The hero humanitarian is dead. And Joël Glasman is glad. In his new book “Humanitarian Humanities”, Glasman advocates for a more reflective and empirically informed approach to humanitarian action, emphasizing the importance of social sciences, local ties and contextual knowledge in the field. Listen in to Joël discussing his findings, callling for a shift from the heroic era of humanitarianism to a more scrutinized and regulated approach.
The book:
“Petit Manuel d’Autodéfense à l’Usage des Volontaires”
Transcript
0:54 Lars Peter Nissen
came on Trumanitarian back in:Joel Glassman, welcome back to Trumanitarian.
2:44 Joël Glasman
Great to be here.
2:49 Lars Peter Nissen
ually. This was back in what,:3:45 Joel Glasman
published Minimal Humanity in:5:05 Lars Peter Nissen
And I really liked your book. I think it was hugely helpful to, as you say, deconstruct the whole numbers game. And I think we should, we should mention that you have done a lot of work together with Brendan Lawson, who also has been a guest here on Trumanitarian, the episode, Hugeness, which was a very enjoyable conversation about numbers and how they change nature and so on. And what I like about the work you guys do is that you really, um, it's like you make the numbers not sterile but organic. In a sense, you also look at how they were produced, institutional framework within which they were made and how that changes the nature of a number. Because I happen to think that numbers can be extremely dangerous if they are just free flowing mathematical sort of entities that we think don't have a history. And I think you guys have done a great job of sort of connecting numbers to context. At the same time, I also have to say the way I remember our last conversation, I think my, where I was a bit reluctant or thought that I would wish for you to, to engage more was in the whole issue around scale. I probably felt that, yeah, I see what you're saying. It's great. But if all you can say is it was bad to quantify, it was bad to, to, to make it big because then we lost all these things. Yeah, I can see that, but there's inevitably a trade off. And unless you can engage with that trade-off, you're not going to have a really interesting conversation with practitioners. I think that's probably the feeling I left our last conversation.
6:40 Joel Glasman
Yeah, I think there is a... Scale is one thing. I will put it slightly differently at first. It's the distinction between normative knowledge and critical knowledge. Numbers, standards, rules, international law, all of that is normative knowledge. It's knowledge that is produced to have a goal, an aim to set an horizon. And it's indispensable. You need normative knowledge. And this is why almost all handbooks in humanitarian practice come from this kind of normative or technical knowledge. The Sphere Handbook, the UNHCR Handbook for Emergencies. The UNICEF Handbook for Emergencies and all of that, it's all normative knowledge. And we need that, right? The problem with normative knowledge, so it's that it just tells you how the world should be. It does not tell you how the world really is. So the problem that you frame as the question of scale is you can imagine humanity and the globe and norms as you would like them to be.
And it's necessary if you want to take action. But the argument that Brandon and me and others would like to do is we have to look at the world how it is first and to look at the crisis. And this is where the critical humanities are needed to describe how things really function. And it's what anthropology does, it's what history does, it's what sociology does. And the question is how to drain, how to gather the lessons from the critical humanity.
8:34 Lars Peter Nissen
So in essence, from deconstruction to how the world really is, that's where you're moving.
8:39 Joel Glasman
Yes. So the question about how to use the social sciences for humanitarian action is a common question. And mostly it has two answers. The one is to say, ‘yes, we need general knowledge. We need to have some kind of education about how things work’. But it's very general, it's very broad, it's not very precise. And the second thing is applied sociology or applied social sciences is when humanitarian actors, humanitarian organizations hire an anthropologist within a refugee camp for a very specific set of questions. What do refugees do with this and this? Or how do they use non-food items? Or what about child nutrition and food habits and stuff like that? It's embedded sociology or embedded humanities. It's also legitimate, it's useful. Now, the answer that I want to push for in my new book is a third way of looking at the use of social science. It's to say, well, the social sciences are something that any practitioner can engage with without becoming a professional sociologist. It's like, you know, everyone working in Humanitarian action can do a certificate for first aid without pretending to be a medical doctor. Everyone can have a driver lesson without pretending to be a professional driver. So everyone can have some baggage in the humanities without pretending to be a professional sociologist.
