This Special Section addresses the entanglement of the moral economy of humanitarianism with the political economy of contemporary migration governance (Ramsay 2020a). As humanitarian discourses and actors have become progressively central to migration management (Riva and Hoffstaedter 2021), critical scholars have charted the increasing confluence between humanitarian, securitizing, and neoliberal logics in these spaces (Cabot and Ramsay 2021; Giudici 2021; Pallister-Wilkins 2017; Riva and Routon 2020). The literature pinpoints several depoliticizing effects of this confluence, including the weaponization of humanitarian discourses and actors to secure borders and govern “others” (Gerard and Weber 2019; Pallister-Wilkins 2017; Paynter and Riva 2023; Ticktin 2014) and the creation of neoliberal regimes of care (Brković et al. 2021) that “responsibilize” citizens and civil society actors to fill the gaps in state welfare provision (Hyatt 2001; Muehlebach 2012; Rozakou 2016).
Drawing on scholarship highlighting reactive, short-term humanitarian temporalities of crisis and emergency (Brković et al. 2021; Brun 2016; Dunn 2012) and the paternalistic dimensions of global aid expertise (Fassin 2007; Kothari 2005; Li 2007; Roth 2015) the five articles in this Special Section examine the political effects of humanitarian–neoliberal temporalities and expertise. We find that urgent temporalities and global expertise work to amplify neoliberal values of efficiency, productivity, and universality while marginalizing alternative and local knowledges. Yet, the articles also highlight ways in which humanitarian actors and migrants navigate and challenge these dominant modes of governance.
The themes of temporalities and expertise emerged collaboratively from our “Critical Humanitarianisms” four-day writing workshop held in Minjerribah (Australia) in June 2022.1 Through this process, it became clear to us that there were parallels in our work spanning anthropology, geography, women's studies, sociology, and criminology, and fieldsites across the Global North and South including Asia, Europe, Oceania, and Latin America that spoke beyond the wider theme of our workshop focusing on the humanitarian–neoliberal nexus. We all recognized the precarity imposed by the urgent timeframes and agendas of the humanitarian sector, and the performance of expertise by aid professionals that sidelined lived experience as well as volunteer and local knowledges. We were united in a political commitment to critical analysis directed at systemic change. We thus also sought to bring some hope to the discussion by learning from how humanitarian actors express resistance and solidarity.
The Special Section is hence underpinned by a critical examination of humanitarianism (Cabot and Ramsay 2021; Fassin 2011; Malkki 2015; Ticktin 2014) and an interdisciplinary perspective (Vannini et al. 2018) grounded in a comparative ethnographic approach, which brings together our research from Australia, Manus Island (Papua New Guinea), Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Brazil. We use an intersectional feminist lens to highlight how different dimensions of identity, such as gender, class, and race, play pivotal roles within the humanitarian system. This framework is also attentive to the connections between past colonial histories and current migratory structures (Briggs et al. 2008; Picozza 2021). The contributors to this Special Section are all committed to work that makes visible these historical connections to interrogate the politics of displacement and the subsequent restrictive asylum processes. Accordingly, the articles aim to uncover relations of power, as well as ways to redress how humanitarian discourses and practices serve to reproduce hegemonic and normative structures. We also acknowledge that these themes speak to realities beyond migration. As Heath Cabot and Georgina Ramsay (2021) have noted, the tendency to think of displacement as an exceptional way of being ignores the common conditions of precarity faced by both citizens and noncitizens under contemporary global capitalism.
In addition to our intersectional feminist approach, the editors and authors of this Special Section draw on our different research experiences and positionalities through the use of ethnography and other qualitative methodologies to illustrate different levels of dis/engagement in the field of humanitarianism (see Manoussaki-Adamopoulou et al. 2022). From spatial mapping to digital ethnography, these methodologies allow for deeper and more complex understandings on how humanitarianism, neoliberalism, expertise, and temporality intersect in migration governance and how they are articulated and experienced in different contexts, by both humanitarian actors and migrants/refugees themselves as the targets of these systems. In short, our aims are to interrogate the neoliberal and humanitarian nexus in migration governance through analyzing the role of expertise and temporality, utilizing intersectional feminist approaches attendant to lived experience including ethnographic and qualitative methodologies and comparing a diverse array of fieldsites from across the Global North and South.
