Description
Book SynopsisLauren Carruth''s Love and Liberation tells a new kind of humanitarian story. The protagonists are not volunteers from afar but rather 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 evaluation 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 practicenot 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
Trade Review
Lauren Carruth's Love and Liberation is an insightful ethnographic study of global humanitarianism, critically analyzing humanitarian work in Ethiopia's Somali Region (Soomaaliweyn). Over the course of the book's chapters, the author takes us on a journey, from the vast and arid terrains of the Ogaden to the dilapidated and stifling office buildings of Jijiga (the region's capital).
* Society of the Anthropology of Work *
Table of ContentsPrologue: "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 Is Anti-Politics
6. From Crisis to Liberation
