Research in Progress Seminar 

Monday 28 November 2022,  2:30-4:30pm (GMT)

This is an in person event held at the RAI (details on how to get to us below),
please book your ticket here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/research-in-progress-idil-asan-tickets-461103301387 

Vulnerability in Humanitarian Governance:
Power, Categories, and Casework 

Idil Asan  (PhD Student, University of Cambridge, Centre of Development Studies)

This dissertation foregrounds vulnerability as a ubiquitous notion within the lexicon of refugee governance. Focusing on the Turkish humanitarian context, it examines how various actors problematise vulnerability in the administration of aid and asylum. In contrast to existing studies on refugee situations which often adopt a ‘realist’ definition of this concept, this research engages with vulnerability through a discursive framework, bringing into question the political construction and material consequences of its deployment as a category at the level of everyday policy and governance in a protracted refugee context.

While the concept of vulnerability is couched in the language of ‘effective’ care and moral responsibility, this dissertation contends that such a framing obscures the modes of power involved in humanitarian interventions to address and eliminate vulnerabilities. Throughout this study, I make three arguments. Firstly, I argue that the discourse of vulnerability conceals the contestation but also convergences of knowledges of various actors involved in making sense of the socio-political processes that construct vulnerabilities of populations in protracted displacement. Secondly, I argue that the discourse of vulnerability sanctions humanitarian power to extend its reach as its linguistic space becomes more ‘inclusive’. Thirdly, the construction of the ‘vulnerable refugee’ as one that is deserving of assistance and rights on the ground is highly impacted by the micro dynamics of Turkey’s positioning within the global context of migration management.

Drawing on qualitative research tools with an ethnographic sensibility, this study examines the relationship between power and discourse as it manifests through the everyday practices in ‘Aidland’, analysing perspectives of displaced populations and aid workers on moments of encounter. Drawing on critical scholarship on humanitarianism, I examine the political work of the vulnerability discourse in sustaining and producing new power geometries – asking to what extent the ‘vulnerability framework’ is designed around the refugee, and how much is designed around the aid worker.

In this working progress seminar, I will discuss (a) how an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ has shaped my study of discourse, and (b) my analyses and findings so far.

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50 Fitzroy Street, London, W1T 5BT  (Find it on a map here)
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