Research Project

Initial project description: Humanitarian crises are often portrayed as self-evident emergencies defined by urgency, scale, and human impact. Yet the designation of an event as a “humanitarian crisis” is shaped by processes of interpretation, representation, and political negotiation. My PhD project, Humanitarian Imaginaries: The Constitution of Humanitarian Crises in Latin America, explores how humanitarian crises are constructed and communicated through narratives and representations by actors in the Global South.

In recent years, Global South organizations have gained increasing visibility within international humanitarian debates, particularly in discussions surrounding localization and calls to decolonization. Despite this growing attention, their own perspectives on crises and humanitarian responses remain comparatively underexplored. This project therefore seeks to put in evidence how actors in Latin America interpret, frame, and communicate humanitarian crises, and how their narratives may reinforce, adapt, or challenge dominant understandings of humanitarian emergencies.

The research also considers the expanding role of “non-traditional” humanitarian stakeholders, including civil society organizations, private institutions, and initiatives emerging from fields such as Sport for Development and Peace (SfD), in shaping local narratives of crisis and response. By examining how such actors represent crises and articulate forms of intervention, the project analyses how humanitarian imaginaries are produced, circulated, and contested. Through centering perspectives from Latin America, this PhD research contributes to critical and decolonial debates on humanitarianism and offers new insights into how knowledge about crises is produced and mobilized in local humanitarian governance.