Humanitarian Intervention in Mayotte (Cyclone Chido): Between Continuity and Local Specificities
This research analyses the humanitarian and institutional response to Cyclone Chido in Mayotte, in order to understand how the socio-political exceptionality of the territory influences the coordination, perception and effectiveness of emergency interventions.
This research is being conducted in collaboration with Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud.
Humanitarian or social context and issues
Cyclone Chido (December 2024) revealed the extreme vulnerability of Mayotte, a French department marked by multiple weaknesses: widespread poverty, informal urbanisation, rapid population growth, unequal access to rights and a crisis of confidence in the State. Beyond being a natural disaster, the event exposed the social and political divisions of a territory perceived as peripheral and treated as an exception. The humanitarian challenges go beyond emergency management: they concern reconstruction, social cohesion, institutional recognition and the collective capacity to prevent recurring crises in a context of precariousness and persistent otherness.
Against this backdrop, the research aims to analyse the modes of action, coordination and decision-making that structured the humanitarian response to Cyclone Chido, examining the discrepancies between the planned measures and their actual implementation. It seeks to understand how social representations, power asymmetries and bureaucratic logic shape crisis management and aid distribution. By identifying the tensions between institutional automatism and local adaptation, the project aims to produce operational lessons to improve humanitarian mechanisms in overseas territories in situations of structural exception.
How has Mayotte’s political, social, and administrative exceptionalism influenced the coordination and implementation of the humanitarian response to Cyclone Chido? To what extent have state and non-state actors been able—or unable—to adapt their practices to a context marked by mistrust, precarity, and multiple identities?
Field of research and methodology
The research field is Mayotte, a French department in the Indian Ocean characterised by a young, multicultural population, most of whom live in precarious administrative and economic conditions. Cyclone Chido primarily affected residents of so-called informal areas, who are marginalised in terms of access to public assistance and often excluded from institutional mechanisms. This context makes the investigation particularly sensitive: mistrust of the authorities, political tensions exacerbated by the migration issue, language barriers. Added to these constraints is the need to question the position of the researcher, who comes from mainland France and whose perspective is marked by historical relations of domination. In a space where regimes of otherness and morality structure interactions and the distribution of legitimacy, the presence of a white, external researcher cannot be neutral. The research therefore adopts a reflexive stance, attentive to the dynamics of symbolic and social boundary formation, and aware of the power effects inherent in the investigation itself. The methodology is qualitative: semi-structured interviews with institutional actors (prefecture, ARS, Red Cross, NGOs, etc.), local associations and disaster victims; documentary analysis (reports, press, official communications, etc.); ethnographic observations; and mapping of organisational interactions.This multi-level approach will enable us to understand the concrete mechanisms of coordination, power and perception in post-disaster response.
The scientific benefits of research for humanitarian and social actors
This research aims to provide humanitarian actors with an in-depth understanding of the social, political and symbolic dynamics that shape their work in Mayotte. Rather than viewing humanitarian aid as a neutral or purely technical response, it questions the logic behind interventions, the effects of framing and the tensions between assistance, control and recognition. By analysing the gaps between institutional mechanisms and local expectations, the project highlights the scope for more locally-based action that is more aware of its own limitations and the imaginaries it mobilises. It thus feeds into a strategic reflection on the place of humanitarian aid in French overseas territories. This research contributes to a critical reflection on the place of humanitarian aid in the spaces of ‘peripheral France’, where structural vulnerability tends to naturalise the exception and mask its political causes. By emphasising the importance of trust, intercultural understanding and the “localisation” of aid – the limitations of which will be discussed – the research will contribute to the design of more inclusive and sustainable models of action that are adapted to the realities of the DROM-COMs, which are faced with recurrent crises and structural vulnerabilities.
From a scientific perspective, the project fills a major gap in the study of humanitarian interventions within French territory, where postcolonial, bureaucratic and humanitarian logics intersect. It offers an original analysis of ‘continuity in exception’, combining organisational sociology, political science and postcolonial studies. By examining the tensions between centralisation and local adaptation, it contributes to a rethinking of crisis governance in overseas contexts. This work will provide knowledge that can be transferred to other areas in ‘chronic crisis’, where humanitarian aid partially replaces the state, while questioning its own practices and imaginaries of intervention. Finally, it will shed light on humanitarian coordination in a French territory governed by regimes of otherness, and will raise questions about the methods (automatic responses, standards, choice of actors and interlocutors, etc.) of humanitarian intervention, which is currently undergoing a major reconfiguration (particularly since the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul).
Biographies
Alice Corbet is an anthropologist and CNRS/IRD researcher at the LAM laboratory (Les Afriques dans le Monde). Her research focuses primarily on the management of migratory movements (refugees or displaced persons), particularly through camps (organized or spontaneous), and on the functioning of the humanitarian system that oversees these populations (host states, UN agencies, local and international NGOs, etc.).
Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud (anthony.goreau-ponceaud@u-bordeaux.fr) is a geographer, lecturer at the University of Bordeaux and researcher at LAM (Les Afriques dans le Monde). After completing his thesis in 2008 on the Tamil diaspora in Île-de-France, he pursued postdoctoral work on Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in the state of Tamil Nadu (southern India). His research falls within the field of migration and mobility geography. Since 2023, he has been studying the asylum system and migration policies in the Indian Ocean region. More specifically, he is conducting multi-sited investigations in Mayotte and Réunion in order to decipher border dynamics, the production of regimes of otherness and the effects of the confrontation between multiple moral economies.
Photo credit : Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud.