In its 2024 Decolonial Framework and Strategy, the International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) asserts that ‘we are not the “experts” because in a pluriverse there can be no one single “expert” or “authority”’.Footnote 1 This claim is at the heart of ongoing political contestation over what it means to ‘decolonise’ humanitarianism.Footnote 2 In recent years, humanitarian agencies have faced sustained criticism for failing to reckon with their colonial origins and the violent legacies of that history. In response, a growing movement has sought to reform the sector by redistributing money and power away from Geneva and New York, flattening organizational hierarchies, revising institutional language, and advocating discursively for more just futures. Yet these efforts amount to more than material redress or organizational reform: they also entail – as the IWDA’s statement makes plain – a fundamental challenge to the assumption that expertise derives from a particular kind of objectivity, one accrued through neutral, technocratic, and universalizing modes of knowledge production.
At one level, attempts to decolonize humanitarianism represent a radicalization of a longstanding unease with the sector’s detachment from the contexts in which it operates. The figure of the humanitarian ‘parachuting’ into a crisis zone has long been criticized for the ignorance and arrogance it embodies: the assumption that only neutral outsiders possess the relevant expertise to diagnose and address the causes of crisis.Footnote 3 Efforts to remedy this by integrating the ‘local’ knowledge of civil society actors, activists, researchers, and journalists have themselves attracted sustained critique, however, for deploying shallow forms of participation that depoliticize underlying issues and naturalize structural violence.Footnote 4 A decolonial intervention, by contrast, is posited to radically reorder the relationship between ‘north’ and ‘south’ in ways that would not only improve the everyday practice of humanitarian programming but progressively transform inequalities in global governance more broadly. Decolonial humanitarianism is, at its most ambitious, a project entailing a genuine ‘power shift’.Footnote 5
Yet the politics of mainstreaming decolonialism into global governance are far from straightforward. Those who wish to decolonize humanitarianism disagree sharply about what a power shift would entail. Does it mean a cosmopolitan rebalancing of humanitarian aid – integrating marginalized expertise into the metropole to diversify its knowledge base but preserving its foundational principles as broadly legitimate? Or does it mean dismantling humanitarianism altogether in favour of a radical political alternative? A further question concerns co-optation: to what extent does mainstreaming risk subordinating radical politics to technocratic or corporate interests, thereby betraying emancipatory possibilities? Finally, if there is no single ‘expert’ to adjudicate the validity of knowledge claims, and we are instead committed to integrating the full diversity of human experience into humanitarian practice, do we risk rendering any coherent global humanitarian future impossible?
Exploring these questions requires a closer engagement with the knowledge politics of decolonial humanitarianism. The movement’s contemporary roots lie in a body of decolonial social theory that is, at its core, a critique of the Eurocentric and white supremacist knowledge hierarchies that determine which ways of living are valued, and which are not. Philosophically, these theories foreground the colonial foundations of modern knowledge and institutions but, politically, their injunction is relatively blunt: ‘the destruction of the coloniality of world power’.Footnote 6 For decolonial humanitarianism, as we will explore, this means dismantling the knowledge hierarchies that govern who cares for whom, how that care is delivered, and what futures are imagined for those who suffer. As others have noted, however, decolonial theory tends towards philosophical or political abstraction, and translating it into practice thus often remains underspecified, particularly outside debates on decolonizing the university.Footnote 7 Decolonial humanitarianism is therefore especially instructive as an attempt to import this radical doctrine into some of the most conservative institutions in global governance.
Put differently, decolonial humanitarianism exemplifies how diverse actors are working to translate decolonial theory into political settings that are, on their face, inhospitable. In this context, the challenge is both to delegitimize colonial forms of knowledge and establish the legitimacy of alternative knowledge claims, forms of expertise, and understandings of objectivity by asserting that such alternatives are not only valid but potentially more just, humane and appropriate. In what follows, we examine how decolonial humanitarianism strategically and tactically articulates its knowledge as authoritative to different audiences. More specifically, we attend to how it authorizes expertise differently through aesthetic strategies, drawing on a tradition within decolonial thought that understands knowledge legitimation as inseparable from our sensory engagement with the world – and which therefore always demands ‘counter-aesthetic’ strategies as a mode of contestation. That process, we further suggest, involves articulating a form of ‘decolonial objectivity’, which stresses, first, the impossibility of objectivity in humanitarianism, thereby challenging supposedly foundational humanitarian principles such as neutrality and impartiality. Second, and nonetheless, it aesthetically articulates a version of strong objectivity – in the sense of Sandra Harding – that valorizes embedded (over disembodied), autonomous (over dependent), and futurist (as opposed to presentist or reactionary) forms of knowledge and expertise, over those currently dominant in humanitarianism.Footnote 8 Adapting Quijano, we therefore ultimately argue that decolonial humanitarianism involves a process of aesthetically decolonizing the humanitarian ‘imagination’.Footnote 9
To get to that argument, we now proceed in three main parts. First, we construct a typology of three different approaches to decolonial humanitarianism that exist today. Second, it is suggested that each of these strands of decolonial humanitarianism involves an aesthetic critique of the ways in which humanitarianism has purported to produce objective knowledge claims, against which they mobilize a counter-aesthetic project constituted by what we will describe as three main aesthetic imaginaries: embeddedness, autonomy, and (cosmolocal) futurism. Third, we then situate these aesthetic strategies within the broader knowledge politics of decolonialism. Criticizing a contemporary dichotomy in which some forms of decolonialism are considered radical and others metaphorical, it will be argued that our aesthetic analysis reveals all decolonialism to be metaphorical in the sense of their obligation to aesthetically mobilize sensible imaginaries of difference that mobilize political change. On this basis, we also advocate for greater solidarity among advocates of different strands of decolonial humanitarianism, foregrounding that though decolonialism may be mobilized ‘metaphorically’ or ‘aesthetically’ today, those strategies are key to the possibility of reaching concrete – material – decolonization in the future.
What is decolonial humanitarianism?
