One summer day, as I entered a café in Hamra, Beirut—a place I frequent—I spotted Ali Kadri, the Arab thinker whose work had been influencing my research. Struggling to pin down the central question of my study—how the humanitarian sector functions within the political economy of war and disaster—I asked for his thoughts on humanitarianism’s role in Syria.

After mocking the term “humanitarian,” Kadri offered a stark critique: “You have a resource-rich country, Syria, refusing to bow to America. What would you do if you were America? You bomb the area, annihilate the people to access resources at a lower price, and for those whose lives aren’t wasted through direct killing, you manage their waste through structural genocide. You organize them into refugee camps, distribute food rations and aid, and in exchange, extract their political agency. For the ‘aid boxes,’ the people pay with their will.”

Humanitarianism is a mechanism of imperialist control. The same western powers that waged war on Syria and are backing the Zionist entity in its genocidal campaigns in Gaza are the major donors to NGOs managing its consequences in the region. These organizations systematically extract political will from surplus populations while reinforcing cycles of dependency.

Drones and aid packages jointly facilitate capital’s processes of waste accumulation. While the colonial soldier has sometimes been replaced by the NGO worker, the extractive logic persists: managing and exploiting surplus populations for imperial interests. The role of surplus populations now extends beyond lowering wages and providing cheap labor; “waste” or “excess” populations are managed as capital’s reserve army of labor whose waste itself becomes an industry.

A framework that centers imperialism in the discussion around the failures of the humanitarian sector often faces pushback with theories of multipolar imperialism being advocated, dismissing theU.S.-led wars as the primary driver of waste accumulation. Some would insist that humanitarian work could serve “worthwhile purposes,” arguing that funds can be allocated for meaningful projects without completely denying its embeddedness in war economies. Once again, imperialism is brushed aside as a component of the equation rather than the core of accumulation.

However, in The Accumulation of Waste Kadri remains more persuasive in arguing that U.S. imperialism is uniquely responsible for global waste production. He contrasts China’s locally contained military spending with America’s planetary “militarism specialty”: “Consider the investments in imperialist wars, in the permanent U.S. military bases, in foreign aid and loans to developing countries (these are also investments in waste), and in ideological indoctrination through Western NGOs, universities, and modes of learning, etc. Altogether, these are waste requiring socially necessary labor time. They are Northern industries and labor that migrate South. Not only sweatshops, but also white migrants, expats, settlers or soldiers of empires work in the South to extricate resources, primarily excavate lives.”

He continues: “The military costs of the North, or the destabilizing aid masquerading as official development assistance, and NGO spending, rebound to the North and reconstitute the white working class into better fighting shape.”

Drawing on the works of Ali Kadri, Estella Carpi and Gilles Carbonnier, I argue that crises are manufactured and exploited to legitimize imperialist interventions, and surplus populations are managed as “waste,” and humanitarian aid functions as a tool for extracting political agency and resources.

Initially focused on Syria and the 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquake, I found Syria’s rapidly shifting terrain and constraints on traditional fieldwork compelling me to examine humanitarianism through Kadri’s framework of waste accumulation.

The humanitarian industry functions as a system of waste-population management, constituting an essential element of the war economy. Mirroring capital’s treatment of material waste, it industrially manages surplus human populations as a reserve army–where their very disposability (their condition as ‘waste’) becomes value-generating.

As the U.S.- and EU-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza continues—expanding to Lebanon for over 66 days last September—its halt coincided with the fall of Assad regime and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) seizing control of Damascus. This aligned with Israel’s largest-ever military campaign, targeting Syria’s entire territory. The offensive systematically destroyed strategic installations, defensive capabilities, research centers and archival repositories.

Simultaneously, Israeli ground forces occupied the remaining Syrian Golan Heights, seized the U.N.-supervised separation zone and captured Mount Hermon’s peak—the source of the Yarmouk and Jordan Rivers—along with critical water infrastructure. Israel then declared a 15-kilometer-deep security buffer zone and a 60-kilometer-deep intelligence zone (reaching Damascus’ outskirts). Netanyahu explicitly stated Israel would prevent Syrian forces from entering areas south of Damascus, demanding complete demilitarization of Quneitra, Deraa and Suweida provinces while vowing to “protect” (and further alienate) the Druze community. Syria’s geography remains ruptured: U.S.-backed Kurdish SDF control the northeast and most oil resources, as the new regime’s forces massacred Alawite communities in Syrian coastal villages.

As bombs continue to level neighborhoods across the region, NGOs administer the resulting human debris—not to alleviate suffering, but to manage it at optimal cost. Refugee camps become laboratories of social control. This is humanitarianism as imperial governance: the management of disposable lives for maximum extraction of both resources and political agency.

Estella Carpi’s concept of “emergencization”, in “The Politics of Crisis-Making”, provides a critical lens for understanding how crises are manufactured and exploited. By declaring a state of emergency, humanitarian actors reshuffle social and political relationships, legitimizing imperialist interventions while depoliticizing affected populations. This process, Carpi argues, perpetuates cycles of poverty and suffering by treating crises as inevitable rather than addressing their causes.

Humanitarian discourse frames crises as apolitical events, obscuring their structural and political roots. By situating the humanitarian industry within imperialism, we can understand how NGOs extract political will from populations rendered refugees—sometimes in their own lands, as with Palestinians and Syrians. These organizations manage populations and operate in artificially depoliticized spaces: the refugee camps.

