At the ‘frontiers’ of humanitarian performance: refugee resettlement, theatre-making and the geo-politics of service

Abstract

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Certain repeated moral narratives support justifications for humanitarian interventions, and simultaneously inform perspectives of ‘the figure of the refugee’. How does ‘the humanitarian’ appear in these narratives? How are the characters of ‘the refugee’ and ‘the humanitarian’ constructed in relation to one another? How does their interlinkage potentially affect refugees’ agency to act, within a neo-liberal and universalist trope of geo-political expansion? In this article, I respond to these questions and describe a theatricality of humanitarian action. I do so by drawing on experiences as a theatre-maker working in a refugee resettlement programme in Thailand, in 2007–2008.