The many customers under the large thatched roof consisted of Congolese and Westerners, most of whom were experts in culture, humanitarianism, or conflict resolution – subject matter that the authorities didn’t seem to practice as they should. Consequently, the international community had mobilized and dispatched legions of experts to compensate for these serious omissions … To propagate holiness around zero latitude, humanitarians in their immaculate vehicles were distributing rations of sanctified cookies throughout the land and attempting to comfort poor genuflecting souls, muttering dogmas they’d memorized in the humanities departments in the northern hemisphere.Footnote 10
Decolonial humanitarianism is part of a broader decolonial movement whose contemporary forms are largely rooted in the social science and humanities departments of universities ‘in the northern hemisphere’. This is not immaterial to the question of decolonial humanitarian praxis. As the Congolese writer In Koli Jean Bofane ironically observes, the training of future humanitarian ‘experts’ by northern universities often amounts to little more than ‘muttering dogmas’ when it encounters reality. This dynamic is visible in a precursor to the explicit integration of decolonialism into humanitarianism: the ‘local turn’ in humanitarianism and peacebuilding. That project began as an attempt to advance ‘the slow decolonization of knowledge’ by creating ‘more epistemological space… for networks of local voices, actors, and scholars’.Footnote 11 Over time, however, it appeared to calcify into a depoliticized dogma, its founding structural concerns ‘ignored in the haste to gather data to support careers, policy-driven objectives, or the state’.Footnote 12 It was precisely this failure that helped spur the rise of explicitly self-defined decolonial humanitarianism, with its renewed commitment to radical structural change.Footnote 13
Nonetheless, decolonial humanitarianism is not a unitary project. Multiple and distinct forms exist and thus need to be disentangled. To that end, we now develop a brief typology that identifies three principal forms: one oriented to reform, one to rejection, and one to the wholesale revolutionizing of humanitarianism. Each is presented as an ideal type though, in practice, they often cross-fertilize, despite appearing incommensurable at this analytical level. As a matter of scope, it is also important to stress that the term humanitarianism is also ambiguous. Below, our focus is on efforts to decolonize traditional understandings of humanitarianism, those typically defined as constituting a form of ‘compassion across borders’ funded from wealthy nation states, usually those implicated in colonialism or neocolonialism.Footnote 14 With Aloudat and Khan, we thus explore attempts to decolonize humanitarian aid – as a formalized system, even an industrial complex – as opposed to the base principal of humanitarianism that can be seen more simply as the ‘active belief in the equal value of all human life’.Footnote 15 This reflects our interest in epistemics, expertise, and knowledge production, given it is this narrower form of humanitarianism that is most clearly marked by colonialism and racism.Footnote 16 Decolonial humanitariannism has focused on these actors given that although the dream of many is the replacement of this system by something else entirely, financial, logistical, and technical power remains vested in international organizations, and must first be wrested from them before change can occur. Thus, while part of the stakes of decolonizing humanitarianism lie in what might come ‘after’ (something we explore at our conclusion) to replace or transform that system, our focus here is on the process of reaching the possibility of imagining such an ‘after’ rather than what it might fully constitute. The process, put differently, of inaugurating the aforementioned ‘power-shift’.
Reform
A reformist strand of decolonial humanitarianism builds on localization discourse, retaining a commitment to the ethico-political value of humanitarianism’s mission while seeking to make its structures genuinely inclusive. In practice, this involves advocating for organizational and institutional change: decentralizing the power structures at the heart of international humanitarianism by, for instance, relocating staff and offices to the global south, restructuring leadership through diversity initiatives, and elevating ‘lived experience’ of humanitarian crisis as a legitimate source of expertise.Footnote 17 These changes echo longstanding diversity and social justice efforts in other domains, though they are rendered more complex by their application to global governance institutions. Crucially, the ambition extends beyond merely integrating ‘local’ knowledge at the field level. If marginalized voices are heard only in operational contexts, little will change. The goal is therefore to transplant alternative knowledge into the metropolitan centres of humanitarian decision-making and so to shift power away from donor countries. Efforts to revise the internal language of organizations have accompanied these structural moves. Prominent organizations associated with this reformist trajectory include Oxfam,Footnote 18 which relocated its secretariat to Nairobi under an explicitly decolonial mandate, and Médecins Sans Frontières, which has undertaken work to counter systemic racism within its own structures.Footnote 19 Among the most far-reaching proposals within this strand are those concerning finance. To move beyond the tokenism that has often characterized localization agendas, reformists argue that a majority of funding should flow directly to local actors on an unrestricted basis, and that this be framed explicitly as a matter of social justice and reparation.Footnote 20
Rejection
Frustration with the limits of inclusivity and structural reform has given rise to a more sceptical position. For some, reformism represents too strong a continuation of the localization agenda, one in which decolonialism becomes a buzzword while substantive change remains illusory.Footnote 21 The alternative rests on a key distinction: while ‘humanitarianism’ can be decolonial, humanitarian aid cannot.Footnote 22 In this view, the very existence of a professionalized ‘humanitarian industrial complex’ wherever it is geographically based and whatever its internal composition perpetuates entrenched social, political, and economic dependencies.Footnote 23 Humanitarian aid, in other words, is an irreducibly neocolonial structure that no reform can redeem. What is required instead is a wholesale departure from traditional liberal-international humanitarian organizations. But this does not mean simply valorizing local civil society or small-scale grassroots initiatives. Consider the following formulation from the organization Adeso (African Development Solutions):
Imagine a world where Africa is no longer dependent on International Aid or International Nongovernmental Organizations (iNGOs) to solve its problems … [in that world] we [would] use African expertise to source African solutions.Footnote 24
The vision here is one of replacing the international humanitarian system with an ‘African’ alternative. Adeso thus refuses funding from the UN and iNGOs, relying instead on philanthropy to build regional capacity for humanitarian/development initiatives. As others observe, this reflects a growing trend among humanitarian organizations based in the global south, which find the bureaucracy, restrictions, and politics of international humanitarianism constraining, depoliticizing, and at times actively harmful.Footnote 25 In the terms of radical decolonial theory, the goal is a ‘delinking’ from traditional humanitarianism, in favour of the autonomous development of alternatives.Footnote 26 In this, the imagined alternative is a humanitarianism originating from the global south and so which escapes the gravitational pull of liberal-international humanitarianism altogether. From this vantage point, the current ‘crisis’ in international aid is an opportunity: the right moment to move beyond systems that privilege Western ontologies, epistemologies, and politics; reproducing a fundamentally unequal status quo.Footnote 27
Revolutionize
A third position exists within decolonial humanitarianism, one critical of both reform and rejection. For some, rejecting humanitarianism lacks genuine radicalism if it amounts to little more than a ‘localized’ mirror of late-capitalist humanitarianism. Consider the trajectory of Degan Ali, leader of the aforementioned Adeso; a prominent advocate for the rejectionist strand. Discussing the humanitarian situation in Somalia, she observes:
The private sector and the diaspora are the ones who are holding the country together. It’s not the aid. People think that the aid is what’s saving people’s lives. It’s not, it’s the private sector, it’s the diaspora’s remittances, it’s not aid and it’s not the government.Footnote 28
She goes on to advocate for expanding the private sector’s role, cultivating private philanthropy, and even praises the ‘success’ of the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. Such sentiments are, to say the least, uncomfortable for reformist decolonial humanitarians. But they are more troubling still for those committed to a genuinely revolutionary ethos that would address race and its intersecting axes of oppression at a systemic and epistemic level. From this perspective, true emancipation cannot be achieved by replacing international humanitarian aid with the private sector, global philanthropy, and late capitalism, all of which are themselves implicated in the colonial project. Against such co-optations, proponents of this revolutionary alternative call for ‘taking seriously alternative non-white supremacist ontologies and epistemologies offered by Black and Indigenous feminists in their full diversity’.Footnote 29 On this view, genuine localization would not position the local in contrast to the universal but would instead instantiate ‘a pluriverse of multiple possibilities’.Footnote 30 Without this reorientation, antiracist and anticolonial work ‘merely sketches a different map of Man’s territorialising assemblages’.Footnote 31
These calls are – as the terminology makes clear – very abstract, something discussed further below. But what is gestured at is grounding humanitarianism in a knowledge politics that exists ‘outside of the hegemonic, structuring episteme’.Footnote 32 This means escaping not only the technocracy of humanitarianism but also its entanglement with late capitalism and, broadly, all ideological forms structured by modernist knowledge production. It requires identifying a ‘position of the unthought’ capable of serving as the ‘locale of and for radical epistemic innovation’.Footnote 33 In this view, ‘to decolonize is not to critique from within, it is to rupture and rebuild’.Footnote 34 What is demanded is therefore not simply a rejection of humanitarianism in its professionalized form, but a revolution that transforms the very conditions that make humanitarianism necessary in the first place. Whether such a transformation is conceivable, let alone achievable, is a question we return to below.
