Creative fictions: Incentive work and humanitarian labour in South Sudan

Abstract

The career of the incentive has been meteoric and global, cropping up in peace‐building, state‐building, global health, and humanitarian contexts across the world. In this paper, I consider incentive work from the vantage point of independence‐era South Sudan. In doing so, I build conversations between geography and spatially sensitive anthropology about the power of social forms to shape action, through an attention to the porous and polyvalent logics of legitimation entailed in ‘creative fictions’. Attention to the modes of legitimation help to understand not only what social forms do, but also how they emerge, travel, and are appropriated and repurposed for use by new sets of actors. In tracing the transit of incentive work from development practice into humanitarian programming, I understand incentive work as a creative fiction—an intangible social form that animates and channels action to generative ends. While incentive work emerged as a tidy solution to constraints within the humanitarian sector on who might be paid for what kind work, the social form of incentive work proliferated. Set free from those constraints, incentive work offered up channels of accumuclation to new actors—including mid‐level state functionaries—by mobilizing and ligitimating claims on un‐ and under‐compensated labour though a call to voluntas, the morally inflected volitional ethos of volunteerism.