Over the last few months, grassroots activists based in urban Russia have got involved in humanitarian projects supporting the inhabitants of Mariupol, a city almost fully destroyed by what the Russian government calls a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Control over the city was surrendered to the Russian military in May 2022. Volunteers provide survivors of a three-month-long siege with clothes, food, medicine and firewood – the latter being important as heavy bombardment and severe fighting have damaged the heating systems of residential apartment blocks, which means that many individual apartments are kept warm this winter with the help of home- or industrially made metal wood-burning stoves. Yet, apart from bringing these material necessities to Mariupol, volunteers also return with new perspectives on the conflict. ‘Mariupolitans are remarkably resilient’, explained one of the volunteers. But they also pointed to the ‘flip side’ of this resilience: ‘This woman, for instance, thinks that after managing her daily survival thanks to the stuff that we bring, things might start looking up and [that] she might be eventually able to continue as before, living essentially a European life’. Volunteers saw their duty here also in explaining that the inhabitants of Mariupol had yet to fully grasp what kind of society they were now a part of. Conveying new regimes of silence and hierarchies can be seen as a form of grassroots humanitarianism. The present special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores cases of humanitarianism and their sociohistorical conditioning.

At first sight, this special issue, entitled ‘Vernacular Humanitarianisms’ and guest edited by Čarna Brković, captures well-known forms of humanitarian care. The introduction and five articles, however, carefully contextualise and historicise these humanitarian acts to place analytical attention on vernacular ideas and practices of humanitarianism. According to Brković, this means examining distinct definitions of ‘helper’ and ‘helped’ as well as the very motivation to help. How do actors in the humanitarian sector understand themselves, recipients of help, or the state and other agencies that provide it? As such, this special issue is part of a growing body of work that provincialises transnational humanitarianism in order to challenge it as conceptually hegemonic and producing globally active forms and hierarchies of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2012). These visions come hand in hand with those of ‘mobile sovereignty’ (Pandolfi 2008), which allows humanitarian interventions to easily enter and operate at various locations. Brković’s point is not that such critical understandings of humanitarianism are wrong but that they are limited. While some contemporary forms of humanitarianism are genealogically related to the ‘twin projects of European Enlightenment and colonisation’ (p. 5), others resonate with Islamic ideas of humanness, histories of socialist humanitarianism, and draw on Jewish, Indian and other religious moral repertoires to underscore practices that promote human welfare. By implication, although many of these humanitarianisms ‘are premised on a fantasy of universal moral community’, these universalist visions of humanity are not the same; this universalism needs, as Brković argues, to be situated and decolonised. And, most importantly, there are multiple emerging, locally embedded and ‘small-scale experiments in helping fellow humans that cannot be neatly fitted into any of the usual categories of help’ (p. 7).

What follows from this is, first, that humanitarianism is a ‘vernacular’. It appears embedded in everyday usage of universal categories (whether Enlightenment or other) and everyday practices. Second, effects of this vernacular humanitarianism cannot be assumed in advance; rather, they need to be explored ethnographically. This is not to say that contemporary humanitarian projects cannot be explored with familiar methodologies. In fact, what this special issue invites us to do is to rethink the analytical value of ethnographic approaches in light of these new contexts. For instance, Jiazhi Fengjiang's contribution to the special issue about Chinese grassroots search and rescue organisations is explicitly political-economic. Humanitarian imaginaries of search and rescue provide marginalised working men with a sense of recognition and rhyme with gendered moral subjectivity. Brković’s example of humanitarne akcije (p. 1) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, humanitarian actions out of compassion for fellow neighbours, can be read as a familiar effect of the neoliberal fragmentation of public healthcare. These practices of mutual support instantiate a solidarity with next-door-neighbours – ‘those who can be affected by the same burdens, structural issues and historically shaped contingencies’. This collective is different from the ‘we’ of transnational humanitarianism – an imagined ‘we’ ‘that can jump from one crisis to another’. Furthermore, these forms of solidarity critique neoliberal healthcare and government corruption as legacies of Yugoslav socialism. While some of such humanitarian acts are critical gestures and political counter-proposals, other humanitarian vernaculars can depoliticise. Drawing on Ferguson's (1994) concept of the ‘anti-politics machine’, María Hernández-Carretero reveals the ‘anti-politics of inclusion’ in her contribution. In Oslo, volunteers’ attempts at helping refugees actually end up reinforcing an idealised form of integration that favours cooperation with Norwegian civil society and state over meaningful contestation. As such, the anti-politics of inclusion might play into a politics of exclusion rooted in state narratives of who deserves to stay in Norway and who doesn't.

Political lines of exclusion are also at stake in humanitarian rhetoric in Sri Lanka, explored in Tom Widger's article. Focusing on the country's different ethnic and religious groups, Widger argues that humanitarian rhetoric constitutes forms of ‘strategic detachment’ (p. 68) that serve to obfuscate accusations of war crimes and political favouritism. While this humanitarian rhetoric claims a non-religious and depoliticised commitment to Sri Lankan national identity, it blurs yet also constitutes internal differences and multiple contexts for political exclusion. In his contribution, Jan Grill charts humanitarianism from below in Colombia by focusing on the long-term histories of migration to and from Venezuela. Humanitarianism, here, emerges as ‘dispositions toward suffering others (arriving) from far away but also toward the marginalised subjects at home’ (p. 86). Grill shows how figurations of humanitarianism ambivalently challenge as well as strengthen distinctions between the (impoverished) citizens of Colombia and refugees from Venezuela. Similar to Hernández-Carretero's paper, he raises important questions about the work of universal and vernacular ideas in determining deservingness and belonging in a transnational context. Through the caminantes (‘walkers’) migrants, one of the most haunting figures and symbols of the migratory crisis in the Americas, Grill examines the entangled temporalities and relationships that inform particular forms of humanitarian action in the city of Cali.

Finally, Anne-Meike Fechter asks if quantification is vernacular. Her research focused on privately funded humanitarian initiatives in Cambodia. These initiatives strive to achieve a broader social change. Here, a quantifiable ‘scale’ refers to the constant challenge to provide ‘more’, if not merely ‘enough’ support to those ‘in need’. The response from these organisations includes making and deploying their own scales, such as that of the individual (‘every person counts’) (p. 16). Fechter argues that following such a scalar reading of humanitarianism avoids dismissing these efforts as negligible. Instead, it makes visible diverse humanitarian practices that exist on the margins of the formal and institutionalised humanitarian sector. This allows her to productively unsettle taken-for-granted views on what ‘small-scale’ humanitarianism means while contributing to the anthropological approaches to scale. Her account of small-scale humanitarianism resonates with the grassroots initiative described at the outset of this editorial – helping the inhabitants of Mariupol seems like a nascent moral response to their suffering in the aftermath of the city's near-destruction; it is expressed by individual efforts rather than organised humanitarian aid. The grassroots ethical contours of this humanitarian response, its minor scale and the ongoing suppression it potentially obfuscates raise questions about the kind of humanitarianism at work here and the ‘kind of society’ it adumbrates.