Abstract

Since 2014, humanitarian cash, vouchers, and digital transfers have grown from scattered pilot projects to a peak of 24% of all humanitarian aid distributed globally in 2022. Cash assistance programs require different and distinct relationships between aid and wider political economies than direct food aid: the removal of parallel markets for humanitarian food aid, imbrication of displaced people in local markets, negotiations and participation of financial service providers and central banks, and remote, app-based, and digitized transfer of aid. Based on digital ethnography and interviews with humanitarian organizations overseeing formal cash assistance programming and coordination 2021–2022, this article shows how market-oriented logics operate across different registers in humanitarian aid: evaluation of local markets as means for pricing basic needs and the distribution of the means of survival; a field of competition between organizations; the accumulation of expertise about cash assistance’s specific requirements; the development of digital platforms; and the negotiation of refugee-specific banking and legal frameworks. Drawing together recent work on carceral economies of refugee governance and frontier imaginaries and logics, we develop the concept of humanitarian frontiering to capture how market-based interventions like cash assistance create opportunities to reconfigure financial, governmental, and socio-political relationships in refugee contexts. In particular, we show how humanitarian logics “salvage” market practices to distribute aid and, in turn, bring banks, financial service providers, a range of aid organizations, and refugees into context-specific assemblages. We thereby contribute novel analysis of humanitarianism’s frontiering practices to research on extractive frontiers and refugee governance.