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- Convenors:
-
Watfa Najdi
(Erasmus University of Rotterdam)
Zeynep Kasli (International Institute of Social Studies)
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- Format:
- Experimental format
- Stream:
- Crisis, conflict, and humanitarian response
Short Abstract:
The panel explores how community-led responses in the Global South resist and create possibilities for alternative modes of social transformation while developing their own approaches towards crisis response, solidarity and collective care beyond conventional development and humanitarian frameworks.
Description:
The panel explores how community-led responses to the overlapping crises of the Global South resist and create possibilities for alternative modes of social transformation beyond conventional development and humanitarian frameworks. Drawing on the experience of refugee-led organizations and local initiatives as a response to compound crises in Lebanon and beyond, the panel examines how marginalized communities navigate and resist traditional humanitarian governance while developing their own approaches towards crisis response and collective care.
Key questions the panel seeks to address:
1- How do responses by refugee and local communities to overlapping crises such as, economic collapse, displacement, political instability, and war, challenge dominant development and humanitarian paradigms?
2- What could development theory and practice learn from emergent, community-led humanitarian responses born within contexts of chronic uncertainty?
3- How do grassroots crisis response initiatives envision a different development model in which solidarity, dignity, and collective care are core?
4- What are the methodological and epistemological challenges to researching community-led responses to crisis, and how do these contribute to new approaches to development research?
While theoretical presentations are welcome, the panel is also intended as a space for ground-level mobilization experiences shared through stories, letters, pictures, and other creative formats. The aim is to create a warm, intimate space that breaks from traditional academic conference dynamics and better reflects the topic of community-led responses and collective care.
Accepted contributions:
Contribution long abstract:
In conflict zones like southern Lebanon, multiple actors—ranging from UN peacekeeping missions to NGOs and CSOs—compete for space, resources, and influence in addressing humanitarian and developmental needs. This paper examines the "turf wars" that emerge between the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), local civil society organizations (CSOs), and international NGOs, focusing on how these conflicts reflect broader tensions around solidarity, neutrality, and decolonization.
Using the 2024 war on Lebanon as a case study, the research explores how UNIFIL’s peacekeeping mandate intersects—and often conflicts—with the priorities and approaches of NGOs and CSOs operating in the same space. It highlights examples of friction, such as competition over funding, conflicting operational goals, and divergent approaches to engaging with local communities. These tensions reveal underlying power imbalances, where UNIFIL’s international backing and resources often overshadow local efforts, raising questions about decolonization and the role of solidarity in humanitarian action.
The paper contributes to the panel’s exploration of polycrises by analyzing how overlapping crises—geopolitical, social, and humanitarian—amplify these tensions. It calls for rethinking coordination and collaboration models to advance equitable partnerships that respect local agency while addressing systemic inequalities. The paper highlights the barriers to achieving equitable partnerships in polarized and crisis-affected environments, offering insights for reimagining collaboration in ways that prioritize justice and local agency.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores how RLOs in Lebanon challenge top-down humanitarian frameworks by fostering solidarity-based crisis responses. Through case studies, it highlights how these initiatives reimagine resilience and inform equitable, community-driven approaches to global challenges.
Contribution long abstract:
Title: Reimagining Humanitarian Governance: Refugee-Led Innovations in Crisis Response
This paper explores how refugee-led organizations (RLOs) in Lebanon navigate intersecting crises—protracted displacement, economic collapse, and political instability—to challenge dominant humanitarian paradigms. Rejecting top-down, technocratic approaches, RLOs foster community-driven crisis responses rooted in solidarity, dignity, and collective care.
Through ethnographic case studies, participatory fieldwork, and testimonies from RLO members, the paper highlights how these organizations resist donor-driven constraints while generating alternative forms of knowledge and practice. By centering lived experience and relational networks, RLOs offer effective, adaptive responses to crisis management that prioritize community-defined needs over depersonalized success metrics.
The analysis emphasizes that RLOs do more than respond to crises—they actively reshape humanitarianism and development by reimagining resilience and self-determination. These grassroots initiatives envision solidarity-based models that challenge the systemic inequities embedded in traditional governance structures.
