Multilingualism and cosmopolitanism in the construction of a humanitarian elite

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the role of multilingualism in the discursive construction of mobile humanitarians’ privilege at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Based on interviews and institutional documents, I examine the value accorded to different workplace languages in the discourses of neutrality and internationality by/in this institution. Inspired by the concept of cosmopolitan capital, I argue that the ICRC expat is constructed through an elitist definition of multilingualism and international experience defined by mobility. This capital is unevenly distributed and stratifies the ICRC workforce. The minority of mobile staff are institutionally iconised as international and neutral partly by virtue of anonymous languages, especially English. Meanwhile, resident staff mediate these anonymous languages into authentic languages like Pashto, which are an index used to categorise them as locals.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• discourses of internationality
• humanitarian workers
• linguistic ideologies
• mobility

Acknowledgements

I am thankful to all the humanitarians who have helped me to understand their careers at the ICRC. Many thanks to the Special Issue editors, Alexandre Duchêne, David Block and Zorana Sokolovska for their feedback on previous versions of this article. This research has been possible thanks to a Swiss Excellence Scholarship for Foreign Scholars (2015.0317) at the University of Fribourg and the research project “The appropriation of English as a global language in Catalan secondary schools: A multilingual, situated and comparative approach” (FFI2014-54179-C2-1-P, MICINN) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positioning of the ICRC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Maria Rosa Garrido is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Multilingualism, University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Her current research focuses on multilingualism, mobilities and labour in an international humanitarian agency from a critical sociolinguistic perspective.

Notes

1. Their salary is two or three times higher than that of senior local staff, whose salary and benefits are aligned with the local labour market.

2. These “non-nationals” might sometimes speak the official and/or vernacular language(s) of the nation-state where they are working.

3. All the names in this article have been anonymised in order to protect informants' confidentiality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss Confederation State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (2015.0317).