Angela Sherwood is an ESRC research fellow and, starting in December, a lecturer in the Department of Law. Her PhD in law is also from Queen Mary. We ask her about her current and previous research, as well as her teaching plans for this year.
My ESRC-funded project addresses humanitarianism as an underexamined site of state power and institutional violence within the criminological field. Although humanitarian organisations are increasingly entangled in regimes of policing, securitisation, and militarised reconstruction, they have not attracted significant criminological attention. My aim in this project has been to show how conceptual frameworks of social harm and state/corporate crime can generate new ways of thinking about some of the dehumanising, coercive, and predatory behaviours of humanitarian organisations that are often normalised and overlooked.
Haiti has been the point of departure for my analysis of ‘humanitarian crime.’ Under the pretext of humanitarian intervention, international actors have repeatedly rewritten Haiti’s land laws and policies in ways that facilitate accumulation and validate the land seizures of Haiti’s postcolonial elite. In studying these processes, my research highlights how humanitarian actors have not only supplied moral-legal rationales for land dispossession, but also colluded with state actors in organising highly coercive eviction operations inside displacement camps. My interpretation of crime in this context deals with both violations of international norms and Haitian civil society’s labelling of humanitarianism as a ‘project of death,’ as a form of theft, and as an integral part of a wider system of state criminality.
In addition to working on my monograph, one of the benefits of this grant is that it has overlapped with some very timely public debates about what it means to ‘decolonise’ the humanitarian system. These conversations have created an opening for constructive dialogue about humanitarianism’s criminogenic features, especially as many large Western-based humanitarian organisations are under pressure to show they are not part of the perpetuation of colonialism. There have been several opportunities to disseminate my research to humanitarians and other target audiences through webinars, workshops, opinion pieces, and guest lectures. With the assassination of Haiti’s president this summer, followed by a devastating earthquake, another key focus of my public engagement has been to work with Haitian grassroots campaigns and to use research to support demands for reparations, democracy, and communal forms of aid as an alternative to humanitarian interventions.
My ESRC grant parallels other work that I have done examining the legal framework on internal displacement and the accountability of international organisations. I’m currently collaborating with Professors Cathryn Costello (Hertie School) and Megan Bradley (McGill University) on an edited volume entitled IOM Unbound? Obligations and Accountability in an Era of Expansion (CUP 2021). This collection brings together legal and political insights to reconsider some of the IOM’s more controversial practices, its obligations under various bodies of law, and its accountability gaps.
Without a doubt, my former employment with humanitarian organisations, including during the Haiti earthquake, has influenced the direction of my research. My time in Haiti (prior to my PhD) highlighted many of the exploitative, racialised and politicised dimensions of international interventions that I proceeded to investigate through the lens of crime. After finishing a postdoc at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, it was the themes running through my research that brought me back to Queen Mary for my ESRC grant. Although the department’s research centres and their critical focuses on race, law, empire, and state violence played a key role in this decision, I have also come to value the department for its incredibly supportive environment for early career researchers. The department’s intellectual environment, mentoring system, resources, research and career advice has made Queen Mary an excellent place to pursue this type of grant.
I will be teaching land law starting in January, but before that I will be contributing to some of the additional teaching sessions organised by Dr Roxana Banu to give students more context on the colonial history of land law. For these sessions I am hoping to bring an idea of how Haiti’s property laws have developed in relation to ideas of race, and to trace the very different conceptualisations of adverse possession that have unfolded since the Haitian Revolution and explain the disjuncture between formal law and customary ideas of land use and ownership.