Situated Universalisms

In 2019, the citizens of Tuzla, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina, started a petition called ‘Children's medical treatments should be paid from the budget, while politicians should be paid with SMS, and then whoever pays – pays.’¹ The organisers explained the petition was a call to reverse the current distribution of the money from the state budget, which is used to pay the salaries of appointed officials but not the more demanding medical treatments for children. One result of this distribution was ‘humanitarian actions’ (humanitarne akcije), the local model of raising money for medical treatments abroad that have proliferated in the former Yugoslav region in the last three decades (Brković 2014, 2016a). Reversing the situation, the petition organisers suggested that officials’ finances should depend on the (humanitarian) mercy and goodwill of others to donate money through an SMS, while children's healthcare should be fully covered through public funds as a civic right. The kind of humanitarian imaginary and practice that underlies this petition is different from that of ‘transnational humanitarianism’ (Ticktin 2014) and its mobile sovereignty (Pandolfi 2008), which jumps from one place to another, trying to save whole populations in emergencies. The differences are apparent: humanitarne akcije are organised for fellow citizens. They are inflected by a sense of entitlement to public healthcare for all, shaped by the experience of Yugoslav socialism, by an idea that anyone can find themselves in need of humanitarian aid – which was likely the result of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, by the shrinkage of public healthcare and the individualisation of responsibility for wellbeing and survival during the postsocialist neoliberalisation, and so on. The ‘we’ of the transnational humanitarianism rationale is a universal-human-kind-we that can jump from one crisis to another, while the ‘we’ of the humanitarne akcije is a more situated, next-door-neighbour-position of those who can be affected by the same burdens, structural issues and historically shaped contingencies.

Yet, despite the differences, these two sorts of humanitarian imaginary and practice share something important: both present enactments of ‘humanitarian reason’, understood as a ‘morally driven, politically ambiguous, and deeply paradoxical strength of the weak’ (Fassin 2012: xii). In other words, both the ex-Yugoslav and the transnational forms of humanitarianism are premised on a fantasy of universal moral community that has the power to make inequalities and injustices a bit more bearable (2012: xii). Although one is regional and another transnational in scope, both forms of helping are informed by visions of humanity understood as a universalist category.

Importantly, these universalist visions of humanity are not the same. In the former Yugoslav emic understanding, human (čovjek) is a moral rather than just biological category, whereby saying ‘She is (not) a human’ (Ona (ni)je čovjek) means ‘She is (not) a good person’ (Brković 2016b). The very need to translate these emic nuances into English speaks about the socio-historical situatedness of the former Yugoslav universalism of ‘humanity’. Yet, it would be wrong to overlook its claim to universality, because it can help us understand processes through which a sense of universality is socially produced in particular ways – in transnational humanitarianism too.² Transnational humanitarianism needs to be ‘provincialized’ (Weiss 2015), because the relationship between humanitarianism, human rights, and politics can be organised in different ways, as recent calls to ‘decolonise the human’ indicate (Steyn and Mpofu 2021). Critically tuned research of small-scale humanitarianisms points to situated, peripheral and sometimes even decolonising visions and practices of ‘the humanity’ understood as a morally imbued framework for imagining and recognising broadly shared experiences.

Growing Interest in Small-Scale Humanitarianisms

In the last five years, there has been a clear increase of anthropological interest in the grassroots humanitarianism (McGee and Pelham 2018), voluntary humanitarianism (Sandri 2018), domestic humanitarianism (Altman 2019), everyday humanitarianism (Brković 2016b; Horstmann 2017; Richey 2018; Sandberg and Andersen 2020), solidary humanitarianism (Rozakou 2017), activist humanitarianism (Reda and Proudfoot 2020), vernacular humanitarianism (Brković 2017; Sutter 2020), demotic humanitarianism (Taithe 2019), diaspora humanitarianism (Kleist 2021), distributed humanitarianism (Dunn forthcoming) and similar forms of ‘humanitarianism from below’ (Kloos 2020) and ‘citizen aid’ (Fechter and Schwittay 2019). There has also been somewhat of a split in analytical foci when discussing this sort of informal support between the Global North and the Global South. First, the landscapes of the ‘European refugee crisis’ gave rise to the discussions on the relationship between solidarity and humanitarianism. In much recent critical migration scholarship on the European border regime, inspired by leftist, feminist and antinationalist standpoints, the key question about humanitarianism is how progressive it is. Here, the term ‘humanitarianism’ usually marks vertical, patronising, hierarchical relationships that keep people who need help in the state of dependence, while ‘solidarity’ is understood as horizontal and reciprocal, as involving radical openness, collaboration and willingness to organise communities otherwise, beyond the state bureaucracy and capitalist economy (for a similar distinction between ‘humanitarian’ and ‘humanising’ among Australian helpers, see Altman 2020). This progressive imaginary shapes even the calls to re-evaluate the term ‘humanitarianism’ as a politically promising force. For instance, Maurice Stierl focuses on ‘what possibilities exist for political dissent to emanate from within humanitarian reason’ (2018: 704) in the work of three NGOs that operate in response to the EU border regime in the Mediterranean. In Robin Vandevoordt's reading, small-scale humanitarianism is potentially subversive because it ‘helps us [to] think through a shift from a humanitarianism that transforms forced migrants into recipients of aid, to a form of solidarity that allows more room for their socio-political subjectivities’ (2019: 264).

