The local labour building the international community : Precarious work within humanitarian spaces

Article Economy and Space The local labour building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces Elisa Pascucci Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), University of Tampere and EuroStorie CoE, University of Helsinki, Finland Abstract Recent research has highlighted the relevance of spaces of international aid and development as sites where global politics materializes. However, the position of local aid workers within these spaces remains less explored. Drawing on fieldwork with humanitarian professionals employed in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper theorizes the salience of labour and precarity in the geographies of contemporary humanitarian aid. The ethnographically informed argument is built through three main points: (1) unemployment and insecurity among locally recruited humanitarian staff; (2) the forms of care and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) racialized and classed relations within humanitarian spaces. I argue that the differential precarities experienced by aid workers reproduce a porous and contested ‘local vs international’ divide. While challenged by the ‘new inclusions’ brought about by the global expansion of the aid industry, this divide perpetuates entrenched exclusions and hierarchies, raising ethico-political concerns about the presumptions of abstract universality inherent to humanitarianism. Keywords Humanitarianism, precarity, labour, care, Middle East, Syrian refugee crisis Introduction The aid ‘industry’ is a relevant actor in international politics not only for what it does, but also, increasingly, for how it does it. Humanitarian and development workers live, Corresponding author: Elisa Pascucci, Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Researcher, Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG), University of Tampere and EuroStorie CoE, University of Helsinki, Siltavuorenpenger 1 A, huone/room 329, PL/P.O. Box 9, 00014 Helsingin yliopisto/University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected] EPA: Economy and Space 2019, Vol. 51(3) 743–760 !The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308518X18803366 journals.sagepub.com/home/epn work and socialize in what Lisa Smirl (2015) has called ‘auxiliary space’. At the same time transnationally hyper-connected and physically well-demarcated, if not segregated (Apthorpe, 2011), this space develops and perpetuates itself through specific economic and social relations – from the market for domestic services targeting international staff to expatriate sociality that takes place within ‘aid compounds’ (Duffield, 2010). Since the early 2000s, humanitarian and development ‘auxiliary space’, and the economies associated with it, have undergone a dramatic global expansion (Duffield, 2012). As Heathershaw (2016: 92) notes, ‘the “international community” may or may not be building and developing the world, but it is constructing itself ’ (see also Smirl, 2008, 2012). The effects of this expansion are far from transitory. Duffield (2012: 476) highlights how this growth has been ‘widely felt in the Global South’, where the aid industry has become one of the main providers of paid employment for local populations. While we continue to know relatively little about the actual quantitative dimensions of this trend, Egeland et al. (2011) estimate that approximately 90% of the global workforce employed in the development and aid sector is locally recruited. Local aid workers, including refugees working for non-governmental and international organizations (NGOs and IOs) within camps and urban settlements, are increasingly in charge of implementing actual field operations and securing access to hard-to-reach areas (Farah, 2010; Malkin, 2015). As such, they are exposed to greater risks than expatriate staff, often for much lower salaries and poorer insurance conditions. Yet existing research on development and aid professionals has mostly focused on those whom Arturo Escobar (2012: xvi) eloquently defined as ‘transnationalized middle-class experts’ – hyper-mobile expatriates occupying coordination and managerial positions. Significantly less attention has been paid to ‘subordinate development professionals’ (Heathershaw, 2016: 79), working in low-end or mid-range jobs, recruited with local contracts in the countries where field missions are located, and whose access to the transnational mobility associated with aid and development professions is significantly restricted. Beyond operationally oriented and clinical literature (Bennett and Erberts, 2015; Eriksson et al., 2013), few have looked at the forms of local labour the aid industry relies on for the implementation of its interventions, and ‘who’ local aid workers are, socially (the study by Corpus Ong and Combinido (2017) on local aid workers in the Philippines and the work by Fluri