10:21 Lars Peter Nissen
Yeah, so some of what you say really resonates with me. I think that humanitarian action essentially is a craft and not a academic discipline. And what I hear you saying is we need to lower the threshold for engaging with academic knowledge and techniques and approaches. And we don't need to go to university and get a master's degree in sociology for five years in order to be able to dabble. Or to apply some things. There is a, I don't want to say non-academic, but a more layman sociologist in all of us, and we should not be afraid to apply that.
10:57 Joel Glasman
Exactly. I think there's two kinds of problems. The one problem is quite frankly, that sociologists and historians tend to be arrogant and to speak in a jargon. They don't want to be understood. This is one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is sometimes
organizations are worried about critics and criticism, and they see academia as an enemy. But more and more, we see scholars and humanitarian practices that really want to discuss and to have a conversation. Now, the division of labor is very important. Sociologists do not save lives. Sociologists and historians do not make the world better. They don't take action. And that's fine. All right? They can contribute to enrich the conversation. They should not take the decision. Scholars make very bad decision makers. Right? We should not make mixed mistakes here about the role of each category of persons.
11:50 Lars Peter Nissen
I would agree with that. And I think universities are probably some of the worst runned institutions in the whole world, actually.
11:56 Joel Glasman
Yeah I dont… I agree with your criticism of universities. I mean, the worst. I don't know, universities are fine. But I agree with the fact that we should not… there was a tendency also in a certain period of time to over stretch the role and to the expectation about what scholarship can do. You know, scholarship is not, does not give you ready-made solutions. We need deliberation for that. We need the instances, the decision makers in organization based on solid discussion and conversation to make political and strategical decisions. But in the best case, those decisions are informed by solid knowledge. Decisions that are informed by solid knowledge, but the sociologists themselves do not…are not in charge. And that this kind of division of labor, we should be very clear before engaging the conversation about who is doing what. And if that is done, then the criticism and the knowledge, the critical knowledge produced by the humanities is very relevant.
13:03 Lars Peter Nissen
I totally agree. I actually used to write a blog called Academic Cowboy in order to sort of reflect exactly this dilemma. And I also want to say that I think from a practitioner's point of view, I think there is a willingness to engage, but we also meet a lot of academics where, quite honestly, we don't have time for this. Because it's like, yeah, you're probably right. Somewhere, it's not very relevant for me right now. But I think there is a growing group of
academics who tend to get their hands dirty and want to engage in that exchange. And I think that's fantastic. I also think we need the other kind of academics. We need the ones who don't really make sense… they play a really important role in sort of digging very deep. It just makes them less useful for practitioners.
13:57 Joel Glasman
Yeah, it's less useful for now, but might be useful for later. There is a repertoire of ideas that for now are not on the spot. And we see that, you know, at every crisis, when the Corona crisis came, and you can remember the start of the pandemic. Suddenly, everybody turned to the historians who were studying pandemics of the past. So the knowledge that had been global health history, that has not been very at the center of the attention for years, suddenly became very relevant. And that's the case with crisis. And that's exactly what the military understood. The notion of history and the idea why history has been so important in the curricula and the discipline, if you go to all military schools, to Sandhurst, to West Point, to the École de Guerre in Paris, you have history lessons. And the reason is that because officers know about what they call the fog of war and the frictions, this notion from Clausewitz, they know that war is dirty and there isn't uncertainty and surprise. And what do you do to prepare for that? It's not enough to have normative knowledge. It's not enough to have data and figures. You also have to have some notion about what happened in the past, about battles of the past, about the wars that have already happened, and to imagine what can possibly happen. The wars of the past, they don't give you the answers, but they help you to ask the right questions.
