Violent Compassions: Humanitarian - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Violent Compassions: Humanitarian
Design and the Politics of Borders
Mahmoud Keshavarz

Through the past five years, and specifically since the spring and
summer of 2015 referred to by the Western media as “the refugee
crise,” a flood of new humanitarian design competitions, projects,
think tanks, exhibitions, panels, and conferences have addressed
“refugeehood” as a timely subject for design. From Silicon Valley
start-ups and other entrepreneurial efforts to academic initiatives,
designers and design researchers have mobilized their skills,
connaissance, and creativity to address the urgent issue of displaced
individuals and communities. Some of these projects, such as prod-
uct and interaction design solutions, adopt a technocratic, univer-
sal approach; meanwhile, others involve social design initiatives
that purport to take a more collaborative and long-term approach.
Both of these types of projects, although different in method and
outcomes tend to be understood as caring for the other under the
banner of “making a difference” and “turning crisis into an oppor-
tunity.” As a result, they are frequently acknowledged by profes-
sionals, entrepreneurs, citizens, and academics to be possible
interventions when political projects fail or are simply ignored.
Most of these initiatives come from a sense of emergency—a sense
of crisis that “something must be done” to address the suffering of
human beings on the move. They also are derived from a sense of
compassion for “the other” in the name of universal humanity—
a sense of caring for someone who is in a relatively (plus) vulnera-
ble condition.

Based on the two notions of “crisis” and “compassion,” this
article outlines and problematizes the humanitarian perspective
in design. By contextualizing different historical and contemporary
humanitarian design examples in an analysis of current European
border politics, the article warns against the pitfalls of this increas-
ing engagement of design practices with refugees and vulnerable
communities on the move. I critique how designing, in the after-
math of the spring and summer of 2015, has been mobilized with-
out due consideration of the types of politics it produces and the
types of politics it eventually ignores. Ce faisant, this article does

https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00611

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not call for a better humanitarian design practice; rather, it ques-
tions humanitarian design practice as a whole and challenges the
foundations, logics, and politics upon which humanitarian design
appears and expands. Although I do not offer guidelines for a
design practice in this article, I nonetheless call for greater sensitiv-
ity from designers and design researchers in the Global North.
Those who want to address issues related to migrants and refugees
need to develop a better understanding of the politics of the cur-
rent border regime that produces and regulates refugees, asylum
seekers, and undocumented migrants worldwide. It further
demands that instead of using their epistemic skill of “problem-
solving,” designers should align with the politics of justice
demanded by refugees and rethink their practice in solidarity with
such politics.

Unsettling Crisis
One reason that so many in the field of design have given atten-
tion to refugees could be the scale of migratory movements and
their deadly consequences, communicated through the term “cri-
sis.” The urgency of a growing population of displaced and crimi-
nalized individuals—categorized varyingly as refugees in
UNHCR camps, asylum seekers in migration office queues or other
waiting zones, or undocumented migrants living with the con-
stant fear of detention and deportation—is further heightened by
the rise of neo-Nazi and fascist political parties, with either explicit
or implicit xenophobic and racist policies. This current situation
cannot be denied; cependant, differentiating between urgency and
emergency is important.

In policies and media narratives concerning migration, ref-
ugees, and the asylum system, emergency is a desirable word;
the term is used liberally to frame the ways we are told to think
about the growing numbers of nationally and internationally dis-
placed individuals and communities. The constant use of the term
“crisis” in the context of migration represents an abstraction of par-
ticular events by a generic logic, making crisis a term that seems
self-explanatory.1 However, “crisis” is not simply explanatory or
descriptive; the term itself constructs that particular condition.

Crisis makes the event described an exception to an other-
wise peaceful order. Par exemple, the deaths of migrants in the
Mediterranean Sea in summer 2015 frequently has been called the
“Mediterranean Crisis.” According to statistics, cependant, the first
deaths of a similar kind in the Mediterranean were reported in
1991 in Gibraltar—a few months after the Schengen agreement
was completed with a convention toward a common visa policy.2
The European Union (EU), as a strategic project, redesigned Europe

2121

Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis (Durham, Caroline du Nord:
Duke University Press, 2013).
From January 1, 1993, to May 5, 2018,
the network United Against Racism has
documented 34,361 deaths that occurred
as a result of European border politics.
These deaths have happened both inside
and at the shores of Europe or as a
consequence of deportation. For the
full list of names, causes of death, et
dates, see Death By Policy: http://www.
unitedagainstracism.org/wp-content/
uploads/2017/06/ListofDeathsActual.
pdf” (accessed August 30, 2018).

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

into a continent without internal borders. This redesigning could
not be accomplished without installing and developing a more
extensive and technologically complex border apparatus around
and outside of Europe.3 Since the 1990s, Frontex, the European
border management agency, has grown by a massive scale, les deux
administratively and technologically; it has incorporated drones
and high tech surveillance systems, and sound and smell detec-
tors as part of a smart border initiative are imminently looming on
the horizon.

