatile markets to turn their virtual earnings into real-world value.

Image 5: The study notes of an Axie Infinity scholarship holder

The entry barrier to Axie Infinity is steep. At its peak, in July 2021, even the cheapest team of three Axies required to start playing cost around $1,000—an impossible sum for most Cubans. This led to the emergence of a parallel economy where affluent players and companies, often based in wealthier countries, granted “scholarships” to aspiring players. Gaming guilds emerged on Telegram, offering training sessions and conducting entrance exams for those seeking scholarships. These scholarships involved lending Axies to players who couldn’t afford them in exchange for a share of their earnings, often up to 70 per cent. This system allowed Cuban players to participate in the game, but it also mirrored exploitative labor practices, with the scholars—typically from the Global South—bearing the brunt of the risk while the asset owners in more developed nations took the lion’s share of the profits.

Scholars were required to play for several hours every day, with their performance closely monitored—either by coaches hired by NFT owners to provide training but also to surveil them, or through surveillance software that tracked their activity. In my friend Juan’s guild, there were even two competitive leagues, and members could be relegated like football teams. Those who failed to meet performance targets were quickly replaced by other aspiring players, reinforcing a precarious labor market marked by a harsh hire-and-fire culture. In this context, Axie Infinity’s promise of decentralized and equitable opportunities increasingly resembled a new form of digital serfdom, perpetuating existing inequalities rather than alleviating them.

Trust and Mistrust in the Cuban Crypto Economy

Beyond the game itself, Cuban players encountered significant challenges when trying to convert their in-game earnings into usable currency. Due to U.S. sanctions, centralized cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance and Coinbase block users from Cuba, forcing players to depend on informal and often opaque networks for transactions. In the Telegram currency exchange groups where Cubans from across the country participate, the primary challenge was establishing trust, as no one wanted to be the first to send cryptocurrency or fiat money and risk relying on the trading partner to follow through. This led to the development of new intermediaries and trust mechanisms. To mitigate the risk of fraud, some Telegram groups set up their own escrow systems, where admins held funds from both parties for a fee until the exchange was finalized. Other groups introduced a VIP system, granting trusted status to users with multiple successful transactions who provided personal information to the group’s administrator and paid a monthly fee. While these systems offered a semblance of security, they also underscored the inherent contradictions of a supposedly “trustless” blockchain-based economy that, in reality, relied heavily on middlemen and trust-based social networks to work.

Despite the often exploitative working conditions and the complicated process of cashing out game tokens, Cuban Axie Infinity players demonstrated considerable agency in navigating these challenges. They used platforms like Discord or Telegram to create grassroots solidarity networks, actively sharing information about scholarship opportunities and educating others on gaming strategies. This sense of community and mutual support became a crucial resource for many players striving to make the most of the game’s economic opportunities.

For many Cubans, Axie Infinity also represented a rare chance to engage in the global digital economy at a time when Cuban society had only recently come online. It enabled some players to transition from mere participants to asset owners and investors by purchasing their own Axies. Many of the players I interviewed had eventually invested in the game, buying their own digital pets and exploring the speculative potential of this virtual economy. For these players, the game marked their first encounter with a global financial market, pushing them toward speculative behavior and exposing them to its inherent risks. The SLP token—like many cryptocurrencies—proved to be even more volatile than the Cuban peso, making it a highly unpredictable asset. Nevertheless, this volatility did not deter them from hoping to strike it big; rather, it underscored the precarious yet captivating nature of their engagement with digital economies.

Precarious Play

The experience of Cuban Axie Infinity players sheds light on a broader trend in the digital economy: the merging of play, work, and investment in ways that challenge traditional definitions of labor. Concepts like “gamification” (Robson 2015) and “playbor” (Kücklich 2005) have been used to describe how game-like elements are incorporated into non-game contexts to enhance engagement or extract value. However, play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity take this a step further by directly integrating financial incentives into gameplay, creating a highly speculative and precarious form of digital work.

Image 6: Screenshot from the website CoinMarketCap, showing the market trend of Axie’s highly volatile in-game cryptocurrency Smooth Love Potion (SLP).

For Cuban players, the volatility of the SLP token added another layer of uncertainty. In the early days, some players earned substantial sums, far exceeding local wages. But as new player growth slowed after the hype in the summer of 2021, the game’s revenue—and thus the value of in-game assets—plummeted. The in-game inflation began to mirror real-world inflation: the more players sought to extract value from the game without reinvesting, the faster the currency’s value declined. When North Korean hackers stole $620 million from the game’s blockchain in March 2022, the already fragile Axie economy collapsed further, leaving many players with worthless tokens (Harwell 2022).

The Fragile Promise of Blockchain

The case of Axie Infinity in Cuba exposes the limits of the promises made by blockchain evangelists (e.g. Tapscott and Tapscott 2016, Domjan et al. 2021, Kshetri 2023). Far from bringing financial inclusion and economic empowerment to the Global South, the game’s ecosystem often reproduced existing inequalities and inflationary dynamics. In theory, blockchain technology is supposed to offer a decentralized, transparent alternative to traditional financial systems. Yet, in practice, Cuban players found themselves entangled in a web of intermediaries, trust-based networks, and volatile markets, which reinforced rather than dismantled power imbalances.

The rise and fall of Axie Infinity in Cuba provides a stark reminder of the limitations and risks inherent in new digital economies. This became especially evident when Axie Infinity’s in-game inflation eventually surpassed the inflation in Cuba’s real economy that had driven many players to the game in the first place. While the game initially offered a lifeline to some, it also exposed the precarious nature of digital work, where players are subject to volatile earnings, insecure contracts, and exploitative conditions. The experience of Cuban players thus challenges the narrative that blockchain technology will bring about a more equitable global economy. Instead, these systems can easily replicate and even exacerbate existing inequalities, creating new forms of digital labor exploitation and financial speculation.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig.

