Contribution short abstract:

This ethnographic paper draws the picture of the tension between two divergent humanitarian practices that strategically chose to coordinate and explores the potential of this conflictual encounter to foster political solidarity.

Contribution long abstract:

In December 2023, I was on the other side of the border for the first time, in the Croatian city of Rijeka. As two women activists from a politically engaged activist movement, we found ourselves working with Caritas uniforms—a well-known Catholic humanitarian organization. This was a strategic decision of a criminalized grassroots NGO to coordinate with a legitimized structure in order to legally exist and monitor the dynamics of migration mobility in Croatian territory. In practice, it turned into an alienating experience, both politically and emotionally. Living in a monastery and working within a hierarchy that reproduced structural inequalities during the encounters with people on the move amplified this dissonance. At the same time, we had to navigate this conflict and ambiguity to maintain our activist practices under cover. We were the last activists working in this humanitarian alliance before it reached a boiling point, leaving us with a whirlwind of complex emotions: Was it a failure? Was it a mistake from the beginning? What did we learn anything from it?

Drawing from this ethnographic experience, this paper aims to see the potential of these convergent yet conflictual bodily encounters between seemingly irreconcilable humanitarian approaches on the other side of the border, where we don’t feel belong. Following critical discussions on humanitarianism(s), I ask if conflictual bodily encounters could provide a generative terrain to forge political activism.