Anna Leander1Thanks to Eylyn Janine, Sari Rut, and Vanessa for opening their shelters/homes to me, for asking me to write about them and for taking time to read this short essay and sharing their thoughts about it. I also want to acknowledge everyone else who talked to me during my too brief visit to Norte de Santander and the contribution of Liliana Soler Lutzelschwab her collaborators of Parcomun and Consornoc without whom none of these conversations would have been possible. David Morales Castaño support of the research and subsequent careful comments on the text are particularly appreciated. The responsibility for the analysis and views expressed is entirely mine.
Professor
Geneva Graduate Institute
…read the distinction between will and willfulness as a grammar, as a way of ordering human experience, as a way of distributing moral worth.2Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Duke University Press, 2014: 14.
‘To be identified as willful is to become a problem’ Sara Ahmed writes in her book on willful subjects.3Ahmed, Willful Subjects: 3. Ahmed’s book opens with the brother Grimm tale ‘the willful child’ about a ‘girl who would not do as her mother wished’. ‘God had no pleasure in her’. The girl dies. She is so willful that when she is buried her arm keeps coming out from the earth covering her body. Her mother ‘strikes the arm with a rod’. The arm is ‘drawn in, and then at last the child had rest beneath the ground.’ Ahmed refers back to this grim Grimm tale throughout her book. For her, it epitomizes the embodied, affective connections between willfulness and violence. Someone willful is someone whose will is of lesser worth. It can be discarded and disregarded in the physically violent ways of the Grimm tale or through the subtle forms of violence of marginalizing, dismissing, disregarding, disrespecting, humiliating, excluding and more. Either way, willfulness and violence are intimately connected. In this short essay I want to focus on the way humanitarian design plays into this connection; on what it does to ensure that the will of ‘local humanitarians’ does not cross the line separating will and willfulness and so lead them to the violent realm of the lesser worth. The encounter of three exceptionally strong willed women with humanitarian design provide the entry point.4The observations about these encounters are obviously mine. Although I could not have made them without them. I am not speaking on their behalf or purporting that they would share my analysis or views.
The women are Eylyn Janine, Sari Rut and Vanessa from Pamplona, Norte de Santander, Colombia. Pamplona is close to Venezuelan border and a passing point for many of the refugees leaving that country. The three women turned their homes into shelters for these migrants (and keep them open). Eylyn Janine takes in refugees generally. Sari Rut’s main focus is on children. Vanessa welcomes women subjected to sexual harassment and violence. They are what the The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies calls ‘local humanitarians’.5According to the IFRC, local humanitarian actors are the first to respond when disasters strike and often have access to areas that international actors do not. Their presence within communities before, during, and after crises means they are generally best placed to link immediate response efforts to longer term resilience-building, preparedness and recovery https://www.ifrc.org/happening-now/advocacy-hub/localization. The ‘humanitarian design’ they encounter is not that of glitchy, catchy objects, techno-fixes or apps often associated with the expression ‘humanitarian design’.6See e.g. Duffield, Mark. “Post-Humanitarianism: Governing Precarity through Adaptive Design.” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1, no. 1 (2019): 15-27; Redfield, Peter. “Shacktopia: The Meantime Future of Humanitarian Design.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 30, no. 2 (2022): 16-33; Scott-Smith, Tom. “Humanitarian Neophilia: The ‘Innovation Turn’and Its Implications.” Third World Quarterly 37, no. 12 (2016): 2229-51. There are few of these in their world. The humanitarian designs they meet are mundane. They include the design of objects such the kits they distribute, the beds, chairs or toilets they have been gifted or the information posters they hang on their walls. They also include the design the online systems they work with every day as a consequence of the datafication of humanitarianism7Johns, Fleur. # Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order. Oxford University Press, 2023; Aradau, Claudia. “The Tangle of Digital Humanitarianism.” London Review of International Law 11, no. 3 (2023): 523-34., including e.g. the design of forms, questionnaires, data bases, homepages, facebook profiles, Instagram accounts and the connections of these to computers, phones and pads.
