“In contrast to those who suggest that we act as soon as the whistle blows, I suggest that, even before the whistle blows we ceaselessly try to know the world in which we live — and act. Even if we must act on imperfect knowledge, we must never act as if knowing is no longer relevant.” (p. 6)  

—Mahmood Mandami in Saviors and Survivors

Some thoughts on ‘voluntourism’

First, a definition
The usage of the term ‘voluntourism’ has increased exponentially in the last half decade and, for many, it carries negative connotations.  For some voluntourism is one manifestation of the overtly disparaging “slacktivism” meme that has gained a lot of traction as well.  This wikipedia article does a nice job reviewing the history, current status and controversies surrounding “volunteer travel.”

A conversation with a Jordanian aid worker
This semester I am teaching a class on the humanitarian sector, and I recently had a Jordanian aid worker, a communications manager, Skype into class from Amman, Jordan.  Among the topics we discussed was his reaction to what he called ‘voluntourists,’ those who come to Jordan, travel to the refugee camps, and treat the experience like an open-air human zoo.  Though they will deny this is the case, these people come looking to confirm stereotypes and preconceptions they already have, in many cases arriving in Jordan having done scant background research. The fact that only a relatively small percentage of Syrian refugees (less than 20%) actually live in camps like Azraq or Za’atari is lost on them.  No, all -or even the majority- of visitors are not ‘voluntourists’, but enough fit the description to make national aid workers in Jordan wince as they see new faces arrive requesting a ‘tour.’  Though these visitors may have the best of intentions, only wanting to bear witness to those they want to understand and to help, the national aid workers responsible for arranging these visits must remain sensitive to rights of the those in the affected communities.

As James Dawes put it in his 2007 book That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity, “This contradiction between our impulse to heed trauma’s cry for representation and our instinct to protect it from representation -from invasive staring, simplification, dissection – is a split at the heart of human rights advocacy.” (p. 9; emphasis in original).

During our Skype conversation we talked about the line between giving a voice and taking a voice.  The comms staff person’s job is to give a voice, and the voluntourist, deliberately or unwittingly, tends to take a voice.

Required reading
Perhaps required reading for all humanitarians should be the March 2012 Atlantic article by Teju Cole “The White-Savior Industrial Complex” (with a nod to the dated but more-relevant-now-than-it-was then farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower entitled “The Military-Industial Complex“).

Cole’s essay has become part of the cannon with regard to critiquing the activism and voluntourism efforts of many -mostly white- Americans, and it is cited or nodded to by an increasingly wide away of authors and bloggers.  Cole famously made the point that “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”  His words challenge me and my students to examine our privileges: our Global North status, Americanness, our skin color (those who are ‘white’), our English language facility, and, perhaps most prominently, our [relative] wealth.

In an address to the Conference on InterAmerican Student Projects (CIASP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 20, 1968 US critic Ivan Illich raises the issue of doing unintentional harm, “… the Peace Corps spends around $10,000 on each corps member to help him adapt to his new environment and to guard him against culture shock. How odd that nobody ever thought about spending money to educate poor Mexicans in order to prevent them from the culture shock of meeting you?”

Here Illich anticipates many contemporary critics of so-called voluntourism: “There exists the argument that some returned volunteers have gained insight into the damage they have done to others – and thus become more mature people. Yet it is less frequently stated that most of them are ridiculously proud of their ‘summer sacrifices.’ I do not agree with this argument. The damage which volunteers do willy-nilly is too high a price for the belated insight that they shouldn’t have been volunteers in the first place.”

Another statement from Illich merits a closer look. He points out an unintended and potentially harmful impact of our best-intended acts as we travel abroad to “help.” He says to that gathering of Peace Corp volunteers, “By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class “American Way of Life,” since that is the only life you know.” Simply stated, we are social beings and we learn from each other -sometimes actively but most of the time unconsciously and passively- elements of culture and life-perspective. We “teach” our culture wherever we go and are at the same time we learn from the cultures we visit.

Do I see myself here?
In their article “#InstagrammingAfrica: The Narcissism of Global Voluntourism”, sociologists Lauran Kascak and Sayantani Dasgupta argue that “Voluntourism is ultimately about the fulfillment of the volunteers themselves, not necessarily what they bring to the communities they visit.”  They break voluntourism photos into three telling categories The Suffering Other, The Self-Directed Samaritan, and The Overseas Selfie.

Ouch. In various ways on past travels around the world I am guilty of taking all three, though not recently.

“As ‘Voluntourism’ Explodes In Popularity, Who’s It Helping Most?” posted on the Carrie Kahn’s “Goats and Soda” blog at NPR offers some soft challenges to the idea of voluntourism.  As is often the case, though, commenter ‘emanresu‘ on the post was even more informative and incisive.  I include the whole comment because it is so well written and expresses many points with which I agree.

“The voluntourism trend has given countless white middle-class western kids the opportunity to get a glimpse of what life is like for most of the rest of the world. After a couple weeks of squat toilets, intermittent electricity, and massively overcrowded public transportation, they fly home to tell their families about how life-changing it was to teach English to brown children and get over their fears of cockroaches. All well and good for those who have the resources to pay for a trip like this, and I sincerely applaud the good intentions– the world needs more people with their eyes open to the plight of others, and a bit of international awareness. But, can we all stop trying to pretend that voluntourism isn’t another form of soft colonialism?

Consider this hypothetical situation: you are planning a two-week trip to Nicaragua to build a school for orphans. You are spending thousands of dollars on airfare, and likely another fee for signing up with the school-building organization. During your stay, you will very likely do shoddy construction work, have “meaningful interactions” with adorable kids in your terrible Spanish, get mild food poisoning, and reinforce the image of Rich White People as Saviors of the Third World. After you leave, the building may or may not be used for its intended purpose. Perhaps more volunteers, or else locals with proper expertise, will have to undo the poor work that you did with such good intentions. In any case, you feel satisfied, the poor people have a school, and now you can all go home and continue your own lives.

But. What about the unemployed carpenters in that village? Why not spend a fraction of the money you used to pay your travel there, and employ them to do a proper job? Or sponsor the whole community to build it together, thus creating a sense of responsibility towards the building and its future? And what about the school itself, what happens when the organization leaves, having done what it set out to do, and there is no money to pay a teacher or buy schoolbooks for the adorable orphans? Maybe the building will be repurposed as a shed for animals, or will slowly fall into disrepair. It might just end up being “that place the the gringos built that can’t be used because they nailed the roof on wrong.”

I don’t wish to discourage anyone from applying their goodwill. I just urge us all to critically examine the implications of our actions, individual and collective, and try to examine the source of the problems that we are so keen so solve instead of addressing the surface. From a position of privilege, can we take a more informed view of the vast socio-economic discrepancies directly caused by our own complicity in a system which values capital over life? Of course the world needs help. And it’s a beautiful thing that there are so many people ready to offer what time and money they have. But the benefits of voluntourism are largely an illusion.

I think the term ‘soft colonialism’ is worth a deeper look, to be sure. Are we, from the US who travel abroad, as Ivan Illich argued long ago, nothing more than ‘salespeople for the middle class American way of life’?  This idea deserves more in depth exploration, and Daniel Dennett presents us with the fairly well articulated concept of ‘dangerous memes.’  In short, the argument goes, you can inoculate against disease viruses but ‘viruses of the mind’ are potentially even more damaging, infecting most dramatically the young [African, for example] children who crowd around the mzungus, their minds not yet fully protected because their cultural learning is still in process.  Richard Dawkins, originator of the term “meme” (in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene), elaborates on the idea of ‘viruses of the mind’ in his 2003 book The Devil’s Chaplin.

Doing harm?
Making detailed note of a specific -and perhaps insidious- form of voluntourism, visiting orphanages in the developing world, Rafia Zakaria in his article “The white tourists burden” explains that,  “Volunteerism presents an escape, a rare encounter with an authenticity sorely missed, hardship palpably and physically felt – for a small price.”  He is among may who are asking the question about whether or not voluntourism is doing more harm than good.

Scanning down the list of blog posts -some very on point and other not so much- on this Huffington Post  site is useful and can serve to shed light on the good, the bad and the ugly of voluntourism.  Of particular note is the blog post that went viral by Pippa Biddle entitled “The problem with little white girls (and boys):  why I stopped being a voluntourist” where she chronicles her transformation of perspective on her efforts to ‘help.’

My thoughts on this topic were put into some words of “Advice for new college graduates out to save the world“, though you’ll find nothing terribly new in this piece it may sum up some of what you have read above.

Summary thoughts
Can the visitors to the Amman headquarters of the hundreds of INGO’s all be painted with one brush, all voluntourists?  Of course not.  But for the ones where ‘the shoe does fit’ strong reaction is perhaps appropriate.  We should never proceed blindly as we seek to address our need to show -and act on- our empathy toward others, wherever this may happen.  Though we all need to avoid the “paralysis of analysis” that this self-questioning can generate, we must never act as if knowing the real impact of our actions is not relevant, despite our best intentions.

 

 

 

“This research is really needed and important for Jordanian aid and development workers.” 

–M&E  aid worker in Amman

 

As part of my research on national (aka ‘local’) humanitarian aid and development workers, I have been fortunate to talk with many Jordanians working for INGO’s in various capacities.  Their generosity and openness has been a gift.  Here are some thoughts from my discussions with one young professional.

Thoughts on low response to survey
Recently I have had a series of very informative interviews with a young female Jordanian research director at a mid-sized INGO working in Amman.

Among multiple topics, we have talked about my survey, live for many weeks now, and she said the release of the survey was badly timed because just now the ‘expats’ are coming back from holiday/New Year break and everyone is gearing back up and working long hours these early winter months.

