Everyday Ethics in Disasters: How Local Communities Shape Crisis Politics

• In Event: Multi-Epistemological Research: An Integrative Approach

Abstract

In settings of humanitarian crisis, stories of ethical paradoxes and challenges inevitably surface, whether around a café table in Beirut, Cox’s Bazaar, or Goma. While aid agencies, universities, and news outlets have ethics rules and regulations, standardized guidelines frequently do not address the seemingly trivial, everyday challenges that crop up in crisis settings. Rules may prohibit humanitarian workers from giving money to child beggars, but offer no guidance on how to humanely deny them. Researchers and journalists may know how not to re-traumatize interviewees, but still contribute to community research fatigue. However, local members of the same professional communities often develop strategies to protect themselves, vulnerable individuals, and their communities during moments of crisis. Focusing on the humanitarian situation in the Mashriq, we use multi-sited fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and observations with Kurdish and Lebanese journalists, scholars, and humanitarians to examine how they develop strategies to cope with the “grey areas” of conflict- and crisis-adjacent work. We argue that their approaches often involve innovation and informal expansion of their roles, for example, from a primary care doctor into basic mental health counselor or a sociology professor into a community gatekeeper. However, we also note how these evolving roles in turn shape local professionals’ assessments of the utility and constructiveness of international aid, scholarly research, and foreign media. We contend that these emergent communities of practice offer important practical lessons for foreign practitioners in the field, but also note the potential for international workers to shape the politics of conflict zones in unexpected ways. In doing so, the paper makes a non-linear, causal argument centered on the interaction of meaning, context, and roles. In doing so, it builds on a growing interpretivist tradition that examines how meaning-making and emotion affect political processes.

Authors

• Sarah E. Parkinson, Johns Hopkins University

• Valerie de Koeijer, Johns Hopkins University