The ambition here is not to assess whether or not these designs work as intended or if they are efficient. It is to draw attention to their politics by asking what the encounter with them does to the will of the three women in Pamplona. Do these humanitarian designs bolster and reinforce the (bluntly put) awe inspiring will of these three ‘local humanitarians’ or does it on the contrary impair it, doing violence by qualifying them as willful, as problems? How does humanitarian design play into the ‘grammar… distributing moral worth? Following how the encounter with humanitarian design affects the local humanitarian becoming, making and afterlife of Eylyn, Sari Rut and Vanessa suggests answers. Anticipating them, the conclusion asks if designing differently can distance these three women (and other local humanitarians like them) from the violent realms of willfulness.
1. Becomings: Willfulness Designed by Omission
Eylyn, Sari Rut and Vanessa and other ‘local humanitarian’ like them are an essential part of humanitarian operations. They make them work. Acknowledging that ‘local humanitarians’ are ‘the ones actually delivering most humanitarian assistance, often invisibly’, the IFRC has made ‘localization’ one of its priorities.8IFRC, note 5. So have many other humanitarian organizations. The ‘Grand Bargain’ (2016) and the ‘Grand Bargain 2.0’ (2021) of the IASC9Created in 1991, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) is the longest-standing and highest-level humanitarian coordination forum of the United Nations system. It brings together the executive heads of 19 organizations and consortia to formulate policy, set strategic priorities and mobilize resources in response to humanitarian crises. set out general principles for such localization.10https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/grand-bargain-official-website/grand-bargain-20-structure They focus on the governance of the relations between the locals and the international organizations on what principles and practices that matter. They assume the local humanitarians to be there. The question is how to work with them. But of course ‘local humanitarians’ such as Eylyn Janine, Sari Rut and Vanessa are not just there. They become humanitarians because there is a crisis. Eylyn Janine’s family is from Pamplona. Her mother, Marta Duque, was outraged by the state of the refugees passing through and stared offering shelter. When she passed away, Eylyn Janine took over what had by then become the ‘Fundación Marta Duque’. Vanessa is one of many ‘retornados’.11Colombians returning from Venezuela. She felt solidarity with the women passing through. Sari Rut came as a refugee and wanted to give back to her community. Their shelters began informally but as the number of Venezuelans grew, the women sought and obtained support from some of the many international humanitarian organizations that were working in the region at the time. Here they began encountering humanitarian designs. Their encounters evolved in time as their life as humanitarians changed. One constant however is that these designs do not take into consideration the enormous will becoming (and remaining) a local humanitarian involves. It assumes it. With this systematic omission, the responsibility of humanitarian design for will crossing into willfulness begins.
Being ‘the first to respond when disasters strike’ work is dangerous. It requires courage. It also demands a willingness to become a problem for violence, to take the risk of facing it. In Pamplona, it requires putting oneself in the way of the violence that permeate the lives of the people coming. To prevent this violence from moving in, shelters, and this includes those of Eylyn, Sari Rut, Vanessa, have spaces for leaving ‘things’ at the entrance. These spaces are introduced with reference to the importance of keeping weapons out. But that is not enough. Vanessa explains that in her shelter, body-searches of everyone coming in necessary. The most important thing is to check that they have no knives hidden in their clothes. Checking the lower parts of legs and ankles is particularly important. Razor blades are the worst. They are cheap, common, small and easy to hide. Vanessa has handwritten papers with information/instructions on her walls. One reads: ‘you are being supervised with the national police’. It is there to let visitors know that if they make trouble, the police will be called in. Vanessa hopes the police would come but seems uncertain. She gestures towards Ricardo who sits at the entrance. He helps out when there is trouble. Violence against women and the protection of a shelter dedicated to them does not make it to the top of local police priorities. Vanessa is on her own with those who help out in her shelter. So is Sari Rut. So was Eylyn Janine for a long time. She recently made an agreement with the police. They check in regularly. She talks about this agreement with relief. With or without support from the police, facing the violence of the choice to become humanitarian takes a lot of will for all three women.