Mutual Suspicion: Race, Corruption and Humanitarianism in Eastern DR Congo

Suspicion of corruption in crisis is central to debates about who counts as an authentic humanitarian. This article examines suspicions of corruption in global humanitarianism in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo: between humanitarian colleagues, as well as humanitarians and the people they are there to assist. Mutual suspicion of corruption, I argue, is deeply racialised: rooted in racial logics and expressed through racial grammars. Within Western-based NGOs, suspicion of corruption amongst Congolese employees reproduces racialised imaginaries of Africans. Meanwhile, suspicion in eastern DRC of covert forms of profiteering amongst humanitarians (both foreign and Congolese) is also articulated in racial terms: drawing from collective memories of imperial extraction or exploitation and associated with the corrupting power of whiteness. This mutual suspicion illustrates the multiple racial registers of corruption that shape both humanitarian bureaucracies and encounters today, and the importance of an anthropological approach to corruption that closely attends to race.