Description
Greece remains a key entry point into EUrope for people seeking protection. Humanitarian organisations play a vital role in this context, including in the operation of camps where people seeking protection are forced to reside (Gordon & Larsen, 2021). Humanitarian organisations are engaged in sanitation work, building and providing shelter, distributing food, and more. Scholarship has shown how Greek camps, especially on ‘hotspot’ islands, are ‘semi-carceral spaces’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2020), that commercial actors are profiting from camp infrastructures (Franck, 2018), and that humanitarian organisations facilitate the management of people perceived as ‘relative surplus populations’ within capitalist structures (Bird & Schmid, 2021). Yet, there is little research that explores the interconnection of these scholarships and how humanitarian organisations specifically are engaged in racialised capitalist exploitation of people seeking protection. Focusing on the role and experiences of single men, I demonstrate how humanitarian work is actively enabled through the racialised capitalist exploitation of men seeking protection. I highlight that single men constitute a notable portion of the humanitarian labour force used to manage and sustain refugee camps. Yet, men seeking protection rarely receive financial compensation for their labour. Based on interviews with humanitarian practitioners and single men seeking protection, document analysis, and autoethnographic insights from my own experience as a humanitarian practitioner in Greece, I argue that single men are exploited by humanitarian organisations and that their unpaid work is reshaping humanitarian work and humanitarianism more broadly. This paper contributes to scholarship on humanitarian work and its entanglements with racial capitalism, while also emphasising the importance of gender, particularly masculinities, in understanding racial capitalism.
