Introduction

The previous chapter has shown how forms of digital humanitarianism, including crowdfunding, can generate particular hierarchies, biases and blind spots. They extend advantage to some but further marginalize others who aim to make use of these fundraising mechanisms. Having surveyed a wide range of aid and development tools and practices with a view to their potential for horizontality, what, if any, fit that bill? Mutual aid is the most obvious notion to turn to. We understand mutual aid here as forms of reciprocal assistance among individuals and groups such as families, neighbourhoods or differently shaped communities. Such assistance may be within and among such groups. Within the discipline of anthropology, different types of reciprocity have been distinguished, including ‘balanced’ reciprocity, which involves both giving and receiving, and generalized reciprocity, where assistance is given without a particular or immediate expectation of return. One might further nuance this concept by including situations where people give and receive assistance but involving two parties; or indeed the practice known as ‘paying it forward’, where someone might give to a younger person, or give in the future, as a result of having received support in the past from someone else. In many ways, forms of mutual aid may therefore be the most obvious examples of horizontal peer-to-peer (P2P) support that we have been discussing so far.

Many theorists agree that mutual aid is not new and that ‘people have worked together to survive for all of human history’ (Spade, 2020), while Springer claims that ‘mutual aid is the fundamental basis of all human societies’ (Springer, 2020).