En outre, on a larger scale—and as part of a long process
of neo-colonization, which has formed the economic basis of the
EU project4—many African countries have signed agreements with
the EU to facilitate deportation, detention, and harsher border con-
trol. In exchange, they receive aid, which is often used to pay off
debt to European banks and the International Monetary Fund.5
Contextualizing the tragic deaths in the sea in the border politics of
the past 30 années, these more recent events do not look so excep-
tional. Plutôt, they are part of a long process of constructing
Europe into a fortress by externalizing its borders, redrawing its
map, and re-graphing its geopolitics in a way that crossing borders
for the global poor has become dangerous, deadly, and almost
impossible. Calling the movement of those who seek asylum and
refuge a crisis—because European borders have historically
stopped, regulated, or slowed down these crossings—is not only
an ahistoric perspective; it also has led to criminalization of those
who claim the right to mobility and asylum, exercising their auton-
omy, if nothing else.

En outre, by calling these tragedies an emergency and
rendering them exceptional, we deny the long-standing process of
designing hostilities and violence against the global poor and posi-
tion design as a bystander. Many scholars have shown that mate-
rial practices, such as designing and technological configurations,
have played vital roles in the production of immobility and have
displaced populations historically. This involvement is both direct
and indirect. These material practices directly shape mechanisms
for the exclusion of certain populations by maintaining passport
and visa regimes, technologizing and securitizing borders, et
infrastructuring deportation and detention.6 They indirectly shape
global displacement by producing a world damaged by over-con-
sumption, cheap labor, climate change, and war.7

When the historical and material violence of European
border politics is masked and ignored through the discourse of cri-
sis, the condition is then presented as a result of technical defi-
ciencies in the system, which calls for more creative and innovative
solutions or engagements of designers.8 Vinnova, a Swedish fund-
ing agency that supports “innovative” and “technical” projects for

3 Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Borderwork

Beyond Inside/Outside? Frontex, the Citi-
zen–Detective, and the War on Terror,»
Space and Polity 12, Non. 1 (2008): 63–79.
Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson,
Eurafrica: The Untold History of European
Integration and Colonialism (Londres:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014).

5 Aino Korvensyrj, “The Valletta Process
and the Westphalian Imaginary of
Migration Research,” Movement Journal
3, Non 1 (2017): 191–204.
Voir, respectivement, Mahmoud Keshavarz,
The Design Politics of the Passport:
Materiality, Immobility and Dissent
(Londres: Bloomsbury, 2018); Stéphane
Rosière and Reece Jones, “Teicho-
politique: Re-Considering Globalisation
Through the Role of Walls and Fences,»
Geopolitics 17, Non. 1 (2012): 217–34
and Ruben Andersson, “Hardwiring
the Frontier? The Politics of Security
Technology in Europe’s ‘Fight Against
Illegal Migration,’” Security Dialogue 47,
no.1 (2016): 22–39; Nicholas De Genova
and Nathalie Peutz, The Deportation
Regime: Sovereignty, Espace, et le
Freedom of Movement (Durham, Caroline du Nord:
Duke University Press, 2010) and William
Walters, “Aviation as Deportation
Infrastructure: Airports, Planes, et
Expulsion,” Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies (2017): 1–22.
Tony Fry, A New Design Philosophy:
An Introduction to Defuturing (Sydney,
Australia: UNSW Press, 1999); et
Felicity D. Scot, Outlaw Territories:
Environments of Insecurity/Architectures
of Counterinsurgency (Cambridge, MA:
AVEC Presse, 2016).
Tom Scott-Smith, “Humanitarian
Neophilia: The ‘Innovation Turn’ and Its
Implications,” Third World Quarterly 37,
Non. 12 (2016): 2229–51.

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

a sustainable society released a call for grants in September 2015.
Titled “Innovation for a more secure migration and integration of
the new comers,” the agency supported 16 different projects with
subventions, allocating 10 million Swedish Kronor. Similar funding
opportunities have been announced in other European countries.
In the same month, SAS Scandinavian Airlines announced a plan
to increase its baggage allowance to help refugees. Travelers to the
Mediterranean—the majority of whom were tourists at that time—
could check in more baggage if they were taking “clothes, shoes
and toiletries” for refugees.9 As European passengers enjoyed their
freedom of movement, they also were granted a sense of moral
achievement by taking gifts to those whose passages were blocked
by European countries, including Sweden. The airline exploited the
vulnerability of refugees to attract more customers through its free
baggage allowance. The hypocrisy in compassionate initiatives
such as this one addressing emergency situations reveals itself in
the practices of these companies outside the “emergency” context.
Par exemple, SAS has long been criticized by anti-deportation
activists in Sweden for its collaboration with migration authorities
in deportation of undocumented migrants and asylum seekers
whose applications were rejected.

