The Politics of Humanitarian Technology

Good Intentions, Unintended Consequences and Insecurity

Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138729322
• eBook ISBN: 9781317692973
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This book offers a detailed exploration of three examples of humanitarian uses of new technology, employing key theoretical insights from Foucault.

We are currently seeing a humanitarian turn to new digital technologies, such as biometrics, remote sensing, and surveillance drones. However, such humanitarian uses of new technology have not always produced beneficial results for those at the receiving end and have sometimes exposed the subjects of assistance to additional risks and insecurities.

Engaging with key insights from the work of Foucault combined with selected concepts from the Science and Technology Studies literature, this book produces an analytical framework that opens up the analysis to details of power and control at the level of materiality that are often ignored in liberal histories of war and modernity. Whereas Foucault details the design of prisons, factories, schools, etc., this book is original in its use of his work, in that it uses these key insights about the details of power embedded in material design, but shifts the attention to the technologies and attending forms of power that have been experimented with in the three humanitarian endeavours presented in the book. In doing so, the book provides new information about aspects of liberal humanitarianism that contemporary critical analyses have largely neglected.

This book will be of interest to students of humanitarian studies, peace and conflict studies, critical security studies, and IR in general.

1
Humanitarian technology

Recent reports from some of the most influential international humanitarian actors have highlighted a number of success stories that in different ways illustrate how new digital technology successfully has aided the realisation of humanitarian objectives, for example, by using mobile phone technology to enable critical information sharing (IFRC 2013: 129) or the distribution of cash assistance (UN OCHA 2013: 15). Alongside this optimism, descriptions of conferences that specifically focus on this issue of humanitarian technology also bear witness to a profound sense of confidence in the ability of new digital technologies to aid the realisation of laudable humanitarian ambitions.¹ In a statement from the Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, we are, for example, informed that ‘humanitarian applications of technology’ can help ‘improve the lives of underserved peoples’ and how new technologies can be ‘key to the development of solutions to humanitarian problems’ (Global Humanitarian Technology Conference 2014).

Indeed, if we look at the current global landscape, there are many challenges for humanitarian actors to respond to, and in the face of such challenges, various new technologies – that, for example, promise to provide greater efficiency – understandably become attractive. However, although new digital technologies can of course to some extent and under certain circumstances be harnessed by humanitarian actors to support certain aspects of their practices, humanitarian efforts also confront important challenges which new technologies cannot solve and what is more introducing new technologies into various humanitarian contexts may even give rise to new challenges. But, in order to appreciate such limitations to the kinds of challenges that new technologies can be hoped to reduce and to be able to recognise how new challenges can emerge in the context of humanitarian technology uses, this book argues that two assumptions must be addressed because they influence how we frame and understand this issue of humanitarian technology: assumptions about the nature of humanitarianism (Chapter 2) and assumptions about the nature of technology (Chapter 3). With respect to ‘humanitarianism’ the book stresses the importance of recognising how humanitarianism’s history in combination with several contemporary examples – e.g. sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers (UN Office of Internal Oversight Services 2002) and humanitarian workers being involved in human trafficking, which has even been turned into a Hollywood production (The Whistleblower) – bear witness to various ways in which humanitarian practices can cause harm. And in view of the abovementioned optimism, the book argues that this legacy must not be disremembered but should instead help frame our current debates about humanitarian technology uses.

Three main arguments and two additional lines of reasoning

The politics of humanitarian practices: adding new technology adds new political complexity

The humanitarian practices that this book focuses on unfold in complex political contexts,² with local and global conflict dynamics that humanitarian practices cannot simply be isolated from. Acting in politically complex settings challenges the humanitarian principle of neutrality and the first argument presented in this book is that humanitarian uses of new technology can add to (rather than reduce) the ways in which humanitarian practices are linked to contextual political dynamics. For example, as will be explained in Chapter 4, although humanitarian uses of new biometric technology is often considered capable of enhancing objectivity and of simplifying cumbersome refugee registration process, the use of this new technology also adds a new layer of political complexity, for instance in the form of questions about biometric data sharing with host governments as well as questions about what such data sharing implies for the humanitarian principle of neutrality. This argument will be substantiated throughout the book – for instance, with more examples of how humanitarian technology uses can add a new layer of political complexity that, for example, challenges the already disputed notion of neutrality, but more importantly also the safety of the refugee. We shall return to this important point shortly.

