The Politics of Humanitarian Technology: Good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity 2015000648, 9781138022072, 9781315777276

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The Politics of Humanitarian Technology is a pathbreaking book on the use of new technologies in humanitarian crises. Eschewing the conventional view that technologies are neutral and largely beneficial to populations at risk, Jacobsen brilliantly outlines how humanitarian crises have emerged as laboratories for testing and experimenting new, and often problematic, technologies. Drawing together the work of Michel Foucault and science and technology studies, Jacobsen demonstrates how the ‘humanitarian-technology nexus’ enables complex and unequal enactments of power and privilege. Historically grounded and philosophically sophisticated, this is a brilliant intervention into the politics of humanitarianism. Peter Nyers, McMaster University, Canada Katja Jacobsen’s The Politics of Humanitarian Technology is a timely and profoundly important book. From satellite surveillance through to social media analysis and drone technology, donor governments and humanitarian aid agencies are enthusiastically and uncritically embracing new technology as a one-click solution to their growing problems. (With reference to refugee biometrics, GM food aid and rotavirus vaccination development, Jacobsen’s meticulously researched and cogently argued book challenges this optimism.) Not only is the global-South revealed as an unregulated commercial laboratory for techno-­ scientific experiments that would be politically difficult in the North, the resulting ‘humanitarian’ seal of approval is helping legitimate the planetary rollout of new and intrusive forms of global governance and bodily control built upon this experimentation. Amidst all the hype, The Politics of Humanitarian Technology is one of the few critical works to address these developments. It’s essential reading for anyone interested or concerned with the role of technology in an increasingly divided world. Mark Duffield, Emeritus Professor, University of Bristol, UK Jacobsen breathes new life into debates on humanitarian harm through a rich and novel analysis of the introduction of digital technologies to humanitarian practices. Focusing on the troubling political consequences that are suffered by already vulnerable subjects in the process of adopting biometrics and other digital technologies, Jacobsen exposes the extent to which the introduction of humanitarian technology is anything but neutral. This book deserves the full attention of anyone interested in the politics of humanitarianism and digital technologies in global politics. Benjamin J. Muller, King’s University College at Western University, Canada The Politics of Humanitarian Technology sheds light on the centrality of technology to humanitarian practices and asks us to attend to their insidious political effects. Through insightful empirical analyses of humanitarian experimentation and the production of ‘vile’ bodies as objects of experimentation, this book illuminates important changing dynamics of international politics. Claudia Aradau, King’s College London, UK

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The Politics of Humanitarian Technology

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 humani­ tarian 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 experi­ mented with in the three humanitarian endeavours presented in the book. In doing so, the book provides new information about aspects of liberal humanitari­ anism 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. Katja Lindskov Jacobsen is Assistant Professor in International Risk and Dis­ aster Management at Metropolitan University College, Denmark.

Routledge Studies in Conflict, Security and Technology Series Editors: Mark Lacy Dan Prince Sylvia Walby and Corinne May-­Chahal Lancaster University The Routledge Studies in Conflict, Technology and Security series aims to publish challenging studies that map the terrain of technology and security from a range of disciplinary perspectives, offering critical perspectives on the issues that concern publics, business and policymakers in a time of rapid and disruptive technological change. Nonlinear Science and Warfare Chaos, complexity and the U.S. military in the information age Sean T. Lawson Terrorism Online Politics, law, technology Edited by Lee Jarvis, Stuart Macdonald and Thomas M. Chen Cyber Warfare A multidisciplinary analysis Edited by James A. Green The Politics of Humanitarian Technology Good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

The Politics of Humanitarian Technology

Good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity Katja Lindskov Jacobsen

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Katja Lindskov Jacobsen The right of Katja Lindskov Jacobsen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-Publication Data Jacobsen, Katja Lindskov. The politics of humanitarian technology : good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity / Katja Lindskov Jacobsen.  pages cm. – (Routledge studies in conflict, security and technology) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Humanitarianism–Technological innovations. 2. Humanitarian assistance–Technological innovations. 3. Technology–Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. BJ1475.3.J34 2015 303.48′3–dc23 2015000648 ISBN: 978-1-138-02207-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-77727-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

Contents



Acknowledgements Foreword

1 Humanitarian technology

viii ix 1

2 Humanitarian challenges and new technologies

15

3 Theorising technology

36

4 Humanitarian biometrics

57

5 GM food aid and the molecular subject as political

88

6 Humanitarian vaccination, vilization and expansion of power

112

7 Humanitarian aspirations and technology expectations

130



152 177

Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements

A number of friends and colleagues have provided valuable support at various stages, from the maturing of ideas to the finalization of the book manuscript – many more than I can acknowledge here. Early in the process the patience, support and guidance offered by Cindy Weber and Mark Lacy was immensely important in helping me think through some of the broader questions that I address in this book. In the writing process, comments from reviewers and con­ ference participants who made the effort to engage with various aspects of the arguments that I make in this book have also been extremely helpful in terms of moving the project forward. In the later writing stage, three people have been of more help than I could have ever hoped: Carina Meyn, Nathalie Rigall and Maja Janmyr have all read individual draft chapters and have taken the time and effort to offer helpful comments and to engage in discussions with me about various arguments presented in this book. I am extremely grateful and thankful for your engagement and encouragement. Importantly, each of you also helped me not lose faith in the project. In this respect, I also owe much to David Chandler, Mark Duffield and Anna Leander. Their expression of interest in the project and their positive feedback also helped me maintain confidence in the project. I also want to thank David Chandler for writing a foreword to this book. It is a great honour to have the content of this book introduced with the words of such a dis­ tinguished scholar. None of these people are, of course, responsible for my argu­ ments, nor for my mistakes or omissions. Finally, and most importantly, it is difficult to put into words the significance of the unceasing support and patience of my closest friend and always-­preferred life companion, Martin. I am forever grateful and thankful for your support.

Foreword

The world of humanitarianism is undergoing fundamental change through the assistance of new technologies, held to be transforming international assistance in humanitarian emergencies. Science, new mobile technologies and Big Data are reputed to enable communities to prevent, cope with and to bounce back from humanitarian emergencies in ways that were impossible before. Human­ itarian actors, including United Nations agencies, international bodies and non-­ governmental organisations have all published official reports in which a broad range of new technologies – from Global Positioning Systems to mobile phones – are applauded on account of their empowering potential and their capacity to improve humanitarian tasks dealing with health emergencies, conflict preven­ tion, underdevelopment and disaster risk management. In today’s context, where new technologies are seen as increasingly central to the practices and even the meaning of humanitarian interventions in the global periphery, The Politics of Humanitarian Technology is required reading. Jacob­ sen cautions that new technologies call for a close examination of how human­ itarian interventions are understood to operate and suggests that new technologies should not be seen as providing easy solutions to difficult and complex problems. This book is about the politics of humanitarian technology: new technologies should not be understood as merely technical or neutral but that they have political implications which need to be taken into account in aca­ demic and policy analysis. The emphasis on the politics of humanitarian techno­ logy enables Jacobsen to draw a number of highly important insights from a range of case studies including the biometric monitoring of refugees, the use of GM-­modified maize as food aid and rotavirus vaccination programmes. Perhaps of most importance is the analytical framework deployed in the book, which seeks to take the materiality of technology seriously thorough combining insights from the work of Michel Foucault with approaches in the science and technology studies literature. This approach avoids seeing technology as having agency per se, while addressing the constitutive role of technology in human­ itarian practices and considering how these practices can constitute technologies as scientifically or ethically acceptable. Humanitarian practices are already deeply enmeshed within issues of power, politics and profitability, however, as Jacobsen powerfully argues, equipping humanitarian actors with new technologies

x   Foreword does not ameliorate the problem. New technology does not make humanitarian­ ism more scientific, objective or neutral. In fact, the application of new techno­ logy amplifies some problems rather than solving them. This problem of amplification can most clearly be seen in the ways in which the application of new technologies reproduces problems of bias and differentiation in the construction of some lives as more valued than others. Jacobsen powerfully contends that rather than a universal vision of human equality, humanitarian prac­ tices distinguish between the value of lives in the global core and lives in the global periphery. Humanitarian practices thus feed into a production of differently valued bodies considered subject to forms of intervention that would not be accept­ able to citizens in the global core. Examples are plentiful, from refugees forced into mandatory biometric surveillance, to experimental vaccine testing and to the provision of food aid considered unsafe for Western consumption. Here we have a reversal of the liberal view of humanitarianism – rather than Western actors intervening to protect the welfare of vulnerable victims in the global periphery, these humanitarian subjects are enrolled in the protection of those at the global core. As Jacobsen illustrates, humanitarian actors have been entirely complicit in the provision of untested technologies even where problems and vulnerabilities mitigate such practices. As fields for large scale testing and experimentation, humanitarian subjects can easily be seen as less valued as their lives and liberties are placed in jeopardy while humanitarian practices test and develop new technologies. The distinction between humanitarian aid and the exploitation of humanitarian subjects for testing and morally legitimising new technologies seems to be a fine one. The politics of humanitarian technology serves not only to amplify the exist­ ing problems of the imbrication of humanitarian practices within webs of power, interest and contestation but also to highlight how new technologies become constituted through these practices, especially through the opportunities pro­ vided for moral legitimisation and scientific testing. Problematic and contested technologies now become ‘humanitarianised’ and we have humanitarian drones, humanitarian Big Data, humanitarian GM crops and humanitarian biometric sur­ veillance. Thus technologies considered problematic, unethical and dangerous or untested in Western society have received both normative and scientific affirma­ tion through their embedding within humanitarian practices. Jacobsen provides a great service in problematising the assumptions made by both the humanitarian and the tech communities. There is a powerful humanitarian– technology nexus through which humanitarian actors assert that new technolo­ gies enable humanitarianism to become more efficient, neutral and uncorrupted and technology companies assert that the deployment of new technologies in the humanitarian field demonstrates that they are neutral, positive and beneficial to humanity. This book punctures both sides of this equation and highlights the dangers of this nexus for understandings of both humanitarianism and of the role of technology. The problematisation of the politics of humanitarian technology is not merely an academic or conceptual matter. A failure to grasp the politics of humanitarian

Foreword   xi technology can have lasting consequences for humanitarianism itself. This is because new technologies are increasingly constitutive of the ways in which humanitarian problems are seen and grasped. As Jacobsen highlights, new technologies are productive in extending the field of humanitarian intervention in certain ways, previously thought to be infeasible or not cost effective, thus constituting new fields of action and new entities to be governed. Rather than merely understanding technology as a neutral means to an end, this book opens up the urgent political and ethical implications of understanding technology as constitutive of humanitarian practices and meanings. David Chandler

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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

2   Humanitarian technology 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

Humanitarian technology   3 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

4   Humanitarian technology 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.

Humanitarian technology   5 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

6   Humanitarian technology 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 perpe­ trators 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

Humanitarian technology   7 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’ stemming from humanitarianisms entanglement with violent conflict dynamics, other important dimensions of this current humanitarian turn to new technologies cannot be understood apart from another important context, namely a history of harm stemming from humanitarian uses of variously experimental technologies. Zones in the colonial periphery have been used as zones of experimentation, with examples ranging from experiments with town planning to medical trials (Anderson 1992). As Lara Marks notes about the history of oral contraceptive pills: ‘the initial field studies with women were conducted in Puerto Rico, an American Colony’ (2005: 209). And often such practices were understood as cases of ‘humane’ colonial governance (Lester and Dussart 2014). This historical legacy arguably helps us recognise the continued importance of remaining critical of the risk that the impulse of care can come with harmful effects – and of the risk that humanitarian technology uses can become entangled with practices of control when the technologies being tested are subsequently used as technologies of power that expands governance into additional domains of human existence (such as in the case of contraception). As such, the history of

8   Humanitarian technology peripheral experimentation constitutes an important historical legacy whose continued relevance will be further unfolded throughout this book. Disremembering this history of humanitarian harm Yet, in the context of the recent humanitarian turn to new digital technology – also referred to as ‘digital humanitarianism’ (Conneally 2011) or ‘cyber humanitarianism’ (Duffield 2013) – concerns about humanitarian endeavours having harmful effects seem to have faded in official accounts of the plethora of opportunities that such digital technologies allegedly offer the humanitarian community (IFRC 2014; OCHA 2013). As will be described in greater detail throughout this book, humanitarian actors increasingly represent new digital technologies as solutions through which to overcome some of the challenges that they confront – but commonly in ways that fail to recall how humanitarianism’s history bears witness to various ‘downsides’ and harmful effects. As will, for example, be described in Chapter 4, UNHCR have introduced new biometric registration technologies on the assumption that such technologies are capable not only of improving humanitarian efficiency, but also of bringing enhanced accountability, for example, by using biometric technology to ensure that refugees only receive assistance packages once and that funds thus reach the largest possible number of intended beneficiaries: ‘To prevent ‘double-­dipping,’ the UNHCR is using computerised iris-­recognition technology in refugee camps in Pakistan’s west to identify and register returnees’ (UN News Centre 2004). But in the midst of such optimism about the plethora of opportunities that new technologies are said to offer, the above legacy helps us appreciate how important questions remain unaddressed: in what sense was the issue of ‘double-­ dipping’ the biggest identification challenge that humanitarians confronted? How do unprecedentedly accurate biometric technologies help humanitarians respond to other crucial problems, such as those of causing harm by feeding rebels? What new difficulties may the use of experimental biometric technologies occasion? And, more generally, on what grounds should we expect new technology to resolve problems of humanitarian endeavours potentially causing harm? These are questions that, in a certain sense, illustrate one important shortcoming that comes with this failure to situate the issue of humanitarian technology in the context of the legacy of humanitarianism’s entanglement with violent conflict dynamics when addressing and framing the issue of humanitarian technology. And as this history of humanitarian entanglement with violent conflict dynamics also suggests, there is a certain persistence to the phenomenon of humanitarian endeavours having harmful effects, which arguably makes it difficult to maintain that such effects are best understood as insignificant. And, what is more, accounts of ‘unintended consequences’ of humanitarian practices have increased beyond the context of refugee camps. We have, for example, seen accounts of harmful effects in a number of other humanitarian contexts, from peacekeeping operations (Aoi, de Coning and Thakur 2007) to long-­term ‘state-­humanitarian’ development assistance (Wiig and Holm-­Hansen 2014; U-­landsnyt 2014).

Humanitarian technology   9 So  although the potential for humanitarian efforts to alleviate human suffering should not be neglected altogether, this book suggests that negative effects of even well-­intentioned humanitarian efforts should neither be disregarded nor disremembered – instead, this history should be brought to bear on current debates about humanitarian technology. An intense sense of optimism may not be the only cause for the history of humanitarian harm fading and losing its apparent importance as a legacy of relevance to present day humanitarian practices. What is more, proponents of the liberal view of history and humanitarianism may well disagree with this suggestion that humanitarian harm and humanitarian experimentation are to be recognised as important parts of the context within which to address the issue of humanitarian technology and may, of course, argue otherwise – e.g. by insisting that cases of humanitarian experimentation and examples of humanitarian practices that have unintentionally caused harm are nothing more than a few exceptions to the broader picture of humanitarian good-­doing, and therefore neither representative of nor a challenge to the more profound progress in global politics which humanitarian sentiments (and the kinds of endeavours that such sentiments give rise to) epitomise. Indeed, it may seem a convincing argument that although some accidents and negative consequences do come about, the benefits of humanitarian efforts by far outweigh the risk of negative effects, and that, therefore, we should conclude that ‘the humanitarian movements that have gathered momentum since the Enlightenment will continue to make progress’ and that ‘most likely . . . violence against women, human trafficking, the beating and bullying of children, . . . will continue to decline, albeit bumpily and unevenly, over a span of decades’ (Pinker 2011). This idea of humanitarianism and a global sentiment of care as indubitable signs of progress, detached from questions of power and control, is certainly a powerful and often-­voiced position. Of course, there are ‘better angles’ (Pinker 2011) to human impulses and actions, and indeed, the humanitarian aim of ‘alleviating suffering globally’ (ICRC) is a laudable objective which it is difficult to argue against. And, indeed, the benefits of humanitarianism are often stressed through references to the shortcomings of the idea of states as guarantors of security in a global political landscape based on the principle of sovereignty. We only need to look at Syria to see one example of the shortcomings of state sovereignty as security. But, as the following section suggests, the second reason why we should care about humanitarian technology is that such a focus can help us appreciate an important sense in which humanitarian practices (as with humanitarian discourses) do not necessarily offer an alternative to this view of sovereign power and state security.

The politics of technology as constituted and constitutive Now, as already alluded to, the second reason why humanitarian technology should be of interest only becomes recognisable if we begin from a specific conception of technology. Indeed, the suggestion put forward in this book is that we

10   Humanitarian technology need not only place the issue of humanitarian technology in the context of historical legacies. We also need to frame our analyses through a concept of technology that allows us to recognise not just the more familiar risk of failure in the context of experimental technology uses (and the risk that such failures may translate into humanitarian failures), but also the kinds of risks that transpire as a result of how technologies affect and are affected by these humanitarian uses. What the book suggests is that one way of thinking about these constitutive effects is through the idea of risks stemming from success: humanitarian technology uses may feed into the constitution of an otherwise controversial technology as successful, and this may then feed into arguments in favour of a more widespread roll-­out of technologies that for various reasons have confronted opposition and controversy. Not only does the humanitarian use affect the social constitution of a new technology in these and other ways. At the same time, technologies can also affect the construction of social relations – in other words, technology is not only constituted (in social practices that also unfold outside seemingly impenetrable laboratory walls), but technology also has a degree of vibrant, constitutive agency (Bennett 2010) capable of influencing the construction of social identities and relations. And, as will be illustrated in each of the three case studies, additional forms of harm can transpire in the context of these co-­constitutive processes. In order to develop a framework that can help us appreciate the sense in which technology is political and the relevance of this in a humanitarian context, Chapter 3 combines insights from the work of Michel Foucault with insights from the Science and Technology Studies literature, as the basis for a conceptualisation of technology through which we can begin to explore and appreciate the relevance of constitutive processes in the context of humanitarian technology uses. The logic of this theoretical move can perhaps be made more accessible by placing it in the context of a somewhat more familiar and commonly rehearsed argument from the discipline of International Relations: state identities are constructed in social relations between states and a specifically constricted identity has implications upon these relations (upon the conduct of international relations). And what this book suggests is that this is also true for technology: technologies and knowledge derived from technologies are also constructed in social relations – not just ones that unfold in sealed-­off laboratories but also in the context of humanitarian technology uses (as well as state uses, industry uses, etc.). And at the same time the construction of a technology in a specific capacity (e.g. as normatively acceptable) has implications for these relations (e.g. for the conduct of humanitarianism, the exercise of state authority, etc.).

The structure of the book In the next chapter we shall explore the concept of humanitarianism in greater detail by focusing our attention on humanitarian technology uses within three important contexts: a more recent history of critical debates about humanitarian neutrality and the potential for negative side effects of even well-­intentioned

Humanitarian technology   11 humanitarian endeavours; a longer history of what I refer to as humanitarian experimentation; and a conceptual revision of the very notion of technology, notably with attention to questions of agency. In Chapter 3, we shift the focus to an exploration of the question of how to conceptualise technology. More specifically, I introduce a number of insights from Michel Foucault, Science and Technology Studies and Grégoire Chamayou – insights that I then use to develop an analytical framework through which to explore the role of technology in humanitarian contexts. In the three subsequent Chapters (4, 5 and 6) this framework is then applied in my reading of three selected case studies: iris recognition applied on an unprecedentedly large scale in the context of refugee repatriation, the delivery of genetically modified (GM) maize approved for animal feed as humanitarian food aid, and the administration of controversial rotavirus vaccine candidates. Each of the case studies can be read in their own right and without engaging in the more theoretical elaboration of how technology can be conceptualised when seeking to explore the potential implications of humanitarian technology uses. These cases have been selected on the basis of three criteria. Humanitarian diversity The three cases represent different forms of intervention, and different places of intervention, ranging from the management of returnees outside refugee camps (iris scanning of Afghan returnees), through the delivery of assistance to populations inside refugee camps (GM food aid), to humanitarian vaccination programmes administered to populations ‘beyond’ camps (rotavirus vaccines). When seeking to shed light on the complexities of contemporary humanitarianism – including how technology is introduced and with what implications – these ‘humanitarian diversities’ seemed helpful, indeed necessary, to include. Now, let’s elaborate a bit more on the difference between humanitarian actors. First of all, it is worth commenting on the more obvious difference between intergovernmental organisations and non-­governmental organisations. The difficulty that characterises humanitarian intergovernmental organisation, such as the United Nations, is that whilst they have a humanitarian focus (i.e. a focus on security that differ from that of states) their structure nevertheless implies a certain association with member state policies and priorities. On the other hand, humani­ tarian non-­governmental organisations (NGOs), i.e. non-­profit voluntary groups of individuals not affiliated with government policies, arguably have a stronger basis for maintaining a claim to independence in their humanitarian work. However, this also entails difficulties whether due to funding difficulties or confrontation with state policies with implications for the realisation and reach of NGO humanitarianism. In short, even NGOs do not operate from a position of isolation from state policies. Even if ties to state policies and security priorities, for example, due to funding structures, may be more pronounced for some humanitarian actors than for others, this book still maintains that no humanitarian actors can claim to operation in isolation from power. For one thing, even if humanitarian actors do not receive funding from states and in that sense can

12   Humanitarian technology claim to be independent, this still does not mean that their activities are not political – as we have seen, whether funded by states or not, whether considered a strategic part of a military strategy or not, humanitarian practices can still be expected to have an impact on local power dynamics and in that sense they are not isolated from politics. So the point to recall as we consider the issue of humanitarian technology uses is that all humanitarian actors operate in a space defined by different power dynamics – yet humanitarian actors’ relation to these power dynamics can take many forms, with varying consequences for the humanitarian objective of offering alleviation from suffering. Now, two more things must be said. First of all, this distinction is more complex on the ground as NGOs serve as implementing partners or operational partners to the UNHCR in ways that sometimes make it difficult to distinguish one type of humanitarian actor from another. For example, when an explicitly critical NGO such as MSF run clinics in a UNHCR camp setting where ‘relief kits donated by UNHCR’ are distributed by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) who has often been criticised by NGOs, e.g. with reference to how its presence ‘have the effect of prolonging untenable state policies and practices’ and of providing ‘an alternative agency for states where they prefer to avoid their human rights obligations’ (Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 2003). Certainly, recent instances of humanitarian organisations being targeted – often motivated by anti-­western sentiments – lends support to the significance of noticing that such distinctions between different kinds of humanitarian actors seem hard to maintain in practice, with implications for humanitarian actors across the board. Not only the UN has been critiqued for having too close ties to donor policies and targeted for that reasons – e.g. in Iraq but also more recently when ‘anti-­UN protest’ hit South Sudan (BBC News). Red Cross, MSF and other humanitarian NGOs with greater independence from donor policies have also been targeted. MSF has recently revealed details of an attack on a camp in South Sudan and both organisations have had to deal with kidnappings of staff members. Second, ties to government policies are only one sense in which humanitarian organisations are political in ways that may give rise to negative effects. In addition to neutrality in the sense of independence from donor politics, humanitarians also need to consider how their endeavours may not be neutral but rather affect and be affected by a number of other factors including local conflict dynamics, discourses, and in relation to the working of power understood more broadly, also vis-­à-vis the use of technology. Technology may, for example, impact the more subtle difference between humanitarians that work in a more or less close proximity to beneficiaries, with implications for empathy (Duffield 2013) but also for more tangible things such as their ability to observe if negative effects surface locally. We shall elaborate more on this in the following chapters. Given these significant variations, generalisations about ‘humanitarians’ necessarily ‘include many exceptions’ (Lischer 2005: 144). And, crucially, the aim of this book is not to make any generalisations about ‘humanitarians’ but, rather, to suggest that we approach the issue of humanitarian technology in the context of a broader exploration of the very notion of humanitarianism, including

Humanitarian technology   13 its history, its diverse range of actors as well as debates about its delimitation and acceptable use. And not only are there significant differences between humanitarian actors, there are also important differences between donor states and their funding practices and strategies. Since 9/11, some humanitarian donors (notably the US but also EU) have, for example, tied their humanitarian funding more closely to new counter-­terror laws and policies than others (Mackintosh and Duplat 2013) and this is another important nuance to consider when contemplating the issue of humanitarian risks and technology uses. Indeed, it is a point that we shall return to in the next chapter, as well as in our analysis of biometric refugee registration and in the concluding chapter. Different types of technology/knowledge When deciding how to explore this issue of humanitarian technology, one could have chosen to go into detail with three different cases of medical technologies/ inventions being tested in different humanitarian settings. However, a main ambition of this book has been to explore the breadth of the kinds of technologies being experimented with in different ways in a variety of humanitarian settings. For that reason an important selection criteria was that the three cases had to involve different kinds of technologies. Accordingly, the case studies include: a case of a new medical invention, a new product of biotechnology, and a case of new biometric registration technology. This diversity in the type of technologies being considered in the three cases, gives us a favourable position from which to begin an exploration of how the contemporary humanitarian turn to new digital technologies may form part of a longer history of experimentation with other types of technologies. In other words, this combination of cases helps us move the more familiar argument about experimentation and risks being ‘offshored’ to the global periphery, from the domain of medicine to analyses of humanitarian technology uses more broadly. An important point to stress in the context of this book is that, when using new technologies, humanitarian actors need to be aware not only of the risks of failures but also of the risks that may stem from the constitutive effects upon political order and identity. Controversy Each case study deals with a controversial technology. Rotavirus vaccine spurred controversy because early uses of the vaccine had given rise to undesirable side effects, e.g. intussusception (a rare type of bowel obstruction, see Chapter 6). Genetically modified food was (and still is) a controversial topic, and the StarLink maize was surrounded by particularly high levels of controversy in the US since the maize, which was only approved for animal feed, had ‘escaped’ into the human food supply. And, finally, biometric technology (e.g. fingerprinting, face recognition, iris recognition, voice recognition) is also surrounded by much controversy; a number of critics have, for example, raised concerns about the privacy implications of this new registration technology. The fact that each case

14   Humanitarian technology study deals with a controversial technology allows us to explore the question of how the normative authority of ‘humanitarianism’ may potentially affect the acceptance of these technologies as normatively agreeable insofar as their use in humanitarian contexts helps provide success stories about their ability to further humanitarian objective (e.g. to deliver food to starving populations). The limitation to this selection is, of course, that the cases presented in this book will not be able to shed much light on the equally important question of humanitarian uses of less-­controversial technology. However, the important point to stress is that in our exploration of these three case studies the main focus will not be the questions of how or whether such ‘experimental humanitarian endeavours’ contribute to the constitution of ‘scientific facts’ in the narrow sense of the term. Rather, the main focus of the book is the question of how these humanitarian practices contribute to the social constitution of specific – new and controversial – technology as normatively acceptable. We shall elaborate on this point in the theory chapter, in which key insights from Science and Technology Studies will be introduced. Thus, in short, the focus of this book is that the recent turn to technology in the humanitarian community cannot be understood apart from three important contexts: recent debates about negative effects (whether from entanglements with local power dynamics or too close ties to donor policies); a history of experimentation; and a revised notion of technology (and agency). These are the contexts that we shall now elaborate on before we turn to our three case studies. Thus a paradox emerges if the humanitarian desire to find comfort in a position as righteous ‘good doer’ comes at the expense of neglecting potentially negative effects of even well intentioned engagements. The use of new technology by humanitarian actors should be understood as feeding into this paradox, not as offering a solution. When thinking about how to approach the issue of humanitarian technology, this book suggests that we are better placed if we recall rather than neglect a degree of hesitancy that has been linked to humanitarianism since time immemorial, as suggested by Chamayou through this quote: ‘I love only charity . . . but I am afraid, nonetheless, that I am not fundamentally good’ (2012: 84) – an expression of a sense of humanitarian hesitancy that we shall return to throughout this book.

