Everyday Humanitarian Geographies: Security and Segregation in Beirut

Abstract

This paper brings a geographical perspective to bear on the study of the humanitarian aid industryʼs relation to the spaces it operates within. It argues that this allows us to move beyond a narrow focus on policy to consider how the security-driven segregation identified in the literature manifests itself in the everyday geographies of the people who populate this industry: international aid workers. It accomplishes this by using travel journals and in-depth interviews to map and unpack the daily comings and goings of 13 international aid workers in Beirut, Lebanon: a city with a sizeable humanitarian presence, significant security concerns, and yet no fortified aid compounds. This particular case reveals how the aid industry is implicated in local sociospatial processes and how its spatial patterns are in fact determined by pre-existing forms of (securitised) segregation. By employing the literature on geographies of fear to observe how international aid workers navigate this landscape, this paper therefore seeks to re-scale security, revealing it to be sociospatial practice which ties together the everyday and the geopolitical.