Humanitarian uses of new technology: contemporary cases of humanitarian experimentation

The second argument presented in this book is that in some cases humanitarian actors deploy new technologies experimentally and thus expose already vulnerable subjects to additional sources of harm. First of all, using experimental technology exposes the implicated humanitarian subjects to the risk of encountering technology failures that, as will be illustrated throughout this book, can jeopardise their safety in various ways – as can be recognised through an analogy to the medical domain (an analogy whose limitations we shall return to shortly). Secondly, an underlying acceptance of refugees as suitable test subjects is symptomatic of a broader phenomenon where humanitarian practices and discourse participate in the construction of refugees as ‘vile’ bodies worthy of differential treatment – a conception which enhances the risk of refugees being exposed to harm. This argument is substantiated with examples in the three case studies, as well as through references to an important historical legacy, which is nevertheless often overlooked in current debates about humanitarian actors’ uses of new technology, a history of how peripheral populations have previously been exposed to experimental technologies in the name of humanitarian care. This legacy illustrates how altruistic uses of experimental technology have been linked to the development of technologies through which to expand the exercise of state power into a new domain of life. This history should be brought to bear on our analyses of the contemporary consequences of testing new technologies in various refugee contexts, including the possibility that such practices can feed into the development of new technologies of power that render new aspects of ‘life’ governable.

In short, not only can the use of new technology add a new dimension of politics to humanitarian practices, but, what is more, humanitarian uses of new technology sometimes resemble experimentation in ways that expose already vulnerable subjects to additional risks from failure and from power’s expansion. But whereas harmful effects such as those mentioned above – humanitarian involvement in trafficking, sexual exploitation, etc. – are examples of ‘harm’ that humanitarian actors are now paying attention to since such forms of harm have already received attention publicly, many of the new technologies that humanitarian actors have deployed in various contexts have been so new (certainly their use in particularly challenging and complex humanitarian contexts) that it can be difficult to know what exactly to look for to ensure that no harm is being done when deploying these new technologies. And, adding to this, this book also argues that humanitarian technology uses may not only generate new risks when technologies fail: as we shall see below, risks may also emerge when new technologies are used successfully.

Revisiting assumptions about technology: harm from successful technology

The third argument presented in this book is that humanitarian uses of new technology can also cause harm when new technologies are deployed successfully. However, in order to recognise this, the book argues that we need to revisit not just the notion of humanitarian neutrality or of experimentation as a ‘distant’ past but also, crucially, the way in which we conceptualise ‘technology’. Accounts of the advantages of using new technology in humanitarian contexts are often based on the idea that technologies are trivial and passive instruments, which serve no other function than to ease the realisation of predefined objectives, such as greater efficiency and objectivity. The third argument presented in this book concerns the importance of how we conceptualise the nature of technology as this can help us appreciate an additional sense in which humanitarian uses of new technology can cause harm. To appreciate how successful technology uses can give rise to insecurities and potentially cause harm – also when deployed by humanitarian actors with good intentions – the book argues that we need to appreciate that technology can have constitutive effects of political significance, both with respect to how humanitarian practices feed into the constitution of new technologies (in ways that can, for example, affect their normative acceptability), and with respect to how technologies themselves can have politically significant effects – for instance, by making it possible to conceive of new dimensions of human existence (such as genetic make-up or biometric profiles) as open to political intervention. For example, even if new digital fingerprint technologies do not ‘fail’ technologically when introduced into humanitarian contexts, their successful uses are not altogether unproblematic; new forms of highly sensitive data emerge and this, for instance, calls for new measures of protection in the face of data sharing possibilities. According to a WikiLeaks document from 2009, the US government has been encouraging the Kenyan government (who, in collaboration with UN’s refugee agency, has biometrically registered all refugees in the Dadaab camp near the Somali border) ‘to cross-check refugee prints with its TIP [Terrorist Interdiction Program]’ on the basis that doing so will help ‘catch terrorists posing as refugees’ (2009). And in a recent report from United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) called ‘Humanitarianism in the Age of Cyber-warfare’ a similar paradox is also recognised. On the one hand, humanitarian actors are collecting increasingly more sensitive data, such as biometrics, on the basis that this can, for example, help provide more accurate information, which is important when assessing how much assistance is needed and where. But, at the same time, the report also recognises that: ‘the more information that is shared the more risks and challenges for privacy and security emerge’ (UN OCHA 2014: 5). As Gus Hosein and Carly Nyst note: ‘The linkability of biometrics increase the likelihood of their expansion and re-purposing in other environments (… immigration systems, for example) and for other purposes unimagined at the time of their collection’ (2013: 36). This is just one example of the sense in which ‘successful’ humanitarian uses of new technology can give rise to new forms of insecurity – in this case for the biometrically registered refugee. This will become clearer throughout the book and all three case studies also illustrate how humanitarian technology uses in different ways partake in various constitutive processes of political significance.

