| Summary: | <p>This thesis examines how international humanitarian organisations in Lebanon see and respond to the populations they aim to support. It focuses on four different organisational practices used by humanitarian actors in programme implementation in Lebanon: classification, assessment, targeting, and empowerment. While these processes are couched in the language of impartiality, objectivity and neutrality, I argue that from design to deployment, they are profoundly social, politically embedded processes, which carry tremendous material force. By ignoring or obscuring the political, social and unintended material consequences of their work, humanitarian organisations are in danger of sustaining and reproducing the inequalities they aim to alleviate.</p>
<p>Drawing on 12 months’ ethnographic research with international humanitarian organisations in Lebanon, I make three interrelated arguments. Firstly, I argue that legibility is established via socio-material networks of people, technologies, policies, and objects. Power relations are formed through these networks, which rely on ‘invisible’ work on the part of displacement-affected communities and front-line staff. Secondly, I argue that humanitarian legibility is established along gendered lines. Women are engaged with as vulnerable by humanitarian practitioners, while risks faced by adult men are rendered invisible. Thirdly, I argue that humanitarian organisations establish legibility in ways that are deeply embedded in the socio-political context of Lebanon: local and national dynamics have a profound impact on the ways that humanitarians see, and humanitarian actors actively shape the political and social environment around them.</p>
<p>While solidarity remains at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise, humanitarian schemes of legibility, even when shaped profoundly by the context, rarely afford the flexibility for staff members to put the humanity, dignity and experiences of displacement-affected people at their centre. Throughout this thesis, I argue that the networks that have evolved around schemes of legibility have standardised the ways that humanitarians see and consequently, the power they exert is formidable.</p>
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