and Lehr (2017) on Afghanistan are two remarkable exceptions to this). Drawing on fieldwork in Jordan and Lebanon, in this paper I explore the experiences of this largely ignored category of ‘humanitarian labourers’. I argue that the local–international divide within humanitarian aid labour, echoing colonial discourses and practices, leads to differential precarities for local aid professionals. My argument rests on a theoretical-methodological move focusing on the spatiality and materiality of humanitarian labour. Drawing on studies of labour and class in the contemporary Middle East, and on feminist and postcolonial geographies of care (Herrera, 2017; Khosravi, 2017; Raghuram, 2016; Sukarieh, 2016), I propose the precarity of labour as a salient lens through which to examine spatialized hierarchies among aid professionals. In so doing, I consider precarity as a socially and politically distributed condition associated with material and affective labour performed in conditions of (relative) uncertainty and subalternity, a condition that is deeply ingrained in the sociality and identity of the working subjects. This perspective is attuned to the politics of circulation ‘of bodies, of food, of sentiment, of disease, of material support’ within and around humanitarian spaces (Lopez et al., 2015: 2235). Rather than considering hierarchies among aid workers as the product 744 EPA: Economy and Space 51(3) of the biopolitical contradictions embedded in the modern moral category of ‘humanity’ (Fassin, 2010), the paper posits the relationality, spatiality and materiality of locally recruited labour as essential for our understanding of ‘actually existing’ humanitarianism. As such, my approach is aligned with feminist methodologies that highlight the geopolitical relevance of the hidden and the understudied in the everyday, as experienced through the intimacy of bodies engaged in care and research work (Hiemstra, 2016; Moss and Donovan, 2017). The next section of the paper outlines this theoretical and methodological approach by contextualizing within the ‘spatial-material’ and ‘everyday turns’ in critical development and humanitarian studies (Heathershaw, 2016; Jennings and Bø ˚as, 2015). It then elucidates how the concept of the precarity of labour is applied in the study. The third section briefly discusses the role of humanitarian organizations in the economic landscape of Jordan and Lebanon and introduces the ethnographic fieldwork upon which the paper is based. The fourth section focuses on three intertwined dimensions of precarity as experienced by local aid workers in Jordan and Lebanon: (1) unemployment, temporary work contracts and insecurity; (2) the forms of immaterial and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) gendered, racialized and classed exclusions and hierarchies within humanitarian spaces. I thus explore the ways in which local staff encounter the humanitarian sector primarily through their subjectivity as workers, and their economic agency. Once recruited, they are often relegated to tasks that mobilize their ‘native’, subaltern knowledges and gendered emotional and affective capacities, while being exposed to spatial and material hierarchies, and even forms of everyday and cultural racism. In the conclusions I reflect on how the concepts of labour, care and precarity can contribute to a critical geography of humanitarianism. Locating the precarity of humanitarian labour Historically, critiques of international development and aid have moved primarily from a postcolonial position (see, among others, Barnett, 2011; Kothari, 2005). Tracing the continuities between colonial forms of government and the ways in which humanitarian interventions seek to order the world, this body of work has shifted the focus of research from aid receivers to the humanitarian and development apparatuses themselves (Heathershaw, 2016). As Kothari (2005: 443) points out, since the 1980s such critiques have been primarily discursive, moved by ‘the desire to reveal the many embedded, tenacious strands of colonial forms of knowing and representing’ within humanitarianism and development’s longstanding ‘drive toward rendering people, places, and modes of circulation legible’. Within geography, this has resulted in critical work exposing the depoliticizing effects of aid and development, as well as, since the end of the Cold War, their growing centrality in visions of geopolitical and biopolitical security, in the policing of unwanted global circulations and in perpetuating forms of symbolic and material violence (Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Gregory, 2004; Lopez et al., 2015). Following the ‘spatial and material turn’ in the social sciences, objects, spaces, infrastructures and practices of intervention have become important tools for identifying and delimiting the contours of an object of analysis, the international humanitarian community, which remains otherwise rather elusive (Heathershaw, 2016). The study of the people doing development and aid and their work has been another such important tool. Literature on ‘Aidland’ has scrutinized the everyday lives, biographical trajectories and motivations of aid professionals (Apthorpe, 2011; Fechter, 2012a, 2012b; Fechter and Hindmann, 2011). Pascucci 745 Following the seminal work of Lisa Smirl (2012, 2015), other influential studies have theorized the condition of aid professional as ‘liminality’: ‘a community of people whose objects are their very selves and whose spaces are their own liminal, in-between sites’ (Heathershaw, 2016: 82; see also Duffield, 2010). Although these writers carefully highlight how the boundaries of the international humanitarian community remain loose, and the latter encompasses both locals and global actors, empirical attention is mostly devoted to the transnationality of high-end aid professionals. Existing critical scholarship thus perpetuates a view of everyday life in humanitarian spaces as marked by hyper-mobility, securitized living and defensive architectures, ‘scattered’ and unstable – yet somehow glamorous and privileged – personal lives. Nevertheless, existing literature acknowledges how the work of transnational humanitarian professionals is also shaped by structural global conditions as they manifest locally in specific societies. For instance, Fechter and Hindmann (2011) highlight the growing precarization and casualization of development work. Duffield (2010) suggests that the ‘fortified aid compounds’ in which aid professionals increasingly live and work in postinterventionary societies reflect widespread patterns of urban segregation and ‘splintering’ in the Global South. More recently, contributions within the so-called ‘everyday turn’ point to the embeddedness of aid and development in small-scale political economies in which local actors play a central role (for an example related to peacekeeping, see Jennings and Bø ˚as, 2015). Despite these important critical insights, however, the relevance of labour as an epistemic, heuristic and political category in the study of international aid remains undertheorized. In this article, I address this gap by proposing the category of the precarity of labour as an analytical tool for moving beyond disembodied narratives of transnational liminality and exceptionality, tracing the spatialities of international humanitarianism as a localized, material-economic and embodied actor in postcolonial societies. I define precarity as resulting from experiences of work marked by uncertainty, insecure and diminishing material conditions, and (partially) unacknowledged performances of care and affective labour. While aware of the important existing discussions on the ontology of precariousness (Butler, 2009; see also, on the Middle East, Joronen, 2017), the scope of the paper is limited to labour-related conditions of precarity that are politically and socioeconomically produced and distributed through uneven geographies, affecting the bodies of some workers far more than those of others (Khosravi, 2017). In line with recent political ethnographies of labour, youth and marginality in the Global South, I consider such conditions as ‘inseparable from issues of subjectivity, affect, sociality, and desire’ (Millar, 2014: 35; see also Khosravi, 2017: 219–220; Lazzarato, 2004; Neilson and Rossiter, 2008). The term precarity as employed in the article thus encompasses precarious work, but it also has implications well beyond the labour sphere. The paper’s contribution in theorizing local precarious labour in humanitarian spaces rests on two interrelated elements. First, it brings to the fore the uneven and unstable politics of location that mark labour-related precarity within humanitarian spaces. In doing so, it grounds the discussion of the inequalities reproduced through the perpetuation of the ‘local vs international’ divide, which Fassin (2010) identifies as one of the main aporias of global humanitarianism, in the study of the spatialities of labour. To this end, as Neilson and Rossiter (2008) argue, precarity is a particularly apt concept. Far from being the exception to Fordism that prevailing narratives have depicted, precarity is ‘the norm that blurs the boundaries between capitalist production and reproduction’ (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008: 58). It is a condition to be found across geographical boundaries, and mobilizing a wide variety of embodied affects and practices that exceed – but are not disjoint from – the 746 EPA: Economy and Space 51(3) domain of paid work. As such, the concept of precarity demands a ‘rethinking of the very notions we use to describe and analyse the current hierarchization and spatialization of labour, notions such as the international division of labour or the three worlds model of world geography (and its more contemporary binary elaborations, such as North/South)’ (Neilson and Rossiter, 