Blog post
| 2023
Humanitarian racism and “pet exceptionalism”: confronting hierarchies of life in refugee protection.
Not only are Ukrainian refugees treated as more worthy of protection than refugees from the Middle East and Africa; it seems like their pets are too! This begs a deeply uncomfortable question: given the historical and colonial tendency to conflate non-white people with animality, might Ukrainian pets be considered more human than the refugees trapped in prison-like camps (cages) at the European border? Arguably, the “pet exceptionalism” Sandvik identifies in the article linked above also challenges us to rethink and reimagine the subject of humanitarian protection.
