The Everyday Emotional Lives of Aid Workers: How Humanitarian Anxiety gets in the way of Meaningful Local Participation
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Abstract: Participatory approaches to humanitarianism, peacebuilding, and international development promise to listen to the voices of local aid beneficiaries. However, aid workers often listen to these voices through reductive narratives of aid beneficiaries, ventriloquizing their voice and inhibiting meaningful participation. Why do aid workers – despite humane intentions – continue to rely on reductive narratives? This paper inquires how the everyday emotional lives of aid workers make reductive narratives persist. Based on 65 semi-structured interviews in Singapore, Jakarta, and Aceh, and 40 aid worker books and blogs, I show how aid workers regularly experience emotional anxieties that question their complicity in the suffering of others and their powerlessness to do anything about it. Reductive narratives resonate and persist because they allow aid workers to cope with these anxieties. I illustrate the emotional resonance of three reductive narratives – civilizing; romanticized; and impersonal narratives – in three common practices of local participation in aid work: professionalized standards; visiting the field; and hiring locals. Given the emotional origins of reductive narratives, rational critique is insufficient for reforming or decolonizing aid work. Rather, change must also involve engaging the underlying emotions of aid workers.
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The Emotional Life of Numbers:
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Scientists self-consciously construct metrics and models to bracket complexity by simplifying reality. Yet, why are international experts frequently unable to unbracket this complexity when making policy in the real world? We argue that the allure in metrics and models is not just in its practical utility, but in the feeling of control for its user. Hence, experts cling onto their metrics and models to avoid feeling impotent. To illustrate, we trace the history of: economic metrics (from population growth, to GDP, to poverty indexes); nuclear deterrence models (from the massive retaliation to brinksmanship) ; and climate models (from the Club of Rome to the IPCC). We show how experts began to construct these metrics and models as to reassure themselves of their self-efficacy. However, once formed, metrics and models can take a life of its own and induce a feeling of impotence within a larger public. By comparing technical objects that continue to be circulated with those that do not, we demonstrate how the affective resonance of metrics and models depends on whether they continue to speak to the anxieties of their time and place. By challenging the assumption that international expertise is devoid of emotions, this paper bridges the mutual lack of engagement in the emotions and global governance literatures.
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