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In rich ethnographic detail, Border Humanitarians explores the narratives of Burmese activists in exile who rely on transnational political and social networks to respond to gender violence among the hundreds of thousands of migrants living and working precariously on the Thai border with Myanmar. The activists this book follows must navigate a multiplicity of representations; they are simultaneously "illegal" in Thailand, underpaid feminized laborers in a global garment supply chain, and targets of global North humanitarian intervention with funding to "rescue" and "empower" them. Looking at how these multiple roles overlap, Saltsman asks how state border enforcement regimes, global humanitarianism, and neoliberal capitalist trajectories produce varied sets of constraints and opportunities in migrants’ lives. Here, like in many spaces that are simultaneously zones of refuge and hubs for flexible labor, the borderlands are both a site of dispossession for migrants as well as a resource for collective agency. As Saltsman details, gender itself emerges as an important tool for migrants and aid workers alike to navigate insecurity and assert varying ways of making order amidst the upheaval of displacement and ongoing exclusion.
Winner of the 2023 International Political Sociology Book Award The seamy underside of humanitarianism What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the politics of humanitarian responses to border violence and unequal mobility, arguing that such responses mask underlying injustices, depoliticise violent borders and bolster liberal and paternalist approaches to suffering. Focusing on the diversity of actors involved in humanitarian assistance alongside the times and spaces of action, the book draws a direct line between privileges of movement and global inequalities of race, class, gender and disability rooted in colonial histories and white supremacy and humanitarian efforts that save lives while entrenching such inequalities. Based on eight years of research with border police, European Union officials, professional humanitarians, and grassroots activists in Europe’s borderlands, including Italy and Greece, the book argues that this kind of saving lives builds, expands and deepens already restrictive borders and exclusive and exceptional identities through what the book calls humanitarian borderwork.
The author assesses the politics of different humanitarian interventions in the Mexico-US border region developing a unique perspective on the significance of people, places and things to contemporary border struggles.
Drawing on the concept of the ‘politics of compassion’, this Handbook interrogates the political, geopolitical, social and anthropological processes which produce and govern borders and give rise to contemporary border violence.
At a time of escalating conflict between states and NGOs engaged in migrant search and rescue operations across the Mediterranean, this book explores the emerging trend of citizen-led forms of helping others at the borders of Europe. In recent years, Europe’s borders have become new sites of intervention for traditional humanitarian actors and governmental agencies, but also, increasingly, for volunteer and activist initiatives led by "ordinary" citizens. This book sets out to interrogate the shifting relationship between humanitarianism, the securitization of border and migration regimes, and citizenship. Critically examining the "do it yourself" character of refugee aid practices performed by non-professionals coming together to help in informal and spontaneous manners, the volume considers the extent to which these new humanitarian practices challenge established conceptualisations of membership, belonging, and active citizenship. Drawing on case studies from countries around Europe including Greece, Turkey, Italy, France and Russia, this collection constitutes an innovative and theoretically engaged attempt to bring the field of humanitarian studies into dialogue with studies of grassroots refugee aid and, more explicitly, with political forms of solidarity with migrants and refugees which fall between aid and activism. This book is key reading for advanced students and researchers of humanitarian aid, European migration and refugees, and citizen-led activism.
The book examines the reasons behind accusations of dysfunctional humanitarian identities and the loss of space for impartial action. Through a combination of practical examples in case studies from the field with a theoretical and philosophical approach to questions of voluntary service, community and identity, it reconsiders the exceptional discourse that constructs these identities and drives humanitarian response in environments of complex emergency. By recognizing both the strength and the limits of its social and political agency, the study presents opportunities for the construction of a less exceptional space, or ‘niche’ within the humanitarian sector, where the politics is around one of an ordinary humanitarian society instead of an ordered humanitarian system.
This book examines the management of migratory flows in the Mediterranean within an international security perspective. The intense migratory flows registered during the year 2015 and the tragedies in the Mediterranean Sea have tested the mechanisms of the Union’s immigration and asylum policies and its ability to respond to humanitarian crises. Moreover, these flows of varying intensities and geographies represent a threat to the internal security of the EU and its member states. By using Spain and Italy as case studies, the author theorizes that the EU, given its inability to adopt and implement a common policy to effectively manage migratory flows on its Southern border, uses a deterrence strategy based on minimum common denominators.
This book identifies the history, conventions, and uses of security discourses, and argues that such language and media frames distort information and mislead the public, misidentify the focus of concern, and omit narratives able to recognize the causes and solutions to humanitarian crises. What has been identified as a crisis at the border is better understood as an on-going crisis of violence, building over decades, that has forced migrants from their homes in the countries of the Northern Triangle. Authors Robin Andersen and Adrian Bergmann look back to U.S. military policies in the region and connect this legacy to the cross-border development of transnational gangs, government corruption, and on-going violence that often targets environmental and legal defenders. They argue that the discourses of demonization and securitization only help perpetuate brutality in both Central America and the United States, especially in the desert borderlands of the southwest. They offer ways in which stories of migrants can be reframed within the language of justice, empathy, and humanitarianism. A compelling examination of language, media, and politics, this book is both highly contemporary and widely applicable, perfect for students and scholars of global media, political communications, and their many intersections.
Explores how humanitarian aid workers help and hinder the care of unaccompanied children as they arrive in the United States Every year, tens of thousands of children cross into the United States without a legal guardian at their side, often fleeing violence and poverty in their countries of origin. In Unaccompanied, Emily Ruehs-Navarro shows us one aspect of their heartbreaking journeys, as seen through the eyes of the aid workers who try—but too often fail—to help them. Drawing on interviews with aid workers, migrant children, and others, Ruehs-Navarro follows unaccompanied youth as they seek help from a wide range of professionals. From legal relief organizations to family reunification specialists, she shows us how different aid workers may choose to work for, with, or against unaccompanied immigrant youth, deciding whether they should be treated as refugees, child dependents, or, in some cases, criminals. Ruehs-Navarro highlights how aid workers, and the systems they represent, often harm the very children they are designed to help. Unaccompanied brings into focus the plight of immigrant youth at the border, illuminating our failure to manage the human casualties of a growing crisis.
In May 2003, President George W. Bush declared victory in Iraq. But while we won the war, we catastrophically lost the peace. Our failure prompted a fundamental change in our foreign policy. Confronted with the shortcomings of "shock and awe," the U.S. military shifted its focus to "stability operations": counterinsurgency and the rebuilding of failed states. In less than a decade, foreign assistance has become militarized; humanitarianism has been armed. Combining recent history and firsthand reporting, Armed Humanitarians traces how the concepts of nation-building came into vogue, and how, evangelized through think tanks, government seminars, and the press, this new doctrine took root inside the Pentagon and the State Department. Following this extraordinary experiment in armed social work as it plays out from Afghanistan and Iraq to Africa and Haiti, Nathan Hodge exposes the difficulties of translating these ambitious new theories into action. Ultimately seeing this new era in foreign relations as a noble but flawed experiment, he shows how armed humanitarianism strains our resources, deepens our reliance on outsourcing and private contractors, and leads to perceptions of a new imperialism, arguably a major factor in any number of new conflicts around the world. As we attempt to build nations, we may in fact be weakening our own. Nathan Hodge is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who specializes in defense and national security. He has reported from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia, and a number of other countries in the Middle East and former Soviet Union. He is the author, with Sharon Weinberger, of A Nuclear Family Vacation, and his work has appeared in Slate, the Financial Times, Foreign Policy, and many other newspapers and magazines.