By framing the issue of humanitarian technology uses in light of these three arguments, the book raises a number of questions that challenge the abovementioned optimism: what kinds of humanitarian obstacles are new technologies envisaged as a solution to? What additional challenges have and do humanitarian actors confront? How might greater appreciation of historical and present cases of how various well-intentioned humanitarian endeavours have caused harm foster reservations about the above-mentioned humanitarian techno-optimism? In what sense can humanitarian uses of new technology give rise not just to ‘success stories’ but also to failures – and to harmful effects related to the use of ‘successful’ technology? On what grounds – that is, based on what assumptions about humanitarianism and about technology – can it be considered a ‘solution’ to introduce new technologies into various humanitarian contexts; what if new problems (ethical, political, etc.) emerge? Now, this brings us back to the debate about humanitarian harm, and the question of how to avoid well-intentioned humanitarian technology uses having negative effects.

How to ensure that humanitarian technology does not cause more harm than good?

The fourth argument presented in this book is that in recognition of how various new technologies have already been adopted by a number of humanitarian actors and in view of how this trend will most likely continue – possibly even with the expansion into new humanitarian settings, such as we have seen with the recent introduction of biometrics in urban refugee contexts – it seems necessary for the humanitarian community to more explicitly address the important question of what the politics of humanitarianism (as well as the notion of constitutive technology) implies for the difficult question of how to ‘ensure’ that humanitarian uses of new technologies follow the ‘Do No Harm’ principle (Anderson 1999). In a certain sense, this book suggests that the issue of humanitarian technology uses adds a new dimension to this old, but still highly relevant, debate about the various ways in which humanitarian practices and discourses unintentionally can cause harm. But in the concluding chapter the book also argues that we need to move beyond the Do No Harm framework in its current form in order to engage with important question about whether such ‘avoidance’ is ever possible, and if not, then how can humanitarian actors respond to this predicament? These questions will only be engaged with in the last chapter of the book. Mainly, the book seeks to offer a different way of thinking about the prior question of how to recognise various ways in which humanitarian activities can cause harm. More specifically, it argues that we also need to look at humanitarian technology uses when thinking about this question.

Return to the cosmopolitan core: relevance beyond the refugee context

Lastly, the book also argues that humanitarian technology uses are relevant beyond ‘remote’ refugee contexts: the kinds of harmful effects that stem from successful technology uses and constitutive effects can accompany the ‘tested’ technologies that make their way back into cosmopolitan centres (once they have been trialled in the humanitarian periphery). From this perspective, humanitarian technology uses are not only interesting because they tells us something about an additional sense in which humanitarian practices can cause harm – they are also interesting because they tell us something about the successfully constitutive effects that in turn can have an impact on how to conceive of the legitimate reach of power. In short, the book illustrates how humanitarian technology uses can have significant – albeit commonly unheeded – impacts on how power operates, not only in humanitarian zones but also beyond.

A history of humanitarian entanglements with violent conflict dynamics

When addressing the issue of humanitarian technology, a number of contextual factors are of crucial importance and one such factor is the history of how humanitarian endeavours have ‘helped’ sustain, prolong and/or exacerbate the violent conflict dynamics whose agony these humanitarian efforts were intended to offer protection from. From non-governmental humanitarian organisations (e.g. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)), to intergovernmental humanitarian organisations (e.g. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)), and state-humanitarianism (e.g. US Agency for International Development (USAID), a broad range of different types of humanitarian actors have experienced that humanitarian assistance (food, medical supplies, etc.) as well as different aspects of the provision of such assistance (stolen vehicles, paying fees, etc.) in various ways, have fed into local conflict dynamics with the effect of prolonging and/or exacerbating the very violence that humanitarian actors intended to provide alleviation from.