The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism
Decolonial humanitarianism’s three forms exist in tension, even outright conflict. Yet each is also united by a shared ambition: to legitimate alternative understandings of expertise and knowledge. Whether articulated in more liberal or more radical registers, the decolonial challenge to humanitarianism is a challenge to knowledge claims – or, more precisely, to the question of what knowledge should be integrated into humanitarian action: whether the real ‘lived experience’ of humanitarian crisis, indigenous or subaltern cosmologies of the good life, or capitalist knowledge produced within the constraints of the global south. Logically, it is therefore also a challenge to who should define what humanitarianism is as a project. This unifying claim reflects a shared intellectual lineage: the view that colonial power operates not only through military, institutional, or financial means, but also epistemically. Simply: colonization is not solely about the control of bodies, but of minds, ideas, and worldviews but, with Quijano, also about the ‘colonization of the imagination of the dominated’.Footnote 35
How did such a colonization of the imagination become possible? What made alternative ways of knowing seem unimaginable, unthinkable, and ungrievable? Many answers exist. Yet in decolonial theory, a growing trend answers these questions by deploying an aesthetic understanding of knowledge. Or, more precisely, an understanding of the aesthetic strategies used to legitimate modernity, colonialism, and power. But what is meant by aesthetics here? Decolonial definitions go far beyond the term’s colloquial association with art, design, and visual culture, as well as common definitions found within the aesthetic turn in International Relations (IR). Indeed, within IR, the aesthetic turn is closely associated empirically and methodologically with the ‘visual turn’ – and thus a focus on images, symbolism, artefacts, and representation.Footnote 36 The value of this approach has been to understand aesthetics as referring ‘not just to visual art but … to an effort to legitimizing a broader set of creative insights’.Footnote 37 However, decolonial approaches go far beyond this ‘creative’ understanding of aesthetics.
For Mignolo, aesthetics is ‘an aspect of the colonial matrix of power’, given that colonialism involved ‘not only control of the economy, the political, and knowledge, but also control over the senses and perception’.Footnote 38 It is thus that he prefers the term aesthesis – the Greek root of the term aesthetics, which more broadly refers to perception or sensation – arguing that colonialism imposed a ‘normativity that colonized the senses’.Footnote 39 This echoes much older insights from Frantz Fanon, who once wrote that very banal architectural forms, customs of civility, language, and other elements were explicitly designed by colonialists as:
Aesthetic expressions of respect for the established order [that] serve to create around the exploited person an atmosphere of submission and of inhibition which lightens the task of policing considerably.Footnote 40
Put simply, banal everyday aesthetic practices formed a central part of maintaining colonial order tout court. Following this, Sylvia Wynter situates aesthetics as a form of symbolic ordering that produces the ‘unitary system of meanings’ capable of sustaining social cohesion (or domination) with a force analogous to genetic inheritance in organic life.Footnote 41 This analogy goes beyond social construction or performativity by foregrounding how aesthetics allows naturalized knowledge claims to transcend the conscious awareness of a given social order’s subjects, embedding coloniality through its material, sensory, and affective presence in the world.Footnote 42
These views on aesthetics are closer to more recent discussions in IR where, for example, Bleiker stresses that aesthetic approaches should aim ‘to validate the whole register of human perceptions and sensations’ in understanding world politics.Footnote 43 Or where Austin describes a compositional approach in which aesthetics ‘predefine[s] and determine[s] what it is possible to “make sense of”’ and so which extend aesthetics far beyond the representational into, instead, the material, technological, embodied, atmospheric, and affective.Footnote 44 For our purposes, aesthetics then refers to the ‘persuasiveness of form, the elicitation of a sense of appropriateness’Footnote 45 and encompasses the full range of our sensory, affective, symbolic, and representational engagements with the world – including their entanglement with race, gender, class, and colonial racism.Footnote 46 In the long march of history, this culminated in the aesthetic construction of Frantz Fanon’s ‘fact’ of blackness, and, with bell hooks, in a racism that ‘has created an aesthetic that wounds us, a way of thinking about beauty that hurts’.Footnote 47 Increasingly, decolonial theory has thus focused on attempting to undo this ‘control over the senses and perception’ – for without such undoing, no alternative can be legitimated, imagined, or opened.Footnote 48
Before exploring how that control can be ‘undone’, however, let us turn back to humanitarianism. The aesthetic mechanisms by which knowledge produced outside humanitarian metropoles is delegitimized have never been difficult to discern. PeaceDirect, for instance, notes that decolonial critiques:
Argue that the excessive fears of corruption in peace efforts in the Global South or the insistence on the need for an external mediator are ways to hint that populations of colour are lacking the necessary ‘civility’ to lead in conflict resolution and transformation efforts and require the guidance of a more educated, external actor; one who is usually White and from the Global North.Footnote 49
The reference to ‘civility’ here is aesthetic. Steven Shapin has extensively documented the centrality of ‘civility’ to the authorization of scientific knowledge, including the aesthetic performance of ‘gentlemanly’ conduct as one social basis for according credibility.Footnote 50 Building on this, and its elaborations in Science and Technology Studies, the production of ‘objectivity’ or ‘expertise’ can be understood as an aesthetic achievement – one organized around what counts as ‘civil’, in which normative (ideally white, male) bodies serve as the privileged vectors of authoritative knowledge.Footnote 51 Such bodies have been aesthetically constructed as capable of maintaining critical distance from their objects of study; purged of personal bias, emotion, and subjective investment. This logic maps directly onto humanitarianism, where it has long been maintained that familiarity with context and personal ties to a population are liabilities that compromise objectivity or neutrality.Footnote 52 Indeed, core international humanitarian organizations have long aesthetically presented themselves as bastions of civility, curating their knowledge production accordingly.Footnote 53 The Fundamental Principles of, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – neutrality, independence, and impartiality – are secured aesthetically through the image of the Swiss-passport-holding delegate observing crisis from a far, technocratically managing logistics, and foregoing political opinion.Footnote 54
Against this, decolonial humanitarianism involves a ‘rejection of the idea of objectivity, which assumes that evaluators can separate their own experiences, values, and assumptions from what they hear and interpret, an idea which is considered to stem from colonial ways of thinking’.Footnote 55 This rejection should be understood precisely: it is not a rejection of rigour – in research, services, programming, or skills – but a refusal to treat objectivity as anything other than situated, embodied, and contextual, and so a recognition that the naturalization of any form of objectivity is achieved only aesthetically through the instillation of what Strathern calls a ‘sense of appropriateness’.Footnote 56 Any claim to objectivity, on this view, is a claim to a certain aesthetic appropriateness, which means there is always more than one form of objectivity in play. Decolonialism inverts what counts as appropriate by readmitting experience, values, and situated knowledge as legitimate epistemic resources. In this, decolonial humanitarianism as a whole is invested in promoting a decolonial objectivity that rejects the aesthetic of traditional humanitarian aid and instead aesthetically articulates a version of strong objectivity – in the sense of Sandra Harding – that valorizes distinct forms of knowledge as more ‘appropriate’ to humanitarianism.
