President Donald Trump’s announcement of the US troops repositioning within Northeastern Syria, and the subsequent Turkish military operation targeting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the northeast, is often referred to in the media as a betrayal of Kurdish allies by Western powers.

Indeed, since 2014, the SDF, a reportedly joint Kurdish and Arab militia, has fought alongside the US against the Islamic State (ISIS). The prematurely publicized “defeat” of ISIS, perceived as essential to global security, came at the price of tens of thousands of lost lives among SDF members.

Yet such acts of betrayal from the “international community” towards not only Syrian combatants, but also activists, civil society, humanitarians and common citizens have characterized the conflict for years. Many Syrians have worked alongside EU and US allies – the latter including military forces, governments, international humanitarian agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and even private companies.

Many Syrians have worked alongside EU and US allies.

Once the geopolitical situation changed, they were often left behind in conditions of utter danger and extreme precarity. In most cases, their stories never made it to international media. In this post, we draw on our current research to fill this gap.

In August 2019, thanks to funding from the Academy of Finland and the University of Helsinki, we started working on a qualitative research project on humanitarian remote management and local labor in the Syrian conflict and displacement.

The Demise of Localization, the Rise of Remoteness

The humanitarian community has discussed for years the need to transfer the control of humanitarian coordination and resources to local organizations – a debate known as “localization agenda”.

Yet to date, most professionals in the field would agree that localization has failed: funding and decision-making remain in the hands of international organizations and NGOs whose headquarters are located far from the areas affected by humanitarian crises.

What this debate has often neglected to acknowledge, however, is that while policy decisions and the management of resources are far from being localized, most of the workers dealing with difficult tasks on the ground are already recruited locally.

While policy decisions and the management of resources are far from being localized, most of the workers dealing with difficult tasks on the ground are already recruited locally.

In a typical scenario in today’s humanitarian aid, expatriate managers coordinate operations from safe areas, while local partners within conflict zones deliver actual aid to beneficiaries – from medical supplies to food parcels and cash assistance. The risks they face to get their job done range from aerial bombings to food shortages and repeated exposure to severe psychological trauma. Yet their salaries are much lower than Western aid workers, and their working conditions incomparably more difficult.

The Syrian conflict is often held as the crisis in which the use of remote management in humanitarian aid was mainstreamed, hence our choice to focus on it.

The humanitarians we spoke to for our research worked for small to medium-sized Syrian aid organizations, acting as implementing partners for US and EU-based international NGOs, on programs funded by prominent Western agencies such as USAID, DFID and ECHO.

They recalled years spent working as much as 15 hours per day, remaining available to their managers abroad 24/7 through messaging outlets such as WhatsApp and Skype.

Their motivations varied from a sense of duty and solidarity towards their war-torn community, to the impossibility of finding another job in a local economy shattered by armed conflict.

(Dis)enfranchising the (Im)mobile

Some of the workers we interviewed were based in areas such as Dara’a (commonly known as the Cradle of the Revolution), the southern province held by opposition groups until summer 2018, when an offensive co-led by the Governments of Syria and Russia, breaching an internationally brokered de-escalation agreement which Russia was a co-negotiator of, led to its fall under president Bashar al Assad’s government control.

As the province fell back under government control, and Western allies withdrew funding and backing, its people also voiced their grievances about betrayal by the international community. Their plea, however, encountered limited international solidarity.

Among them were local humanitarians who repeatedly, and in vain, asked for help from the organizations they had worked for. Once the Syrian army retook control of Dara’a, these workers were left with two equally dangerous options: stay in the area and “reconcile”, pledging renewed allegiance to the Syrian government, or flee to opposition held areas in northwestern Syria.

Those who decided to stay in so-called “reconciled” areas faced well-documented threats of harassment and arbitrary arrest by the authorities, due to their previous work with organizations funded by powers hostile to the government.

