Paper details

Paper authors	Roanne van Voorst
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

This article analyses how aid actors working for INGOs and NGOs perceive refugees who have started to engage as agents for humanitarian aid, after they arrived in European refugee camps. It is based on fieldwork in a refugee camp in Lesbos, as well as on semi-structured interviews with aid actors. Through a critical examination of humanitarian aid discourse and practice, I identify two implicit understandings. First, humanitarian aid is generally conceived of as the planned activities of Western professional development actors; while the aid provided by refugees is regarded as spontaneous, unprofessional and ‘voluntarily’. Second, while Western professional development actors typically consider themselves as capable of adhering to traditional humanitarian principles such as ‘neutrality’ and ‘impartiality’; they believe that refugee-aid actors are not, due to trauma or involvement in conflict. Interestingly, aid actors with a refugee background also believe they are not ‘neutral’ or ‘impartial’; instead, they use an alternative paradigm that circles around the issue of care and empathy, to describe the way they engage in aid. However, they also insist that their ‘professional’ colleagues share these motivations and hence, that the traditional humanitarian principles are unrealistic to accord to, by anyone engaged in aid. One major conclusion of the paper is that essentialized understandings of what an aid-actor is and what should be his/her motivations to engage in aid, limit the potential of refugee engagement in aid as a means of innovating the industry by broadening understandings of what aid entails and how it can be done.

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