Notes 1 Such as Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems and Global Impact; Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, and International Humanitarian Technology Conference. 2 Since the late 1990s, critical scholars have referred to many of the settings in which humanitarian practices unfold as ‘complex political emergencies’ (Duffield 1996; Goodhand 1999) or just ‘complex emergencies’ (Keen 2008). 3 With reference to these humanitarian efforts in Zaire, it has been argued that humanitarian practices may not just feed into conflict dynamics in ways that have harmful effects – an even more critical argument is that humanitarian assistance can actually be ‘a cause of conflict’ (Lischer 2003).

2 Humanitarian challenges and new technologies

In appreciation of a history of harm, conflict and power dynamics Before we explore the issue of ‘humanitarian technology’ it is important first to dwell on the notion of humanitarianism itself. Indeed, the notion of humanitari­ anism has been the subject of much debate. In what follows, we shall explore two aspects of this debate that are of particular relevance to the issue of humani­ tarian technology, namely the normative powers of ‘humanitarianism’ and a history of humanitarian harm with a focus on two aspects: a history of humani­ tarian harm stemming from entanglements with conflict dynamics (with various examples of how even well-­intentioned humanitarian endeavours can cause harm, for example, by feeding belligerents and consequently prolonging violent conflict) and a history of humanitarian harm stemming from variously experi­ mental technology uses. This two-­fold history of harm should be recognised, so this book argues, as another important backdrop against which to frame our current thinking about humanitarian technology uses. As implied in this atten­ tion to the powers of humanitarianism as well as to history as providing exam­ ples of various instances of humanitarian harm, the way in which this book conceptualises humanitarianism differs from the idea of humanitarianism as an ‘external’ and ‘neutral’ response to harm – in isolation from conflict dynamics, power and harm. Indeed, by calling attention to the power and history of entan­ glement with harm and conflict dynamics, the book does not intend to engage in debates about whether humanitarianism can be separated from politics (Weiss 1999: 22) but, rather, it seeks to add to a somewhat different type of considera­ tion, the aim of which is to contribute to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between humanitarianism and politics – and the consequences thereof (Duffield et al. 2001: 269). And from this perspective, we can then begin to formulate a series of questions through which to frame our exploration of the different ways in which ‘humanitarianism’ is linked to politics and conflict dynamics – with specific attention to the various procedures involved in forging such linkages. But, of course, to simply acknowledge that humanitarianism cannot be sepa­ rated from politics and conflict dynamics does not, in itself, offer any solutions – it

16   Humanitarian challenges only just offers a starting point from which to engage with an important set of issues, including questions of what kind of politics humanitarianism is entangled with, and with what implications for humanitarian technology uses. The normative power of the humanitarian language Humanitarianism is commonly defined as a commitment to protect human life and to prevent or alleviate human suffering, wherever such may be found (Red Cross, cited in Slim 1997: 345).1 And, indeed, this is a very powerful idiom; the normative power of the humanitarian language has, for example, been of central importance in the history of a specific humanitarian actor, namely the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its position as a moral guardian (Hammerstad 2014: 11; see also Loescher 2001).2 But insofar as the humanitarian idiom is accepted as epitomising a morally irrefutable ambition (the alleviation of human suffering globally) – as allowing for an ‘extra-­political ethics’ (Zehfuss 2012: 863) – then this powerful language also comes with a crit­ ical flipside: different actors have laid claims to this extra-­political moral high ground, with one such actor being the sovereign state. During the 1990s, various ‘humanitarian interventions’ provide illustrative examples of how states used the normative powers of ‘humanitarianism’ to confer legitimacy upon intervention­ ist endeavours – for example, in the case of military action in Bosnia being framed within a ‘humanitarian responsibility discourse’ (Hansen 2013: 113; Campbell 1998) and there are many other examples including ‘the use of human­ itarian arguments for an imperialist war against Iraq’ (Burke 2004: 350). Indeed, more generally, since the mid-­1990s ‘policy-­makers have increasingly claimed to be guided by humanitarian principles’ (Chandler 2001: 678). As such, one flipside to the normative powers of humanitarian language is that this power can help justify security practices whose main objective is not in accordance with humanitarian aims of alleviating suffering wherever it may be found, i.e. the normative power of humanitarianism can both give humanitarian actors (such as UNHCR) a powerful position (Hammerstad 2014) but, as illustrated above it does at the same time also represent a type of power that humanitarianism is in many ways haunted by. And in view of flipsides such as this potential for humanitarianism’s normative powers to confer legitimacy upon violently interventionist state endeavours, it was pointed out more than 10 years ago that: ‘the language of humanitarianism must be clarified’ (Duffield et al. 2001). In addition to the continued relevance of this call, our focus in this book on humanitarian technology uses brings attention to another important dimension: besides these examples of how states have used a humanitarian language to confer legitimacy upon military interventions, the normative power of the humanitarian language can also play a significant role in the context of techno­ logy uses, for example, by ‘helping’ confer normative legitimacy upon otherwise controversial technologies such as UAVs, more commonly referred to as drones  or biometric registration technologies like fingerprinting or iris scans

Humanitarian challenges   17 (see Chapter 4). In Chapter 4 we will, for example, see how humanitarian uses of biometric technologies in refugee registration feeds into a production of success stories, which in turn can help confer normative legitimacy upon this somewhat controversial technology. And in the next chapter, we shall elaborate on a con­ ceptualisation of technology, which offers a framework through which to combine these critical insights about the normative powers of the humanitarian language, with analytical insights about the kinds of constitutive processes that transpire in the context of technology uses – also in humani­tarian settings. In recognition of the significance of this type of power, another difficult ques­ tion emerges: how to delimit the proper use of this powerful language? Humani­ tarian actors have indeed sought to clarify the notion of humanitarianism and restrict its proper use by defining a more specific set of intentions and practices. In 1994, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a Code of Conduct, which specified ‘a set of guiding principles for organizations involved in humanitarian activities’ (1994), i.e. principles that also specify what is not ‘proper’ humanitarian action: ‘We shall endeavour not to act as instru­ ments of government foreign policy. NGHAs [non-­governmental humanitarian agencies] are agencies which act independently from governments’ (1994), by way of contrast, the principle of ’humanity’ takes the place of politics and parti­ ality on the basis that: ‘our obligation to provide humanitarian assistance wher­ ever it is needed’ (1994). Insofar as ‘true’ humanitarian actors are defined by their adherence to these principles, it would seem difficult for states to success­ fully lay claim to the extra-­political power of the humanitarian language. In this sense, these ‘humanitarian principles’ should help clarify humanitarian language by offering a foundation with reference to which it would be possible to distin­ guish ‘true’ humanitarian actors (NGOs who have signed up to these guidelines)3 from other actors seeking to sponge off the normative powers of humanitarian language. To ‘become a signatory to the code’ a request must be filed to the ICRC and thus by establishing, and to some extent monitoring, a set of prin­ ciples that any actor claiming to act in the name of humanitarianism must adhere to, it should be possible to distinguish humanitarian responses to human suffer­ ing from other forms of assistance. However, during the 1990s critics increasingly argued that humanitarian actors themselves often fail to live up to these laudable principles. Critics called attention to a range of practices that tie humanitarian actors to state policies and priorities in ways that make it difficult to maintain the definition of humanitarian actors as ‘neutral’ and impartial. One specific issue was that of funding: if the language of humanitarianism should only apply to actors who adhere to the ICRC-­defined principles, then various funding practices arguably raise problems. Strategies of ‘humanitarian’ state funding vary enormously and whilst ‘earmark­ ing’ is not endorsed by all states, it is sufficiently widespread to merit closer attention (Duffield et al. 2001: 270; Väyrynen 2001) as a funding practice that challenges humanitarian principles. Earmarking is a funding strategy whereby donor states exert considerable influence on humanitarian priorities by tying their funding to specific objectives and strategic priorities: ‘rather than delegating

18   Humanitarian challenges responsibility for resource allocation to multilateral organizations by providing unearmarked funds, official donors now wish to influence more precisely how, where and on what their money is spent’ (Macrae and Harmer 2004: 4).4 And similar concerns are expressed in a briefing from the Humanitarian Policy Group about the ways in which ‘funding to UN agencies has been subject to greater earmarking, reducing multilaterals’ room for independent manoeuvre’ (Reindorp and Schmidt 2002: 1). As will become clear throughout the book, awareness of these debates about  ‘earmarking’ form an important part of the context within which to approach the issue of humanitarian technology. For example, as will be explained in Chapter 4, earmarking and donor demands constitute an important aspect of the context within which to situate the recent turn to biometric techno­ logy in humanitarian refugee registration. Now, it should also be said that in addition to this issue of earmarking, today’s humanitarian state funding is in some cases also tied to security prior­ ities of donor states in an additional sense, namely through the influence of new counter-­terror legislation. In July 2013, a report was published on this subject of how ‘Donor Counter-­Terrorism Measures’ impact on ‘Principled Humanitarian Action’ (Mackintosh and Duplat 2013).5 Zooming in on two case studies, namely Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, it assesses how the anti-­terror laws of the US, UK, EU and Australia, among others, ‘designed to prevent inter­ national support to groups deemed terrorist organizations’ affect humanitarian activities in these two locations. As the report points out, aid agencies operating in these contexts are extremely concerned about the risk of coming into conflict with the counter-­terrorism legislation of their donors: certain donor counter-­terrorism measures have presented humanitarian actors with a serious dilemma. If we abide by our principles, we may break the law and face criminal prosecution. Adherence to some counter-­terrorism laws and measures may require us to act in a manner inconsistent with these principles. (Foreword by Valerie Amos and Toril Brekke in Mackintosh and Duplat 2013)6 Current humanitarian operations in Syria powerfully illustrate another example of how counter-­terror laws affect humanitarian efforts. Under US law (US Patriot Act), ‘material support’ is defined as any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safe houses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explo­ sives, personnel (one or more individuals who may be or include oneself ), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials. (Mackintosh and Duplat 2013: 40)

Humanitarian challenges   19 With such expansive definitions it becomes difficult for humanitarian actors to deliver aid to civilians in areas that are not under government control, due to concerns that any activity in rebel held areas can come into conflict with this definition of what constitutes illegal ‘material support’ to terrorists. Indeed, humanitarian actors are even concerned that purchasing food or other items at a local market could be considered ‘material support’.7 By way of closing this brief discussion of the normatively powerful humani­ tarian language, of efforts at delimiting the rightful claims to this language and of some of the difficulties that such efforts have encountered, one important point must be stressed: rather than seeking to provide a strict definition of the term, the approach taken here is that these attempts to delimit the proper use of the humanitarian language and the simultaneous occurrence of practices (e.g. funding practice) that challenge this delimitation – i.e. these disagreements about the scope of the humanitarian language and the claims by different actors to act in its name – should be approached as an important part of the analysis. And, as noted above, this is also the case in relation to the issue of humanitarian techno­ logy uses, as various actors (non-­government, governments, industries and sci­ ences) aspire to represent a range of technology uses through the normatively powerful humanitarian language. We shall return to this issue of the power of humanitarian language in each of our case study analyses. That said, other critics have argued that another reason why humanitarianism is best understood, not as distinct from, but rather as (more or less) closely tied to state policies and prior­ ities is to be discerned at the level of discourse. Put differently, the power of humanitarianism is to be understood as more than ‘just’ a question of language. Humanitarian discourse: more than a matter of language As defined by Michel Foucault, discourse is something more than language in the sense that a discourse refers to the ‘ready-­made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination, those links whose validity is recognised from the outset’ upon which meaningful language depends (Foucault 1969). Through analyses of the composition of humanitarian discourse, critics have argued that humanitarianism and state policies are linked at the level of dis­ course, for example, where the discourse of humanitarianism relies upon a con­ ception of ‘valuable life’ which corresponds to (rather than challenges) state categorizations that are based on a discriminatory logic of security (Foucault 2003). Whereas sovereign security is premised upon the power to enforce authoritative distinctions between lives worthy of protection and lives that can legitimately be killed in the name of security (Foucault 2003), humanitarianism is commonly seen as epitomizing an alternative ‘perspective on how best to protect human life’; for example, in the form of a commitment to offer protec­ tion to individuals whose safety cannot be guaranteed by sovereign states’ dis­ courses and violent survival strategies (Feldman and Ticktin 2010: 2). However, when discursive convergences are unveiled a paradox emerges; state policies are informed not only by goals that differ from humanitarian principles, but by goals

20   Humanitarian challenges that may at times contradict humanitarian incentives. And in view of this paradox, Grégoire Chamayou has recently reminded us that such convergences of humanitarian and state discourses on valuable human life should prompt humanitarian actors to revisit the question of what protection those who are expelled from the protective order can enjoy (2012: 135).8 One scholar who has illuminated such discursive dimensions of the link between humanitarianism and sovereign power is Giorgio Agamben. As Miriam Ticktin notes ‘contemporary debate about biopolitics and humanitarianism . . . relies heavily on work done by political philosopher Giorgio Agamben’ (2006: 33) who in turn draws upon the work of Foucault.9 Through analyses of the dis­ course within which ‘worthy’ human life gets defined, Agamben shows how humanitarian discourse relies upon and partakes in the production of a notion of valuable life that corresponds to that of the sovereign imagination (Agamben 1998). Agamben refers to this correspondence as a ‘secret solidarity’ (1998: 133) and others have made similar arguments with reference to ‘functional solidarity’ (Agier 2010: 5), an ‘osmosis between humanitarianism, the military and politi­ cians’ (Douzinas 2007) or a ‘contract of mutual (in)difference’ between sover­ eign rule and the ‘humanitarian apparatus’ (Pandolfi 2003: 371) – arguments that can be interpreted as evidence of how this link arguably constitutes an important feature of the contemporary political landscape in which ‘humanitarian actors now work closely with states’ (Barnett 2005: 723). More generally, analytical attention to constitutive processes at the level of discourse has become fairly widespread in critical analyses of humanitarian­ ism.10 An important body of literature has, for example, uncovered how, at the level of discourse; humanitarianism partakes in the production (rather than questioning) of ‘hierarchies of humanity’ (Fassin 2010), i.e. of differentially valued forms of life (Douzinas 2007; Helal 2014). And others have shown how humanitarian discourse in certain respects parallels the broader post-­9/11 dis­ course of securitization where refugees and terrorists become amalgamated (Bigo 2002)11 and, more generally, critics have pointed out how humanitarian discourse entails not only a discursive rendering of certain forms of life as undesirables (Agier 2010), wasted life (Bauman 2003) or surplus populations (Duffield 2007), but also of ‘peripheral’ forms of life as dangerous and as potentially necessitating/legitimating new forms of control (Dillon and Reid 2001) or containment (Duffield 2007). Julian Reid has for example used insights from discourse analysis to frame an exploration of what he refers to as the ‘biopoliticization of humanitarianism’ (2010; see also Nyers 2006). And insofar as humanitarianism is rendered subordinate to the discriminatory logic of the discourse of sovereign security, then humanitarianism is at serious risk of being unable to attend to its goal of caring for those individuals whose safety cannot be guaranteed by sovereign states. In other words, a radical point that some critics have stresses is that when linked to sovereign power in these ways, then humanitarianism risks becoming a means by which the logic of violence upon which the survival of sovereign states is said to rest is managed, rather than eliminated (Weizman 2012).

Humanitarian challenges   21 Now, in a certain sense, this book offers a perspective that supplements these critical arguments insofar as it calls attention to an additional set of mechanisms through which humanitarianism and sovereign security forms a ‘secret solid­ arity’ – mechanisms that operate not so much at the level of discourse but at the level of materiality. But before we elaborate further on how the book more spe­ cifically proposes to explore how power operates at the level of materiality, in the context of humanitarian technology uses, it must first be said that another body of critical humanitarian analyses also form an important part of the context within which a focus on materiality and humanitarian technology must be situ­ ated, namely a literature that calls attention to cases where humanitarian prac­ tices have given rise to ‘negative effects’ – not as a result of ‘secret solidarities’ at the level of discourse, but as a result of entanglements with violent conflict dynamics on the ground. Humanitarianism in practice: humanitarian harm As has already been said, humanitarianism has many faces (Douzinas 2007): critics have not only called attention to linguistic and discursive ties between a presumably neutral and impartial humanitarianism and the security priorities of states, some have also called attention to various examples of how even well-­ intentioned humanitarian practices can have ‘negative effects’ for the intended beneficiaries (Duffield et al. 2001). In other words, various critics have argued that even if a specific humanitarian endeavour follows the principles of humani­ tarianism as defined by ICRC, this does not necessarily offer an impermeable guarantee that humanitarian practices will succeed in alleviating human suffer­ ing, even when intended to. In fact, a number of critics have presented different versions of the more general concern that ‘in dire circumstances, the myth of neutrality hurts the people whom international philanthropists say they want to help’ (Seybolt 1996: 526) and different arguments have been presented as to the causes of such negative effects. Humanitarians themselves A number of specific instances have given rise to criticism that to some extent one source of ‘negative effects’ in the context of humanitarian endeavours is humanitarians themselves. As noted in the Guardian, ‘The embarrassment caused by the misconduct of UN forces in devastated communities around the world – including Haiti, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Cambodia, East Timor and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) – has become an increasingly high profile, political problem’ (Bowcott 2005). Some of the most remarkable cases  that have given weight to this type of critique include the case of UN peace­keepers bringing cholera to Haiti in 2012 (Freedman 2014), the revelation that UN peacekeepers were involved in human trafficking in Bosnia, and the disclosure of the involvement of UN peacekeepers in the sexual abuse of minors in the context of peacekeeping operations in a number of places including

22   Humanitarian challenges Mozambique, Cambodia, DR Congo, Sierra Leone and Liberia: ‘Allegations have recently surfaced that troops sent to police Liberia were regularly having sex with girls aged as young as 12, sometimes in the mission’s administrative buildings’ (Bowcott 2005).12 Indeed, such instances have spurred severe critique of the lack of accountability on the part of humanitarian actors vis-­à-vis the subject of assistance (or abuse?). In fact, the UN has itself identified, investi­ gated and sought to address the problem. In a 2001 report by The Special Rap­ porteur on violence against women, Ms Radhika Coomaraswamy, she voiced her concerns about the phenomenon of women being trafficked from refugee camps and other shelters set up for their protection, as well as being trafficked to service United Nations peacekeepers in countries where such peacekeepers are located. In par­ ticular, the Special Rapporteur expresses concern about the growing number of reports of rape and other sexual abuse committed by United Nations peacekeeping forces and staff, and by soldiers and staff associated with military bases around the world, and emphasises the particular responsibility that the Organization has for taking appropriate steps to prevent such abuse. (Coomaraswamy 2001: 4) Now, in the history of humanitarian endeavours these instances may well seem few and easily dismissed as insignificant exceptions of no relevance to the bigger picture of good-­doing humanitarians: if only those few evil-­doers are excluded from the humanitarian system then this cause of negative effects is ‘easily’ dealt with. Yet there are other, arguably more profound and indeed less easily dismissed reasons why humanitarian practices may have negative effects. Indeed, a number of critics have argued that the ways in which humanitarian practices affect local conflict dynamics may constitute an important source of potentially negative effects. Humanitarian practices and local power dynamics Critics have also, in a different sense, argued that ‘humanitarians themselves’ are part of the problem. As David Rieff puts it: ‘A humanitarian relief worker has to make deals with gunmen. Otherwise, you don’t get your supplies through’ (2003). Whilst some humanitarian endeavours may well hold a potential for bringing additional safety to lives exposed to violence, humanitarian initiatives also entail a potential for negative effects as a result of how these practices affect local power dynamics. Indeed, critics have called attention to ‘the politics of humanitarian engagement on the ground’ (Hyndman 2000: 118) arguing that a crucial reason why humanitarian practices may occasion negative effects stems from the ways in which humanitarian practices intertwine with political dynamics at the local level of intervention. In order to recognise the possibility of harmful consequences at the local level, we need a detailed ‘micro-­level

Humanitarian challenges   23 conflict analysis’ aimed at identifying ‘how aid interacts with the conflict’ (Anderson 2001). And, indeed, such analyses have helped shed light on how a range of negative effects may, for example, occur ‘when warring forces gain control of supplies intended for civilians, either through imposing levies or through theft’ (Smock 1997: 2). As a result of such looting or levying, human­ itarian relief supplies may end up feeding conflict dynamics rather than civilians (Seybolt 1996: 523) and consequently the provision of humanitarian aid have in some cases exacerbated local conflict dynamics (Slim 1997: 348), thus worsen­ ing and potentially prolonging the very violence whose victims these same humanitarian practices claim to deliver protection to in a neutral manner. Even if humanitarian endeavours are ‘neutral’ in the sense of not having close ties to, and not being defined in relation to, the security priorities of donor states, the meaning of neutrality ought to be differentiated such that it does not render invisible how even ‘donor-­neutral’ endeavours may have ‘far from neutral’ effects on local power dynamics. Indeed, this interface with, rather than isolation from, local conflict dynamics, and the risk that harmful effects may emerge as a result (Anderson 1995), has been highlighted as an important reason for not mis­ leadingly accepting the conceptualisation of humanitarian assistance as neutral. Instead, the chance of minimising the risk of negative effects13 would seem to increase if humanitarian actors would instead recognise how specific pro­ grammes and practices are ‘severely bounded by the circumstances in which aid organisations operate’ (Seybolt 1996: 521), notably by local conflict dynamics and the politics of internal conflicts (ibid.). In other words, it would seem more favourable to acknowledge that humanitarian assistance ‘cannot operate outside the networks of power in the refugee camps and war zones in which they work’ (Hyndman 2000: 117) and that humanitarian practices, especially in conflict zones and complex emergencies, need to take great care to recognise how such activities may affect the aims and abilities of those involved in local conflicts (Keen 2008; Keen and Lee 2007; Polman 2010; Barnett and Weiss 2008). Indeed, some humanitarians have recently recognised, publicly, how their prac­ tices give rise to crucial paradoxes that it is crucial not to dismiss but which humanitarians must find ways of facing up to (Terry 2002, 2013; see also MSF Speaking Out Case Studies). Whilst such initiatives are indeed important, they are not sufficiently wide­ spread and they have not yet had the effect of making humanitarians face up to these paradoxes. Indeed, we continue to see examples of how humanitarian practices in refugee contexts entangle with and feed into violent conflict dynamics, and scholars also continue to draw attention to the kinds of dif­ ficulties that the issue of harm in humanitarian refugee camps give rise to. With  a focus on UNHCR-­administered refugee camps, Maja Janmyr has, for example, recently called attention to the issue of responsibility in cases where human rights violations transpire in such camp settings (2013). Now, a recent example of how humanitarian refugee camps intended to provide security to innocent civilians fleeing violent conflict sometimes still generate ‘harm’, are cases where camps have come to serve as ‘safe havens’ for some of the actors

24   Humanitarian challenges that take part in the fighting. A recent case of this can be seen in the refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria. As Sarah Vogler, from the Strategic Studies Divi­ sion of the D.C.-based Center for Naval Analyses, notes: There is evidence that AQIM has infiltrated the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, as well as indications that Sahrawi from the camps have joined terrorist groups based in Mali. These developments pose immediate concerns for the security of Western Sahara, Mauritania, Morocco, and Algeria. (Vogler 2013: 8–9) Additional sources lend further credence to this observation. An article in The North Africa Post, for example, states that ‘the increasing inroads by al-­Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) . . . in the Polisario-­controlled refugee camps in Tindouf ’ (North Africa Post 2013). And, in fact, such instances have already influenced the policies of governments in the region. The government of Niger has, for example, recently ‘instructed aid agencies not to set up refugee camps in southern Niger lest they become centers for militants’ (Lewis 2014). Now, for various reasons, it is difficult to disregard this problem of refugee camp infiltration as exceptional and of no significance in view of the great amount of laudable work being done by humanitarian actors. For one thing, it is a problem that has surfaced in a considerable number of contexts, including the current case of Syria where it was recently noted that ‘numbers of terrorists fleeing from Yabroud [following the Syrian armed forces’ seizure of control over the city] entered the Lebanese refugee camps in Wadi Hamid’ (Syria 360° 2014). And similar remarks have been made about refugee camps in Jordan: ‘Rebels in the Free Syrian Army are recruiting fighters from inside a refugee camp in Jordan’ (Nicks 2013). And, such current examples are not unpreced­ ented. Indeed, the problem was already being addressed in the Khartoum Decla­ ration, adopted by all members of the OAU (now AU) in 1998: The presence of armed elements among civilian refugee population is a major concern. Member States are urged to take necessary measures, in con­ sultation with the OAU and the UNHCR, to preserve the civilian ad human­ itarian character of refugee camps and settlements by separating armed elements from the civilian population. (OAU 1998, point 9) And as noted in a more recent news story published by UNHCR: ‘Infiltration of refugee camps by militia is nothing new. The Goma refugee camp in eastern DRC was notorious for sheltering the Interahamwe fleeing the Rwandan Patriotic Front after it invaded Rwanda in 1994’ (Warah 2013). Moreover, similar remarks have been made about the Dadaab refugee camp located in Kenya close to the Somali border: ‘Al Shabaab appears to have infiltrated the complex and may be using the camps as a platform to extend its operations to other parts of

Humanitarian challenges   25 Kenya’ (Garvelink and Tahir 2012). Crucially, the observations that have been made about this case of ‘camp infiltration’ do not only suggest that this issue is somewhat widespread. Indeed, recent observations also seem to suggest that the problem is developing and taking new forms, including ‘using the camps as a platform’ for recruitment of refugees also by the Kenyan government: The Somali armed faction, Al-­Shabaab, has been reportedly infiltrating Kenya’s Somali refugee community. Recently, there have been reports that the government of Kenya has been covertly recruiting Somali refugees to return to Somalia to fight against Al-­Shabaab. The use of refugees by Kenya to counter the threat of Al-­Shabaab demonstrates a new perception of outside threats and suggests that Kenya is now willing to sacrifice ideals of humanitarianism to secure its border with Somalia. (Burns 2010: 5) Whilst more examples could be added, the point to stress here is that bearing in mind these examples of humanitarianism inadvertently ‘aiding’ rebels, it seems difficult to maintain that humanitarian practices are entirely neutral vis-­àvis local conflict dynamics. Perhaps an urgent question for humanitarians to address more explicitly is whether they, too, are willing to sacrifice ‘ideals of humanitarianism’ and whether the mere fact of ascribing to humanitarian prin­ ciples of neutrality, defined as not participating in conflict of a political nature, is an adequate response to these incidents of ‘negative effects’. Now, this risk of refugee camp infiltration is only one aspect of a much broader phenomenon, which was also touched upon in Chapter 1, and which David Rieff refers to as ‘the humanitarian trap’ (2003: 56), the trick being that when aid ceases to be neutral in all senses of the term because of how it affects local conflict dynamics, then even well-­intentioned and ‘donor-­neutral’ humani­ tarian assistance may end up leading to a prolonging of war, rather than simply to the alleviation of suffering. Insofar as this has happened, critics have argued that it may actually be irresponsible (Seybolt 1996) for humanitarian actors to cling to nostalgic principles of neutrality if this entails a condition in which humanitarian actors may more easily ‘writes off ’ rather than confront – let alone prevent – the potentially damaging consequences that can emerge when assist­ ance entangles with local conflict dynamics. Instead, ‘humanitarian aid organisa­ tions must recognise the political consequences of their actions so they can try not to make things worse’ (Seybolt 1996: 522; see also Anderson 1995). Thus, calling attention to the risk of harmful consequences stemming from the ways in which even ‘donor-­neutral’ humanitarian aid feeds into local power dynamics also raises the important question of responsibility: ‘should humanitarian organi­ sations be held responsible for the political consequences of their behaviour?’ (Seybolt 1996: 525) As Seybolt notes, a critical point is that ‘aid organisations are rarely held responsible when things go wrong’ (1996: 525). And indeed this question is no less important when we add a focus on humanitarian actors’ uses of ‘new technology’ and the likelihood of harmful effects stemming from this.