Methodologically, the paper reflects on the challenges of capturing the relational and dynamic nature of RLO responses. It explores how creative formats, such as storytelling and community-centered participatory methods, contribute to new approaches in development research.
Ultimately, this paper argues for a rethinking of development theory and practice, showcasing how the experiences of RLOs in Lebanon can inform more equitable, contextually relevant, and sustainable responses to global challenges. This contribution aligns closely with the panel’s focus on community-led responses and transformative social action by grounding the discussion in local perspectives and innovative practices.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores how Syrian refugee-led organisations in Lebanon navigate shrinking civic space, creatively resist restrictive aid structures, and foster grassroots crisis responses rooted in dignity, while emphasising the need for systemic accountability towards host states and donors.
Contribution long abstract:
The 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees marked pivotal moments in the global refugee regime by recognising the importance of directly funding local actors and fostering meaningful refugee participation. Despite these policy advancements, refugee-led organisations (RLOs) in the Global South continue to face substantial challenges, particularly in contexts like Lebanon where shrinking civic space increasingly constrains their operations.
This paper examines how Syrian RLOs in Lebanon navigate these adverse conditions and sustain efforts to facilitate refugee access to rights. Through 16 ethnographic semi-structured interviews with 12 interlocutors from six Syrian RLOs, conducted over a 10-month period, this study analyses the dual sites of shrinking space: within host states and the global refugee regime, including UN agencies, donor states, and international NGOs (INGOs).
Findings highlight RLOs' strategic adaptability, including creative navigation of political, legal, and civic challenges. However, the expectation for RLOs to independently reform host states' hostile refugee policies and problematic aid structures remains unrealistic. The research underscores the urgent need for systemic accountability, recommending the adoption of the Global Refugee-Led Network's meaningful participation guidelines for donors and host governments, and Asylum Access’s equitable partnership frameworks for INGOs.
This study concludes by calling for further inquiry into refugee leadership as a community-led practice, emphasising its potential not only within humanitarian responses but also as part of larger transnational diaspora movements advocating for political solutions to forced displacement's root causes.
Contribution short abstract:
This chapter presents an analysis of the lived realities of Syrian and Afghan individuals in Turkey, shifting focus to the organisational level by examining the interpretations within Syrian and Afghan associations.
Contribution long abstract:
Adopting the term "Association" in line with the Turkish Civil Code, the analysis explores how themes of identity, reality, and concealment manifest in these associations' experiences. It critiques the homogenising impact of labels such as "refugee" and "refugee-led organisations" (RLOs), which obscure the associations' internal diversity, members' distinct immigration statuses, and the constraints imposed by the Turkish legal framework.
Using feminist and counter-narrative approaches, the chapter reveals how these associations resist imposed labels, challenge dominant discourses, and navigate structural inequalities within a restrictive environment. Members’ stories highlight tensions between their quest for autonomy and the symbolic annihilation stemming from legal and social frameworks. Through vivid metaphors like “living on a ventilator” and “release the cat,” members express the yearning for self-determination amid constraints.
This chapter underscores the need to move beyond monolithic portrayals of displaced associations, advocating for a nuanced understanding of their complex identities and broader power dynamics. By problematising existing labels, it calls for a contextual approach that recognises their unique behaviours, integration processes, and contributions, while amplifying counter-narratives that challenge the invisibility of their lived realities.
Contribution short abstract:
In Baringo County, cattle are key to livelihoods but are threatened by cattle rustling, causing food insecurity. Using Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach, this study explores local strategies, revealing women's microfinance and adaptive farming as critical for resilience.
Contribution long abstract:
In Baringo County, cattle play a vital role in the local economy and culture and fall under “communities’ livelihood assets." They are a primary source of income for many families through the sale of livestock, milk, and meat. However, cattle rustling in the area has continuously disrupted and undermined local communities’ livelihoods, leading to food insecurity. To avert the food crisis, the Kenyan government only provides food aid to local people. However, despite the effort, people remain vulnerable. This paper focused on understanding the inherent potential of the local people to change their livelihoods within their respective social and economic milieu in response to the cattle rustling crisis. Amartya Sen's Capabilities Approach was deemed appropriate for the focus of this research as it provides a robust framework for analysing grassroots responses to crises. It underscores the importance of enhancing access to resources, education, and healthcare to address communities' complex and interrelated challenges. The study adopted a mixed-methods approach, merging participatory action research (PAR) with qualitative case studies. Data were collected through focus group discussions, semi-structured interviews with 80 local leaders, and participant observations. Findings revealed that indigenous knowledge systems, women-led microfinance groups, and digital innovations significantly enhanced community capacities. Women’s savings initiatives alleviated economic shocks, while adaptive farming practices strengthened food security amidst the cattle rustling crisis. The paper enhanced development theory by integrating the Capabilities Approach with empirical evidence from rural communities in cattle rustling-prone areas in Kenya.
