How did you come to choose your research topic?

Developing a research topic is never a straightforward process for anyone, nor was it for me. As an extension of my master’s thesis, my initial PhD project proposal focused on the role of humanitarianism in producing spatial and temporal (im)mobility as a mode of being for Syrian refugees. This topic had developed through my experiences of living and studying in Jordan for some years before I joined the institute. Along with the first years of preparatory coursework and 16 months of fieldwork in Jordan, the PhD project was reinvented and refined methodologically and theoretically many times. Ultimately, sound ethnography is about the ability to attune to the realities of the people you end up working with and to remain open to the possibilities of reinventing the theoretical explorations of the project along the research process.

Can you describe your thesis questions and methodology?

The main purpose of this research was to understand how people live in a system designed by humanitarian organisations and governments. Approaching bureaucracy as an object of observation that makes it possible to trace such complex and multilayered relationships, the key question I ask is, “How does bureaucracy (re)shape and sustain the ‘humanitarian afterlife’ in Jordan?” By asking this question, I explore how bureaucracy conditions humanitarian time and space, how it affects everyday life and work for local humanitarians and Syrian refugees, and how they navigate in, with, but also beyond its procedures. For this, I did 16 months of fieldwork in Jordan, working with local humanitarian workers and Syrian refugees in their everyday lives – in urban spaces, informal tented settlements (ITSs), and the Azraq Refugee camp. Through close ethnographic engagement, I approached bureaucracy on multiple scales and followed different administrative processes stretching from “street-level” administrative encounters between refugees and humanitarians to more institutionalised organisational trajectories. I examined at once how actors higher up in the humanitarian hierarchy – international organisations, states, and donors – envision the purpose and implementation of humanitarian operations, how these visions are framed and formulated in plans and policy documents, how they are implemented, and how they are navigated by humanitarians and refugees on the ground.

What are your major findings?

Tracing the interconnections between these administrative processes that in different ways co-produce each other, this research proposes that bureaucracy is never only an epistemological tool “of knowing and doing” humanitarianism, but a condition through which certain humanitarian epistemologies are made. In other words, bureaucracy is never simply an instrument, mechanism, or measurement to create forms of knowledge about humanitarianism that guide various actors in how it should best be carried out. It is rather an existential condition for humanitarian imagination and practice, one that has material effects on the lives of both local humanitarians and refugees.

What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?

The thesis forces a conversation about humanitarianism that we urgently need to have now as the world is witnessing one of the most acute humanitarian crises in modern history – Israel’s brutal war on Palestine, and now also Lebanon and potentially Syria – which exposes the structure of the humanitarian apparatus more than ever and simultaneously puts everything it stands for into question. That the humanitarian apparatus is currently losing its credibility (although that has for long already been the case for those whose lives are directly entangled with it) – is an understatement. This undoubtedly situates the importance of this dissertation in a larger global context – both politically and socially – raising essential questions about humanitarian structure and politics, which practitioners, politicians, and scholars alike will eventually need to address.

What are you doing now?

After submitting my PhD thesis, I have been engaged in the Institute’s executive programmes Conflict and Fragility Management and Development Policies and Practices (MENA-track). It is the second year that I am supervising professionals in the humanitarian and development sector writing their thesis on various geographical and topical areas within the realm of humanitarianism, development, conflict and displacement in the MENA region. I am also in the application process for the Postdoc.Mobility programme funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, which will hopefully allow me to continue my research through a fellowship at George Washington University in DC in 2025.

Have you kept in touch with the Syrian refugees you met for your thesis? 

Having engaged with refugee politics in Jordan before my PhD, many of the people whose stories I explore in this thesis I’ve known for years, while I met others during fieldwork for my dissertation. Having worked with Syrians in Jordan for nearly eight years, many have become significant in my life in ways that extend beyond the scope of this research – and all have, in one way or another, lived, endured, and fled the brutality of the Assad regime. 

Will you continue to “follow” them in your future research, perhaps in Washington? Do you think that Assad’s fall might enable them to escape the limbo of humanitarian bureaucracy by returning home? 

While Assad’s fall brings great hope for the future, it is at the same time tempered by uncertainty. Syria’s hopeful yet uncertain future will indeed be central to my continued research, particularly in understanding bureaucracy as a condition for humanitarianism. Within a day of Assad’s fall, the UNHCR in Jordan began informing Syrians about return, and within a week, many European countries began revising their policies on Syrian asylum seekers. While return is widely considered the ultimate “exit” from displacement, such abrupt shifts reveal how states and humanitarian institutions overlook the profound destruction and ruination of life in Syria – and how this might shape the possibility of return. They also disregard the slow deprivation of social, economic, and political participation – the very fabric of everyday life – that displaced Syrians have endured over the past 13 years. In doing so, they fail to consider what kind of lives potential returns would make possible.

Building on the concepts developed in this research, it is clear that “return” will not signify a complete exit from displacement, as is often imagined. Instead, it will be shaped by the lasting impacts of destruction in Syria and of prolonged deprivation and displacement.

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Hanna Berg (centre) defended her PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology, titled “A Humanitarian Afterlife: Bureaucracy and the (Re)production of Syrians’ Displacement in Jordan”, on 25 October 2024. Professor Alessandro Monsutti (left) presided over the committee, which included Professor Patricia Spyer (right), Thesis Supervisor, and, as External reader, Professor Ilana Feldman, Department of Anthropology, The George Washington University, USA.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Berg, Hanna. “A Humanitarian Afterlife: Bureaucracy and the (Re)production of Syrians’ Displacement in Jordan.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2024.
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Berg.

Banner image: Azraq Refugee camp, Jordan. Photo by Hanna Berg.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.