Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

Humanitarian technology: a critical research agenda

New technology may offer many opportunities for humanitarian action, but it also presents a number of challenges. Currently, most of the critical analysis of these potential challenges takes place in the blogosphere, on tweets and on listservs. There is a strong need for more scholarly engagement on the subject. This article offers an agenda for critical inquiry into the emergent field of humanitarian technology as applied to a broadly defined context of crises, encompassing both natural disasters and conflict zones, by identifying what technology does to the humanitarian enterprise, and by reflecting on the key challenges that emerge.

The Rise of the Humanitarian Drone: Giving Content to an Emerging Concept:

This article explores and attempts to define the emerging concept of the humanitarian drone by critically examining actual and anticipated transfers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, from the global battlespace to the humanitarian emergency zone. Focusing on the relationship between the diffusion of new technology and institutional power, we explore the humanitarian drone as a ‘war dividend’ arising from the transfer of surveillance UAVs, cargo-carrying UAVs and weaponised UAVs. We then reflect on the ways in which military practices and rationales guiding drone deployment may also shape humanitarian use, giving particular attention to the concept of surgical precision, the implications of targeting logic, and the ambiguous role of distance. Next, we consider the broader implications for humanitarian action, including the promise of global justice and improved aid delivery. Finally, we analyse the most difficult aspect of the humanitarian drone: namely, its political currency as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ in conflict scenarios.

The humanitarian cyberspace: shrinking space or an expanding frontier?

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’.

Do no harm: A taxonomy of the challenges of humanitarian experimentation

This article aims to acknowledge and articulate the notion of “humanitarian experimentation”. Whether through innovation or uncertain contexts, managing risk is a core component of the humanitarian initiative – but all risk is not created equal. There is a stark ethical and practical difference between managing risk and introducing it, which is mitigated in other fields through experimentation and regulation. This article identifies and historically contextualizes the concept of humanitarian experimentation, which is increasingly prescient, as a range of humanitarian subfields embark on projects of digitization and privatization. This trend is illustrated here through three contemporary examples of humanitarian innovations (biometrics, data modelling, cargo drones), with references to critical questions about adherence to the humanitarian “do no harm” imperative. This article outlines a broad taxonomy of harms, intended to serve as the starting point for a more comprehensive conversation about humanitarian action and the ethics of experimentation.

The Reframing of the War on Drugs as a “Humanitarian Crisis”: Costs, Benefits, and Consequences:

The War on Drugs has had grave humanitarian consequences for Latin America. It has encouraged a highly militarized and ultimately unsuccessful approach to drug control, leading to violence, displacement, and human suffering throughout the region. In acknowledging and responding to this suffering, humanitarian organizations have recently begun to frame this situation as a “humanitarian crisis” to facilitate humanitarian entry into new spaces. There is a need for a conceptual conversation about the use of the label “humanitarian crisis” in reference to the human costs of the War on Drugs in Latin America, particularly its rhetorical and normative use by the media and civil society and its strategic and moral use by humanitarian actors. La Guerra contra las Drogas ha tenido grave consecuencias humanitarias para América Latina. Ha promovido un enfoque altamente militarizado y en última instancia fallido, para controlar las drogas, lo que ha provocado violencia, desplazamientos y sufrimiento humano a través de la región. Como reconocimiento y respuesta a este sufrimiento, las organizaciones humanitarias recientemente han empezado a plantear esta situación como una “crisis humanitaria” para así facilitar la entrada humanitaria en nuevos espacios. Es necesario que se dé una conversación teórica sobre el uso de la categoría “crisis humanitaria” en referencia a los costos humanos de la Guerra contra las Drogas en América Latina, especialmente su uso retórico y prescriptivo por parte de los medios de comunicación y la sociedad civil y su uso estratégico y moral por parte de los agentes humanitarios.

Gendering violent pluralism: women’s political organising in Latin America

ABSTRACT As a theory on violent democracies, the theory of violent pluralism is silent on the gendered realities of this violence as it plays out in Latin America. To bridge that knowledge gap, this article begins to develop a theory of the ‘gender of violent pluralism’. The article builds on socio-legal research on displaced women’s political organising in a violent context in Colombia (2010–2014) while also drawing on empirical examples of violence against women activists from Brazil, Central America and Mexico in the same period. The article proposes to unpack this concept as a three-pronged relationship between political organising and gendered violence: political organising as a response to gendered violence, gendered violence as an obstacle to organising and finally, political organising as a cause of further gender-based violence. Ultimately, the article is also an attempt to articulate a more general critique of the concept of violent pluralism – its conception of democracy, its possible erasure of the efforts of non-violent actors and how it calibrates the scope and intensity of political violence.

Regulating War in the Shadow of Law: Toward a Re-Articulation of ROE

The experiences of multinational engagements in Kosovo in the late 1990s, and then more recently Afghanistan from 2001 and Iraq from 2003, have led to a political debate about the linkage between legality and legitimacy. At the heart of contemporary political and academic discourses about war are questions about the scope and content of the law of armed conflict. Considerably less attention has been given to another mode of regulating warfare, namely Rules of Engagement (ROE), despite their operational significance. This article seeks to begin to bridge this knowledge gap by examining ROE as a means to achieving greater legal accountability for the use of force against civilians. To that end, the article aims to do two things: first, to use examples from the US and the multinational context to develop a typology of the various issues that might affect ROE adversely in a legal accountability perspective, either as a background context or through the deployment and use of ROE itself; and second, to look at ways of rearticulating ROE, setting them on a path toward a more standardized and judicialized form of accountability.

Worlds of Human Rights

Worlds of Human Rights presents ethnographic studies from Sub Saharan Africa that highlight how individuals and groups use human rights to achieve greater justice. It shows how struggles concerning land, property, gender equality and legal identity are shaped by contexts of history, power structures and legal pluralism.

UNHCR and the pursuit of international protection: accountability through technology?

Abstract Better management and new technological solutions are increasingly portrayed as the way to improve refugee protection and enhance the accountability of humanitarian actors. Taking concepts of legibility, quantification and co-production as the point of departure, this article explores how techno-bureaucratic practices shape conceptions of international refugee protection. We do this by examining the evolving roles of results-based management (RBM), biometrics and cash-based interventions as ‘accountability technologies’ in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ international protection efforts. The article challenges the assumption that these technologies produce a seamless form of accountability that is equally attentive to donor requests and the protection needs of refugees. By focusing on how the constitution of these techniques as ‘accountability solutions’ shapes conceptions of the very meaning of protection (ie the problem to be addressed), we also show what dimensions of protection get omitted in this co-production of technical solutions and socio-political problems.

Technology, Dead Male Bodies, and Feminist Recognition: Gendering ICT Harm Theory

Abstract Drawing on anthropology, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and critical masculinity studies, this article contributes to a theory of male harm by reflecting on examples of data-driven screening practices in refugee protection and targeting practices in drone strikes as a way of making sense of the relationship between technology and men’s suffering. The article identifies and unpacks the shifting composite of attention and dis-attention to male vulnerability and intersectionality residing at the heart of the gendered and racialised logic of screening and targeting. This logic produces distinctions between ‘protectable’ and ‘undesirable’ civilian bodies, where data-mediated masculinity emerges as a key attribute of this undesirability. The article ends by discussing possible methodological turns for developing a more conscious techno-legal feminism.