15:27 Lars Peter Nissen
Yeah, they hone your mental model so that when you're confronted with the fog of War,
you find new creative solution and you might win that battle. And in spite of all the reservations I have about humanitarian military collaboration in the field, and once we are in the fog of war, I think we need to keep a healthy distance. There's so much we can learn from the military as an institution in terms of how they develop and train and prepare. I also want to say though, that it's also on a background of military budgets being at the scale of thousands of what the humanitarian budgets are so if you look at how much money they spent preparing, we don't have that money. So I think the principle is right. I think we can't just replicate that institutional setup, but we would get better humanitarian action if we understood the past as well as the military understand the past.
16:18 Joel Glasman
There was a French general, Marshal Foch, who fought in the First World War… one of the general in this tradition of mixing military knowledge with history, who said, and you know, his preoccupation was really to train officers with a very concrete impact. And he said that, you know, you cannot train officers only with strategy, you have to train them about history. And he had this expression about military humanities which was for him the best training for officers and strategists. And this is why the title of my book is Humanitarian Humanities. So it's not… we should do the same as in the military, but we do want to take humanities seriously, because those guys are serious. If they take the time to read history books, it's because they understand that it matters.
17:30 Lars Peter Nissen
I totally agree. And I really like the way you sort of approach this. Now, how do we do that? What's your argument? How do we strengthen humanitarian humanities?
17:42 Joel Glasman
So there are three aspects that are very important, I think. The first is thinking in emergency, which means having analogies, analogies with battle or emergencies in the past and using them to understand the present. That is a strategy that we can see on many examples, asking the right questions. That's one.
18:00 Lars Peter Nissen
Or having the right analytical framework or historical analogy that we can apply to understand some of the underlying dynamics, thats what you’re saying right?
18:08 Joel Glasman
Yeah, exactly. The second one is what anthropologists call thinking the reality of others. Seeing the world through the eyes of others, understanding why people do what they do. You know, when you work somewhere in a refugee camp or in a crisis, people do not always act according to the rules. They do not act always according to the norms or to the standards. And the question is why? Now, people, and this is what anthropology tells us, always have very good reason to do what they do. And to understand those reasons, we have to understand the context, the constraints, the political constraints, the cultural constraints, the emotional constraints that are on the back of those people, to understand why. It doesn't mean that we have to agree with them. It doesn't mean that we have to think that everything that they do is good. But we have to, and this is an expression that anthropologists use, postpone judgment. You know, to take our own norms and our own judgment and put it at the end of the inquiry. But first, really taking seriously what people do and why they do what they do. And this is what Anthropologie does very well. This is the second point.
19:39 Lars Peter Nissen
Interesting. I think there's a very strong parallel to human centered design talking about empathizing with the user and really sort of living their reality or gaining those deep insights into what is it like having been driven from your home and sitting in a five square foot, sorry, five square meter tent with eight other people and being handed food twice a day. I mean, what is your world like? And so in a sense for me, it's also about not dehumanizing the people we serve, but truly seeing them as people and understanding their reality and their world as a point of departure for then being able to help. I strongly agree with that. And it is interesting that today I hear humanitarians talk more about human centered design than about anthropology.
20:30 Joel Glasman
Yes, I think it's a way. I mean, I don't really care about the language. And this is where scholarship has to be a little open and the jargon, whatever you can call it, anthropology, you can you can call it in different ways. But in thinking with the reality of others, it's not only… the other is not the refugee or the aid recipientry, right? It's also the donors. It's also the bureaucrats. It's also the politicians. It's any kind of people who is not you, okay? So the anthropologists do not only study the beneficiaries of humanitarian action, but what they call studying up. And it's really important too, right? To have this symmetry in the inquiry.
21:12 Lars Peter Nissen
And I guess you wouldn't exclude yourself from the equation either. You also need to think about you and how you are othering to others, I guess. I don't know if that's correct to say, but I mean, you have to not make yourself invisible.