Those who decided to leave, on the other hand, found themselves in areas of the country where risks and needs are unsurmountable to include recurrent reporting of targeting humanitarian and health facilities, and where the use of a scorched earth strategy, as commonly described by media outlets in the area, is commonplace.

From there, the only small chance to reach safety for themselves and their families was being smuggled into Turkey, an option that required cash, and exposure to the risk of violent assault by Turkish border guards.

In fact, of the most interesting aspects emerging from our current, and previous research, is precisely the role of mobility in making the lives and expertise of humanitarians valued and safe, or disregarded and disposable.

Lack of access to mobility is a result of restrictive international migration regimes, but also established patterns of underemployment and deskilling, through which the aid industry reproduces, rather than challenges, global inequalities.

Expatriate managers in international humanitarian organizations, just as in the private sector, are often habitual jet setters, used to being relocated to working stations across the world, and leading transnational personal lives. Local workers, on the other hand, even when highly skilled and having years of experience in the sector, are much less likely to get to move or travel for work.

This lack of access to mobility is a result of restrictive international migration regimes, but also established patterns of underemployment and deskilling, through which the aid industry reproduces, rather than challenges, global inequalities. As one of the workers we interviewed put it when describing the lack of chances for career advancement and international mobility he had experienced: “Once a local, always a local”.

Denied access to mobility acts not only to prevent professional development, it also inscribes intersecting inequalities onto one’s immobile body. It reinforces global hierarchies that classify people on the basis of where they were born. In other words, the immobility and invisibility of Syrian aid workers act as a mechanism of racialization.

The EU Journey

Among those we interviewed, the only aid worker who made it to an EU country had to go through complex and lengthy asylum procedures, involving further years of restricted mobility.

Irregular migration outside of Syria and dangerous journeys to reach asylum destinations in the EU are often the only option available to professionals with significant skills, who have worked for the most vulnerable members of their societies with impassioned dedication, and provided a fundamental service to the international humanitarian community.

Former Syrian aid workers are likely to struggle even more to have their rights to protection acknowledged.

As the EU-Turkey statement on refugees vacillates before president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan‘s plans for deporting refugees back to Syria, and access to asylum in the EU is made difficult by policies such as the hotspot approach, former Syrian aid workers are likely to struggle even more to have their rights to protection acknowledged.

To be sure, all Syrians, and indeed all asylum seekers, deserve access to fair and dignified asylum procedures, regardless of their skills and qualifications.

The case of Syrian aid workers, however, exposes a fundamental contradiction of the international humanitarian community – namely the disposability of its local workers – that international donors, including Finland in its role of EU President, should urgently address.

Nadine Hassouneh is Visiting Researcher at the EuroStorie Centre of Excellence, University of Helsinki and an Honorary Fellow at the The Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL), Amman.

Elisa Pascucci is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the EuroStorie Centre of Excellence, University of Helsinki.

Julkaisu As a donor, the EU should not ignore the protection needs of Syrian aid workers ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

In “My home, in Libya” director Martina Melilli shows the intimacies of colonialism, war and migration, amidst stories that remain untold.

My home, in Libya, featured previously at e.g. the Locarno Film Festival 2018, is featured now also at DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Festival 2019. The film starts with an attempt to put some pictures in order. An intimate collection of familiar faces scattered across two continents and North African architectures, forming both joyful and painful journeys, which, however, cannot be completed.

This unfinished visual recollection, which seems to escape the director and protagonist’s own gaze, is the first of the three recurrent visual landmarks that punctuate this touching and imperfect documentary. It represents the theme that runs through the whole film: Italy’s inability to acknowledge and speak about its colonial history.

In a country that officially apologized, paid financial reparations, and in 2008 even signed a “Friendship Treaty” with the state it had brutally occupied, Libya, this may seem paradoxical. Yet this “colonial aphasia”, or inability to speak, as theorized by historian and anthropologist Ann Stoler in her study of French colonialism, is so deep and pervasive that it still underlies much of Italy’s political and social landscape.

