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ABSTRACT
In an effort to contribute to a more critical understanding of the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in humanitarian action, this article explores the topography of the ‘humanitarian cyberspace’ – a composite of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘humanitarian space’ – as it has emerged since the mid-1990s. The goals are to offer some observations about the conditions of the humanitarian cyberspace and to reflect on the relationship between the persistent features of humanitarian action and new developments brought on by ICT. The prism through which the role of ICT in humanitarian action is explored is that of the ‘shrinking humanitarian space’.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Daniel Gillman, Thea Hilhorst, Kristoffer Lidén, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, John Karlsrud, Maral Mirshahi and Mareile Kaufmann; and to Mark Duffield for his patience and Patrick Meier for his impatience.
Notes
1. OCHA, Saving Lives. See also OCHA, Humanitarianism in the Network Age.
2. Vinck, “Humanitarian Technology,” 14.
3. Couldrey and Herson, “The Technology Issue”; and Meier, “New Information Technologies.”
4. Duffield, Disaster Resilience. Technology and innovation will be one of four tracks at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016.
5. Of course, humanitarianism has never existed without technology – and a select few scholars have been interested in it for a long time. See, for example, Stephenson and Anderson, “Disasters.”
6. According to Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?”, the phrase was first used by Loescher to describe the limitations imposed upon the operating environment of humanitarian agencies in the highly politicised context of cold war conflicts in Central America. Loescher, “Humanitarianism and Politics.”
7. Taking a temporal view, Beauchamp considers the humanitarian space through a number of historical shifts, including the change in the focus of humanitarian aid from the military to civilians; the institutionalisation of international disaster relief; the institutionalisation of international development; and the changing role of military actors. Beauchamp, Defining the Humanitarian Space. Other observers conceive of the humanitarian space in terms of IHL principles. Thürer, “Dunant’s Pyramid.”
8. Beauchamp, Defining the Humanitarian Space; Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?”; and Collinson and Elhawary, Humanitarian Space.
9. Collinson and Elhawary, Humanitarian Space.
10. This definition is borrowed from ‘United Nations and Global Humanitarian Governance: Critical Perspectives’, a course offered through the Finnish University Partnership for International Development. http://www.unipid.fi/en/course/29/united_nations_and_global_humanitarian_governance_critical_perspectives/. For discussions of the topic, see Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance.”
11. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 41.
12. Mills, “Constructing Humanitarian Space.”
13. Metcalfe et al., UN Integration and Humanitarian Space.
14. Oxfam, Policy Compendium Note, 2.
15. Sandvik, “Introduction.”
16. Mills, “Constructing Humanitarian Space,” 610.
17. According to Meier, “Strengthening Humanitarian Information,” 73, ‘self-organization in a digital world affords opportunities unfeasible in the analogue past. Disaster-affected populations now have greater access to information, and many of their information needs during a crisis can be met by mobile technologies.’
18. Collinson and Elhawary, Humanitarian Space.
19. Oosterveld, ‘Implications for Women’; and Tennant et al., Safeguarding Humanitarian Space.
20. Spearin, “Private Security Companies and Humanitarians”; and Metcalfe et al., UN Integration and Humanitarian Space.
21. Such constraints to humanitarian engagement include high levels of violence; the ideology, objectives, tactics and capabilities of non-state armed actors; and legal and bureaucratic restrictions imposed by donor and host governments, including in relation to counterterrorism strategies. Labonte and Edgerton, “Towards a Typology.”
22. Humanitarian Outcomes, The New Normal.
23. Collinson and Elhawary, Humanitarian Space, 9.
24. Kleinfeld, “Misreading the Post-tsunami Political Landscape.”
25. Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?” For this argument generally, see Hegre and Nygård, Peace on Earth?
