‘Sometimes fear gets in all your bones’: towards understanding the complexities of risk in development work

ABSTRACT

In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in ‘Aidland’ studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific.

Keywords:

• Aidland
• risk
• Afghanistan
• development work
• culture
• gender and feminism

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to the Editor and reviewers for the highly constructive feedback on early drafts of this paper. Deep gratitude is also offered to the NGO and local and international staff who generously offered their time and knowledge.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. The Author continues to work with this NGO in a critical research and advisory role.

Notes

1 Aid workers themselves recently started a digital campaign, #notatarget, to draw attention to the issue (#Notatarget 2019).

2 Importantly, some scholars have raised doubts over the actual increase in risks, with some arguing that heightened awareness and overzealous risk-management policies are creating a highly ‘risk averse’ environment and increased anxieties among aid workers (Duffield, 2010, 2012).

3 It is important to note that risk levels fluctuate with frequent governmental changes and changing levels of international involvement, as well as seasonally (the arrival of spring typically signals ‘fighting season’) and along with territorial rule changes and challengers (Rutting 2018).

4 In a number of interviews, international staff spoke about their efforts to block out media coverage of Afghanistan: ‘I was never a person who was sucking in all the news about war zones …. But I had to really focus on putting that all aside to get on the plane’ (Hazel).

5 Interestingly, the women interviewed seemed to have the more vivid recollections of their embodied experiences of excitement, fear and anxiety, and particular coping strategies, leading up to their departures. However, it is also possible that the male interviewees felt uncomfortable admitting their doubts or concerns to a female researcher.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is based on research from a three-year Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund grant.

Notes on contributors

Holly Thorpe

Holly Thorpe is a professor of sociology of sport and physical culture at the University of Waikato. Her research interests include sport for development, action sports, youth culture, the body and embodiment, and girls’ and women’s participation in sport and recreation. She embraces interdisciplinary approaches and has published over 65 articles and chapters, three sole-authored books and six edited books on these topics. She has been a recipient of Fulbright and Leverhulme fellowships, and received the 2018 New Zealand Royal Society Early Career Research Excellence Award for Social Sciences for her work on youth in sites of conflict and disaster.