21:28 Joel Glasman
And we see anthropologists when they write books about, or sociologists or historians, when they write book about humanitarian organization or donors or organizations like the UNHCR, it's very useful, but it's also very useful to look at, you know, local policemen, bureaucrats, practices of corruption, for instance. Anthropologists have made amazing work on corruption, a problem that human organizations are facing in every crisis in which they are intervening. Why do people require policemen or teachers or nurses require some money to deliver a service that they should do for free? That's the question that humanitarian organizations are facing. And anthropologists have very sound answers about that. And they can show that in most places, people do not apply the legal rules exactly. So they have illegal practices, but these practices do not have to be illegitimate. People do make the distinction between corruption practices that are legitimate. For instance, if you give a medical doctor who saved your child a little present, it's not legal, but it might be all right for people. Or a teacher who has made a great job or a nurse who has made a great job that requires a little present, especially if the nurse is not well paid. It's legitimate in many societies, but all the corruption practices such as a policeman or soldier who requires money from the taxi at the checkpoint, especially if it's too much money, especially if he keeps the money for himself can be seen as really illegitimate and not acceptable. So in the same society, even though the rule is not applied, it doesn't mean everything goes, everything is possible, people have no notion of rules. It means that they have practical rules. Those are not written norms, but they are practical norms. To understand in every world, every region, every professional group, what are the practical norms, this is one of the core lessons of anthropology.
23:43 Lars Peter Nissen
And I'd like at this stage to confess that my wife once baked a cake for the immigration officer in Uganda, who got my permit for me to stay in country. So I felt like that had to get off my chest. All right. So we have to first have some historical analogies that we can use to help interpret reality as it is today. Secondly, we have to empathize with the people we are in and understand the context we operate in through their eyes in order to be able to really devise the right interventions. And then what's the third point, Joel?
24:19 Joel Glassman
It's about critique. And it's something that comes from the sociology of domination, the sociology of critique. Now, critique or criticism has been sometimes badly understood. Criticism is all over the place now. And also it has become some words like, symbolic domination or disciplinary system, or have become used by everybody, words that were 50 years ago only in the realm of professional sociology. Now it is, it is used and sometimes it's overstretched and sometimes the critic is annoying and, and overreaching. Um, but I think that we, we, may want to, uh, skip from critic to as a, you know, as a challenge to critic as a mean to defend yourself, to understand
What is wrong? What can we do? And how do we make choice about what we want to defend within our organizations, within our projects, within our practices? What kind of practices we want to defend? And this is where Critique becomes very useful. To identify when I'm working in an organization, and in every organization there are struggles and challenges and different fractions and different tenders, which is perfectly legitimate. And then it's how do you pick and how do you choose your battles and the things that you want to change. This is where sociology can help you a great deal.
25:49 Lars Peter Nissen
I really liked that one as well. And I think, I sometimes think that our obsession with coordination stands in the way of a healthy critical culture. Because we are on one side strapped into a really, really fast moving hamster wheel, trying to get operations to move. And on the other hand, we have to think and critique and reflect. And those two things don't fit well together. We feel it in ACAPS very much when we try to say, yeah, we understand that we don't want to duplicate operational efforts, but duplication of analysis is actually not duplication. Redundant analytical capacity is a smart strategy in situations where there are high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty. You need more than one opinion to make sure you get it right. And it's an extremely hard point to drive home when you're in the midst of a fast-moving operation.
26:47 Joel Glasman
And this is where the alliance with scholars can be helpful because they have more time. And of course, the problem of how do you organize the rhythm of long-term research and short-term needs is a real question. But they may have a PhD student taking three years, funded by a university, to study one question. And of course, the type of answers that you will get… not all of them may be immediately applicable. But you will have some kind of division of labor that say, ‘OK, we don't have to tackle this in all depth immediately, but let's have a cooperation here’. And I think that the cooperation between universities and NGOs to tackle some certain points. And of course, it doesn't mean that all the knowledge produced by university might be useful, but some of it. And I think that there are new corporations here, new think thanks within humanitarian organizations working closer and closer with university that are very promising.