The Humanitarian–Neoliberal Nexus
Humanitarianism encompasses a range of meanings from “a moral imperative to intervene” (Ticktin 2014: 274) to a form of governing precarious lives (Fassin 2012: 4). Broadly understood as “helping others,” humanitarian action—including development aid—is an intervention based on the concepts of neutrality and impartiality and is therefore positioned as apolitical. While recent research has juxtaposed large-scale, institutionalized humanitarian interventions with small-scale, informal, and vernacular modes of helping (Brković 2023), humanitarian efforts at both scales have been critiqued for their depoliticizing nature by excluding context for the social or political causes of suffering (Hardt and Negri 2000; Karakayali 2017), reducing refugees to “speechless emissaries” (Malkki 1996), separating humanitarian and political spheres (Brković 2016), aligning humanitarian intentions with capitalist interests and exploitation (Ramsay 2020a), or emphasizing political neutrality (Ambrosini 2022).
Interventions abroad are juxtaposed by domestic humanitarian work and national welfare policies, where neoliberal reforms have led to—among other things—the outsourcing of service provision that has made NGOs and humanitarian agencies increasingly responsible for the management of care. Nonprofit organizations, volunteers, and civil society often fill the vacuum left by public institutions in providing assistance to migrants (Riva and Hoffstaedter 2021). Neoliberalism is not only a political and economic system that claims the market should be freed of government control (Harvey 2005), but also an ideology that has permeated all social spheres (Duggan 2003), affecting subjectivities by reinforcing certain traits, such as being flexible, independent, responsible, (heteronuclear) family-oriented individuals (Ganti 2014; Ong 1999). The presence of neoliberal logics in all institutions has not undermined the state's ability to exercise control but rather allowed for the state's tentacles to reach even further, as a form of “governing through freedom” (Miller and Rose 2008) that pushes responsibilities onto individuals and non-governmental actors (Muehlebach 2012). These newly responsibilized actors provide care in an environment constrained by neoliberal values of efficiency and value for money, supplying services for free as volunteers and/or competing for funding and contracts in a humanitarian marketplace. As Daniela Giudici (2021) and Georgina Ramsay (2020a) have shown, such neoliberal values have encroached so far into the humanitarian domain that discourses of duty and productivity have replaced those of suffering and need, impelling migrants to perform their deservingness by illustrating their capacity to contribute to their host societies.
In addition to the permeation of neoliberal discourses of productivity and efficiency into humanitarian spaces, humanitarian organizations, civil society actors, and volunteers have found themselves implicated in “humanitarian borderwork” (Pallister-Wilkins 2017; Walters 2011). Here, even though humanitarian organizations are primarily focused on giving assistance, they also end up engaging in control, security, and surveillance (see Aradau and Tazzioli 2020; Pallister-Wilkins 2020), including appropriating humanitarian logics to justify state practices of enforcement, risk, and exclusion (Mountz 2020). Humanitarian actors can often fail to critically assess how their work supports the very system they seek to contest by, for instance, considering refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention (Ramsay 2020a) or re- inforcing reformist ideas rather than advocating for systemic change. The conjoining of neo- liberal, humanitarian, and securitizing logics thus entangles humanitarian discourses and actors with border regimes and governmental agendas.
However, humanitarian organizations assisting migrants also seek to resist and challenge neoliberal and bordering agendas. Many social movements and civil society actors practice solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual aid efforts that seek to subvert border regimes and xenophobic attitudes (Altman 2020; Cuttitta 2017; Sandri 2018; Vandevoordt 2019) as well as top- down humanitarian power imbalances (Rozakou 2017). There has been an increasing clamp down on these efforts by authorities who seek to criminalize attempts to assist border-crossers (Schwiertz and Schwenken 2020) and to control grassroots efforts by imposing processes of professionalization on informal organizations (Brković et al. 2021). Hence, we follow Paolo Cuttitta, Antoine Pécoud, and Melissa Phillips (2023) in proposing that civil society actors involved in migration governance encompass dual forces of de/politicization.