The theme runs through the whole film: Italy’s inability to acknowledge and speak about its colonial history.

In her late twenties, while leading the transnational life of an artist between Padova in northern Italy and Brussels, director Martina Melilli sets out to investigate and visually narrate the story of her father’s family. Her grandparents were among the over 44,000 Italian residents of Libya, mostly descended from the colonizers that had settled in the country first through the occupation of the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, in 1911–1912 after the military campaign known as Italo-Turkish War, and, secondly, but more significantly, during the fascist colonial rule of 1934–1943.

Soon after Colonel Muammar Gaddafi seized power in 1969, the Italians of Libya were expelled. In 1970, Melilli’s grandparents and her young father arrived at Naples’s port alongside thousands others forcefully repatriated. They were initially settled in a nearby emergency refugee camp and met with some hostility – one of the several forgotten examples of displacement in Europe’s contemporary history.

Moved by her desire to dig into the story of her grandparents’ love, marriage and forced repatriation, and its impact on her family relations, Melilli hopes to see the places where they used to live in the centre of Tripoli, the Libyan capital. Her attempt to visit the country, however, is halted by war and borders, as Gaddafi’s repression of the Libyan uprising of the early 2010s causes an UN-backed no-fly zone declaration, leading to a destructive NATO intervention.

Unable to obtain a visa, the artist remains stuck on the northern side of the Mediterranean. She cannot but look at that sea turned into a barrier – a deadly contemporary frontier indeed for many people. This watery border – not without some rhetorical, sentimental indulgence – is the second recurring visual landmark in the film.

The third are the streets and squares of Tripoli. Sometimes referred to in Arabic as “the bride of the sea” – as in fact are many other Mediterranean coastal cities – Tripoli represented by the movie is a city rendered almost spectral by war, where old colonial buildings act as an empty background for the director’s family memories.

It appears as a notably postcolonial city devoid of political life, and very different, for instance, from the hurting yet vibrant anti-colonial Algiers, which European publics have learned to know through works of art such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s movie Battle of Algiers  (1966, banned for 5 years in France after its release), or the songs of provocative French rapper Mèdine.

As viewers of My home in Libya, we are only allowed to see Tripoli from a car’s window. The vehicle is driven by Mahmoud, a Libyan engineering graduate, whom the director had contacted through common friends to act as a local collaborator, bypassing the lack of access to the war-torn country. Through the exchange of instant messages between the two, the documentary provides an intimate and tender, but also geopolitically charged account of contemporary wars and migrations. In it, colonial history is omnipresent, yet mostly uncommunicated. Avidly explored, it remains somehow unspeakable.

This brings the viewer back to aphasia, which Stoler argues, is different from simple “forgetfulness”, or repression. It affects knowledge and communication, preventing us from finding words that can fully express the enduring relevance of colonialism and coloniality. It is about the “affective practices that both elicit and elude recognition of how colonial histories matter and how colonial pasts become muffled or manifest” in the present.

The disordered, incomplete collection of pictures, the frightening sea, and the spectral emptiness of post-colonial Tripoli in My home, in Libya can all be read as symptoms of this aphasia. Despite its powerful images, daringly intimate tone and emotional intensity, which make the documentary worth watching, Melilli’s work cannot but reproduce this impossibility to communicate.

In fact, it is the aphasia of a whole political community. Despite recent important historiographic and cultural analyses by some of its intellectuals and scholars, Italy is still haunted by the “total denial of colonial atrocities, the lack of debate on colonialism, and the survival, in the collective imaginary, of theories of justification”, as historian Angelo Del Boca writes describing the country’s relation to its former colonies.

Colonial relations, past and present, are central to many of the political and social challenges Europe is facing today, also in countries that were historically not at the forefront of colonial violence against the Global South, like Finland.

