My Brother's Keeper: The Double Experience of Refugee Aid-Workers

Abstract

The language of development and humanitarian ‘interventions’ suggests a binary relationship between an active, intervening agent and a passive victim, a recipient. This article examines what happens when the lines blur and subjects of intervention — the ‘beneficiaries’ in need of ‘saving’ — become the agents of intervention, the aid-workers: when refugees, recipients of aid, are also aid givers. Through ethnographic research at a community centre on the Turkish–Syrian border, where Syrian refugees worked as aid-workers assisting other refugees as part of the centre's ‘participatory approach’, I explore the unintentional ‘side effects’ of a participatory approach to a refugee assistance project and look at the productive effects of participation. Through the stories of several such refugee aid-workers I explore the ways in which including refugees in aid delivery may reinforce existing class structures, as posited by the approach's critics, and the unexpected opportunities, such as social mobility, that crisis creates.