Many Moving Parts: Continuity, Disruption and Change in Global Humanitarian Aid Relations

• Applicant: Dr. Patricia Ward
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 508285312

The overall objective of this project is to elaborate understandings of how ‘displacement’, framed as an unprecedented global problem, orders and stratifies society. I operationalize this objective by examining ‘humanitarian logistics’: now touted as a key component of preventing displacement from occurring in the first place. Specifically, this project considers how perceptions of someone or something as ‘out of place’ (e.g. refugees, asylum-seekers) mobilize and order ‘the worth’ of human and non-human resources in the humanitarian aid chain in response. Previous scholarship has long documented how aid practices mitigate but also produce social inequalities. Similarly, scholarship shows how logistics produce and reify social hierarchies because they ‘differentiate groups’ rights and rights to life based on their relationship to systems of supply’ (Cowen 2014: 5). However, the scope and meanings associated with ‘humanitarian logistics’ remain loosely defined and ambiguous. This project subsequently draws upon Bourdieu’s field theory approach to account for this ambiguity and how it first, may reflect competing logics between state and non-state actors regarding ‘how’ humanitarian aid should be organized to prevent and respond to displacement. Second, this project looks at this ambiguity to consider how it may also be indicative of changing relations and positions of power within the humanitarian field today, particularly with the ever-growing participation of the private sector. This project is particularly attuned to the role of ‘non-Western’ and ‘global South’ actors in this regard, groups that largely remain unaccounted for empirically and theoretically despite their significant roles. Considering this ambiguity in these ways expands understandings of how ‘displacement’ organizes what and who is considered ‘in’ or ‘out’ of place in multiple social orders and contexts beyond groups that are usually analyzed and classified as ‘displaced’. In so doing, this project will offer a more complete picture of the processes, relations and struggles that shape (and are shaped by) displacement and the social inequalities and hierarchies of worth that manifest as a result. The objectives of this project can therefore be summarized as follows: (1) Expand empirical and theoretical frameworks to account for how displacement orders and stratifies society; (2) Enrich empirical accounts of the relations and logics undergirding humanitarian logistics in response to displacement; and (3) Develop a relational, multi-directional analysis of the contemporary humanitarian field as a medium through which the organizing principle of displacement operates and orders society.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants