In contrast to military interventions, humanitarian work is often understood to be both more benign and centred around care for the vulnerable. There are reams of academic scholarship on military masculinities, but - despite recent scholarship highlighting the overlaps between humanitarian and military logics - we hear very little (if anything at all) about humanitarian masculinities. In this paper, I argue that we need to analyse and dissect humanitarian masculinities in order to understand how humanitarianism operates on the ground. International humanitarianism, in the forms we currently know it, could not exist without its masculinities, which are central to its exercise of power over refugees. Through an ethnographic exploration of the life and governance of Za‘tari Refugee Camp in Jordan, the largest camp for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, I examine how humanitarians occupy masculinised positionalities that simultaneously disempower Syrians and restrict Syrians’ own performances of masculinities.
This is done through an exploration of three key themes: politics, policing and sovereignty. This chapter analyses the challenges that a camp such as Za‘tari represents for state and humanitarian authorities in terms of sovereignty, and the masculinised performances of Jordanian sovereignty that seek to solve the tensions of extra-territoriality. It examines how Syrians' political activities in the camp were delegitimised and shut down by the camp's authoritarian leaders and subsequently how extensive policing of the camp became the mechanism through which Syrians' political protests were disrupted and disavowed, and through which the camp population was – in the words of one NGO leader – "domesticated." Understanding humanitarian masculinities, I argue, gives us a different lens through which to understand what is done to humanitarianism’s ‘vulnerable beneficiaries’ in the name of care. This w0rk is part of an ongoing book project, which is based on a year of ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork in Jordan, which included working voluntarily for an NGO in Za‘tari camp, and extensively interviewing both humanitarians and refugees.
