Anne-Meike Fechter

The military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar intensified a long-standing situation of conflict-induced displacement within and from the country. In this context, existing networks of informal support become ever more important for displaced people’s immediate survival, and mid-term livelihoods. Drawing on data from a larger project on protracted displacement economies, we investigate how social networks become conduits for cross-border support; how existing modes of aid are being transformed, and how new ones come into being. These do not necessarily consist of conventional international organisations, but rather a multitude of actors which are often overlooked. They include networks sustained by kinship links, ethnic solidarities, faith-based groups, and diasporic support. Many of the people involved have past or current experience of displacement themselves. Our broader aim is therefore, to make visible patterns of support and solidarity that extend among displacement-affected populations, translocally across borders, and further afield. This also builds a different picture informal aid in displacement, which comes into view as formal actors become less prominent.

As multiple forms of ‘vernacular humanitarianism’ are emerging, ordinary citizens, active locally or internationally, play an increasing part. Their interventions face the challenge of scale, and scale-ability of their activities. What can be their role if they only engage with small groups of people? How do they attribute meaning to these interventions, given that the scope of the problem is always larger than what they can hope to achieve? Drawing on research with privately funded humanitarian initiatives in Cambodia, the article argues that in order to accommodate the partialness of their endeavours, they deploy a particular scale, namely that ‘every person counts’. The practices carried out under this logic contain singular acts of care, and lives being transformed. Other scales are being brought into play, such as an individual ‘paying it forward’ by supporting others and thus effecting change in wider society. En observant l’émergence de ‘l'humanitarisme vernaculaire’ dans toute sa diversité, les citoyens ordinaires contribuent à ce phénomène au niveau local ou international. Leurs interventions pourraient garantir l'innovation et les solutions locales ; mais, au même temps, ces interventions sont confrontées par un double défi concernant leur échelle et leur capacité d'extension. Existe-t-il un rôle pour l'humanitarisme de tous les jours qui se limite aux activités concernant des petits groupes d'individus ? Comment trouve-t-on le sens de ces interventions, compte tenu de l'ampleur du problème qui dépasse toutes les bonnes intentions pour faire du bien ? Cet article, basé sur la recherche auprès des initiatives du parrainage privé au Cambodge, montre que ces activités utilisent l’échelle dit ‘chaque personne compte’ pour pallier leurs insuffisances. Les actions guidées par ce raisonnement incluent des gestes particuliers du soin et des améliorations de vie. Il existe d'autres échelles pour effectuer des transformations sociales, comme un individu qui ‘paie d'avance’ en aidant les autres ; c'est un point essentiel. Au lieu d'envisager une séparation entre l’échelle de l'individu et l’échelle de nombreuses personnes, les acteurs de l'humanitarisme envisagent des liens. D'une manière plus générale, ces pratiques de tous les jours proposent que l'approche à l'extension de l'humanitarisme pourrait également rendre visible sa diversité.

Within South East Asia, informal, non-state development actors have become more prominent. The case of small-scale, private aid activities in Cambodia offers the opportunity to reflect on how state frameworks and interventions matter for such projects. Typically, theories of how a state encourages its citizens’ pro-social behaviour while retracting is own commitments, view this within a single nation state. Citizen aid in Cambodia, however, is often characterised by collaborations between national and international peers, and relies, to some extent, on resource flows along those networks. It encourages us to think through such approaches transnationally. This means broadening the analytical framework of the ‘moral neoliberal' (Muehlebach 2012, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) to account for the fact that activities of thus-responsibilised citizens expand beyond the confines of their nation state. In the Cambodian case, a lack of public service provision, combined with a hitherto loosely regulated third sector, have created conditions where such initiatives have proliferated. The case of private aid thus challenges the scope of ‘moral neoliberal', as conceived within the framework of a nation state, as it leaves out of sight those ‘ethical citizens’ who are active transnationally.