To get to such a decolonial objectivity – however – and as we explore below, decolonial humanitarianism is engaged in a form of ‘counter-aesthetics’. Its first task has been to delegitimize the existing aesthetic basis of humanitarian knowledge production and so disorder the distribution of the sensible in the sector. With Jacques Rancière, the goal has thus been to counter the existing aesthetic order through the production of ‘dissensus’: a ‘re-configuration of the common experience of the sensible’.Footnote 57 In this, the hope is to make the naturalization of knowledge production in humanitarianism more contingent. This raises an interesting tension. As we will see below, decolonial humanitarianism remains quite ‘light’ on concrete recommendations vis-à-vis reshaping professional norms, institutional standards, funding processes, etc. at a concrete-programmatic level. Instead, the counter-aesthetic mobilized works to ‘authorize’ alternative sources of knowledge by delegitimizing existing practices but leaves relatively ‘open’ what should replace them. This tension, about what should replace the existing order in concrete terms, is one we move to exploring more fully at the conclusion of this article.
Below, we now move to teasing out three main elements of the counter-aesthetic strategy of decolonial humanitarianism: what we term aesthetic strategies of embeddedness, autonomy, and futurism. Each can be associated with more than one of the types of decolonial humanitarianism outlined above, albeit in different ways, and each attempts to shift standards for knowledge production differently. To study their emergence, the analysis explores a comprehensive sampleFootnote 58 of decolonial humanitarian texts including reports, guidance documents, manifestos, and related grey and social scientific literature. The sample was selected to give a representative snapshot of the diversity of critical directions from which decolonial humanitarianism has emerged. Thus, the discourse of large organizations like Oxfam or the ICRC is included alongside the work of thinktanks such as PeaceDirect, professional journalistic outlets such as The New Humanitarian, and small NGOs. Each mobilizes a counter-aesthetic that is targeted, as we have said, against ‘traditional’ international humanitarianism and its operations. To analyse that aesthetic, we draw on a form of critical discourse analysis and synthetic review to tease out one possible interpretation of these aesthetic modes of authorizing expertise. Of course, the ‘openness’ of aesthetic practice, which is intrinsically open to polysemy, naturally renders this analysis subjective, and open to other interpretations, something we will explore further in the conclusion.
Moreover, it is important to emphasize that our focus here is not on analysing any single organization’s aesthetic strategy, nor a concrete plan for institutional or political change articulated by a single organization. Instead, we seek to unpack how decolonial humanitarianism has emerged as a diffuse but nonetheless consistent counter-aesthetic discourse across the sector. For example, Médecins Sans Frontières shift in this direction can be traced to a bottom-up ‘Decolonise MSF’ movement in which staff members accused the organization of structural racism, but which then fell into a wider coalition of decolonizing humanitarianism organized alongside other actors.Footnote 59 The goal below is to trace out, thus, this wider ‘coalition’ of decolonial movements that have targeted traditional humanitarian aesthetics, but not to delve into a single story of that process, as it must be read collectively. Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that this methodological approach does ‘flatten’, to some degree, profound differences between the organizations involved, as well as necessarily exclude a focus on ‘relational’ forms of humanitarianism that have arguably always-already been decolonial in their operations.Footnote 60
Embeddedness
Decolonial humanitarianism embraces a counter-aesthetic of embeddedness – the ways in which actors are more or less situated within a particular context, sensitive-to its complexities, and vulnerable-to its exploitation. While this appears to echo discourses of localization – of being ‘from somewhere’ rather than ‘elsewhere’ – it importantly nuances that debate beyond a kind of disembodied localism. As Oxfam notes, ‘those who benefit from or control current economic and political systems are not just external groups, but also include domestic elites that benefit from those systems’.Footnote 61 This statement reflects the complexities of intersectional positionality and the need to privilege lived experience over simplified national, racial, or other markers. As such, decolonial humanitarianism is especially concerned with recognizing subaltern knowledge, which is seen as being most embedded in the contexts of humanitarian relevance. This is most obvious in the growing valorization of ‘indigenous’, ‘ancestral’, or related forms of knowledge. Equally, the interstitial and hybrid experiences of subaltern actors in the Global North – such as African American communities – have been stressed as part of this picture. Such knowledge is expressed as not only marginalized but also as containing expertise that can be operationalized to tackle problems linked to, say, the climate crisis. Such a valorization moves either in reformist directions, where such knowledge is integrated into the existing system, rejection, where it forms the basis for de-linking from international aid, or revolutionary directions where it is fuel to reimagine the system entirely.
Aesthetically, embeddedness is articulated in different ways. Visually, a notable trend is the deployment of naturalistic motifs, imagery, and metaphors. The cover of the Oxfam report Decolonize! What Does It Mean?, for instance, depicts ‘men and women from Padol village … in far northern Cambodia’ upon the backdrop of trees and a deep green forest, describing their struggle for a ‘communal land title, so it [the community] can manage its forest land, agricultural areas, and sacred places in keeping with its culture’.Footnote 62 The Decolonizing Wealth project equally leads its digital presence with a retro-tinted collage of flowers, green plants, and gardens, overlaid with clapping and smiling men and women – two holding hands.Footnote 63 And a New Humanitarian-commissioned short story expressing an optimistic future for a decolonial humanitarianism begins with an illustration of a digital tablet communicating details of an imagined humanitarian crisis nestled upon a bed of green forest-like leaves.Footnote 64 This naturalistic aesthetic is part of a process of legitimating claims to expertise focused on constructing:
An ethics and culture of sustainability; this entails the rethinking of production towards a new environmental rationality; and a dialogue among forms of knowledge towards the construction of novel environmental rationalities. This ecology’s ethical perspective on nature, life, and the planet entails a questioning of modernity and development, indeed an irrefutable indictment of the developmentalist fallacy. By privileging subaltern knowledges of the natural, this political ecology articulates in unique ways the questions of diversity, difference, and inter-culturality – with nature, of course, occupying a role as actor and agent.Footnote 65
Here, embedded expertise becomes validated as being more ‘appropriate’ not only for specific problems, but for systemic change. And if, as we have said, aesthetics is about instilling such a ‘sense of appropriateness’, then we can see these counter-aesthetic tactics as stressing the inappropriateness of outsiders intervening not only in local spaces but also at a systemic level: ‘an irrefutable indictment of the developmentalist fallacy’. Of course, this is not solely about a romanticized view of the natural world. To return to Quijano, he noted that ‘the colonizers were expropriating from the colonized their knowledge, specifically in mining, agriculture, engineering, as well as their products and work’.Footnote 66 That this extraction of knowledge in the colonies went on was hidden by the ‘colonizers imposing a mystified image of their own patterns of producing knowledge and meaning’.Footnote 67 A counter-aesthetic of embeddedness challenges the legitimacy of that mystified objectivity, doing so through evoking imaginaries of ‘connection’ to nature, space, and ecology, which has resonances with wider discourses of sustainability, and by stressing its functional value of the knowledge that embedded actors possess.
