Sustaining and complicating hierarchies of race and class in humanitarian protection

Surrounded by friends in the comfort of her living room, Umm Mahmoud recalled going to a workshop designed for women on life skills. On entering the hall, she discovered that the training included information on washing your body properly and periods: ‘I know this!’, she exclaimed with her hands in the air, ‘I’m an old woman’.

This intervention developed from a conversation during my PhD viva which highlighted the severe and potentially violent disconnect between what refugee communities need and what international aid agencies finance and operationalise. Shaped by a brief vignette describing the experiences of Umm Mahmoud, a middle-aged mother of two living in Zaatari Village, Jordan, this short piece discusses how humanitarian protection programmes undertaken in Global South geographies sustain hierarchies of race and class which maintain a distinct binary between white aid workers and the ‘other’ beneficiary. Such explicitly racist agendas emphasise the need to decolonise humanitarian protection programmes and challenge the ‘perpetuation of colonial power relations in seemingly benevolent activities’ (Rutazibwa 2019: 66). This contribution draws out the racial hierarchies present in humanitarian practice which have become intrinsic to the success and organisation of the sector itself.