During the same period, a mobile phone app was produced
that claimed it could help to pinpoint the location of boats in dis-
tress at sea. It won a humanitarian award but proved to be a fake
and non-functioning app.10 In 2013, in the aftermath of the tragic
deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea—they drifted in the
sea for several days and their call for rescue was ignored by the
Italian coast guards—an architectural firm designed a solution
that proposed a line of saving buoys to be installed in the Mediter-
ranean without paying attention to the histories of the migrant
struggle at the sea.11

These initiatives ignore the fact that a serious engagement in
the act of “saving” would require a great transnational mobiliza-
tion of labor, forces, and time—not simply creating an app or a
product. Par exemple, AlarmPhone is a labor intensive initiative
consisting of transnational activist networks across Europe, le
Middle East, and North Africa. It mobilizes satellite information,
open source data on sea traffics, and local solidarity networks to
watch the Mediterranean Sea and the Aegean Sea 24 hours a day,
assisting refugee boats in distress by sending their location to
nearby ships for eventual saving. The activists not only engage in
the practical act of saving but also work extensively on political
campaigning efforts to promote freedom of movement and publish
monthly reports on the abuse and violation of the rights of refu-
gees and migrants by coastal guards of European and North Afri-
can countries.12

Radio Sweden, “Airlines increase
baggage allowance to help refugees,»
Septembre 5, 2015); https://sveriges-
radio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=
2054&artikel=6248656 (accessed August
15, 2018).

10 Alex Hern, “Refugee Rescue App Pulled

from App Store After It Is Outed as Fake”
Guardian, Juin 21, 2016, https://www.
theguardian.com/technology/2016/
jun/21/refugee-rescue-i-sea-app-pulled-
app-store-outed-as-fake (accessed
Août 15, 2018).
I have elsewhere discussed this project
in length and the problems with the
way design practice conceals the
violence of European border politics
in its speculation about saving refugees.
See Mahmoud Keshavarz, “The Violence
of Humanitarian Design” in Design Phi-
losophy Reader, éd. Anne Marie Willis
(Londres: Bloomsbury, 2018), 120–26.
12 For more information, see http://watch-
themed.net and https://alarmphone.org
(both accessed on August 15, 2018).

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

Describing the im/mobility of certain populations using the term
“crisis” conceals the discursive and material politics that actually
produce these events and paves the way for “humanitarian
conception,” which aims to “restore” the situation—often into the one
preferred by those who produce the sense of crisis.

Humanitarian Design: Exception or the Norm?
As an established and well-promoted approach, humanitarian
design had a precedent long before the spring and summer of 2015.
It has been advocated as a way to craft technical solutions to prob-
lems primarily in the Global South, such as water access, emer-
gency shelter, affordable housing, éducation, and health, par
engaging a wide range of actors including professional design
firms, development companies, philanthro-capitalists, universities,
charities, NGOs, and residents of communities who are recipients
of international aid.13

Humanitarian design often is moralized as a decision to
save lives and “empower” individuals instead of giving services to
the Global North14 and often is uncritically assessed as “empa-
thetic.” Discussion of humanitarian design usually occurs within
the context of development programs, empowerment, aide, and mis-
sionary projects.15 However, critics have accused humanitarian
design of being a practice of “new imperialism.”16 As such, Cedric
Johnson argues that humanitarian designers seek to propose tech-
nical solutions to problems rooted in imperial and colonial histo-
ries, structural inequalities, labor exploitation, and the neoliberal
restructuring of societies worldwide. In pursuing technical solu-
tion, they neglect the politics and history of the conditions in
which they intervene. Par conséquent, the global poor—as the main
consumers of humanitarian goods—are constructed as design
opportunities for the generosity of the elite, rather than as histori-
cal subjects with their own worldviews, skills, and political sensi-
bilities.17

Humanitarian interventions have always been justified as a
temporary way of addressing an “immediate” situation—as an
emergency approach to saving lives and promoting the universal
concept of humanity. Cependant, anthropological studies of human-
itarianism, particularly in relation to refugee camps, tell a different
story: The majority of humanitarian practices become the norm
and prolong the condition of precariousness and misery.18
Although the turn from temporary to permanent is something that
humanitarian and aid workers are reluctant to accept, in humani-
tarian design, the notion of permanence forms the basis of the
practice.19 Consequently, a situation characterized as emergency
and temporary turns into a permanent site for the consumption of
aid products specifically designed for the “humanitarian market.”

13 Cynthia E. Forgeron, Design for the Other

90% (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum
2007); Bryan Bell et al., Expanding
Architecture: Design as Activism
(New York: Metropolis Books, 2008);
and Emily Pilloton, Design Revolution:
100 Products that Empower People
(Londres: Thames and Hudson. 2009).

