Love and Liberation : : Humanitarian Work in Ethiopia's Somali Region / / Lauren Carruth.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2021
• VerfasserIn: Carruth, Lauren,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2021]; ©2021
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.) :; 8 b&w halftones, 1 map, 1 chart

Lauren Carruth's Love and Liberation tells a new kind of humanitarian story—the protagonists are not volunteers from afar, but rather, are Somali locals caring for each other: nurses, aid workers, policymakers, drivers, community health workers, and bureaucrats. The contributions of locals are often taken for granted, and the competencies, aspirations, and effectiveness of local staffers frequently remain muted or absent from the planning and evaluations of humanitarian interventions structured by outsiders. Relief work is traditionally imagined as politically neutral and impartial, and interventions are planned as temporary, extraordinary, and distant. Carruth provides an alternative vision of what "humanitarian" response means in practice—not driven by International Humanitarian Law, the missions of Western relief organizations, or trends in the aid industry or academia, but instead, by what Somalis call "samafal." Samafal is structured by the cultivation of lasting relationships of care, interdependence, kinship, and ethnic solidarity. Samafal is also explicitly political and potentially emancipatory: humanitarian responses present opportunities for Somalis to begin to redress histories of colonial partitions and to make the most out of their political and economic marginalization. By centering Love and Liberation around Somalis' understandings and enactments of samafal, Carruth offers a new perspective on politics and intervention in Africa.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Note on Transliteration and Somali Language Pronunciation -- Prologue: “I Cannot Give It Up” -- Introduction: Humanitarianism in the Margins of Empire -- 1. Humanitarianism Is Local -- 2. Humanitarianism Is Samafal -- 3. Humanitarian Work -- 4. Crisis Work -- 5. Humanitarianism In Anti-Politics -- 6. From Crisis to Liberation -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index