Daily Negotiations with State Agencies in the Field - Reflections From Refugee Camps in Western Ethiopia

This chapter explores personal experiences of working in refugee camps with a national authority responsible for refugees (Administration for Refugee & Returnee Affairs (ARRA)) in an authoritarian regime (Ethiopia) in 2013. It is a personal reflection organised around key objects or moments in the daily management of a health project by an international humanitarian NGO. The chapter looks at how documents such as the MoU and the camp entrance Permit are used by a national agency to control a foreign NGO and how an environment of opaque rules and unknown regulations aims to reduce the humanitarian agency to a service provider. The chapter examines the way NGO staff try to appeal restrictions placed by the authorities and how these appeals evoke assumptions of personal official power of discretion, though the veracity of these assumptions is never fully known. The chapter examines this practice through the lens of exception and its relation to sovereignty. Following that, the chapter continues to examine the broader relationship between the humanitarian agency and the state’s authority via the consideration of “strategic relationship” and the different visions of collaboration. It concludes that this relationship must be considered in all levels or practice, especially in project’s implementation level (the ‘field’) interactions, and that humanitarian agencies should be wary of reliance on personal relationship as all relations are fundamentally rooted in organisational, historical, and hierarchical contexts.