14 Pilloton, Design Revolution.
15 “Humanitarian Design vs. Design
Imperialism: Debate Summary,»
Change Observer, Juillet 16, 2010;
http://designobserver.com/feature/
humanitarian-design-vs-design-
imperialism-debate-summary/14498/
(accessed May 12, 2015).

16 Bruce Nussbaum, “Is Humanitarian
Design the New Imperialism?»
Fast Company, Juin 7, 2010; www.
fastcodesign.com/1661859/is-
humanitarian design-the-newimperialism
(accessed January 17, 2015).

17 Cedric G. Johnson “The Urban Precariat,
Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power
of Humanitarian Design,” Journal of
Developing Societies 27, Non. 3–4 (2011):
445–75.

18 Liisa H. Malki, “Speechless Emissaries:
Refugees, Humanitarianism, et
Dehistoricization,” Cultural Anthropology
11, Non. 3, (1996): 377–404; Michel Agier,
“Between War and City: Towards an
Urban Anthropology of Refugee Camps,»
Ethnography 3, Non. 3 (2002): 317–41;
Michel Agier, On the Margins of the
Monde: The Refugee Experience Today
(Cambridge, ROYAUME-UNI: Polity, 2008); Miriam
Ticktin, “Transnational Humanitarianism,»
Revue annuelle d'anthropologie 43
(2014): 273–89.

19 One of the most recent celebrated

humanitarian design products is Better
Shelter, designed by five Swedish
designers in Stockholm and supported
and distributed by IKEA. The product is
advertised as the most durable emer-
gency shelter; lasting for three years, it
can be used longer than any other model
previously available on the humanitarian
aid market. See www.bettershelter.org
(accessed August 15, 2018).

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

Gender studies has shown that social norms are the effects
of repetition: Through repetition, worlds materialize and “bound-
et, fixity and surface” are produced.20 Similarly, the design and
production of humanitarian solutions to emergency situations on a
global scale repeatedly produce specific relations to be performed
by refugees and others involved in the humanitarian market. Dans
such normalized “emergency,” refugees become dependent on
humanitarian design to survive. Par conséquent, these design inter-
ventions reconfigure refugees as victims without agency whose
identity is constructed as receivers of ingenious and benevolent
conception. The historical example of “emergency shelter” by Shigeru
Ban, one of the most celebrated humanitarian architects, is illumi-
nating in this sense. Dans 1998, UNHCR provided refugees arriving to
Gihembe refugee camp in Rwanda with plastic sheets and alumi-
num pipes to use for shelter. Plutôt, the refugees would cut down
the trees in the area to use as the support structure for the plastic
sheets and sell the iron pipes in nearby markets. The UNHCR
argued that this “problem” led to deforestation in the area, despite
the fact that the establishment of the camp actually had begun the
deforestation process. In response, Shigeru Ban created a modular
shelter with recycled cardboard tubes, with no financial value. Son
solution was celebrated by the design community as an efficient,
cheap mode of shelter, but in practice, it was a way to deprive
refugees of the small degree of financial independence they had
carved out—and to re-establish the UNHCR monopoly over the
deforestation process.21 The architect’s humanitarian solution in
fact replaced the refugees’ design intervention. Ban’s shelter
imposed further vulnerability upon the refugees through a new
conception. Ban’s prototype is now used worldwide as the model for
UNHCR emergency shelters.

Because they are designed according to real or imagined
failures of governments to provide the necessary infrastructure
for living, humanitarian design products circumvent vital infra-
structures, such as health care systems, transportation, éducation,
and sanitation, for the sake of efficiency. They are designed to
ensure that they do not need any specific infrastructure to func-
tion. Being independent from such systems, they tend to prolong
dependency and to suppress demand from refugees for more
just infrastructures.

Design and innovation’s engagement with refugees is not
confined to technical products but extends to entrepreneurship
and social innovation initiatives. IKEA Foundation is the finan-
cial sponsor and distributor of Better Shelter, a newly designed
modular container that functions as a housing shelter, as well as a
school and a hospital unit in refugee camps. Foundation executives
recently announced that they intend to launch a production line in

20 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: Sur
the Discursive Limits of Sex (Londres:
Routledge, 1993): 9.

21 Andrew Herscher, “Cardboard for

Humanity,” e-flux, https://www.e-flux.
com/architecture/superhumanity/
68638/cardboard-for-humanity/
(Août 15, 2018).