26   Humanitarian challenges Now, an important question is, of course, whether all these instances should simply be regarded – or rather disregarded – as exceptions, and consequently not as illustrative of the otherwise well-­intentioned humanitarianism that commonly serve the laudable objective of protecting populations otherwise left exposed to state violence? My understanding is no! Rather, not only have these and other examples of how humanitarian practices, despite good intentions, may entail harmful consequences for the subject of assistance, given rise to legitimate criti­ cism that needs to be taken seriously. Adding to these insights about the diver­ sion of aid as ‘the most visible paradox of humanitarian action’ (Terry 2002: 218), the reason not to neglect these instances as insignificant becomes even more pertinent if we also investigate how humanitarian practices play into and alter global power dynamics in ways that also entail a risk of countering good humanitarian intentions. Humanitarianism, materiality and global power dynamics Whilst it is important to acknowledge how ‘relief agencies cannot operate outside the networks of power in the refugee camps and the war zones in which they work’ (Hyndman 2000: 117), it is also necessary to pay careful attention to the ways in which ‘humanitarianism’ feeds into global power dynamics. Indeed, a third reason why well-­intentioned humanitarian practices may have negative effects has been located at a level of analysis that addresses important questions such as how humanitarian practices and processes at the level of materiality affect political dynamics, and not necessarily in ways that are conducive to humanitarian objectives. Whilst a focus on how humanitarian practice feeds into local power dynamics has produced valuable insights, such analyses pay little, if any, attention to important trends at the global level, such as humani­tarians ‘acting as intelligence officers’ (Duffield et al. 2001: 272) when implicated in the collection of intelligence in peripheral zones to be used by foreign national security agencies. And, crucially, when such dimensions are omitted, so too is the question of how this entanglement may give rise to potentially harmful con­ sequences, seen from a humanitarian perspective. To appreciate how such dynamics may affect humanitarian objectives, my suggestion is that we need an analytical framework that pays explicit attention to the question of how specific humanitarian practices feed into global power dynamics in ways that cannot be assumed from the outset to have benign con­ sequences for the implicated humanitarian subjects. Whilst discourse analysis is valuable, given its ability to highlight important aspects of the relationship between humanitarianism and politics, a concern is that the importance of mate­ riality may be overlooked, with unhelpful implications for our ability to under­ stand a specific and increasingly important aspect of the manifestation of the relationship between sovereign power and humanitarian practice. The suggestion proposed in this book is that a fruitful starting point for gaining a better appreci­ ation of this link is to look more closely at how humanitarian actors’ uses of new technologies may entail a number of constitutive processes that can potentially

Humanitarian challenges   27 affect global power dynamics in ways that may or may not have benevolent consequences. One humanitarian practice, which has been studied with attention to its rela­ tion to global power dynamics, is the refugee camp as a ‘technology of power’ (Malkki 1995) and as a ‘mechanism for keeping away undesirables’ (Agier 2010: 3–4). Another critic who has investigated the humanitarian refugee camp from a perspective that also pays attention to how power operates at the level of materiality is Jennifer Hyndman (2000). In her analysis of the Dadaab refugee camp complex, she calls attention to the entanglement of humanitarianism and power by showing how humanitarian practices of refugee management partake in the introduction of new ‘technologies of knowing’ (2000: 121) and ‘technolo­ gies of vision’ (2000: 124, 146), that also serve surveillance functions and have effects which may imply a humanitarian failure ‘to ensure that the modes and means of delivering assistance are in keeping with the spirit of the [human­ itarian] objective’ (2000: 147). This is just one reason why we need to look for potentially negative effects of humanitarianism not only at the level of discourse or in relation to specific entanglements with local power dynamics, but also from a perspective that allows us to recognise how humanitarian practices may at the level of materiality be tied to global power dynamics in ways that may be coun­ terproductive to humanitarian objectives. Such attention to how humanitarian practices can feed into global power dynamics at the level of materiality, adds an important point to the critical study of the impact of humanitarian practices. Now let’s take a closer look at a more recent example. In his important work, Eyal Weizman explicitly addresses the question of how state power, also within the humanitarian domain, plays out not only at the level of discourse but also at the level of materiality. More specifically, Weizman calls attention to how politics and power operate in relation to architecture, the built environment and ‘spatial technologies’ more generally (2011: 4). Weizman then explores how seemingly trivial decisions about material and technical issues are in fact deeply political and with potentially violent consequences. One example of such a seemingly trivial yet utterly political issue is Weisman’s account of the implications of humanitarian actors’ involvement in decisions about the reconstruction of roads in Palestinian refugee camps: Although UNRWA’s proposal was argued as a simple improvement to the  camp’s traffic management, the camp’s popular committee, in which the  armed organisations have crucial influence, protested that the widen­ ing  of the roads would allow Israeli tanks to penetrate the camp easily whenever they wanted. This debate ended with UNRWA exercising its sovereignty over the camp’s affairs and pushing on with construction of the wider roads. (2007: 204–205) As Weizman himself notes, this is a striking example of ‘the “humanitarian paradox” – namely, that humanitarian help [UNRWA’s reconstruction efforts]

28   Humanitarian challenges may end up serving the oppressing power’ (2007: 205).14 Thus, adding a new dimension to the critical humanitarian literature that takes its methodological starting point in an operationalization of Foucault’s ideas through the use of dis­ course analysis, Weizman demonstrates why it is of vital importance that we also pay careful attention to how power – also in humanitarian contexts – oper­ ates at the level of materiality. In this sense, Weizman’s analytical focus adds to the above literature and criticism in a way that invites us to pose the important question of how this ‘recognition that humanitarian relief has the potential to become lethal to the people it came to serve’ (2011: 5) has influenced concep­ tions of how humanitarian space is best organised – and the technologies brought in towards the realisation of this end. We shall return to another important aspect of Weizman’s analysis in Chapter 2 – namely, what he refers to as the collusion of technologies of humanitarian­ ism with military and political power, which he sees as a defining feature of ‘the humanitarian present’ (2007: 4). But, for now, the important point to establish is that insofar as Weizman calls attention to the level of materiality, this book follows a somewhat similar approach in terms of how it sets out to investigate humanitarian actors’ uses of new technology from a perspective that calls atten­ tion to the critical question of how humanitarian technology uses entail a series of processes at the level of materiality that may affect, and be affected by, global power dynamics. And, crucially, this approach then also allows us to investigate how the effect of these processes may entail negative consequences that we, only once they have been recognised, can hope to be better able to address. Replying to critique: humanitarian uses of new technology as ‘restoration’ of neutrality Besides the neglect of these cases of ‘negative effects’ in the context of humani­ tarian operations as insignificant – that is, as outweighed by the benefits and positive effects that humanitarian practices also produce – another type of response to this critique seems to emerge in the context of the recent human­ itarian turn to new technology. To some extent it seems that, in a more or less explicit manner, the expectations that humanitarian actors have of such new technologies are based upon their ability to serve as objective and neutral sources of knowledge – and thus, to some extent, as capable of offsetting some of the current challenges to humanitarianism’s proclaimed neutrality and impartiality. For example, if it is an objective, neutral and impartial machine that ‘decides’ whether a given refugee claimant can be recognised as a legitimate recipient of assistance, then this presumably exempts humanitarians from claims that their practices are partial and influenced by donor policies. And insofar as new tech­ nology is considered capable of truthfully and objectively differentiating genuine refugees from undeserving rebels, then the introduction of such technology also seems to exempt humanitarians from the critique that their practices feed into local conflict dynamics. Testifying to some of these expectations is a remark by a UNHCR refugee worker commenting on the benefits of using iris recognition:

Humanitarian challenges   29 Previously when we registered people, we had to recognise refugees we might have seen before. It was very hard. People would say that we were not treating refugees fairly. . . . This [iris recognition] will make it much better. How can they argue now, the machine can’t make a mistake. (UNHCR 2002b) And not only at field level, but also in official reports, the introduction of bio­ metric identification in humanitarian refugee management is represented with a similarly strong faith in the objectivity of the technology and its ability to serve as ‘the most effective means to accurately identify genuine cardholders [i.e. eli­ gible refugees]’ (WFP 2012). Indeed, new digital technologies more broadly are often represented by humanitarian actors as new sources of unchallengeable and objective truths, a representation of technology which underwrites a strong faith in their ability to add neutrality to previously biased aspects of humanitarian practices. As such, the recent humanitarian turn to new technology entails expec­ tations of, and confidence in, these new technologies – as also documented by Gus Hosein and Carly Nyst (2013: 31) – which in a certain sense can be inter­ preted as a more or less explicit response to some of the abovementioned points of critique. In this sense, it may seem tempting to consider the introduction of new tech­ nology as capable of reviving the humanitarian claim to neutrality. However, as Hugo Slim notes: ‘since time immemorial [humanitarian values] have usually co-­existed with violence’ (1997: 343). In other words, there never was a time during which humanitarianism was neutral, no ‘“golden age” when humanitari­ anism was insulated from politics’ (Weiss 1999: 22) – and thus, there never was the presumed neutrality that technologies are expected to ‘retrieve’. However, this is not the only reason why we should be cautious in accepting the repre­ sentation of new technology – accompanied by an aura of presumably unchal­ lengeable scientific objectivity – as capable of offering humanitarianism a renewed ‘separation’ from politics, or a new means through which to eliminate the likelihood of negative effects from ties to donor policies or local conflict dynamics. Indeed, another important reason is that technology, too, is political. The introduction of new technology does not necessarily represent a shift away from donor priorities: iris recognition, for example, is based upon threshold values and recognition processes that may not necessarily be distinct from security-­ driven donor policies. And, similarly, new technology cannot be expected to eliminate the risk of assistance being ‘diverted’ to conflicting parties. There are already instances of refugees burning their fingertips to circumvent the techno­ logy. And, vice versa, there are also cases of legitimate refugees who, due to fears about the use of this new technology decide not register with humanitarian agencies, with the implication that they cannot receive assistance (see Chapter 4). Thus, technology has a number of implications and accordingly relying upon expectations about accuracy, efficiency and objectivity cannot adequately illumi­ nate the role of technology in humanitarian contexts. Put differently, we may fail

30   Humanitarian challenges to notice important effects of the use of new technology if we too readily accept that such technology will necessarily be managed more responsibly and contain less risks of failure due to technological progress. And, moreover, we also risk omitting important effects if we think of the risk of ‘negative effects’ only as epiphenomena of human intentions, realised through technology uses. We shall explore these issues in much greater detail in each of the case study analyses. However, before I present an alternative conceptualisation of technology and an analytical framework though which I propose to approach the issue of humani­ tarian technology, let us first situate this focus on humanitarian technology uses in the context of an important history: a history of experimentation in the global periphery. Humanitarian uses of new technology: a history of experimentation Having established the relevance of looking more closely at how politically significant processes unfold at the level of materiality when investigating humani­ tarian actors’ turn to new technology, we also need to situate such an analysis in relation to an important history. Indeed, ‘every concept of humanitarianism . . . has a history’ that we ought to pay attention to (Rieff 2002: 67) and so too with the recent turn to new digital technology; the emergence of ‘networked’ or ‘digital humanitarianism’ must be placed in a broader historical context. But before we begin to explore this historical context, let us first take a brief look at this recent turn to new digital technology within the humanitarian community. Evidence of this trend can, for example, be seen in recent reports published by two of the most central humanitarian actors: The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ report on Humanitarianism in a Network Age (2013) and the 2013 edition of The International Federation of Red Cross’ World Disasters Report with a focus on technology and the future of humanita­ rian action. In addition to these reports, a wide range of empirical instances also provides evidence of the emergence of a ‘networked’ humanitarianism: the use of peacekeeping drones in DRC (Karlsrud and Rosén 2013); the use of Global Positioning Systems (Duffield 2013) to monitor refugee movements; the use of biometrics (fingerprinting etc.) to register refugees (Jacobsen 2010: 2015a); and the use of mobile phones to deliver cash assistance (Smith et al., 2011; Smith 2012).15 As mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the main arguments advanced in this book is that important aspects of this current trend – further evidenced by the emer­ gence of notions such as ‘digital humanitarianism’ (Conneally 2011) and ‘cyber humanitarianism’ (Duffield 2013) – cannot be understood apart from a critical legacy, namely a history of humanitarian experimentation, which is commonly written off as belonging to a distant past.

Humanitarian challenges   31 Colonialism and experimentation One context in which the term experimentation has been used is in relation to ‘colonial humanitarianism’ (Rieff, 2003). Concerning the link between colonial­ ism and humanitarianism, Alan Lester and Fae Dussart have recently explored the link between practices of colonialism and humanitarian governance, suggest­ ing that the colonization of indigenous peoples should be placed within a larger historical context of Western humanitarianism (2014). And concerning practices of experimentation, scholars have called attention to the link between humani­ tarian imperialism and colonial experimentation (Clymer 1976) – including spe­ cific cases such as the failure of a presumably well-­intentioned ‘democratic experiment in Congo-­Brazzaville’ (Clark 2002) and the representation of experi­ ments with preventative medicine as an act of ‘good doing’ intended to help sub­ jects in French colonial Vietnam move towards a more civilised state (Monnais 2006). In short, a number of scholars have called attention to how an important part of colonial history concerns the function served by peripheral and humani­ tarian contexts that were often regarded as appropriate sites for the trialling of a range of new inventions. Making linkages to this colonial history, a few scholars of contemporary bioethics have called attention to the important question of how the risk of experimentation failure is currently being outsourced to the global periphery. Critical scholars have documented how – not only in the past but also today – various experiments, notably with new drugs and medical inventions, are currently travelling abroad to the global periphery transforming the people living in these places into test subjects. In The Body Hunters, Sonia Shah (2006) demonstrates how contemporary experiments are ‘going global’. From an anthropological perspective, Adrian Petryna has shown how experiments are currently being ‘off-­shored’ to the global periphery (2009: 6). We shall return to these important analyses in Chapter 3 as we explore in greater detail how to con­ ceptualise the nature of technology, including the role of technology in human­ itarian contexts – also in relation to this point about the production of populations made available for experimentation (Chamayou 2008, translation by Lambert). For now, the point to stress is that in the field of bioethics this historical legacy of experimentation in the colonial periphery has been taken seriously – not as a thing of the past, but as a practice that needs to be explored in its con­ temporary guise. The task before us is to consider how this legacy may shed light on otherwise overlooked aspects of humanitarian uses of technology at the periphery of contemporary global politics. In other words, this legacy, and the critical analyses that it has inspired within the field of bioethics, should invite us to explore how the context of contemporary humanitarianism may entail a set of processes that feed into a somewhat comparable construction of ‘helpless’ subject categories and differential assumptions about ‘ethical standards of injury’ (Jain 2010: 17)16 which, in turn, may combine in potentially dangerous ways with the scientific ideal of the undertreated body as ‘the best human [test] subject’ (Feldman and Ticktin 2010: 18).

32   Humanitarian challenges Experimentation and post-­Cold War humanitarian practice Another use of the term experimentation is evident in relation to ‘post-­Cold War humanitarianism’ and the argument that the development of ‘humanitarianism’ since the end of the Cold War can be understood as involving a series of experi­ ments with how to respond to humanitarian disasters in an altered political land­ scape. In this spirit, Mark Duffield, for example, points out that ‘[t]hroughout the 1990s, experiments took place that sought to use humanitarian action as a strategy to contain conflict’ (Duffield et al. 2001: 273). Focusing on a more spe­ cific example, Hyndman and Nylund (1998) use the concept of experimentation to argue, in a somewhat similar vein, that instances such as Operation Restore Hope represent ‘an experiment in post-­Cold War humanitarian intervention on a global scale’ (1998). With reference to a specific humanitarian organisation, which certainly was affected by the end of the Cold War, some critics have used the notion of experimentation to suggest that the UN itself represents ‘an experi­ ment in devising fundamentally new forms of global governance’ (Ruggie 2003; see also Childers and Urquhart 1994),17 including experiments ‘with a number of coordination models’ (de Coning 2007). Others again have referred to specific aspects of UN peacekeeping practices – such as the concept of co-­deployment – as an ‘international experiment’ (Francis 2005). Summing up some of these sen­ timents, Hugo Slim notes that [i]n what has frequently been described as a series of humanitarian experi­ ments, UN military operations have been carried out in the name of peace­ keeping, peace-­enforcement, post conflict peace-­building and humanitarian assistance in countries like Somalia, Former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Mozambique, Rwanda and most recently in Angola. (Slim 1995b)18 Shifting the focus to a specific branch of the UN, namely the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the term has also been used to describe the history of this specific humanitarian actor. Jeffery Crisp has, for example, explained how UNHCR, in the early 1990s, experimented with ‘the introduction of “Quick Impact Projects” or QIPs’ in Nicaragua, which ‘follow­ ing the end of a decade-­long civil war’ was confronted with large numbers of returnees (2001). With reference to a different aspect of humanitarian refugee management, Simon Turner has used the term experimentation to describe how ‘the humanitarian refugee camp’ represents a ‘biopolitical experiment’, an experiment in managing populations through a combination of complex subject categories and physical technologies (fencing, etc.) (2005: 318–319). Indeed, Turner suggests that, paradoxically, the refugee camp seems a perfect place to test the ability of biopolitical technologies of control to effectively govern and simultaneously care for an entire population. And by other scholars, Darfur has been described as an experiment in African peacekeeping (Fleshman 2010; Duffield 2013). Interestingly, the experimentation terminology has also been used by

Humanitarian challenges   33 humanitarian agencies themselves. Yet, when used from within the humanitarian community, the use of the term is intended to foreground the positive effects of experimentation as a way in which to invent new ways of responding more effectively to difficult humani­tarian situations. However, such uses make no mention of the potentially negative implications of experimental practices that the above literature alludes to. Indeed, in the body of work in which ‘experimen­ tation’ has been used in a critical manner, the concept has served to highlight how the appearance of new forms of post-­Cold War humanitarianism have entailed a range of experimental practices through which humanitarianism has become tied to sovereign state politics in novel ways. Indeed, Mark Duffield has, for example, argued that – for the past decade and continuing into the present – Sudan and South Sudan have served as laboratories of liberal interventionism as a technology of governance. And, more broadly, critics have used of the term to highlight how various experiments have helped test and develop new mecha­ nisms of ‘proxy policing and the exercise of authority’ (Pugh and Sidhu 2003: 42–43) or new forms of humanitarian–­military relations, such as the ‘human­ itarian military intervention’ in the Balkans (Pugh and Sidhu 2003: 105). In short, the products of such experiments have not necessarily helped provide innovations that would facilitate revival of a neutral humanitarianism better equipped to ‘alleviate human suffering wherever it may be found’ (ICRC). Humanitarian experimentation, sovereign power and materiality On the issue of experimentation and sovereign power, the recently translated work of Grégoire Chamayou is extremely relevant. As described by Chamayou, experimentation (and its history as linked to colonial expansions and to the pro­ duction of bodies ‘suitable’ for subjection to practices of experimentation) is best understood with reference to the work of Michel Foucault; not just his work on biopower, but also his early work on subjection of bodies to new technology as explored in The Birth of the Clinic (1963). In a somewhat similar vein, Chamayou describes the ways in which ‘the doctor’ now collaborates in the pro­ duction of vile bodies, in such a way that his medical practice becomes con­ verted into experimentation – experiments that in turn were linked to a shift in the mode of sovereign power. And the crucial question that this perspective on experimentation enables us to pose in the context of this book concerns the issue of the extent to which humanitarianism serves a similar role as entangled in practices of experimentation that serve to produce bodies regarded as ‘fit’ for subjection to experimentation and to test and develop new technologies that, in turn, serve to alter the mode of sovereign power in ways that may expand the reach of power, rather than protect bodies from its excess. Bringing all of this to bear on our focus on humanitarian uses of new techno­ logy, Chamayou urges us to approach the question of power and experimenta­ tion on peripheral/superior bodies in a manner that pays careful attention to how these practices ‘are not only discursive’ but also physical. As Leopold Lambert notes in his review, Chamayou’s book ‘is not a simple historical description of

34   Humanitarian challenges experimentation on human beings’ (Lambert 2013). Rather, Chamayou suggests that in order to understand the politics of experimentation, which I suggest is also applicable to contemporary humanitarianism, we need to develop ‘a typology of vilization technologies’ (Lambert 2013), which can be understood more broadly as a typology of technologies involved in the production of bodies considered ‘fit’ for experimentation – whether because these bodies are constructed as ‘vile’ or because they, also through such technologies, have come to be regarded as unde­ sirable (Agier 2010), surplus (Duffield 2007) or simply as less valuable. It is this question of the role, function and effects of technology – and the role of technology as an under-­theorised link between humanitarianism and sover­ eign power – that I will now turn to in the following chapter. For in addition to this history of how the link between humanitarianism and sovereign power – also through practices of experimentation – may give rise to various negative effects, the argument in this book is that, rather than seeing technology as an inherently progressive and modern thing that will revitalise humanitarianism in an idealised form as neutral and isolated from potentially harmful power dynamics, we also need to develop a more nuanced understanding of the role and function of technology as only then will we be able to appreciate how humanitarian uses of various technologies may occasion an additional set of neg­ ative effects. Thus, whilst the use of new technology is on the lips of various humanitarian agencies, we should not forget that this current trend forms part of a broader history, which reminds us of the fact that peripheral populations are being subjected to more or less experimental technologies. Indeed, ‘the chal­ lenge for aid agencies is to understand their role in the growing politicisation of aid’ (Duffield et al. 2001: 273) and to understand this role it is imperative to bear in mind these two important legacies. To advance our understanding of the sense in which humanitarian actors’ turn to new technology may entail new – and potentially harmful – ties between humani­tarianism and sovereign power, my suggestion is that we need to revise the way in which we conceptualise and analyse the nature of technology.

Notes   1 ‘The prime motivation of our response to disaster is to alleviate human suffering amongst those least able to withstand the stress caused by disaster’ (ICRC 1994).   2 Anne Hammerstad also refers to ‘the power of persuasion’ (2014: 292).   3 As of today 524 humanitarian organisations have become signatories of this Code of Conduct. See: www.ifrc.org/Global/Publications/disasters/code-­of-conduct/Code%20 of%20Conduct%20UPDATED_APRIL%202014.pdf   4 ‘Some donor bodies reallocate earmarked funds at short notice to respond to new crises. For example, in autumn 2001, several major donors reallocated existing contri­ butions to multilateral partners to focus on Afghanistan. This had the effect of leaving these agencies unable to meet their budgets for less visible crises elsewhere’ (Macrae and Harmer 2004).   5 An independent study by Kate Mackintosh and Patrick Duplat, commissioned by the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Office for the Coordination of Humani­ tarian Affairs (OCHA).

