Humanitarian bargains: private refugee sponsorship and the limits of humanitarian reason

Abstract

This article analyzes Canada's private sponsorship of refugees to explore the conceptual and practical limits of humanitarian reason. In private refugee sponsorship, sponsors channel their humanitarian impulse to resettle refugees in a time-limited partnership with both the state and the refugees they sponsor. To gain insight into how sponsors perform their role in this structurally and temporally bounded trajectory, we conducted a national online survey of 530 sponsors who volunteered to support Syrians resettled to Canada after November 2015. Our analysis draws primarily from written comments shared by survey respondents. We find that over time, sponsors resort to tacit ‘humanitarian bargains’ to mediate between their initial commitment to save refugees’ lives and their ongoing quotidian experiences of intervening in and shaping refugee lives. These bargains become visible when sponsors evaluate sponsorship by reference to a set of expectations and judgements about sponsored refugees, their fellow sponsors and the state. We suggest that the concept of the humanitarian bargain has explanatory force beyond refugee sponsorship.