The introduction to this collection brings together, under the umbrella terms of citizen aid and grassroots humanitarianism, interdisciplinary research on small-scale, privately funded forms of aid and development. It notes the steady rise of these activities, including in the Global South as well as North, such as in the context of the recent European refugee crisis. It considers their position vis-à-vis more institutionalised forms of aid; methodological approaches and their challenges; and asks what political dimensions these initiatives may have. It outlines key themes arising from the contributions to the collection, including historical perspectives on ‘demotic humanitarianism’, questions of legitimacy and their apparent lack of professionalisation, motivations of their founders, the role of personal connections, as well as the importance of digital media for brokerage and fundraising. Being mindful of its critiques and implicit power imbalances, it suggests that citizen aid deserves more systematic academic attention.

The stated purpose of development is often characterised by the motivation to ‘help’ – that is, to intervene in the lives of others in supportive ways. This paper argues that this perspective has obscured how development activities are also animated by its twin desire to ‘connect’. While this holds significance for development more broadly, it becomes particularly evident in a mode of assistance that has gained prominence more recently. These are privately funded, small-scale projects led by individual founders, here described as ‘citizen aid’. Based on ethnographic research among citizen aid initiatives in Cambodia, the paper argues that the relevance of ‘connecting’ has been insufficiently recognised so far. It explores different aspects of what participants mean by ‘making a connection’, including face-to-face contact, direct experience of aid activities, and their tangible efficacy. It also finds that establishing interpersonal relationships across national, ethnic and cultural differences, while potentially challenging, is a key motivation for those involved. Finally, the paper argues that acknowledging the desire to connect questions notions of the ‘distant stranger’ as the archetypical humanitarian object, highlighting the wish for familiarity and closeness as potentially just as important for motivating and directing assistance to others.

A Cambodian town is the site of transnational flows of resources between private donors, and Cambodians in need of assistance. Such forms of ‘citizen aid’, initiated by individuals, constitute a form of resource transfer across borders which falls outside the purview of migration scholars. Unlike remittances, they are not primarily channelled through kin-related or geographical ties. Instead, they are enabled by brokers of care, Cambodian and international, who facilitate both personal connections and forms of support. The lens of the broker enables an understanding of citizen aid as a form of brokering care. It offers a critique of the moral ambiguity of the broker, as well as on the relationship between care and control. Casting people in need not merely as recipients, but as providing opportunities for intervention sought after by supporters, means upending conventional notions of who are recipients and donors, and what kind of resources they control respectively.

This article explores the meaning of volunteering among professional aid workers. While they experience disenchantment in their daytime work, volunteering provides them with benefits lacking in their paid jobs. At the same time, a compensatory model does not capture the complex dimensions of this relationship. One motive behind their professional work – bringing about positive change for others – is also the driving force behind their voluntary practices. Such excess of doing good may be indicative of their overall commitment. If aid workers make sense of their actions within a framework of alienated labour, rendering their waged aid work as a commodity, volunteering emerges as a remedial response. At the same time, their paid and unpaid work is animated by the impulse of giving. Such co-existence implies that gifts and commodities are not mutually exclusive; or indeed that both can be understood, following Parry (1986), as emerging from a highly developed capitalist system.

Contemporary research on children affected by migration in Southeast Asia has examined the impact of mobility on their life chances, choices and overall welfare. Extending this concern, this article seeks to address these questions in the context of privileged migration. Specifically, it asks how the mobility of children whose parents work for aid agencies in low-income countries shapes the way they understand and negotiate experiences of privilege, as well as their everyday encounters with poverty. Based on ethnographic research with young people and their families in Cambodia, the findings suggest that parents and children may envisage their international mobility as a chance for personal growth, specifically as manifest in the form of ‘open-mindedness.’ Such positive discourses are complicated, however, by a simultaneously engendered sense of superiority toward those who are less mobile. They are also intertwined with practices of ‘bracketing’ possible frictions arising from their interactions with children of local elite members. While the young people’s proximity to poverty provides opportunities for locally-based service-learning activities, connections with their parents’ work can remain The article therefore suggests that this form of international mobility may not, in itself, enable a critical engagement with poverty or with their own and others’ privilege.