Reconceptualizing Vulnerability and Safeguarding in the Humanitarian and Development Sector

Abstract

 Since 2018, “safeguarding” has been hailed as the answer to abuse, exploitation, and harassment in the humanitarian and development sector. However, safeguarding as a concept relies on conceptions of vulnerability, which are rarely critically interrogated. Bringing feminist, postcolonial, and critical disability studies to bear on what is conventionally viewed as an apolitical policy response, we argue that the need for safeguarding should be located within wider racialized, gendered, ableist, and geographic structures of power within which the sector is embedded. We conclude with theoretical reflections and directions for change centering intersectional and repoliticized conceptualizations of vulnerability and thus safeguarding.