Humanitarianism: Key Debates and New Approaches Everyday Humanitarianism in Cambodia

Offers an accessible account of everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia, as well as wider insights into how people link local actions to global challenges. Everyday humanitarianism in Cambodia grapples with an essential human conundrum: in a world of pervasive inequality and poverty, where should one intervene? What shapes our choices? And what difference can a seemingly small act make? Humanitarianism is often understood through its institutional forms, with large-scale approaches being equated with importance. This book shows how informal and local forms of aid – everyday humanitarianism – disrupts this assumption. Drawing on ethnographic work with Cambodian and foreign practitioners who set up their own projects, it offers a detailed account of the unseen world of privately-funded aid. It reveals radically different understandings of how individual actions matter. Everyday humanitarians make use of their own, interlinking scales, rendering people and causes meaningful regardless of numbers or size. Applying this scalar approach to social relations unsettles long-held imperatives such as humanitarian impartiality. Through tracing whom people choose to support and why, Fechter argues that much of this humanitarianism is, on the contrary, driven by partiality. Critically nuancing the trope of the white saviour, what matters is shared history and biographical affinities between people – which motivate humanitarian action. Recalibrating our understanding of how individual actions matter and what ‘counts’ in humanitarianism, this volume will appeal to humanitarian scholars, policy makers and practitioners, as well as those interested in social activism, human rights, and kindness and mutual aid. Faced with the scale of global challenges such as poverty and inequality, one question is where to start. Humanitarian efforts can only ever have limited reach. Among all of human suffering, whom should we support? And what shapes our choices? Such questions are at the core of this book. Through an ethnographic account of moralities, it traces how everyday humanitarian practitioners challenge entrenched values of what matters, upending the notion that the large-scale is inherently important, and even questioning what ‘large’ means in the first place. Instead, these practitioners typically aim to create a difference in the life of a particular person, situating their limited actions within pervasive poverty.