Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert

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.

Moving media and conflict studies beyond the CNN effect

After the ‘CNN effect’ concept was coined two decades ago, it quickly became a popular shorthand to understand media-conflict interactions. Although the connection has probably always been more complex than what was captured in the concept, research needs to be updated in order to better understand the multifaceted contemporary environments of both media and conflict. There are growing numbers and types of media sources, and multiple interactions between media and conflict actors, policymakers and engaged publics from the local to the global and back. We argue that understanding the impact of media reporting on conflict requires a new framework that captures the multilevel and hybrid media environments of contemporary conflicts. This study provides a roadmap of how to systematically unpack this environment. It describes and explains how different levels, interactions, and forms of news reporting shape conflicts and peacebuilding in local, national and regional contexts, and how international responses interact with multiple media narratives. With these tools, comprehensive understandings of contemporary local to global media interactions can be incorporated into new research on media and conflict.

How Sudan’s ‘rogue’ state label shaped US responses to the Darfur conflict: what’s the problem and who’s in charge?

Few conflicts have been subject to as much international attention and efforts at resolution as the conflict in Darfur between 2004 and 2009. In spite of these attempts, the situation in Darfur today can at best be qualified as an unresolved conflict. This article closely examines the ways in which the Sudanese state has been perceived and qualified in order to determine how the conflict was understood and how the state was approached by outsiders. As is shown, despite frequent descriptions of the nation as a ‘fragile’ or ‘failed’ state, throughout the conflict Sudan has primarily been approached as a ‘rogue’ state. The article argues that this distinction has led to the prioritisation of certain strategies based on ‘protection’ and ‘punishment’ over attempts to resolve the underlying causes of the conflict, something a more sophisticated understanding of the Sudanese state’s internal weaknesses and instability might have allowed.

Globalised rebellion: the Darfur insurgents and the world

This article is concerned with the rebellion in Darfur as a way to illustrate the politics of insurgency in the era of globalisation. We first show how the Darfur rebels have projected their struggle onto the world stage, before examining the effects that this has engendered. On the one hand, Darfur’s global profile solidified the rebels’ cause and co-opted international actors in support of it. This translated into real leverage for the rebels, and it constrained the Sudanese government by reducing its ability to use brute force. At the same time, internationalisation encouraged the Darfur rebels to make maximalist demands at the expense of articulating a broader political vision addressing the root causes of conflict. Moreover, the substitution of local legitimacy for international connections lowered the barriers of entry for new groups and thus promoted fragmentation. The combination of these effects makes for intractable conflict scenarios, the current situation in Darfur being a case in point.

The new informatics of pandemic response: humanitarian technology, efficiency, and the subtle retreat of national agency

Digital communication technologies play an increasingly prominent role in humanitarian operations and in response to international pandemics specifically. A burgeoning body of scholarship on the topic displays high expectations for such tools to increase the efficiency of pandemic response. This article reviews empirical uses of communications technology in humanitarian and pandemic response, and the 2014 Ebola response in particular, in order to propose a three-part conceptual model for the new informatics of pandemic response. This model distinguishes between the use of digital communication tools for diagnostic, risk communication, and coordination activities and highlights how the influx of novel actors and tendencies towards digital and operational convergence risks focusing humanitarian action and decision-making outside national authorities’ spheres of influence in pandemic response. This risk exacerbates a fundamental tension between the humanitarian promise of new technologies and the fundamental norm that international humanitarian response should complement and give primacy to the role of national authorities when possible. The article closes with recommendations for ensuring the inclusion of roles and agency for national authorities in technology-supported communication processes for pandemic response.

Drones como Veículos para a Ação Humanitária: Perspectivas, Oportunidades e Desafios

The paper addresses the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or drones, for humanitarian action. By analyzing the deployment and functions acquired by such technologies at the global level, the paper critically discusses and scrutinizes the increasingly frequent narratives linking drones as vehicles for humanitarian action and thus seeks to contribute and offer some inputs to this nascent and important debate.