Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the 'spaces of aid' inhabited and created by local NGOs in South Sudan and how these overlap with, replicate and challenge the 'auxiliary space' (Smirl 2015) of international humanitarianism. It highlights both the creativity and risks associated with traversing these spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on participant observation and over 50 life history interviews with the founders, leaders and staff of South Sudanese organisations, from small-scale, 'demotic' humanitarians (Taithe 2019) to large national NGOs. It explores how they negotiate their position as both subcontractors for the international humanitarian system, operating on the margins of 'auxiliary space' (Smirl 2015), and as members of extended kinship networks and local and national communities.

The paper highlights how the founders and staff of many South Sudanese NGOs engage in a creative, complex process of bricolage, drawing together resources from professional, domestic, international and local spaces in order to meet the needs of 'beneficiaries' and kin. To sustain activities in the gaps between international projects, local NGO staff frequently work unpaid or draw on income from farms, businesses or loans. These forms of local resources and labour sustaining projects of the international humanitarian system are often unacknowledged. Yet, local aid workers also draw on and repurpose the resources of the international humanitarian system to facilitate everyday, "vernacular" modes of helping. They also frequently engage in forms of moral labour (Fechter 2016), arising from discrepancies between aspiration and reality.

The paper also reveals the frictions between scales, and how the 'humanitarian impulse' of the international often relies on the precarious labour of those locally employed. Local NGO staff operate in very different conditions from the protected 'auxiliary space' of international humanitarianism. Precariousness is manifested both in exposure to physical risk and in unpredictable, short-term contracts and intermittent salaries.