The language of development and humanitarian interventions suggests a binary relationship between an active, intervening agent and a passive victim, a recipient. This article examines what happens when the lines blur and subjects of intervention - the beneficiaries in need of saving - become the agents of intervention, the aid-workers: when refugees, recipients of aid, are also aid givers. Through ethnographic research at a community centre on the Turkish-Syrian border, where Syrian refugees worked as aid-workers assisting other refugees as part of the centres participatory approach, I explore the unintentional side effects of a participatory approach to a refugee assistance project and look at the productive effects of participation. Through the stories of several such refugee aid-workers I explore the ways in which including refugees in aid delivery may reinforce existing class structures, as posited by the approachs critics, and the unexpected opportunities, such as social mobility, that crisis creates. © 2015 Journal of Peacebuilding & Development.

Participation Turkey Humanitarianism Refugees Development Syrian refugees aid-workers

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