The New Humanitarian Tragedy? When humanitarian language becomes oppressive | Rethinking Humanitarianism
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Mar 12, 2026 Heidi Mogstad, senior researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute who studies humanitarian language and crisis politics, explores how well-meaning words can harm. She examines how terms like "tragedy" erase political responsibility. Short takes cover securitization of refugees and Palestinians, three linguistic harms, and alternatives that insist on rights, agency, and naming complicity.
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Securitizing Language Turns People Into Threats
- Securitizing language frames refugees and Palestinians as present or future threats.
- Mogstad shows examples like describing camps as 'ticking bombs' and children portrayed as future terrorists in state discourse.
Tragedy Masks Political Responsibility
- Calling mass suffering a tragedy obscures that it's the result of deliberate political choices.
- Heidi Mogstad contrasts 'tragedy' with predictable, willed outcomes like repeated drownings due to ordinary democratic policies.
Humanitarian Framing Erases Political Agency
- Political misrecognition reduces people to humanitarian objects and erases their political agency.
- Mogstad warns that even sympathetic frames like 'they are our future workforce' strip refugees of inherent rights to asylum and self-determination.