Projected. Welfare and Humanitarian Relief in Internationalised States

In this paper, I interrogate international approaches to humanitarian aid and welfare distribution. The analysis posits “the project” as the central form of international engagement with poverty, misery and need. Building on qualitative research in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the United Republic of Tanzania, the paper suggests that projects embody and regulate the relationships between donors, IOs, INGOs, states and populations. I analyse two inherent aspects of projects: Bounded temporality and delimited spatiality. Projects’ bounded temporality, I argue, seemingly contradicts claims to durability and sustainability. To maintain claims of continuity, international interventions borrow from states’ claims to timelessness. Projects’ claims to broad impact, despite their own delimited spatial practices, similarly rely on states’ supposed encompassing territoriality. In the concluding section, I discuss how international and sovereign institutions together govern the DR Congo and Tanzania respectively, and what it means to be ruled in such deeply internationalised settings.