The Borderless World? Social Entrepreneurship and Solutions to the “Refugee Crisis”

• In Event: The Will to Improve, The Vision of Future-Making, and Innovations for Development - I

Abstract

In a recent report, the UNHCR strongly advocated “connecting refugees” through mobile and internet connectivity through the active participation of the private sector. Declaring the limitations of humanitarian aid, social enterprises in the global North and South claim to combine business based approaches with philanthropy in order to intervene in the “refugee crisis.” Based on interviews and textual analysis of project documents, my paper critically examines this “will to improve” (Li, 2007) as imaginaries of techno-utopianism and expertise travel from the Silicon Valley to such “global projects.” I examine financial inclusion projects in the South based on blockchain technology that promise a stateless global society in which the demise of traditional mechanisms of the state will usher in a borderless world for refugees. I argue that the constructions of the “expert” and the “refugee” in such projects ignore complex geopolitical, racialized and situated power struggles in their solutionism for a seemingly apolitical world. Further, I focus on social enterprises involved in ICT training and employment for refugees. Social incubators, hosted by business and technology elites, promise flexible and portable employment for refugees. However, these development projects engender precarious work in the information economy and significantly, reinforce an apparently progressive ethos through representations of “safe,” heteronormative individuals in the global North and distant others in the South that that prevent politicized alliances aimed towards deeper structural transformations. My paper interrogates the corporate humanitarian complex as the private sector increasingly supplements or replaces civil society organizations and the state for “helping refugees.”

Author

• Sreela Sarkar, Santa Clara University