Demarcating Boundaries: Against the “Humanitarian Embrace”

Abstract

Recent years have seen renewed calls for bridging the “gap” between the worlds of policy-makers, humanitarian practitioners, and researchers in the social sciences and humanities. This has resulted in a growth of partnerships between academics, aid organizations, governments, and businesses with the aim of joining forces to help those in need. In this paper, I respond critically to these developments and question the seemingly common-sensical logic behind attempts to forge ever-closer collaborations across institutional boundaries. I argue that the humanitarian arena, despite its heterogeneity, is by no means a level playing field in which the meanings, power structures, and practices of aid are ever truly “open” for negotiation. Bridging divides has often served as a way of consolidating the institutional and epistemic hegemony of humanitarian actors and inadvertently dele-gitimized critical scholarship seeking more structural change. Scholars in refugee and forced migration studies have hereby been engulfed in a tightening “humanitarian embrace.” I contend that in order to fulfill a more radical scholarly commitment to social justice, anti-violence, and equality, it is time to demarcate the boundaries between institutionalized humanitarianism and politically engaged, slow, and insurgent forms of research that centre solidarity with marginalized, racialized, encamped, and displaced migrants themselves. Towards this end, I propose infiltration, slow scholarship, and accompaniment as alternative methodologies for research in humanitarian spaces.