Paper details

Paper authors	Roberto Calarco
In panel on	“Humanitarian borders” between care and control
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Scholars widely discussed the ambiguous role played by humanitarianism and its contribution to migration control. Recent literature questioned the interpretation of humanitarianism as merely legitimising the current European border regime, and underlined the need to further investigations on the (de)politicising role of humanitarian actors’ discourses and practices.
By focusing on the case of Oxfam borderwork performed in Sicily between 2016 and 2018, this article further explores: a) if and how humanitarian borderwork contributes to (de)bordering processes across and within the southern Italian borderline; b) if and how humanitarian borderwork has a role in perpetuating or challenging the current border management system.
The research methodology is built on multi-sited ethnography, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The fieldwork in Sicily covers a period of ten months between 2017 and 2018.
The article describes how Oxfam re-oriented and re-located its interventions in Sicily and how it contributed to redrawing the humanitarian border across time and space. The paper concludes by arguing that a) Oxfam borderwork was characterized by a continuous tension between its contribution to the (re)production and its contribution to the dissolution of national and urban borders; b) Oxfam humanitarian interventions were entangled with political ones and contributed to challenging the current border management system.

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