Politics of humanitarian care: aid, displacement and social reproduction in Croatia

The idea behind the REHUM project is that institutionalized practices of care are being replaced by emergency humanitarian aid, forming an ambivalent concept of humanitarian care.

By using a participative ethnographic approach in two humanitarian settings – post-earthquake displacement and irregularized migration – the project will explore how and if the expansion of humanitarian initiatives in different emergencies points to the same problem of the erosion of institutionalized care while shedding light on ambivalent transformations of grassroots organizations and its employees/volunteers in their attempts to replace such systems.

While previous research pointed out different aspects of social inequalities enhanced in and by humanitarian programs, the emphasis on the entanglements between humanitarianism and care in the context of migration/displacement in Croatia, especially regarding the phenomenon that political theorist Nancy Fraser termed “crisis of care”, has not been quite touched upon.

In order to expand the critique of humanitarian care in Croatia, but also in a wider sense of the European (semi)peripheries, REHUM will theoretically and empirically explore the intersection between social reproduction, humanitarianism, and displacement.

Starting from the assumption that care, understood as an essential part of life and a practice inevitable for human development, is structurally devalued and externalized to the area of household and informal aid initiatives, REHUM will aim to identify the ways in which humanitarianism in Croatia underpins that process while situating scarce state responses and their replacement with temporary humanitarian solutions in a broader political framework.