Steffen Köhn is a filmmaker and associate professor of visual and multimodal anthropology at Aarhus University. He is the author of: Island In the Net. Emergent Digital Culture and its Social Consequences in Post-Castro Cuba (forthcoming with Princeton University Press) as well as Mediating Mobility. Visual Anthropology in the Age of Migration (Wallflower/Columbia University Press 2016). His films have been screened at the Berlinale, Slamdance, Rotterdam International Film Festival, BFI Film Festival London, and the Word Film Festival Montreal, among others.

References

Domjan, Paul, Gavin Serkin, Brandon Thomas, John Toshack. 2021. Chain Reaction: How Blockchain Will Transform the Developing World. Basel:Springer International Publishing.

Harwell, Drew. “U.S. Links Axie Infinity Crypto Heist to North Korean Hackers.” The Washington Post, April 14, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/14/us-links-axie-crypto-heist-north-korea/.

Kshetri, Nir. 2023. Blockchain in the Global South: Opportunities and Challenges for Businesses and Societies. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kücklich, Julian 2005. Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. fibreculture 5 (1): 1-5.

Robson, Karen Kirk Plangger, Jan H. Kietzmann, Ian McCarthy,and Leyland Pitt. 2015. Is it all a game? Understanding the principles of gamification. Business Horizons 58 (4): 411-420.

Tapscott, Don and Alex Tapscott. 2016. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World. New York: Penguin.

Cite as: Köhn, Steffen 2024 “Tokens of survival: the rise of crypto gaming in Cuba’s inflationary economy” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/steffen-kohn-tokens-of-survival-the-rise-of-crypto-gaming-in-cubas-inflationary-economy/

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Blog, Features, The Social Life of Inflation

Ståle Wig, Sian Lazar and Eva van Roekel The social life of inflation: introduction

Image 1: Fruit and vegetables sales in Havana, Cuba, where inflation has sky-rocketed in recent years. Photo by Ingrid Evensen

After a period of relatively low inflation in many economies in the Global North, inflation has once again become a major world concern. The COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted supply chains and labor markets, combined with increased government spending and rising energy prices due to the war in Ukraine, has contributed to a global surge in prices. Unsurprisingly, public debates have centered on how to stall this development. Bankers, policymakers, and economists negotiate which economic levers to pull, and when, to stabilize the prices. Amid discussions about rising interest rates, new monetary policy and government price caps, where does anthropology fit in? What can anthropology add to the academic study of inflation?

This blog series invites colleagues to explore the realities of inflation through ethnographic studies in their areas of expertise. How does global inflation effect people’s everyday lives? How do ordinary people navigate and experience price rises? Inflation, it turns out, is a fitting topic for anthropological research. The ethnographic method, known to focus on the fine-grained textures of everyday life, is suited to analyze not only why and how inflation occurs, but also how people try to sustain their lives and find new ways to attract and store value when the usefulness of their national currency starts melting away—like “a piece of chocolate in hand on a hot day,” as one disgruntled Cuban business owner recently put it.

As this collection reminds us, the causes and effects of inflation are discussed not only in government meeting rooms, Central Bank offices, or behind closed doors at lavish G7 summits but also in roadside cafes in Kashmir, among motorcycle delivery drivers in Beirut, high-school students in Caracas, and by aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Kigali. How inflation manifests in everyday conversations is of particular interest to anthropological research, because the way soaring prices become politicized—in other words, who or what is blamed for inflation—shapes its broader social and political consequences. Whether dissatisfaction with rising prices is expressed through electoral voting, union organizing, migration, or political protests, the everyday experience, framing and understanding of inflation remains crucial to its effects.

While inflation is on one level inherently political and moral, it is often perceived as technical, arguably due to the dominance of economics approaches to the issue. This very technicality can in turn have political effects. Based on fieldwork among aspiring tech entrepreneurs in Rwanda, Alexandrine Royer, for instance, describes how inflation becomes a way for disgruntled citizens to express political frustrations. As the Rwandan government has turned increasingly authoritarian, many are wary of openly directing their discontent at political leaders. “Inflation talk” (Amri 2023), being seemingly apolitical in nature, offers a safer avenue for articulating their concerns and complaints. The anthropology of inflation is well-suited to attune to these processes – investigating what political and moral modes of understanding underlie talk about and action directed at inflation. A striking case in this regard is Argentina, where the new president, a self-proclaimed anti-establishment candidate, rose to power by attributing the responsibility for inflation to his political opponents, as described by Sian Lazar and Dolores Señorans in their blog piece.

Another area for anthropological research concerns how ordinary people both produce and respond to prices. Arguably, since the work of historian E.P. Thompson (1971), economic anthropologists have recognized that even a seemingly technical issue like the pricing of goods is shaped by social and political processes beyond the economic forces of supply and demand. As Thompson famously showed, bread is not just another commodity but part of the “moral economy” of the working class, a share of the common good to which people feel they have a rightful claim. The makeup of the moral economy differs across geography and history. Drawing on field research in Pakistan, Quirin Rieder investigates the fascinating case of tea prices in rural Kashmir, showing how ordinary people may not only react to and protest inflation but also contribute, to some extent, to shaping the phenomenon itself. As it turns out, there are limits to how much people will accept to pay for a cup of tea, or indeed other staple items, like a basket of eggs, a bottle of water, or a pack of tampons.

Ethnographic research can reveal how such consumer preferences are defined by specific social and political histories, which in turn shape people’s reactions to, and attempts to handle, inflation. The point may seem obvious but is worth emphasizing. Not only does inflation unfold in economies that are historically and socially constituted, but as Neiburg (2023: 10) has put it, inflation itself is a “social and cultural fact”. Culturally and historically constituted notions of “the normal life”, and a “life worth living” will always contribute to shaping the experience of rising prices. For many, inflation is a crisis, a rupture from ordinary life. Yet contrary to the assumption that inflation is always an inherently negative phenomenon, Daromir Rudnyckyj’s provocative blog piece suggests that it is not universally perceived as a “problem.”

