Paper details
| Paper authors | Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert |
| In panel on | “Humanitarian borders” between care and control |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
(Co-authored with Kristin B. Sandvik & Mathias H. Tjønn)
What is a humanitarian crisis and why does it matter how we define it? This crisis label has become a vehicle for political and popular mobilization and for generating resources. In the wake of the “long summer of migration” in 2015, Norway received an unprecedented number of asylum claims. While volunteers mobilized to deliver first necessities to refugees arriving in Oslo, the authorities, first taken by surprise, would soon mobilize to organize the reception and thereafter severely restricting access to the country and the asylum process. The number of applicants decreased with 95% in the first quarter of 2016, compared with the months before. Overall, the influx resulted in zero fatalities.
In this paper, we address the knowledge gap around the use of the “humanitarian crisis” label, to qualify short-term non/low mortality events in the Global North. Seeing how its use emerged, and then faded, in this context, we suggest calling this a “pop up” humanitarian space. We hypothesize that history, and cultural and political national contexts matter for how the label is adopted and adapted, and that domestic models for international aid shape expectations about what actors do ‘at home’ also, and in short how the humanitarian space ‘pops up’.
