Event Date: March 6, 2025 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Location: FSS 4006, 120 University Private, University of Ottawa

Presented by CIPS

Emily K. M. Scott will present her research exploring how and why humanitarian actors sometimes act disruptively to control issues previously held outside humanitarian bounds. From building advanced reconstructive surgery hospitals that treat wounds ‘gone cold,’ and not the fresh life-threatening wounds of war, to constructing new migration routes that move people across borders for care, organizations transform and subvert humanitarian action. Drawing on over 120 interviews and 10-months of political ethnography with aid workers working in Lebanon and Jordan in response to the Syrian refugee crisis in 2016 and 2017, she will discuss two mechanisms INGOs use to deliberately, and radically transform their care and control, offering novel services and setting new rules: narrative contestation, through which what counts as legitimate and justified humanitarian need or action is altered; and vectors for entry, which offer novel desirable services or rulemaking (as a trojan horse) to gain access to areas where organizations are otherwise not welcome. This set of mechanisms make or take space, where gatekeepers—whether old guard humanitarians, donors, or state or non-state actors who control access to populations—are reticent to accept humanitarian assistance, as it is. Findings have implications for the question of ‘who governs’ affected populations in crises, and why.

Speaker:

Emily K. M. Scott is Associate Professor and Director of Research in the International Development Department at the University of Birmingham in the UK and Associate Fellow with the CIPSS at McGill University. She is a scholar of humanitarianism, conflict, and organizational behaviour with particular focus on the protection of civilians and health, migration, and localization in the Middle East. Her research is published in journals, such as Global Studies Quarterly, World Development, Deadulus, and the Journal of Global Security Studies, amongst others, and she is contributor to outlets including the Washington Post and the New Humanitarian. Emily Scott received my Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is a Fulbright Alumna.

Moderator:

Marie-Eve Desrosiers – Chairholder of the International Francophonie Research Chair in Political Aspirations and Movements in Francophone Africa, and Associate Professor, GSPIA, University of Ottawa.