In other cases, humanitarian actors deploy a form of ‘equivalence’ in which knowledge embedded in particular indigenous lineages are shown to mirror – and in fact long pre-date – core humanitarian principles.Footnote 68 For example, the ICRC has sought to counter the critique that ‘international law and … specifically IHL, is based on Western philosophies’ by commissioning research into indigenous ‘humanitarian’ traditions showing how they correspond with international humanitarian law.Footnote 69 Aesthetically, this strategy discursively connects embedded knowledge to ‘modern’ knowledge, showing a lineage that gifts continued appropriateness to the latter. The visual imagery used to depict such equivalency is deeply problematical from a decolonial perspective: an artist’s rendition of ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ ‘warriors’ from unnamed ‘African’ political spaces. Nonetheless, it can be seen as an effort to shift our sensible understanding of where humanitarian knowledge emanates from. Paradoxically this example, therefore, is attuned to the rejectionist decolonial humanitarian injunction that while humanitarian aid (such as that the ICRC privileges) is colonial, humanitarianism has its roots in many different and diverse knowledge traditions.
Autonomy
There is a well-known risk in any aesthetics of embeddedness: it can evoke a false-nostalgia and fetishization of the ‘natural’ that risks equating person and place, race and space, and so forth. Indeed, as Indigenous studies has long made clear, attempts to valorize ‘authenticity’ (something embeddedness either tacitly or explicitly implies) are deeply essentializing, reproducing colonial logics even where it is deployed with the strategic goal of undermining those logics.Footnote 70 This is obvious in the ICRC’s visual depiction of indigenous knowledge, discussed above, where imaginaries of ‘African knowledge’ are aestheticized in strikingly colonial ways. In particular, a naturalistic aesthetic of embeddedness can erase the creolized nature of postcolonial subjects and the fact that:
Looking nostalgically from the present across an epochal divide to a primordial past for measures of authenticity often occludes regimes of hierarchy and value that may have arisen in the intervening temporal span.Footnote 71
Decolonial humanitarianism seeks to avoid this trap. It does not rely on authorizing alternative forms of expertise solely through embeddedness but advocates for ‘learning from but not idealizing’ embedded actors given a risk of ‘promoting interventions … simply because they are non-western, which may reproduce other forms of historical marginalization or power hierarchies’.Footnote 72 As PeaceDirect suggests, this involves avoiding ‘romanticizing the local’ by recognizing what ‘local groups can bring, as well as their limitations’ and ‘to avoid assuming homogeneity … – some actors may disagree and hold divergent beliefs’.Footnote 73 In this:
Indigenous knowledge systems are valuable not because they are without critique, but because they are how many people may conceptualise peace in their context and without that understanding, any peacebuilding effort is likely to overlook certain key considerations.Footnote 74
Aesthetically, a counterweight to embeddedness thus emerges in decolonial humanitarianism – what we can term a counter-aesthetic of ‘autonomy’. This aesthetic foregrounds the agency, plurality, and complexities of decolonial actors and their role in humanitarianism – avoiding embeddedness becoming naturalized. Indeed, part of the aesthetic of the coloniality of power precisely involved the homogenization of the colonies that embeddedness can risk. This is reflected in humanitarian photography, which is organized around a ‘crucial ingredient … the representation of pain and suffering, which links victim and savior’.Footnote 75 Such a method of modulating the representation of the suffering of others strips them of voice, as has long been critiqued. Against such an effacement of agency, dignity, and power – decolonial humanitarianism stresses that ‘understanding the social lives and relationships of the actors [depicted] … may affect how audiences consume these images’.Footnote 76
Photographically, decolonial humanitarianism is thus notable in its use of ‘medium shots’ that work to ‘showcase activities … [and] create intimacy, closeness, approachability, genuineness, and empathy’.Footnote 77 Indeed, most of the grey literature on decolonial humanitarianism deploys such photographic techniques, with a particular focus on depicting non-Western humanitarians carrying out work, typically in groups. Depictions of communities benefiting from humanitarian work, for their part, are often photographed at the eye-level, which is generally seen to ‘imply equality, ordinariness and/or closeness’.Footnote 78 While such an aesthetic shift has become common even to non-decolonial humanitarianism, its importance here relates to the depiction of ‘activities’ among non-‘Western’ humanitarians, especially ‘expert’ activities. As PeaceDirect further notes:
Part of decolonising the aid system is examining what is considered legitimate data and who is considered skilled enough to collect it. Funders and organisations should invest in local researchers rather than funding Western researchers’ travel, with research rooted in local indigenous values and incorporating indigenous methods. When designing a programme, INGOs should work with local leaders to examine existing models, logframes and theories of change, and adopt new ones rooted in local approaches.Footnote 79
If embeddedness relates to an aesthetic legitimating different forms of ‘data’ as expertise, then autonomy shifts hierarchies on ‘who is considered skilled enough to collect it’. As a Christian Aid report on Decolonisation and Decoloniality puts it, this is about ‘knowledge justice’.Footnote 80 And, while this occurs visually, it also includes other approaches. Especially within reformist and rejectionist strands of decolonial humanitarianism, there remains a pressing need to balance the legitimation of embedded knowledge as different with it also being functional. While decolonial humanitarianism can offer a counter-aesthetics of radical difference and potential transformation, decolonial objectivity in the specific domain of humanitarianism must be legitimated in ways that are ‘structurally coupled’ to the international system.Footnote 81 Most decolonial humanitarian activities remain dependent on international donors, of whatever kind, given global economic structures, as well as geopolitical realities. In this context, more theoretical decolonial claims that advocate for ‘refusal’Footnote 82 – of all pragmatic negotiation with power – are often seen as detached from such realities. Moreover, with Mihlar, decolonial humanitarianism does not necessarily ‘require discarding the methods, tools, and practices of the Global North but dislocating the powerful position they hold and reconfiguring them with “othered” “marginalised” knowledge and ways of being’.Footnote 83 For reformists and rejectionists, in particular, this is about rebalancing the validity of knowledge.