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

refugee camps in Jordan, turning refugees into IKEA workers. Ce
move has been celebrated as a successful strategy by which social
entrepreneurship can thrive under challenging conditions.22 It is
part of a bigger plan that advocates harnessing “the remarkable
opportunities of globalization” by establishing special economic
zones (SEZ) in the less wealthy countries that host the majority of
refugees worldwide. The main idea is that these countries can host
companies from rich countries, offering them tax breaks and
reduced regulation for hiring refugees as workers. Critics have
already suggested that this idea, already deployed in Jordan and
Lebanon, ignores refugees’ rights and circumvents international
obligations in order to keep refugees out of rich countries by any
means possible.23 The jobs that SEZs offer typically are low- ou
semi-skilled job with long hours and repetitive tasks, with no clear
labor rights protections, to the degree that some have called SEZs
“special exploitation zones.”24 The focus is on merely giving refu-
gees a job of any kind, and it ignores the diversity of skills that ref-
ugees have, the work conditions, labor protections, and other
support structures, such as security, health care, child care, et
public transport.

The global consumption of humanitarian design reconfig-
ures and consequently normalizes emergency situations, convert-
ing them into a permanent condition of displacement. Ce faisant,
these designs avoid engaging with the historical and political
issues that created the need (or “market”) for humanitarian design.
In contrast to the technocentric narrative at the heart of humanitar-
ian and development programs, problems created by the modern-
ization of the world and its forces, such as colonialism and
capitalism, do not necessarily have “modern solutions.”25 Thus, le
temporal politics of humanitarian design—in which the time and
place of the emergency turn into permanency—not only ignore the
histories of displacement, but also determine specific futures for
refugees. Humanitarian design thus renders the bodies (of refu-
gees) as subjects of biological help, but not political support.

The Violence of Compassion
The deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean or the harsh con-
ditions of refugee camps evoke compassion above all else, once
the history and politics of border control and regulation of
displaced communities become actively concealed. The primary
issue stays in the realm of feeling, rather than the realm of justice.
When refugees become characterized as people who need “our”
generous help and protection, questions of rights and justice disap-
pear. Par conséquent, refugees are removed from a political space in
which they can exercise their right to freedom of movement and
are placed in a technical space concerned with improving condi-
tions of survival.

22 Eleanor Gibson, “Humanitarian Experts
Propose Turning Refugee Camps into
Enterprise Zones Called ‘Refugee
Cities,’” Dezeen, Décembre 9, 2016,
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/12/09/
refugee-cities-turn-camps-into-enter-
prise-zones/ (accessed June 6, 2017).

23 See Benjamin Thomas White, “Refuge
and History: A Critical Reading of a
Polemic,” Migration and Society 2,
Non. 1 (2019): 107–18.

24 Heaven Crawley, “Migration: Refugee
Economics,” Nature 544 (2017): 26–27.

25 Arturo Escobar, “Development, Violence

and the New Imperial Order,” Develop-
ment 47, no.1 (2004): 15–21.

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

Postcolonial feminist Sara Ahmed notes that compassion
plays a central role in othering by transforming others into objects
of emotion.26 As a specific performative endeavor, compassion
often mobilizes emotions through a strong binary relationship.
By showing compassion to someone, the sympathizer enters into
a relationship in which the recipient of the compassion has little
or no control. Being sympathetic or compassionate about another’s
suffering sets emotions in operation. “In operation, compassion
is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, le
compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone
else’s suffering.”27

Once the “compassionate” think of themselves as having
resources to offer the other, then the refugee becomes an abstract
figure who can be emancipated using different design approaches,
including humanitarian design. The effects of such approaches are
not evaluated according to the political call for justice and equality,
raised by refugees who move despite walls, fences, and borders.
The “success” of these projects instead relies on their ability to first
generate an academic or commercial narrative about the helpless
and abstract figure of the refugee and then win acclaim by provid-
ing both assistance and empowering strategies. En outre,
humanitarian design interventions help the public and the design
community to imagine themselves and their practice as essentially
good, positive, and sympathetic; thereby disguising the privileges
and inherent historical violence embedded in designing—specif-
ically in relation to conditions of displacement. It is the vulnerabil-
ity of the “other” from the perspective of the designers that makes
them “able to help.” Thus, humanitarian design, despite its inten-
tion, seems to be more about creating opportunities for the privi-
leged to offer their skills, connaissance, and creativity —rather than to
support the vulnerable. Anthropologist Liisa H. Malkki argues
that the need to help someone somewhere else who is “out in the
world” is more often about helping oneself to overcome issues or
problems at “home.”28 Thus, in practice, acts of compassion might
be concerned with the helper more than the helped. This view
repositions the helper and the helped and allows us to reconsider
who the true subject of compassion is.

The contemporary militarized border regime is not only
about producing violence toward the bodies that transgress them
as stated in the beginning of this essay. It does more than that.
While it generates the maximum violence required to stop or slow
down refugees and migrants, it is designed to hide this violence
and instead promote a sense of pity and compassion for “some” of
those bodies.29 Therefore it is imperative that borders are not only
destructive but also productive. They destroy, demarcate, and limit
political subjectivities of certain groups but enable other groups to
observe a select few instances of the crisis, feel pity, and extend

26 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters:

Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality
(Londres: Routledge, 2000).
27 Lauren Berlant, Compassion: Le
Culture and Politics of an Emotion
(Londres: Routledge, 2004).

