Guest: Andrea Contenta, working on humanitarian organizations, Independent Researcher
Duration: ~18 minutes
In the next two podcast episodes, titled “What Kind of Worlds Does Humanitarianism Sustain?”, we take a critical look at the humanitarian field – not as a neutral space of emergency response and aid delivery, but as a complex system shaped by institutions, structural constraints, funding cycles, and internal hierarchies.
Humanitarian organizations often present themselves as impartial actors responding to crises. Yet their ways of working are far from apolitical. On the contrary, their practices frequently reflect – and reproduce – neoliberal and neocolonial logics.
Our guest, Andrea Contenta, is uniquely positioned to speak to these tensions. He has spent nearly two decades working with major international organizations in humanitarian operations across multiple regions, while simultaneously developing a sharp and grounded critique of the humanitarian system itself.
His experience spans some of the most defining crises of the past twenty years: the conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur in the mid-2000s; the Somali conflict and famine across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Yemen; forced migration in the Horn of Africa; the Ebola epidemic in West Africa; and, from 2015 onwards, migration routes into Europe through the former Yugoslavia, Greece, the Balkans, and the Central Mediterranean – including Tunisia, Libya, and Italy. More recently, he has worked on forced migration in Central and North America.
Drawing on these experiences, Andrea offers a voice that is both critical and grounded – shaped by long-term engagement rather than distant observation.
When I first sent him the interview questions, he responded with several comments – one of them about the title itself. “Fine,” he said, “but the real question today is whether -and how – we can rethink humanitarianism.” Is there still room to move beyond corporate management models? Is it possible to bring “humanity” back into humanitarianism? Especially at a moment when humanitarian language has been mobilized for violent and exclusionary purposes – as in the case of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
The first episode serves as an introduction, in which Andrea shares concrete examples from different contexts to illustrate how humanitarianism operates today across the globe. We then move, in the second episode, to the core of his argument: a critical examination of the managerial tools that structure humanitarian work and of the humanitarian organization itself as a workplace shaped by specific hierarchies, logics, and forms of governance.
More information can be found in:
- Constructing Crisis at Europe’s Borders, MSF Report, Andrea Contenta, Emily May, Reem Mussa, Elisavet Papadimitriou , June 2021
- Contenta, Andrea. “From Corridor to Encampment. Mapping EU Strategies of Containment in Serbia.” movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies 5, no. 1 (2020).
https://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/14.contenta–from-corridor-to-encampment.html