This paper focuses on self-organized, grassroots volunteers who have emerged as key actors in the humanitarian response to Europe's contemporary "refugee crisis." Based on ethnographic research on the Greek island of Chios and in Paris and taking established critiques of humanitarianism as our point of departure, we explore how volunteers providing humanitarian care navigate the ethical and political dilemmas traditionally encountered by aid workers. More specifically, we ask: what kinds of social relations do volunteers enact through their practices and in their everyday encounters with refugees in and beyond refugee camps? How do the specific qualities of these encounters affect the possibilities of enacting alternative modes of humanitarian practice? Focusing firstly on volunteer-refugee interactions during camp distributions-the paradigmatic mode of humanitarian work-we explore how volunteers simultaneously mimic disciplinary humanitarian practices and engage in processes of ethical deliberation that inform more dignified forms of care. Secondly, we show how everyday volunteer-refugee interactions, formed within diverging spatiotemporal contexts of the two sites, lend themselves to exchanges of "biographical life," opening up spaces for creative solidarities with refugees and more political interventions vis-à-vis the contemporary border regime. We conclude that commonly considered humanitarian logics of depoliticization and dehumanization are not guaranteed outcomes of volunteer humanitarianism. Instead, some of the volunteer practices and everyday encounters that we document hold the potential for more fluid and humane responses to an ever-changing landscape of refugee flows and containment.
This article examines the European Commission’s information policy during the heavily politicised Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. Through the methodologically innovative use of Freedom of Information requests, it moves beyond official discourse to reveal how internal deliberation among Commission officials is preoccupied with monitoring and containing civil society mobilisation against the deal. Underpinned by elitist conceptions of democracy, public opinion emerges as a problem to be solved through strategic public relations, despite the Commission’s discursive commitments to greater transparency and political dialogue with citizens. The findings challenge the widely-held notion that a ‘communication deficit’ between European Union institutions and their publics is at the root of the perennially elusive formation of a European public sphere. Instead, approaching TTIP as a key frontline in the struggle over post-democracy, I conclude that antipublic ideas encoded in the Commission’s information policy are reflective of historically engrained institutional ambivalence towards public-political participation.
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