28 Liisa H. Malki, The Need to Help:
The Domestic Arts of International
Humanitarianism (Durham: Duke
Presse universitaire, 2015).

29 Humanitarian discourse is itself a

by-product of the securitization process,
and the former ends up strengthening
and reinforcing the latter. This “military
and humanitarian government” can be
understood by tracing how humanitarian
technologies are being implemented
in conjunction with military force and
vice versa. See Didier Bigo “Security
and Immigration: Toward a Critique
of the Governmentality of Unease,»
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 27,
no.1 (2002): 79; Didier Fassin and
Mariella Pandolfi, Contemporary States
of Emergency: the Politics of Military and
Humanitarian Interventions (New York:
Zone Books, 2010); and Nils Gilman,
“Preface: Militarism and Humanitarian-
ism,” Humanity: An International Journal
of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, et
Développement 3, Non. 2 (2012): 173–78.

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

their compassion. This is why borders are one of the main sites
where inequality can be witnessed most starkly. Humanitarian
design projects engaged with migrants and refugees ignore
the violence of border politics and focus only on the compassion
produced by the same politics of borders. These designs derive
from a “politics of pity” rather than a “politics of justice,” to bor-
row Hannah Arendt’s terminology.30 Such politics, based on a
binary distinction between those who suffer and those who do
pas, is determined by observation rather than action. It is a spectacle
of vulnerability that causes humanitarian design to intervene.31
However this spectacle is not neutral or inevitable; instead, it is the
work of a collective imagination based on racialized and gendered
ideas about who is a worthy subject of compassion.32

The spectacle of vulnerability ignores what has made the
subjects vulnerable in the first place and ignores the demands
voiced by migrants themselves. Rather than being recognized as
subjects who are resisting and exposing a historically racist and
colonial mobility regime—one that secures an exclusionary wealth
for already wealthy Europeans—the refugees are understood as
objects of Western compassion and humanism. This view “replaces
questions of responsibility, restitution, repentance, and structural
reform with matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality—
a move that transforms the responsible colonial agent into an
innocent bystander, confirming its status as ‘ethical,’ ‘good,’ and
‘humane.’”33

The European politics of compassion toward refugees, facil-
itated through design initiatives might seem contradictory while
Europe establishes harsher border controls, criminalizes those who
help migrants to cross borders,34 and makes it almost impossible
for migrants to seek asylum. Cependant, this seemingly paradoxical
politics has been an inevitable part of the colonial project based on
a will to forget, to not know, or to not want to know about the
structural border violence that makes the need for compassion pos-
sible in the first place.35 As a result, ongoing acts of humanitarian-
ism sustain inequality by forcing the complex social and political
struggles mobilized by refugees into just two categories: “those
who have the power to protect and those who need protection.”36

The temporal politics and compassionate power of humani-
tarian design, when mobilized by technological innovations and a
spectacle of vulnerability, generates a category of human beings
who are understood to exist merely to be helped.

Which Human in Humanitarian Design?
Questioning humanitarian design is not an easy task. Who would
argue with wanting vulnerable people to suffer a bit less, survive
a bit longer, or be better taken care of? Cependant, addressing these

In her book, On Revolution, Arendt
distinguishes between two types of poli-
tics: one that derives from compassion
toward the suffering of the other and the
one that acts in relation to inequality.
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Nouveau
York: Viking, 1963).

31 During 2015 et 2016, images of bodies
being washed to the shores and of
cramped, non-white bodies on the boats
circulated extensively in the media. Voir
Mahmoud Keshavarz and Eric Snodgrass
“Orientations of Europe: Boats, le
Mediterranean Sea and the Materialities
of Contemporary Mobility Regime,»
Borderlands e-journal 17, Non. 2 (2019);
and Nicola Perugini and Francesco
Zucconi, “Enjoy Poverty: Humanitarianism
and the Testimonial Function of Images,»
Visual Studies 32, Non. 1 (2017): 24–32.

32 Miriam Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond

Humanitarian Borders,” Social Research:
An International Quarterly 83, no.2
(2016): 255–71.
Ida Danewid, “White Innocence in the
Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the
Erasure of History,” Third World Quarterly
38, Non. 7 (2017): 1684.

34 “Watch the Med Alarm Phone Weekly
Report: Solidarity at Sea is not a
Crime!” May 1, 2017–June 11, 2017,
https://alarmphone.org/en/2017/06/
14/solidarity-at-sea-is-not-a-crime/
(accessed August 15, 2018); and Charles
Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, “Blaming
the Rescuers: Criminalizing Solidarity,
Re-Inforcing Deterrence (Juin 14, 2017),
https://blamingtherescuers.org/report/
(accessed August 15, 2018).