To date, there are 79 responses to the survey, just over 1% of the thousands of Jordanian aid and development workers now in the sector.  There are 4400 working with organizations belonging to the Jordan INGO Forum (JIF) and likely 2000 more in various other organizations and capacities. Collectively, the aid and development sector may be the biggest industry in Jordan, even bigger that tourism in terms of numbers of workers.

As we talked about the survey response -or lack thereof- she noted that  “… it is hard to engage people in civil life” and that many are “conditioned to not trust the system.” She went further to note that, in her view, the more educated people were, the less likely they were to be engaged, and that this is related to a chronic sense of disappointment between governmental and organizational aspirations and the actual results.

In sociology we use the terms “ideal culture” and “real culture” (I talk about it in this post from 2014), and when I discuss these terms with my students, I note that the gap between the “is” and the “ought” is not the exception, but rather the rule in most organizational settings.  Just yesterday we talked about the aspirational “ought” of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and the reality that the global situation on every continent is far, far short of the goals in this lofty document.

For another recent example, note the continuing gap between the rhetoric and actions of the Afghanistan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) and the current state of affairs in this crippled state. The ideal and the real are further drifting part, methinks, not just in Afghanistan and Jordan, but globally.

Generations of Jordanians have been dealing with refugees at least since -ironically- 1948, the year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was published. Here are some numbers: 2,175,491 (Palestinian refugees) (2017); 65,922 (Iraqi); 655,624 (Syria) (2018) for a total of approximately 2,896,837, or just less than one third of Jordan’s total population of 10,248,069 (source).  Given this over 70 year history of dealing with waves of refugees from their neighbors in the Levant, one can easily understand a Jordanian attitude of resigned acceptance of the gap between what is and what could be.  Peace and progress in the region seem beyond the control of any single person, organization, or even government, no matter how well resourced they might be. It is hard to get engaged in civic life when you have many reasons to believe that your civic engagement actions are, on the whole, unheard and ineffectual.

Another humanitarian I interviewed made the single point that taking the time to complete a survey -not to mention the mental and emotional energy necessary for that effort- is difficult given the demands of the work week.

Indeed, why would a Jordanian humanitarian worker take the time to complete yet another survey, especially one that comes from an outsider, a non-Arabic academic from the US?

Methodology notes
As is noted on the opening page of the survey, the overall purpose of this research is to learn about the views and lives of local aid and development workers in Jordan.  My goals are to share these survey results with the humanitarian (aid and development) community in Jordan and much more broadly to the rest of the world via blogging and eventual academic publication of the overall results.  My methods to this point have included using social media, personal contacts, and an over ‘snowball’ strategy, with the hope that, meme-like, word would spread and more would hear about the opportunity to share their views.  The survey itself was crafted using the extensive input from over a dozen Jordanian INGO workers, and I have not talked to any Jordanians who thought the research was a bad idea or that the questions were off point or otherwise not appropriate.

I’ll close the survey in a few weeks and immediately begin presenting the results on this blog, doing so with the intent to honor the the gift of time and intellectual energy given to me by each respondent.

I’ll be posting more in the very near future about my discussions with this young Jordanian woman.  In the meantime, if any of you reading this just now is a Jordanian working in the humanitarian sector, please consider taking the time to complete the survey.  Click here.

In you have any questions, concerns, or feedback I invite you to contact me.

 

Its not what you know its who you know

Overview
The use of social networking as a tool to navigate both personal and professional life is a time honored cultural universal. Indeed, historically nearly every facet of social life was deeply influenced by (perhaps even determined) one’s family, clan, and tribal connections.  The traditionally accepted norm of using connections to move forward in life both personally and professionally is now simultaneously clashing with and merging into our more modern and bureaucratized world.

Begun in 2002, LinkedIn matured the commodification of this social phenomena, and its corporate reach has grown rapidly. Versions of this platform have been launched in India, China, and Russia, just to name a few.  Two years ago the Middle East version was launched, and now all totaled there are nearly 500 millions users around the world able to connect in 24 different languages.

This post explores the use of wasta. Loosely translated wasta means as ‘connections’ and is roughly analogous to the concept of social networking. I explore questions about wasta as it relates to the lives and activities of humanitarian aid and development workers in the Middle East.

Complicated lives
As I continue researching the aid and development sector, I am constantly reminded that the lives of all humanitarian aid workers are complicated in ways that many outside of the sector likely will never understand. Meeting both material and psychosocial needs -their own, those of their colleagues, and those of the people they ‘serve’- can be hella tricky.

On a typical day professional humanitarians can be confronted with many situations where nuanced cultural understanding is not only helpful but, critically, may mean the difference between life and death -theirs or that of those in the affected communities with which they work.

On top of that onerous charge, they are tasked with functioning within and between large and inherently complex bureaucracies.  Oftentimes they are also involved with brokering communication and coordination between the social/bureaucratic world of their employer and the sociocultural world of the targeted affected communities.