Humanitarian challenges   35   6 Specific cases have given rise to concern among humanitarian actors. As noted in the report: ‘The 2010 US Supreme Court judgement in the case of Holder v. Humani­ tarian Law Project et al. brought the US material support statute to the attention of humanitarian actors . . . and eight US-­based charities have been designated by the Treasury Department for providing support to, or acting on behalf of, designated ter­ rorist organization’ (Mackintosh and Duplat 2013: 41). See also ‘Counter-­terrorism laws can stifle humanitarian action, study shows’ (Guardian 2013).   7 Interview with aid worker in Jordan   8 A question that Hannah Arendt called attention to almost 50 years ago, in her critique of the lack of protection for refugees and other stateless persons who she argued were effectively stripped of ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt 1968: 296)   9 Agamben draws upon a specific reading of the work of Foucault, and it should be noted that this has been contested. See, for example, Jabri 2007. We shall return to Foucault’s work in much greater detail in Chapter 3. 10 Including analyses of ‘the discourse of humanitarian operations’ (Slim 1997: 342) 11 See also Miriam Ticktin who described in great detail how ‘refugees have been increasingly viewed with suspicion’ (Ticktin 2006: 36). 12 See also Ray Murphy 2007. 13 The ‘negative effects debate’ (Duffield et al. 2001: 270). 14 In The Least of All Possible Evils (2012) Weizman notes that ‘This kind of war is undertaken both by destruction and reconstruction – and attempts to make the refugee problem disappear by architectural means’ (2012: 144). 15 See also Last Mile Mobile Solutions (LMMS): Technology and Partnering for Social Innovation, ALNAP Innovations Case Study No. 3, 2009. 16 See also Jain’s analysis of how ‘subjects are created differently under different con­ ditions’ (in Feldman and Ticktin 2010: 17). 17 As Childers and Urquhart have also argued that ‘the structure of the UN system itself is also overgrown by many years of proliferation and experiment’ (1994: 21). 18 The term experimentation has also been used in relation to a number of specific UN operations. The early mission in DR Congo (1960–1964) has been referred to as an ‘Experiment in world government’ (Martelli 1966), but also in relation to operations in East Timor, Sri Lanka, Somalia, (Boulden 2001), and in Afghanistan and Liberia (de Coning 2007).

3 Theorising technology

Despite good intentions and high hopes concerning the prospect that new tech­ nology can advance humanitarian objectives, a closer examination of specific cases of humanitarian technology uses within three domains (medicine, biotech­ nology, biometrics) illustrate that various negative consequences have emerged in the context of such endeavours. A revision of the very concept of technology can help open our eyes to some of the reasons why humanitarian technology uses may feed into processes that generate harmful effects for the populations involved. In other words, besides a critical consideration of the various negative effects that may accompany the entanglement of humanitarianism and politics (see previous chapters), we also need to critically revise the concept of techno­ logy in order to deepen our appreciation of how humanitarian technology uses may potentially occasion negative effects – even when deployed with good intentions. Commonly, humanitarian actors do not just think of their own practices as neutral, they also think of technology as neutral – that is, as an unbiased, objective and accurate instrument through which to ease the realisation of prede­ fined humanitarian ends, whose formulation, interpretation and explanation the given technology does not have an impact on. One sense in which technology is considered neutral is through its representation as a source of objective truths, contrasted with human biases and preconceptions: Previously when we registered people, we had to recognise refugees we might have seen before. People would say that we were not treating refugees fairly, and you could really doubt your own judgement. This [iris recogni­ tion technology] will make it much better. How can they argue now, the machine can’t make a mistake. (Rifaat Tajik, UNHCR 2002a) Based on such assumptions about technology as ‘neutral’ (unbiased and accurate), optimism flourishes about the potency of new technologies to further humanitarian objectives. Indeed, optimistic views about the vigour of new digital technology can be discerned at the highest level – such as in an inaugural lecture by Mr. Suárez del Toros (then President of International Federation of the Red

Theorising technology   37 Cross) in which he notes that humanitarian organisations ‘greet this new tech­ nology’s potential for progress with enthusiasm’ (2002). And a similarly optim­ istic view can also be discerned among humanitarian field-­workers, including refugee workers in Lebanon one of whom notes that he has now ‘seen first-­hand the power of technology to alleviate suffering and to streamline efficacy across the organisation’ (ReliefWeb 2014). However, assuming that technology is simply a neutral instrument through which to ease the achievement of humanitarian aims and having such pronounced faith in the humanitarian potency of new technology entails a risk of paying too little attention to the potential for undesirable effects in the context of technology uses, let alone the question of how to identify the kinds of undesirable con­ sequences that can materialise in the context of humanitarian technology uses. Bearing in mind the literature on the politics of humanitarianism, this chapter adds a new dimension to this scholarship by bringing insights from a number of critical thinkers who have theorised upon the politics of technology to bear on our analysis of humanitarian technology uses. This move allows us to frame the issue of humanitarian technology in a manner that challenges not only humani­ tarian claims to neutrality but also the commonplace conception of technology as neutral – including attending assumptions, such as the temptation to believe that humanitarianism can regain its status as neutral and non-­political through a turn to ostensibly objective technology. To critically assess this (to some obser­ vers, tantalising) amalgamation of humanitarian neutrality and technological neutrality – which hides from view how humanitarian practices entangle with politics at the level of materiality and how this entanglement may entail a series of negative effects – we need to begin our analysis from a starting point that enables an exploration of the politics of technology. By thinking about techno­ logy ‘with and beyond’ Michel Foucault, we can begin to appreciate some of the ways in which technology is political and thereby acquire a better starting point for analysing humanitarian technology uses in a manner that allows us to grasp – as a pre-­condition for subsequently attempting to counter – the emergence of potentially negative side effects.

Thinking with Foucault: in what sense does technology matter politically? I would like to trace the transformation [from the power of sovereignty to power over life] at the level of the mechanisms, techniques, and technolo­ gies of power. (Foucault 2003: 241) More than simply stating that technology matters, insights from the work of Michel Foucault can help us frame the important question of how technology matters politically. First, it should be said that, for Foucault, power is to be understood as a force that transcends politics. This conception obviously chal­ lenges the idea of a humanitarian space detached from politics and from power.

38   Theorising technology Rather than thinking of power as a thing to be possessed and localised within a narrow state apparatus, Foucault approaches the study of power from a perspective that invites us to recognise how ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse (Foucault 1991) as well as in processes at the level of ‘mechanisms, techniques, and technologies’ (Foucault 2003: 241). As such, politics is not dis­ tinct from power and this is a crucial aspect of Foucault’s use of the term techno­ logy. But how, more specifically, did Foucault make the word technology ‘do conceptual work’ that it had not done before (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 3).1

Transformations and ‘families of technologies of power’ At the most comprehensive level, Foucault uses the term technology with refer­ ence to a ‘family of technologies of power’ (2007: 16). More specifically, Foucault refers to two ‘families of technologies of power’ as he identifies what he saw as ‘a crucial mutation, without doubt one of the most important in the history of human societies’ (2007: 161): one family of technologies of power appeared in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; another family of technol­ ogies of power that appeared a bit later, in the second half of the eighteenth century. First, Foucault traces the emergence of disciplinary power. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault, for example, contrasts two forms of penalty: the violent and obviously brutal torture on the one hand, and the highly regulated and disciplined arrangement of the nineteenth century prison. On the one hand, he details the specifics of the prison as a new mechanism of punishment that targets the body of the individual with a series of meticulously regulatory pro­ cedures and, as such, represents a transformation from previous forms of punish­ ment that targeted ‘juridical subjects from whom one could take goods, life too’ (Foucault 2007). At the same time, Foucault notes that in order to appreciate the political significance of ‘the birth of the prison’ we also need to consider how this technology of punishment formed part of a much broader transformation, namely the emergence of a new ‘family of technologies of power’ that Foucault calls ‘disciplinary power’ and which extends beyond the prison including institu­ tions such as schools, factories, and military barracks (2007: 160). Foucault also identifies another transformation, another ‘family of technologies of power’ which appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century and which Foucault referred to as biopower. This other family of technologies of power did not target the individual in his/her singularity but ‘the population’ as a political body with specific characteristics – birth rate, rate of mortality, etc. (Foucault 2007: 160–161). With the emergence of ‘a whole series of techniques of observa­ tion, including statistics’ these population-wide characteristics had been rendered visible and concomitantly a new series of problems also emerged: problems of public hygiene; of housing; and, more generally, of ‘how to regulate population flux’. As it had become possible to observe such population-­wide features it had also become possible to envisage these features as amenable to regulation and so we saw the emergence of a new technology of power seeking new techniques as part of the ‘perfection’ of this new bio-­politics (Foucault 2007: 161).2

Theorising technology   39 We shall return in more detail to both of these technologies of power. However, at this point, the important thing to establish is that in tracing these transformations in families of technologies of power, Foucault calls attention to the co-­emergence of three important elements: the discovery3 of new aspect of human existence as amenable (2007: 161); the appearance of new problems; and from this, the emergence of ‘a whole series of techniques’ charged with the task of amendment given (or assumed necessary) by the appearance of these new problems.4 In short, throughout history we have seen the emergence of different families of technologies of power – or, different ‘major technologies of power’ (Bonditti 2008) – each of which entails: • •

Technologies as sources of knowledge that facilitate the discovery of new aspects of human existence as amenable and the appearance of a new logic of discriminatory amendment. Technologies as techniques through which to achieve the ‘requested’ amendment.

Four points must be made, to add some important nuances to this somewhat sim­ plified distinction. First, what is the relationship between technologies as sources of knowledge and technologies as techniques for amendment? Rather than being understood as referring to distinct types of technologies, they refer to distinct functions that technologies may potentially serve with implications for the work­ ings of politics and power. As such, these distinct uses of a commonplace term (technology) can be understood as an illustrative example of how Foucault turned familiar words into analytical tools capable of doing conceptual work, and of aiding his investigation of ‘particular practices, technologies, sites where power was articulated on bodies [and] where knowledge of human individuals became possible’ (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 3). Similarly this distinction is intended to aid our appreciation of two different senses in which technology can have implications for the operation of politics and power. In short, ‘families of tech­ nologies of power’, ‘techniques’ and ‘technologies of knowledge’ are analytical distinctions through which the term technology can be made to do conceptual work. To illustrate this, a specific technique of control, e.g. biometric registration, should be explored not simply as a technique with negative effects (inhibiting a ‘suspicious’ person from crossing a border). Rather, we also need to explore how biometrics may serve two additional functions: how might biometric technologies come to serve as a technology of knowledge;5 and how might biometrics play into the emergence of a new discriminatory divide.6 Indeed, the distinction between ‘techniques’ and ‘technologies of knowledge’ should not be considered opposites or mutually exclusive but merely a distinction that helps us recognise different functions as well as the relation between them. Indeed, for Foucault, an important part of an analysis of power is an investigation of the intersection of ‘techniques’ and ‘scientific discursivity’ (1978: 68). It is at this intersection that new aspects of human existence (e.g. sexuality) come to be defined as ‘suscepti­ ble to pathological processes’ and hence as ‘calling for therapeutic or normalizing

40   Theorising technology interventions’ (ibid.: 68). Thus, whilst Foucault invites us to conceptualise techno­ logy as individual techniques and as ‘much more complex and above all much more positive than the mere effect of a ‘defence’ (1978: 90) – i.e. as more than just politi­ cally relevant vis-­à-vis its repressive potential – it must also be said that neither individual techniques nor productive effects should be considered in isolation. Second, these ‘major technologies’ do not replace each other: the emergence of disciplinary power did not replace the sovereign right to kill, and the emer­ gence of biopower did not replace the logic of subjecting individuals to discipli­ nary techniques. Rather, as new technologies emerge they ‘dovetail into’ and alter existing ones (Foucault 2003) – resulting in an ever-­more complex land­ scape of power relations in which power operates at various level, e.g. the indi­ vidual and the population. Third, through this comparison, Foucault then challenges the commonplace assumption that the prison as a new form of punishment was irrefutably more humane. Indeed, through his identification of this important change in ‘major technologies of power’ (Bonditti 2008), Foucault does not simply describe a series of progressive alterations – rather, he invites his reader to consider how power has come to operate not in an increasingly more enlightened, rational and humane manner but in a manner the violence and forcefulness of which has become increasingly more subtle, meticulous, and harder to renounce. Foucault thus challenged the idea of the new technology of punishment as evidently ‘less violent and more humane’ – instead, he suggested that ‘the birth of the prison’ should be understood as involving a more subtle form of violence and a more meticulous definition of the politically worthy humane (i.e. of the normal versus the abnormal human, the safe versus the dangerous). Finally, whilst each family of technologies of power is comprised of discur­ sive formations as well as constitutive processes at the level of materiality, Foucault’s notion of discourse has received somewhat more attention than the material aspect of his theorisation of technologies of power.7 A number of crit­ ical scholars (Duffield,8 Walters,9 Reid10 and others) have made valuable use of the discursive aspect of Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of power’ in their analyses of humanitarian practices and the suggestion made in this book to pay greater attention to the more material aspects of Foucault’s theorisation of tech­ nology11 in our analyses of contemporary humanitarianism should certainly not be understood as a neglect of the significance of such analyses – or, more gener­ ally, of the significance of exploring how power operates at the level of dis­ course (Coole and Frost 2010). As Bonditti notes, ‘discursive formations . . . have material, physical, technical, historical and social conditions of possibility’ (Bonditti 2008: 134). In other words, technologies form part of the condition of possibility for a given discursive formation and paying more careful attention to constitutive processes at the level of materiality can help us depict these possib­ ilities. As such, our focus on technology and materiality should be considered complementary to analyses of how power operates at the level of discourse. And on that note, we shall now return to the notion of technology. More specifically, to deepen our appreciation of how technology as a device of repression/control

Theorising technology   41 and as a source of knowledge/power matters politically, we shall now elaborate on Foucault’s use of the term technology not with reference to ‘major technolo­ gies’ but with reference to the function of ‘minor’ technologies of power.

Technology as ‘device’ matters politically in relation to how power is exercised One sense in which technology matters politically concerns the extent to which a given technology is bound up with specific ways of exercising power and enforc­ ing racial divisions. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault thus calls attention to ‘devices that were used to ensure the spatial distribution of individual bodies (their segregation, alignment, surveillance)’ (2003: 242) – and, more generally, Foucault’s work has brought attention to the issue of how power operates in hitherto unnoticed places, including the built environment (e.g. the prison and town layout) thus linking politics and power to processes at the level of material­ ity. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault, in a somewhat similar vein, describes the significance of power as a force that operates through ‘a whole series of techniques for the surveillance of individuals’ (2007: 8), thus calling attention to the political function of ‘the actual techniques themselves’ (2007: 8). Now, a crucial point about the emergence of new devices and specific techniques is that technologies of power have ‘become more complicated’ (2007: 8), more meticulous (1973: xii), more subtle (2012: 136)12 and neither less violent or more humane. In short, one sense in which technologies matter politically is related to their use as means, device, and instrument through which to exercise power in an ever more meticulous and subtle manner.13 Although humanitarian actors insist on the adequacy of neutrality principles and the neutrality of their practices, we saw in the previous chapter how humani­ tarian practices are political in a number of ways – in relation humanitarian tech­ nology uses as well. Therefore, when exploring how power operates in humanitarian contexts, we risk omitting important dimensions if we fail to pay attention to the ways in which power operates at the level of materiality. Now, this aspect of Foucault’s work has already inspired critical analyses of how power operates at the level of materiality in various humanitarian contexts; for example, in relation to the spatial layout of refugee camps (Turner 2010; Hyndman 2000)14 and decisions about road construction (Weizman 2012): if decisions about recon­ struction of roads result in roads that are wider than previously, then this, so Weizman demonstrates with reference to the case of Palestinian refugee camps, will enable Israeli tanks to penetrate the area far more easily (2012). Indeed, these analyses powerfully illustrate how an understanding of the political significance of humanitarian technology uses requires that we pay careful attention to the question of how seemingly inconsequential decisions – e.g. about road construction – can have implications for the humanitarian goal of providing protection. Indeed, a foremost characteristic of Foucault’s thinking on technology and power is the idea that power is not just a negative or repressive thing but also a pro­ ductive and positive force: ‘All these negative elements – defenses, censorships,

42   Theorising technology denials – [are] only component parts that have a local and tactical role to play in a transformation into discourse, a technology of power, and a will to knowledge that are far from being reducible to the former’ (1978: 12). Accordingly, important questions remain under-­explored if we stop our analysis of the politics of technology at this point: technologies certainly matter politically as a means through which power is exercised in an ever more meticulous and subtle manner but how are such devices, such negative technologies of power, constituted in the first place? How does a given technology come to appear authoritative and/ or more humane? And how do new devices emerge? Devices matter politically as technologies of power when, for example, they serve to enforce racial divi­ sions but how are such divisions constituted in the first place – and what is the role of technology in relation to the constitution of such racial divisions? To address such questions, we need to recognise how technology also matters politi­ cally in an additional sense, namely as a positive technology of power.

Technology matters politically vis-­à-vis power’s domain of operation and discriminatory logic15 To say that technology can serve as a means of power is not to say that technology only matters politically as an epiphenomenon of predefined political interests. The question of how technology matters politically entails another important dimen­ sion, namely the productive effects of technologies – effects that Foucault invites us to explore along two dimensions. Domain16 The first sense in which technologies are ‘positive’ derives from the extent to which they have productive effects on power’s domain of operation by serving as sources of knowledge. When called upon as a source of authoritative and politi­ cally relevant knowledge – as that which enables the ‘discovery’ of a new aspect as amenable – technology should be understood as productive insofar as it feeds into ‘the appearance of a new element,’ or aspect of human existence, that previous theories and political practices had not been capable of imagining as susceptible to legitimate intervention and manipulation (2003: 245).17 For example, with respect to the second transformation18 – the emergence of another family of technologies of power – Foucault describes how it was only with the emergence of statistical knowledge that the ‘population’ emerged as a field of political intervention.19 And, in this sense, statistics should be understood as a productive ‘technology of power’ insofar as it was indispensable to the emergence of ‘a new body . . . the population as a political problem’ (2003: 245).20 In short, technology matters politically vis-­àvis its role in relation to the very constitution of ‘the field of power’ (Foucault 2003). Looking at this historically, Foucault was able to discern how this positive effect gave rise not simply to new domains that replaced existing once but to an expansion of power into additional domains – once new domains had been ren­ dered knowable. Accordingly, our analysis of new technologies as sources of

Theorising technology   43 authoritative and politically relevant knowledge should be attuned to the ways in which such technologies emerge in addition to and ‘dovetail into’ existing ones – only then to recognise the sense in which such changes represent an expansion of sovereign power into a domain where it would not previously be possible for power to claim neither a legitimate right to intervene nor a monopoly on truth.21 And, along similar lines, Bonditti has more recently argued that in our analyses of ‘current political technologies, the challenge is to observe a network so as to deci­ pher how various techniques work together’ (2008: 149). This conception of the politics of technology is obviously very different from the idea that technology is only political when used as a means through which to exercise power over predefined entities (e.g. domains or aspects of life). This insight from Foucault helps us recognise the importance of paying attention to the politics of positive technologies of power in relation to their role in bringing about a new definition of the aspect of human existence that power can legiti­ mately and authoritatively intervene into – in other words, the importance of paying attention to the question of how technology matters politically given its productive function in relation to an expansion in the domain of power. Divides Second, ‘technology’ can serve a productive function with important political implications as a result of how the technology can feed into the constitution of a specific discriminatory modality – or, the constitution of a specific ‘way of intro­ ducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die.’ (Foucault 2003: 254). Again, as an anchor of authoritative knowledge, technology also matters politically in relation to the constitution of the very logic upon which new divisions within humanity are drawn, and in relation to the work needed to make such division seem natural and incontrovertible. In the first transformation that Foucault identified – that is, in the emergence of discipline as a family of technologies of power – Foucault describes how various technologies were integral to the production of new lines of demarcation: ‘a body to be cared for’ and protected ‘from the many dangers and contacts’ had to be ‘isolated from others so that it would retain its differen­ tial value’ (1978: 123). And this isolation as a means of protection and produc­ tion of differentially valued bodies depended upon specific technologies: ‘an entire administrative and technical machinery made it possible to safely import the deployment of sexuality into the exploited class’ (1978: 126). In the second transformation, Foucault similarly points to the role of techno­ logy in relation to the emergence of new lines of demarcation. It was, for example, only with the emergence of presumably authoritative knowledge about the nature of races that we saw the emergence of a new definition of safe/unsafe, normal/abnormal political identity. As such, the specifics of a given ‘racist break’ or caesura ‘is bound up with the technology of power’ (2003: 258) – i.e. with technology as source of knowledge on the basis of which a specific grid of divisi­ bility emerges as necessary, legitimate and as ‘harder to renounce’ given, in this

44   Theorising technology case, that belonging to a certain race could not easily be repudiated (Foucault 2003). Again, this dimension of the politics of technology is obviously different from the function of negative technology of power and its role in relation to ‘simply’ enforcing predefined divisions. Put differently, Foucault thus uses the term technology to call attention to the politics of technology in relation to the very emergence of specific discriminatory distinctions – specific rationalities or modalities of power (2007: 5)22 – that negative technologies of power then serve to enforce. By way of summary, productive technologies of power matter politi­ cally insofar as they contribute to the constitution of new domains of political intervention and new modalities of divisibility. Consequently, a crucial question for critical humanitarian scholars to consider is therefore whether humanitarian uses of new technology contributes to any or all of these dimensions of the ‘pol­ itics of technology’. Do humanitarian uses of new technology feed into an expan­ sion of the domains of life under power’s control? May humanitarian uses of new technology feed into the emergence of a new discriminatory logic, a new type of racist break – and perhaps also into the enforcement of this discriminatory logic within a newly enlarged domain of political intervention? However, the majority of scholars who have used and developed Foucault’s approach to the study not only of political technology but of power more broadly, have mainly focused on a third meaning – name technology as discourse. This has certainly produced a wealth of insightful analyses of how power operates through discursive structures to establish the precondition for ‘taken-­for-granted’ meanings and a specific sense of rationality. Thus Foucault showed how we miss a crucial dimension of how power operates if we omit the discursive forces that serve to establish a given rationality and make it appear self-­evident. Only when this founda­ tion appears natural can it serve as the basis for power’s unchallenged reach and thus, by showing the procedures at work to maintain this apparent inevitability, Foucault offered a method through which to challenge power’s claim to legitimacy. Whilst such Foucault-­inspired discourse analyses have indeed produced valu­ able insights – also in the field of critical humanitarian studies (see Chapter 2) – I want to suggest that the material aspects of Foucault’s use of the term technology merits more careful attention. And to further develop this somewhat neglected focus on the politics of technology (certainly in the field of critical humanitarian studies) we can fruitfully turn to the recent work of Grégoire Chamayou in order to better appreciate the sense in which technology is indis­ pensable to power and to some of the work within the field of Science and Tech­ nology Studies – notably the concept of co-­constitution – in order to deepen our appreciation of how technology gets constituted as normatively acceptable sources of reliable and politically relevant knowledge, on the basis of which we can authoritatively define political identity.

Thinking with and beyond Foucault Foucault’s attention to the politics of technology at the level of materiality has recently been developed further by Grégoire Chamayou, whose work provides

Theorising technology   45 valuable insights into important but under-­explored questions, including the sense in which technologies are indispensable to power. Technologies of capture: a history of indispensable technologies of power In Manhunts, Chamayou offers a ‘history of the technologies of predation indis­ pensable for the establishment and reproduction of relationships of domination’ (2012: 1). More specifically, Chamayou demonstrates how, since the fifteenth century, we have seen three great forms of manhunts – ‘three great forms of cynegetic power’ (2012: 150) – each with their attending technologies of capture: (1) techniques of violent acquisition (slavery); (2) techniques of violent capture (the first sovereign); and (3) techniques of elimination/exclusion (pasto­ ral power). Chamayou then argues that this is not simply a history of the past; two things can be said about hunting power in its contemporary form. Following these three great manhunts we have witnessed the emergence of a new type of hunting occasioned by ‘the rise of Western capitalism’ which according to Chamayou gave rise to new forms of man-­hunting on three continents: the Americas; the African continent; and the Old Continent (2012: 150–151). In addition to this, later forms of man-­hunting are also characterised by sovereign states’ quest to monopolise ‘the power of legitimate hunting’ (2012: 150–151). As such, the history of man-­hunting that Chamayou offers is a history of the indispensability of technologies of capture in the smooth functioning of power and a history of the present insofar as the changing forms of man-­hunting remain central to contemporary forms of power. Yet, whilst on the one hand, new technologies of predation have thus developed throughout history, Chamayou also, on the other hand, concludes that: ‘beneath the apparent similarity [of man-­hunting] are concealed very different forms of power’ (2012: 149). Chamayou thus opens our eyes to the importance of recognising that when exploring these changing technologies of power, we should also pay attention to the underlying continuity which, for Chamayou, is a form of power that persistently insists on the necessity of man-­hunting, albeit in an altered manner and with changing logics of legitimacy. So, historically we can discern an important continuity in power’s violent acquisition of subjects (2012: 8), but we also see a change in the specific means of acquisition. This relationship between the development of new technologies of power and the underlying similarity in the logic of power calls for further elaboration: how, specifically, are technologies indispensable to power? How are technologies indispensable to the continuity of power and/or to its changing forms (of preda­ tion, of domination)? Chamayou offers important insights into this issue in another significant piece, namely Medicine and Vile Bodies, in which he also explores the relation­ ship between power and technology. In this book he demonstrates how not only capitalism entails new forms of man-­hunting: in contemporary society, the estab­ lishment of sovereign claims to authority are inseparable from science and the

46   Theorising technology production of seemingly authoritative and unyielding ‘truths’ (2008). This, in turn, gives rise to another kind of man-­hunting, i.e. the hunts for ‘legitimate’ human test subjects. To address this issue more thoroughly, we shall now explore two important sets of questions concerning the sense in which techno­ logy is indispensable to power: how do new technologies emerge? And what is the role of technologies not only in enabling a specific form of power/domination, but also in relation to the changing morphology of power?