Second, anthropologists look at how citizens of the Global South help one another at the edges of institutionalised humanitarianism and development, as a potential challenge to the geopolitical imaginary of transnational humanitarianism. From this perspective, acknowledging the diversity of small-scale humanitarian actors ‘may help destabilise some of the distinctions between helper/helped, between East/West or Northern/Southern, between individual/collective suffering, between professional/“other” actors’ (Olliff 2018: 671). In other words, anthropological explorations of everyday humanitarianism of the actors from the Global South often approach it as a politically promising bottom–up alternative to the institutionalisation of the ‘impulse to give’ (cf. Bornstein 2009) which takes place in transnational humanitarian aid work. One result of diversifying the actors recognised as humanitarian is increasing ‘the potential for greater exchange, collaboration and recognition within humanitarian landscapes’ and ‘that much richer tapestries of care and support are enabled for those who suffer’ (Olliff 2018: 670).

These differences in focus can make a conversation between studies of the vernacular humanitarianisms in the Global North and the Global South relatively ‘bumpy’, although both bodies of literature are often interested in prefigurative forms of politics and in the distinction ‘disappointing/politically promising’. The difference probably has to do with the Western European genealogy of humanitarianism as separate from welfare states and civic activism (Barnett 2011). Humanitarianism emerged when capitalist expansion fostered a sense of global responsibility and universal moral community (Haskell 1985). However, that responsibility for the distant Other has not been framed as a civic or human right, but as a matter of ethics, compassion and personal goodwill. In the late nineteenth-century Western European constellation of moral and political responsibility, rights were reserved for fellow citizens, humanitarian compassion directed to the distant Others. While this constellation has been thoroughly changed (Fassin et al. 2017; Muehlebach 2012; Ticktin 2011), its echoes are still clear today.

Perhaps an inspiration for overcoming these differences in focus between the Global North and South could be found in the studies of the histories of humanitarianism in the Global East. Explorations of the socialist origins of humanitarianism (Andrews 2020), as well as of what humanitarianism meant under the real-existing socialisms (Capotescu 2020; Denéchère 2014), illuminate alternative ideas about the relationship between the state, citizenry and responsibility. For instance, as Jiazhi Fengjiang in this issue demonstrates, Chinese humanitarian tradition does not start with universality, impartiality and independence but is saturated by Confucian notions of state moral responsibility to care for people's lives. Furthermore, in socialist countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, Red Cross humanitarianism included complex and ambivalent intersections between self-organisation and state-provided support (Hachmeister 2019). In socialist Yugoslavia, it also included making a call to the Red Cross movement to recognise the anti-racist struggle against colonisers as a humanitarian issue (Brković 2023). More research on the socialist histories of humanitarianism is needed, but what is there demonstrates clearly that humanitarianism includes tensions and negotiations over how to relate the envisioned universal moral community with the particularities of the national and local polities. Placing analytical attention on vernacular ideas and practices of humanitarianism would mean questioning the definitions of the ‘helped’, the ‘helpers’ and the ‘reasons to help’, and studying how various actors in the humanitarian exchange understand themselves, others and the state, navigating between the politics of ‘gifts’ and the politics of ‘rights’ (Swamy 2021).

How to Recognise Humanitarianism?

