Citizen Aid and Everyday Humanitarianism

Development Futures?

Anne Meike Fechter, Anke Schwittay, Anne Meike Fechter, Anke Schwittay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000192490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Historische Geographie

Citizen Aid and Everyday Humanitarianism brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately-funded forms of aid that operate on the margins of the official development sector.

The last decade has seen a steady rise of such activities in the Global South and North, such as in response to the influx of refugees into Europe. The chapters in this volume cover a variety of locations in Asia, Africa and Europe, presenting empirically grounded cases of citizen aid. They range from educational development projects, to post-disaster emergency relief. Importantly, while some activities are initiated by Northern citizens, others are based on South–South assistance, such as Bangladeshi nationals supporting Rohingya refugees, and peer support in the Philippines in the aftermath of typhoon Hayan. Together, the contributions consider citizen aid vis-à-vis more institutionalised forms of aid, review methodological approaches and their challenges and query the political dimensions of these initiatives. Key themes are historical perspectives on 'demotic humanitarianism', questions of legitimacy and professionalisation, founders' motivations, the role of personal connections, and the importance of digital media for brokerage and fundraising. Being mindful of the power imbalances inherent in citizen aid and everyday humanitarianism, they suggest that both deserve more systematic attention.

Citizen Aid and Everyday Humanitarianism will be of great interest to scholars and professionals working in international development, humanitarianism, international aid and anthropology. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Demotic humanitarians: historical perspectives on the global reach of local initiatives, 1940–2017

Bertrand Taithe

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on over 70 years of demotic humanitarianism from a grassroots perspective. Using the archives of Hudfam and Elizabeth Wilson as well as more recent oral history of local nongovernmental organisations in the West Yorkshire region of the United Kingdom, this paper seeks to cast a new light on the complex network of humanitarianism enabled by local groups. The concept of demotic humanitarians will be used here to denote the modest scale of this work, but also the humanitarians’ self-perception as local agents of internationalism acting within localised networks. From the creation of Hudfam in 1942 (before Oxfam but in Huddersfield) to the birth of the Christian African Relief Trust or local partnerships with Ghana, this article shows how entangled in other social and political initiatives demotic humanitarians were.

Humanitarians today are observing a ‘grassroots’ renewal of humanitarian actors, the rise of ‘citizen activism’ or the simple renewal of humanitarian volunteerism. The camps at the border of recent migration ‘crises’ in Calais and Dunkirk, in Greece or along the many inroads into Western Europe have given a particular salience to the phenomenon. ¹ Outside of the humanitarian system and often ignorant of its dilemmas, practical norms, and Sphere standards or the full range of professionalising drivers of the past 20 years, ² these new humanitarians seem to many a ‘new phenomenon’. Historians can of course recall the mobilisations of the 1980s and 1990s on behalf of the victims of war in the Balkans or the many organisations set up to welcome the thousands of refugees from Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia. ³

Yet between the long-lasting survivors of distant crises, such as Save the Children, and new organisations improvising rescue work at the borders of European Union, there are a multitude of vibrant, local, more mundane forms of humanitarianism. This paper seeks to explore this particular configuration of citizen activism and the very localised networks they involve in their own form of global activism. The scholarship of humanitarianism has tended to underplay the significance of the charity market and of its networks, for a range of reasons. Despite the emergence of notions of social entrepreneurship – more attuned with neoliberal market forces ⁴ – or indeed the Western conviction that a ‘vibrant civil society’ was the mark of a distinct and vital democratic culture, ⁵ the scholarship of charities has seldom been connected explicitly with that of humanitarian work. ⁶ Nevertheless, humanitarianism begins and sometimes ends at home. What I call ‘demotic’ humanitarianism is anchored in local and vernacular forms arising from charity work combined with often more political forms of solidarity. The term demotic refers specifically to the language and culture of these activities. In its common form the language these mundane actors of humanitarianism use is clearly distinct from the increasingly formal, jargon-prone and technical lingua of a highly regulated sector which defines itself as a ‘system’. ⁷ This higher language of professionalism is not merely an apparatus of technicity; it represents a desire to anchor humanitarian practice in a specific fashion. As Mark Duffield and others have noted, this professionalising driver relies on common assumptions which are either ignored or rejected by demotic humanitarians. While many devote considerable time and energy, deploy professional skills and significantly invest in the field of humanitarian work, they speak only fragments of the professional lingo which might allow them access to state funding. ⁸ The term demotic thus denotes a positionality in relation to the larger operators of humanitarian aid but also a common tongue intelligible without mediation to the wider public. Importantly, demotic humanitarians barely use the term ‘humanitarian’ itself and often prefer more familiar cultural references such as charity, rescue or relief work. ⁹