35 Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana,

Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance
(New York: SUNY Press, 2007); Gloria
Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes
of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke
Presse universitaire, 2016).

36 Ticktin, “Thinking Beyond Humanitarian

Borders,» 265.

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concerns does not mean that the politics that necessitate and
generate humanitarian design should go unnoticed. Most im-
portantly, we must ask: What politics do humanitarian design
interventions produce? What type of person is imagined to be the
recipient of compassion? Who is being saved or empowered by
these design initiatives? Does the need for empowerment via
design interventions exist, or is it simply imagined by design
epistemologies? Is this need constructed by designers’ social and
historical positions and by the dominant Western scholarship on
social and humanitarian design? Malkki has suggested that the
figure of the refugee is often abstracted by those who are interested
in producing knowledge about refugees. The refugee becomes “an
epistemic object in construction”—a product conceived by differ-
ent power practices, including design and humanitarian aid.

This abstraction is most evident in the design interventions
for refugee camps across the world, as discussed earlier. Encamped
refugees are managed and domesticated according to a particular
border politics that, despite the promise of globalization, a
become harsher toward asylum seekers and refugees since 1990. Dans
this prolonged encampment, humanitarian design continuously
redesigns the condition of vulnerability into a permanent site of
control and modification and destroys refugees’ possibilities for
acting politically. The contemporary violence of borders not only
deprives migrants on the move of their right to freedom of move-
ment, but also—and more importantly—deprives them of the pos-
sibility of acting to claim that right. Under such conditions,
humanitarian products, services, and innovations blur the line
between the practices conceived to manage humanitarian needs
and practices that manage life; a fine line emerges between care
and control. It is important to ask: Through what “modes of power
[sont] vulnerable populations formed as such?”37 Humanitarian
design practices construct a need for protection and empowerment
for vulnerable populations that is materialized through products,
services, and architectural forms. This not only negates the capac-
ity of those declared to be vulnerable to act politically, mais aussi
expands biopolitical forms of regulation and control through new
scales, des sites, and imaginations. Through moralized goods, tel que
Better Shelter or Life Buoys, humanitarian design practices imag-
ines a human being that is produced at the intersection of technol-
og ies of popu lat ion gover nance and the product ion of
differentiated values of human lives. The production of this imagi-
nary human being in return calls for another sort of political econ-
omy, concerned mainly with morality over political demands or
legal obligations at the intersection of the neoliberal market and
supra-state control.38

37 Judith Butler et al., Vulnerability in

Resistance (Durham: Duke University
Presse, 2016), 5.

38 Peter Redfield, “Bioexpectations: Life
Technologies as Humanitarian Goods,»
Public Culture 24, Non. 1 (2012): 157–84.

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Michel Aiger argues that we need to break the link between
urgent medical aid and the designerly reconfiguration of sites of
emergency through various products and prototypes.39 Building on
his argument, Eyal Weizman writes:

Aid without a camp is aid that does not seek to manage,
maison, develop, and perform migration control. Refugees,
like all people escaping war and famine throughout
histoire, make their way across borders into cities, or settle
and construct new ones. Aid, si nécessaire, should follow
them into these spaces rather than construct environments
of total control to facilitate its delivery.40

Humanitarian design shows that humanitarianism is not simply
about an efficient response to crisis but about designing certain
conditions of life. It enters and legitimizes itself as a crisis response
but nonetheless establishes certain conditions and thus a certain
politics of life. Fait intéressant, humanitarian design reveals that the
general claim humanitarianism makes—of saving only in the
here-and-now—is incorrect. Humanitarianism always stems from
certain politics and histories, and it establishes specific politics and
futures. When it turns into a design practice with durable solu-
tion, systèmes, and infrastructures of aid, it confines and regulates
the space in which refugees can act politically.

Breaking the Cycle of Border Violence
My critique on contemporary design’s engagement with issues
related to “the other” is not new. After reading Design for the Real
Monde, Gui Bonsiepe engaged in a series of harsh exchanges with
the author, Victor Papanek, dans 1974. Bonsiepe accused Papanek of
being naïve, of lacking a complex political understanding of power
relations, and of promoting a poisonous new brand of neo-colo-
nialism. Referring to Papanek’s famous tin-can radio, Bonsiepe
criticized it as a “paternalistic design—covered by humanitarian
coating… doused in the ideology of the noble savage,” as well as an
instrument of ideological penetration and control in line with the
U.S. army’s policy in the Cold War.41 Papanek rejected these accusa-
tions.42 Whether one accepts Papanek’s or Bonsiepe’s arguments,
what is missing from the conversation entirely is how “the other”—
his or her body, vie, and future—becomes the object of Western
designers’ consciousness.

