ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the particular forms of care, attention and attachment – the quiet politics – that the young refugees experience in humanitarian spaces, and with what consequences. The young Syrians and Iraqis spend a good part of their daily lives connected to the protected activities that take place in these spaces, and their ethical and political commitments are the grounds on which they constitute their moral and political selves. Our account draws on formal interviews with humanitarian carers and managers, as well as observational data, information conversations and engagements with the staff and young refugees at all three partner organisations. These humanitarian spaces anchor how the young refugees orient themselves – often as rights-bearing subjects and occasionally as racialised Syrians and Iraqis. As such, refugee humanitarianism can produce subjects as well as enable agential claims to subjecthood. Humanitarian spaces form unique and defining social worlds, in other words. This chapter thus asks: what constitutions of subjectivities and subjecthood does quotidian life under humanitarian care open up? Can we see a kind of quiet, ordinary politics taking place, and can we think about the caregiving encounters as constituting a kind of political and civic engagement? The picture that emerges is one in which these humanitarian organisations become unique places of civic engagement and encounter in the city. They are experienced by the young refugees as culturally safe spaces characterised by kindnesses and civilities and demands to treat and be treated with decency. Sometimes, however, the caregivers see the young Syrians and Iraqis as vulnerable yet resilient children in need of the generic care and protections that all childhoods require, and so caregiving can struggle to articulate and address those distinctive experiences of alterity that inhere in everyday, lived refugeedom.
