Bio

Sara Riva is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Queensland, Australia. She’s a feminist and a border abolitionist. Her research looks at the intersections of neoliberalism, migration, humanitarianism, and the border.

Project

The purpose of humanitarianism is to help those in need, in particular groups perceived as vulnerable—or made-vulnerable groups. However, this understanding of humanitarianism is interwoven with the Global North’s need to act as a moral arbiter. In addition, humanitarianism’s entanglement with neoliberalism has made it a public-private apparatus of containment, confinement, and deterrence. Based on my personal experience, having worked in the humanitarian arena for a few years while always engaging in local community initiatives, two contradictory and yet coexisting rationales inhabit my mind. On the one hand, as a product of a Judeo-Christian metropolitan postimperial center (Tester 2010), and as a “good” neoliberal responsible subject/citizen, I have the (moral) impulse or need to react towards social injustice and suffering by engaging in solidarity initiatives—whether at home or abroad. On the other hand, I understand that endorsing the humanitarian possibility not only depoliticizes social injustice, but it is also used by governments to disavow their (international) responsibilities. This paper explores the author’s personal dilemma as a feminist and critical thinker of engaging in (vernacular) humanitarian work (Brković 2017) in regarding to refugees, and its connection to neoliberalism’s “responsibility” and colonial histories (and presents).