This last task is made all of the more complicated because the affected communities with which they work -lets use the current example of Syrian refugees in Jordan- have a matrix of both formal and informal social structures and, as a further complication, much of this social fabric has been frayed, modified by war, loss, and relocation. A person who may have been a leader in his village back in Syria is now surrounded by many who are not aware of his important social connections, and only see him as an equal, just another refugee.  Further, in the eyes of the NGOs, individuals are seen as, well individual and less so part of a larger social network.  In a previous post I touch on the frustrations that come with this reality.

Vitamin W in Jordan?
For the aid worker, understanding and navigating culturally nuanced social networks and the related networking norms raises many questions, one of which is to what degree does the social capital and wasta that one had accumulated before fleeing Syria carry over to this new life as a refugee?  For my research, there are a series of additional questions that arise, namely

• To what degree do humanitarian workers have to work both with and around informal networks such as wasta as they go about their jobs?
• Do Jordanian humanitarian aid workers use their own wasta to get things done?  If so, how is this reconciled with bureaucratic protocols and the, to some extent, the broad anti-corruption policies of their organization?
• To what degree do demographic variables such as gender, age, and current position impact the use of wasta both within the affected community and between those in the affected community and the people representing the aid sector?
• How do humanitarian workers differentiate both personally and as agents of their organizations between legitimate and non-legitimate uses of social connections, of wasta?
• Are there other units of analysis as we probe into wasta?  Can organizational membership bestow wasta?  To what degree are some NGOs more potent in terms of their connections and influence than others, and how does this play into inter and intra organizational interactions?  How do these differing degrees of influence impact the effectiveness of the organizations and the aid workers acting as the faces of the organizations?

Some background on wasta
There is a considerable body of literature on wasta. Here are just a few book-length analyses.

Wasta: The Hidden Force in Middle Eastern Society (1993) by Robert B. Cunningham and Yasin K. Sarayrah was published decades ago but seems as relevant now as ever.  The authors stress how the use of

wasta permeates the Middle Eastern culture but may hamper development since it inherently circumvents the processes and protocols of international organizations and businesses.  They suggest the wasta must be understood and adapted to by outsiders rather than ignored.

In Palestinian Refugees and Identities:  Nationalism, Politics and the Everyday  (2015) Luigi Achilli details issues surrounding wasta and the fine distinction between wasta and fasad.  His book focuses a small group of young men as they navigate their lives as refugees in and out of refugee camps.

In The Political Economy of Wasta: The Use and Abuse of Social Capital Networking (2016) edited byMohamed Ramady takes a global approach to wasta, noting that using one’s social capital to maximize outcome in both personal and professional spheres is a cultural universal, with LinkedIn a modified web version of this phenomena.

The clash playing out in real time
As I noted above, there is an inherent clash between traditional cultural norms and modern bureaucratic protocols and functioning.  To the point, while it may be culturally acceptable and expected behavior to hire one’s nephew for a job, national or international anticorruption laws may prohibit such an action. In some previous research I reported on and offered comment about mostly expat Aid Worker Voices on corruption.  See here for the original post.

Wasta-like power and influence, used for the right reasons and with positive socially accepted values as the driving logic, can be good and efficient under the right circumstances. Abuse of power, though, is as old as our species, and arguably, pre-dates it.  An Iraqi refugee noted to me that,

“You have touched on a very sensitive issue that is hindering development in regions like the Middle East. Wasta always was and is still keeping skilled people from doing their part in developing their countries.”

Indeed there are both positive and very negative impacts of wasta. One thing is certain, though, and that is we can only gain by understanding more clearly this and related cultural realities, and that means addressing the research questions I raise above.

In my next post I’ll present the views on the use and abuse of wasta among local Jordanian aid workers.  Stay tuned.  In the meantime, if you would like to contact me, click here.

Post script
I know that it must be hard to enforce anti-wasta type laws, especially related to nepotism, when the President of the United States has appointed immediate family members into official positions of significant influence.  This irony is not lost on many and the impact is far reaching.

 

“In terms of dealing with the tension between the humanitarian bureaucracy and the humanitarian mission, I think working on this project is the only thing that could have kept me in this field.”

-Lillie Anne, speaking from Amman about her work on the The Mahali Lab

 

Serendipity
Social media certainly has its downsides, but one major positive function of the Facebook platform is that groups can be formed, bringing together people that otherwise would remain proverbial ‘ships passing in the night.’  Many months ago I joined the closed Facebook group Fifty Shades of Aid, and scrolling through the posts has allowed me to deepen my understanding of aid workers around the world.

Researching and writing about humanitarian aid workers is part of my job as a professor of sociology, but a bigger part is teaching and mentoring undergraduates. This fall I am teaching our department’s required ‘classical sociological theory’ course and, as luck would have it, as I was covering the German sociologist Max Weber I happened up this poem in Fifty Shades:

 

Reading this poem I was struck by how clearly Lillie had captured a concept I had just discussed with my students, namely Weber’s  ‘iron cage of rationality.’  Her use of phrases to paint a picture of frustration, of being caught between the ‘humanitarian bureaucracy and the humanitarian mission’ are masterful, and I immediately knew that this was something that I wanted to share with my students to amplify their understanding of Weber’s ‘iron cage.’

