For the past decade, calls for greater accountability, efficiency and crises anticipation in the humanitarian sector have led aid organizations to embrace data-driven governance and invest in an array of digital technologies, ranging from virtual reality and AI, to algorithms and automated facial recognition. This project examines how ‘digital humanitarianism’ is emerging as a field of knowledge, a community of practice and an arena of experimentation through the development of partnerships between humanitarian organisations, private corporations and scientific institutions.
To date, technological considerations have prevailed in discussions on humanitarian innovations, focusing on data science, management and engineering. While policy research on the use of digital technologies in relief operations is primarily concerned with assessing their alleged successes and failures, the present project, instead, considers the theoretical, practical and ethical issues related to the extensive reliance on digital technologies for detecting humanitarian needs, measuring vulnerability, and anticipating crises. Using anthropological research methods, this ethnographic study moves beyond inquiries seeking to evaluate what digital technologies do for humanitarian action and critically examines what they do to humanitarianism at large. It focuses on the assemblages of actors converging in ‘innovation hubs’ and examines the entanglements of capitalist, solutionist, and audit logics that inform their collaboration in the design of ‘techs for good’. It asks: what conception of ‘humanity’ and regimes of living are articulated at the intersection of philanthro-capitalism and digital humanitarianism? Conceiving digital innovations as the manifestation of a new mode of governing vulnerable populations at a distance, the central goal of the project is to better understand how scientific knowledge and corporate practices structure and influence humanitarian action and conversely, to explore how humanitarian action relies on such knowledge. It examines the entire design cycle of digital technologies, from ideation, to prototyping and testing.
To anticipate digital humanitarian futures, the research design combines anthropological theory and ethnographic inquiry with Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches to study the uneven expressions and local logics of knowledge, governmentalities, and the multiple meanings of “digital humanitarianism” in international sciences and policy networks, tech-philanthropies, scientific laboratories and humanitarian field operations. It is conducted by a team of anthropologists, that includes the PI, a postdoctoral fellow, a PhD student and two Ugandan researchers, across four sites: (1) Stanford University and the tech-philanthropies of the Silicon Valley, (2) the scientific laboratories of a Polytechnic school in Switzerland (EPFL), as well as (3) refugee settlements in Uganda and (4) Jordan. These sites have been selected for being important humanitarian innovation hubs while varying significantly in terms of the structure of their innovation ecosystems and their broader relation to economic and political developments. This project will be the first of its kind in anthropology to focus specifically on the making of digital humanitarianism and to engage theoretically with the concept of technological innovation. Within the social sciences, this project’s attention to the way digital humanitarianism is apprehended and enacted in an era of global climate change, protracted crises and diminishing financial resources will generate new empirical and theoretical insights into how digital technologies shape human-more than human relations and reconfigure the scope of humanitarian action. It will contribute to ongoing efforts at opening the debate on the social and political implications of digital humanitarianism in international policy circles.
Timeline: September 2025 - August 2029.
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