Dialogues: A conversation with Themrise Khan

In this episode of Dialogues, host Garry Aslanyan speaks with Themrise Khan, a Pakistani independent development professional and researcher with almost 30 years of experience in international development, aid effectiveness, gender and global migration. Themrise is also the co-editor of the book "White saviorism in international development: theories, practices and lived experiences." In this dialogue, she shares her views on the origins of this concept and how it continues to influence national autonomy, global power imbalances and race relations.

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Transcript

Themrise Khan [00:00:00] Facing such dire observations about the state of the field. Is it even possible to establish equal relationships between the global North and global South? Is it possible to dismantle an industry that lives off the underdevelopment of others, whose bread and butter are the continuing international inequalities? "Cole 2012" asked over a decade ago. How a well-meaning Westerner can help the global South today. It begins, I believe, with some humility about the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of the Global South. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:00:50] Welcome to dialogues. I am Garry Aslanyan, and this is a special series of the Global Health Matters podcast. In this series, I'll be blowing open some of the echo chambers that exist in global health. To help me in this quest, I have invited thoughtful and inquisitive individuals from different walks of life. Each of them has explored and written about global health issues from different disciplinary perspectives. I hope this dialogue series will give you the listeners an opportunity and space to step out of your daily routine and contemplate global health issues through a different lens. So, let us get started. For this dialogue episode, I am joined by Themrise Khan. Themrise is a Pakistani independent development professional and researcher with almost 30 years of experience in international development, aid effectiveness, gender and global migration. Themrise is also the coeditor of the book "White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences". In this dialogue, Themrise will be sharing more of the origins of this concept and how it continues to influence national autonomy, global power imbalances and race relations. Hi Themrise, how are you today? 

Themrise Khan [00:02:32] Hi Garry. I am good. How are you? 

Garry Aslanyan [00:02:34] Where do I find you? 

Themrise Khan [00:02:35] You will find me today in Karachi, Pakistan. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:02:38] I imagine it is quite hot. Let us kick off this conversation by giving us an experience or an encounter you have had in your own country of Pakistan that has highlighted the inequities in power and privilege that exist in international development these days. 

Themrise Khan [00:02:58] That is a tough question to answer Garry, simply because there is not just one experience or encounter that I can share. There are so many, one does not even know where to start. I guess if you are talking about international development and power and privilege, one example I can give you is that for many years in my career as an independent development consultant in Pakistan, I used to be the national consultant on several international teams of consultants who would come in from donor countries in the West to Pakistan to look at projects funded by these donors, etc.. I would be on those teams and I would have to accompany these consultants, mostly white, Western and mostly male, to a number of the project sites, which were small villages across different parts of the country, and we would go visit projects like schools or health units or vocational centers, etc. and everybody was pre-prepared for these visits. The principal of the schools, for instance, had been told, you are going to have foreign visitors coming in to look at your school. When we would arrive, there would be a reception committee waiting with garlands of roses and flowers to shower rose petals on the foreign visitors.  They would be treated like royalty. I myself on the other hand, everybody would respect me, very much so, but I would completely be sidelined in the excitement and in anticipation of these white foreigners coming into a village. For me that was always something that stood out, how my own people saw inequality in the sense that I was one of their own technically, we were all Pakistanis, but for them, I was still just one of their own, an ordinary person, the white foreigner who had all the money, who was coming in with the money to make sure that everything was going well so they could continue getting the money was the one who was feted like royalty. That really stuck out for me in terms of how international development as a profession has created this dynamic of royalty versus the people. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:05:39] In recent years, we have had a lot of discourse on how to decolonize, or this term decolonization has been really debated. There were a lot of efforts and new approaches aimed at shifting power in development or in global health. Do you feel that progress is being made on that front? 

