Dignity and the Production of Value in Humanitarian Operations: Housing for Internally Displaced People in Georgia

In the aftermath of the 2008 Georgia-Russia conflict, humanitarian aid programs to Internally Displaced People (IDPs) were structured around the concept of upholding human dignity, which entered into the lexicon of globalized humanitarian practice with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A discourse of dignity was the backbone of both legal and planning documents that established housing programs for the displaced, and it was also a core tenet of oral discourses during planning meetings and informal conversations among humanitarian actors. Yet the rules and guidelines established under the guise of dignity were either wholly ignored, or the standards set were unachievable. This paper will investigate how the concept of “dignity” was operationalized and deployed in housing programs. In the broader context of Georgia’s post-socialist transformation to a neoliberal state, I investigate how humanitarian programs produce and assign value to property through the lexicon of dignity, and what happens when the humanitarian valuation of property meets the neoliberal state’s own valuation of that property.