2008: 58). The task is thus to focus on precarity’s capacity, as a fuzzy, contextual and materially grounded concept, to foreground the embodied struggles and spatialized hierarchies that characterize labour, beyond our implicit focus on the (post-) industrialized ‘North’. In this paper, this is done by highlighting how the distribution of precarious labour in the humanitarian sector contributes to making the boundaries of the so-called ‘international community’ porous and ever-shifting, without, however, making them disappear – to the contrary, often making them more resilient and entrenched. Second, my analysis foregrounds care – as a labour form and social practice – as central to the definition of labour precarity within humanitarian spaces. Indeed, Neilson and Rossiter’s (2008) critique of the implicit spatialization embedded in theories of labour resonates with the postcolonial, ethico-political ‘dislocation’ of care advocated in recent feminist geographical writing (Raghuram, 2016; Raghuram et al., 2009). ‘Although care is fundamental to all our lives globally’, Raghuram (2016: 517) writes, ‘we lack reflections on what the actually-existing global variations of care imply for our ethico-political theorizing.’ Prevalent, Eurocentric narratives of humanitarianism as help to distant others that goes ‘from North to South’ (see Pallister-Wilkins, 2018) have obscured the localized forms of assistance, solidarity and labour that are essential to international interventions. As I argued elsewhere (Pascucci, 2017), refugee aid, particularly since the emergence of communitybased approaches, often relies on local networks of sociality and mutuality in the provision of relief and assistance. As this article will show, local humanitarian staff are often recruited because of their ‘local knowledge’ and linguistic and cultural competence. Many are employed in field tasks where frequent contacts with aid beneficiaries require the constant mobilization and management of workers’ affective sphere and practices of care. Although essential to humanitarian assistance, these practices are partially unacknowledged, and often uninsured. Nevertheless, they tend to expand well beyond the boundaries of working life, even for the subjects who, like many of the people interviewed for this paper, approach the aid industry primarily as a provider of jobs. As such, they are an essential element contributing to the precarity experienced by local aid workers. In the following two sections I explore these experiences of precarious care labour ethnographically, discussing what their uneven spatialities may tell us about the ethics and politics of humanitarianism. Researching the labour of aiding Syrian refugees Twenty-first-century Jordan and Lebanon are interesting sites for an exploration of precarious labour in the humanitarian sector. In 2016, the International Labour Organization (ILO) identified the Middle East as the geoeconomic region with the highest youth unemployment in the world (Dibeh et al., 2016). For both Jordan and Lebanon, Syria is just the last of a series of geopolitical, social and economic crises that have involved not only the reception and enduring encampment (Lebanon) or naturalization (Jordan) of Palestinian refugees, but also structural adjustment and neoliberal reforms. In both countries, precarity, as Neilson and Rossiter (2008) would have it, is not a novel, neoliberal exception. Although worsened by the economic policies implemented since the late 1980s, and often arbitrarily blamed on the high number of refugees from neighbouring countries, precarious labour has been a structural feature of Lebanese and Jordanian societies throughout the modern era (Chalcraft, 2007). Neoliberal restructuring inserted itself into a social fabric characterized by Pascucci 747 sharp inequalities, oligarchies, urban segregation and informality, and sectarian and familybased ‘social/geographical cleavages’ (Fawaz, 2009: 848; see also Sukarieh, 2016). As Lenner and Turner (2018: 7) write in their study of the Jordanian labour market, local dynamics ‘are caused by, but also have disrupted, different neoliberalizations’. Here, precarity has a broader social resonance that encompasses colonial dependency, local relations of patronage, urban informality, lack of welfare and political arbitrariness. Since the Arab uprisings of 2011–2012, the two countries, alongside Turkey, have become important hubs for humanitarian assistance to Syrians displaced within the region, leading to a significant expansion of the local IGO/NGO sector. However, civil war and Palestinian displacement meant that international aid agencies established their presence in Lebanon well before the influx of Syrian refugees started in 2011. Similarly, the 2003 Iraq War and the associated mass displacement led to Jordan becoming an important centre for the coordination of international humanitarian responses. According to UNHCR registration data sources, as