In the context of a greater focus on the politics of migration, the ‘refugee entrepreneur’ has become an increasingly important figure in humanitarian, media, and academic portrayals of refugees. Through a focus on Jordan's Za‘tari refugee camp, which has been deemed a showcase for refugees’ ‘entrepreneurship’, this article argues that the designation of Syrian refugees as ‘entrepreneurs’ is a positioning of Syrians within colonial hierarchies of race that pervade humanitarian work. For many humanitarian workers in Jordan, Syrians' ‘entrepreneurship’ distinguishes them from ‘African’ refugees, who are imagined as passive, impoverished, and dependent on humanitarian largesse. Without explicit racial comparisons, humanitarian agencies simultaneously market Syrian refugees online as ‘entrepreneurs’, to enable them to be perceived as closer to whiteness, and to thereby render them more acceptable to Western audiences and donors, who are imagined as white. This article extends scholarly understandings of the understudied relationship between race and humanitarianism. Furthermore, it asks critical questions about the political work and effects of vision of the ‘refugee entrepreneur’, which it locates within the context of the increasingly neoliberalised refugee regime. ‘Refugee entrepreneurs’ do not need political support and solidarity, but to be allowed to embrace the forces of free-market capitalism.

In recent years, scholarship on international organisations (IO) has devoted increasing attention to the relations in which IOs are embedded. In this article, we argue that the rationalist-institutionalist core of this scholarship has been marked by agentic, repressive understandings of power and we propose an alternative approach to power as productive in and of relations among IOs. To study productive power in IO relations, we develop a theoretical framework centred on the concept of ‘metagovernance norms’ as perceptions about the proper ‘governance of governance’ that are shared among IOs in a governance field. Drawing on discourse theory, we contend that metagovernance norms unfold productive power effects, as dominant notions of how to govern well and effectively (i) fix meanings, excluding alternative understandings and (ii) are inscribed into practices and institutions, hence reshaping inter-organisational relations over time. To illustrate our framework, we trace metagovernance norms in discourses among health IOs since the 1990s. We find a historical transformation from beliefs in the virtues of partnerships, pluralisation, and innovation, towards discursive articulations that emphasise harmonisation, order, and alignment. Moreover, we expose the productive power of metagovernance norms by showing how they were enacted through practices and institutions in the global health field.

Coalition forces have spent upwards of $50 million on condolence payments to Afghan and Iraqi civilians. These condolence payments were intended as an expression of sympathy rather than an admission of fault, and the programme itself has been criticised for the arbitrary, inconsistent, and low valuation of civilian lives. Rather than focus on the practical problems associated with condolence payments or normative arguments about whether belligerents ought to compensate those harmed, this article will trace the strategic imperatives that underpinned this programme and shaped its development. As coalition forces began to recognise the strategic costs of civilian casualties, they used a variety of tactics to mitigate the effects of civilian casualties on the success of military operations. This article will argue that condolence payments should not be seen as a humanitarian gesture designed to recognise and respond to the suffering of ordinary civilians, but will argue that condolence payments should be viewed as a weapons system aimed at securing specific military goals. As such, this article will argue that condolence payments continued to objectify and devalue the lives of Afghans and Iraqis by treating them as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.