Contribution short abstract:
In our three-year project with people living in displacement in Myanmar, it became clear how they support themselves and each other through multiple networks and resources flows, often outside the formal aid system. What does such mutual aid tell us about how societies work even outside of crisis?
Contribution long abstract:
The military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar intensified a long-standing situation of conflict-induced displacement, with a resulting dramatic increase of people seeking shelter away from their hometowns and villages. In this situation, existing networks of informal support become ever more important for people’s immediate survival, and mid-term livelihoods. Our research project on Protracted Displacement Economies investigated, how social networks become conduits for cross-border support; how existing modes of aid are being transformed, and how new ones come into being. These are not necessarily, or not at all, carried by international organisations, but rather a multitude of actors which are not always visible in the conventional humanitarian system of aid. They include networks sustained by kinship links, ethnic solidarities, faith-based groups, diasporic support, as well as the role of ethnic armed groups. Many of the people involved have past or current experience of displacement themselves. Our broader aim is therefore, to make visible patterns of mutual support and solidarity that extend among displacement-affected populations, through testimonies, images and objects.
Contribution short abstract:
In this chapter, I employ a feminist care ethics to explore the everyday dynamics and interactions of humanitarian action in crises-affected Putumayo department in Colombia. Research participants oppose universalist, top-down humanitarian actions and illustratre alternative and situated practices.
Contribution long abstract:
Populations in Putumayo, Colombia face different humanitarian crises, as a result of armed violence, drug trafficking, the impact of disasters and the neglect of state institutions. In this convergence, I was able to identify the ways in which such crises are managed, the actors who decided to respond and who were perceived as deserving of humanitarian support.
Research participants challenged the notion of exceptional and temporary responses needed to such crises. In addition, they presented a critical view on the lack of state and humanitarian responses and questioned short-term forms of humanitarian support, for example, cash transfers. Conversely, they aimed at long-lasting responses and also brought in the non-material support they need to overcome the crisis.
Inscribed in non-dominant forms of doing humanitarian action, this chapter seeks to understand how the vernacular practices of populations in Putumayo in times of crises can be situated within the notion of a feminist ethics of care as an alternative.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper highlights community-led flood resilience strategies in Malawi. The community employed living with floods mitigation measures such as construction of raised houses, community led restoration initiatives, culture practices including praying to their god, Mbona and offering sacrifices.
Contribution long abstract:
Flooding poses a threat to human life such that nations implement different mitigation and adaptation measures to protect human life. One of the mitigation measures in Malawi was planned resettlement. However, in the quest to remain in the flood plains to protect their place attachment due to livelihoods needs, social bonding and place identity, the flood plain dwellers employed their own in situ mitigation measures which has a great impact on the people’s life and their socioeconomic status. These community-initiated mitigation and adaptation measures include construction of raised houses locally known at ‘tchete’, building of flood barriers, planting trees and grass along riverbanks. Additionally, people believed in the supernatural powers by their ancestors as one of the mitigation measures to flooding. A belief that ancestral protection could be obtained by using traditional medicine to keep the floods away and praying to the ancestors for help by offering sacrifices locally known as “nsembe” is strongly expressed as a mitigation measure in the study area. It was learnt that the people’s belief and culture has had a great impact on how the Lower Shire River valley community copes with flooding. Therefore, this study highlights different narratives of disaster response where communities have strong voice and employs their own mitigation and adaption measures when in crisis whose ideologies differs from the policy makers point of view. Therefore, these measures highlight grassroots responses to disasters, the potential for alternative modes of social transformation that prioritize community agency, self-determination, and sustainable crisis response.