of 2017 Jordan hosted over 600,000 Syrians who had fled their home country because of the war (Lenner and Turner, 2018). In the same year, Syrian refugees in Lebanon numbered nearly one million (UNHCR, 2017). Coupled with the relative geopolitical stability they both enjoy, these figures have made the two countries the setting of choice for many NGOs’ regional coordination offices. Little is known about the actual impact of the presence of aid agencies on local economies in Jordan and Lebanon. However, my ethnography suggests that the humanitarian sector’s role as an economic actor and employer is perceived as increasingly relevant by local populations, reflecting a trend that is global in scale (Farah, 2010; Jennings and Bø ˚as, 2015; Sukarieh, 2016). As in other middle-income countries across the region, the Syrian refugee crisis, often discussed in terms of its detrimental macroeconomic effects, has also ‘spark(ed) development opportunities’ (Zetter and Ruaudel, 2014: 8). The influx of refugees raised internal demand, which benefited ‘largescale agricultural producers, landlords, local traders, businesses and retailers, construction contractors’, but also ‘suppliers of goods and commodities to the humanitarian programme’ (Zetter and Ruaudel, 2014: 8). Refugees and refugee aid thus benefited a local enterprising middle class threatened by increasing precarization – the class to which many of the people included in this study belonged, or aspired to belong. Fieldwork for this paper was conducted in 2016–2017 in the context of a wider project on the economies and technologies of humanitarian responses to the Syrian crisis in the Middle East. Research has involved approximately four months of ethnographic observation with international NGOs in Beirut and the Bekaa (Lebanon) and Amman and Zarqa (Jordan). Potential participants were recruited by ‘snowballing’ through a set of diversified contacts: common friends, expatriate staff at international NGOs and academic colleagues at local universities whose former students had found work in the aid sector. Ethnographic methods included following one of the informants on one of her field trips in rural Lebanon, visiting community centres run by an international NGO that employed local field workers, and ‘hanging out’ with Jordanian aid workers during evenings and weekends, at bars, restaurants and social events. I also analysed blog entries written by local young professionals employed in the humanitarian and development sector in Jordan. My ethnographic approach combined embodied presence and informal sociality in order to foreground the hidden and marginalized intimacies in the geopolitical and geoeconomic everyday – from alcohol consumption as a marker of cosmopolitan professional subjectivity, to anxieties about unemployment and deskilling (Fluri and Lehr, 2017; Hiemstra, 2016; Moss and Donovan, 2017; Walsh, 2007). A form of feminist ‘periscoping’ (Hiemstra, 2016), this methodology involved reflection on my positionality in relation to the hierarchies of mobility, class, gender and race that were central to my inquiry. As a Southern European 748 EPA: Economy and Space 51(3) woman whose education and professional biography shared many aspects with those of the workers I spoke to (experiences of study abroad, periods of unemployment and precarious employment, work in and research on the aid sector, etc.), ethnography often allowed for the development of comradery, connection and friendships beyond my role as an outsider researcher. Geographies of privilege and precarity were often shifting in these encounters in the field. For instance, the relative privilege resulting from the mobility afforded by my European passport was in some cases outweighed by the class cleavage separating me from some of the Lebanese and Jordanian professionals I met, whose socioeconomic background was higher than mine. Ethnographic observation was complemented by 16 in-depth interviews with locally recruited members of staff of local and international NGOs and other IOs. In-depth interviews were conducted in English, while ethnographic conversations took place both in English and Arabic – Arabic being the native language of all the participants. The people interviewed were all national hires: recruited and employed locally in their country of nationality and residence. Demographically, they were female and male university graduates in their early-twenties to mid-thirties, typically with a middle-class or lower middle-class background. Nearly all of the participants had degrees from local public universities. Three had studied at British and American secondary schools, attended private American higher education institutions in the Middle East like the American University in Beirut (AUB) and the Lebanese American University (LAU), and had postgraduate degrees from European universities. The majority of the people met while conducting ethnography, as well as the people with whom I