Temporalities and Expertise in Migration Governance
In order to tease out the overlap between neoliberal, securitizing, and humanitarian logics in migration governance, we explore the blurred boundaries between state and non-state actors and how dominant temporalities and forms of expertise shape the contours of migration governance today. Recent scholarship has tracked the rise of new civil society actors in humanitarian arenas who are informal, grassroots, and locally based (Brković et al. 2021; Cuttitta et al. 2023; Fechter and Schwittay 2020; Humphris and Yarris 2022; Sandri 2018; Wagner 2018). In Europe, responding to increased flows of migrants since 2015, volunteers and activists have come to the forefront of aid efforts (Ambrosini 2022; Bendixsen and Sandberg 2021; Feischmidt et al. 2020; Fleischmann and Steinhilper 2017; Rozakou 2017), displaying forms of “volunteer humanitarianism” (Sandri 2018) and “citizen aid” (Fechter and Schwittay 2020). In other contexts, migrants themselves have become central to aid provision, both in their own countries and through remittances and “diaspora humanitarianism” (Musa and Kleist 2022; Olliff 2022). In focusing on the involvement of both state and non-state actors—including humanitarian organizations, volunteers, activists, and civil society—we contribute to recent scholarship highlighting the increasing presence of non-state actors in migration governance (Cuttitta et al. 2023; Schweitzer et al. 2022) and offer an intersectional lens to current organizational (Lang et al. 2021), South-South (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2020), and gender-based themes (Bilecen et al. 2019) in migration studies.
Our first theme of temporalities pays attention to anthropological literature and lived accounts that highlight how time has been mobilized as a means of control (Andersson 2014; Khosravi 2017; Ramsay 2020b; Tofighian and Boochani 2021), whereby more powerful actors impose mechanisms of “waiting” and “stuckedness” on migrants as a form of deterrence and punishment (e.g., Hage 2015; Hoffstaedter and Missbach 2022). People on the move are often forced into immobility as they navigate bureaucratic processes and systems that are designed to constrain their movement until they are deemed “legal” and therefore “safe.” The slowness and stuckedness of migrants’ temporalities are contrasted with the fast-paced temporalities of humanitarian workers. Responding to crisis and emergency, humanitarian time is reactive and urgent (Bendixsen and Sandberg 2021; Fassin 2007). Aid workers are expected to hit the ground running, imposing “one size fits all” models of aid and intervention gleaned from other emergency contexts (Dunn 2012). Their horizons are set on addressing needs in the urgent present rather than any long-term future building (Brun 2016). This reactive temporality links humanitarian time with neoliberal time, which also operates on a fast-paced schedule (Klein 2007). When humanitarian organizations operate on short-term contracts in the neoliberalized humanitarian marketplace, they are impelled to perform in a way that signals productivity, efficiency, and value for money. We are interested in unpacking this juxtaposition between intentionally slow, protracted waiting/stuckedness imposed on migrants, and the reactive urgency of humanitarian actors.
Our second theme of expertise draws from literature across development studies and anthropology (Fassin 2007; Fechter and Schwittay 2020; Goulet 1980; Kothari 2005; Li 2007; Mosse 2011; Roth 2015; Smirl 2015) as well as recent interdisciplinary work on the notion of lived expertise (Bian 2022; Sou 2022). Expertise is a learned process (Boyer 2008), performed by aid “professionals” (Roth 2015) who utilize their skilled knowledge as a means to claim legitimacy, credibility, and authority (Mosse 2011). The deployment of expertise in aid contexts has been critiqued for extending neocolonial agendas by imposing neoliberal technocratic, depoliticizing solutions, and relying upon universal Western models of improvement/development that often do not account for specific local contexts (Kothari 2005; Li 2007; Mosse 2011). Here, expertise is racialized (Bian 2022), privileging and rewarding Western knowledges and white aid workers who occupy positions of power and are remunerated more than local (usually non-white) staff (Fassin 2007; Roth 2015). Yet the presence of new actors such as volunteers (Altman 2022; Malkki 2015) and “experts by experience” (Yemane and Yohannes 2023) bring alternative sources of knowledge based on relational, situational, and lived experience that present a challenge—and offer value—to more traditional sources of aid expertise. While volunteers have been critiqued for their emotionally driven lack of professionalism (Malkki 2015), the personal relationships they form can also transcend the aid-recipient schema and challenge aid assumptions (Altman 2022; Vandevoordt 2019). Meanwhile, those with lived experience bring crucial understanding of migration systems and circumstances that can assist in developing critical cultural awareness (Braun 2017). However, these alternative forms of expertise are often devalued. As Liisa Malkki (2015) has noted, volunteer work is often undertaken by women and dismissed as trivial or unessential when contrasted with high stakes emergency work performed by (mostly male) aid professionals. Moreover, the presence of emotions as key drivers of volunteer motivations is seen as problematic (Dunn 2017; Karakayali 2017). Experts by experience are also pigeonholed for their cultural knowledge rather than their myriad other skills (Grellmann 2022). There is hence a hierarchy of expertise that entrenches neoliberalized Western knowledges.