‘Our M&E tools grate against compassion’
I began a conversation with Lillie and found that she is working in Jordan with Syrian refugees.  That my current research is on Jordanian aid workers and issues related to work in that sector made our chance meeting all the more fortuitous. 

Over Skype I asked her about her life as an aid worker, her thoughts on my research on local aid workers in Jordan, and the poem that brought us into contact.  I wanted to know more about how she both experiences and understands the clash between the urge to maintain dignity for all and the need to ‘get the job done efficiently according to protocol.’

A Jersey girl working in Jordan
Getting to know each other at the beginning of the interview, I learned that Lillie is from New Jersey, which in her words is “well-known for its culture and international focus.”  Lillie allowed me to talk about my research -giving me very useful feedback on a draft of the survey intended for local aid workers in Jordan- and we talked about many topics before I finally asked her to explain the background behind the writing of her poem.

She explained,

“… I had just transitioned to the position I’m in now a few weeks before, and I had been before that in a cash and livelihoods program.  We had just revamped our coping strategies index and our vulnerability assessment that we were using to determine if people were eligible or not for cash assistance.

You do have the sense when you’re looking at the questions -and there’s a standard one used for that in Jordan- that this is degrading.  This survey is dehumanizing, asking people specifically about the food groups that they’re eating, and how many people are disabled?  How many people can’t work?  It’s rudimentary.  It’s a process-oriented thing when you’re conducting this survey, and you can be doing hundreds of them in a day.

I had just gone from that work to this community-driven innovation lab, which involved very long, unstructured conversations with humans, just to build connections, build trust, and get to know people, and it was that juxtaposition that gave birth to that poem.”

I asked Lillie to explain what the poem was about just as she would if she were talking to my students.  Her explanation adds a new and powerful dimension to what I had given my students, and is a spot-on capturing of what I think Weber, a man who understood power, would say.  She noted that,

“I think really at the heart it’s about power and reflecting on the power that we have when we’re in this position, deciding if someone can meet their basic needs or not, if they have a livelihood or they don’t, or they have this opportunity or not, and that I don’t think we reflect enough on how enormous that power is in this humanitarian sector, and how people feel interacting with us, interacting with our services.  How do we make them feel?  It’s that bureaucratic influence, that people are a means to an end to implement your program or achieve certain outcomes or certain indicators.  We just rarely reflect on human experience for the person who’s interacting with us.”

When explaining Weber’s iron cage I steal some phrasing from Blaise Pascal (“And thus, not being able to make what is just, strong, one made what is strong, just.”). I point out that, increasingly in an age of inexorable, unavoidable, and pervasive bureaucratization, with increasing frequency we are faced with the fact that not being able make that which is real measurable, we tend to make that which is measurable real.  It is rational to move forward with a necessary process that allows for an accountable and efficient allocation of scare resources, but that act of rationality crushes out the humanity of the social interaction.

“Pluck this pain from midair and brutalize it with an algorithm/Your identity databased and replaced with heart-scraping simplicity”, indeed. The words of an artist.

A universally felt frustration
As evidenced by the scores of reactions and comments to her poem on Facebook, it is obvious that the clash between the humanitarian bureaucracy and the humanitarian mission Lillie speaks of is a universally felt frustration within the sector.

What I heard Lillie say, in so many words, was that at some points her job made her a participant in an almost inherently dehumanizing process. She was undercutting dignity by going straight to some very personal questions, or what could appear to be personal questions.  She agreed and said,

“Absolutely, and this is the thing that just kept coming back from these community consultations that we’ve just done is that people do feel like they’re completely compromising their dignity when they’re interacting with humanitarian services, and it came back from everyone we talked to in every city, male, female, youth, older people, so many different stories that people told us just to try to show us, this is what we experience and feel when we come to you for help.”

In his book That the World May Know:  Bearing Witness to Atrocity (2007) James Dawes puts it this way, “This contradiction between our impulse to heed trauma’s cry for representation and our instinct to protect it from representation -from invasive staring, simplification, dissection- is a split at the heart of human rights advocacy.”  (emphasis in original)

That the word ‘dignity’ is used in the very first sentence of the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is significant and lies at the heart of the work Lillie and others are currently doing in the Mahali Lab.  This work, an effort to soften the bars of the ‘iron cage’, is important and, I hope, will continue to inspire more poems that bear witness to our human struggles.

---

My deepest thanks to LillieAnne for taking the time to help me with my research and explaining in such powerful detail the story behind her poem.  More of Lillie’s poetry can be found on her blog Torn to Canvas: Writings from a restless mind.

I have written a good bit in other posts about the bureaucracy in the humanitarian sector and about the sector as a whole.  You can find my book-length compilation of aid worker voices and comment about the sector here.