A third area of interest suggested by the case studies in this collection centers on how people navigate monetary instability and plurality. As Harry Pettit points out in his case study from Beirut, monetary instability will often set off a messy battle for the control over the circulation of cash as well as the digital infrastructures that facilitate economic transactions. In a related vein, Van Roekel draws on field research in Venezuela to ask how Venezuelans navigate and assess their de facto multi-currency economy of foreign bank notes, crypto currencies, and gold after a decade of hyperinflation. In several cases, people find, or even invent, new sources of value, or turn to new techniques of storing and circulating value, when the national currency start to lose worth. A final, fascinating example comes from Cuba, a country that only in recent years has experienced the effects of inflation, as described in two separate blog entries by Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier and Mélissa Gauthier, and Steffen Köhn. Here, the ongoing economic crisis and triple-digit inflation rates have inspired Cubans to turn to “play-to-earn” crypto games online, to access digital currencies. Runaway inflation and economic crises are breeding grounds for new digital experimentation with money and exchange creating niches for makeshift economic survival, speculation and quick profit, while reproducing historical conditions of vulnerability, inequality and “crypto-colonialism” (Rosales et al. 2024).

Combined, the ethnographic studies in this blog series on the social life of inflation reveal the potential of an anthropology of inflation to inquire economies from below. This effort has only just begun.

This text is part of the feature The Social Life of Inflation edited by Sian Lazar, Evan van Roeckel, and Ståle Wig.

Ståle Wig is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, and author of the forthcoming book, The struggle for the market. Life and hustle in Cuba’s new economy (Pennsylvania University Press).

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her latest book is How we Struggle: A Political Anthropology of Labour (Pluto Press)

Eva van Roekel is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is author of the monograph Phenomenal Justice. Violence and Morality in Argentina (Rutgers University Press).

References

Amri, M. (2023). “Inflation as Talk, Economy as Feel: Notes Towards an Anthropology of Inflation”. Anthropology of the Middle East, 18(2), 27-45.

E.P. Thompson (1971). “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past & Present 50 (1): 76–136.

Neiburg, F. (2023). “Inflation: Pragmatics of money and inflationary sensoria. economic sociology. perspectives and conversations”, 24(3), 9-17.

Rosales, A., van Roekel, E., Howson, P., & Kanters, C. (2024). “Poor miners and empty e-wallets: Latin American experiences with cryptocurrencies in crisis”. Human Geography, 17(1), 43-54. https://doi.org/10.1177/19427786231193985

Cite as: Ståle Wig, Sian Lazar and Eva van Roekel: The social life of inflation: introduction” Focaalblog 10 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/stale-wig-sian-lazar-and-eva-van-roekel-the-social-life-of-inflation-introduction/

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Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Adia Benton Humanitarian vernaculars (and the racial vernaculars of humanitarianism)

Image 1: Untitled (Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes) 1976, by Ana Medieta

While explaining the origins of Gramsci’s definition of hegemony to an interviewer, the labour historian Michael Denning (2023) suggested taking a Jeopardy! approach to social theory, which is to say: “rather than try to define a term, give a term, and the question to which that term is the answer.” For the purposes of this short essay, I’ll begin with the term “humanitarianism.” If humanitarianism is the answer, the question is: why do you help someone who is not like you, who is also far away from you; what are the logics or the rationale underlying the imperative to organize help for distant others, for attempting to alleviate their suffering? As Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima note in the introduction to this collection, when the question is posed this way, “the human” that forms the basis for much theorizing about humanitarianism is not a universal category, but a differentiated (and aspirational) one; in this formulation, “empathy for ‘distant others’ is not simply a moral calling but a politically filtered and calibrated gesture.”

What comes into view when we acknowledge that humanitarianism is premised on the idea of treating members of a suffering collective as if human? This is where the critical study of humanitarianism and its taxonomies of difference intervenes. To argue for a critical study of humanitarianism and its taxonomies of difference is not to normalize or ascribe normative status to humanitarianism as an Euro-American or Eurocentric mode of governance, profession, ethos, laws, or industry, but to denaturalize it as the primary category through which we understand the moral and political imperatives to help others along lines of or transversal to allegiance, affinity, solidarity, or difference. It is also to highlight the forms of difference upon which the field rests and operates, through which it is mobilized and that it produces.

Fechter and May, working at the Myanmar-Thailand border, observe local, grassroots efforts to assist internally displaced persons and refugees fleeing protracted conflict. They call for de-centring taxonomies of difference in “classical” humanitarianism—what Dorothea Hilhorst (2018) has defined as the “highly institutionalized form, often led by organizations from the Global North”—and to instead examine the taxonomies of humanitarianisms and the various affinities and inclusions associated with them. I understand them to also be asking: Can examining the lateral, vernacular or everyday forms of assistance during crisis help to (re)construct different genealogies, and therefore, a different critique, of the imperative to help, its social and political organization, its emergent and undergirding sodalities?

Based upon the insights provided in the other posts, I’d like to propose that reframing these locally organized acts of mutual aid and solidarity as ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ simply provincializes these acts as an (humanitarian) object of study. Using a sleight of hand deployed by Fechter and May, I wonder if it is perhaps more politically necessary to excavate and decipher not only vernacular humanitarianisms—if we must call them that – but also the humanitarian vernacular, revealed through our analyses of so-called classical humanitarian ideologies, organizations, practices, and discourses (cf. Pierre 2020, and her discussion of the racial vernacular of development). Doing so helps us to understand how humanitarianism organizes, institutionalizes, and builds upon existing ideas about ethics, labour, race, culture, religion, gender, family, and nation—and vice versa.