Roadmap of the Special Section
The articles in this Special Section collectively illustrate how temporalities and expertise are weaponized by neoliberal processes to provide universalized models of and for the world, valuing some forms of life, mobility, and intervention over others. Moreover, neoliberal policies and practices that seemingly produce a withdrawal and inaction of the state and its authorities in humanitarian interventions actually lead to its further entrenchment. The Section begins with Rachel Sharples's article that offers the new term “grey sovereignty” as an entry point into mapping spatial and temporal modes of containment and erasure in island detention gulags. Showing how time both fades and makes visible forms of violence in these remote spaces, she offers a critical examination of the entanglements of sovereign and neoliberal discourses of risk and securitization with humanitarian discourses of care and protection in the management of people seeking asylum. Sharples examines the case of two islands used to contain refugees: Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal, Bangladesh, and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Drawing on archival research and mapping techniques, Sharples highlights how precarity, temporality, and power inequities form the basis of “grey sovereignty,” where laws and regulations are suspended, ignored, and/or manipulated so that some governments can control and contain irregular migration. Humanitarian rhetoric becomes conflated with governmental securitization agendas, resulting in outcomes that harm refugees and asylum seekers.
The idea of diffuse spatial and temporal containment and control in humanitarian settings is further explored by Bronte Alexander. In her article, she examines how a Brazilian military–humanitarian intervention sought to control, manage, and contain Venezuelan refugees. Alexander argues that spatiotemporal structures created by military–humanitarian agencies work to govern the everyday mobilities of urban refugees and migrants living without shelter, who are often framed as criminals or threats within neoliberal narratives. This temporal structuring reveals a juxtaposition between the “secured” act of waiting inside an institutional setting versus the “risky” act of waiting in urban public spaces. The latter form is not only stigmatized in a neoliberal society that valorizes productivity and independence, but also signals the difficulty of governing the urban mobilities of those outside institutional shelters. Furthermore, the article highlights how the humanitarian framing of the response and the reliance on humanitarian actors allows the state to shift responsibility onto civil society. This move, initially regarded as inaction, neglect, or abandonment, nevertheless shows how the state maintains control over migrants’ everyday lives.
Meanwhile, Aslam Abd Jalil and Gerhard Hoffstaedter's article explores how different refugee registration schemes in Malaysia aim to collect refugee identity data in order to categorize, enumerate and discipline refugees. The Malaysian state does not formally recognize refugees, but uses civil society, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and a private company to track refugees. The latter Tracking Refugee Information System deploys technological expertise by a private company to aid the state's surveillance efforts of refugees. Here, technological expertise and a neoliberal approach to migration governance coalesce to create a refugee registration system that benefits the Malaysian state and a profit-making company, while diminishing refugee protection, in what the authors argue is a form of technocolonialism.
