Humanitarian remoteness: aid work practices from ‘little Aleppo’

Abstract

In response to the Syrian conflict, the biggest humanitarian challenge since the Second World War, aid organisations have set up large‐scale cross‐border operations. Aid convoys and workers within Syria have become targets, forcing most operations to be carried out remotely from the Turkish border city of Gaziantep, a ‘little Aleppo’ hosting more than 300,000 Syrians. This produces a transnational humanitarian social field embedded in historical, political and economic relations. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork among aid workers and organisations providing relief assistance remotely, this article analyses the production of humanitarian remoteness, both rhetorically and in practice, shaped by remote technologies and the division of labour. In the case of Syria, the normalisation of remote practices and the dependency on local aid workers and organisations ultimately increases the distance between donors and beneficiaries inside Syria, although it reinforces the illusion of control among aid managers.

Conflict-related health research in Syria, 2011–2019: a scoping review for The Lancet - AUB Commission on Syria

“…Additional interventions and program evaluations included delivery and evaluation of an intervention through provision of information and follow-up questionnaire in bread packages being distributed by a humanitarian organization in Northern Syria [ 21 ], evaluation of three modes of food assistance programming in Idlib in 2014–15 [ 34 ], evaluation of an International Rescue Committee cash assistance program on violence against women in Raqqa [ 76 ], evaluation of effectiveness of multi-level WASH risk reduction interventions in southern Syria in 2018 [ 64 ] and examination of the impact of a psychosocial support program on the wellbeing of a control and intervention group of farmers [ 96 ]. Several papers interviewed humanitarian workers, including humanitarian health staff working on non-communicable disease (NCD) care in Syria [ 50 ] and those involved in the cross-border humanitarian response from Turkey [ 78 , 81 ].…”

Privileged Precarities

“…There is the focus on aid workers' fascination with this type of work and the resulting paradoxes showing in their (work) lives (Roth 2015b;2015a). Other wide-ranging volumes gather anthropological perspectives on the everyday work of development workers (Fechter 2014;Mosse 2011a), while single articles evaluate, for instance, the humanitarian imperative of aid work (Fechter 2016) and the impact of remote work in humanitarian aid (Fradejas-García 2019;Fisher 2017). Others examined NGOs as lifeworlds operating along the lines of transnational development orders and project logics (Kalfelis 2020).…”

Exquisite Corpses and backward glances: European social anthropology 2019

“…As well as peonising graduate and postdoctoral research staff, this turn drives an output‐oriented, project‐based model of research that can sometimes call into question the integrity of the discipline itself by bringing back the division between ethnography (as a practice of gathering data) and anthropology (as a generalising science). A significant number of articles published in 2019, within the rubric of anthropology, inhabit that borderland that anthropology shares with neighbouring social sciences: with human geography (Saxer and Andersson 2019; Brachet and Scheele 2019; Gardini 2019; Saxer 2019; Gohain 2019; Schweitzer and Povoroznyuk 2019; Luo et al 2019; Fradejas‐Garcia 2019; Andersson 2019); area studies (Goh 2019); urban studies (Civelek 2019; Kobi 2019); development studies (Green 2019); human economics (Diggins 2019; Pied 2019; Henig 2019); and sociology (Miller 2019). Geoffrey Hughes, in his 2018 survey of European anthropology in this journal (Hughes 2018), referred to the rise of what he called ‘meta‐anthropology’, breaking down traditional boundaries between academic knowledge production and knowledge practices, both in the field and in wider political economies, a development he cautiously welcomed as prefiguring a more secure future for the discipline in the age of audit and concrete accountability for so‐called ‘deliverables’.…”