Abstract
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world's largest humanitarian aid agencies were largely nowhere to be seen. In their absence, tens of thousands of volunteers from Ukraine, Poland, ...and further abroad helped the more than 16 million displaced and war‐affected Ukrainians. This massive volunteer response represents a case of “distributed humanitarianism,” a post‐Fordist form of humanitarian aid that disrupts the Fordist international aid industry that has existed since the end of World War II. Because it uses donated money, labor, and goods; avoids bureaucratic accountability measures; and relies on person‐to‐person aid chains, distributed humanitarianism is faster, more cost‐efficient, and more resilient than large‐scale institutionalized aid.
Chokepoints are essential elements of systems centred on the regulation of flow. Geophysical chokepoints, sites of topographic narrowing, play a key role in what I call 'vascular geopolitics', or ...geopolitics based on the control of circulation rather than the control of territory. Using the case of the Roki Tunnel, which goes beneath the Caucasus mountains to connect Russia and Georgia, I show how Russia has attempted to exercise neocolonial control over the breakaway province of South Ossetia and of Georgia proper by maintaining control of the tunnel. However, chokepoints can be transformed in kind and moved in space, and this has allowed Georgians to contest this form of regional geopolitics.
This article develops an anthropology of chokepoints: sites that constrict or 'choke' the flows of resources, information, and bodies upon which contemporary life depends. We argue that an ...ethnographic and analytical focus on chokepoints - ports, canals, tunnels, pipelines, transit corridors, and more - recasts longstanding anthropological concerns with the character and consequences of global circulation or 'flow'. Chokepoints, we argue, are zones of operative paradox - where increased connectivity slows movement down; where the marginal become powerful; where local activities have distributed effects. Studied ethnographically, chokepoints reveal worlds animated neither by rapid circulation nor complete blockage, but by the dynamics of constriction and traffic. We approach the chokepoint as a site, an instrumental concept, and an analytic for exploring the constricted contemporary. Thinking with and through these choked arteries, we ask: What do chokepoints do? How? When? For whom? We conclude by offering eight dimensions of chokepoints as entry points for research.
Refugee protection and resettlement problems Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science),
05/2016, Letnik:
352, Številka:
6287
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Refugees face painful uncertainties that could be ameliorated by aid agency coordination
In 2015, more than a million refugees and other migrants entered the European Union. They are just a small ...part of the world's rapidly burgeoning population of displaced people, which climbed by more than 37% between 2009 and 2015 to reach 59.5 million people. Humanitarian aid to these people has been dramatically insufficient, and many displaced people now lack adequate food, medical care, housing, or transportation. As a geographer, I spent 16 months between 2009 and 2013 conducting participant observation research in camps for displaced people in Georgia (see the photo), where I discovered serious shortfalls in the humanitarian aid system. Increasingly, humanitarian aid is a temporary solution to a permanent problem, a stopgap that not only does not help displaced people resettle but, instead, makes it more difficult for them to move on with their lives.
The notion of crisis has evolved from a sudden, acute event to a broader disruption of stable historical narratives and the future. This article explores how the crisis surrounding the Russian ...invasion of Ukraine challenged the inevitability of Poland's membership in the West and threatened to catapult it back into a history of war and Russian domination. However, for Polish volunteers aiding Ukrainian refugees and the military, the crisis was also a temporality in which their actions took on outsize importance. By working on seemingly mundane tasks of provisioning and transport, they attempted to shape history and, in doing so, redefined the concept of humanitarianism in times of crisis. This article highlights how crisis can serve as a potential for collective action, blurring the distinction between individual and collective agency and redefining how people respond to crises.
"No Path Homeis an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as ...well as presenting a clear theoretical account."-Laura Hammond, SOAS University of London, author ofThis Place Will Become Home
For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition.No Path Homedescribes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. InNo Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
ABSTRACT
The former Soviet Republic of Georgia has the world's highest rate of botulism—a rate over 90 times the U.S. rate. Why is Georgia disproportionately affected by this potentially fatal ...disease? I argue that unraveling the origins of hyperendemic botulism requires a new understanding of the state, one that sees it not only as an ensemble of actors, ideas, and objects but also as a phenomenon that creates discontiguous and variegated spaces. I trace the economic origins of botulism in Georgia to the organization of the Soviet state and the way it collapsed, examine how local ideas of purity and danger affect the range of possible solutions, and look at the ways that new kinds of state projects create isolation and disease as well as inclusion and health. botulism, Georgia, state, epidemiology, public health, food safety, postsocialism
When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” ...refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.
This article uses the idea of the ‘uncanny valley’ – the revulsion that people feel when looking at a human facsimile or lookalike – to examine the eerie atmosphere in refugee camps. The authors ...argue that by considering the underlying engineering of camps as almost, but never quite cities and the social and political formations that produce them as both ions and rationalized action, we come closer to understanding the pervasive sense of uncanniness that surrounds the camp. Moreover, the authors hold that the durable mark of the camp – that is, the continuing stigmatization of both the space and the people in it as something set apart by political violence – is an essential feature, not only of this particular built environment, but of modernity itself.
It has been a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine started. It is clear that the impact of this war goes far beyond Ukraine. We already know that it will have long-lasting consequences for the ...regional and global economy, in particular for energy and food security. The war is reshuffling old geo-political arrangements and alliances. It is also shaping the political landscapes of European states: international relations, inflation and migration are increasingly becoming key topics in national elections.