The circulation of mass imagery of illegalized migration
and of refugees taking lethal routes to Europe simultaneously
leads to a ubiquitous humanitarian discourse and a xenophobic,
racist, and nationalist one that empowers the politics of fascist par-
ties all around the world. The simultaneity is not a coincidence.

39 Michel Agier, “Humanity as an Identity
and Its Political Effects (A Note on
Camps and Humanitarian Government),»
Humanity: An International Journal of
Human Rights, Humanitarianism, et
Développement 1, no.1 (2010): 29.

40 Eyal Weizman, Least of All Possible Evils:
Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to
Gaza (Londres: Verso, 2011): 61.
41 Gui Bonsiepe, “Design and Under-

development,” Casabella 385, Janvier
(1974): 43

42 Alison J. Clarke, “Design for

Développement, ICSID and UNIDO: Le
Anthropological Turn in 1970s Design,»
Journal of Design History 29, Non. 1
(2015): 43–57.

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Design’s engagement with refugees—in camps outside of Europe,
along its deadly borders, or in reception centers inside Europe—
has been framed as a counter-response to a growing xenophobic
right wing that sees migrants as threats, as bogus, and as parasites.
Cependant, it ultimately reproduces the same logic it aims to resist.43
The logic of many of these humanitarian initiatives is based on a
universal figure who is essentialized, imagined, and produced
through narratives of help, projects of protection, and initiatives of
empowerment. This abstract figure is imagined to be at worst a
consumer of a welfare and at best a collaborator of humanitarian
conception, either somewhere else “out in the world” or at “home.” In
both cases, a specific politics of borders is adhered to, and a certain
inclusion by exclusion happens. In both cases, “the other” is under-
stood as either a non-productive or a productive economic force.

Against the background of a prevailing critical discourse—
one that presents design as an agent of social, politique, and envi-
ronmental change, it is important to remember that it is not enough
to design “for” or even “with” the other. Designers and design
researchers in the Global North must also recognize how and why
they carry their acts of designing from the positions they occupy.
In promoting the conceptualization of design as a change agent for
political and social problems without considering the politics of
designing, we risk depoliticizing the context in which the design
interventions take place. bell hooks eloquently critiques the
engagement of leftist liberal scholars with “the other,” the “subal-
tern” and poor:

It is not just important what we speak about but how and
why we speak. Often this speech about the “other” is also
a mask, an oppressive talk hiding gaps, absences […]
Often this speech about the “other” annihilates, erases.44

When addressing these issues, designers must question what
and whose political agendas are being driven, as well as what
other politics are being pushed to the margin or being erased,
masked, and ultimately oppressed. As long as designers uphold
western epistemological frameworks that understand complexi-
ties of the world to be “problems” in need of solving by their
generosity, compassion, technical skills, and social capital, alors
their interventions run the risk of being oppressive. Ignoring the
politics of borders that have created vulnerable populations, OMS
are rendered in need of compassion and humanitarian design, runs
the risk of supporting the side of the oppressor, despite humani-
tarian designers’ good intentions. The call to acknowledge this
complicity might not constitute a guideline for design practice, mais
considering it is nonetheless vital for those who wish to engage in a

43 Danewid, “White Innocence in the

Black Mediterranean.”

44 bell hooks, “Marginality as a Site
of Resistance,” in Out There:
Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures, éd. Russell Fergusen and
Trinh T. Minh-ha (Cambridge, MA:
AVEC Presse, 1990), 343.

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Les problèmes de conception: Volume 36, Nombre 4 Autumn 2020

collective struggle for justice. The cynicism and defeatism toward
which discourses of emergency and humanitarian design force us
must be resisted. Plutôt, let us begin to imagine and develop prac-
tices that engage in a non-essential, non-crisis terms which pri-
oritize the struggles of refugees in transgressing national borders;
works that expand the prevailing exclusionary notion of citizen-
ship by redistributing wealth and resources globally rather than
nationally; and makings that generate a politics of justice through
various networks of solidarity that guarantee political subjectiv-
ville. These shifts are already happening within different refugee
mouvements, and the first step is to notice and recognize them. Tak-
ing this first step might help us to break the cycle of violence that
contemporary border politics produces, which mobilizes selective
compassion toward refugees while immobilizing them.

Acknowledgement
This article is a revised version of a key note talk titled, “Care/Con-
trol: Notes on Compassion, Design, and Violence,” delivered at
NORDES 2017: Design + Power, 7th Nordic Design Research Soci-
ety Conference, June 15–17, 2017, Oslo School of Architecture and
Design (AHO), Oslo, Norway. I thank Andrew Morrison and
Dagny Stuedahl for the invitation. I also thank Carl DiSalvo and
Angeliki Dimaki-Adolfsen for their helpful comments on earlier
versions of the text.

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