carried out in-depth interviews, were working for international NGOs. Some of these organizations were among the major operational partners of the UNCHR in the Middle East. At the time of the interview, one of the informants was working for an organization belonging to the UN system, while two of them had previous experiences at the UN, mostly as fieldworkers in refugee camps. Another respondent was employed by a small NGO she had co-founded, working in Lebanon but registered in the UK, while another was employed by a local NGO based in Amman, Jordan. All of the people included in the study, with the exception of four, were working in roles involving care and services requiring presence ‘in the field’. Only three were programme coordinators, and one a desk-based policy analyst. All of them but the latter, however, had started to work in the IO/NGO sector from the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ – that is, as field officers. International community, local labour ‘Fallen agencies’: unemployment, insecurity and the aid industry I really didn’t want to work for an NGO. But after spending a year at home, with nothing to do, I told myself: Great! You got a postgraduate degree to end up unemployed and sit at home watching TV! Noor, 1 a woman in her early thirties from Amman, Jordan, drank her herbal tea and explained how, a couple of years earlier, she had resolved her unemployment crisis: putting her anti-imperialistic politics aside and accepting a job in an international NGO, in a programme addressing the Syrian humanitarian emergency. Noor’s description of the way she had surrendered to ‘the dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx, 1992, as quoted by Sukarieh, 2016: 1204) was marked by fierce cynicism towards the NGO world. A heightened sense of frustration ran through her accounts of her daily life at work, Pascucci 749 particularly the experience of being subordinated to expatriate management, despite her qualifications and knowledge of the local context. Similar experiences of ‘fallen agency’ (Chalcraft, 2007: 11) characterize the predicaments of many other Jordanians and Lebanese for whom, since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, jobs in the NGO sector have become one of the few available routes out of unemployment and financial instability. In 2016 in Beirut, it was not uncommon to hear university professors comment on how, thanks to the expansion of the humanitarian sector over the previous four years, finding qualified jobs had become easier for political and social sciences graduates than for young people holding MBAs or trained as software engineers. Like Noor, many of the workers interviewed had come to the aid sector after more or less protracted experiences of unemployment and underemployment. The following extracts from the interview with Qais, a 26-year-old working as a field assistant for a major IGO, show how, among graduates with urban middle-class backgrounds in Jordan, NGOs and IGOs are considered as even more attractive employers than the private sector. Q. Was it difficult to find a job after you graduated? A. It was really hard to find a job. I stayed at home for about 3 months after I finished university, I wanted to recover a bit, perhaps hang out with friends a little. Then I started to apply for jobs and all I could find were jobs like salesman ...you work as a salesman for 250 JD per month. I worked for 2 days – 2 – for a company that sold batteries for remote controls. It was the worst job ever. (...) Q. What kind of contract did you have in that job? A. No contract ...they give you a contract for a month, and they renew it if you meet the target. Otherwise they kick you out. At the IGO, at first I had a 3-month contract, then a 6 months one, then 9. Then fixed term for a year, and with a pension fund this time. Q. What about the salary? Are they better in this sector? A. Yes, salaries are higher than any other sector including the private one. You can make more money only if you have your own private business. If he had to mention one reason why he would advise a friend to apply for a job in the sector, Qais concluded, ‘it would be the salary!’ While he considered his experience in this regard as largely positive, however, all of Qais’ contracts had so far been temporary. Most of the employment opportunities offered by humanitarian organizations in Jordan are temporary, reflecting the global trend towards casualization that affects both local and international staff (Fechter and Hindmann, 2011). Ameera, a recent graduate from the University of Jordan, approached me at the end of a training session in basic computer programming organized by an American NGO based in Amman. She was looking for advice on how to find a job in an international NGO or other ‘international companies’. She explained she had a humanities degree and was fluent in English and Spanish. Ameera had worked for some time for a UN office in Amman, as a field assistant. However, her contract had not been renewed due to the shift in US refugee and immigration policies that followed the election of Donald Trump to the White House, which had led to the indefinite suspension of the programme she had been working in. Jobless since then, Ameera was worried about deskilling. ‘I am forgetting my English and my Spanish due to lack of practice. I have tried to apply for other jobs’, she complained, ‘but the outcome is always an email starting with “we regret to inform you”.’ Work and money can be uncertain also for graduates who found their own NGO. Georgina, a Lebanese woman in her mid-twenties, was precariously employed by a small NGO that she had contributed to founding. She described NGO work – she spent over half 750 EPA: Economy and Space 51(3) of her time in the field, both in Beirut and in the Bekaa – as extremely rewarding, and reiterated her ethical commitment to it. However, she also said it was demanding, financially unstable and unsustainable in the long run: ‘It is not something I can continue to do once I start a family.’ Georgina was interested in research, and had a desire for a more intellectually satisfying and prestigious job. For most of the workers interviewed, the first contact they had ever had with the aid and development sector was the outcome of a job search. They approached the humanitarian sector primarily as an economic actor and an employer (see Fluri and Lehr, 2017). In their perceptions and those of their families, as economic restructuring made graduate jobs particularly difficult to come by, humanitarian and development agencies had replaced state bureaucracies as providers of sufficiently secure, fairly prestigious jobs that allow them to preserve their middle-class status. Yet the pathway to stable work offered by the sector was anything but smooth and straightforward. While employment in NGOs and IGOs had been for many a way to break a pattern of protracted unemployment, uncertainty prevailed. The sector was perceived as inherently precarious, with job opportunities linked to rather volatile emergency situations, as shown by the case of Ameera. Sukarieh (2016: 1221) has argued that the incorporation of Middle Eastern urban working and lower middle classes, jobless graduates and otherwise marginalized youth in development programmes, both as beneficiaries and as workers, does not erase ‘their continuous exclusion from economic life’ (see also Elyachar, 2005). The middle-class workers examined in this paper can be regarded as examples of ‘partial inclusion’, rather than exclusion. Nevertheless, the actual tasks for which local staff are employed share many of the characteristics that have been identified as constitutive of precarious work, particularly the prevalence of care and emotional labour. As the next section will show, even for those who cynically claimed to be working ‘for the salary’, these tasks required a degree of personal and ethical investment that influenced the local politics of humanitarian intervention. Precarious care The first anecdote Qais recalled when I asked him what he found most difficult about his job was his awkward encounter with an 85-year-old beneficiary. As part of the programme he was working as a field assistant in, he had to travel to Erbil and escort the elderly Kurdish Iraqi woman on her trip to Amman, where she would be reunited with her family before being resettled with them in the United States. It was Qais’ first international mission, and he remembered being initially rather excited and curious about travelling to Iraq. Pretty soon, however, Qais realized that he could not deliver what was expected from him in that operation, namely providing company, support and care to the client. The woman spoke mostly Kurdish, and communication in the little Arabic she knew was uncomfortable. Stressed about her first long trip away from home and air travel, she was in need of reassurance, not to mention assistance with tasks like going to the toilet and changing clothes. The slight embarrassment with which Qais recalled the episode is akin to that commonly experienced by workers in the nursing and care sectors doing what has been defined as ‘body work’ (McDowell and Dyson, 2011: 2197; see also Twigg et al., 2011). Although his job description did not involve touch and actual ‘paid work on the bodies of others’ (Twigg et al., 2011: 171), in the case of the elderly Iraqi woman expectations of care were real, and involved both emotional and physical aspects. Buthaina, a business graduate in her mid-twenties, had been working in the aid sector for three years when we met, and was currently employed by a major international NGO. After completing her degree in business and a short, very precarious experience in the sales and Pascucci 751 Note 1. To protect confidentiality, names have been changed and, in some cases, other identifiers omitted. 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