Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply Chain Humanitarianism

Focusing on the design and production of the IKEA Foundation "Better Shelter" and on its use in a camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece, this article explores the role of logistical calculative rationales in the provision of emergency shelters to refugees. It argues that an engagement with the critical geographies of logistics contributes to the study of such "humanitarian goods" in two main ways. First, it foregrounds the technologies that allow emergency shelter products to circulate across production sites and disaster and border zones, and their connections to broader infrastructures and commercial networks in what recent literature has called "supply-chain humanitarianism". Second, a logistical lens highlights the disruptions that characterise the production and usage of emergency shelter products. The analysis adds to a body of work that exposes humanitarian technology and design as sites of friction, deeply embedded in global processes of bordering and accumulation.Peer reviewe

Book review of Sahraoui, N. (Ed.) (2020) Borders across Healthcare: Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 233 pp.

Book review. Reviewed work: Borders across Healthcare : Moral Economies of Healthcare and Migration in Europe / N. Sahraoui (ed.). - New York and Oxford : Berghahn, 2020. 233 pp.The notion that "even health systems that are considered 'universal' restrict the access" of migrants (Chapter 1, p. 24) is the main takeaway from Borders across Healthcare, an important, well thought-out collection of nine essays Paris, CNRS, France). Published in 2020, the collection was arguably written and compiled before the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet, far from diminishing its relevance, the timing makes the book prescient and even more insightful.Non peer reviewe

The local labour building the international community : Precarious work within humanitarian spaces

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More logistics, less aid : Humanitarian-business partnerships and sustainability in the refugee camp

This article identifies logistics - the science and practice of managing complex operations and moving goods - as an essential yet overlooked dimension of the alignment of global business and global aid in the UN 2030 Agenda era. Focusing on refugee aid, it draws on qualitative fieldwork with practitioners in the field of humanitarian logistics, active in the partnership environment of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), in five countries (Greece, Jordan, Lebanon, Rwanda and Sweden). The analysis shows how aid workers see profit and non-profit partnerships for humanitarian logistics as a priority in the context of the so-called humanitarian-development nexus. In particular, logistics is considered essential to bring refugee aid in line with emerging standards of sustainability. The article puts forward a twofold argument. First, it shows how sustainability policies prioritize logistical solutions that are based on the integration of the displaced in local and transnational markets, rather than on the delivery of material goods and infrastructures. Second, in a slight departure from existing literature on humanitarian logistics, it argues that the agency of the humanitarian sector, and not just that of the corporate world, is central in the promotion of humanitarian logistics partnerships. The conclusions discuss the ethical and political implications of a humanitarianism increasingly oriented towards supply-chain rationales, in which more sustainable logistics often equates less material aid. (c) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer reviewe

Governance

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Nursing trauma, harvesting data : refugee knowledge and refugee labour in the international humanitarian regime

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Refugees in the IT sector : Young Syrians' economic subjectivities and familial lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the "coding boot camp," an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self-reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a "protected" to a "productive" subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more-than-individual relations and identifications-with families, religious identities, and national communities-that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology-centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.Peer reviewe

Beyond depoliticization and resistance: refugees, humanitarianism, and political agency in neoliberal Cairo.

Responding to the call of contemporary political philosophy to locate ‘the political’ beyond the boundaries of formal citizenship (Balibar, 2004; Chatterjee, 2004; Rànciere, 2004), over the last few years researchers across various disciplines have devoted increasing attention to migrant and refugee protests and political mobilization (Tyler and Marciniak, 2013). Research in this area has thoroughly questioned paradigms of biopolitical exception, but also challenged widespread assumptions on the political agency of subaltern subjects as always associated with mundane, silent, and invisible practices. In this context, academic attention has been devoted significantly to Euro-American borderzones and spaces of enforcement, and, in the Global South, to refugee camps. Today however, evidence is growing that the vast majority of refugee and migrant populations are urbanized, and do not live in the West. Based on an 18-month ethnographic fieldwork, this thesis contributes to this growing body of work exploring the contested relations between refugees and humanitarian agencies in Cairo, Egypt. Theoretically, the analysis combines insights from assemblage geographies (De Landa, 2006; McFarlane, 2011) and critical development, refugee, and urban studies (Hyndman, 2001; Simone 2004a, 2004b; Elyachar, 2005; Duffield, 2007, 2011; Bayat, 2010; 2012; Hyndman and Giles, 2011). The empirical sections of the thesis are articulated around two main axes of inquiry. Part B – The Boundaries of Aid – looks at how refugees in Cairo engage with the spatial practices of humanitarian organizations, contesting their growing securitization and the boundaries and hierarchies that separate them from practitioners. Part C – Sociomaterial infrastructures: agency beyond resistance – focuses on the networks – encompassing human and non-human elements – which allow refugees to build relations of support, experience sociality, and organize politically autonomously from aid agencies. The thesis puts forward a two-part argument. Not only do the struggles of refugees in Cairo challenge prevalent understanding of humanitarian aid as a domain of ‘depoliticization’, but they also question the distinction between everyday life and overt manifestations of ‘resistance’, contestation, and protest. Confronted with a complex and often violent system of humanitarian and urban governance, refugees in Cairo, I demonstrate, are able to mobilize a range of practices and position takings which problematize prevalent conceptualizations of resistance, and point to the need for rethinking questions of agency in conditions of structural violence

Living Through and Living On? : Participatory Humanitarian Architecture in the Jarahieh Refugee Settlement, Lebanon

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