As such, while the aesthetics of embeddedness and autonomy gift legitimacy to decolonial knowledge, they are often retrofitted into relatively traditional forms of humanitarian advocacy. For example, autonomy is aesthetically stressed through the strategic reappropriation of the technocratic language and graphics of humanitarian programming. The START Network’s Anti-Racist and Decolonial Framework, for instance, includes a sophisticated infographic comparing ‘racism & colonialism’ and ‘anti-racism & decolonialism’ in an ‘input/output’ style model that depicts the radical knowledge claims of decolonialism within a more- or-less traditional quantified, systematized, and ‘process-orientated’ humanitarian aesthetic.Footnote 84 In this, an aesthetic of autonomy premised on stressing the validity of non-Western actors collecting and analysing data through shifting patterns of (photographic or otherwise) representation is further buttressed by co-opting a professionalized graphic design aesthetic.Footnote 85 This functional aesthetic effectively stresses decolonialism as not only more ‘just’ but also more efficient. Again – however – this process is not without tension. Some criticize this aesthetic mixing-and-matching for replacing a politics of pity with one of empowerment, resilience, and adaptability.Footnote 86 This alternative politics, and its excessive ‘positivity’, risks an embrace of neoliberalism and even a naïve romanticism of decolonial politics.Footnote 87
(Cosmolocal) futurism
Aesthetics of embeddedness and autonomy authorize expertise differently and in ways that situate subaltern knowledge as ‘valid’ by inverting the classic humanitarian aesthetic privileging distant-neutral objectivity. At the same time, autonomy and embeddedness are in tension with one another, as we have discussed, and the very fact of their inverting the classical aesthetic of humanitarianism risks – as others have noted – reproducing colonial hierarchies in knowledge production.Footnote 88 A third aesthetic element appears central to reducing this risk – a futurist sensibility. This sensibility is also articulated against the status quo, as Mbembe notes:
Most Western donor agencies … consider Africa to be a zone of emergency, a fertile ground for humanitarian interventions. The future is not part of their theory of Africa when such a theory exists. Africa is the land of never-ending present and instant, where today and now matter more than tomorrow, let alone the distant future.Footnote 89
The presentism of humanitarianism is implicit in its classical aesthetic of emergency, suffering, and repetition. In this, knowledge that is presented as ‘timely’ is often most privileged, in the terms of this special issue.Footnote 90 In a context where crisis is seen as constant, and repeated, yet also unexpected and complex, then knowledge or expertise that can be rapidly mobilized and ‘scaled’ across time and space becomes most valuable. This poses difficulties for a counter-aesthetic that privileges ‘careful, contextual, relational, and resourced’Footnote 91 forms of embeddedness and autonomy that could be associated more with a timelessness than timeliness in their knowledge claims. While these alternative sources of expertise are situated as more appropriate than disembodied yet timely knowledge, their weakness in effecting change in their here-and-now, and especially without the support of ‘donors’ from elsewhere, is clear, especially during what remain nascent efforts to decolonize humanitarianism. Yet, what is stressed at the same time is that supporting the rise of these decolonial humanitarianisms in the here-and-now will open the pathway to a different future for humanitarianism entirely. Consider the remark of one participant in a debate between dozens of humanitarians on decolonizing the sector:
We have to come to terms with what has happened in the world and all the different countries where we’re working … Until we actually grieve that and we face the truth, we’re not going to get to a place to be able to repair that in a very authentic way … This heaviness and the discomfort that we’re experiencing here … is the start of what I would call decolonisation [and] may be the start of a healing journey … We’ll figure out the other [technical] stuff [about how to move the money] later.Footnote 92
The latter words here that ‘technical stuff’ will be dealt with later evoke a different order of priorities to that typical in mainstream humanitarian action. An aesthetic of urgency, grounded in a pragmatic help/triage logic in the here and now, is part of the justification for the intense focus on logistics, evaluation, and emergency preparedness in traditional humanitarian logics. Against this, a futurist aesthetic is articulated precisely to deal with this aporia, encouraging both a form of ‘grieving’ in which the legacies of colonialism are worked through and an alternative imagining of a future. This aesthetic is largely articulated at the discursive level, through forms of storytelling that deploy metaphor, narrative, and emotion to evoke different possible futures.Footnote 93
For our purposes, at least three forms of this futurism can be identified that roughly correlate with the three ideal-types of decolonial humanitarianism identified above. The first can be termed a kind of utopian futurism that imagines global governance structures entirely differently. A short story entitled Earthquake Relief. Mexico. 2051. A Glimpse into Tomorrow’s Humanitarian World published by The New Humanitarian typifies this futurism.Footnote 94 The story encompasses elements of embeddedness and autonomy stressing the expertise of ‘local’ actors. But it dwells most on an imaginary scenario in which there are no international humanitarian organizations per se because ‘it costs money to have an organization – a headquarters, marketing for the organisation itself, highly paid permanent employees whose job was the organisation rather than the work’.Footnote 95 At the same time, non-local humanitarians continue to exist, albeit being directly employed by local organizations as-and-when needed for specific expertise. Addressing the question of how such an arrangement would be financed, the story imagines a global system of ‘emergency funds’ set aside at the local, national, and international level – which are automatically distributed transnationally as and when needed, something that ‘evens out globally over time’.Footnote 96 In this narrative, a cosmolocal future is imagined in which the benefits of embeddedness and autonomy are cumulated into a global system that remains scalable in times of emergency: ‘with a real sense of solidarity’.
The second form this futurist counter-aesthetic takes is rather more realist or pragmatic, often working through counterfactual examples. In an interview with Degan Ali, for example, she heavily criticizes the United Nations Humanitarian Air Service, an internal airline used for relief efforts and transporting humanitarians across the world. This service is paid, organized not dissimilarly to a commercial airline. Ali notes that given the tentative growth of private (Africa-based) alternatives to this system, ‘there’s absolutely no reason … for the competing alternative UN led donor system of airlines [to exist] … [because that’s] harming the private sector’.Footnote 97 In her futurist alternative, humanitarian funds would support local industries, drawing analogies to, for example, the United States’ de facto subsidization of ‘Jeff Bezos group and Elon Musk’s group’ in the space travel sector.Footnote 98 While this example appears rather more banal, it fits strongly within a narrative in which local expertise is validated through its autonomy and embeddedness and so should be independent of a global governance system over time, pragmatically showing straightforward steps that could open such a future.
Finally, a revolutionary decolonial futurism exists, following the ethos that ‘decolonisation must not be reduced to repair’ because ‘it is already being lived through the insurgent knowledges, fugitive infrastructures and epistemic disobedience of’ subaltern actors.Footnote 99 Such a future is now most often expressed through the term pluriversality – an understanding of multiple yet co-existing worlds in which each unique knowledge system not only has its ways of being acknowledged as ‘expert’ but, over time, sees that recognition of autonomy converted into socio-political autonomy.Footnote 100 While the exact form this will take is often left vague, central to its counter-aesthetic is the idea of solidarity among ‘globally dispersed’ knowledge systems that have been damaged by colonialism.Footnote 101 In this view, while the postcolonial societies that still remain the most affected by humanitarian crisis are inherently plural and different to one another, they are seen as having a shared history of suffering on which future solidarity can be built.Footnote 102 Hints of a future based on that coherence are thus identified by revolutionary decolonialists in, for example, the efforts of Tunisian fishermen to save migrants at risk of drowning at sea, the abolitionist practices of refusal of African Americans against the prison-industrial complex, or the everyday practices of ‘relational humanitarianism’ that save many lives globally, outside all formal or institutional systems.Footnote 103 In short, while this future is more abstract, it is seen as already existing in nascent forms.
Each of these counter-aesthetic futures serves an important function in challenging humanitarianism’s traditional knowledge politics. Indeed, one can perceive them as attempts to challenge the notion that modernity, inflected in its colonial form, represents any ‘progressive’ history. And their power is especially important in a context in which even those who inhabit the colonial metropole have become disenchanted with the idea of progress, as most recently indicated in the rise of the terms like permacrisis or polycrisis, or more broadly in dissatisfaction with late capitalist dynamics.Footnote 104 In a context where the future appears to have disappeared, decolonial approaches that suggest that authorizing expertise differently – beyond objectivity – will not only make things more just and humane in the here-and-now but also actively open a pathway to a different future, conjuring an especially powerful aesthetic vision. Decolonial humanitarianism becomes not simply about humanitarianism in a strict sense, nor about solely the past, but about opening up a different politics for humanity. In this, with Katherine McKittrick, the experience of having been subjected to suffering gifts an expertise that allows one to escape ‘determinism’ and instead aesthetically create the ‘conditions to concoct a different story altogether’.
