Ruins of relief: temporalities of humanitarian aid abandonment in the tri-border zone between DRC, CAR, and South Sudan

Abstract Humanitarian projects in the tri-border zone between the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan rarely end with a clean closure. Drawing on in-depth interviews with local humanitarian workers (2022–2024), this research argues that “abandonment” is not a moment but a temporal and structural process shaped by donor timelines and exit routines that reassign responsibility to those who remain. This process is conceptualized through four linked relations: (1) crisis temporality, whereby project speed and short-term deliverables undermine continuity; (2) infrastructural memory, as clinics, boreholes, and meeting spaces persist as material reminders of broken commitments; (3) emotional labor and moral injury among local staff asked to explain departures they did not decide; and (4) improvised continuities, in which local actors sustain fragments of care and monitoring after programs formally close. Together, these reveal how humanitarian time organizes the afterlife of aid, producing forms of violent inaction that are felt unevenly across communities. The research contributes an ethnography of exit that recenters local workers as stewards of humanitarian time and as custodians of its residues. It advances a framework for temporal accountability, proposing that exit strategies include commitments to infrastructural care, shared communication responsibilities, and recognition of local actors’ ongoing temporal labor. By reframing abandonment as governance over time, this research finally illuminates what endures after aid withdraws and what must change for more responsible closure.