In her contribution on Turkish humanitarians working among Muslims in Africa south of the Sahara (a space racially coded as ‘Black Africa’), Güner provides a clear illustration of what attention to taxonomies of difference can offer. She details the discursive construction of Muslim whiteness in humanitarians’ accounts of their encounters with Black Muslims in Africa, highlighting the circulating narratives about their interpellation as ‘White Muslims’ by their African interlocutors (Güner 2023). Her contribution here not only reveals how “the racial logics of humanitarianism operate…in transnational contexts outside of the West,” but also how national racial projects and formations are constituted through humanitarian governmentality.

Within the humanitarian vernacular, taxonomies of difference (and affinity) are laid bare as operational categories within nongovernmental and state organizations, which are reproduced and experienced via everyday encounters with these entities. Ward, drawing on her research in Jordan and sociological theories of on-the-ground race-making, reveals how racialized constructions of the formal and informal classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘local’,” organize everyday work of Jordanian freelance consultants. These expert consultants are ‘fast-fixers’ who, working on short timelines, are hired to edit and improve international consultants’ reports to donors. Fast-fixers are often former employees of humanitarian NGOs who have ‘maxed out of the local’ and into freelance work; for a range of reasons, including the limited mobility afforded by their passports, they do not move on/up and work abroad. These ‘local’ consultants insist that they are ‘true humanitarians’ because they have remained in place to help others, rather than hopping from place-to-place—a notable feature of humanitarian labour regimes (Redfield 2012; cf. Benton 2016). Ward ultimately outlines the humanitarian industry’s racial vernacular and how it is “deployed in ways that sustain racial thought, that index particular racial meanings, and that prescribe certain social and political practices” (Pierre 2020: 87).

In the work of Tsoi and Stuewe, respectively, Canada and Germany define their border and migration projects in terms of humanitarianism and human rights. Stuewe argues that Germany’s humanitarian approach to managing Yezidi refugees from Iraq prioritizes assimilation via conventional educative programming like language instruction, but also what historical anthropologist Ann Stoler referred to as the ‘education of desire,’ the curriculum highlighting German norms and values around family, kinship, and romantic love (“free partner choice”). The programming is experienced by Yezidi refugees as a violent erasure of their kin practices and, thus, an existential threat. Tsoi focuses on Canada’s relaxed immigration policy, in which a “democratic logic intersects with a capitalistic logic to control border mobility.” Specifically, the regime of mobility governing this policy is also a racial regime, in which democracy and capitalism are intertwined: Hong Kong diasporans in Canada are racialized as uniquely economically productive citizens. Incoming Hong Kong migrants are, thus, prospectively placed in the category of ‘productive labourers’, while the conferral of Canadian citizenship is the democratic intervention. Together, Tsoi and Steuwe show how border regimes, particularly when they are characterized as humanitarian, or as performing a humanitarian function, interpolate humanitarian assistance into exploitative and often violent, differentiating function of borders.

Each of these contributions helps us to understand the humanitarian vernacular and its ‘grammar’—how humanitarianism organizes, institutionalizes, produces and builds upon local, everyday notions of ethics, labour, race, culture, religion, gender, family, and nation. They also show us specific ways humanitarianism becomes vernacularized, organizing the scale and scope of helping economies; sustaining racial regimes that subtend international humanitarian organizational forms and local labour conditions; prescribing certain kinship practices and enabling border migration regimes that consolidate ideas about membership, belonging and humanity.

Adia Benton is an associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Northwestern University, where she is affiliated with the Science in Human Culture Program. She is the author of the award-winning book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, and is currently writing a book about the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak.

References

Benton, Adia. “African expatriates and race in the anthropology of humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 2, no. 3 (2016): 266–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2016.1244956.

Denning, Michael. Interview by Daniel Denvir. Transcript, January 23, 2023. https://jacobin.com/2023/01/michael-denning-antonio-gramsci-prison-notebooks-theory-hegemony-class-organizing

Güner, Ezgi. “Rejoicing of the Hearts: Turkish Constructions of Muslim Whiteness in Africa South of the Sahara.” Africa 93, no. 2 (2023): 236–55.

Hilhorst, Dorothea. “Classical Humanitarianism and Resilience Humanitarianism: Making Sense of Two Brands of Humanitarian Action.” Journal of International Humanitarian Action 3, no. 1 (September 10, 2018): 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-018-0043-6.

Pierre, Jemima. “The Racial Vernaculars of Development: A View from West Africa.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 1 (March 2020): 86–98. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13352.

Redfield, Peter. “The Unbearable Lightness of Ex-pats: Double Binds of Humanitarian Mobility.” Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 2 (2012): 358–382. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01147.x.

Cite as: Benton, Adia 2024. “Humanitarian vernaculars (and the racial vernaculars of humanitarianism)” Focaalblog 20 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/20/adia-benton-humanitarian-vernaculars-and-the-racial-vernaculars-of-humanitarianism/

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Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Ezgi Güner Islamic Humanitarianism and Renegotiating the Boundaries of Turkish Whiteness in Africa South of the Sahara

The silence around the salience of race in development and humanitarianism (see White 2002, Kothari 2006) has lately been interrupted by an increased attention to white saviourism, especially in social media and celebrity humanitarianism (Benton 2016, Toomey 2017, Pallister-Wilkins 2021, Budabin and Richey 2021). This body of literature provides crucial insight into the deep entanglements between humanitarian subjectivity and global white supremacy. My research examines similar entanglements by ethnographically tracing the transnational discourses and practices of Turkish Islamic humanitarianism in Africa south of the Sahara. Turkey, under the neoliberal authoritarian rule of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter AKP) provides an intriguing case study of the co-optation of Islamic ethics of care by humanitarian governmentality and the re-entrenchment of racial hierarchies embedded in the foundations of humanitarianism in novel ways.

