Paper details

Paper authors	Malay Firoz
In panel on	The Politics of Difference in Humanitarian Practice
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Humanitarian actors in the Middle East have recently advocated for a “resilience-based” approach to aid, defined as a holistic response that strengthens the ability of refugees to sustain themselves. While this approach is often sanctioned in the interests of promoting refugee agency, my paper explores the ethno-racial imaginaries of humanitarianism which map distinct refugee groups according to their capacity for labour and will for independence. In particular, I argue that the “Arab entrepreneurialism” of Syrian refugees is rendered legible within a horizon of structured antiblackness, which draws on European aid workers’ invocations of “Africa” as both synonymous with bare life and yet less entitled to aid. Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan and Lebanon, I interrogate this antiblackness as emblematic of the latent hierarchies embedded within universalist prescriptions of human rights. I further relate this argument to the humanitarian abandonment of “minority refugees” such as the Sudanese in Jordan, demonstrating how aid programs can rehabilitate one people at the expense of another. In so doing, I recast the classic dilemma of triage as not simply the optimisation of limited resources, but the crystallisation of a racially inflected moral geography which accords some refugees more value than others.

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