Multilingualism and cosmopolitanism in the construction of a humanitarian elite

This article investigates the role of multilingualism in the discursive construction of mobile humanitarians’ privilege at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Based on interviews and institutional documents, I examine the value accorded to different workplace languages in the discourses of neutrality and internationality by/in this institution. Inspired by the concept of cosmopolitan capital, I argue that the ICRC expat is constructed through an elitist definition of multilingualism and international experience defined by mobility. This capital is unevenly distributed and stratifies the ICRC workforce. The minority of mobile staff are institutionally iconised as international and neutral partly by virtue of anonymous languages, especially English. Meanwhile, resident staff mediate these anonymous languages into authentic languages like Pashto, which are an index used to categorise them as locals.