IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/envira/v51y2019i3p743-760.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The local labour building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces

Author

Listed:
  • Elisa Pascucci

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the relevance of spaces of international aid and development as sites where global politics materializes. However, the position of local aid workers within these spaces remains less explored. Drawing on fieldwork with humanitarian professionals employed in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper theorizes the salience of labour and precarity in the geographies of contemporary humanitarian aid. The ethnographically informed argument is built through three main points: (1) unemployment and insecurity among locally recruited humanitarian staff; (2) the forms of care and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) racialized and classed relations within humanitarian spaces. I argue that the differential precarities experienced by aid workers reproduce a porous and contested ‘local vs international’ divide. While challenged by the ‘new inclusions’ brought about by the global expansion of the aid industry, this divide perpetuates entrenched exclusions and hierarchies, raising ethico-political concerns about the presumptions of abstract universality inherent to humanitarianism.

Suggested Citation

  • Elisa Pascucci, 2019. "The local labour building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 51(3), pages 743-760, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:51:y:2019:i:3:p:743-760
    DOI: 10.1177/0308518X18803366
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308518X18803366
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0308518X18803366?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ronaldo Munck, 2013. "The Precariat: a view from the South," Third World Quarterly, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 34(5), pages 747-762.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Brigit Ronde, 2024. "“The Brains Are Frozen”: Precarious Subjectivities in the Humanitarian Aid Sector in Jordan," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 12.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Natalia Flores Garrido, 2020. "Precarity From a Feminist Perspective: A Note on Three Elements for the Political Struggle," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 52(3), pages 582-590, September.
    2. Joshua Greenstein, 2020. "The Precariat Class Structure and Income Inequality among US Workers: 1980–2018," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 52(3), pages 447-469, September.
    3. Hermanus Stephanus Geyer Jr, 2023. "Precarious and non-precarious work in the informal sector: Evidence from South Africa," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 60(10), pages 1915-1931, August.
    4. Joseph Choonara, 2020. "The Precarious Concept of Precarity," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 52(3), pages 427-446, September.
    5. Zoe Adams & Simon Deakin, 2014. "Institutional Solutions to Precariousness and Inequality in Labour Markets," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 52(4), pages 779-809, December.
    6. Adam Formby & Mustapha Sheikh & Bob Jeffery, 2024. "The Global Disappearance of Decent Work? Precarity, Exploitation, and Work‐Based Harms in the Neoliberal Era," Social Inclusion, Cogitatio Press, vol. 12.
    7. Sabogal Camargo, A.M., 2021. "Passion, precarity and inequality? Working conditions of urban dancers in Colombia," ISS Working Papers - General Series 135150, International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam (ISS), The Hague.
    8. Kasturi Sadhu & Saumya Chakrabarti, 2021. "Neo-Dualism: Accumulation, Distress, and Proliferation of a Fissured Informality," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 53(4), pages 694-724, December.
    9. Carin Runciman & Khongelani Hlungwani, 2022. "Organising Against Precarity: The Life of a South African Labour Broker Worker," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 36(3), pages 557-568, June.
    10. Patricia Harrison & Helen Collins & Alexandra Bahor, 2022. "‘We Don’t Have the Same Opportunities as Others’: Shining Bourdieu’s Lens on UK Roma Migrants’ Precarious (Workers’) Habitus," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 36(2), pages 217-234, April.
    11. Mondli Hlatshwayo, 2020. "Workers’ education under conditions of precariousness: Re-imagining workers’ education," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 31(1), pages 96-113, March.
    12. Ronaldo Munck, 2020. "Work and Capitalist Globalization: Beyond Dualist Reason," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 52(3), pages 371-386, September.
    13. Dominika Polkowska & Kamil Filipek, 2020. "Grateful Precarious Worker? Ukrainian Migrants in Poland," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 52(3), pages 564-581, September.
    14. Kamil Filipek & Dominika Polkowska, 2020. "The Latent Precariousness of Migrant Workers: a Study of Ukrainians Legally Employed in Poland," Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 205-220, March.
    15. Sefa Kaya, 2020. "İnsana Yakışır İş Açığı: Çalışan Yoksulluğu Açısından Bir Değerlendirme Endüstri İlişkileri Temelinde Türk Endüstri İlişkileri Sisteminin Modernizasyonu," Journal of Social Policy Conferences, Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics, vol. 0(79), pages 55-106, December.
    16. Tanja D. Hendriks & Rafael Verbuyst & Mayke Kaag, 2022. "Fraught with Friction: Inclusive Development for Informal Workers in Urban Ghana," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 34(5), pages 2305-2323, October.
    17. Chris Smith & Ngai Pun, 2018. "Class and Precarity: An Unhappy Coupling in China’s Working Class Formation," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 32(3), pages 599-615, June.
    18. Meir Russ, 2017. "The Trifurcation of the Labor Markets in the Networked, Knowledge-Driven, Global Economy," Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Springer;Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET), vol. 8(2), pages 672-703, June.
    19. Amrita Chhachhi & Jan Breman & Marcel Linden, 2014. "Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level," Development and Change, International Institute of Social Studies, vol. 45(5), pages 920-940, September.
    20. Jon Phillips & Saska Petrova, 2021. "The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(5), pages 1031-1050, August.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:envira:v:51:y:2019:i:3:p:743-760. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.