Themrise Khan [00:06:09] Yes and no. There is a lot of recognition, and this includes global health and development, global health in particular since Covid, there are inequalities. It is all related to colonialism, hence decolonization, to a certain extent, I absolutely agree with that, colonialism has had a massive ongoing and continues to have a massive impact on the way we look at the world and look at each other. We have also reached a point where a lot of countries have accurately decolonized, i.e., they have broken away from colonial control and they are now independent states. The idea of decolonizing and shifting power and global health and development is not so much about colonialism, which is where the discourse and the approach is focused, it is more about who gets to decide? Is it the person who has all the money that gets to decide what happens, where and how and when? or is it the person on the other side who does need the money in most cases makes that decision. I think there has been no progress at all. We are still discussing the point where we are trying to define what decolonization means in the context of global health or development.  We need to go beyond those discussions into what is the actual reality of countries right now politically, socially, economically. So, short answer, no, I do not think progress is being made. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:07:48] Interesting because we had an episode focused on the decolonization in global health, and that was one of the most listened to episodes. There is a lot of interest in this debate. Going with terms and language really matters, you have recently written several pieces, and I have read at least one of them highlighting the importance of the terms we use and, in this case, in distinction between countries or nations. How would you like to see our universal vocabulary change and what impact could that have if we were to do that? 

Themrise Khan [00:08:30] Definitely, I think language matters and that too has been a very important part of the discourse. Ironically, the term decolonization is also about language, because the term is an English term. When I was doing some research on it, I tried to find a translation of the word decolonization in different languages, I could not find a single one, Arabic was the one that came closest to some sort of a definite word that was a literal translation, but there was actually no other word for decolonization in any other language, not in French, not in Spanish, not in Urdu, etc. That itself was a huge finding, so yes, language does matter. The whole idea is what language are we talking about?, and if we are talking about a universal vocabulary, what is the universality of that vocabulary?,  so what we wrote about in that piece you mentioned was what are the most appropriate terms to define who we all are, and who we all are is very, very different. One of our recommendations were that we all come from different regions. The global South is not just the global South, and the global North is not just the global north are currently the terminology used when it comes to development and health, but even the South is made up of continents. We are not even talking about regions, we are talking about continents. So, why don't you let them decide how they want to be referred to?, and that is the key if we are talking about shifting power, then ask countries how would they like to be referred, and that again shows you the power dynamics and how language also appropriates power. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:10:19] If we keep with the terms and one of the terms you chose to explore the great in in more depth, it was this term white saviorism. Through the reading you just did, this led to a publication of this anthology by you and several other co-authors titled "White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences". Could you unpack for our listeners how you have come up to understand this term and the value inherent in it and the implications of using that term? 

Themrise Khan [00:11:07] This is a term that I think has been around for a long time but has never really been given any importance or prominence, particularly in international development. The way we saw the origins of this term was actually by an article written by Teju Cole a Nigerian American author who wrote a piece in The Atlantic in 2012 entitled "The White-Savior Industrial Complex". That was a piece specifically about Africa and basically how an entire industry had been formed around the idea of white people coming and saving those who are less fortunate than them, and that is where the term, the white-savior industrial complex came up. It was earlier white saviorism, but again, very little spoken about it, written about it, discussed, academically more so, but nobody actually brought it up in terms of how we practically approach and implement international development. This led us and my two other coeditors to think about exploring this in a little more detail, and because there was a lot of talk about racism and systemic inequalities and so what does white saviorism have to do with it? That is how we came up with the topic of the theme of the book. We had different iterations of it. We wanted to see how this developed in theory, how it developed in actual practice and in people's lives who worked in that sector. That is where we came up with the concept of the book itself, and we saw white saviorism as a mental state of mind. That is how we defined it in the book as well, that this is not something that is not a tangible, applicable approach. It is something that is imbibed psychologically in the minds of anyone who wants to be a savior, anyone who thinks that they are superior to others and thinks that it is only them who can bring betterment into the lives of others. That is how we approached the topic and the book and all its contributions. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:13:36] And you use it not in a racial kind of context, but more in broader context? 