In what sense are technologies indispensable: a double indispensability? First, technologies are indispensable to power’s negative operation, to its prac­ tices of domination – be it the use of techniques for acquiring slaves including enslavement and penal servitude (2012: 45) or ‘techniques for identifying, excluding, and eliminating dangerous elements’ (2012: 20; see also 2008: 17). Now, in addition to this point, Chamayou also suggests – only implicitly in Manhunts but very thoroughly in Medicine and Vile Bodies – that technologies are indispensable to power’s continued supremacy in another sense. Chamayou notes that ‘what is peculiar to humans, we might say, resides in their ability to contest their exclusion from humanity’ (2012: 8). In other words, the divides that power enforces within humanity at any given time are never left entirely unchal­ lenged but will always spur resistance.23 On that note, to the extent that power constantly needs to overcome challenges to its legitimacy, it also constantly needs to develop new technologies (new and more subtle, harder to renounce, seemingly more humane, etc.).24 These ideas arguably resonate with aspects of Foucault’s thinking such as his remark that ‘these mechanisms of power, these procedures of power, must be considered as techniques. Which is to say, proced­ ures that have been invented, perfected and which are endlessly developed ’ (2007: 158). In this sense, Chamayou’s argument about how experimentation is indispensable to practices of power can thus be considered a development of Foucault’s argument about the endless development of techniques, of mechan­ isms of power. As follows, political technologies have what I will refer to as a double indis­ pensability. On the one hand, technologies are indispensable to the enforcement of existing divisions between valuable and vile bodies. At the same time, the subjects that these divisions deem ‘inferior’ can then ‘legitimately’ be subjected to experiments that potentially feed into the development of new (more meticu­ lous, more humane, less easy to renounce) technologies of power – as indispens­ able in order for power to confront the continuous challenges to the legitimacy of its current morphology.25 And this brings us back to the problem of experi­ mentation, which is why we shall now elaborate on this latter aspect, i.e. power’s relentless quest for new technologies and the attending need for ‘legitimate’ human test subjects.

Theorising technology   47

The indispensability of experimentation – and appropriate test subjects One of Chamayou’s important points is that available human test subjects – cer­ tainly when large amount of bodies are needed – do not simply exist as legiti­ mately available for practices of experimentation (2008). Instead, they are produced as such through what Chamayou calls ‘vilization technologies’ – i.e. discursive and physical technologies that serve to produce the type of ‘vile’ body needed for practices of experimentation to unfold (Lambert 2013). And, cru­ cially, Chamayou explicitly argued that this function does not only unfold at the level of discourse, but also through physical practices such as starvation. Again, indicative of how such experiments are indispensable to power’s continued supremacy, Chamayou defines vilization technologies as ‘political technologies, that is, technologies designed to insure the exercise conditions of a power’ (2008: 17). So, what Chamayou provides is a framework for understanding how technologies of vilization are indeed a prerequisite for the conduct of seemingly legitimate human experiments some of which may feed into the constitution of new technologies of power. Thus, in addition to the important function of demar­ cating certain identities as belonging to the periphery of that which sovereign power regards as worthy, Chamayou points to another important function of enforcing divisions between valuable and vile bodies, namely that the vile subject can legitimately be regarded as suitable for experimentation – and, in that capacity, becomes capable of serving another crucial function namely that of aiding sovereign power in its ceaseless transformations, including the inven­ tion of new technologies of power. Of particular relevance to the context of tech­ nology uses in the global periphery, it should be said, that preceding the work of Chamayou, the term ‘vile bodies’ has been used in analyses of technology uses involving subjects in the colonial periphery (Anderson 1992; see also Chapter 2). Now an additional paradox emerges when these processes unfold in the context of humanitarianism: can the subject deemed worthy of humanitarian assistance simultaneously be regarded as vile and fit for experimentation?

Humanitarian vilization and experimentation Now, to return to the context of humanitarianism, my suggestion is that currently these technologies of predation operate in a type of context that Chamayou does not pay explicit attention to, namely the context of humanitarianism. This obvi­ ously gives rise to a series of important questions: to what extent do human­ itarian practices participate in the production of ‘vile’ bodies that, in this capacity, can subsequently be considered suitable for experimentation? To what extent may such experiments feed into the development of new technologies that, in turn, may assists a power based on violent man-­hunting to obtain new means through which to potentially address challenges to its continued legiti­ macy and supremacy? And, how easily or neatly can the demarcation of certain

48   Theorising technology bodies as ‘vile’ serve to overcome political challenges to their exposure to prac­ tices of experimentation? But before we return to the focus on humanitarian technology uses, another important point should be stressed. Insofar as a key reason for calling attention to the politics of technology is to challenge the seeming legitimacy of power’s expansion into a new domain of life and the seeming authority of the discrimina­ tory divisions that power enforces within these domains, then it seems that we need to address another important question: how is new technology – and new knowledge – constituted as authoritative in such a way that it can legitimately be regarded as relevant to the determination of political identity? How do new tech­ nologies emerge in a capacity that enables them to serve as technologies of power? Indeed, Foucault has been criticised for reducing knowledge to power: ‘While Foucault himself drew back from equating power and knowledge, they are none­ theless closely entwined in his work, . . . in such a way as to reinforce and mutu­ ally construct each other’ (Walby 2000). So whilst Foucault’s work provides a useful perspective for understanding the various roles that technology may play vis-­à-vis the functioning of power, he offers little insight into the question of how specific forms of knowledge come to be regarded as authoritative, as rel­ evant to the demarcation of political identity and as normatively acceptable as a foundation for enforcing racist divides. Whilst one of the functions of techno­ logy concerns the role of knowledge as ‘the basis of power’, it must at the same time be said that not all knowledge is regarded as relevant to the functioning of power and that no knowledge automatically acquires this status. Let us therefore now turn to a body of literature that can help us deepen our appreciation of the processes through which specific technologies come to acquire a status as unyielding source of authoritative knowledge upon which power’s claims to legitimate intrusion and violent enforcement of racist division can be based. In the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), a number of scholars have already addressed such questions about the constitution of technology as an authoritative ‘origin of truth’.

Questions of agency: technologies as constitutive and constituted Yes, technologies matter, but how are we to think about the question of agency? In what sense, to what extent, can technology be said to entail capacity for agency? And how are technologies constituted in a specific capacity (as author­ itative, as sources of politically relevant knowledge)? Or, to use Foucault’s own terms, how does a technology acquire a ‘right of origin over truth’ (1973: 2). Insights from STS can help us address both of these questions about constitu­ tive agency:26 how technologies are constituted (as authoritative, as legitimate, as accepted etc.); and how technologies are constitutive (of the political). When seeking to explain how and where these constitutive practices unfold, STS scholars emphasise the role of everyday practices, to which I will add technology

Theorising technology   49 uses in humanitarian contexts. Put differently, STS insights open up new avenues through which to explore important questions concerning the politics of techno­ logy, including the issue of how new technologies acquire authority (scientifi­ cally, morally, etc.) through processes of humanitarian experimentation. More specifically, insights from Science and Technology Studies can help us further important aspects of Foucault’s work in the sense that STS proposes that we ­theorise technology as constituted and constitutive in ways that pay careful atten­ tion to the processes through which technologies are constituted as sources of authoritative and politically relevant knowledge and to the processes through which technologies have constitutive effects – e.g. on conceptions of what exists as a legitimate site of intervention. To illustrate what STS insights can add to our conceptualisation of how tech­ nology matters politically, I will zoom in on two themes that I believe to be illustrative of issues that STS scholars approach in a distinctive manner: the issues of constitutive agency; and the question of what we should recognise as constituted in our analyses of ‘science in society’. Through these two themes, STS adds a broader focus on constitutive agency and a broader perspective on what researchers need to investigate the social construction of. Taking this double-­constitutive scenario as the starting point for our analysis of human­ itarian uses of new technology, STS helps us recognise how different risks may transpire at these two levels (constitution by technology and constitution of technology), thereby enabling an appreciation of the potential for risks that cannot be understood simply as the consequence of technology failures. This is why a reading of Foucault which focuses only weakly on material agency can fruitfully be supplemented with insights from STS when seeking to develop an analytical framework through which to investigate humanitarian uses of new technology.

Constitution by whom/what On the subject of constitutive agency, STS scholars insist that the sense in which technology is constitutive cannot simply be understood as an ‘epiphenomenon of social and political interests’ (Jasanoff 2004: 3). Constitutive agency is not only to be located in human actors whose will or intention may be sought realised through otherwise passive technology. Rather than seeing technology as having constitutive effects only as a secondary occurrence to primary phenomenon (e.g. human beings expressing political interests), STS maintains that ‘the material’ encompasses capacity for constitutive agency. From this starting point, STS scholars have developed rich vocabularies through which to conceptualise the sense in which ‘matter’ can be considered capable of constitutive agency. Bruno Latour’s notion of actant is one example of an STS notion that seeks to explain how ‘matter’ has capacity for agency (Jasanoff 2004).27 Besides on-­going STS efforts at conceptualising how human and non-­human matter entail consti­ tutive capacity, broader debates about materiality and agency have gained prom­ inence in adjacent disciplines.28 Inspired by Latour, Jane Bennett has recently

50   Theorising technology conceptualised material agency through the notion of ‘vitality’, which she uses to denote ‘the distinctive capacities or efficacious power of particular material configurations’ (2010: ix) or, by the same token, ‘the capacity of things to . . . act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (2010: viii). Thus Bennett is inviting us to think about material configura­ tions as capable of a certain agency, as ‘vital materiality’ (2010: vii), rather than passive objects. This conceptualisation of technology as constitutive distinguishes STS from other theoretical approaches that seek to explain the social as constituted. To Constructivism’s focus on language and discourse (Coole and Frost 2010: 26–27) STS adds an additional dimension by insisting that we expand our con­ ceptualisation of constitutive agency and take seriously the role of materiality. From this perspective, an STS analysis insists on an analytical focus that includes an appreciation of the vitality of ‘the material correlates of social for­ mations’ (Jasanoff 2004). In her articulation of the merits of STS insights, Jasa­ noff argues that, crucially, an STS approach avoids ‘the charges of social determinism’ because of its double focus on human and material forms of agency (Jasanoff 2004: 3). Conceptualising constitutive agency with this double focus on human and non-­human agency also entails a distinct perspective on the question of where constitutive ‘moments’ are to be located. In Constructivist analysis, the main emphasis is on constitutive processes prior to the use of tech­ nology (given the assumption that constitutive agency lies with human actors). By contrast, an STS approach invites us to address the question of what techno­ logy does as an issue to be ‘deduced from its performance’ (Latour, cited in Bennett 2010: viii), and to look for constitutive processes in the interplay between human and material agency.

Constitution of what A second characteristic theme in STS concerns the insistence that science ought to be studied as socially constituted (as legitimate, as authoritative, etc.) and the emphasis on exploring how the social constitution of science and technology has implications for the constitution of society (of a specific social order, with spe­ cific social identities).29 As captured in the notion of ‘co-­production’, STS insists that the making of social order cannot be understood without due attention to the simultaneous ‘making’ of science and technology (Jasanoff 2004). In this way, STS expands the analysis of constitution to include a focus on technology as a social construct with significant implications for how we understand social reality. Indeed, ‘science’ and ‘society’ are regarded as two aspects of a common phenomenon, namely the production of what we believe to be and respond to as ‘reality’. Such co-­production is approached from the starting point that ‘co-­ production is not about ideas alone; it is equally about concrete, physical things’ (Jasanoff 2004: 6). From this perspective STS scholars have illuminated how scientific knowledge both embeds and in embedded in social identities (Jasanoff 2004: 3–4; see also Jasanoff 1996), tracing how specific concepts for classifying

Theorising technology   51 and ordering social worlds have gained stability along with particular expres­ sions of knowledge (Jasanoff 2004: 5). The concept of co-­production has been used by various STS scholars to explore epistemic emergence (the making of science) and emergence of social categories (the making of social order) in a manner that highlights the constitutive relationship between the two, i.e. the complex interplay between the ordering of knowledge and the ordering of society (Jasanoff 2004). Finally, STS also invites us to recognise how these constitutive processes do not just unfold in a strictly scientific and objective manner within scientific spaces sealed-­off from external forces of politics and human subjectivity. And, in this sense, STS insights thus give us a fruitful starting point for a considera­ tion of how social processes beyond scientific laboratories may contribute in various ways to the constitution of technology and knowledge in a specific capa­ city and with implications for the simultaneous constitution of political identity. Crucially, these STS insights arguably further another important aspect of Foucault’s work in the sense that Foucault also calls attention to the role of social processes in the constitution of technologies of power. As he writes in The History of Sexuality: ‘An entire social practice . . . furnished this technology of sex with a formidable power and far-­reaching consequences’ (1978: 119). On that note, let us turn to the question of how such constitutive processes may unfold in the context of humanitarian technology uses.

Humanitarian experimentation: risks of failure and risks of success How, then, does this reading of Foucault’s theorization of technology and my elaboration on this through Chamayou and STS, become relevant to the question of how humanitarian technology uses matter politically? In what follows, I want to suggest that when relating the two senses of ‘technology’ that are evident in Foucault’s work – the latter of which has been elaborated through STS – it makes sense to return to the question of humanitarian uses of new technology through an analytical framework that distinguishes between two types of risks related to the use of new technologies: the risks of failure (related to technology as device) and risks of success (risks stemming from various constitutive aspects of positive technologies of power, including the successful constitution of new subjects/objects of intervention and new racist caesuras). Risks of failure To conduct an experiment is to risk success or failure, and when human health and lives hang in the balance, the stakes are high indeed. (Harriet A. Washington 2006: 55) The more familiar way of thinking about the kinds of risks that may transpire when trialling unapproved technologies is most easily discernible in the field of

52   Theorising technology medicine. The history of experimentation only too powerfully illustrates how vilized bodies – whether ‘black Amer­icans’ or subjects in the colonial periphery – were subjected to practices that involved considerable risks. In the colonial periphery, vilization created a space in which ‘Amer­ican physicians’ could justify subjecting ‘Filipino bodies and Filipino behaviour . . . to ceaseless medical inspection, training, and discipline’ with risks of failure confronting these bodies (Anderson, W. 1996). Similar practices unfolded amongst vile bodies in the ‘colonial core’. As Harriet Washington points out, once ‘black Amer­icans’ had been accepted as suitable test subjects the coming years ‘saw an escalation of sadism in experiments on slaves’ including, for example, a 1846 experiment in which boiling water was being poured on naked enslaved typhoid pneumonia patients to test the efficacy of such practices as treatment (Washington 2006: 60–61). Such instances were not limited to a few individual cases. We can also find numerous examples of larger institutionalised experiments involving vilized bodies in the colonial core. One often-­cited example was the Tuskegee experi­ ment in which black men with syphilis were observed, but not treated, in a gov­ ernment study (Brandt 1978). Many more examples can be found, but the important thing to stress at this point is that these practices cannot easily be understood as part of a history of a distant colonial past. Rather they are integral to a history of the present. Obviously, the history of vilized humans being exposed to experiments with enormous risks of encounter­ ing detrimental failures is much broader than colonial experimentation. Indeed, it was in the aftermath of World War  II (and German doctors’ practices of human experimentation) that we then saw the emergence of The Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code is a set of ethical principles for human experimenta­ tion intended to protect humans from being subjected to such practices, includ­ ing the principle of informed consent. Whilst the advent of such guidelines and principles represent a noteworthy difference from earlier colonial experimenta­ tion during which informed consent ‘was not part of the ethical mores’ (Wash­ ington 2006: 55) contemporary critics have, however, challenged us not to regard the materialisation of such guidelines as a total shift away from unethical practices of experimentation. Indeed, a number of critics have called attention to the fact that this laudable principle does not always offer protection to those most in need. Indeed, informed consent has been ‘misapplied’ in a number of experiments in developing countries; e.g. in the case of HIV experiments on pregnant women (Dyckman 1999). As such, practices of experimentation that expose vile bodies to grave risks of failure should not be understood as part of a history of a distant colonial past but as a historical context though which to understand how ‘the indispensability of experimentation’ continues into our present condition, albeit in a different form: today clinical trials are being off-­ shored to the global periphery (Petryna 2005). This is an important part of the context within which to understand a specific aspect of the experimental prac­ tices that we see unfold in contemporary humanitarian locations where subjects are considered ‘vile’ with the risk of being exposed to the violence of experi­ mentation (exposure to risks of failure).

Theorising technology   53 But, as Chamayou reminds us – and in accordance with our two-­fold reading of Foucault’s notion of technology – violence does not only occur at the time of acquisition, but also later, when a technology is used as a means of governing (risks of success) (Chamayou 2012: 8). Using the above STS insights about tech­ nology as constituted and constitutive in my conceptualisation of experimenta­ tion, we shall now elaborate on the notion of risks stemming from success by addressing two questions. Risks of success: experimentation and epistemic emergence When studying specific technologies and bodies of knowledge as constituted – in social processes – an important focus, also in the context of experimentation, is the question of how social agency contributes to a specific constitution of technology (as credible, as authoritative, as morally acceptable, etc.) and how this constitution may have implications for the simultaneous making of social order and identities within that order (Jasanoff 2004). Indeed, an STS approach provides a starting point for understanding how an additional set of risks may emerge in the context of successful experimentation by insisting that we examine the social processes that affect the stabilisation of specific knowledge-­claims, whilst noticing that in order for ‘experimental results to be authoritative’ it is often necessary to make recourse to ‘some shared domain of unquestioned moral authority’ (Dear 2004: 10–11). In the case of humanitarian uses of new technologies, an STS perspective thus calls attention to the significance of the moral authority ascribed to humanitarian actors as well as to the humanitarian terminology. And STS insights then invite us to investigate this aspect – i.e. the ways in which ‘humanitarian morality’ may affect the social constitution of a specific technology – not as an external factor to the scientific process, but as a factor that can affect the constitution of the technology, for example as normatively acceptable. The type of ‘risk from success’ that this conceptualisation of experimentation enables us to see is how humanitarian use of new technology may give rise to dangers stemming from how these practices may endow a new (and contested) technology with new levels of moral credibility. Thus, the constitutive function that humanitarian uses of new technology may serve is not to be understood narrowly in terms of pro­ viding ‘scientific’ evidence. Rather, we need to expand our appreciation of the functions of such technology uses to also include an exploration of how such  practice may contribute to the production of moral credibility as can indeed be of crucial importance, especially in cases where the technology being used is  surrounded by controversy ‘at home’ (among Western citizens). An STS-­inspired approach thus invites us to investigate humanitarian technology trials as social practices that partake in the constitution of a specific techno­ logy  with implications for how its subsequent authority, legitimacy and use as well as how the knowledge gained through such technology uses is understood and acted upon.

54   Theorising technology Risks of success: experimentation and the emergence of social order and identities The other aspect that STS invites us to focus on concerns the question of how the technology ‘strikes back’ (Latour 2000) in ways that impact upon the making of a specific social imaginary. When investigating the use of new technology, we need to not only look at the constitution of this technology but also at how the technology – in a particular constitution and capacity (e.g. as authoritative source of knowledge) – loops back upon the social order. Accordingly, I explore how the specific constitution of a new technology influences the making of social order and social identities within that order. This is the second aspect of the ‘co-­ constitutive’ process that we need to attend to when seeking to understand the emergence of ‘risks stemming from success’. Successful experimentation may produce new sources of authority, a ‘success’ which may in turn give rise to risks stemming from the changes that this new source of authority can have on social order, hierarchy and social identity. From this perspective, I investigate how the ‘ordering of knowledge’ during a humanitarian experiment affects the emergence of a specific social order – and the place of social identities within this order. Inviting us to investigate how a given technology has constitutive effects, an STS approach helps us see how a specific constitution of ‘humani­ tarian technology’ – as endowed with specific authority – can ‘loop back’ onto our conception of social reality with implications for how we understand social identities and categories (Jasanoff 2004). This framework – this translation of our revised conception of the politics of technology into a distinction between risks of failure and risks of success – facil­ itates a critical assessment of a range of risks that humanitarian actors may fail to consider insofar as they assume that technologies are best understood as non-­ political ‘means to an end’. Indeed, such a conception of technology will cer­ tainly fail to appreciate how risks stemming from these critical dimensions of the politics of technology may potentially translate into humanitarian failures to protect its subjects not only against exposure to experimentation failure but also against exposure to additional levels of seemingly legitimate intervention by sovereign power. Thus, we now have an analytical framework through which to explore the phenomenon of humanitarian technology uses, and, on that note, we shall now turn to our three specific case studies: humanitarian uses of biometrics; biotech­ nology; and vaccination.

Notes   1 ‘In inventing the tools and insights that made these relations visible, the very words themselves which are now so familiar – truth, knowledge, power, technology, discourse, practice – were given a new sense and made to do conceptual work that they had not done – that had not been done – before’ (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 3).   2 See Chapter 16 ‘The Meshes of Power’ in Elden and Crampton (2007).   3 As Foucault notes: ‘The discovery of population is, alongside the discovery of the individual and the body amenable to dressage, the other great technological core

Theorising technology   55 around which the political procedures of the West transformed themselves’ (2007: 161).   4 ‘At this moment, what I will call ‘bio-­politics’ was invented. It is at this moment that we see appear problems like those of housing, . . . of public hygiene, [of] how we can regulate population flux. . . . And, from this, a whole series of techniques of observa­ tion, including statistics, obviously, but also all . . . are charged with this regulation of the population.’ (2007: 161).   5 For example, when biometric data is called upon as source of knowledge about a per­ son’s ‘presumed becoming’ (Hildebrandt 2007).   6 For example, the difference between registered and unregistered bodies as syn­ onymous with the difference between subjects who are deserving or undeserving of humanitarian assistance.   7 See Coole and Frost 2010.   8 Duffield examines human security ‘as a relation or a technology of governance. . . . It is precisely its vagueness and lack of precision that enables it [the concept of human security] to work as a technology of governance within the external frontier zone.’ (2007: 113–114).   9 William Walters (2011) ‘the inscription of the humanitarian border into discourse’. 10 Julian Reid: ‘The biopoliticization of humanitarianism has been forged through its exposure to similar discursive fields of authority’ (2010: 395). 11 Indeed, this point has also been made about the broader ‘turn to materiality’ in Inter­ national Relations – see, for example, special issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41 (3), 2013. 12 Chamayou has recently restated the continued relevance of this aspect of Foucault’s analysis: ‘modern proscription is both more subtle and more methodical’ (2012: 136). 13 Birth-­control practices are another example. Foucault Society Must Be Defended (2003: 243). 14 Jennifer Hyndman has, for example, explored the role of counting and calculating (maps, statistics, etc.) as ‘technologies of surveillance, control and management of refugees in post-­independence Kenya’ (2000: 123). 15 ‘[T]he domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality’ (Foucault 1973: xvii). 16 Which Foucault also refers to as ‘site’ or as power’s ‘bearing area’ (2003: 245, 242). 17 Foucault: ‘life and death are [no longer regarded as] phenomena that fall outside the field of power’ (2003: 240). 18 With respect to the first transformation, Foucault refers to ‘an extension of the domain controlled’ (1978). 19 ‘The discovery of population is . . . the other great technological core around which the political procedures of the West transformed themselves’ (Foucault 2007: 161, translated by Moore). 20 But also in The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault calls attention to the role of technology (as device) in ‘opening up’ new dimensions of life to the language of rationality (1973: xvi). 21 ‘So, there is not a series of successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier ones to disappear’ (Foucault 2007: 8). 22 In Security, Territory, Population (2007) Foucault speaks about ‘These three modali­ ties’: juridical, disciplinary, and security (5–6). 23 Indeed, as Foucault explains, resistance is intrinsic to power. 24 This resonates with Rabinow and Rose’s reading of Foucault: ‘As his studies of the birth of social medicine show – and as also spelled out in Discipline and Punish – these strategic assemblages are initially formed as responses to crises, problems or perceived challenges to those who govern’ (2003). 25 Following Foucault’s conception of power, the power to define certain subjects as ‘unsuitable’ or ‘abnormal’ is a productive power in the sense that these bodies

56   Theorising technology s­ ubsequently serve this important function of seemingly suitable and legitimate test subjects in technology trials, though which new technologies of power may eventu­ ally emerge. These ‘unsuitable’ bodies serve as subjects of experimentation necessary in order for new technologies of power to develop/emerge, which can explain why they are actively hunted, as described by Chamayou (2012). 26 Whilst some have argued that STS has been narrowly concerned with specialist inter­ ests ‘with limited relevance to some of the central themes of political and historical debate’ (Barry 2001: 12) this book disagrees with that judgement: a number of STS scholars have, for example, through the notion of co-­production (Jasanoff 1995) expli­ citly aimed at elaborating a link between their analytical approach and key policy issues. 27 Much has been written on the topic of materiality and agency. This chapter is not able to do justice to all aspects of this discussion. The point to stress is that STS con­ tributes a more nuanced conceptualisation of the sense in which technology is consti­ tutive – beyond as a mere ‘means’ through which human will or design is sought materialised. 28 Including the discipline of International Relations; see, for example, Diana Coole ‘Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism’, Millennium Journal, 2013: 41; Connolly ‘The ‘New Materialism’ and the Fragility of Things’, Millennium Journal, 2013: 41; Suganami ‘Causation-­in-the-­world. A Contribution to Meta-­theory of IR,’ Millennium Journal, 2013: 41. 29 Feminist STS has paid great attention to the relationship between constitution of science and technology and constitution of gendered identity. See, for example, Haraway ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (1988): 575–599; Wajcman ‘Feminist Theories of Technology’ in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (1995), Jasanoff et al. (eds).