28:00 Lars Peter Nissen
I think in my experience, there are two key bottlenecks or obstacles for this. On one side, from the academic side, it's really important to get the right academics. I mean, that almost goes without saying right, because sometimes you… if academics make the humanitarians feel like guinea pigs, or, you know, can you please jump through this hoop for me one more time so I can see what it looks like again. You know, that doesn't play very well. It has to be somebody who understands the practicality of what we do, the craft of what we do, and who's able to funnel academic knowledge into that. That's obvious. I think the other obstacle, and I see this quite a bit, is that I think there is a real desire within a lot of the mainstream humanitarian organizations to change and to do better. But what very, very often happens is one of two things. Either it becomes a show pony. So it becomes that little unit you have in headquarters. And whenever you have guests, you drag them in and say, look, we are doing this thing and this is new and innovative. And I don't quite understand how it works, but it's fantastic. And look at the colors of the map. And then it doesn't, it's a bubble. It's something that's developed in a sandbox and never traveled into the real world. Or if it actually does travel into the real world, and I've seen this probably mostly with analysts who are embedded into operational organizations as sort of a staff function advising operations a bit like the intelligence services in the military operation, right? They are simply ignored. Context gets in the way of doing business We had an analyst on this show a while back. The episode is called the Humanitarian Irritant. And that was a feeling he had. He worked in different organizations trying to advise and build context and feed that into decision-making. And he felt like people just thought he was a nuisance and they didn't listen. And ‘get away with your context. I'm working with my lock frame here’. Right. And so I think that's the danger from inside the humanitarian organizations, either that it becomes a show pony or that if we get the construct right, and it actually is part of operations that is not used.
30:14 Joel Glasman
The thing is, I think you… I perfectly agree with that. The first thing is your point on getting the right scholars. Scholars are like plumbers and policemen. You find good ones, you find bad ones, you find arrogant ones, you find excellent ones. It's just normal and we should not be upset about that. That's just a profession and in a profession, well, you find everything. The second thing is the bubble thing and how to get out of the isolation. I think there is... we should accept that there will be some rubbish produced, some reports that are not useful, some comments that are not useful. We accept that from any sectors of human knowledge production. If you look at statistics, most of the statistics are not used and that's no problem about that. We're still seeing everybody think statistics are important. Even so, 90% of the statistics that we produce are never used by anyone and most of it is bad, but that's not a problem. But when it's a book, theres an.. an outrage about the fact that some money has been placed in the book and now it's not is used as well. But that's part of the process. Or humanitarian innovation. You know, if you look at if you go in any organization, you have a unit for humanitarian innovation, producing some apps and gadgets. Most of these apps, they are never used. But nobody complains about that, because sometimes you have an app that really works well, and then it does something right. So it doesn't it doesn't question the notion of innovation as a whole, of the notion that we should work on some solution. And I think that the analogy works with humanities, right? If you want to have a cooperation with humanities, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work. That's part of the process. And we should accept that. But I think that we can make the cooperation better.
32:05 Lars Peter Nissen
ll we have is a computer from:33:46 Joel Glasman
I think that first the good thing with the humanities and social sciences, it's low cost actually. And you speaking of tools and technologies and all of that… mostly we work with a pen and a paper. And the thing is, if you look at what huge corporations such as Google. Google Venture has reinvented anthropology, has rediscovered ethnography. If you look at how Google Venture does research prints those days, even though they have big data and they have big machines, what they are doing now is they take a handful of people and they ask them, and they ask them questions and they look at them, use their apps to see how they use it. So they do ethnography actually with a pen and a paper. Not much more than that. Very cheap, very low cost because they say you can have all the data of the world. But if you have someone in front of you and ask the question and listen to what they say, then you might understand something that all this data can never give you. Right. And this is Google Venture speaking. It's a large organization. Right. It's not some French philosopher of the sixth.
35:08 Lars Peter Nissen
I think they also do that. They also do that.
35:15 Joel Glasman.
No, of course. Yes.
35:16 Lars Peter Nissen
I mean, and I think that that really shows the strength of the approach. But I think my point is the reason it works for them is that it is embedded in a far more comprehensive and really clever approach to learning and evolving and adapting.