Themrise Khan [00:13:44] Yes and no. I mean, it is definitely racial because we are specifically talking about white saviorism, so that is the idea of how the white industrialized western world wants to save the non-western marginalized world. Yes, absolutely, there is a racial element involved in it, no doubt. But it is also because we are talking about saviorism as a mindset. That means it can go beyond that as well, so it is a bit of both. It is definitely racial. It is also conceptual. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:14:18] When you were leading this book and this anthology project, you and your coeditors allowed, academics, practitioners to share their opinions, experiences regarding this term white saviorism. But you also made a conscious decision to only allow contributors and people to come and be part of this from the Southern countries, Southern writers. Why was this important criterion for you to embrace? 

Themrise Khan [00:14:54] Because for us, this was not about the North, it was about the South. They have always been on the receiving end of white saviorism. We know what people want to say about it in the West, not much, they think they are saviors. That is it. Who else is going to do it? But it is actually the recipients of that who have the real stories to tell because they have to face this every single day. Most publications focus a lot on authors from the North. They always get the opportunity to publish and write, whereas people in the global South never do get those opportunities. I know that from experience being based in the global South, I never got a chance to be published internationally because I just did not have the profile, being from the Global South. We wanted to give the opportunity to people from the Global South, in particular, people who had never published before or never written before, to give them the chance to say their piece and to have their voice heard. This was a non-negotiable for us. We just wanted the opportunity to be for those who never get the opportunity. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:16:11] Let us listen to a reading from one of the chapters written by Sadaf Shallwani and Shama Dossa. It is entitled "Evaluation and the White Gaze in International Development". 

Themrise Khan [00:16:25] Evaluation, along with research and monitoring, is an important tool that perpetuates the white gaze and global development. According to Smith 2012, "Research Through Imperial Eyes", what we call the white gaze centers on a western worldview, conveys superiority and entitlement, and is driven by a desire to bring progress into the lives of indigenous peoples who are viewed as lacking. This approach steals knowledge from indigenous peoples, its primary benefits are accrued by those who stole it. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:17:02] Themrise, when looking at this particular chapter and how international development and similarly global health rely on ability to use evidence, to learn, to improve, and of course some of it is very familiar to me, but yet this chapter sometimes may question some of the fundamental reevaluation practices, and someone who works for a program that is focused on so much on implementation and research and results, I have to ask, how do you think we could find a better alternative way to know how we are making progress? I am very convinced that many of our listeners are intrigued by this particular use of how this is interpreted. 

Themrise Khan [00:17:59] This was a chapter that is extremely relevant to the sector as a whole and was one of our most read. I am so glad we got an opportunity to talk about this, this is another thing that is a very popular subsector within international development as a whole. I myself have been an evaluator for about ten years of my career. The example I gave right at the beginning was that I was on an evaluation mission with the international evaluators who had come in from North America and I was the national evaluator and everything was done by them, they brought the matrices, they brought the evaluation criteria with them, this is how it is going to be done, this is the information that we need and this is how we need to put it together. All of that was predetermined, pre-decided, and we would sit and talk about it together as a team. I would give reams and reams of my own daily reports about these visits and the Pakistani perspective on it, and ultimately it would never actually get into the final evaluation report. That is also eventually what we were told, they were not really interested to hear what we had to say, everything had to be measured according to this pre-set criteria that comes from there. That pre-set criteria does not actually match with the realities on the ground. I know we had the OECD DAC evaluation criteria of relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, etc., that was the guiding principle, and we had to sort of force fit so many fantastic findings and nuances that we would come across during our visits into these four, five, fixed criteria, and I would be like this does not fit. You need a new criteria for this, no, we have got to fit it in somehow. Then you think, well, what are the findings that would come out of this? What exactly is being evaluated? Who is doing it and why? and there was tons of evidence that would be left untouched. I mean when we constantly talk about evidence based planning or evidence-based research, when the evidence you have, and the flexibility to pick and choose it because you happen to be the one orchestrating the entire project, then is that really even evidence at all? That is exactly the white gaze that Sadaf Shallwani must speak about. Where is this coming from? This is coming from the white Western world. This is not our evaluation criteria. This is not how we would want to evaluate our work. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:21:02] What I take from this is that we have to look beyond the set things that we use, and question and look further and not miss other aspects of how the progress is made or how lives are improved. 