Despite the common perception of post-disaster environments as apolitical spaces—where compassionate actors unite to help “innocent” victims, creating “a blank page where history can be written anew,” Gilles Carbonnier challenges this notion in “Humanitarian Economics”. He argues that “disaster precipitates the destruction of the old and thus making way for the new faster than otherwise would be the case,” while emphasizing that “theoretical arguments and rudimentary empirical evidence hint at a perverse cycle between disaster, weak institutions and war.” As he notes, scholars have demonstrated that “disasters are by no means exogenous to the development process. They are embedded in social transformations and political economy interactions.”

Carbonnier further critiques the limitations of a resilience-focused approach, stating: “A resilience approach tends to place more emphasis on the capacity of systems to absorb shocks and recover without necessarily paying much attention to social exclusion and power relations within the system, which risks drawing attention to technical fixes only.” This observation aligns with critiques like Carpi’s concept of “emergencization,” where humanitarianism becomes a tool of depoliticization.

From the outset of his book, Carbonnier underscores the political dimensions of crises, writing: “Humanitarian action alone would obviously not provide any solution to the Syrian crisis, which requires a political settlement. (…) Too often, it serves as a foreign policy option by default, a smokescreen for diplomatic and military failure that makes the unacceptable more tolerable.” He later clarifies:
“Humanitarian aid may be provided in a neutral manner, but its distributional impact is not neutral. Like it or not, relief agencies are part of the political economy of war.”

Refugee camps function as factories where lives are consumed and wasted, death becomes a commodity. This process, Kadri argues in “The Accumulation of Waste”, is “structural genocide”: lives literally shortened through engineered suffering.

This exchange crystallized what my research kept revealing—through formal study and conversations with comrades working in the humanitarian industry, affected communities, as well as researchers—that humanitarianism’s failures are not bugs but features of the system.

In the section titled, “Situating Waste in Imperialism,” Kadri notes: “The socially necessary labor time required for the production of wasted man as subject reduced to substance must be compressed and delivered in the shortest chronological intervals.”

In parallel, Carpi’s concluding analysis exposes the mechanics of crisis framing: “While international humanitarian discourse has made crisis a self-evident explanation for material deprivation, human suffering, and political failure, crisis does not entail any self-evidence. A crisis-driven understanding of welfare remains today’s greatest engine for international funding. In other words, rather than emergency itself, it is emergencization—the official declaration of crisis and the emplacement of international humanitarian actors—that reshuffles ingroup and outgroup relationships and identity work at an individual and a collective level.”

She continues: “Over humanitarian history, the tyranny of emergency has questioned ‘adhocratic’ forms of humanitarianism—ruling by improvisation—aimed at sorting out immediate needs while failing to provide long-term perspectives. […] The crisis-making machine not only posits wars and other human disasters as unpredictable events that produce crisis but also posits the prediction of the political consequences of ‘crisis’ as unachievable. […] The tyranny of emergency inevitably leads to the tyranny of the present: an ahistorical present.”

It is worth noting that both UNRWA and UNHCR had temporary mandates, renewed every three years for over 76 years, forming the post-war refugee system. UNRWA lacked a formal charter, operating based on 1949 UN report recommendations and General Assembly guidance. Initially, UNHCR focused on European refugees post-WWII.

The U.S. pushed for a separate Palestinian agency (UNRWA) instead of UNHCR, approved in 1950, to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War, seeing refugee camps as fostering a “refugee mentality” and destabilizing the region, as Kjersti G. Berg notes in her chapter “A Necessary Evil”. Several former British officers who had served during World War II and the Mandate period assumed expert roles in UNRWA, leveraging their military experience.

In Gaza, for example, where nearly 190,000 displaced persons sought refuge—most from southern cities like Askalan, Asdod, and Al-Majdal—UNRWA administered eight refugee camps. Al-Bureij Camp, for instance, derived its name from the ruins (khirba), located within the lands of the Hanajira tribe. During the British Mandate, the area had been a military barracks, later repurposed by displaced families into a residential community.

This structural genocide manifests in the daily struggles of millions of Syrians and Palestinians. Families subsist in tent clusters and uninhabitable spaces—from Idlib to Gaza—where existence has been reduced to an endless fight for survival, proving Carpi’s thesis that emergencization progressively ratchets down survival thresholds.

Each day becomes an exhaustive effort to secure minimal livelihood under conditions designed to break body and spirit. In arguing for only “One Imperialism”, Kadri states: “War as production is peculiar because it employs labor which is ‘alive,’ living labor, the war machinery (dead labor) and labor consumed as input (the war dead), all of which contribute to value. The war dead, in particular, is the input and product at once whose rate of exploitation is gauged by the shortest time span (sudden death) dictated by the exigencies of social time.”

He concludes: “The Syrian humanitarian catastrophe is itself a process of setting aside value, shifting value and destroying value. Although the space upon which the imperialist war occurs in Syria, such war as destruction is both consumption and production of value in multi-temporal and spatial arenas. The war instantaneously triggers a chain of production and consumption sub-processes associated with several multinational players involved in the war.”

During a panel discussion in Beirut in the early days of Al-Aqsa Flood, Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sittah stressed the need to establish our “Arab Rescue Organizations” capable of independently operating across the region to respond effectively to wars, such as in Gaza and Sudan.