Displaced brokers: How displaced people shape humanitarianism in an era of fragmented protection

ongoing

Research on displaced people is often reduced to the vocabularies and imaginaries of the nation-state and multilateral and international humanitarian organisations. This research seeks to open up new perspectives in studying displaced people by moving beyond institutionalised (and fragmented) definitions and instead probing deeper into their differentiated experiences under differentiated regimes. The need for new perspectives becomes urgent as conflicts multiply and displacements of various communities are prolonged while simultaneously, the scope of asylum becomes narrower. Given this socio-political background, the project seeks to foreground a specific cadre of displaced people: those carrying out (in)formal roles in humanitarian organisations. Their mobilisation will be examined through the lens of brokerage to uncover how they are not just intermediaries or by-products of a volatile situation but rather disruptive and (re)constructive forces in a field that is in flux. To do so, a mixed methods approach that combines participant observation with elite interviews and focus groups will be applied in the case of Afghan and Syrian ‘displaced brokers’ in Turkey. This study will make three key contributions: (1) through a detailed study of the dynamic between ‘displaced brokers’ and humanitarian organisations, it will produce new data on contemporary mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion of displaced people under the differentiated protection regimes in Turkey, (2) it will make a theoretical contribution to knowledge about the transformative capacity of brokerage by linking the distinctive attributes of the contemporary Turkish refugee governance and global humanitarian mechanisms to the context of different groups emerging from different conflict contexts (3) it will provide policy-relevant analysis to reveal the role of displaced brokers as aid agents, prompting policy acknowledgement to streamline their brokering within humanitarian processes.