Themrise Khan [00:21:22] 100%. In fact, I would go one step further and say not just change the processes, change who does the evaluation. I mean, why can we not evaluate our own work? I have brought this up before and people say that is a conflict of interest. How can you evaluate your own work? How can you evaluate work in a country you have never even been to and you know nothing about? You know that you are literally just ticking boxes, that is all you are doing. Evaluation needs to be in our control as well, and eventually it can become collaborative. Absolutely.  I am not saying to kick everybody out, but for it to become collaborative, you have got to be open to collaboration, and I think the evaluation field is not at all open to collaboration. We need to change the narrative as well in terms of who is the evaluator, who is the evaluated and why is that so? 

Garry Aslanyan [00:22:24] Switching to another chapter and again, it is using another term. The chapter is called "Matriarchy Complex", very interesting, let us listen to a reading from this chapter. 

Themrise Khan [00:22:41] While the white western male has been the most visible representative of the white savior in international development as the face of the donor implementer and manager, his female counterpart has equally perpetuated racist stereotypes. She is the gender expert, specialist or consultant who travels from the prosperous North to the underdeveloped South to design, manage, advise or train Southern women and men on how to achieve success in gender equality. At a time when gender equality is now as much a topic of discussion in the North as it is in the South, she is also gradually taking over as the face of international development by representing international organizations in the global South. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:23:32] Themrise, here you characterize a white woman working in development as a matriach, someone who sees her knowledge as superior or otherwise assumes positions of power that should be in the hands of local women. How this phenomenon came about and how is it perpetuated; I also want to see is it possible to generalize to all white women? 

Themrise Khan [00:24:03] That chapter is very close to my heart, and I wrote it because of my interaction as a brown woman from the Global South with white women from the West, in my own country as well as in their country. I use the term matriarch, which is actually a term that I discovered with the help of my coeditors, that the women in colonial times, the wives of the British officers in Africa and South Asia actually did, there is a lot of literature available, some of which I have also mentioned in the chapter. They considered themselves to be mothers to the natives, because they thought that these poor natives needed to be looked after and nurtured, and that they were the ones to do it. Hence the term matriarch, which I also use as a play on patriarchy because that is all we talk about but we never talk about the fact that women too are as much a part of this industry in perpetuating the inequalities of this industry as much as men, and white women in particular, because they come with their male counterparts from the same countries. They do look at us differently. I mean, I will be very frank with you, there is not much of a sisterhood going on between women from the global South and the global North. We may claim there is, but behind the scenes there is a lot of tension because white women do come in as the power holders, and a lot of them treat young women very badly. I use a lot of real-life examples from women I spoke to and requested from them about their lived experiences. So, coming back to your issue about is it only white women? No, it is not, they have started that issue of power, but another finding is that it is also just if a non-white woman represents a powerful institution in the global North, she also imbues that matriarchy complex. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:26:31] This is very good that you have unpacked this, it is a very uncomfortable conversation at times, but you were able in this book to unpack it and let people ask these questions. In part two of the book, you have real life experiences submitted to you from countries, and one anonymous chapter highlights the presence of brown saviors in countries, and you have already touched upon that. Again, I am quoting your book and I have not come up with those terms. The story highlights the account of a mid-level Bangladeshi manager who would rather hire the son of the Bangladeshi ambassador favoring political connections over technical expertise. This is not an uncommon phenomena, obviously, but is it also perpetuating unfair privilege and power. Do you think we have any ways to stop this perpetuation of a saviorism? 