4 Humanitarian biometrics

Biometric refugee registration in the Afghan-­Pakistan borderland1 For more than a decade we have witnessed a humanitarian turn to a range of digital technologies: fixed-­wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, were used by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Haiti and by Medair to provide humanitarian relief in the Philippines (Santos 2013); surveillance drones were deployed in the MONUSCO peacekeeping mission in DR Congo (Nichols 2013); and, in response to the refugee crisis in Syria and its neighbouring countries, the ‘UN has been using satellite imagery and geographic information system (GIS) data to create detailed maps of areas of concern’ (IRIN November 2013).2 And, for more than a decade, different biometric technologies (notably fingerprinting and iris scanning) have been introduced into various refugee management contexts and development contexts (Jacobsen 2010; Muller 2004; Aas 2006; Franke 2009; Farraj 2011; Gelb and Clark 2013).3 More recently, this trend – this humanitarian turn to digital technology – was marked by the publication of two landmark reports by significant humanitarian actors: the International Federation of Red Cross’s annual World Disasters Report which focused on ‘technology and the future of humanitarian action’ (2013) and a report by the United Nation’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs entitled Humanitarianism in a Network Age (2013). Within this broader trend, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sees the use of biometric registration technology (fingerprinting or iris scanning) as marking ‘a new direction in refugee registration’ (UNHCR 2006a). High hopes and expectations are invested in this broad range of new digital technologies: drones are expected to make peacekeeping efforts more effective, biometrics technologies are expected to solve a variety of problems in the context of refugee management, e.g. by bringing greater accuracy, objectivity and swiftness to an otherwise cumbersome registration procedure. And, at a more general level, new digital technologies are expected to offer new opportunities for humanitarian action (ICRC), and to help improve various aspects of contemporary humanitarian endeavours. However, considering the various sources of negative effects in the context of humanitarian efforts and considering our revised

58   Humanitarian biometrics conception of technology as constituted and constitutive, it seems necessary to take a closer look at the role of such new technologies – including their ability to revolutionise humanitarian efforts in a manner that simply produces improvement. To explore some of the dynamics at play when humanitarian actors deploy new digital technologies, we shall now zoom in on a specific case study, namely UNHCR’s use of iris recognition technology during its repatriation of Afghan refugees. On the one hand, UNHCR represents its use of iris recognition technology in the context of this repatriation endeavour as uncontroversial – as a new technology whose only noteworthy effect will be to speed up and bestow greater efficiency and accuracy to an otherwise time-­consuming and potentially biased refugee registration process. On the other hand, UNHCR has also referred to the technology as ‘experimental iris testing’ (UNHCR 2003a) thus recognising that the use of this new technology was experimental in the sense that it was ‘the first field use of such iris technology anywhere in the world’ (UNHCR 2003a). The sensitive iris recognition technology had never previously been used under such ‘harsh conditions [as] in the heat and dust of Pakistan’s border territories with Afghanistan’ (UNHCR 2003a). The analysis that follows is guided by a curiosity about the sense in which iris recognition functions as a solution that brings greater efficiency and/or as an experimental technology that comes with problems of failures and other negative effects. Biometrics There are many different biometrics: facial recognition, voice recognition, finger­print recognition, and iris recognition are only some of the more familiar examples. A common definition of a biometric is that it is an ‘automatically measurable, robust and distinctive physical characteristic or personal trait that can be used to identify an individual or verify the claimed identity of an individual’ (Woodward et al. 2003: 1). In this sense, that is, as a ‘personal trait that can be used to identify an individual’, biometric identifiers have a long history of use in prisons (Magnet 2011; Maguire 2009) and in the colonial periphery (Pugliese 2012; Breckenridge 2014). But, since the late 1990s, we have seen the emergence of digital technologies capable of capturing and processing these ‘distinctive physical characteristic’. Thus, contemporary biometric technologies entail a digitalisation of a unique body part, and with this digitalisation of biometric identification, new forms of knowledge production (from profiling techniques and data mining) implies that contemporary biometric technologies can feed into political decision-­making processes in ways that differ from past uses of biometric identification (Jacobsen 2012). Historical context: humanitarian experimentation and biometric classification As biometric registration technologies – fingerprinting and iris recognition – are increasingly adopted by humanitarian actors in different contexts, including refugee

Humanitarian biometrics   59 registration, two things are important to note about the historical context within which to situate this humanitarian turn to biometric technology. First, the experimental piloting of new technologies at humanitarian sites in the global periphery has a history. One example of a more familiar type of experiment is the testing of new medical inventions at different peripheral sites, including various humanitarian settings (Jacobsen 2011). As has already been documented, such practices continue into the twenty-­first century (Petryna 2009; Shah 2006). In addition to the testing of unapproved medical inventions, new biometric technologies have for more than a decade been piloted in humanitarian contexts and UNHCR has been at the forefront of the introduction of biometric registration in refugee management (Jacobsen (2015b) Disasters Journal (forthcoming)). The introduction of iris recognition in the repatriation of Afghan refugees in 2002, marks UNHCRs first use of iris recognition. Following the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, UNHCR initiated a repatriation program to help Afghan refugees currently living in camps inside Pakistan return to their country of origin and in October 2002 it was decided that iris recognition technology should be installed in the Voluntary Repatriation Centres (VRCs) at which UNHCR handed out assistance packages to Afghan returnees to help make their journey safe. Previously, UNHCR had used ‘photo-­ID, interviews and luggage-­checks’ (UNHCR 2003a) as verification methods to help differentiate ‘genuine’ returnees from ‘recyclers’ or ‘false refugees’ who were trying to claim a second assistance package (BioID 2012; UNHCR 2006b). But with large numbers of Afghan returnees, aid workers now found that these methods began to prove ineffective (BioID 2012; UNHCR 2003d). According to UNHCR, the use of iris recognition in this particular context was experimental in the sense that the technology was deployed under more challenging conditions than hitherto. Previously iris recognition had, for example, been tested in Heathrow airport and similar locations where heat, humidity, light and other conditions could be controlled more easily than in the Afghan–Pakistan borderland (Khaw 2002; Daugman 2003; Sasse 2007). UNHCR recognised that given these harsh conditions, it remained to be seen whether an ‘iris testing verification centre’ could ‘be operated in conditions inside Afghanistan’ (UNHCR 2003c). Yet, as will be illustrated in this article, UNHCRs experimental use of biometrics had other effects than simply to test whether iris recognition could perform reliably under these harsh conditions. Humanitarian actors’ turn to biometric registration should not only be understood in relation to a history of humanitarian experimentation with other technologies. It must also be situated within a broader historico-­political context in which biometrics is recognised as part of the ‘emergence of a new form of politics: biopolitics’ (Pugliese 2012: 3). Genealogically situating the development of biometrics in this way serves to elucidate the historical entanglement of biometrics and a politics of discrimination and categorization (Pugliese 2012) and to place biometrics in relation to a broader phenomenon of ‘data managing and arithmetizing the other’ (Ansorge 2012: 30). This history – these accounts of the ‘racism that underpins biometric technology’ (Bell 2013: 465) – provides an important background against which to appreciate why this contemporary

60   Humanitarian biometrics humanitarian turn to biometrics cannot easily be understood without an appreciation of how biometric technologies are deployed by states to categorise individuals and enforce authoritative distinctions between ‘valuable’ forms of life and other forms of life that are classified as less valuable, with implications for their life chances and choices (Lyon 2003). UNHCR and the piloting of iris registration in refugee repatriation In this repatriation endeavour, UNHCR identified a problem of ‘recycling’ which occurs when individuals seek ‘multiple disbursement of UNHCR’s return assistance package’ (UNHCR 2002c; Biometric Technology Today 2005). According to biometric vendor Iridian Technologies (hereafter Iridian), it was in response to this problem that the company developed a solution for UNHCR ‘based on biometric registration of all refugees claiming repatriation assistance from UNHCR when repatriating from Pakistan to Afghanistan’ (BioID 2012). Iridian was to deliver the iris recognition technology for this UNHCR operation and BioID was charged with the task of on-­site implementation and management of the technology. As described by Gideon Long, ‘grappling with a flood of refugees returning to Afghanistan’ UNHCR had now found a ‘novel way to keep an eye on Afghans’ (Long 2002). Following an initial pilot phase (September 2002), iris recognition became ‘mandatory for all returning Afghans wishing to obtain travel and reintegration assistance’ (UNHCR 2007) and the technology was rolled out in five Repatriation Centres (BioID 2014). Iris recognition is a type of biometric technology that uses the pattern of a person’s iris (the coloured tissue around the pupil) as the biological feature with reference to which an individual can be recognised through a computerised process whereby a previously acquired, digitalised and stored iris template is matched against the ‘live’ iris image of that person. In 2002, iris recognition was still a relatively novel type of biometric. Propelling the uptake of this particular technology was, among other things, the claim that, even more so than with finger­prints and facial images, iris patterns are unique to every individual (Zhu, Tan and Wang 2000: 801; Daugman 2004). It has been said that no two iris patterns are alike and that iris recognition can therefore serve as an unprecedentedly accurate biometric identifier (Savithiri and Murugan 2011). Now, in the context of this UNHCR repatriation of Afghan refugees, it became a prerequisite for all refugees above the age of six seeking assistance from UNHCR to have their iris image captured, digitalised, stored and checked against the entire database of other digitalised refugee templates enrolled and stored during this repatriation endeavour. This ‘matching’ of new entries against existing ones was designed to take place in a so-­called ‘one-­to-many identification mode’ in which a particular iris image is matched against all entries in a database (Daugman 2004: 21). Such ‘one-­to-many’ searches were carried out in order to establish (with the accuracy and authority of this new technology) whether a given refugee had previously been registered and had thus already received assistance. If the ‘one-­to-many’ search produced a match, then an alarm went off and the refugee presenting him

Humanitarian biometrics   61 or herself to the system was labelled a ‘second timer’ and denied assistance (UNHCR 2003a). The seeming simplicity of this iris registration process and the way in which it presumably eases the delivery of refugee assistance is described in UNHCR accounts as an important reason for the introduction of this new technology: ‘The new technology eases the job of refugee agency staff working at the centres’ (UNHCR 2003a)4 and it simply ‘helps meet the needs of refugees’ (UNHCR 2012a). Removing the cumbersome and time-­consuming process of conducting interviews etc. and promising to eliminate the difficulty of having to make decisions about whether a given person is a ‘genuine’ refugee or a ‘second timer’, biometric registration was said to significantly ease the job of humani­ tarian staff. Adding to this notion of iris registration as a machine that simply eases refugee assistance, the use of this new technology was commonly repre­ sented as a simple and uncontroversial technical matter in various UNHCR documents: ‘The iris check is a simple procedure in which an iris image is captured and stored’ such that a subsequent database search which only ‘takes a second or less’ can reliably distinguish a genuine returnee from a second timer (UNHCR 2002). To appreciate some of the factors that have influenced UNHCR’s turn to biometric registration technology it is also necessary to recognise how efficiency is a crucial factor in relation to many of the tasks undertaken by UNHCR, including registration. And this was certainly true in the context of this Afghan repatriation endeavour, which was one of the largest repatriation programmes in UNHCR’s history (UNHCR 2012b). Indeed, with the intention of ensuring that all Afghan refugees wishing to return are assisted to make this journey safely, the ability to process large amounts of individuals understandably becomes important. And, in a broader sense, the fact that UNHCR confronts a historically large task is not only due to the scale of this specific repatriation endeavour. More generally, UNHCR’s mandate has changed over time from protection of refugees who have crossed an international border to also taking responsibility for additional tasks such as IDP protection and repatriation (Betts et al. 2012; Loescher 2001), which implies that UNHCR more generally encounters a larger task. These contextual factors contribute to explaining why efficiency is of great impor­tance to UNHCR – and thus also why the agency has been keen to welcome technologies through which to possibly achieve such efficiency. But, as Lisa Malkki has remarked, asking critical questions is particularly important when practices of humanitarianism seem to represent ‘the best of all possible worlds’ (1996: 398). In such cases, we must do our utmost ‘to come up with something better’ (Malkki 1996: 398) and one way of facilitating this is to allow a revised conception of technology to inform our analysis of the various risks that could potentially emerge.

Risks stemming from technology failure In the face of this ‘recycling problem’ – which was said to get in the way of a limited amount of humanitarian assistance reaching as many ‘deserving’

62   Humanitarian biometrics refugees as possible – iris recognition came to be regarded as a ‘solution’: Through biometric registration of every refugee it would (presumably) be possible to recognise and ‘weed out’ recyclers and thereby ensure a fair and equitable distribution of humanitarian assistance. However, the sense in which the introduction of iris recognition technology can be said to have facilitated the safe return of these Afghan refugees remains to be explored in greater detail. According to a number of technology experts, certain promises about the performance of iris recognition technology still remained unproven at the time of this UNHCR endeavour. Notably, one claim was much disputed – namely, that iris recognition technology could make ‘decisions about personal identity with extremely high confidence’ (Daugman 2004: 21). Challenging this claim, critics pointed out that the technology’s ability to reliably match two iris images and accurately determine their resemblance had thus far only been tested in relatively small databases (Gulmire and Ganorkar 2012: 4345; Thieme 2005). Whilst small-­scale testing had shown promising results which had been held as proof of the technology’s unprecedented accuracy, an important problem remained to be addressed: if the technology was scaled up from a database of a few hundred entries to a database containing millions of templates, ‘technology experts’ warned that this could be expected to produce a significant increase in the number of false matches (Hao et al. 2008).6 As noted in a technical report on iris recognition, there is a ‘lack of independent, large-­scale testing of its performance’ (Newton and Phillips 2006). That is, when deployed on a large scale the accuracy of iris recognition technology could not be guaranteed: when the size of the database of iris templates in which the technology searches for a match increases, then one should also expect the risk of false matches to increase (Jacobsen 2010). In the context of UNHCRs largest repatriation endeavour to date, it thus remained to be seen whether the use of iris recognition in this context could flawlessly match the digitalised iris images of new refugee claimants against the iris templates of returnees who had already been granted assistance and whose biometrics were thus stored in this database. Acknowledging this unproven aspect of the technology, we can appreciate an additional sense in which UNHCR’s use of iris recognition was experimental: besides the application of the technology under difficult ‘conditions inside Afghanistan’ (UNHCR 2003a), the introduction of iris recognition was also experimental insofar as the population to be registered biometrically was far larger than in previous applications (Lodge 2004). As noted above, in such circumstances we should expect to see the number of false matches increase as a result of the considerable increase in the size of the database of refugee templates. Rather than any mentioning of potential risks related to this issue of false matches in large scale projects, UNHCR regularly reported on how the refugee population quickly grew. In 2003 (after the introduction of mandatory iris recognition) ‘UNHCR facilitated the return of over 343,000 Afghans from Pakistan’ (UNHCR 2003f: 332) and by 2010 approximately three million former refugees had been repatriated from Pakistan back to Afghanistan.7 Even if it can, of course, not be assumed that every refugee had their iris image registered and

Humanitarian biometrics   63 stored in the UNHCR database, when recalling that iris registration was made compulsory we can still expect the number of refugee templates to be considerably larger than in previous application contexts.8 As stated in a UNHCR announcement to the returnee population, all refugees returning from Pakistan to Afghanistan with UNHCR assistance must be scanned by an iris machine, a computer-­based technology that examines the eye and can detect if someone has been tested before . . . they [the refugees] must go through the iris screening; otherwise they will not receive their entitlements. (UNHCR 2003e) A conundrum now becomes evident: on the one hand, ‘technology experts’ caution against the risk of false matches in large-­scale applications; on the other hand, although the number of iris-­registered Afghan refugees grew rapidly during this repatriation endeavour, UNHCR accounts make no official mention of this risk of falsely matched refugees nor of any measures put in place to detect and correct for such false matches. That said, it must at the same time be recognised that although official accounts and representations make no reference to the probability, let alone the implications of such technology failures in the context of this humanitarian endeavour, this does not mean that the introduction of biometrics in refugee contexts goes uncriticised within UNHCR as a whole. Internally there have been discussions and concerns have been voiced – although they do not figure in official accounts of this very first use of iris recognition technology in a refugee context. We shall return to this point later. Anonymisation as privacy protection: the problem of detecting false matches Paradoxically, failures to officially acknowledge potential technology failures associated with an increase in the size of the database combined with well-­ intentioned attempts to provide privacy protection to iris registered refugees, can inadvertently have reinforced the risk that a false match might translate into a humanitarian failure to assist a deserving refugee. The UNHCR system of iris recognition was designed in such a way that all biometric refugee data was anony­mised: ‘the code describing the iris has no link to the name, age, destination or anything else about the refugee’ (UNHCR 2003a). From the perspective of UNHCR, such anonymisation of biometric refugee data was introduced as a measure of privacy protection. Although anonymisation was intended to enhance the privacy afforded to refugees in this context of mandatory iris recognition, the possibility of a different outcome becomes visible if we look more carefully at how the design of this measure could potentially hinder the detection – let alone correction – of a false match. If privacy protection simply meant that no personal data was linked to the stored iris template and if a refugee was then falsely matched, how was

64   Humanitarian biometrics that false match ever to be corrected for, as this form of ‘privacy protection as anony­misation’ made it impossible to determine whom the stored iris template originally ‘belonged to’ – and whether this person was in fact the person presenting his or her ‘live’ iris to this biometric recognition system. Although intended as a privacy protective measure considering the likelihood of false matches in large databases (Fox 2004), it seems that UNHCR might inadvertently have introduced a system in which this conception of ‘privacy protection’ can perhaps unintentionally turn against those refugees whom the technology might fail to match correctly. It is impossible to acquire exact data about the number of false matches in this context, but a simple calculation suggests that for an enrolment population of two million (which is a low estimate), an error rate of 3 per cent (Moore 2003b) translates into 60,000 false matches. This is, of course, not an accurate representation of the number of Afghan refugees that may have been falsely matched during this endeavour. Indeed, I do not want to suggest that such a high number of false matches went undetected in this UNHCR operation. The point to stress is simply that this risk of technical failures (particularly under experimental conditions) being translated into humanitarian failures may have been of a magnitude that deserves attention. Whilst risks of failure should not be regarded as insignificant, the sections below show how we, through our STS-­inspired conceptualisation of experimentation, can become aware of an additional set of risks that may emerge in the  context of successful experimentation. Specifically, I use the idea of ‘co-­ constitution’ to explore the question of what kinds of risks a ‘successful’ use of experimental technology may give rise to.

Risks of success Social constitution of acceptability: humanitarianism’s normative power The first type of risk to be explored relates to the aspect of co-­constitution, which concerns the social constitution of technology. From this perspective we are encouraged to explore how UNHCRs use of iris recognition contributed to a specific constitution of the technology – as different from the idea that UNHCRs experimental use will simply test already established capabilities. An STS-­ inspired approach helps direct our attention to how this technology use contributes to the constitution the technology as credible (or not), as a source of unyielding authority (or not), and as a source of politically relevant knowledge (or not). We thus broaden our analysis of the kinds of effects that this technology trial may occasion. To explore this issue, the following section looks at three kinds of ‘evidence’ and related forms of authority that this humanitarian experiment endowed the iris recognition technology with.

Humanitarian biometrics   65 Industry ‘success stories’ Iridian Technologies and it implementing partner, BioID, refer to this UNHCR application of iris recognition as ‘evidence’ of the technology’s success. On its website, BioID proudly describes how ‘In three weeks some 15,000 individuals were registered and recyclers successfully detected’ (BioID 2012) and Iridian has – amongst other things – announced that following this initial success, the programme was in fact expanded: ‘Expansion of Iris Use in UN Repatriation Program for Afghan Refugees’ (Iridian 2003). In this press release, iris recognition is represented as vital to the distribution of humanitarian aid: ‘using iris recognition to maximise distribution of a human aid program. Iris recognition is vital to helping the UN refugee agency distribute human aid’ (ibid.). Indeed, this UNHCR use of iris recognition is referred to by Iridian as ‘evidence’ of the technology’s reliability and applicability in difficult conditions and, as such, this specific technology trial feeds into the constitution of biometric iris recognition as suitable for use not only in hard-­core security contexts such as counter-­terrorism, but also in humanitarian contexts where it – according to this ‘evidence’ – can be vital in assisting UNHCR deliver assistance to refugees. Other similar success stories about this UNHCR application of iris recognition resonate more broadly throughout the industry. We can, for example, find the case mentioned in keynotes at significant events such as The Biometrics Exhibition and Conference, where a speech on ‘The importance of biometrics in a humanitarian context’ referred to UNHCR’s use of biometrics as ‘evidence’ of the technology’s importance and its reliable performance.9 Technology providers are not the only ones who contribute to the constitution of this humanitarian technology trial as a success story. Investigating how this technology trial contributes to the constitution of iris recognition technology as a success, the role of UNHCR in this process is also important. Humanitarian ‘success stories’ The ‘results’ of the technology testing are represented in various ways by UNHCR. One type of representation is news stories in which UNHCR representatives are interviewed and their accounts are then presented as a form of ‘evidence’ that the technology trial was ‘successful’. One example of this repre­ sentation of this technology trial as a success can be found in a UNHCR news story entitled ‘Iris testing of returning Afghans passes 200,000 mark.’ In this news story, Hasim Utkan (UNHCR representative in Pakistan) describes the technology trial in the following terms: ‘This is the first time UNHCR has used such biometric checks . . . it has proved very successful, meeting not only the cultural needs of the refugees but the operational requirements of the UNHCR’ (UNHCR 2003a, italics added). Now, what a focus on constitutive effects can help us appreciate about such representations of this UNHCR use of biometric technology is that besides testing the technology’s capabilities, UNHCR – with statements such as these – also contributes to the constitution of this technology

66   Humanitarian biometrics as a ‘very successful’ humanitarian technology. Further evidence of this constitution of the use of iris recognition as a humanitarian success, can be found in a statement by UNHCR spokesman Jack Redden, who notes that, ‘Iris testing has been considered a great success because it allows us to maintain a check on legitimate returnees’, adding that his agency was very pleased with the performance of the state-­of-the-­art technology, often under adverse conditions (IRIN 2003). The way in which UNHCR contributes to the social production of iris recognition technology through the representation of its uses of this technology as ‘great successes’ cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of UNHCR’s ability to draw on its legitimacy as an important humanitarian actor with a mandate to ensure the international protection of refugees worldwide. Here an STS perspective helps advance our analysis by insisting that we approach ‘the making of technology’ with careful attention to the significance of the interplay between different forms of authority. In this case, the interplay between ‘humani­ tarian authority’ and the constitution of technological authority. Now, when considering UNHCR’s representation of refugee biometrics as a success and the constitutive effects of such success stories, the political context should of course be taken into consideration too. For besides the interest in portraying itself as a champion of the humanitarian principles, there are also other important reasons why UNHCR officially portrays these technology uses as a ‘great success’. One other reason has to do with the fact that a number of donor states have earmarked funding for the use of biometrics a practice which places UNHCR in a difficult position with possible implications for how the agency officially represents the benefits of having introduced this specific technology. We shall shortly return to this issue of donor demands and earmarking practices as an important point to consider in relation to UNHCR’s turn to biometric technology. Policy-­level success stories The experience from this UNHCR technology trial also made its way into key policy documents such as the European Commission Directorate-­General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) funding decision for 2005 in which we are informed that: ‘Experience with iris recognition technology experiments has been quite good, suggesting that wider use of this technology could save UNHCR “substantial resources” because of its deterrent value to fraud and “recyclers” ’ (ECHO 2005: 7). UNHCRs experimental technology use thus feeds into a broader political context concerning the social construction of biometrics as sufficiently successful for further rollout of the technology. Another example of how the constitution of this use of iris recognition as a success feeds into calls for further roll out of biometrics, is an ODI report which notes that ‘technological solutions such as cards with biometric data, like the iris recognition system used by UNHCR in Afghan refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan, could address some of these corruption risks’ (Savage et al. 2007: 6). UNHCR’s use of biometrics in this Afghan repatriation context does therefore not simply test a set of prior

Humanitarian biometrics   67 ‘uncertainties’ regarding the technology’s ability to perform. Indeed, this technology trial also contributes to the constitution of iris recognition as a success, as capable of providing a solution to fraud and corruption in other contexts. Crucially, this STS approach allows us to recognise how the moral authority of UNHCR forms part of the constitutive interplay between different forms of authority that all contribute to the constitution of biometrics as credible and successful. But not all interpretations support this official account of refugee biometrics as a success. In an NGO statement issued at an Executive Committee Consultancy in September 2002 concerns were raised from within the humanitarian community: Registration is important. . . . However, biometric data collection, are among a variety of methods now being used by States not for protection purposes. . . . Raise serious questions about the civil and political rights of refugees . . . and could jeopardize their ability to secure effective protection. (September 2002; see also UNHCR 2002) And we can also find examples of critique and discussions within UNHCR; not all UNHCR staff recognise the turn to biometric registration as an indisputable success but such discussions are, however, not made public, they remain internal and thus leave official accounts unchallenged. Neither external concerns nor internal discussions had any significant impact on the recommendations put forward by the Executive Committee, who continued to encourage States and UNHCR to introduce new techniques and tools to enhance the identification and documentation of refugees and asylum-­ seekers, including biometrics features, and to share these with a view towards developing a more standardised worldwide registration system. (UNHCR 2001) Now, besides this important aspect – the role of UNHCR in the social constitution of biometrics as authoritative and the attending risk that critical deliberation goes unnoticed – the notion of co-­constitution also reminds us that we should investigate how the thus constituted technology ‘loops back’ upon society in ways that affect the constitution of social order and identity. Emergence of social order and social identity We therefore need to dwell on the broader political context within which this practice of ‘humanitarian experimentation’ unfolds. In this case, the broader political context involves a vision in which biometrics is regarded as capable of strengthening homeland security – even if this might jeopardise the safety of humanitarian subjects including refugees. As a humanitarian actor, UNHCR see itself as defending a notion of security that differs from that of states ‘concerned

68   Humanitarian biometrics about terrorism and border security’ (Betts et al. 2012). However, UNHCR obviously works closely with states (Barnett 2005: 723) and most humanitarian practices are inseparable from power and politics, including the dominant notion of security predicated upon a differentiation and categorisation of bodies only some of which are deemed worthy of protection (Agier 2010; Agamben 1998; Dillon and Reid 2001; Jabri 2006). In line with such criticism, let us now explore selected aspects of the broader political context within which UNHCR and its use of biometrics must be situated in order to appreciate how various risks may emerge in the context of biometric refugee registration. When technology loops back: the making of social order Regarding the issue of contemporary humanitarian refugee management more broadly, a number of scholars have critiqued humanitarian actors’ neglect of the ways in which their refugee identification practices (Feldman 2007) feed into the construction of refugees as a domain of knowledge and intervention (Malkki 1995). Amongst other things, critics have highlighted the importance of paying attention to the implications of such knowledge production (Sandvik 2011), particularly when it unfolds in the context of a ‘politics of proof ’ in asylum and immigration (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 10) and feeds into the labelling of certain subjects as ‘undesirable bodies’ (Agier 2010). In relation to the case of biometrically registered Afghan refugees, these important insights can help call attention to the issue of how biometrics in humanitarian refugee management might contribute to the construction of the refugee as a new domain of knowledge and intervention. In our case, this concern with the politics of humanitarianism and the politics of technology invites an exploration of how a refugee population required to undergo biometric registration with UNHCR becomes constituted as a new domain of knowledge. An important sense in which a biometrically registered refugee becomes a new domain of knowledge stems from how the technology enables the extraction of new forms of ‘knowledge’ from the processing (data-­mining) of masses of digitalised biometric data (Hildebrandt 2007; Rouvroy 2008). And an important sense in which the biometrically registered refugee becomes a new domain of intervention stems from the ways in which the collection and storage of biometric data combined with new possibilities of ‘real-­time access to these data sets’ (NSTC 2006) enables a type of monitoring that previous forms of registration did not allow for. For these reasons, successful biometric registration cannot be regarded as an ontologically inconsequential production of biometric templates. In the context of this use of biometrics in humanitarian refugee management, we see the emergence of a novel type of refugee body, namely a digitalised refugee body. Once we recognise the politics of humanitarian refugee management as well as the politics and history of biometric technology, we can then begin to appreciate why this new digital refugee body (as a new domain of knowledge and intervention) may come with a distinct set of new vulnerabilities, some of which