One commonly cited example was the case of refugee camps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the mid-1990s. In these camp settings humanitarian actors, in accordance with principles of impartiality and humanity, indiscriminately distributed food to all refugees fleeing genocidal violence in neighbouring Rwanda. However, this well-intentioned humanitarian endeavour had a number of critical ‘side effects’ (Terry 2002, 2013; Polman 2010; Weiss 1999). Notably, the camp settings in Zaire had become ‘safe havens’ for genocidal warlords who continued to orchestrate violence against Rwandan Tutsis, and by feeding all camp inhabitant humanitarians were also feeding these perpetrators and thereby ‘helping’ to sustain deadly levels of violence in Rwanda. In these and other ways (Polman 2010) humanitarian activities in Zaire contributed to a worsening of the situation, and at a certain point MSF decided to ‘withdraw from the refugee camps of eastern Zaire’ (Rieff 2011) in recognition of the risk that in certain circumstances, even well-intentioned humanitarian efforts can do more harm than good (Polman 2010).³ Now, this is only one example of some of the difficult dilemmas that humanitarians confront and which this book explores in greater detail on the basis that such experiences constitute an important part of the context within which to appreciate the significance of a current trend in the humanitarian community, namely the turn to new technology. Indeed, this case of refugee camps in Zaire hosting Rwandan genocidaires (Adelman and Barkan 2011) is only one example of how history bears witness to humanitarian activities in refugee camp contexts that have ended up feeding into local conflict dynamics. In his recently published account of MSF’s activities in ‘Salvadoran Refugee Camps in Honduras’ in the late 1980s, Laurence Binet, for example, describes how: ‘Unknown to us, we [MSF] were supplying doctors to the guerrillas’ (2003).

Thus, the link between violent conflict dynamics and humanitarian practices in refugee contexts is indeed a phenomenon that has been known for at least a decade prior to the 1994 Rwanda case and a phenomenon that can take many different forms. And one obvious reason why these historical examples continue to remain relevant is that today, more than 20 years after the widely criticised Rwanda-case of humanitarian aid feeding into conflict, similar phenomena still occur today. Humanitarian refugee camps have, for example, recently served as grounds for acquiring new recruits. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, ‘Rebels in the Free Syrian Army are recruiting fighters from inside a refugee camp in Jordan’ (Nicks 2013), and a similar phenomenon was also observed in the context of the violent conflict and the attending refugee crisis in Mali. As was, for example, noted in a 2012 report by the Secretary-General, armed groups have been involved in ‘cross-border recruitment of children in refugee camps in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and the Niger’ (UN Security Council 2012), and previously a similar phenomenon has been observed in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya near the Somali border where ‘the Somali armed group al-Shabaab has … sought to recruit fighters’ (HRW 2009). Critics have at least since 2005 (Lischer 2005) pointed to the UN-run Dadaab refugee camps complex as a ‘safe haven’ for Al Shabaab fighters and as a site where they acquire new recruits (Sabahi 2014).

Arguably this issue of humanitarian refugee camps ‘aiding’ violent rebels in different ways constitutes one of humanitarianism’s many ‘dark faces’ (Douzinas 2007). But what must also be said is that in a certain sense the focus of these debates about how humanitarian practices may feed into violent conflict have changed since the 1990s. Whereas the main concern in the case of Rwandan genocide perpetrators in Zaire was that humanitarian aid would feed into conflict dynamics whose perpetrators had local ambitions (i.e. the genocide in Rwanda), a main focus of current debates is that humanitarian practices can feed into violent conflict dynamics whose perpetrators have global ambitions. For example, in September 2013 a photo purporting to show the ISIS-linked Muhajireen Kavkazwa Sham in a USAID-tent led to widespread allegations that ‘Al Qaeda-Linked Syria Group Enjoying USAID’ (Carter, 2013), a shift that we shall return to at different points throughout this book.

Further adding to the sense in which a history of humanitarian harm constitutes an important part of the context within which to address the issue of humanitarian technology, the book also suggests that in addition to this legacy of ‘negative effects’ stemmi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Humanitarian technology
• 2 Humanitarian challenges and new technologies
• 3 Theorising technology
• 4 Humanitarian biometrics
• 5 GM food aid and the molecular subject as political
• 6 Humanitarian vaccination, vilization and expansion of power
• 7 Humanitarian aspirations and technology expectations
• Bibliography
• Index