Exploring a diverse range of small-scale actors who engage in helping also raises the question of how to recognise ‘humanitarianism’. Should we approach the everyday minor acts of help between Muslims and Buddhists in a Sri Lankan neighbourhood as humanitarian, if they are deployed strategically as a means of mediating inter-ethnic relations, as Tom Widger demonstrates in this issue? Can we recognise this form of everyday help as ‘real’ humanitarianism? Or is this actually a pursuit of a particular political interest – to co-exist peacefully with your neighbours in a situation marked by inter-ethnic violence – dressed in the ethical clothes of humanitarianism? With respect to the articles in this special issue, we can ask: what is it that links as ‘humanitarian’ activities as diverse as language cafés and hiking groups organised for the refugees in Norway (María Hernández-Carretero), small fair-trade projects in Cambodia (Anne-Meike Fechter), search and rescue volunteerism in China (Jiazhi Fengjiang), everyday giving between Muslims and Buddhists in Sri Lanka (Tom Widger) and a soup kitchen in Colombia (Jan Grill)?

The answer we offer is that ethnography should lead the way. This special issue approaches as ‘humanitarian’ whatever our interlocutors in the field mark as such. We do not want to create a new category of ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ as distinct from ‘everyday’, ‘grassroots’, ‘solidary’ or other forms of humanitarianism and we use this range of terms that describe small-scale acts of helping fellow humans more or less indiscriminately. As Anne-Meike Fechter and Anke Schwittay write, this sort of small-scale aid is ‘more productively employed as a sideways lens, a perspective for recognising forms of intervention and resource distribution which often remain under the radar of established development [and humanitarian] research and practice’ (2019: 1770). At the same time, we do not suggest that all forms of small-scale help present an instance of humanitarianism. This special issue stresses the importance of the emic perspective on what counts as ‘humanitarian’ because this speaks about situated universalisms. When our interlocutors frame a certain practice of helping by referring to ‘humanity’ and ‘humanness’, this regularly includes a claim to belonging to a universal moral community whose members share some important experiences and have certain obligations to one another. Such locally situated yet universalist claims are an inherent part of what we recognise as ‘humanitarian’ in this special issue.

Some genealogies of situated universalisms have been explored more than others. The case in point is transnational humanitarianism, situated in the twin projects of European Enlightenment and colonisation (Barnett 2011; Barnett and Weiss 2008). Similar could be said for Muslim humanitarianism as a reflection of Islamic ideas of humanness and morality (Mostowlansky 2020). As mentioned above, socialist histories of humanitarianism have recently started to attract more attention and there is still a lot to be said about the attempts to support fellow humans made from the decolonial (Steyn and Mpofu 2021), Jewish (Weiss 2017), Indian religious (Bornstein 2012) and other moral repertoires. Furthermore, as Maria Framke and Esther Möller emphasise in their research on the Red Crescent in Egypt and the Hindu Mahasabha in India in the late colonial and early postcolonial years, extensive research on ‘nonwestern perspectives on humanitarianism and its relationship with colonialism and decolonisation’ (2019: 1) is still missing. At the same time, the ways in which different moral traditions converge with one another and with the shifting ideas over the state and its bureaucratic responsibility for survival and well-being result in various experiments in helping, which further diversify humanitarian landscapes around the world.

Socially Produced Ontological Consequences: Towards Decolonial Perspectives on ‘Humanity’

Is the call to pay more attention to the vernacular forms of humanitarianism just another way of saying ‘Well, the Bongo-Bongo do it differently’? In other words, does vernacular humanitarianism imagine a world of one humanity, many humanitarianisms, as Tom Widger asked in our discussions during the preparation of this special issue? Do we advocate for more cultural relativism and assume that there is one ‘really real’, materially and biologically stable category of humanity, which is interpreted differently from various socio-historical standpoints? Not quite. Yet neither do we follow the essentialist footsteps of some contributors to the ontological turn in anthropology (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2012).

Instead, this special issue suggests that vernacular forms of humanitarianism are better analytically approached as socio-historically produced frameworks that have ontological consequences. It explores how their situated universalisms are performed in everyday life, keeping in mind Judith Butler's argument that performativity describes ‘a set of ‘processes that produce ontological effects, that is, that work to bring into being certain kinds of realities or … that lead to certain kinds of socially binding consequences’ (2010: 147). This is not an a priori ontological standpoint, because the analytical emphasis is on the social production of reality; however, it is also not a reflection of a naïve cultural-relativist position that assumes material reality is the same everywhere, while its cultural interpretation is different. Instead of an argument for an appreciation of the standpoint of ‘radical alterity’, we propose an analytical approach that pays attention to how situated universalisms are performed in everyday life enabling particular forms of care as well as of power – we thus keep possibilities of social critique in sight. The temporal element is important here: particular constellations of power and meaning generate differences that have material, ontological consequences, but do not stem out of a pre-given difference in being (e.g. Mol 2003).

