Paper short abstract:

Drawing on multi-sited research in Somaliland’s borderland regions and expanding Fassin’s (2011) concept of ‘humanitarian government’, this paper reveals how the norms, values and emotions associated with multiple forms of aid are produced, resisted, circulated, and appropriated ‘on the ground’.

Paper long abstract:

It is well-known that the provision of humanitarian aid produces hierarchies between expatriate aid workers, exploited local employees, and disposable local life (Fassin, 2011). Yet does aid from the diaspora present a radical alternative to the international aid system, or can it also entrench existing inequalities and create new hierarchies? International and diasporic aid tend to be studied separately or characterised as parallel, even competing processes. Drawing on multi-sited research in Somaliland’s borderland regions I show that international and diasporic humanitarian interventions not only share the same ‘humanitarian space ‘(Hilhorst and Jansen, 2010) but are entangled in complex and counterintuitive ways. I develop a moral economy approach that expands Didier Fassin’s concept of ‘humanitarian government’(Fassin, 2011) to reveal how the norms, values and emotions associated with multiple forms of aid are produced, resisted, circulated, and appropriated ‘on the ground’. On the one hand, I find that diasporic aid positions itself as an ‘anti-humanitarian machine’ (c.f. Ferguson), critiquing and exposing the underlying political and moral imperatives of international aid. Yet despite fundamentally contrasting logics of humanitarian assistance, in certain circumstances there is also significant coordination and overlap, including the recent emergence of entities that fuse the logic of diasporic aid with the legal-bureaucratic structures of international aid. Both diasporic and international aid are therefore distinct yet related forms of humanitarian governance that emerge out of the same context of structural global inequality and share the same basic tension between compassion and repression.