Beyond crisis management? The role of Citizen Initiatives for Global Solidarity in humanitarian aid: the case of Lesvos

Abstract

In recent years, what has been called citizen initiatives for global solidarity (CIGS) have grown considerably in numbers across Europe and beyond. Lately, CIGS have also received attention as they are responding to humanitarian crisis across the world. In Europe during 2015, citizens were heavily involved in catering for incoming refugees, putting up loosely organised voluntary-based initiatives. CIGS popped up in places such as Lesvos, which is the focus of our research. Humanitarian CIGS are quick in their response to needs on the ground, are quickly governed by rules and regulations as well as overall ideas about crisis management, and come to work either with or in opposition to other actors. We examine two examples of CIGS positioned at the margins of the humanitarian aid machinery in Lesvos. Through a lens of power and resistance, we discuss how they resisted paradigmatic ideas of crisis management and instead called for a different interpretation of how to think about and do crisis management.     

Escape to the island: International volunteer engagement on Lesvos during the refugee crisis

As hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants haphazardly crossed the strait between Turkey and the Greek island of Lesvos on their way to safety in Europe in 2015, thousands of citizens from all over Europe temporarily abandoned their day jobs to be of some sort of assistance for the refugees as they arrived on the beaches of Lesvos. We analyze the process and the relationships between the various stakeholders who were involved in the refugee crisis between April 2015 and January 2018, arguing that there is a need to find new ways of managing this type of spontaneous volunteerism without on the one hand strangling flexible and innovative volunteering initiatives, and on the other hand without compromising knowledge-based humanitarian responses.