Focusing on Huddersfield, a region of middling prosperity, higher than average ethnic diversity and lower than average religious affiliation, this article seeks to set the localisation of demotic participation in humanitarian activities into a longer historical perspective in order to explain its vitality and complexity. ¹⁰ Huddersfield had no Oxfam charity shops until the 1990s. This reflected the fact that in this textile town of the West Ridings of Yorkshire, Hudfam has preceded its more famous sibling and retained anachronistic autonomy. Hudfam was created in response to the famine in Bengal. Though it remained a provincial organisation, Hudfam endured from the 1950s, when the Korean War revived its fortunes, until the demise of its leadership in 1991. Independently from this old association, from 1982, volunteers were gathering goods for Africa in schools before forming the Christian African Relief Trust (CART) in 1995. This organization, which still exists today, engaged with the same ethos of volunteering and development. Hudfam and CART stayed resolutely local and demotic throughout their history. These organisations endured thanks to the strength of their local networks, and their history reflects the vitality of their volunteering. Much as Liisa Malkki found about the volunteers of the Finnish Red Cross, ¹¹ these organisations respond to profound desires to volunteer and serve – a ‘need to help’ which can be documented in the archives and through oral history. Much of the story of Hudfam relies on the archives made public and some private papers and diaries, journalism and memoir writings of a formidable organiser and humanitarian, Elizabeth Wilson. The story of CART, on the other hand, is more inchoate still – the archival sources were gathered for the purpose of this enquiry and much of the interviewing took place in response to my request over a period of three months in the summer of 2017. What both organisations and their humanitarians share is their rootedness and domestic scale. The third organisation under consideration, Ghana Outlook (GO), is more recent still and considerably less structured as a formal organisation, functioning more as a network than as a nongovernmental organization (NGO). It has very few assets and little tangible physical presence in the locality; nevertheless, it illustrates vividly how local networks feed from their exposure to international work. All three organisations are illustrative of locally rooted networks, but they also highlight how, since the 1940s, global issues were mediated and responded to in the provincial ‘Global North’. The contextual specificity of this story is what makes it significant: demotic humanitarians are commonplace but they also have a history.

In Britain as in most of Western Europe and North America, most charities remain bound to domestic concerns – a trend which foundations have tended to reinforce. ¹² Yet if most charitable activities are small scale and parochial – in the strictest meaning of the word – they have a considerable social and cultural weight associated with a strong sense of ‘place’. Cumulatively, the sum of these networks amounts to a thick web of connections. Hudfam raised funding for international relief work in the first instance and, subsequently, for local development projects across the world, some of them directly led by family members of Hudfam leaders. ¹³ CART was set up to respond in kind and through ‘gifts of love’ to chronic needs across Africa; more recently it has attempted to engage on its own terms with emergency relief needs. Both were registered with the UK charity commission. By 2016, there were in England and Wales ‘165,334 charities (and 16,455 subsidiaries) on the register’ while the commission claimed to have ‘regulated’ £70.93 billion pounds of income. To put this in perspective, this charitable market exceeded by nearly a factor of three the international NGO (INGO) humanitarian budget. ¹⁴ By 2015, 14,000 charities from England and Wales worked abroad and their share of the budget was around £16.6 billion pounds (which would compare with the 20-odd billion dollars identified by the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action (ALNAP) for INGOs of the humanitarian sector in the same period). ¹⁵ This figure was for England and Wales only and does not include charities regulated by Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) and the Charity Commission for North Ireland. Furthermore, this only represents the compliant world of charities. Informal groups and organisations which do not claim charity status and tax relief escape any kind of close scrutiny.

The story of Hudfam develops a bridge between post-war volunteerism, links with Quaker work and major international efforts such as the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine (UNWRA). ¹⁶ Through the history of Hudfam and the sociology of CART and GO, one can chart the evolution of a culture of humanitarian volunteering – rooted in sometimes complex engagement with politics, religion and faith – which connects many different groups and extends itself to the wider world. While many of the activities remain small scale or even mundane (staffing a shop smelling of old clothes) or loading a container with goods (‘consignment’ destined to African ‘consignees’), these volunteers contribute to the substance of a largely unreported world of international solidarity. Since the Scottish enlightenment and Tocqueville, via Putnam and other social theorists, the desire to organise in social groups centred on altruistic motives has been the object of specific scrutiny. ¹⁷ ‘The more the merrier’ seems to have been the general understanding of how things ought to be. ¹⁸ When countries and nations previously under Soviet rule suddenly opened themselves to Western influence after 1990, Western agencies and donors promoted ‘spontaneous’ associations in order to revitalise society. The Polish model of social resistance to oppression made this proposition alluring for democratisation processes. ¹⁹ As Atlani-Duault showed well, these hopes and soon the ambition to create civil society often fuelled misunderstanding and misplaced efforts. ²⁰ Sociologists of ‘civil society’ themselves theorised how democratic societies fostered associations and thrived on charitable organisations. They used, as Putnam did, the proliferation of charities and associations as a proxy for the vitality of ‘social capital’ and trust in a society. ²¹ But there is a circularity to their argument which many noted, as it takes a liberal regime to ...