Historically an aid recipient country, Turkey has refashioned its global image as a “humanitarian state” over the last decades (Keyman and Sazak 2014, Çelik and İşeri 2016, Akpinar 2022). Africa south of the Sahara has provided the racial terrain on which Turkey’s position within the “international community” has been renegotiated. In tandem with the Turkish foreign policy reorientation towards Africa south of the Sahara and the rapid growth of the continent’s share in Turkey’s official development assistance since the mid-2000s, faith-based humanitarian NGOs ranging from small local associations to nation-wide foundations have extended their operations to Muslim Africa. Blurring the boundaries between development, humanitarianism, Islamic charity and proselytizing, these organizations have been channelling pious donations collected from middle-class citizens to rural Africa mainly in the form of water wells, medical camps, schools, mosques, solar energy and irrigation systems, community gardens, livestock, sacrificial meat, Qur’an distribution and orphan sponsorship, among others. The transnational flows of state resources and aid from Turkey to Africa south of the Sahara are returned not only by flows of profit, but also racialized discourses and images of Muslim Africa that circulate nationally through the networks and infrastructures created by the Islamic civil society (Güner 2023, forthcoming).

Image 1: The visual trope of touching hands with different skin colour universally signifies racial diversity, equality and solidarity. This global signifier is adopted and widely circulated by Turkish humanitarian organizations, as in this image, to symbolize the racial difference, yet religious sameness of Turkish and African Muslims. The interracial intimacy between aid donors and recipients is more often a gendered construction of Islamic “brotherhood” than “sisterhood”, unlike this image.

The paradox of Islamic humanitarianism resides in its advocacy for racial egalitarianism in reference to the Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition while inevitably inheriting the racial hierarchies historically inherent in humanitarianism. Turkish humanitarianism at the conjunction of state policy and pro-government civil society aims to build a global umma (community of believers) knit together with humanitarian sensibilities and under the politico-religious leadership of AKP’s Turkey. In doing so, it reproduces the global racial hierarchies at the scale of the umma, situating Turkey at the top.It is not a coincidence that this self-ascribed positionality entails a claim to whiteness. If Turkey’s ascendancy to the position of the protector of the Muslim world has been justified based on historical arguments about being the heir of the Ottoman empire as well as the Caliphate’s religious legacy in the past, today, it is also naturalized through racial arguments.

Circulating narratives about their interpellation as White Muslims by their African interlocutors, Turkish humanitarians contribute to the re-entrenchment of white supremacy in Turkey in novel ways (Güner 2021, 2023). This racial project hinges on the bifurcation of whiteness into Western-Christian and Ottoman-Islamic formations in Africa south of the Sahara. Constructed as the moral antithesis of colonial racism, Muslim whiteness claims racial sameness with and civilizational difference from the West based on a particular imagination of the Ottoman-Islamic heritage. In the humanitarian discourses I study, Muslim whiteness is differentiated from Western whiteness by its capacity to create interracial intimacy. In contrast to the segregationist logic of colonial racism in Africa, Muslim whiteness is defined by an immediate emotional and corporeal intimacy with the Black Muslim, therefore justifying the growing Turkish presence on the continent as “brotherly”.

Image 2: Within the humanitarian visual regime, hands also symbolize help. Images of giving and receiving hands not only speak to the racialized asymmetries of humanitarianism in general, but more specifically to the symbolic language of Islamic ethics of charity deployed by the Prophetic tradition. This picture is taken as a Sudanese Muslim is about to shake hands with a Turkish Muslim. By circulating it on social media, the Turkish NGO conveys the message that they are welcome in ‘Africa’. The interracial handshake also foreshadows the humanitarian donations that will pass from one to the other.

To conclude, the racial logics of humanitarianism operate in a similar way in transnational contexts outside of the West. The making of a global umma on the basis of Islamic humanitarianism racializes Muslims as white saviours and positions them above black and brown victims. As the White Muslim comes into being through the touch and the gaze of the Black African, this racial formation also reveals how even the wildest dreams about erecting a politico-moral alternative to the Western civilization in a multipolar world have inherited whiteness as the hallmark of civilization.

Ezgi Güner is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in global/comparative studies of race and ethnicity at the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Haverford College. Her research focuses on the transnational articulations of race, religion, and empire across the Middle East and Africa south of the Sahara.

References

Akpinar, P. (2022), ‘Turkey’s “Novel” Enterprising and Humanitarian Foreign Policy and Africa’, in J. Jongerden (ed), The Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Turkey (Abingdon: Routledge), pp. 495–507.

Benton, A. (2016) ‘Risky business: race, nonequivalence and the humanitarian politics of life’, Visual Anthropology 29:2, 187–203.

Budabin, A. C. & Richey, L. A. (2021) Batman saves the Congo: How celebrities disrupt the politics of development. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Çelik, N. & İşeri, E. (2016), ‘Islamically oriented humanitarian NGOs in Turkey: AKP foreign policy parallelism’, Turkish Studies, 17:3, 429-448.

Güner, E. (2021) ‘Rethinking whiteness in Turkey through the AKP’s foreign policy in Africa south of the Sahara’, Middle East Report 299 (Summer). Available at https://merip.org/2021/08/rethinkingwhiteness- in-turkey-through-the-akps-foreign-policy-in-africa-south-of-the-sahara/

Güner, E. (2023) ‘Rejoicing of the hearts: Turkish constructions of Muslim whiteness in Africa south of the Sahara’, Africa 93:2, 236-255.

Güner, E. (Forthcoming) ‘Revisiting the tesettür question in Muslim West Africa: Racial and affective topography of the veil in Turkish discourses’, Culture and Religion.

Keyman, E. F. & Sazak, O. (2014) ‘Turkey as a “Humanitarian State”’, POMEAS (Project on the Middle East and the Arab Spring) Policy Paper, 2. Available at https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/31364/1/keyman-turkey-as-a-humanitarian-state.pdf

Kothari, U. (2006) ‘An Agenda for Thinking about “Race” in Development’, Progress in Development Studies, 6:1, 9–23.

Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2021) ‘Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy’, Security Dialogue 52, 98–106.

