Humanitarian Diplomacy Field of NGOs: A Conceptual and Applied Analysis

In addition to providing humanitarian assistance in the field, humanitarian aid organizations also operate in areas that require a diplomatic function—such as facilitating beneficiaries’ access to aid, evacuating individuals to safe zones, locating missing family members, and securing the release of individuals held in captivity. Since the 2000s, these activities have increasingly been conceptualized under the term “humanitarian diplomacy.” The sociology of Pierre Bourdieu—constructed around the concepts of game, habitus, field, and capital—offers a useful analytical framework for understanding this domain. By asking what kinds of motivations and forms of capital humanitarian diplomacy actors bring to the field—that is, to the game—it becomes possible to grasp the nature of the humanitarian diplomacy field itself. In this study, data gathered from the primary literature of four selected organizations, along with in-depth interviews conducted with their representatives, were analyzed through document analysis and in-depth interviews. Through the conceptual lens of Bourdieu’s sociology, the study aims to explore and understand the structural positioning of Turkish civil society organizations within the field of humanitarian diplomacy.

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