Paper short abstract:

This paper argues we can mobilise the concept of commodification with the aim of understanding how specific constructions of 'the refugee' (vulnerable, political, resilient/neoliberal, etc.) are more valued than others and deemed worthier of aid in today's humanitarian space in Burkina Faso.

Paper long abstract:

Within the literature interested in humanitarianism and the refugee regime in the African context, the terms 'commodity' and 'commodification' have been used to look at a variety of practices from different actors. For instance, Waldron (1987) looked at food and material assistance being sold or exchanged by refugees, and Callamard (1994) at refugee ID cards traded to increase access to aid and social services. Daley (2013) analysed the role of celebrities as a form of commodification of humanitarianism, and Scott-Smith (2013) relied on the notion of commodify fetishism to study the uses and meanings of humanitarian objects. Somewhat differently, my paper argues that we can also mobilise the concept of commodification with a different aim: that of understanding how specific constructions of 'the refugee' (vulnerable, resilient/neoliberal, political, etc.) are more valued than others and deemed worthier of aid in today's humanitarian space in Burkina Faso. Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out with Malian refugees living in Burkina Faso, I show how such analytical lenses allowed me to understand the process of 'objectification' that refugeeness went through, and that eventually ended up producing a specific 'legitimate refugee'. Simultaneously, the social and political relations of production behind it (which actors, interactions, discourses, or power unbalances played into those constructions) were concealed. In other words, I suggest that commodification processes made 'the neoliberal refugee' and 'the vulnerable refugee' into the ideal figures of refugeeness in Burkina Faso, and that today those figures are the ones deemed worthy of assistance by the refugee regime.