Anthropology
College of Liberal Arts
Twin Cities
Award Year
2024
University Award
McKnight Land-Grant Professorship
Compassion or Collaboration? Turkish Humanitarianism in Somalia
Liberal humanitarianism driven by compassion shapes global politics as wars, climate change, and economic crisis keeps decimating human life. The reconfiguration of humanitarianism by non-liberal donor countries remains to be an understudied aspect of humanitarianism literature. This project studies Turkish humanitarianism in Somalia by conducting community-engaged research among Somali diaspora in Minneapolis and ethnographic research in a Turkish hospital in Mogadishu. It aims to explore the limitations of compassion-based politics and produce a collaboration-based critique.