Themrise Khan [00:27:34] First thing that I always say is that unfair privilege and power exists everywhere. Any country you go to, any institution you go to, any government you go to, any community you go to, any village you go to, there is privilege and power, we see social hierarchies in villages between tribes, between feudals and the farmers who work on their lands, it exists everywhere. I think that is something we all have to be very mindful of, when we speak of privilege and power. Secondly, because this exists everywhere, it definitely exists in the global South, and in global South the system of nepotism is very, very strong, and we see it everywhere. I see it in Pakistan every day, and in Pakistan we call it sifarish. Sifarish is a term, a word in Urdu, which means a personal request to somebody, somebody requests you a favor, so this is my son and please give him a job or please put in a good word for him, etc., it is embedded itself into our societies so deeply that it is basically how societies run now. So, how do you change that? How do you change that core? It is a very, very difficult question. What you need is somebody to just come in and rip it to shreds and not be scared of the consequences and just start all over again, but who is going to do that? So, it is hard, but it is an outcome of the privilege and power that exists everywhere. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:29:24] Maybe the starter is to talk about it, including this conversation we are having and putting that out and hearing from you and all of your contributors to the work you have done. In the final part of our conversations, maybe we can look a bit more into future and strategies. In the recent reports you published, you wrote that there is a need to completely move away from the current model of what we call aid and development towards independent nations, meeting their own development needs and generating their own systems of financial technical support, and obviously you are writing overall for development, and probably this applies to global health immediately the same way. Do you believe that this aid system can transform? or does it need a more radical approach? 

Themrise Khan [00:30:16] I think it needs to be burnt to the ground. I think it needs to be completely destroyed, broken down and then completely built up from scratch, by someone else, and honestly that is what I mean, I have thought about this for years. My first instinct was let us separate the two, let the North and the South figure out their own problems first, and then we can come together, sit together at the table and maybe discuss what needs to be done next, and most people did not agree with that, because they were like, no, we just have to be collaborative, and I said you cannot be collaborative when countries themselves do not know where they stand, internally. I am not talking about internationally, but internally where do they stand as a nation amongst their own people? We are not even having those conversations within different countries. You are asking a group of countries to sit together with another group of countries and work things out. Not going to happen. But, then the more I delve into it, the more I seriously believe the system is damaged so much beyond repair, and we see that with Gaza, with Palestine, this has been an opportunity for the entire industry to change the way they work, and to do something to prevent millions of people from being killed. But they have done absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing. There was a study that I just saw a couple of days ago by this voluntary organization in the UK called Charity So White, that did a study of the charities in the UK to see what their response to the Palestinian situation was, and I am not exactly sure of the number, but close to a little over 50% of the charities in the UK had remained absolutely silent about it. So, when you have a system that is supposed to prevent inequalities, that is supposed to prevent conflict, that is supposed to help people in distress. When more than half of them have remained deathly silent in one of the worst cases of conflict that we have seen in this century, then honestly there is nothing you can do to transform this system. You literally have to burn it to the ground. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:32:56] Themrise, as someone who works in this area, one of the things you always mention, it comes through from your writing as well, is this intersection of different aspects of human development, and it comes to health, it is not just health, it is also housing, income, education, etc., and obviously, we have seen how Covid played out, and you mentioned that at the top of the conversation, you cautioned that global health often fails to account for many other related intersecting human rights or other issues. That holds a rather one-sided view of society, that does not really help in terms of how to deal with these issues. Maybe you could share your views on how you think this can be changed, especially with our looking forward, how we prevent future pandemics or how we tackle some major global health issues. 