To put it differently, the concept of vernacular humanitarianism follows the call of Sylvia Wynter to move ‘beyond Man, toward the human’, whereby by the ‘human’ we understand the multiple, situated, historically contingent ways of imagining and recognising similarities of human experiences. Walter Mignolo writes that in Wynter's work of uncoupling the ‘Man (the Vitruvian Man) as a model of Humanity, the point is not to find the true and objective definition of “what is Human,” but to show that such projects are filled with an imperial bend, a will to objectivity and truth’ (2015: 110). Similarly, focusing on vernacular ideas and practices of humanitarianism, the goal is not to locate the one understanding of the ‘human’ which could be offered as the alternative to the Man of European coloniality. The point is rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising that people share experiences across differences is not reserved for Western European epistemology.

As already mentioned, small-scale humanitarianisms are not necessarily progressive and can be elitist and exclusionary. Still, due to their narrow scope, their effects are inherently limited. As Anne-Meike Fechter in this issue argues, vernacular humanitarianisms are shaped by a problem of scale: a tension between the scope of the problem the humanitarian actors want to address and what they can hope to achieve. Yet, these small-scale humanitarianisms do make certain realities possible, in at least two ways. One, they could (un)intentionally provide support to the dominant institutional organisation of reality, as María Hernández-Carretero demonstrates in this issue. In Norway, grassroots support directed to the refugees strengthened the dominant governmental framework of integration and fit right into the existing constellation of relations between the state and civil society. Two, small-scale humanitarianisms could also offer the conceptual means through which claims to a different reality can be made. This is illustrated by the petition to invert the distribution of public funds in Bosnia and Herzegovina, mentioned at the beginning, where the situated universalism of humanitarne akcije was used to make claims for the reorganisation of the material world.

Emergent Humanitarian Forms of Life and their Role in Projects of Governance

All the articles in this special issue discuss relatively recent small-scale experiments in helping fellow humans that cannot be neatly fitted into any of the usual categories of help, traversing instead the boundaries between humanitarianism, welfare, voluntarism, activism or development.³ Small-scale experiments in helping seem to have mushroomed over the last several decades (Bendixsen and Sandberg 2021; Cabot 2019; Drotbohm 2015; Ege and Moser 2021; Feischmidt et al 2018; Zhukova 2020). They link a wide range of actors – including state institutions, international agencies, municipal governments, self-managed communities of neighbours, civic associations, grassroots networks of volunteers, private firms and so on – who enter into new kinds of assemblages, distributing responsibility for others’ survival and well-being in novel and complex ways. These experiments in helping represent what we could call ‘emergent forms of humanitarian life’, paraphrasing Michael Fischer (2003: 456), here understood as an ethnographic fact ‘that life is outrunning the pedagogies in which we have been trained’. The experimental form of these small-scale humanitarianisms poses certain challenges for anthropological critical analysis.

The wide resonance of social criticism that anthropology has directed to humanitarianism has been at least partly made possible by the fact that most people know, more or less, what it is that we talk about when we talk about transnational humanitarianism. Regardless of where they work, transnational humanitarian organisations such as Médecins Sans Frontières engage in evaluations that result in a particular humanitarian politics of life (Fassin 2007). As a sort of ‘migrant sovereignty’ (Pandolfi 2003: 369), transnational humanitarianism also includes a wide range of diverse actors (Malkki 2015), but the effects of their work and relationships with the particular locales where they operate seem to be stable. Due to its global reach and relevance, transnational humanitarianism is relatively well known as a ‘republic of NGOs’ (Schuller 2016) that tends to establish ‘contracts of mutual indifference’ with local governments (Pandolfi 2003) and to render as ‘humanitarian’ various aspects of everyday life (Gilbert 2016). The humanitarian spaces these transnational actors create may produce an ontological state of nothingness (Dunn 2018) and effectively remove the possibility to create a future for the people they are supposed to save (Ramsay 2017).

This criticism is difficult to transpose onto small-scale forms of humanitarianism for several reasons. First, the politics of life in vernacular humanitarianisms are different, often experimental, and there is sometimes no need to differentiate the savers from the saved.⁴ Second, vernacular humanitarianisms do not necessarily reflect the geopolitical distinction between the Global North and Global South, which is shaped by colonial history. As Fechter (2019) demonstrates, small-scale helpers are more likely to seek to make a personal connection across ethno-national differences with people in their vicinity. Third, due to their very limited scope and often experimental character, these forms of help cannot be understood as a stable political project or as a form of sovereignty. Yet, as all the articles in this issue demonstrate, vernacular forms of humanitarianism do play a role in various projects of governance – and, thus, they need to be analysed critically. In other words, the growing anthropological interest in these small-scale forms of helping has demonstrated clearly their differences in comparison with transnational forms of support, approaching them as more or less politically promising. Yet, as all the authors in this issue demonstrate, vernacular forms of humanitarianism are a constitutive part of various political and governmental projects.