35:26 Joel Glasman
The challenge of the humanities is that most of the time, you cannot prove that it's useful. Because what the humanities help you to do is to avoid big fuck ups, right? It avoids to make big mistakes. It's like in the Corona pandemic, wearing the mask, you cannot prove in epidemiology very efficiently that the mask is useful and why? Because if everybody's wearing a mask, that's just people not dying, people not getting sick. It's very hard to prove contentually that it was useful. And it's the same thing with precaution and with the humanities. If you have one or two specialists of the humanities in a committee of deliberation that will make a decision and he says, guys, we have done this in Biafra and it went wrong because this person is in charge of knowing what went wrong in the last crisis, then you might avoid taking very bad decision. You will not see it at the end, right. You will not make a point about that and get a huge funding, but you do avoid bad decisions.
36:40 Lars Peter Nissen
Yeah, I think I agree with that. But if I can bring it back to the military, I think maybe the reason that the military is better at this than we are is that they have really, really brutal metrics to measure on. They get their boys back in boxes if it doesn't work.
37:02 Joel Glasman
Now, I really disagree with the fact that the military is better than the humanitans at that. I think what they're better at is they produce institutions quickly and they take history seriously.
37:16 Lars Peter Nissen
That's what I meant. I think the reason that the military in a way is better at learning than we are… They're not necessarily better at adapting and delivering in operations. That's not what I'm saying. But institutionally, if you look at the way, I mean, they study everything. They study the effect of two-ple toilet paper on the troops. If they fight better, everything, right? We don't do that. I think part of the reason for that is that they suffer the consequences directly themselves if it doesn't work, whereas for us, the humanitarian machine itself does not fully suffer the consequences in the same way.
37:50 Joel Glasman
The reason why the military takes humanity seriously is because it's an older tradition of thought. The military has been there long before the sphere standards were there, or the neo-managial techniques, or the neoliberal ideas about quantifications and standards. They have been there in a period in which... They've seen these different types of knowledge evolve very quickly. So in the military too, in the Ministry of Defence, everywhere, you have those guys, those managers saying, it's all about quantification, it's all about apps, it's all about technology or remote sensing and all of that. And you have these old, other guys saying, yes, but we still have to have our history books and our ethnographers because they tell us something about the local context and that matters. So this is the reason, in my view, why the military is taking that seriously. Now, a lot of knowledge that is produced by the military finance bottom is never used either.
39:00 Lars Peter Nissen
No, I get that. But you see, I would like to challenge you on that. I don't think that's the reason. I think the reason is that the real customers for the humanitarians are not the people who are affected by crisis. It's the people who pay the bill. It's the donors. And if you look at it from that perspective, and you as an anthropologist sort of analyze up or whatever you said, then the way we behave and change and don't change makes so much more sense.
39:26 Joel Glasman
Yes, it's like what Denis Dyckchel calls the double accountability. The problem of the humanitarian projects is that they are actually accountable to the donor, but not really accountable to the beneficiary population. And if something doesn't really work, they just go away and that's it. And that's the problem, right? That in fact, that's one of the massive challenges.
39:54 Lars Peter Nissen
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You could say upward accountability trumps downward accountability. I have a friend who puts it really bluntly. He says, all you really are is the cat food industry. Because cat food is not made for the cat. The way cat food is designed, smelled, the way the box opens is made for the little old lady with blue hair. And not a bad word about little old ladies with blue hair, but that's how cat food is designed to appeal to her and not to the cat.
40:36 Joel Glasman
ig crisis. You know, Ebola in:
41:41 Lars Peter Nissen
Exactly.
And it did. And they raised the funding for anthropology and they created networks and they produced, and they helped produce quite a big knowledge about what people were doing, what they were doing, and people had good reason to do what they were doing.
42:02 Lars Peter Nissen
But that's exactly an example of change happening, not as a result of a bad operation producing bad outcomes for crisis-affected populations. But for a bad outcome for the humanitarians, we get attacked. Then we listen.
