Helping Familiar Strangers: Refugee Diaspora Organizations and Humanitarianism

THE ACT OF HELPING A stranger in need is a complicated one. It involves a person perceiving another’s suffering, feeling compelled to do something about it, and, importantly, acting with the intention of alleviating this suffering. The act of helping strangers in need—humanitarianism—manifests in multifarious ways. While the term humanitarianism has become almost synonymous with practices dominated by large Western organizational actors with remarkably similar genealogies, in fact humanitarians and humanitarianisms come in many shapes and sizes. Erica Bornstein writes about this in terms of the “subtle shades of humanitarian efforts—differentiated by varied imperatives, impulses, and systems