Work in Progress: Subversive humanitarianism. Rethinking refugee solidarity through grassroots initiatives.

Robin Vandevoordt writes:

Across Europe, hundreds of thousands of volunteers have brought food, clothes, medicines and numerous others forms of support to newly arrived refugees. While humanitarian action has always been subversive, I argue that the recent wave of civil actions has pushed its subversive effects one step further. Whereas more modest forms of humanitarian action tend to misrecognise recipients’ social and political subjectivities, their more subversive counterparts can be better understood as enacting a particularist form of solidarity that emphasises precisely those subjectivities. To explore the potential for political innovation in these civil initiatives, I argue that it can be useful to do so through the lens of ‘subversive humanitarianism’.

More concretely, I suggest seven dimensions with which the subversive character of any humanitarian action can be compared across time and space: acts of civil disobedience; the reconstitution of social subjects; contending symbolic spaces; the creation of social spaces and personal bonds; putting minds into motion; and the transformation of individuals‘ life-worlds. I support the argument by drawing upon the recent wave of empirical studies on civil initiatives across the continent, as well as my own ethnographic data on the Brussels-based Plateforme Citoyenne de Soutien aux Réfugiés.

Robin Vandevoordt is Early Career Fellow in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Robin works on a research project on ‘Civil humanitarianism and the politics of refugee solidarity’ with ethnographic fieldwork with several civil initiatives in Belgium, focusing on their subversive relations with governmental policies, professional NGOs and everyday social life. Robin's work also covers different dimensions of Syrian refugees' lives and status in Belgium. 

The seminar will be at 16.30 on Thursday 28 February, in the Abercrombie Building, Headington Campus, Third Floor, Student Hub, White Space. All welcome. See here for details of all the seminars.