Similarly, on a transnational scale, Sarah Haggar's article examines how expertise is understood and deployed in a global interfaith humanitarian organization. Haggar investigates internal tensions, contradictions, and use of geopolitics to explore how national borders affect the transnational ethos and practices of the organization. Through ethnographic examples of organizational meetings, she reveals how the rhetoric of valuing local expertise by giving agency to national and regional chapters of the organization parallels, but is ultimately undercut, by neoliberal principles of responsibilization and managerialism such as auditing, as well as centralized and hierarchical forms of governance. By examining techniques of neoliberal governance alongside geopolitical tensions, Haggar challenges the perception of neoliberalism generating a weak state. The state's outsourcing and privatizing of public services can give the false impression that the state loses control over citizens and migrants. In her example of regional discussions about policy and practices of interfaith peacebuilding, it becomes clear that national sentiments, perspectives, and policies can quickly challenge and derail transnational civil society efforts.
Finally, Tess Altman's article provides an intersectional ethnographic account of the Australian civil society movement supporting people seeking asylum to illustrate how humanitarian actors and recipients mobilize expertise in a range of ways that both reinforce and subvert dominant neoliberal agendas. Altman draws on ethnographic research and interviews spanning from 2015 to 2020 in Melbourne's civil society movement to highlight that even within a movement politically united against Australia's hostile deterrence-based border policy Operation Sovereign Borders, silos are generated based on competing forms of expertise and ways of helping. While some civil society actors practice professional and dominant neoliberalized knowledges that perpetuate the status quo, others—primarily migrants, refugees, First Nations peoples, and women—harness expertise as a means to reclaim authority and credibility for marginalized forms of knowledge including lived experience, Indigenous sovereignty and connection to Country, and relational-based understanding. Altman concludes that expertise therefore also provides a basis to subvert dominant neoliberal bordering agendas. These findings contribute to unpacking the complexity, heterogeneity, and power imbalances that exist within progressive political and social movements.
Conclusion
Our Special Section ultimately interrogates the neoliberal logics that permeate humanitarian spheres. Neoliberal discourses of responsibilization enable the state's tentacles to reach ever further through “governing through freedom” (Miller and Rose 2008), a process that outsources caring and welfare responsibilities onto individuals and non-governmental actors. These newly responsibilized actors are often volunteers supplying services for free or are poorly resourced civil society actors. Newly appointed at the frontlines of migration governance, they are impelled to adhere to neoliberal discourses of efficiency, productivity, and value for money to win short-term contracts and funding; as well as being implicated in policing migrants and securing borders. Thus, understanding the landscape of migration governance today requires a nuanced examination of multiple and overlapping actors and responsibilities.
By considering the themes of temporalities and expertise in a range of humanitarian settings, the articles uncover the diverse ways that neoliberal discourses and practices control migrant mobilities and prioritize dominant Western universalized systems and knowledge. The contributions focus on the role humanitarian organizations play at different scales, in different global contexts and through a range of methods. Each of them highlights the entanglement of many players in humanitarian settings including state and non-state actors and considers their roles in perpetuating and challenging neoliberal bordering regimes. All our contributors acknowledge the structural forces constraining change, but also leave room for resistance and agency. Through presenting this heterogeneity, we seek to show how there is no single way to understand and engage with humanitarianism, and we challenge the dichotomy between humanitarian and other solidarity initiatives.
Collectively, the articles show how the state's extension of power still leaves space to question and resist hegemonic discourses and practices. Analyzing the consequences of the entanglement of neoliberalism and humanitarianism in migration governance is just a theoretical exercise for some, but for racialized and gendered subjects, neoliberal humanitarian migration governance is a material practice with very real consequences. The articles in the Special Section hence strive to contribute to both academic debate and, importantly, to improve humanitarian practice. In this vein, further research that engages with the multiple ways in which diverse actors challenge dominant forms of migration governance in humanitarian contexts seems urgent, and may open up sites for hope and political resistance.
Notes
The workshop was facilitated by Sara Riva's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Global Fellowship funding and an open call was put out on several migration and anthropology academic networks. The expenses paid, inclusive nature of the workshop attracted early career scholars and PhD students who would otherwise potentially not have been able to afford such an opportunity. The majority were women from various cultural backgrounds and academic disciplines/fieldsites, though there was a bias toward Australia-based scholars due to the location. Prior to the meeting, each contributor circulated ideas and later presented a draft paper at the workshop.
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