Description
All is not well in the humanitarian field. Drawing on research with practitioners, and borrowing concepts from existentialism and absurdism, this article documents existential dilemmas facing transnational humanitarians. Emphasising the twin processes of meaning-making and meaning-loss, the article argues that tensions within contemporary aidwork give rise to conditions of absurdity. This absurdity has two dimensions. On the one hand, the humanitarian vocation is a deeply meaningful form of labour – defined by moral purity, post-materiality, and sensorial intensity. On the other hand, the systems of meaning that underpin humanitarian labour are frequently challenged by the stresses and dissonances of an industry beset by political and ethical contradictions. This article explores some of the main sources of alienation affecting aidworkers in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Recent changes, such as diversification, the increasingly corporate modus operandi of humanitarian agencies, as well as reckonings brought about by moves to ‘localise’ and ‘decolonise’ aid, have given rise to a sense of existential uncertainty among many humanitarian practitioners.