Is all decolonialism metaphorical? On the uncertain futures of humanitarian design
I think the person who controls the story actually controls the knowledge about a thing, becomes the person who’s considered an expert on it, and essentially for storytelling in general.Footnote 105
Decolonial humanitarianism generates legitimacy for an alternative form of expertise aesthetically. It draws on strategies to shift, subvert, or interfere with the classic gendered, racialized, and classist aesthetic forms that humanitarian expertise is associated with. Different reasons underlie these strategies, but the decolonial objectivity that emerges across is one that valorizes embedded (over disembodied, floating, or parachuting-in), autonomous (over neutral or impartial), and futurist (as opposed to presentist) expertise. The politics that these counter-aesthetic strategies have generated is radical: while the more ambitious objectives of decolonial humanitarianism have yet to come to fruition, the mere fact that a debate over either a ‘power shift’ at the heart of global governance or imaginaries of abolishing it entirely has emerged owes much to these counter-aesthetic forms of authorizing expertise. Simply, then: change has already been sparked by decolonial humanitarianism.
Yet, one core issue remains to be discussed. Decolonizing humanitarianism, and so the ‘heart’ of global power, is fraught with tension. As Mbembe stresses, the postcolonies are pluralistic: lacking any ‘internal coherence’.Footnote 106 Claiming otherwise and so unifying the experience of colonialism into a singularity would – indeed – be to repeat colonial violence. At the same time, this poses political challenges for decolonial humanitarianism as a collective project. While the counter-aesthetic strategies described above are abstractly common across different forms of decolonial humanitarianism, they are always articulated very differently in specific cases. The question is thus whether the plurality of postcolonial experience can be respected without losing the possibility of sketching a ‘common roadmap’ or ‘set of goals’ through which humanitarianism can be reimagined collectively.Footnote 107 Indeed, our discussion above has focused mainly on counter-aesthetic strategies for decolonizing the humanitarian imagination and less on what would replace humanitarian aid in concrete terms. It is this question – what the future of humanitarian design might be – that we now need to discuss more fully.
To do so, let us first return to revolutionary decolonial humanitarianism, and its origins, which are heavily critical of any reformist or rejectionist formulation. Indeed, the most cited article on decolonization in the last twenty years, Tuck and Yang’s ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, argues that decolonization must not become an ‘empty signifier’ divorced from what they see as decolonization’s only true meaning: the ‘repatriation of land … that is, all of the land, and not just symbolically’.Footnote 108 Something they alternatively called a move towards Indigenous sovereignty. For Tuck and Yang, the aesthetic strategies described above risk such an embrace of metaphorical rather than material change, or what other critics have called the uncritical emerge of decolonial ‘vibes’ or ‘aesthetic gestures’ in decolonialism.Footnote 109 Yet, returning to Mbembe, this critique neglects the plurality of postcolonial experience by focusing on North American settler colonialism and establishes a hierarchy in which ‘permanent settler war’ is presented ‘as the theatre for all imperial wars’,Footnote 110 thereby relegating ‘Third World’ decolonial struggles to subordinate positions in the posited struggle, hierarchizing decolonialism itself.
Moreover, others have noted how these forms of revolutionary decolonialism are themselves founded on metaphor.Footnote 111 Tuck and Yang’s polemic is suffused with metaphors of spatial and territorial enclosure, deploying a distinctly figurative – aesthetic – language because, as Garba and Sorentino stress, ‘metaphor … is geography-making’.Footnote 112 In this reading, the more accurate title of their polemic is decolonization is not just a metaphor, and so – logically – all decolonialism is (also) metaphorical, if never entirely. Wilson Trajano Filho discusses this when exploring the ‘marketing’ of decolonial theory, unpacking the post-modern aesthetic of decolonial theory, noting, for example, that Walter Mignolo’s ‘matrix of power’ is self-admittedly a term inspired by the science fiction film The Matrix.Footnote 113 As many strident critiques also stress, decolonial theory aesthetic legitimizes itself by deploying ‘indigestible highfalutin jargon’ and the ‘cultivation of a convoluted language style’.Footnote 114 In more measured terms, Kwasi Tieku explores Ghanaian efforts to deconstruct ‘colonial knowledge’ but cautions ‘against too much abstraction …’ which can be seen ‘as part of a distraction tactic by those seeking to maintain status quo knowledge, power, and privilege’.Footnote 115 A point that was once also firmly made by Edward Said.Footnote 116
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui equally critiqued the co-optation of indigenous or subaltern knowledge by high-theoretical social scientists in the Global North. For her, their use of terms such as rupture, de-linking, pluriversality, or even decolonialism/decoloniality itself is distant from the lifeworlds of humanitarian suffering: isolating ‘academic treatises from any obligation to or dialogue with insurgent social forces’.Footnote 117 As such, the revolutionary humanitarian decolonial idea that ‘to decolonise is not to critique from within, it is to rupture and rebuild’ can be seen as irresponsible in its abstraction. Consider in this regard Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s critique of ‘decolonialism’ tout court, and his words that he is:
Flabbergasted by the refusal to engage with … the desperate lifeworlds dominant in African countries and the denial to millions of their basic dignity as humans in these countries – and not all of this is traceable only to the depredations of colonialism.Footnote 118
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s critique here echoes that of Kwasi Tieku: scholarship grounded in the reality of suffering rarely sees itself as pure in its thinking, whereas scholarship that is too distant from that reality, whatever its claims to radicalism, tends to fall into a form of ‘disciplinary decadence’.Footnote 119 The critique, at its base, is that revolutionary decolonialism lacks a ‘programme of concrete changes’ to the world of comparable specificity to those offered by reformist or rejectionary strands.Footnote 120 In large part, the critique continues, because these approaches are intensely metaphorical, relying on a far-too vague aesthetic imaginary of the future, or blunt yet underspecified demands for Indigenous sovereignty. Reversing the critique that reformist decolonial humanitarianism represents simply a ‘move to innocence’ – a symbolic act that soothes institutional guilt – these critiques would see more radical decolonial approaches as equal moves to innocence, given they can fail to take the risk of acting, recommending, or engaging with the impurity of politics, instead maintaining an innocent radicalism.Footnote 121
These debates are academic. But reading them through attempts to push them into the real world – as through decolonial humanitarianism – reveals something different. To see this, we can return to Koli Jean Bofan’s novel Congo Inc and his satire of the ‘experts in culture, humanitarianism, or conflict resolution’ heading to the Congo to ‘propagate holiness around zero latitude … muttering dogmas they’d memorized in the humanities departments in the northern hemisphere’.Footnote 122 The theories underlying decolonial humanitarianism, of all kinds, have emerged precisely from those humanities departments in the northern hemisphere where – indeed – many ‘humanitarians’ are trained.Footnote 123 On the one hand, it is thus easy to criticize, for example, reformist and rejectionary decolonial humanitarianism for a fundamental conservatism or co-optation and, therein, with having misread or failed to take seriously decolonial theory. Especially when most of the practical guidance on how to decolonize humanitarianism is written by researchers or practitioners based in the Global North.Footnote 124
On the other hand, it is also true that applied knowledge politics must necessarily be different from abstract knowledge politics. Decolonial humanitarianism makes this abundantly clear. It is a practical attempt to decolonize knowledge production at the centre of global power structures, and so will always deviate from theoretical treatises. Indeed, decolonial theory has largely pursued its own counter-aesthetic strategies at the level of the individual, often through high-artistic interventions that have changed very little in the ‘real-world’ of power politics.Footnote 125 Decolonial humanitarianism, by contrast, mobilizes aesthetics organizationally and institutionally, working to challenge the hegemony of knowledge production at the centre of global governance. It is therefore a uniquely instructive arena in which to assess the practical efficacy of decolonial ambitions. In this regard, and to conclude, I want to suggest that it is important for the future of decolonial humanitarianism that it avoids becoming enmeshed in an endless cycle of internal theoretical critiques between its different forms.