Humanitarian biometrics   69 stem from this digital body’s new accessibility combined with new ways of ‘authoritatively’ knowing the ‘truth’ about this new body. Besides recognising the ways in which biometrics has important ontological implications for the affected refugee population, we also need to look more closely at the political context and, in this case, a critical aspect of this context concerns the relationship between UNHCR and donor states. UNHCR has always had to manoeuvre in a difficult terrain where altruistic goals and intentions have had to be balanced against the reality of ‘being dependent upon donor state funding’ and serving state interests (Betts et al. 2012: 2). In the context of biometric refugee registration, we see this influence of donors and these necessary balancing acts illustrated in UNHCR statements that acknowledge how ‘these measures [iris scanning] have been important in securing the support and confidence of donors’ (UNHCR 2008: 3). Concerning UNHCR’s use of biometrics, the significance of donor states in terms of pushing for the implementation of these technologies is also evident in a 2004 report published by the US Department of State (DOS). In this report – entitled Reforms for a New Era of Refugee Resettlement – the US DOS urges UNHCR to ‘do all it can to require the routine inclusion of biometric identifiers at the appropriate stage of registration’ and adds that ‘U.S. funding should be provided to help UNHCR acquire such equipment [biometric technology] for use in connection with its pilot implementation of the new registration’ (US DOS 2004). Further substantiating the influence of the US (as a major donor) on UNHCR’s turn to biometric refugee registration, the report entails the following recommendation: ‘The U.S. government . . . should provide U.S. funding for early UNHCR use of mobile fingerprint technology developed by DHS [Department of Homeland Security]’ (US DOS 2004). In short, major donors, such as the US, have explicitly acknowledged a practice of earmarking part of their humanitarian funding specifically to the introduction of biometric technology in UNHCR refugee management. To appreciate the significance of such influence we also need to recognise how major UNHCR donors, who influence the implementation of this technology, have elsewhere voiced their interest in gaining access to biometric refugee data. This brings us to another crucial aspect of the political context in which UNHCR has to manoeuvre – the current political landscape in which refugees are increasingly being ‘viewed with suspicion’ (Ticktin, 2006: 36). As has already been demonstrated, this increasing suspicion – at least in its contemporary form – is closely related to the ‘increasing securitization of refugees in the wake of 11 September’ (Betts et al. 2012: 62). With this ‘increased focus on secured forms of identification’ (E.K.U. Jacobsen 2012), including a securitization of refugees, many Western governments have increasingly sought to establish the ‘true’ identity of a refugee through the use of biometric technology to, for example, ‘provide DHS additional information about refugees and their potential eligibility’ (GAO 2008). A GAO report on Biometrics Collection and Data Sharing from 2008, for example, recommends that the US Department of Defence (DOD) should do more to explore possibilities for ‘broader data

70   Humanitarian biometrics sharing,’ noting that ‘to date the only progress has been the sharing of Iraqi asylum and refugee data, which provides DHS with biometrics data on individuals that DOD has encountered in Iraq’ (2009: 7). In this sense, digitalised biometric refugee templates, are inseparable from a contemporary context of ‘national and globalised interoperable databases’ with implications for how this digitalised refugee subject is governed (Pugliese 2012: 23). When technology loops back: the making of social identities and categories Bearing in mind this political context and the technology’s constitute effects with respect to the refugee, we can now begin to appreciate how a technical issue referred to as ‘function creep’ is an example of a risk. ‘Function creep’ refers to the tendency for a project to exceed its original purpose – and in some cases such an expansion can place participants in unforeseen and difficult circumstances (Woodward et al. 2003; Mordini and Massari 2008). In the case of ­biometrically registered Afghan refugees, an important function, which a ‘successful’ iris recognition technology is capable of performing, is that of matching templates across distant databases (Daugman 2007). Consequently, a specific type of function creep – namely the expansion of scope to include cross matching against templates in other databases – is indeed ‘a legitimate concern of the deployment of biometric technology’ (Smith 2007: 40). Such an expansion could place this biometrically registered refugee population in unforeseen and difficult circumstances – certainly if it occurs in the absence of ‘proactive policy that details and protects the use of the data collected’ (Smith 2007: 40). Put differently, ‘function creep’ in the context the collection, storage and processing of biometrics data is one example of a risk that may emerge not as a result of undetected technology failures but as result of an unregulated use of biometric technology that performs ‘successfully’. In the case of UNHCR, the scenario that these remarks demand us to consider is that whilst iris recognition was originally deployed for one purpose (the distribution of humanitarian assistance), the political context described above arguably suggests that ‘function creep’ is a risk which cannot easily be ruled out altogether given, for example, how the US has declared its practice of using ‘Iraqi refugee data’ for purposes of Homeland Security rather than humanitarian security. A question that emerges, once we pay attention to these past practices, is whether there exists a possibility of ‘function creep’ in this case of UNHCR and iris recognition of Afghan refugees – which would occur if the biometric refugee data collected by UNHCR was subsequently used for purposes other than to identify ‘second timers’ in the context of this specific repatriation endeavour. In a critical assessment of this iris-­equipped Afghan repatriation endeavour, Statewatch calls attention to this risk when stating that ‘UNHCR have not adopted data protection rules regarding the database’. Yet such ‘guarantees that the database will not be accessible to any third parties are essential’ not only to the protection of data but to the aim of guaranteeing the safety of this

Humanitarian biometrics   71 refugee population (Statewatch 2003). In this respect, UNHCR is unique in the sense that whereas states that carry out biometric data collection and processing are required to have laws in place that specify the purpose for which this data can be used, UNHCR operates in a complex legal landscape (Farraj 2011) which, in some cases, implies an absence of clearly defined data protection frameworks. Of course UNHCR operates under jurisdiction. Indeed, UNHCR ‘normally operates on the basis of a host country agreement, thus always with the consent of the host country’, and under the jurisdiction of that government, also in the case of biometric registration and data collection (Hosein 2011). What this implies for our analysis is that, in addition to the issue of how donor demands can place UNHCR in a difficult position, we also need to consider the relationship of UNHCR to the host government. Among other functions, host country agreements signal recognition and appreciation of the host country’s hospitality towards UNHCR and the refugee population. Yet, at the same time, such arrangements may in some cases imply that UNHCR finds itself in a position where, even if the agency would want to object to data sharing requests (e.g. due to concerns about potential misuse and risks to the implicated refugee population), UNHCR may find that it cannot easily reject a request from the host government to share biometric information on individuals who are under the jurisdiction of that government. As we shall see in the next section of this chapter, this issue of data sharing is of critical importance in some of UNHCR’s current uses of biometric refugee registration. And what must also be said is that we have already seen how UNHCR has previously had to shy away from ‘raising delicate political questions when dealing with host governments’ (Betts et al. 2012: 19) on the basis that doing so could potentially involve ‘the real danger of UNHCR being expelled from a country’ (Betts et al. 2012: 115), thus leaving UNHCR unable to deliver protection and assistance to the concerned refugee population. Consequently, in such settings, UNHCR may not be able to fully control how the sensitive biometric information collected by the agency is subsequently being used. As Gus Hosein, from Privacy International, points out: ‘a government may determine it wants to verify that there are no terrorists in its country’ (Hosein 2011) and the prospect of refugee data being cross-­matched against terror-­lists is difficult to gauge without careful consideration of how donor demands and/or delicate host state concerns can place UNHCR in a position which makes it difficult for the agency to resist potential data-­sharing requests. Although UNHCR has to respect the laws of the country in which it operates, another important point is that in many such countries (e.g. in Afghanistan) there were no laws to effectively regulate the collection, storage, sharing and processing of biometric data. In such cases, the jurisdiction of host states is thus insufficient as an anchor with reference to which UNHCR can offer refugees any confirmation about the purposes for which their biometric data might be put to use. Bearing this in mind, UNHCR might want to consider paying more attention to the risk of potentially harmful effects stemming from various forms of data sharing – especially in an operation that unfolds along the Afghan–Pakistan

72   Humanitarian biometrics border at a point in time when the US had a strong interest in monitoring individuals’ movements and whereabouts. Whilst UNHCR representations portray iris recognition as a tool with which to produce a repatriation system that cannot be cheated, there is a risk that this view of the role of biometric registration technology renders a series of potentially controversial issues unnoticed and consequently unaddressed – issues which elsewhere have been recognised as critical and taken seriously. Indeed, elsewhere debates about the privacy implications of biometric registration have for instance occasioned revisions in data protection legislation in recognition of the fact that the ethical principle of privacy protection cannot be understood apart from the question of personal data and the digital body. In the EU, for example, such revisions have resulted in a set of rules that ideally give individuals more control over how their personal data is managed and used, e.g. by stipulating that agencies collecting and storing personal data have to notify their clients of any theft or accidental release of personal data (European Commission 2012b). In the case of biometric refugee registration, this comparison helps illustrate how, in the absence of revised legal frameworks, the digital refugee body is likely to remain unprotected from the kinds of privacy threats which biometric data collection might entail and from which European citizens have been regarded as needing legal protection. Privacy and the digital refugee: newly accessible but not newly protected Certainly, the question of how biometric technology ‘affects and is affected by perceptions of privacy is complicated’ (Nelson 2011: 81). As discussed earlier, depending on the specific technology application, privacy measures will not inevitably enhance refugee safety. Indeed, with anonymisation of biometric refugee data, technology failures may yield humanitarian failures insofar as it becomes difficult to detect false matches. But in addition to this, refugee privacy may also be compromised when the technology performs ‘successfully’. The sense in which biometric applications can engender new threat to individual privacy cannot be understood simply by referring to commonplace notions of privacy as related to the physical body (Alterman 2003; van der Ploeg 1999; Floridi 2005). When conceptions of privacy are derived from an understanding of the body as an unaltered biological entity – i.e. when ontological alterations are left unacknowledged – then this yields a perspective from which ‘refugee privacy’ is regarded as a matter that can be protected simply by ensuring the integrity of the physical body. Indeed, such a conception of privacy seems to have lead UNHCR to conceive of privacy protection in this context of iris recognition as an issue that could be ensured by shielding the refugee’s biological body from exposure. Besides the misguided assumption that ‘data anonymisation’ would ensure that biometric data was detached from the physical body of the refugee, UNHCR simultaneously installed privacy protection measures based on the assumption that what needed to be protected was simply the physical refugee body. On this note, as a way to ensure refugee privacy in the context of

Humanitarian biometrics   73 mandatory iris recognition, UNHCR regarded the installation of curtains in their Voluntary Repatriation Centres as an important privacy protection measure as such curtains would serve to shield the face of Afghan women, as they had to unveil themselves before the iris camera, from the gaze of other people (Moore 2003a). Yet, an important question that STS insights help us recognise is whether the only type of body in need of protection in the context of this endeavour was the physical body of the Afghan returnee. An underlying conception of technology as passive and ontologically inconsequential may – among other things – have prevented UNHCR from recognising the emergence of a new type of digital refugee body at risk of being exposed to new forms of intrusion. As a result of insufficient attention to the emergence of digital refugees, UNHCR may have paid too little attention to the new threats to privacy confronted by this digital refugee – for example, as a result of how the whereabouts of the digital refugee could now potentially be accessed and viewed from a distance in ways that were not possible prior to the iris recognition process. These new forms of access could pose a threat not only to the privacy but also to the safety of these refugees, if it should so happen that actors with other motives than refugee protection gained access to this refugee database. In this sense, the use of iris recognition contributed to the production of a type of refugee in need of protection not simply from the eyes of other people in the VRC, but also from the eyes of people accessing this data at a distance to gain new knowledge that might then be acted upon politically. Even though the data was anonymised, an external actor could determine the person’s identity if it matched (or was believed to match) an iris template in another database. Yet, partly as a result of misguided assumptions about the nature of technology, UNCHR may have remained insufficiently attentive to these ontological implications and, as a result, also to the need for new forms of protection. A few scholars have already called attention to concerns that may arise when such ‘knowledge’ about a person’s presumed future becoming – i.e. what biometric data claim to make knowable about a person’s future becoming (Hildebrandt 2007) – is acted upon politically. Again, the notion of co-­constitution helps us recognise how the constitutive effect of biometrics cannot be understood apart from an appreciation of how the technology itself is constituted – in this case, how biometric profiling has been defined as a new type of valid knowledge (Hildebrandt 2008). A defining feature of ‘machine profiling’ may be the fact that the person being profiled is in a position without access to the knowledge that is used to categorise and deal with him/her. ‘This seems to impair our personal freedom, because we cannot adequately anticipate the actions of those that know about us what we may not know about ourselves’ (Hildebrandt 2008: 17). From the perspective of decision-­making based on profiling in which ‘knowledge’ of the person or group in question is derived from data-­mining of biometric data knowledge, an important concern is that the voice of the individual is nullified in the face of the emergence of a new type of ‘scientific accuracy’, which makes it impossible to challenge the way in which this ‘knowledge’ may be used politically in ways that render certain subjects unsafe (Jacobsen 2010). What this seems to

74   Humanitarian biometrics suggest is that if UNHCR wishes to take seriously the question of what risks the use of a new technology might entail, then a promising way of doing this could be to engage these STS insights about how technology has important implications not only if it fails but also when a new technology successfully contributes to producing a change in the ontological status of the implicated refugee.

Beyond Afghan repatriation: humanitarian biometrics in other refugee contexts One reason that this case of iris recognition in Afghan repatriation cannot easily be dismissed as insignificant and exceptional is that it constitutes but one illustrative example of a much broader phenomenon of humanitarian refugee biometrics. A considerable number of cases can be seen: biometric fingerprinting has been tested in refugee contexts prior to the use of iris scanning in Afghanistan; and the use of fingerprinting as well as iris scanning has indeed also been tested in other challenging refugee contexts after this Afghan deployment. Prior to the trialling of iris recognition in the Afghan–Pakistan borderland, the Dadaab refugee camp complex was amongst the very first locations in which UNHCR tested the use of another, more familiar, type of biometrics: namely, fingerprinting. And, indeed, it seems hard to argue that this technology use unfolded entirely independently from ‘donor desires’ formulated with an eye to national security concerns – not primarily with an eye to the safety of those with no access to such security. In a recent UNHCR report on Projected Global Resettlement Needs (2013), a section on ‘Mitigating risks in resettlement’ informs us that ‘UNHCR continued to strengthen its efforts to address issues of resettlement fraud’ and that towards this end UNHCR has ‘benefited from the expertise offered by resettlement States’ including ‘[a] pilot initiated by the United States of America to assess the use of UNHCR’s existing biometric system in US resettlement processing [which] was carried out in Kenya’ (2013: 13). Now, as already alluded to above, the influence of donors on UNHCR policies and practices is nothing new (Betts et al. 2012) and some would stress that such influence is not always in conflict with humanitarian protection objectives. In order to shed further light on this issue of how donor policies may affect the humanitarian turn to biometrics and the aim of delivering protection, it seems fruitful to take a closer look at more recent cases of humanitarian refugee biometrics. Indeed, biometric registration technologies have not only been deployed in the Afghan– Pakistan borderland since 2002 and in refugee camps in Kenya since 2007 (Jacobsen 2015b; Refugees Daily 2011). Most recently biometric registration technology has also been introduced in the context of humanitarian responses to refugee movements in other borderlands: Malian refugees and Syrian refugees. ‘Syrian aid in the tech age’10 ‘The bulk [of Syrian refugees] are living in the neighbouring countries of Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, where the demands on humanitarian agencies and

Humanitarian biometrics   75 host governments are huge. Helping relieve this burden is the application of smart technologies’ (IRIN 2013a). At the same time, the use of biometrics in the context of this region-­wide refugee response has also been presented as an experiment, that is, as offering a setting in which to test the ability of biometric in cross-­border applications. This aspect has for example been noticed in a news-­ story in Homeland Security Today entitled ‘IrisGuard Provides First Cross-­Border Iris Enabled Humanitarian Relief Registration Program’ (Homeland Security Today 2014). Indeed, when vendors explain why their technology is introduced in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, an oft-­cited reason is the possibility of trialling a new technology application – IrisGuard: ‘This is the first cross-­border iris enabled humanitarian relief registration program in the world’ (IrisGuard 2014c). Along similar lines, 3M (another biometric technology provider) notes that the situation matched their efforts at ‘working on ways to adapt biometric systems to new and different situations’ (3M Solutions 2014). The Syrian refugee crisis then represented a perfect real-­world setting in which to test the ability of the new 3M biometric system to deliver as expected when deployed in a new context: ‘When refugees enter a camp, their fingerprints are scanned quickly, using the first-­of-its-­kind 3M Cogent system’ (3M Solutions 2014). Besides this aura of experimentation and a general technology-­developer interest in the Syrian refugee crisis as an opportunity for testing new biometric technologies and functionalities, let us now take a look at specific aspects of the humanitarian use of biometrics as it unfolded in individual countries hosting Syrian refugees. UNHCR and refugee biometrics in Jordan: vilization and a new experimentation population The southern part of Syria shares an almost 400 kilometre long border with the Kingdom of Jordan and, indeed, Jordan was amongst the countries in the region that saw a massive influx of Syrian refugees. According to Jordanians living close to the border, Syrian refugees already began to arrive in March 2011 when the uprising in Syria began, yet ‘the Jordanian government didn’t officially recognize the growing refugee crisis until 2012’ (Migration Policy Centre 2014). In July 2012 the Zaatari refugee camp was set up and in April 2014 ‘the Jordanian government and the UN officially opened a new camp for refugees from the war in Syria, with the potential to become one of the world’s largest refugee camps’ (Beaumont 2014). Yet, many of the Syrian refugees in Jordan do not live in camps but are so-­ called urban refugees: as of April 2014, ‘more than 80 per cent of the refugees in Jordan do not live in camps, but in poor neighbourhoods in the urban areas or the outskirts of Jordan’s cities, often in inadequate dwellings, informal tented settlements and makeshift shelters’ (CARE International 2014). Assisting these refugees represented a new challenge to UNHCR (UNHCR 2014b) and, in order to cope with some of these challenges, iris recognition technology was introduced. First, the technology would resolve the initial problem of registration – with the huge number of refugees UNHCR had problems managing to register

76   Humanitarian biometrics all the new arrivals and to resolve this problems iris technology was introduced: ‘The iris scan was introduced because we are dealing with over half-­a-million people in various locations so we needed to prevent multiple registration,’ said Nihad Hota, a UNHCR registration officer at the Khalda centre (Sundelin 2013). In addition to this application – i.e. biometric refugee registration at designated UNHCR centres – iris recognition technology was also trialled in the context of cash programmes ‘targeting Jordan’s urban refugees’ (UNHCR 2013f ). As explained in a humanitarian news story from IRIN, biometric registration was deployed in relation to a specific aspect of the management of Syrian refugees in urban Jordan: ‘Instead of using a debit card, they [urban Syrian refugees in Jordan] simply have their eye scanned at the ATM machine’ (IRIN 2013a). More broadly, this news story explains how in response to the ‘huge demands’ that humanitarian agencies and host governments confront in relation to the Syrian refugee crisis, ‘the application of smart technologies’ is ‘helping relieve this burden’ (IRIN 2013a). Whilst biometric refugee registration in UNHCR centres had been trialled before (e.g. in Afghanistan), this new refugee crisis represented challenges to which biometrics had not previously been considered the solution – for example, in relation to urban refugees. It was indeed ‘the first time UNHCR has distributed cash this way’, that is, by using iris recognition technology – also referred to in Jordanian news as ‘Hollywood-­moviestyle iris scans’ (IRIN 2013a). And, in that way, well-­intentioned humanitarian assistance efforts driven by a desire to find solutions to new challenges (large numbers of urban refugees in a volatile region), entangled with the trialling of biometric technology. In a certain sense, these Syrian refugees became subjects of technology trials, without much attention to the potential for negative implications. For example, as we shall see in the following section, there have already been cases of biometric data from Syrian refugees leaking to Syrian authorities, with obvious implications for the prospect of safe return for those individuals. Yet, this urban refugee Hollywood-­style biometric application entailed a process of biometric data sharing between humanitarian actors and private actors (IrisGuard and the Amman Cairo Bank). Turkey: humanitarian biometrics also ‘aiding’ governments and the biometric industry As described on the website of 3M, the Arab Spring has unfortunately ‘been accompanied by humanitarian crises. But in Turkey, ‘3M systems [customized 3M fingerprinting systems] have helped refugees find their families, food and medicine quickly’ (3M Solutions 2014). Indeed, this endeavour has been repre­ sented by the industry in a manner that draws upon the normative powers of the humanitarian language. As noted in another article: ‘In recent years, 3M technologies have also helped Syrian refugees’ (Disselkamp 2014). Not only 3M, but also other biometric vendors used this refugee crisis to construct positive stories about a somewhat controversial technology. In a press release entitled ‘IrisGuard Aids UNHCR in Syrian Humanitarian Relief Effort,’ IrisGuard Inc.

Humanitarian biometrics   77 announced a similar success story about the morally laudable uses to which its ‘IrisGuard cross-­border identity solution’ has been put, ending with a quote from CEO, Mr Malhas, stating that: ‘We are greatly honoured to serve the UNHCR in this capacity’ (IrisGuard 2014c). In this sense, this refugee crisis was not just a context in which humanitarian acts of good doing unfolded – it was also a context that seems to have provided a setting for technology uses that, in turn, could potentially feed into the constitution of humanitarian success stories about biometric technology. And once constituted as a humanitarian success, such stories may well affect the technology’s more widespread acceptability in largescale non-humanitarian contexts insofar as the kind of moral legitimacy that these humanitarian applications and attending success stories confer upon the technology travel with it beyond the humanitarian context. The fact that such humanitarian success stories reach a western audience (through news stories as well as industry accounts) seems to lend support to this possibility. This brings us to another important point: indeed, these humanitarian uses of biometrics are not only complicated by the ways in which they may help legitimise a contested technology, with implications for refugee privacy insofar as new aspects of refugee existence are constituted as simultaneously knowable and malleable. The humanitarian nature of these region-­wide uses of biometrics is further complicated when we consider the role of host states and donor states vis-­à-vis the introduction of biometrics in this specific region. In a news story featured on the homepage of IrisGuard Inc. we are informed that ‘UNHCR provides [the Jordanian] Interior Ministry with 108 iris scanners for refugee registration’ and that ‘the equipment is part of projects developed and implemented by Jordan and UNHCR to improve the joint registration of Syrian refugees’ (2014). Moreover, we are also informed that this iris recognition equipment was ‘mostly funded by the UK’s Department for International Development and the US government’ (IrisGuard). Indeed the relationship between biometric technology trials, industry stories, humanitarian actors and contexts, and state policies is by no means simple and straightforward and hardly follows ICRC principles of independence from donor policies. This point about the role of states is certainly also of relevance to another issue that the technology (and its providers) promises to offer a ‘solution’ to. A major concern of the Turkish government has been that rebels may infiltrate the Syrian refugee camps. Not only would this prolong the conflict in Syria, it would also be a huge scandal to Turkey if such stories reached international press. In light of this and under the subheading A Safe Haven – with heavy references to the critique that refugee camps offer ‘safe havens’ to rebels – 3M notes that: It can only be hoped that the conflict will be resolved peacefully and quickly, allowing the refugees to return home soon. In the meantime, systems like this will help reduce the difficulties they face – a safe haven today that could mean hope for tomorrow. (3M Solutions 2014)

78   Humanitarian biometrics UNHCR and refugee biometrics in Lebanon: data sharing and risks stemming from success In contrast to this mix of humanitarian hopes, state interests and industry success stories, the cross-­border and inter-­agency application has also given rise to concern. One point to note is the fact that this UNHCR application of biometrics is designed in a manner that violates legal principles devised to protect citizens in the EU since it, for example, involves children – more specifically ‘all Syrians over the age of three who want to register as refugees’ (Knutsen and Kullab 2014). In addition to this, others have voiced concerns ‘about the cooperation between UNHCR and the Lebanese authorities’ concerning the ‘sharing of refugees’ biometric information, including iris scans’ – indeed, the Lebanese government maintains that it has the legal right to access any information collected on its lands (Knutsen and Kullab 2014; see also Lutz 2014). Such close cooperation between UNHCR and government agencies has given rise to concern among Syrian refugees many of whom are ‘nervous about the prospect of their biometric data being shared with the Lebanese authorities’ (Knutsen and Kullab 2014). A 29-year-­old Syrian refugee, for example, worries that ‘they’ll take that information and give it to the Syrian government’, and similarly, a young Syrian woman with two children, would also ‘rather go without humanitarian aid than submit to an iris scan that could be shared with the Lebanese authorities’ (Knutsen and Kullab 2014). Yet, at the same time, it is also important to note that almost four years into the crisis UNHCR has still not given the Lebanese government full access to its entire biometric refugee database. Indeed, this issue of access to biometric refugee data has given rise to much discussion and controversy – notably since UNHCR ‘has the only list of registered [Syrian] refugees’ in Lebanon, a list that would be helpful to the Lebanese authorities as they were seeking to enforce a new refugee policy (Sykes 2014). And whilst, on the one hand, UNHCR denies that such biometric data sharing is even a possibility, observers have, on the other hand, noted that UNHCR has been ‘in talks with the government on the matter’ (Sykes 2014). And to confirm not only that UNHCR has been discussing the issue with the Lebanese authorities, but also that the issue has spurred concerns among Syrian refugees in Lebanon, it was recently noted in a report published by UN OCHA that ‘when UNHCR was discussing sharing biometric information, including iris scans, with the Lebanese Government, refugees expressed concern about the security of the data’ (OCHA 2014: 7). And lending weight to such concerns about the implications of biometric data collection and data sharing for the security of Syrian refugees is the fact that in October 2013, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC), member of European Council on Refugees and Exiles, accused the Bulgarian Interior Ministry of putting Syrian asylum seekers at risk by ‘providing the Syrian embassy with biometric information about Syrians’ (ECRE 2013). BHC stressed that the provision of any kind of data to an asylum seekers’ country of origin is a gross violation of human rights and goes against

