The humanitarian system and people living with and in long-term refugee situations envisage the future differently. This article explores different notions of the future that may be found in humanitarian policies and among humanitarian workers. Understandings of emergency, crisis and ethics in humanitarianism have particular impacts on how situations of protracted displacement are understood. The policy context for Syrian refugees in Jordan is analysed with particular reference to the ‘humanitarian reason’ which tends to separate between biological and biographical lives. Here, the future and past are separated from the present in a process that decontextualizes forced migrants both temporally and spatially. Through focusing on what humanitarian workers do, practices that challenge currently accepted humanitarian ethics are identified. By way of conclusion, and supported by feminist discussions of temporality and the ethics of care, the article suggests some possible ways of integrating a concept of the future in humanitarianism.

In this article we suggest that the call for widening participation as part of the quest for a more localised humanitarianism has overlooked the clash of ethical registers that this would entail. We show that the formal script of the professionalised humanitarian system operates with an individualised ethics, while multiple other actors that exist alongside the humanitarian system operate with a relational ethical register. Based on a literature review on civic humanitarianism and humanitarianism embedded in social practice, we explore dimensions of the web of social interaction within which humanitarian practices often take place. We ask how to conceptualise these humanitarian relationships when relationships in themselves are understood as compromising humanitarian principles. Inspired by decolonial perspectives and relational ontologies and ethics, we then identify key dimensions of a relational humanitarianism: solidarity, responsibility and justice; identity and belonging; social distance and proximity; and temporality. In conclusion we suggest that for calls for localisation to succeed in genuinely changing power relations and practices, better understanding and recognition of relational ethical registers that operate alongside the formal script of the professionalised humanitarian system is required.

This paper reflects on the role of the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) by analysing and presenting a critique of its report ‘20 Years of INEE: Achievements and Challenges in Education in Emergencies’. Despite the strides achieved in highlighting the importance of education in humanitarian crises, we identify four critical points related to the ontology and epistemology of Education in Emergencies with a specific focus on refugee education: First, the oxymoron between short-term humanitarianism and future-oriented education, second, the purpose of education; third, the role of knowledge production within INEE as a primary agenda-setter; and fourth, how the INEE as firmly embedded in the humanitarian system reproduces unequal power dynamics. In conclusion and by using a decoloniality continuum (Abdelnour and Abu Moghli [2021]. “Researching Violent Contexts: A Call for Political Reflexivity.” Organization. doi:10.1177/13505084211030646) ranging from complicity to liberation, we offer different possibilities for INEE to address the four critical points and the potential for decolonising the field.

Research collaborations between global north and south have a long history in studies of forced migration, and discussions of power relations in such research relationships have existed for a long time. We are two researchers working across the global south–north divide, and this article reflects on our attempt to navigate the research industry amid the ‘Syrian refugee research complex’. We discuss our attempt to carve out a space for more equitable research collaborations across the north–south divide and between partners. We unpack the existing power dynamics and the systems attached to them, e.g. institutional constraints, funding regulations, budget restrictions, and residues of post-colonial power dynamics. We then reflect on how these dynamics help to maintain the north’s hegemony in the research and knowledge production cycle. We argue that collaborative research can gain from a reflective practice that focuses on the relational aspects involved in research. This can be achieved through a ‘friendship approach’ rather than ‘tick-the-box guidelines’.

The authors argue that the political exclusion of displaced people living within states under a variety of humanitarian and policy categories is simultaneously constitutive of mainstream political belonging and social belonging for those excluded. Based on long-term research engagement with displacement in Georgia, Jordan and Sudan, they analyse situations in which an initial crisis-based humanitarian status has become protracted, and in which people have been labelled both forced migrants and citizens, giving rise to tensions with the mainstream but also creating social identities that foster belonging from experiences of exclusion. By analysing these processes as abjection – forms of state control and boundary-making that exclude members from what requires their inclusion – they show that a type of ambiguous citizenship emerges from protracted situations of displacement. People ‘out of place’ but within a state exclude themselves from full citizenship rights by nurturing an alternative status derived from their experiences with displacement regimes. When established and enduring for a lengthy period, such displacement statuses become social categories and identities through processes of abjection. The authors conclude that citizenship itself becomes ambiguous through norms of belonging, the formation of new social categories, and because forced migrants help to constitute the political.