Guest: Andrea Contenta, working on humanitarian organizations, Independent Researcher
Duration: ~20 minutes
In this second episode, titled “What Kind of Worlds Does Humanitarianism Sustain?”, we continue with the core of Andrea’s critique.
As mentioned in the first episode, Andrea Contenta is uniquely positioned to reflect on humanitarianism. His experience spans some of the most defining crises of the past two decades: 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 speaks from a position that is both critical and grounded – shaped by long-term involvement.
While the first episode offered concrete examples of how humanitarianism operates today across different regions, this second episode turns to the core of Andrea’s argument: a critical examination of the managerial tools that structure humanitarian work, and of the humanitarian organizations as a workplace shaped by specific hierarchies, logics, and forms of governance.
In this episode Andrea describes humanitarian organizations as environments deeply entrenched in authority and self-exploitation, and marked by enduring colonial continuities. Staff members often enter the field motivated by solidarity or a desire to help, yet they find themselves navigating layers of bureaucracy, managerial control, and rigid reporting systems. This produces a persistent ethical tension: the work is framed as care, but it is organized through mechanisms that can feel indifferent, extractive, or even contradictory to that purpose. To unpack these tensions, Andrea proposes in this podcast to examine what he calls the “building blocks of the humanitarian model.”
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