Toomey, N. (2017) ‘Humanitarians of Tinder: constructing whiteness and consuming the other’, Critical Ethnic Studies 3:2, 151-172.

White, S. (2002) ‘Thinking race, thinking development’, Third World Quarterly, 23: 407–19.

Cite as: Güner, Ezgi 2024. “Islamic Humanitarianism and Renegotiating the Boundaries of Turkish Whiteness in Africa South of the Sahara” Focaalblog 15 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/15/ezgi-guner-islamic-humanitarianism-and-renegotiating-the-boundaries-of-turkish-whiteness-in-africa-south-of-the-sahara/

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Blog

Oane Visser and Nina Swen COP29, Climate Politics and Caspian Fisheries

Image 1: COP29 International Climate Change in Baku, Azerbaijan, illustration by Zulfurgar Graphics

By hosting the UN’s global Climate Change conference COP29 in Baku (11-22 November 2024), Azerbaijan presents itself as a climate-responsible oil state and new political ally and donor for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) struggling with the impacts of climate change. Yet the fate of fisheries off the coast of Baku, navigating between the oil rig dotted and shrinking Caspian Sea, markedly contrasts with this posture. Drawing on research amongst Caspian fishers, this blog examines these contradictions, and the potential for local (and international) fishers to use the COP on their coast as a space for advocacy.

Just offshore of Baku, the contradictions behind Azerbaijan’s effort to re-position itself as an oil state supporting precarious coastal communities become visible. From Baku’s coast, a COP delegate can see the rigs of one the World’s first offshore oil industries, dating back to 1873. The Caspian Sea is increasingly devoid of valuable fish due to oil industry pollution and climate change. Concurrently, some 40 kilometers east of Baku, small boats of artisanal fishers can be seen navigating their shrinking sea territories.

What a knowledgeable observer can also discern from Baku’s coast, is how the ‘sea’ has receded over the past decades. In contrast to the global trend of rising sea levels, the Caspian water level is projected to fall by 9–18 meters by the end of this century. This is caused by increasing evaporation engendered by higher global temperatures, and regional anthropogenic factors such as declining influx from rivers due to irrigation and ongoing dam construction. This change, together with increased water temperatures and pollution from oil and gas extraction, leads to the disappearance of habitats for fish and the entrance of invasive species. Its level still drops by 7 centimeters annually. In some areas the horizontal retreat of the Caspian Sea amounts to 12 meters. The pace of this change is so substantial that the shallower, Northern part of the Caspian is set to disappear even under more optimistic climate change scenarios.

Oil-fueled international climate aid

The announcement that the UAE would host COP28 in 2023 raised eyebrows amongst climate activists and scientists. With Azerbaijan, another fossil fuel-dominated country has become host. Azerbaijan’s eagerness to host the global climate summit aligns with the recent attempt to reposition itself as an international donor in climate adaptation and disaster relief. As COP host, the country is now leading efforts to create a Climate Fund by oil-rich countries to help vulnerable developing nations adapt to climate change (Volcovici 2024, Eurasianet 2024). Azerbaijan started funneling some of its oil wealth into international aid at least a decade ago. Azerbaijan became a participant in the OECD’s development assistance committee in 2019, marking its nascent role as international donor, even though it continues to receive international (Western) aid. The country spent just about 50 million dollars on international aid between 2005 and 2018, representing 0.05% of its GDP. This amount is significantly less than the 115 million dollar it received itself in aid in 2017 alone (Volcovici 2024).

Ahead of COP29, Azerbaijan announced the establishment of a Climate Fund with a targeted 1 billion dollars to support developing countries’ climate goals (Volcovici 2024). The Fund, to be hosted in Baku, will be financed by 10 fossil-fuel producing countries as well as oil and gas companies. “Countries rich in natural resources should be at the forefront of those addressing climate change,” said Azerbaijan’s COP29 President-Designate Mukhtar Babayev (Volcovici 2024). Together with the UAE (Cop28) and Brazil (organizer of COP30 in 2025, and another major oil producer), Azerbaijan is driving these efforts.

Domestic climate policies versus biodiversity and artisanal fisheries

At the same time, Azerbaijan’s climate action at home is mostly still in the phase of announced ambitions with a recently established target of 30 percent of its energy renewable by 2030. While plans for a large offshore wind farm park, and dams in the Kura River flowing into the Caspian Sea might contribute to fighting climate change globally, they are likely to harm the Caspian Sea’s biodiversity and fishers’ livelihoods. The negative effect of dam building is especially strong upstream in Russia, as the Volga river accounts for 80% of the inflow in the Caspian, and 18 new Volga dams are in the pipeline in addition to the 40 current dams. This is exemplary of a tension observed in various seascapes across the world, where green maritime developments aimed at global climate targets often harm surrounding ecologies, with negative repercussions for local fishing communities (Abasli et al 2024). With wind farms’ arrival parts of the Caspian likely will be closed off for fishing, in addition to zones already inaccessible due to oil extraction.

Caspian fishers identify dam constructions, large-scale irrigated agriculture and especially marine mismanagement as potential causes of the receding coastline, which, they say, causes fish to move to deeper seas. They consider government’s policies, including quotas and a moratorium on high-value species such as sturgeon, to be inefficient and unjust. These measures hinder fishers to diversify their catch based on their own observations of fish population and migration patterns. They now must focus on a narrower range of species and catch smaller (immature) fish. Imposed quotas -only loosely based on scientific data- seem an instrument for oil companies’ new explorations for offshore gas deposits. Marine policy making, has remained top-down as in the Soviet-era, without participation of fishers.

Image 2: Rod fisherman in Baku, photo by authors

COP29 as a space for fishers’ advocacy?

Does the COP29 present a (limited) window of opportunity, for small-scale fishers, local or international, to advocate for their concerns?

