My Brother’s Keeper: The Double Experience of Refugee Aid-Workers

Abstract

The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship between an active, intervening agent and a passive victim, a recipient. This article examines what happens when the lines blur and subjects of intervention — the ‘beneficiaries’ in need of ‘saving’ — become the agents of intervention, the aid-workers: when refugees, recipients of aid, are also aid givers. Through ethnographic research at a community centre on the Turkish–Syrian border, where Syrian refugees worked as aid-workers assisting other refugees as part of the centre’s ‘participatory approach’, I explore the unintentional ‘side effects’ of a participatory approach to a refugee assistance project and look at the productive effects of participation. Through the stories of several such refugee aid-workers I explore the ways in which including refugees in aid delivery may reinforce existing class structures, as posited by the approach’s critics, and the unexpected opportunities, such as social mobility, that crisis creates.

Keywords:

• participation
• Syrian refugees
• Turkey
• humanitarianism
• development
• refugees
• aid-workers

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a paper that was awarded the American Anthropological Association (AAA) Middle East Section Student Paper Award in 2015. The paper was written for a graduate seminar taught by Dr Ilana Feldman, whose scholarship permeates this piece and who has deeply influenced my way of thinking. I am grateful for her mentorship. The research for this article was made possible through a summer research grant from Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. My warm thanks go to the refugees and other employees I met at the community centre who, however briefly, allowed me into their lives and shared their stories with me.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 All names in this paper, of people, organisations and places, have been changed to maintain privacy.

2 I agree with Hyndman and de Alwis (2003, 218) that the term beneficiary is ‘unproblematically mobilized in humanitarian and development discourse’ although it ‘highlights the asymmetrical relationships within which ‘assistance’ is bestowed’. I nevertheless use the term ‘beneficiaries’ in this paper as it was the one commonly used by all workers at the community centre.

3 The humanitarian sector has been increasingly critical of long-term ‘care and maintenance’ programmes for protracted refugees, recognising that ‘as no simple and linear relief-development continuum exists in practice, there is a need to move beyond short-term emergency responses’ (Kaiser 2005, 352).

4 The Turkish government has constructed 25 refugee camps hosting around 270,000 Syrian refugees, but 87 percent of Syrian refugees –– over 1.5 million — live outside the camps. These urban refugees have, at least in theory, access to public healthcare and education, but are left to their own devices for food and shelter.

5 The majority of NGOs operating in Turkey work in cross-border activities delivering aid to Syria. The Turkish government has focused its assistance on camp refugees. In the summer of 2014, when research for this paper was conducted, there were very few organisations servicing Syrian refugees in Turkey who are not living in camps.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Noga Malkin

NOGA MALKIN is a graduate of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University (MA, May 2015), where she focused on Refugee Studies and Gender. She had previously worked for the UNHCR and Human Rights Watch on refugee and human rights issues and currently works with refugees in southeast Turkey.