Yes. And this is our job is to convince the organizations, our organizations, the humanitarian organizations to say, when something like this happened, then learn the lesson and put the funding into, you know, more ongoing relations with knowledge about local societies context. There is this expression by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardin, which I find very useful. He says we need context experts. When human organizations talk about context, very often it's just about a few figures, about a map of the region, about which language...
42:51 Lars Peter Nissen
How many people are we dealing with?
42:53 Joel Glasman
Exactly. And what anthropologists talk about is noting local norms, local practical norms, the local uses...You can call it culture if you want. The local politics, the local power struggles. So you need people who know; who is in charge, who are the big men and so on. And those people, you have two kinds of people. Either people from the region who have a certain knowledge and who are able to have certain amount of self-critic about the society where they come from. And you meet these people everywhere, everywhere you go. You notice quickly in a health organization, some nurses, some doctors who are quite knowledgeable and willing to share their knowledge and also share critical about their institution that they know that not everything is right, but they also know the institution very well. So this is the most important category. And the second category of context experts are the anthropologists, the sociologists coming from outside, but having spent time in the region, learn the language and have local ties. These two types of experts about the context are key for the success of humane interventions.
44:09 Lars Peter Nissen
And how would you engineer the... I totally agree with that. And how do you engineer the interface between the two? When does the magic happen where the local experts who actually sit with all the answers that we need to find, what's the key in sort of getting them out of them?
44:37 Joel Glasman
I think that thats the way anthropologists and sociologists and historians can be used by human organizations, is to identify the local experts. Because if they work in a region, they know people who know, right? Or they know how to find them, to identify them. And because they've been working, you know, I'm working in a university, we have the largest center for African studies in Western Europe. We have more than 45 professors working in African studies. We have a very broad network of people working here, but also with colleagues and with scholars from Africa, from almost any African countries. And if you take your phone, very quickly, you can identify people who know the local knowledge. Now the question is, will the humanitarian organization pick their phone? Who are they talking to?
45:32 Lars Peter Nissen
You know, I don't think the humanitarian organizations will. But I think a lot of humanitarian craftsmen and women will. I think that maybe if you focus very much on the institutional side of our industry, you missed the point that as a community of practice, we're comprised by extremely passionate and driven and clever people who actually, I think they may not use the words we have used in this conversation to describe what they do.
But that's what they do. They know that. They know that if they get to a country where they literally have no clue, they actually know how to find the people who own the sort of knowledge you talk about. And if they don't have a highly dysfunctional personality, they also know how to tap into it. Right? And so I think that it is part of our practice, but it's probably quite an invisible part of it.
46:33 Joel Glasman
No, of course. And that's exactly how to make that visible. I mean... Of course, experienced humanitarian workers, they know exactly that they need that, and they know how to organize that. And this is why they're successful in the organization, is because when they get something done in the field, it works. And the reason why it works is because they know people in the field. They have made... And it's like journalists being able to find the right fixers and the local journalists to work with them and to build ongoing long-term relations. Those are the people who get the work done. Now the question is how to organize that in a more visible way, in a more legitimate way. And the thing is, everybody talks about the figures and when the project works is because actually of the practical knowledge.
47:23 Lars Peter Nissen
Joel, thank you so much for your time today. It's really been a great discussion. Congratulations on your new book. And I think let's just round it off by being totally honest. I don't read French very well, and your book still is only in French. So what Rigmor, our producer of this episode, did, she fed it into ChatTPT. She put your wonderful French, beautiful, nuanced piece of work into ChatTPT and asked the machine to spit out a version in English that takes up no more than a page. And I want to be honest with the listeners, that's the contextual knowledge I had going into this conversation. In spite of that, Joel, it's been a fantastic talk. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. I have a translator now, Jane Rove, working currently on a translation of the book. I hope it will be out soon. Thank you very much.
48:22 Lars Peter Nissen
Thank you, Joel.