The dangerous myth of a “benign colonialism” seems to also find some echoes in the documentary. While poignantly and effectively showing nuances and complexities, familial memories and intimate dialogues partially conceal historical truth. In these passages, aphasia borders denial.

With its delicate visual narrative, My home, in Libya has merit in reminding us that, as European citizens, we must address this aphasia. Colonial relations, past and present, are central to many of the political and social challenges Europe is facing today, also in countries that were historically not at the forefront of colonial violence against the Global South, like Finland.

Paradoxically, as Europe’s global economic and political hegemony seems to fade, its unaddressed “colonial present” continues to produce violent effects on the conditions of racialized people, as we see in many European urban peripheries, and indeed in the ways in which such places are represented in the media.

At the same time, in countries like Italy, the rise to power of racist populist forces produces new toxic narratives of justification for what theorist Silvia Federici calls recolonization, including military occupation, resource exploitation, and a violent regime of externalized border enforcement and migration control in today’s Libya.

DocPoint Helsinki Documentary Film Festival takes place on Jan 28th – Feb 2nd 2019.

Elisa Pascucci is a post-doctoral researcher in the Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives.

Julkaisu DocPoint: Italy’s colonial aphasia ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.

In these discussions, the idea of internationalization is understood in a rather backwards way. It is often treated as a synonym for something foreign – a foreign country, or a foreigner, essentially something that cannot naturally occur in Finland.

Simply put, internationalization is thus assumed to take place when a Finnish person goes abroad or a citizen of another country spends time at a Finnish university.

Beyond this, we hear very little discussion regarding the specific content of the concept of internationalization. This is a very curious thing indeed within the university context itself. Social sciences in particular have devoted much intellectual energy to problematizing the notion of inter-national and its derivatives, and offered alternatives to it.

For a convenient example of this simplistic understanding of internationalization, one need look no further than the Finnish Ministry of Education’s funding model for universities. It now rewards universities for the number of Master’s and Doctoral degrees that foreign nationals (ulkomaalaiset) have completed and also slightly more generously for the number of foreign nationals within their research and teaching staff.

And when the ministry rings its bells, the universities’ leadership salivates. It produces statements declaring that the recruitment of ‘foreign’ scholars is crucial for the development of universities. There have also been cases where an applicant’s citizenship is listed as a recruitment criteria.

What concerns us here is not only the fact that this way of understanding the spatial character of academic life is quite archaic, it is also detached from academic realities.

Of crucial importance is also the fact that when internationalization is understood in this way, it could easily become a breeding ground for different forms of discrimination and scapegoating. It creates unnecessary divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’, between ‘native’ Finnish and ‘foreign’ staff, and thus posits them as competitors, rather than co-workers. Furthermore, in the current climate, this has the potential to add fuel to an already politically charged migration debate in Finland.

Additionally, the idea that it is acceptable to make profit calculations on the basis of an individual’s nationality or citizenship, essentially means that academia is playing a very similar game as The Finns Party (Perussuomalaiset), in its racist and tendentious piece of ‘research’ about the costs of immigration.

Taking a step back to see the bigger picture, what if we just dropped all this talk of internationalization and tried to imagine the university in postnational terms? This would mean thinking beyond nations and their interrelationships, and treating individuals as members of a genuinely global academic community. For us, academia is a place where people do not identify themselves as citizens of particular nations. Citizenship, as a form of social closure, does not resonate with the spirit of the academia.

We would like to see our universities serve critical thinking, truth, knowledge and humanity – values that do not have nationality or citizenship, and therefore are truly universal. After all, the Latin word for university (universitas) stands for ‘a whole’, as well as for a ‘community’ of teachers and students.

Anni Kangas, Anitta Kynsilehto, Ov Cristian Norocel, Elisa Pascucci, Saara Särmä & Cai Weaver are academics who have varying backgrounds and have worked or studied at universities across the world.

Julkaisu Let’s not internationalize but postnationalize universities ilmestyi ensimmäisenä Politiikasta.