Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the moral imagination that local humanitarians invested to sustain their moral project in a refugee camp in Montenegro for fifteen years. It focuses on ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2007), such as disappointment and burnout, that indicate situations in which agency is blocked and suspended.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the moral imagination that local humanitarians invested to sustain their moral project in a refugee camp in Montenegro for fifteen years. It focuses on the sense of disappointment and burnout among the local humanitarians, or ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai 2007) that stand in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions, such as anger or rage, indicating situations in which agency is blocked and suspended. The case in point was a sense of the local humanitarians that they could neither meet their goals, nor leave the refugee camp. This sense of suspended agency was also shaped by their belief that the international humanitarian industry in the developed world had mechanisms in place to protect workers from burnout.

The paper explores what the emergence of disappointment and burnout among the local humanitarians tells us about humanitarianism and its diverging forms more broadly. Such a focus illuminates that the contemporary Balkans is simultaneously included in the humanitarian imaginaries of the Global North and excluded from actual participation in international humanitarian projects due to structural constraints. Burnout, disappointment, and similar ‘ugly feelings’ emerged among the local humanitarians in Montenegro due to a discrepancy between being invited to join humanitarian imaginaries of the Global North and the structurally shaped impossibility to ever meet the set humanitarian goals.