26. Dandoy and de Montclos, “Humanitarian Workers in Peril?”; and OCHA, To Stay and Deliver.
27. OCHA, To Stay and Deliver.
28. Global Humanitarian Assistance, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2014.
29. Hilhorst and Jansen, “Humanitarian Space as Arena.”
30. Herrera, “Technology and International Systems,” 560.
31. McCarthy, “Technology and ‘the International’,” 489.
32. Libicki, Conquest in Cyberspace.
33. Garcia et al., “Ethnographic Approaches.”
34. Deibert and Rohozinski, “Liberation vs. Control,” 55.
35. Commenting on the digital shadow as a cause of and reason for marginalisation, Lerman observes that data sets can be affected by the ‘nonrandom, systemic omission of people who live on big data’s margins, whether due to poverty, geography, or lifestyle, and whose lives are less “datafied” than the general population’s’. These technologies may create ‘a new kind of voicelessness, where certain groups’ preferences and behaviors receive little or no consideration when powerful actors decide how to distribute goods and services and how to reform public and private institutions’. Lerman, “Big Data,” 59.
36. Vinck, “Humanitarian Technology,” 30.
37. Demchak, Conflicting Policy Presumptions.
38. Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism.”
39. Deibert et al., Access Controlled.
40. For more on government surveillance, see, generally, the work of Citizen Lab, Privacy International and the new Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports, which includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Privacy International, among others.
41. Lynn, “Defending a New Domain.”
42. Ferris, “Megatrends,” 923.
43. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”
44. Anderson, Do No Harm.
45. Labonte and Edgerton, “Typology of Humanitarian Access Denial,” 51.
46. Meier, “Strengthening Humanitarian Information.”
47. GSMA, Key Takeaways.
48. Altay and Labonte, “Challenges in Humanitarian Information Management.”
49. Binder, “Is the Humanitarian Failure in Haiti a System Failure?”
50. Seal and Bailey, “The 2011 Famine in Somalia.”
51. Dunn Cavelty, “The Socio-political Dimensions.”
52. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”
53. New humanitarian actors, such as the volunteer and technological communities, also pose particular challenges to humanitarian action. See Sandvik et al., “Humanitarian Technology.”
54. Cone, “The Promise of Social Media?”
55. Sandvik, “The Risks of Technological Innovation.”
56. Ibid.
57. See Collinson et al., “States of Fragility.”
58. Many countries with a history of human rights abuse now employ a range of surveillance technologies – such as Blue Coat Systems and FinFisher – that are capable of censorship, filtering and surveillance; the intent is to gather information to entrap and/or harass civil society actors, including humanitarian organisations. Marquis-Boire et al., Planet Blue Coat.
59. Moreover, countries may impose extensive information-sharing requirements on humanitarian organisations as a condition for issuing host-country agreements. For example, UNHCR does not have complete jurisdiction over the information it collects. Many governments – and not always for benevolent reasons – are interested in integrating UNHCR data into their own registries and surveillance systems. Lindskov Jacobsen, “Making Design Safe.”
60. Hosein and Nyst, Aiding Surveillance, 4.
61. “The New Data Landscape.” http://www.unglobalpulse.org/blog/new-data-landscape.
62. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”
63. Sandvik and Lohne, “The Rise of the Humanitarian Drone”; and Sandvik and Gabrielsen Jumbert, “Les drones humanitaires.”
64. Sandvik et al. “Humanitarian Technology.”
65. Brophy-Williams et al., “Technology and the Future of Humanitarian Action.”
66. See Ziemke, “Crisis Mapping.”
67. Crowdfunding in the humanitarian cyberspace is another example, which will not be discussed further in this article.
68. World Bank, Cash for Assets. But compare Gentilini, Our Daily Bread.
69. Collinson and Elhawary, Humanitarian Space.
70. OCHA, Stay and Deliver, 2.
71. Stoddard et al., Once Removed.
72. Duffield, Disaster Resilience.
73. Collinson and Duffield, Paradoxes of Presence.
74. Ibid., 8.
75. On a related note critics observe that there is currently a great deal of ‘technologising’ going on in the humanitarian space, where problems are redefined and reduced to questions of technological functionality and design. Abdelnour and Saeed, “Technologizing Humanitarian Space.”
76. Donini, The Golden Fleece.