From ‘Warehouse Workers’ to ‘Humanitarian Professionals’? the Contested Value of Supply Chain Expertise in Transnational Aid

This paper looks at changing notions of ‘skill’ and ‘expertise’ within one ever-growing transnational profession: humanitarianism. In a so-called polycrisis era, humanitarian supply chains and their management have never been more vital for ensuring effective and timely aid distributions. Yet, workers employed in supply chain positions within the transnational aid sector have often been overlooked as ‘humanitarians’ and ‘professionals’ in social analyses. We therefore focus on this particular group of aid workers, many of whom are located in or ‘come from’ the so-called global South to consider: What does humanitarian-as-a-profession actually mean, and for whom? Drawing upon interviews with these workers as well as other aid stakeholders, we find that first, their labor, knowledge and expertise are valued in various and even contradictory ways within and between humanitarian organizations despite the criticality of their roles for ensuring ‘successful’ aid outcomes. Second, global North-South relational frameworks of power can only partially explain these contradictions. We therefore draw upon critical interdisciplinary scholarship on logistics, which encourages scholars to ‘see’ social relations ‘like a supply chain’ (Hockenberry et al. 2021) in order to account for the factors driving these workers’ perceived worth in various ‘nodes’ of humanitarian operations accordingly. We argue that humanitarian professionalism(s) are made and unmade through the supply chain via various articulations of racialized, gendered and classed power. Why these various articulations matter are because they lead to ambiguous, yet constant contestations of who can claim ‘humanitarian expertise’ and ‘skill(s)’ for certain groups versus others. We further argue that our analysis provides an important way to contextualize the imperial standpoint (Go 2016) embedded in explanations about the organization of humanitarianism specifically, and conceptualizations of ‘professions’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘skill’ in the world economy broadly.