Short Abstract:

We welcome papers that explore the ambiguities of humanitarian practice and its interfaces to the state, municipal authorities, the civil society sector, etc.

Long Abstract:

Humanitarian imaginations have become an important part of struggles over redistribution within European welfare states and beyond. Welfare debates are often framed around categories of ‘refugees,’‘citizens’, and “illegals,” drawing on humanitarian practices and narratives in complex ways both to lionize and to demonize people on the move. Anthropology has extensively written about humanitarianism as a politics of life implicated in the reproduction of the liberal ‘empire of love’ and its racialized capitalist economy. Humanitarianism is clearly premised on and supports empire, but also undermines and critiques it. What would humanitarianism look like without reference to empire? What is the dynamic between hope and disappointment that drives contemporary moral-political projects, which straddle the boundary between humanitarianism, charity, and mutual aid, and exert the paradoxical ‘strength of the weak’? How is humanitarian imagination employed in political debates about redistribution within a state, and what claims are made on the basis of it? What is the relationship between ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘nationalism’, and what might the contours of ‘humanitarian nationalism’ look like without empire?

We welcome papers that aim to unwrite humanitarianism by exploring the ambiguities of humanitarian practice and its interfaces, for instance in relation to the state, municipal authorities, the civil society sector, or the like. We further welcome in-depth, ethnographic, and historically situated analyses of the everyday practices of grassroots humanitarianisms in effect decentring humanitarianism.

This Panel has so far received 3 paper proposal(s).
Propose paper