Contribution short abstract:

This paper argues that humour plays an important role in the work of Malawian civil servants and state-citizen interactions during times of disaster: enabling a commoning of state critique, humour helped reaffirm state-citizen relationships, despite the state’s material and moral shortcomings.

Contribution long abstract:

As one of the poorest countries in the world, the contemporary Malawi state relies on external funding to cover roughly 40% of its budget, with many state services provided by or through non-state organisations. This is exacerbated during regularly recurring times of disaster, when additional humanitarian aid is needed to support its population, but also the state itself, to execute its tasks. The Malawi Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DODMA) is charged with the overall coordination of disaster governance and humanitarian responses, but a large part of the funding and resources to do so are provided by donors and non-state actors. Moreover, the available resources are always insufficient. Grounded in 20 months of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork with DODMA civil servants at both national and district level between 2019 and 2024, I argue in this paper that humour played an important role in facilitating encounters between citizens and civil servants in rather desperate circumstances. In these interactions, humour enabled citizens to criticise the state and the situation they found themselves in, while civil servants were able to acknowledge and express the inadequacy of their work and the arbitrariness of the state’s ability to provide care, without themselves losing face or authority. In commoning state critique in this way, humour helped to reaffirm the durability of state-citizen relationships, despite the state’s material and moral shortcomings.