Instead, what would happen if we accepted all forms of decolonialism as being metaphorical? The idea that an aesthetic, metaphorical, discursive, etc. project of decolonizing the ‘imagination’ is not subsidiary to material change but rather integral to it? Important here is that aesthetics is central not only to decolonizing ‘the imagination of the dominated’ but also to creating new imaginaries themselves. There is a long tradition in thinking in such terms, most obviously in the poetic-aesthetic language deployed by anticolonialists such as Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, or Frantz Fanon himself, where aesthetics is both a form of critique and productive of alternatives.Footnote 126 In Humanitarian Fictions, Megan Cole Paustian evokes this possibility in an analysis of novels focused on humanitarian action. While she unpacks the white saviourism and coloniality of this tradition, she also moves instead towards novels (largely produced by African writers) that work to ‘demystify and reinvent the vocabulary of global care’.Footnote 127 Such novels, much like the aforementioned Congo Inc:
Situate humanitarian representation within a political network of social relations, and they negotiate the tension between utopian desire and real-world necessity. Their language is universalist but not imperialist, progress-oriented but not salvation-based, postsecular but nonmissionary, invested in giving but not in the frame of benevolence. They show the entanglement of ethics with social, political, and historical forces. They prioritize humanity but draw more on the language of sacredness than sameness.Footnote 128
Above all, it is stressed that these critical humanitarian fictions, while rejecting the liberal ‘international community’, also ‘affirm that, in this irreversibly globalized world, some version of transatlantic care must endure’.Footnote 129 In this, their imaginaries of change mix reformist, rejectionary, and revolutionary aesthetic tones – seeking the decolonization of knowledge but also change in the here-and-now. The contradictions of this navigation between ‘utopian desire and real-world necessity’ – moreover – can be reconciled precisely because of the power that aesthetics has as a form of authorizing knowledge. Unlike claims to expertise grounded in objective, neutral, technocratic, etc. methods, aesthetic credibility emerges from a sense of appropriateness that does not require linearity in its workings: the ‘open’ nature of the aesthetic allows complexity to be expressed.Footnote 130
Put differently, it is important to stress that while the knowledge politics evoked here through counter-aesthetic strategies must not become, with Tuck and Yang, an ‘empty signifier’ – devoid of any meaning – it perhaps actually benefits from having become a floating signifier. Floating signifiers are concepts that are fuzzy, loose, or vague enough that they lack a fixed meaning that can be generalized across contexts but which, nonetheless, unite different actors. Their value lies in the multiplicity of meanings they contain and those unifying qualities. In this, ‘the open nature of a floating signifier invites to dialogue, constitutes identity, accounts for ongoing change, and thereby contributes to the relevance of a concept’.Footnote 131 More, as others have noted, they are very common in global governance itself.Footnote 132 To return to Rancière, the aesthetic strategies that often undergird floating signifiers are important because ‘the aesthetic movement of politics consists above all in the framing of a we’.Footnote 133 Or, put differently, aesthetics allows politics to move beyond difference and to create community.
Vis-à-vis decolonizing humanitarianism, the goal must therefore be to find ways to unite actors that are diverse and different not only in their specific postcolonial experience but also internally, where – for example – divisions also necessarily exist between domestic elites and those suffering from humanitarian crisis. As any form of global governance, the (utopian) goal is always to move beyond difference and find forms of solidarity. It is for this reason, perhaps, that decolonial humanitarianism must generally remain vague on its concrete image of the future, which is something that will emerge only after a long period of negotiation, contingency, and political uncertainty. To return to the humanitarian practitioner mentioned earlier, the idea that ‘we’ll figure out the other [technical] stuff’ on what decolonial humanitarianism means in practice ‘later’ might not be immediately pragmatically satisfactory at first glance, but is actually an astute strategy for coalition building.
Decolonial counter-aesthetics must, therefore, be necessarily vague, open, and imprecise – floating across different identities. In doing so, decolonial humanitarianism at its best, and in practice, embraces what Edouard Glissant described as a politics in which we do not have to ‘understand’ or ‘agree’ with everyone ‘in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them’.Footnote 134 For us, understanding how all decolonialism is metaphorical, thus allows us to see the radicality that exists across its diversity. For example, despite critiques, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in Adeso’s refusal to accept funding from international development or humanitarian organizations, albeit one that then leads to a reliance on the private sector. Equally, there is a true form of decolonial praxis in the efforts of reformists to imagine a form of global ‘emergency fund’ led by local actors, albeit one that indeed risks retaining elements of white saviourism. And, despite the critiques above, there is naturally also a true form of decolonial praxis in revolutionary attempts to grapple at more structural levels with global capitalism and imperial structure. As Paustian’s discussion of critical humanitarian fiction makes clear, however, those who inhabit the ground truths of humanitarian violence are opaque in their preferences for one or another among these forms of humanitarian praxis. Indeed, they typically mix these approaches in action.Footnote 135 The aesthetics of decolonial humanitarianism are thus also necessarily opaque in how they authorize expertise differently, maintaining an ambiguity that allows for allegiances to be built.
Understanding decolonial humanitarianism in this opaque and pluralistic manner is not simply a technical question relating to knowledge production, but also a means of protecting its potential to produce radical change. Despite controversies over the relationship between anticolonial, postcolonial, decolonial, and other theoretical traditions, they all form part of the same lineage: the desire for emancipation from a colonially enforced ‘feeling of not existing’.Footnote 136 Today – however – the attacks on this knowledge liberation movement are more acute than they have been for decades. Humanitarian organizations have been scrubbing references to terms linked to decolonialism from their web pages since the Trump administration’s onslaught.Footnote 137 Political winds have turned, as they not infrequently do, against more progressive knowledge politics. Against such an onslaught, appreciating the power of aesthetically and metaphorically articulated decolonialism to preserve imaginaries of a different future is more crucial than ever given, to close with Achille Mbembe, ‘the basic goal’ of decolonialism ‘is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being but to make it effective’.Footnote 138
Acknowledgements
For exceptionally helpful comments, suggestions, and critiques I would like to thank the editors Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Juanita Uribe, and Leandro Montes Ruiz, the annonymous reviewers of this paper, as well as Stéphanie Perazzone.
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