International movements of small-scale food producers do have representation at the COPs, although small. The COP with the biggest imprint of societal movements was the COP21, where the influential Paris Agreement was reached. Alongside this 2015 summit, a parallel civil society-led summit took place, with numerous food movements, including 15 representatives from fishers’ movements. The side-summit concluded with a big demonstration with over 30.000 people, including fishers (Mills 2023). Some years earlier, a significant milestone for small-scale food producers’ participation in global forums was the opening of the UN’s World Committee for Food Security (CFS) to non-state actors. It allowed agrarian and fishers’ movements to raise attention for small-scale production centered around ‘food sovereignty’ (Duncan et al. 2022, Edelman et al. 2014).

However, in the past few years, the movements’ presence in global forums is gradually being curtailed. In the CFS, corporations have markedly increased their presence, leading to the ‘priority voice’ of civil society being ‘under threat’ (Duncan et al. 2022). Increasing repression, stringent visa regulations, and the choice for authoritarian countries as hosts have stifled vibrant civil society involvement at the recent COPs. At COP28 in the UAE, the number of civil society organizations was lower than before, while agribusiness’ presence grew markedly, with approximately twice as many corporations compared to the previous year. The NGO GRAIN speaks of the ‘Davos-isation’ of the COPs, increasingly looking like the World Economic Forum with its corporate domination.

Like other societal organisations, fisheries movements’ physical participation in the COP has declined since the COP in Paris. Still, there are several fishers’ movements that manage to formulate shared concerns around climate and blue economy-induced marginalization of artisanal fishers, either through live or online COP presence.

However, within the fishers’ movements, post-socialist Eurasia is strikingly absent. Next to Azerbaijani fishers’ lack of cross-border contacts with neighboring Caspian fishers, impeded by rigid borders and shrinking democratic space, they also miss contacts with transnational movements. With a post-soviet legacy of distrust in collective action, small-scale food producers in post-socialist contexts rarely raise their voice, and mostly limit their sustainability actions to ‘quiet’, depoliticized adaptation (Jehlička et al. 2020, Visser et al. 2015). Similarly, the Azerbaijani “Baku Underwater Hunters and Fishermen’s Club” Public Union focuses on information sharing between fishers and refrains from political action.

In sum, despite Baku’s coastal location and its proximity to artisanal fishing communities, the chances for the COP29 to provide significant advocacy space for international, let alone Caspian, fishers are slim. Although two of the largest fishers’ movements, World Forum of Fisher Peoples WFFP, 75 member organizations from 50 countries, and the World Forum of Fish Harvesters and Fish Workers WFF, participate physically in the COP, Azerbaijani fishers are not involved. While state and corporate COP delegates discuss climate policies, Azerbaijani fishers are sailing past oil rigs in their small boats, further offshore in deeper -and dangerous- waters, in attempts to still catch fish in a depleting Caspian Sea.

Oane Visser is associate professor at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, and research associate at the Independent Social Research Foundation, London. He studies food and agrarian movements, climate adaptation, and digitalization of agriculture.

Nina Swen, PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam, examines knowledge production and contestation within environmental conflicts, with a focus on fossil fuel extraction sites.

References

Abasli, I., N. Swen, N & O. Visser (2023) ‘Climate change in Caspian Sea, small-fisheries and climate adaptation’. Presentation at the ISS Workshop ‘Artisanal Fisheries, Climate Change and Knowledge for Adaptation Workshop’, 8 December 2023

Duncan, Jessica, Nadia Lambek and Priscilla Claeys 2021. The committee on World Food Security. Advances and challenges 10 years after the reform.Un monde sans faim: Gouverner la sécurité alimentaire. Paris: SciencePo Les Presses.

Edelman, Marc, Tony Weis, Amita Baviskar, Saturnino M. Borras Jr., Eric Holt-Giménez, Deniz Kandiyoti and Wendy Wolford. 2024. Critical perspectives on food sovereignty, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41(6): 911-931.

Jehlička, Petr, Mikelis Grīviņš, Oane Visser and Balint Balázs (2020) Thinking food like an Eastern European: a critical reflection on the framing of food systems, Journal of Rural Studies, 76: 286-295.

Mills, Elyse 2023. The politics of transnational fishers’ movements. Journal of Peasant Studies, 50(2): 665-690.

Visser, Oane, Natalia Mamonova, Max Spoor and Alexander Nikulin 2005. ‘Quiet food sovereignty’ as food sovereignty without a movement? Insights from post-socialist Russia. Globalizations, 12(4): 513-528.

Volcovici, Valerie 2024. Azerbaijan launches Climate Fund, seeks fossil-fuel support. Reuters, 19 July https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/azerbaijan-launches-climate-fund-seeks-fossil-fuel-producer-support-2024-07-19/

Cite as: Visser, Oane and Swen, Nina 2024. “COP29, Climate Politics and Caspian Fisheries” Focaalblog 12 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/11/oane-visser-and-nina-swen-cop29-climate-politics-and-caspian-fisheries/

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Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Patricia Ward Power, Pace, and Place: Local Consultants and Racialized Expertise

Image: Daily life in Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan (2014), photo by Dominic Chavez/World Bank

Critical scholars recognize humanitarianism as a racializing project rooted in colonial and imperial relations, in which classifications of aid workers as ‘international’, ‘expat’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ reflect the latter (Benton, 2016; Bian, 2022; Pallister-Wilkins, 2021; Warne-Peters, 2020). In this short reflection, I focus on local aid consultants to think about these classifications as ‘on-the-ground race-making’ (Quisumbing and White, 2021): to consider precisely how racialized constructions of these terms organize the actual labour that constitutes contemporary humanitarianism.

