Tag Archives: humanitarianism

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/

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/

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/

Blog, Features, Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Malay Firoz and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima: Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism

Exhibition view of Joseph Kosuth’ installation One and three Frames at Castelli Gallery December 8, 2015 – March 13, 2016

Humanitarian action is marked by a striking disjunction between the universalising humanist vocabulary that undergirds its ethical commitments, and the taxonomies of racialised difference that govern its dispensation of moral concern and material aid. This disjunction is not merely indicative of the inevitable discontinuity between principle and practice. Rather, the valuation of the human as a suffering body—shorn of race, gender, ethnicity, and other identifying markers of the social—precipitates an epistemic ignorance towards racialised difference that in fact consolidates and reinforces difference. After all, as Polly Pallister-Wilkins (2021) suggests, drawing on Sylvia Wynter, the figure of the human is itself a “genre of being” inseparable from the Western colonial metaphysics which instituted it. The “human” in this formulation is a differentiated rather than universal category, such that humanitarian empathy for “distant others” is not simply a moral calling but a politically filtered and calibrated gesture. Yet, humanitarian studies has often reproduced the aid industry’s liberal terms of self-representation by eliding the tangible and structuring effects of racialised difference in humanitarian action. Where such questions are raised, as Adia Benton argues, they are addressed “at the level of discourse, glossing racial hierarchies simply in terms of race masquerading as cultural difference, rather than explicitly in terms of racialized practices and identifications” (2016, 269; emphasis original).

An oft-repeated objection to the analytical centring of race alleges that doing so reproduces an American-centric conceptual apparatus that may misrecognize axes of difference in other contexts. White supremacy has an undoubtedly ugly resonance in American politics, such that calls to decolonise fields of inquiry are routinely occasioned by stochastic and spectacular acts of white supremacist violence in the US. However, it is well established that categories of race were integral to the epistemic encounters which constituted the modern world, and continue to suture what Lisa Lowe (2015) calls “the intimacies of four continents” (da Silva 2007; Robinson 2000; Wynter 2003). The global virality of racial justice movements such as Black Lives Matter is precisely emblematic of their translatability as a political claim, even if the demands and constituencies they serve are inexorably contextual. Moreover, it is striking that such concerns about the parochial provenance of concepts are rarely posed to European canonical theory (Weheliye 2014). Much intellectual labour is expended, for instance, to map Marxian or Foucauldian categories onto historicities beyond European modernity, yet such improvisatory migrations are rarely afforded to other, more insurrectionist knowledge traditions. This form of epistemic ignorance is itself inescapably within the racial, or as Charles Mills calls it, a “white epistemology of ignorance” (2007, 35).

The essays in this collection stage the question of difference for the field of humanitarian studies. They demonstrate how humanitarianism’s moral valuation of life, while invoking the ideal of a purportedly shared humanity, is ultimately embedded in and filtered through social orders differentiated along lines of race, gender, nationality and power—what Adia Benton in the afterword to this collection calls the “humanitarian vernacular.” Benton’s proposed analytical focus on the humanitarian vernacular is, in part, a play on words referencing Anne-Meike Fechter and Eileen May’s essay in this collection, which analyses aid work by local actors in Myanmar as a form of “vernacular humanitarianism” that stands outside of the institutionalised framework of Western humanitarianism. Fechter and May use the case of Myanmar to argue that we should think of the aid sector in the plural—as “humanitarianisms”—to reflect the diversity of actors and values that orient aid work globally. They posit that this also allows us to consider other principles and moral motivations behind humanitarian efforts that are not normally considered “humanitarian” by Western-led organisations, including for instance ideals of affinity and shared biography.

Within refugee resettlement regimes, we also see how difference may be deemed undesirable when it is framed as a barrier to integration (Allison Stuewe), or, conversely, how difference may be welcomed when specific categories of refugees align with the political or economic interests of a host state (David Tsoi). Tsoi’s and Stuewe’s contributions to this collection challenge the mythical ideal of refuge granted solely on the basis of shared humanity; instead, the refugee or migrant must conform to specific criteria that make them deserving or desirable to the state. Finally, Patricia Ward and Ezgi Güner tackle the intimate workings of race in humanitarian labour. In Jordan, Ward argues that local consultants represent a form of racialised expertise capable of “fast-fixing” last-minute evaluations and reports that INGOs and UN agencies cannot complete on their own. These fast-fixers, whose career prospects are limited by the opportunities available to “local staff,” reject the positional authority of “expats” by stressing the local as the true home of humanitarian dispositions. Güner meanwhile skilfully analyses discourses of sameness espoused by Turkish humanitarians in Africa south of the Sahara. Here, much like their Western counterpart, the Muslim humanitarian appears as a white saviour aiding the prototypical Black African in need of help, while advancing a specifically Ottoman-Islamic pedigree of white supremacy in Turkey.

Taken together, the essays in this collection offer various instantiations of what it means to think with difference as an analytical framework, a theoretical posture, and an empirical object. If humanitarianism is anchored in an invocation of being human, these essays suggest that difference does not merely constrain such universalist ambitions, but rather, is constitutive of humanitarianism’s vernacular grammars, and thereby, constitutive of humanitarianism itself. Following in this stead, more research is needed on the way taxonomies of difference are internally striated and situated in tension with one another. By posing the question of how antiblackness in particular, rather than white saviourism in general, organises the determination of humanitarian entitlements, further work may reveal the patterned morphologies of difference that reproduce themselves across diverse scales and temporalities.

Malay Firoz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University. His research focuses on the politics of “resilience-based” approaches to humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees in Jordan and Lebanon, and explores the intersections between humanitarianism, ethics, and forced migration in the Middle East.

Pedro Silva Rocha Lima is a Lecturer in Disaster Studies at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. He researches how humanitarian logics and values travel from war and crisis settings to the context of ongoing chronic urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He is also interested in related topics of the state, normality, relations, and humour.

References

Benton, Adia. 2016. “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism.” Critical African Studies 8 (3): 266–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2016.1244956.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2007. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, 11–38. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Pallister-Wilkins, Polly. 2021. “Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy.” Security Dialogue 52 (S): 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024419.

Robinson, Cedric. 2000. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Silva, Denise Ferreira da. 2007. Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Cite as: Firoz, Malay & Silva Rocha Lima, Pedro 2024. “Taxonomies of Difference in Global Humanitarianism” Focaalblog 23 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/10/23/malay-firoz-and-pedro-silva-rocha-lima-taxonomies-of-difference-in-global-humanitarianism/