Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper, based on ethnographic analysis of the aid sector in post-earthquake Haiti between 2011 and 2018, will take international intervention professionals at the heart of the analysis and unravel their intimate relationalities to anthropologists.

Paper long abstract:

In 2016, more than 663,000 people worked for the United Nations (UN), the International Red Cross, and major international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) on an international assignment in countries of humanitarian and development intervention. Those “mobile professionals” (Fechter/Walsh 2010) inhabiting “aidland” (Apthorpe 2011), constituting a transnational elite network of privileged work migrants, are often driven by a common set of values, a particular perspective on modernity (Stirrat 2000) and share similar backgrounds, education and trajectories (Goetze 2017).

Studies on the aid system in places like Haiti – a case in point considering the use of Haiti as a laboratory for intervention (Müller/Steinke 2018) – rarely focus on the ones steering the interventions as significant factors of analysis. Especially anthropologists often share time, space, social background and a certain historicity with them. The paper, based on ethnographic analysis of the aid sector in post-earthquake Haiti between 2011 and 2018, argues that the anthropological neglect of the role of the “personal” (Fechter 2012) in those interventions is rooted in an incomplete reflexive turn in anthropology. Little ethnographic attention is given to the interveners, in terms of a “community of practice” (Autesserre 2014) as much as on their individual characteristics (Sending 2017) and how both factors influence the “assemblages of intervention” (Doucet 2106).

Rather than solely inquiring the “otherness” of beneficiaries of intervention, anthropologists should consider including the roots of “sameness” to those “intervention professionals” into their analysis, as the discipline as a whole is intimately related to colonial, developmentalist and humanitarian encounters.