Submission ID 118501
| Issue/Objective | In humanitarian healthcare, solidarity and neutrality are two commonly referenced concepts often presented as harboring different implications for action. Neutrality, one of the four core principles of humanitarian action, is traditionally regarded as essential for ensuring impartiality, accessibility, and worker safety in crisis settings. In recent years, some voices suggested solidarity-understood as politically engaged responses- should play a more central role (Claire, 2021; Rasch, 2018; Saez & Bryant, 2022; Slim, 2022). How humanitarian healthcare professionals (HHPs) on the front lines of complex emergencies understand solidarity, and how they feel about calls for increased solidarity in practice, is not known. What these stakeholders perceive as the implications of solidarity for worker and mission safety, access to populations, and operational effectiveness is also not known. This study's central question is: How do HHPs understand and practice solidarity, and what are the implications of enacting solidarity on missions? |
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| Methodology/Approach | This qualitative study employs semi-structured interviews informed by institutional ethnography. Interviews with HHPs will capture frontline experiences, while institutional ethnographic methods will analyze organizational texts-such as policies and public communications identify disjunctures between institutional discourse and everyday practice. A purposive sample of 20-30 participants from diverse roles, organizations, and regions will be recruited. Thematic analysis will identify key themes related to solidarity, neutrality, and humanitarian operations. |
| Results | Anticipated findings include diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings of solidarity and its relationship to neutrality. Drawing on critiques of neutrality as politically disengaged or performative, the study expects to identify tensions between institutional framings of solidarity and how it is interpreted by frontline workers navigating moral uncertainty, political complexity, and operational constraints in high-stakes settings. |
| Discussion/Conclusion | This research contributes to debates on humanitarian ethics by examining whether solidarity offers a viable alternative to neutrality or reproduces similar exclusions under a different name. It will explore how solidarity is practiced, resisted, or reframed in context, and how these dynamics shape emotional labor, ethical decision-making, and the future orientation of humanitarian training, organizational policy, and crisis response. |
| Presenters and affiliations | Francisco Mendina Callero Western University Maxwell Smith Western University Gail Teachman Western University Elysee Nouvet Western University |
