Extractive Humanitarianism: Participatory Confinement and Unpaid Labor in Refugees Governmentality

This article advances the notion of “extractive humanitarianism” to designate the role played by data extraction and knowledge extraction operations in refugee governmentality. It argues that extractive operations rely on refugees’ active participation to their own governmentality—what I define as participatory confinement. The piece engages with feminist literature on unpaid labor and shows that participatory confinement implies that refugees perform unpaid labor activities, which are disguised as voluntary work. It moves on by conceptualizing participatory confinement through the lens of the invitation to governmentality. In order to develop this, the article focuses on two modes of participatory confinement: unpaid labor that asylum seekers do as “voluntary” activities and knowledge and data extraction. It concludes by questioning extractive humanitarianism in light of the subtle coercion and invisible exploitation that asylum seekers are exposed to.