Against the charge of charity: refugee-led organisations, localisation and decolonising humanitarianism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two of the main recent trends in humanitarianism have been the increasing focus on decolonialisation and localisation of humanitarian assistance. Donors have committed to raising funding for local actors, especially to refugee-led organisations, with the hopes of tackling colonial power inequalities in humanitarianism and empowering local actors. Yet, the narratives used to maintain the hegemonic understanding of humanitarianism in localisation efforts and dismiss refugee-led organisations have not been comprehensively studied. Drawing on 130 interviews with refugee-led organisations, non-governmental organisations, international organisations and state officials in Turkey, this article shows that by characterising refugee-led organisations as charities with an assumed religious agenda, instead of humanitarian actors, national non-governmental organisations disparage these actors. I argue that the preconceived idea that refugee-led organisations do not adhere to traditional humanitarian principles fuels other non-governmental organisations’ labelling of refugee-led organisations as charities, but this dismissal is also driven by worries about competition in the humanitarian sector. Adopting a decolonial framework, I assert that the reluctance to shift more power and resources to refugee communities is not only about ideology but also about political economy, an under-examined factor in the literature to date.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".