Themrise Khan [00:33:52] For me, I have been what they call a generalist in this field, but it has strengthened my understanding of the sector as a whole much better than had I been somebody just working in the health sector or just in the education sector or just in gender, etc., and that is where I think we have really run short in the development sector as a whole, is that we compartmentalize everything in it. Health is an extremely important component for me of the overall idea of human development, if you do not have health, you are not able to be educated, you are not able to get a job, you are not able to look after others if you have health issues. But, in international development when we look at health, my perception is that we are looking at basic health. We are looking at the access of every citizen in a country to be able to access health facilities and health services, so then there is the whole scientific aspect of health, the research, the development of drugs, the treatments, etc., and that is a very specialized field, but in development, we are talking about just basic rights, and access to health is a basic right, so is access to education, so is access to a living wage, so is access to shelter, so is access to water, etc.. We need to look at all these components together as a whole, if we want a community to survive, you cannot just provide a community with health services and say you have done your job right, and COVID-19 brought this out very clearly in the sense that everybody started focusing so much on health. We did not realize that we created an education emergency because children had to be out of school for months on end, and they lost an opportunity to learn. People lost income because they did not have jobs and this is a health emergency that did that, so I think COVID-19 brought out these intersections very clearly, but I think the sector as a whole was too focused inwards. That happens with all subsectors, but that is also something you need to keep in mind for future, not just pandemics, but any sort of a crisis that happens. Ultimately, it will be linked to all other components of an individual's life. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:36:34] Themrise as we end, I would like to ask you to offer some guidance or hope for our listeners. And what can they actually do at the individual level to contribute towards greater power equity in global health and in development? 

Themrise Khan [00:36:49] I am one of the worst persons to ask any question about hope because I am just terrible at it. It is not that I do not have hope. I am just a very pessimistic person, but in my pessimism, there is a lot of optimism as well. When I talk about things like, you know, burn it all down, yes, a lot of people will say that is very negative, but behind that thinking is that burn it all down so we can rebuild properly again, so there is hope in that. At least I hope there is. I think individually, it is very important for us to look at ourselves individually. I continue to evolve, even though I have been in this field for 13 years counting, I continue to evolve, my thinking continues to evolve based on everything that is happening around me. I think that is something we need to harness into ourselves as individuals. We all keep saying, what can I just do in this massive world of inequality? It is true, you may not be able to do everything, but I think your own actions may speak a lot for a wider community. I left the sector as a consultant. I stopped doing all the work that I used to do because I just do not believe it anymore. For me, that action is enough to convince me that as an individual it may just be one person, but hopefully others will also follow suit eventually if it works for them. So, I think that is something you keep questioning yourself. You have to keep questioning yourself and you have to look at the world through a wider lens. It cannot just be yours. You have got to look beyond yourself as well. So,  I think I would end with that. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:38:41] Thank you Themrise for this great conversation. It was great to talk to you and get this really different perspective through this conversation. 

Themrise Khan [00:38:52] Thank you very much Garry, it was a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much. 

Garry Aslanyan [00:38:57] As we, the global health community, wrestle with how to decolonize global health. Themrise experiences in the broader international development sector could serve as helpful signposts. First, Themrise highlights the importance of language and how often it fails to give adequate expression of the experiences of people in different countries. Themrise confirms something I already knew, the fact that the term decolonization was not a term found in many other languages. Secondly, Themrise cautions the global health community to not be insular in trying to achieve greater power equity, by reminding us that health is merely one aspect of human development, and it needs to account for other intersecting issues. Thirdly, our current system is far from ideal, and this is an opportunity for each of us to practice greater humility. If history has taught us anything, there is no single group of experts who have all the answers for global health, neither in the North nor in the South. True, systemic transformation of international development and global health will only be realized through greater humility and respectful collaboration. To learn more about the topics discussed in this episode, visit the Episodes web page, where you will find additional readings, show notes and translations. Do not forget to get in touch with us via social media, email or by sharing a voice message. And be sure to subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Global Health Matters is produced by TDR, a United Nations co-sponsored research program based at the World Health Organization. Thank you for listening.