As always, you can reach me here if you have comment, critique, or commentary.

Using ‘exceptional’ nations as examples of positive deviants

A look around the globe with an eye toward ‘exceptions’ can yield some interesting observations and lead -perhaps- to some useful questions.

Not long ago I spent 5 months in Costa Rica teaching a class which compared the American culture with that of Costa Rica.  What I found doing my background research (see Bowman’s New Scholarship on Costa Rican Exceptionalism) is that these two nations have something in common:  both believe themselves to be exceptional.  American exceptionalism has been an oft used -and maligned- trope for many scores of years, the idea being first offered by the French historian and ethnographer Alexis de Tocqueville back in 1931.  That many nation-states (and before that, empires) see themselves as exceptional is just another manifestation of ethnocentrism or, by its other name, nationalism.

Are there other ‘exceptional’ nations?

Ghana and Namibia have been cited as examples of “African democratic exceptionalism”, with Ghana arguably being an exception in its geographic neighborhood, especially compared to the some bordering nations.  Further east and south of Ghana is Zambia, far more stable than its bordering nations to the north, south, and east,  DR Congo, Zimbabwe, Angola, respectively.

In southeast Asia there is Singapore, a city-state island in a sea of turmoil is hard not to notice as exceptional on many levels.

Though it may be now waning, Chilean exceptionalism was recognized by some for years.

Jordan as a ‘positive devant’?
I have turned my attention in the last six months toward the Middle East and more specifically to the humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis.  Why is the organizational hub for this response in Jordan?  At first the answers seem obvious, with all of the surrounding nations ruled out by their current crises and/or lack of apparent neutrality.

But why Jordan?  Is it in some way ‘exceptional’, or restated, a ‘positive deviant’?  The humanitarian aid industry has employed the concept of positive deviance for decades, at least since 1998 when it was used for household livelihoods assessments in Cambodia. This concept has staying power and appears in sector discussions most recently in the context of data driven development.

I am not alone in thinking Jordan exceptional.  The sociologist Dr. Mansoor Moaddel provides some very useful insight in 2002 in his book Jordanian Exceptionalism, carefully outlining the history of the state-religion relationship in this nation.

Applying this concept to a nation as a unit of analysis is, to say the least, problematic.  Accepting that assessment, there are yet some questions that are worth asking not only about Jordan but also of the other ‘exceptional/deviant’ nations around the world.

• What about their history, politics, leadership profiles, ethnic/tribal/religious makeup and overall cultural configuration have contributed to their successes?
• Why is it that some nations wax and wane being and being seen as exceptional?
• What external geopolitical and economic factors play into the depth and longevity of these exceptionalities?
• Do those in the region depend on these deviants for their guidance or show a need for the stability which they represent?
• Can their deviance best be seen as a zero-sum or, alternately, a non-zero-sum situation?

In the case of Jordan all of these questions may be relevant, but perhaps one key factor is their leadership profile, with the monarchy being in some way the ‘secret sauce’ that makes this nation so stable.

Below is what one Jordanian had to say.

“The Levant has been a mixing bowl of ethnicities from all the region (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Turkey). It stared as early as the 1890s when the first waves of Circassians and Chechens started pouring in from Russia. These communities are well established now and well integrated into what is now known as Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Syria. Fast forward a few hundred years to the invasion of Palestinian land by the Zionist movement in the 1940s, thousands of Palestinians fled to neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and even Kuwait. Many of which ended up in Jordan, adding to the already existing population of Bedouin and Caucasian origin. This was not unique to Jordan alone, but to the region in general. These waves of migration continue after the first gulf war and the Sudanese war of the late 1980s, the Iraq invasion in the early 2000s and the Syrian civil war of 2011. Jordan now hosts people of Palestinian, Syrian, Yemeni, Iraqi, Armenian, Circassian, Chechen, and Sudanese decent. Jordan is a Suni-Muslim majority country, with a Christian minority population living in peace with one another following more or less the same culture.

In broader context Jordan looks stable compared to its neighbours, but there remains some unrest within its borders, from Bedouin tribe clashes to peaceful sit-ins in response to heightened by the economic stagnation, high inflation and unemployment rates.

Some might argue that Jordan owes its relative stability due to its peace treaty with Israel, and its good relations with the United States, in which they need a “stable” ally in the region. Hence, after witnessing the mass displacement of their Arab counterparts, Jordanians are well aware of the volatility of the region and that it could have easily been them. Many stand behind the leadership of the HRH King Abdullah II and credit his efforts for the stability that Jordan is enjoying”.

Asked for a summary of the current situation Hala responded,

“Well I guess it is unique and it isn’t at the same time. I think it’s relatively ‘stable’ because of the unique-ish regional political climate, in which it is playing a small part in what is becoming a clearer picture of what some leaders of countries want [read:  the United States]. I think that Jordan in able to keep the cork in place for the time being, but it might not be that easy down the road…  I think it’s unique that there arn’t any obvious mass killings and bombings, but there are real issues under the surface.”

