Paper short abstract:

In this paper I aim to offer a critical take on the way in which the agendas for localization and resilience in contemporary humanitarian practice have been utilized to structure the articulations of development knowledge within international aid and assistance programming in crisis settings.

Paper long abstract:

This paper looks at the ways in which knowledges of "development" are collected, collated, and organized within contemporary humanitarian actions that target communities living in crisis settings. Starting from a critical cultural political economy perspective, the paper will discuss how international aid programmes designed to deliver humanitarian assistance and support to forcibly displaced and other populations who are enduring "vulnerabilities" due to conditions of crisis make use of the popular agendas of "localization" and "resilience" in order to mobilize donor, organizational, and local resources within a depoliticized framework of knowledge articulations. It will consequently be argued that the humanitarian/development nexus initiative, which may be considered the emergent regulating ideal of new international aid and technical cooperation programming, turns less on the practice of the implementation of humanitarian response activities that are expected to lead to development outcomes than on the pragmatic conceptualization of development both as a limit-process whereby communities survive crises and as one way in which experience of crises can be moderated. In making this argument, the paper will analyze several examples, and the overall architecture, of contemporary international assistance programmes targeting the conflict-affected populations of Northwest Syria, tracing the various ways in which the notion of "resilience" has been introduced into this architecture from the mid-2010s through a process of policy dissemination operationalized via both central epistemic communities and peripheral humanitarian communities of practice.