Paper details

Paper authors	Robin Vandevoordt
In panel on	Volunteer Humanitarians in Europe: their Role, Significance and Potential Implications for the Humanitarian Sector
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have brought, food, clothes, medicines and numerous others forms of support to newly arrived refugees. While humanitarian action has always been subversive, we argue that the recent wave of civil actions have pushed its subversive effects one step further. Whereas more modest forms of humanitarian action create a “state of exception” that reduces recipients of aid to embodied instances of “bare life” stripped of any political subjectivities, its more subversive counterparts can be better captured as “political moments” that challenge the “distribution of the sensible” by enabling “those that have no part” to take part. To analyse these political moments and the conditions in which they emerge, we argue that it can be useful to look at them through the lens of ‘subversive humanitarianism’. More concretely, we suggest six dimensions with which the subversive character of any humanitarian action can be compared across time and space: the state of exception; the symbolic transformation of public spaces; the creation of a social space; the personal bond; the movement; and the transformation of individuals’ life-worlds. We support our argument by comparing three well-documented cases of humanitarian organisation: the ICRC, MsF and a small range of civil initiatives supporting refugees. With respect to the latter, we draw upon the recent wave of empirical studies on such initiatives across the continent, as well as our own ethnographic data on the Brussels-based Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés.

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