That Jordan is stable and an ‘exception’ in the region may be true, but why that is so is a very complex mix of history, geopolitical machinations and, yes, personalities.

Nomothetic versus ideographic
Perhaps the sociologist Max Weber was right, and we can and should avoid the tendency to explain our world by reference to general laws and focus on treating real life examples each as unique and qualitatively different from other social realities.  Jordan is neither Ghana nor Costa Rica nor the United States.  The story of the Levant is important to understand alone, without compromising details and interpretations just so they can fit into a larger global sociopolitical pattern.  History stumbles forward and our best efforts can only yield a tentative understanding of why things are the way they are in the present.

One aid worker colleague put it this way, “I think the ‘uniqueness’ factor is that these countries (with the sum of their history, leaders, complexities, demography, etc.) actually found the balance between a relative quality of life for an increasing number of people, relative political and social stability because every country-mix is different, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe for this, hence the feeling of having cracked the code of the masses.”

When asked, ‘who is driving the search of for this balance?’ and, ‘Can the balance mechanisms in one be applied to another?’  she replied simply that “…impossible to take a recipe and apply it elsewhere.”

Indeed.

Extrapolating current trends and directions is our wont as humans, with our egotistical and anthropocentric hubris leading us to the conclusion that we can know the past, understand the present, and control the future.

Have we learned anything useful?
Can we learn from positive deviants and make use of their examples as a guide for how to ‘fix’ the present and proactively guide our future?  I am not sure.  Perhaps we should ask the aid workers who used this conceptual tool for household livelihoods assessments in Cambodia back in 1998.

All for now on this excursus.  Back to our regular programming soon.  If you do have comments or questions contact me.

 

 

And the student asked, “What can we do?”

Bringing aid worker voices to students at my university
I can’t take my class on a field trip to the Middle East or to the Jordanian headquarters of some INGO that is part of the Syrian refugee response, but via Skype I can bring meaningful voices into our classroom space.

Last spring I invited an Evil Genius to my class.  Then deployed in Jordan, our class had a chance to learn from J, a 25 year veteran of the sector.  Here is the post about that visit.

At exactly the same point in my Intro to Sociology course this fall -covering a chapter on global poverty and wealth- I again invited a humanitarian to class, this time a young, bright local aid worker named Hala, a Jordanian of Palestinian decent, that I met when I traveled to Amman last August for my research. As I expected, my class listened to our 35 minute chat intently and several were bold enough to ask Hala questions near the end of our session.

I must point out that in this class of 28 students only a small handful indicated they felt confident finding Jordan on a map, and most had no clear idea the scope of the refugee crisis in the region.  I spent class time before our Skype session giving a broad history and overview and then, after we signed off, lectured about (among other topics) the critical role that remittances and cash transfers play in the lives of the refugees.  My intent here being to clarify and expand on the complicated and complimentary support responses being made by the Syrian diaspora and the aid sector.

Our conversation
Given that the audience was, in general, not well informed Hala kept her comments both general and largely positive. We talked about life in the camps and how the traditional cultural norms were maintained as much as possible.  Our conversation touched on the reality that going ‘home’ to Syria was not an option for most families, and that though most refugees (80%) have been integrated into the Jordanian economy in some fashion, those that live in the camps like Azraq and Zaatari have a difficult life, especially when looking into the future.

Hala told me after the session that,

“I didn’t want to paint a negative picture of people who live in traditional/strong cultures as bad or backwards. These cultures exist all around us, even in the U.S, and it is not about pointing fingers, agreeing or disagreeing, it is about recognising them and choosing to respect them, as well as involving them in the conversation. How would these people like to be fed, what is considered the cultural norm and what isn’t?”

“What can we do?”
The prompt I gave my students was fairly simple.  I asked, “What did you learn from Hala and how did your experience in this class learning the sociological perspective help you understand what was being talked about?”

One theme of their responses was captured by this student who wrote, “Hala’s advice to us to help with the Refugee Crisis was to be aware of what is going on and be educated. By saying this, she is telling us to avoid ethnocentrism. We cannot only pay attention to what is going on in our country. We must be global citizens and worry about what is happening to the world around us.”

Indeed, on the opening page of my syllabus is this quotation, meant to convey my teaching philosophy and an intellectual charge:

“In contrast to those who suggest that we act as soon as the whistle blows, I suggest that, even before the whistle blows, we ceaselessly try to know the world in which we live — and act. Even if we must act on imperfect knowledge, we must never act as if knowing is no longer relevant.”
– Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (p. 6)

This next student shows a deep understanding and provides affirmation that this investment in class time is very positive.