All of the authors in this issue take a critical approach towards vernacular humanitarian practices by asking what forms of sociality, power and inequality they reproduce. The articles demonstrate that vernacular humanitarianisms open up particular possibilities to relate to others as fellow humans, while simultaneously foreclosing other possibilities from taking place. In doing so, this issue moves a conversation away from a simplistic framework which posits the ‘grassroots’ and its ideas of the good as inherently politically promising or progressive towards a more ethnographically attuned perspective in which inequality and ethics go hand in hand. In other words, while vernacular humanitarian practices do not participate in the global industry of humanitarian aid, they can be as universalistic, exclusionary, seemingly apolitical and compassionate as the more globalised and institutionalised enactments of humanitarianism. Vernacular recipes of helping fellow humans often provide much-needed support, but they may also inflict specific forms of hurt that deserve further theoretical and ethnographic attention.

For instance, Hernández-Carretero argues that vernacular forms of humanitarian aid in Oslo follow the footsteps of the Norwegian state when it comes to the integration of refugees, producing an ‘anti-politics of inclusion’. The volunteers’ vernacular attempts to help refugees actually end up supporting the broader governmental assumptions about the need for integration and social cohesion, evoking a long tradition ‘of cooperation rather than contestation between Norwegian civil society and state’. Hernández-Carretero suggests that one effect of this form of vernacular humanitarian practice is a particular kind of silencing that ends up reproducing the exclusionary immigration landscape in which the state's discourse of deservingness is used to differentiate who gets to stay in Norway. Widger looks at how different groups in Sri Lanka used the rhetoric of humanitarianism to distance themselves from the accusations of communal favouritism, as well as of war crimes. This kind of ‘strategic detachment’ from the culturally particular, and a related claim to humanitarianism as a non-religious and apolitical field, encouraged commitment to a national Sri Lankan identity. It provided the conceptual means to mediate inter-ethnic relations while it also strengthened national belonging as the line of exclusion in the process. Fengjiang writes about links between the political economy and popular humanitarian imaginaries in China. In her article, she demonstrates that Chinese grassroots search and rescue humanitarianism boomed at least partly because it provided working men, who became marginalised due to a complex set of conditions caused by local socio-economic development, a sense of recognition and an opportunity to craft themselves into a particular gendered moral self. Fechter explores scale-making processes in privately funded humanitarian initiatives in Cambodia. Her focus on the ‘alternative actors in development’ shows that everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia includes semiotic labour to link different scales: working on helping particular individuals while striving to achieve a broader social change. Jan Grill traces how humanitarianism from below in Colombia is shaped by long-term histories of migration to and from Venezuela, and local ideas about religion, deservingness and debt. He demonstrates that local humanitarian constellations may ambivalently both challenge and strengthen distinctions between the (impoverished) citizens of Colombia and refugees from Venezuela, reproducing dominant ideas about deservingness and belonging. Taken together, these articles show that political effects of vernacular humanitarianism cannot be assumed in advance but need to be explored ethnographically. Another example of this can be found in the humanitarne akcije mentioned in the opening paragraphs: this form of help provided the conceptual means for criticising the dominant ethno-national organisation of governance, as the above-cited petition indicates. Simultaneously, the discourses of moral worth that made humanitarne akcije possible bolstered the neoliberal fragmentation of public healthcare and the reliance on humanitarian compassion of fellow neighbours in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Taken together, the articles also demonstrate that anthropological explorations of how people help one another would benefit from thinking laterally across the bodies of literature that study the conventional domains of Western liberal states. Anthropological discussions of humanitarianism are often separate from conversations about the state and its welfare, or from those about local, socially meaningful forms of helping (cf. Widger 2016). Yet these distinctions prevent some conversations from happening. Thinking about humanitarianism from China, Cuba or socialist Yugoslavia sheds light on the interests and roles of state sovereignty in maintaining and expanding certain visions of humanity and aid over some others. Our focus on vernacular humanitarianism is an attempt to start from what people in a certain place understand as ‘human’, ‘humanity’ or ‘humanitarian’, and then to build an analysis from there, turning to and conversing with different anthropological bodies of literature simultaneously. Our special issue discusses five experiments in helping that highlight intersections as well as tensions between humanitarianism, welfare, development, religious charity and political activism.