The local aid consultant is emerging as an important gig and category of work in the so-called global South where humanitarian operations are present. While not always articulated as a specific job title, major aid employers, including INGOs and UN bodies, recruit individuals residing and working in crisis contexts to do everything from writing reports and evaluations to collecting and analysing data about their aid projects. This recognition and recruitment of locals as consultants contrast with how ‘locals’ in the aid sector are often depicted as brokers of various sorts, eager implementers of global North donors’ agendas on the frontline, or as cultural connectors that help aid organizations and their leaderships from ‘elsewhere’ navigate the national context and reach beneficiaries ‘in need’. Locals are often not associated with roles such as ‘managers’ or ‘experts’ – terms that are more so conflated with so-called aid professionals, or international (often, but not always white) workers. In fact, sometimes locals are not even acknowledged or analysed as workers situated in employer-employee relations. However, speaking with local consultants between 2016 and 2018 in Jordan, a major hub for humanitarian activity, it became immediately evident that the local consultant is just the latest articulation of a construction of difference in terms of racialized skill and expertise on which humanitarianism as an institution, industry, and transnational employer relies.

Local consultants’ roles as what I call ‘fast-fixers’ provide a vivid example of the latter. In this role, aid employers recruit local consultants to ‘fix’ international consultants’ poor-quality reports and evaluations, ‘products’ that are critical for organizations’ project funding. ‘Fast fixers’ improve both the content and technical aspects of the product, and sometimes redo the entire piece all together. In many cases, organizations recruit local consultants for this role ‘last minute before the deadline’ when the report or evaluation is due. This means that fast-fixers not only have to redo the report quickly but deliver better quality in less time as well. Project budgets are overwhelmingly spent near the deadline, so fast-fixers often receive less compensation for their work, too. Given these work arrangements, aid employers’ expressed interests in so-called ‘local knowledge’, that is, local experts’ thoughtful and critical analyses of social relations, cultural norms and living conditions in the local context, appear tenuous and insincere. Instead, the value and expertise of local consultants relate to their pace and price: their ability to deliver quick results for a bargain amount. Like 500-900 percent salary gaps between international and national staff hires in many aid organizations (Carr et al., 2010), fast-fixers’ labour is devalued by its price (their compensation) and distinguished by its content and pace (they must hustle and do particular things to get the job done on time) from international consultants, who usually negotiate what product(s) they will provide (e.g. stakeholder mapping, final report) and their fixed rates for these services well ahead of the project deadline (or maybe even before a project begins).

Undoubtedly, the local consultant is partially an outcome of an aid labour hierarchy that stifles national staff’s upward mobility and professional development (Farah, 2020; Pascucci, 2019). One consultant described to me how he quit his position with a UN organization because he ‘maxed out of the local’: traditional roles designated for local hires ‘stopped’ developing in terms of promotions, salary, and responsibilities. To advance would entail physically working abroad: ‘becoming’ an international, expat staff. However, aid employers must invest significant time and financial resources to process and cover work visas and residencies for this to happen, items that are often ‘easier’ and less costly to obtain for recruits who hold global North citizenships associated with greater geographical mobility.

Becoming a local consultant therefore presents itself as another viable – and perhaps even more desirable – alternative for workers who ‘max out of the local’. After all, consultancies serve at least two purposes: first, they are a way for aid workers to ‘deal’ with the limitations associated with their professional development in traditional aid jobs. Second, they shift the configuration of the labour relation with aid organizations – and the power within it – from employer to client. As consultants, individuals work on a timeline and at a daily rate determined and negotiated with (rather than by) their former employers. In fact, consultants often emphasized with pride their decision to ‘stay local’ as ‘true humanitarianism’ versus what they described as ‘Western’ and ‘expat workers …. who come and go’. They delineated themselves to challenge the conflated relationship between mobility and the humanitarian profession. Yet, their claims seem to also challenge racialized structures and narratives of morality that conflate certain skills, ‘expertise’, and job trajectories with constructions of ‘the humanitarian’, and, ultimately, what it means to be and act human through work too. Such dynamics complicate popular depictions of the ‘local worker’ as simply operating in the interests of ‘white, Western publics’, and suggest that further analyses of humanitarianism from the starting point of ‘the local’ may provide important insights regarding the multiple relations and dynamics that shape how and why aid as work reifies, but also potentially challenges the racialized power hierarchies embedded in the global division of labour.

Patricia Ward is a postdoctoral research associate at Bielefeld University (Germany) in the Faculty of Sociology. Her research interests are in the areas of transnational labour, mobility, humanitarian aid and development. Her recent projects examine the configuration of humanitarian supply chains and labour relations in Jordan’s aid sector.

References

Benton, A. (2016) ‘African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism’, Critical African Studies 8(3):266–77.

Bian, J. (2022) ‘The Racialization of Expertise and Professional Non-Equivalence in the Humanitarian Workplace’, Journal of International Humanitarian Action 7(1):3.

Carr S.C., McWha I., MacLachland, M. and A. Furnham (2010) ‘International-Local Remuneration Differences Across Six Countries: Do They Undermine Poverty Reduction Work?’, International Journal of Psychology 45(5):321–340.

Farah, R. (2020) ‘Expat, Local, and Refugee: “Studying Up” the Global Division of Labor and Mobility in the Humanitarian Industry in Jordan’, Migration and Society 3(1):130–44.

Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2021) ‘Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy’, Security Dialogue 52(1_suppl):98–106.

Pascucci, E. (2019) ‘The Local Labour Building the International Community: Precarious Work within Humanitarian Spaces’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 51(3):743–60.

Quisumbing King K. and A. I. R. White (2021) ‘Introduction: Toward a Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism’, in White, A. I.R. and Quisumbing King, K. (eds) Global Historical Sociology of Race and Racism. Vol. 38, Political Power and Social Theory, Emerald Publishing Limited. 1–21.

Warne-Peters, R. (2020) Implementing Inequality: The Invisible Labor of International Development. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Cite as: Ward, Patricia 2024. “Power, Pace, and Place: Local Consultants and Racialized Expertise” Focaalblog 11 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/11/11/patricia-ward-power-pace-and-place-local-consultants-and-racialized-expertise/