“Hala taught me that bad things happen in the world that are depressing, and as privileged people, we do what we can to help those who have much less and are less fortunate than us. To help me understand privilege from another angle, she explained that Syrian refugees and other families that end up in refugee camps in Jordan have done nothing wrong that caused their current situation. Simply “working harder” or persevering would not allow these people to have a different outcome. In the same way, most students at Elon didn’t do anything better than refugees to grant us access to an upper-level education. She helped me to understand that bad things happen to good people, and we must do our best to educate ourselves on injustices in the world and take action in whatever way we can, from voting for a politician who favors support to refugees to donating money to the cause.

Learning the functionalist perspective in this class helped me understand different elements of Hala’s talk with us over skype; for example, the functionalist explains how all elements of society are interconnected. Hala talked a lot about the interaction with the refugee crisis in the Middle East with the economy. As a sociologist, I can begin to understand how adding thousands of new families to an area with limited jobs and resources can add pressure to the economy as well as competition for jobs and substinence to support a family. Adding more cash flow through remittances and donations stimulates growth in the economy since people have more to spend, which will allow businesses to thrive. 

While Hala wants to have hope for the refugee situation in Jordan and other host countries, she illustrated her struggle in seeing an improved world for these people. One quote that we’ve discussed in class was, “What is the line that separates those who are merely moved and those who are moved to act?” Hala’s talk has moved me and my fellow students, but I wonder who will be moved to act.  Anyone can use their privilege to benefit those who are much less fortunate, and our talk with Hala has solidified my desire to do so.”

Most of the student responses were equally insightful.  I’ll end with this one which ends with a very mature statement.

” One thing that stuck out to me was at the very end of speaking with Hala, a classmate asked, “Is there anything we can do to help.” At first Hala said that really there is not much we can do. She seemed stumped by this question. But then she went on to talk about how we must educate ourselves, and educate others on the situation and to always be aware. I took from this that in order to prevent situations like these from happening, we are fortunate to have it not directly affect us, but we must be aware and ready to help and spread awareness.  Hala knows the situation in Jordan is not good, but her positive outlook on life is something I won’t forget. As she spoke to us she never seemed angry or upset, she seemed just as if she is constantly looking ahead. She explained that [INGO’s] help by sending them food and water, but even so, they are in the middle of the desert, receiving minimal treatment. The sociological perspective makes me thankful for the life that we have here, but also makes me want to learn more about those who have completely different backgrounds than I, have a different life than I, but do not deserve less than I.” (emphasis added)

Several times in class I have mentioned the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a high-water mark in terms of our global commitment to a more just world for all, and this student appears to have taken this seriously.

 

A needle moved?
So, what was accomplished by having this local aid worker from Jordan talk to a bunch of young undergraduates from the Global North? Social change is sometimes generated by focused and dramatic historical moments, but more often than not change is caused by the accumulated impact of countless seeds cast onto the vast landscape of our world.  Some of these seeds will germinate immediately, some only after much time has passed. Hala’s words and infectious smile are now part of these student’s memories, and my hope is that in time their actions will, collectively, indeed move the needle forward.

Thank you Hala for your visit!

Feedback, comments, suggestions?  Contact me here.

 

 

Local aid workers in Amman, Jordan

My recent too-short research trip to Jordan yielded many interviews with local aid workers in Amman and at the refugee camp at Azraq.  The hospitality and openness of all the aid workers I talked with was deeply gratifying, and our talks were all extraordinarily productive.

These aid workers and I are now working on a survey instrument that we hope can be widely circulated among local aid workers in and around Amman and perhaps even beyond.

More to come on the content of these interviews, but for now I want to recount an after-hours conversation related to Azraq and refugee camps in general.

Over a couple beers a small group of us traded insights about a range of topics including Trump’s response to the protests and counter protests Charlottesville, the living situation in the various Syrian refugee camps, and the gap between donor interests and real needs ‘on the ground.’  It was agreed that this gap is a constant and pervasive source of frustration in the sector, indeed.

We talked about the range of ways that one can describe life in a refugee camp.  Many who only do short, controlled visits tend to come away with a ‘glass half full’ image concluding that ‘it really isn’t all that bad’ after seeing cheerful kindergarteners, murals on walls, and football pitches.

A veteran aid worker countered that kind of characterization with the polar opposite, calling Azraq a ‘concentration camp in the middle of a desert’ that serves as a human zoo for voyeuristic donor organization representatives.

The description that you use is matter of perspective and as well your intended audience to be sure. We talked about how to get donors to have a more realistic view of life in the camps, perhaps more along the ‘concentration camp’ lines than the upbeat picture some might paint.

The only way for the donors to really know what life is like living on the ground in a T-shelter with no running water and or proper sanitation, it was offered, would be to have them actually live in the camp for at least 48 hours.

“But what would they do all of that time?” was asked.  “And what about security?”

In response to the security question a young Jordanian female aid worker at the table quipped,

“Well, at least they [the donors] wouldn’t have to worry about anyone coming after them with tiki torches.”

Mic drop.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

More local aid worker voices coming soon as I sort through my notes and continue work on the survey.

Reach me here or on Twitter @tarcaro.