Humanitarian biometrics   79 national and international principles of protection, threatening the security of Syrian asylum seekers in the territory. (ECRE 2013) In this sense, approaching these humanitarian technology uses from a perspective that calls attention to the politics of constitutive processes – including the relationship between technology emergence and the emergence of social order/social identity – seems to provide valuable insights into some of the risks that may otherwise escape attention, including the risks that may emerge when successful technology uses combine with political ambitions that are not of a humanitarian nature.11 In this sense, even this very brief exploration of the use of biometrics in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis arguably helps strengthen a number of the points raised in our more detailed Afghan case study. For example, the important point that the use of biometric technology is implicated in a complex web of motives (humanitarian, experimental, security, industry, etc.) and actors (UNHCR, state-­humanitarianism, industries, external actors (regional and global)) means that it seems impossible to grasp its potential implications on humani­tarian efforts with reference to a combination of humanitarian neutrality and technological neutrality as indicative of progress. Rather, it seems that such complexities demand that we pay careful attention to the various potentialities for negative implications for the safety of Syrian refugees – negative potentialities that humanitarian representations of the ability of biometrics to improve humanitarian efforts in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, may largely overlook although humanitarian uses of biometrics in other contexts as well as a much longer and broader history would seem to stress the need to take such negative potentialities seriously. In a different region, the conflict in Mali also gave rise to large numbers of refugees. Let’s take a snapshot-­look at a specific aspect of the use of biometric refugee registration in this context to illustrate another important point, namely how the use of biometrics cannot easily be isolated from social dynamics at the local level. One country that saw a significant influx of Malian refugees was neighbouring Mauritania. UNHCR in Mauritania: successful biometric exclusions and humanitarian failures The UNHCR-­run Mbera refugee camp is located in southeast Mauritania, about 40 km from the border with Mali. In April 2013, a biometric registration exercise was launched in the camp (UNHCR 2014b). From various sources, even within UNHCR, criticism has been voiced about the influence of donors on this case of refugee protection, including the use of biometrics. In a UNHCR Situation Update from April 2013 we are informed that, ‘In Mauritania, the authorities and UNHCR have launched preparations for the biometric enrolment of Malian refugees as part of a nationwide programme’ (UNHCR 2013e). And in a more

80   Humanitarian biometrics detailed explanation of the reasons behind this initiative, UNHCR writes that biometric registration was introduced in Mauritania, ‘to help UNHCR produce accurate figures, prevent fraud, and better plan and deliver assistance’ (UNHCR 2013c). Other accounts, also from UNHCR, put more emphasis on a different aspect when explaining why it was deemed necessary to use biometric registration, namely the influence of donors concerned about inaccurate figures and ‘fraud’. As explained by Hovig Etyemezian – who at the time was running this UNHCR operation – the new biometric registration process was introduced as a way of ‘countering criticism of their management of Mbera camp’ and ‘refugees have been informed’ (BBC News 2013). Regarding the issue of risks stemming from technology failures, other researchers have – also with reference to the case of UNHCR using biometric refugee registration in the Mbera camp in Mauritania – recently documented how the failure of biometric registration technology to perform reliably translated into humanitarian failures to assist deserving refugees: ‘In September 2013, 6,500 refugees in the Mbera camp in Mauritania were denied access to refugee assistance because of problems with the biometric registration system’ (Hosein and Nyst, 2013: 41). This research also highlights the fact that contrary to situations where citizens risk being falsely matched but have ‘trusted’ passports to prove such mistakes, the risks that may accompany technology failures such as false matches change character when they transpire in a refugee context where ‘the refugee status is . . . called into question sooner than the technology’ (Hosein and Nyst, 2013: 41) and where a falsely-­matched refugee has no alternative source of trusted identification. However, by using our analytical distinction between risks of failures and risks stemming from success, another set of concerns becomes visible in the context of this case. Donors had explicated that the operation should be kept ‘small’ and accordingly they had raised concerns about local Mauritanians registering as refugees in the Mbera camp to receive assistance (mainly food) from UNHCR. In this context, the new biometric registration system was expected to be able to distinguish with great accuracy between ‘genuine’ Malian refugees and local Mauritanians. To serve that function, the biometric application was designed as a ‘joint biometric enrolment and verification’ between the Mauritanian authorities and UNHCR (UNHCR 2013c). Considering this aspect of the technology, an important point is that even successful biometric registration gave rise to concern: Since April, when the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) started biometric registration of the Malian refugees in Mauritania’s Mbera camp, 8,000 of the 68,000 registered refugees have been de-­activated from the system – almost all of them Mauritanians from nearby towns and villages hoping to access aid handouts. In September, a small group of camp residents tried to destroy the registration centre in protest of the new system, raising a key question: when and how should aid agencies helping refugees also try to assist vulnerable host populations? (Jeffery 2013)

Humanitarian biometrics   81 Within UNHCR, the interim country representative in Mauritania, Anne Maymann, who replaced the previous country representative who ‘left abruptly earlier this year’, openly criticised the use of biometrics when implemented to satisfy such misguided donor demands: ‘One of the biggest mistakes humani­ tarian agencies make when dealing with refugees is helping the refugees while neglecting the local population,’ she said. ‘Donors naturally focus on the refugees, but what we need is a more subtle area-­based approach’ (Hussain 2013), especially in ‘drought-­ridden regions where locals are desperate for food’ (Hussain 2014). Indeed, Cyprien Fabre from the European Union Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), which is a major donor to UNHCR, has in fact indicated its acceptance of such over-­registration as normal and acceptable under such conditions, but the biometrics technology makes it difficult to allow for such locally based humanitarian ‘acceptance’ (Hussain 2014). Thus, this case seems to reinforce the important point that we should not expect that adding technology will simply offer new solutions, including ones through which humanitarian actors can again make strong claims to neutrality by way of an amalgamation of humanitarian impartiality and technological objectivity. On the contrary, additional dimensions seem to be added to the politics of refugee protection – donor relations as well as relations to host governments and local populations – when technology is added. And the constitution of knowledge with local effects is certainly one such additional dimension that it would seem unwise for humanitarian actors to ignore the significance of as it may hinder efforts at refugee protection as well as have reputational consequences for UNHCR. But not all humanitarian assistance programmes in Mauritania were tied to donor policies through the implementation of new – and seemingly neutral – technology. Other humanitarian actors insisted on practicing a different kind of humanitarianism – not making donor policies and biometric registration the main focus of their assistance activities. Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF ) also operated in the area and saw it as more humanitarian to allow Mauritanians to access any of their clinics: Mauritanians can access any of the MSF-­run clinics in the camp (IRIN 2013b). This case thus seems to illustrate another aspect of refugee biometrics, namely how the successful constitution of a new technology as an unyielding source of knowledge may affect humanitarian efforts to assist people in need. So besides the constitution of success stories potentially capable of conferring moral legitimacy upon this new technology, another type of constitution unfolds that concerns these constitutive effects of the technology at the local level of implementation. Thus through a brief introduction to aspects of all of these additional cases, various points from the more detailed case study of UNCHR biometrics and Afghan repatriation have been further substantiated insofar as they are also reflected in humanitarian uses of biometrics in response to refugee crisis elsewhere. As such, it seems harder to dismiss the use of experimental iris recognition technology in the context of Afghan repatriation as a singular and insignificant instance. And so, too, does it seem harder to dismiss the range of

82   Humanitarian biometrics potential risks as singular and insignificant – be it the risks of failures when refugee crises are considered opportune contexts for experimental technology trials, or the risks that humanitarian uses of refugee biometrics could imply that humanitarianism becomes tied to donor policies in new ways and in ways that may render refugee protection subordinate to objectives of national security. Now, to conclude this attempt at offering a broader perspective on humani­ tarian biometrics beyond the case of Afghanistan, it should also be noted that UNHCR has recently stated that it will be ‘using more and more biometric technology for registration’ of refugees and, as these cases indicate, humanitarian biometrics is indeed a widespread phenomenon. It has even been deployed in many more settings including Niger, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and South Sudan (Vrankulj 2013) as well as less ‘intensely securitised’ settings such as Burkina Faso, Uganda, Senegal, and Malawi. And, in this latter case, the experimental tone in the representation of this technology use is immediately apparent in headlines such as ‘UNHCR completes testing of biometric system at Malawi Refugee Camp’ (Vrankulj 2014). To appreciate the significance of the variously experimental technology uses described with different levels of detail above, and to better appreciate the sense in which these humanitarian technology uses were experimental as well as what distinguishes humanitarian uses of new technologies, it can prove illustrative to consider how biometric technologies have been deployed in other contexts than refugee registration. Humanitarian vilization in view of European citizenship and safeguards As Gregoire Chamayou suggests, we need to address these questions by placing this specific event in the context of a history of how power always meets opposition and, in turn, always seeks to develop new technologies through which to operate. Whilst new technologies have emerged throughout history, Chamayou highlights the importance of recognising that, ‘beneath the apparent similarity [a power that never ceases to hunts for men] are concealed very different forms of power’ (2012: 149). Thus, when exploring the significance of these changing technologies of power, we should also pay careful attention to the underlying continuity, which, for Chamayou, is a form of power that persistently insists on the necessity of man-­hunting. Part of this necessity is linked to the ways in which the invention of new techniques of power – especially if they seem more humane and operate more meticulously on less easily discernible surfaces (Foucault) – can potentially help counter opposition to the exercise of existing forms of sovereign power. But, the important point is that even seemingly more humane technologies require careful scrutiny since they are not necessarily less violent; sometimes new technologies of power may ‘help’ render the exercise of violence less obvious (Foucault). Emphasising this, Chamayou invites us to consider another fundamental question: how do new technologies emerge and what

Humanitarian biometrics   83 is the role of power in bringing about such new technologies, or in producing favourable conditions for their emergence? Indeed, one of Chamayou’s important points is that available human test subjects do not simply exist as legitimately available for practices of experimentation (2008). Instead, they must be produced as such through what Chamayou calls vilization technologies: discursive and physical technologies through which ‘vile’ bodies are produced as available for practices of experimentation. Let’s now bring these insights about the production of some bodies as ‘vile’ (or valuable only as test subjects) and other bodies as too valuable to be exposed to controversial technology to bear on our appreciation of contemporary humani­tarian uses of experimental biometric registration technology. When humani­tarian technology uses are based upon an acceptance of Afghan refugees as suitable subjects for the trialling of this new technology – or, indeed, takes no notice of acceptability as an issue to be vindicated – a process of vilization feeds off broader discursive structures in which refugees are considered ‘undesirable’ (Agier 2010), ‘surplus populations’ (Duffield 2007), perhaps even as sources of insecurity to be contained and controlled meticulously. But vilization also unfolds in relation to the specifics of the technology use – an aspect that can be recognised when contrasting the use of iris recognition in this refugee context with how biometric registration is practiced in other locations. Even in cases where biometric identification technology is not used in a specifically experimental manner, European citizens have voiced criticism and concerns, notably about the inadequacy of existing data protection given that biometric data collection, storage and processing may potentially entail an infringement of the right to privacy. An example of a specific case that gave rise to debate and criticism was the draft Regulation, put forward by the European Commission on the 18 February 2004, to include biometrics in the passports of all EU citizens.12 This initiative gave rise to concerns among individual European citizens. In September, the Dutch Council of State asked the ECJ to decide if the regulation requiring fingerprints in passports and travel documents violates citizens’ right to privacy. A German citizen has also challenged the inclusion of fingerprints in passports, but the ECJ rejected the case, saying the biometric data prevents illegal entry into the EU and reduces fraud. Indeed, it seems that the biometric passport has come to stay, and the important point to stress in view of the above cases of humanitarian biometrics is the extent to which European citizens can voice their concerns before various authorities that are entitled to listen. And not only individual citizens and privacy groups have raised concerns, but also European advisory bodies such as the ‘Working Party on the Protection of Individuals with regard to the Processing of Personal Data’ (EU Directive 95/46/ EC, art. 29), which had been set up by the European Commission as an independent European advisory body on data protection and privacy (EU Directive 95/46/EC art. 30.3). Recently, the Working Party put forward an Opinion on developments in biometric technologies, in which it recommends that additional safeguards be considered on the basis that:

84   Humanitarian biometrics These technical innovations that are very often presented as technologies that only improve the user experience and convenience of applications could lead to a gradual loss of privacy if no adequate safeguards are implemented. Therefore this Opinion identifies technical and organisational measures aiming at mitigating data protection and privacy risks and that can help to prevent negative impacts on European citizens’ privacy and their fundamental right to data protection. (European Commission 2012a) Certainly, instances such as the SWIFT scandal (permitting the US access to European financial transactions) have lent further weight to such widely voiced concerns about the risk that biometric data collection, storage and procession may infringe the right to privacy and personal data protection. Although ECJ ruled against the challenges put forward by individual citizens regarding the legality of mandatory biometrics in EU passports, the existence of legislative bodies and legally defined restrictions – such as the principle of proportionality – have not been altogether insignificant with respect to the issue of how biometrics is deployed within the EU. For example, in a different case, the European Court of Human Rights ruled less approvingly with respect to another biometric application: in the S and Marper vs United Kingdom case, the European Court of Human Rights had to decide on whether it was permissible for the UK police to retain fingerprints and DNA samples from the applicants (Erdos et al. 2013). In this case the Grand Chamber of the ECHR observed that the retention and storage of these data constituted an interference with the applicants’ right to a private life under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR): ‘the mere retention and storing of personal data by public authorities, however obtained, are to be regarded as having direct impact on the private-­life interest of an individual concerned, irrespective of whether subsequent use is made of the data’ (Erdos 2013). Although European privacy and data protection measures have been criticised on the grounds that they ‘would benefit from a more stringent application of the purpose binding principle’ (Sprokkereef 2008), another critical perspective to consider in relation to humanitarian uses of biometric technology is that, in contrast to European citizens, other individuals do not even seem to be considered entitled to such rights to privacy and data protection in relation to biometric data collection, retention and processing. Even if refugees may have had concerns, no individual had the possibility of bringing this before a court. With the exception of one privacy group – Privacy International – the mandatory subjection of Afghan refugees to experimental iris recognition technology did not give rise to any considerable debate about the potential infringement of refugee privacy. This seems illustrative of one sense in which this Afghan refugee population was being constituted as ‘vile’ in the sense that they were subjected to technologies that other individuals could not lawfully be subjected to certainly not without debate, let alone justification, of the legality of doing so. In these ways, Chamayou’s notion of vilization thus helps us recognise how technology applications – and processes at the level of materiality more generally

Humanitarian biometrics   85 – may involve vilization processes whereby a differentiation is established that produces certain individuals (or entire populations) as capable of being subjected to biometric schemes in a manner that would be considered inacceptable had they involved other rights-­endowed citizens. In addition to the fact that the technology was used experimentally (we shall return to this important point!), other aspects of the humanitarian technology application bear witness to the differential valuation of human life, whereby only certain individuals are considered rightful and legitimate bearers of rights. Notably, with the previous testing of new iris recognition applications involving European citizens, one important precondition for the acceptability of such tests was its entirely voluntary character: ‘The Privium system at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam and Project IRIS at London’s Heathrow Airport (iris recognition immigration system) are examples of voluntary schemes in which frequent travellers can enrol’ (Sasse 2007). Other examples include a voluntary ‘six-­month trial’ of biometrics in Australian airports, during which ‘fingerprints, iris scans and facial information will be collected from selected travellers on a voluntary basis’ (Associated Press 2005) and the more familiar ‘Registered Traveller Pilot Program’ where the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in cooperation with the Northwest Airlines, invited platinum elite frequent fliers to enrol in a pilot program designed to test a system that would use biometric identifiers to conduct a security assessment of each volunteer (US DHS TSA 2004). In contrast, the application of experimental iris recognition technology in the context of humanitarian repatriation in the Afghan borderland was not voluntary. As specified in the official agreement between the government of Pakistan, the government of Afghanistan and the UNHCR ‘Iris recognition processing will be mandatory for all returning Afghans wishing to obtain travel and reintegration assistance [from UNHCR] at designated Encashment Centres inside Afghanistan’ (UNHCR 2007, see Article 15.2). And in this sense, when looking at the specifics of how biometric technologies are being used, we can thus see a process of vilization unfold in humanitarian settings: we can, for example, observe important differences between the above EU specifications and the way in which biometric technology was deployed in the Afghan borderland. Another difference is that even ‘experimental’ technology uses – be it in the context of Afghan repatriation or the Syria refugee crisis – did not give rise to deliberations about the ethics or acceptability of such technology uses, nor to a perceived need for justifications on the part of humanitarian agencies. Rather, an underlying acceptance materialised and produced refugees as legitimately available for a kind of technology use that would give rise to debate had it involved other bodies in other locations.

Concluding remarks What our analysis of this Afghan case study and other illustrative examples of humanitarian uses of refugee biometrics illustrate is how an STS-­inspired conception of technology, attuned to the ontological implications as well as the

86   Humanitarian biometrics politics of technology, can help move our analysis of UNHCR’s turn to biometrics in refugee management beyond a concern with risks stemming from technology failures. Whilst such failures do indeed deserve attention, an STS-­inspired analysis helps us understand why our analysis must not stop once such risks have been laid bare. Furthermore, the examples of humanitarian uses of biometric registration technology that have been discussed in this chapter also helped illustrate that only once we appreciate that the practices of UNHCR cannot be understood apart from broader political sentiments, such as the securitization of refugee and the on-­going Global War on Terror, can we begin to understand how donor demands and requests from host governments, may place UNHCR in a difficult position that risks jeopardizing its ability to enact its role as the guarantor of refugee protection. Indeed, when contributing to the production of digital refugee bodies it seems imperative to recognise what it entails for this new type of refugee body that it materialises in a context where these technologies contribute to reinstating political and very specific notions of what counts as a body deserving of humanitarian protection. By regarding only the iris registered refugee as eligible for humanitarian assistance, UNHCR thus contributed to rendering the digitalised, newly accessible and newly traceable body synonymous with the kind of body to be regarded as deserving of humanitarian protection – albeit with insufficient attention to how these onto-­political alterations may in turn place new demands on UNHCR in its effort to effectively protect this type of refugee body. As illustrated in this chapter, an STS-­inspired conceptualisation of technology and experimentation can move our understanding of risk beyond a focus on failures towards an appreciation of the importance of risks that may stem from successful technology uses. Looking at technology as constitutive also helps us appreciate how, in addition to the emergence of new risks confronting the digital refugee, we also need to recognise another sense in which our analysis of this case can have significance in relation to future uses of biometrics by humani­ tarian actors. In the context of this repatriation endeavour, UNHCR did not only contribute to the production of digital refugees but also to the constitution of biometrics as a successful technology capable of facilitating the realisation of humanitarian objectives. Whilst this may sometimes be possible, our analysis suggests that prior to humanitarian uses of biometrics, it would seem advisable to revisit underlying assumptions about what technology is and does, and to subsequently reflect cautiously on the potential risks that the introduction of biometrics may entail for the implicated refugee population.

Notes   1 Parts of this chapter draw upon Jacobsen, Katja Lindskov (2015a) ‘Experimentation in Humanitarian Locations: UNHCR and Biometric Registration of Afghan Refugees’ Security Dialogue 2015 46(2).   2 ‘Satellite images have been very useful in refugee camp planning. In Jordan’s sprawling Za’atari Camp . . . these maps have been critical in helping UNHCR manage the  evolution of the camp and its residents, whose physical positions are constantly

Humanitarian biometrics   87 shifting. Using the images, aid workers can count how many new tents are put up and calculate how much land is still available’ (IRIN 2013a).   3 SMS, GPS and other ICT have been introduced into various humanitarian contexts (Duffield et al., 2013; Kaiser et al., 2003; Guarasci, 2011).   4 This representation is also evident in donor reports: ‘Biometric registration will automatically improve the UNHCR’s planning and handling of refugee matters’ (Regions of Origin, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2005: 18).   5 ‘Most current iris recognition methods have been typically evaluated on medium sized iris image databases with a few hundreds of subjects. . . . Many new problems are met in classification and indexing of large-­scale iris image databases. So scalability is another challenging issue in iris recognition’ (Gulmire and Ganorkar 2012: 434).   6 ‘To deploy a large-­scale biometric recognition system, the first concern is the probability of false matches, which increases with the number of records enrolled in the database.’ (Hao et al. 2008: 203).   7 According to UNHCR spokesman, Pakistan repatriated 1,565,095 Afghan refugees in 2002; 343,074 in 2003; 383,598 in 2004; 449, 520 in 2005; 133,015 in 2006; 364,476 in 2007; 282,496 in 2008; 51, 290 in 2009; and 109,383 in 2010.   8 For example, the use of iris recognition in Heathrow Airport, with 2.000 voluntary test users (Khaw 2002: 11; BBC News 2002).   9 Keynote delivered by Andrew Hopkins (Senior Registration Officer at UNHCR) and Justin Hughes (Principal Consultant, PA Consulting Group). 10 IRIN 2013a. 11 And not only concerns about the sharing of this sensitive data with governments in the region – but also, beyond this, noting links between the iris scan provider (IrisGuard) and the profiles of members of its Advisory Board, many of whom have close links to the US government: for example, ‘the Honourable Frances Fragos Townsend’ who has ‘most recently served as the Homeland Security Advisor to the President of the United States between 2004 and 2007’ chairing the Homeland Security Council and reporting to the President on ‘U.S. Homeland Security policy and Combating Terrorism matters’ (IrisGuard 2014a). 12 Document COM(2004) 116-final, noted in Official Journal no. C 98 of 23 April 2004: 39.

5 GM food aid and the molecular subject as political

Through an exploration of the delivery of GMO maize not approved for human consumption as humanitarian food aid, this chapter provides insights into the question of how humanitarian uses of such experimental technology, or technology products, may feed into constitutive processes with implications for the reach of sovereign power. Although the focus is on a specific product of new technologies, the argument is that this product (GM Maize) forms part of a broader ‘family of technologies of power’ (Foucault 2007: 16, see Chapter 3). And, accordingly, the case study will therefore be situated in relation to broader arguments about the molecular vision and on other scholars’ arguments about how advances in molecular genetics entail a capacity to enable us to think of new aspects of life (the human body’s genetic make-­up) as governable. Most importantly, the chapter will look into the often overlooked question of how – through what processes – it becomes possible to regard a new technology as a credible source of politically relevant knowledge and, by the same token, how it becomes possible to think of previously ‘apolitical’ aspects of life as open to intervention and as relevant to the determination of that body’s political status. Through what processes does it become possible to conceive of the body’s genetic structure as an aspect of life which is relevant to the determination of this body’s political status? How may humanitarian uses of GM-­technology not simply help feed starving populations, but also ‘help’ the constitution of technology and attending knowledge that legitimises considering the body’s genetic structure as a domain of knowledge relevant to the exercise of power? Informed by guiding questions such as these, this chapter will examine the co-­constitution of epistemological authority and political subjectivity through an exploration of the kinds of constitutive processes that unfold in the context of humanitarian uses of unapproved GM foods.

Foucault and STS: constitution of new means, new surfaces and new racist modalities In Society Must Be Defended (2003), Foucault describes how the emergence of new statistical technologies coincided with the advent of a new object of legitimate political intervention; with these new technologies ‘population’ came to be

GM food aid   89 understood as a political body with characteristics that could not only be ‘known’ but also subjected to new forms of intervention, manipulation and discrimination based upon this new knowledge. Examples include the use of birth control to alter undesirable trends in a population as such trends are made visible (are constituted) in tandem with the emergence of these new statistical technologies. Indeed, for Foucault, a crucial point is that the emergence of the population as a knowable and legitimately alterable ‘phenomenon’ represents not an absolute shift away from power’s previous domains of intervention (the subject of disciplinary power) but, rather, power’s expansion into additional domains of human existence. As with any field of scientific inquiry, molecular genetics must be constituted as epistemologically valid but STS insights invite us to recognise that neither new technologies nor new scientific knowledge is constituted in closed laboratory settings where tests and trials follow strictly objective procedures (Latour and Woolgar 1979). A range of social practices feed into the constitution of technologies of sciences as reliable, as legitimate, and as relevant to the determination of political identity. From this perspective it becomes relevant to explore how humanitarian uses of new – and greatly disputed – technology may feed into the social constitution of this technology as normatively acceptable and/or as an authoritative source of politically relevant knowledge. And this, in turn, gives rise to important questions about how the constitution of a technology and the science behind it may affect the way in which we think about the scope of power’s legitimate reach into additional aspects of human existence and the associated aim of altering undesirable features. By addressing such issues as we explore a case of humanitarian uses of unapproved GM maize, we can begin to appreciate how humanitarian uses of new technology may feed into these constitutive processes.

The politics of co-­constitution in the context of genetic engineering Translating these insights from Foucault and STS into a framework through which to analyse this case of humanitarian uses of unapproved GM foods, a few words must first be said about how advances in genetic engineering technology has been said to affect the exercise of state power. In Herbert Gottweis’s book, Governing Molecules, he demonstrates how, during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, the state became increasingly involved in ‘the governing of molecules’ (1998: 39) and how ‘molecular biology became an important site from which power operated’ (1998: 40). Central to this reading of the relationship between state power and molecular biology is the documentation of how new inventions in the field of biotechnology were deployed by states as new techniques of power. For Gottweis, a particularly important concern is that, as a result, underlying notions of eugenics might continue to inform modern state policies. By calling attention to this continuity, Gottweis insinuates that in debates about the novelty of molecular genetics we must not forget this critical legacy.

90   GM food aid Gottweis’s discussion certainly provides an important historical context within which to situate this chapter’s focus on the question of how humanitarian uses of new products of genetic engineering may feed into the constitution of a technology, indeed a science, with implications for sovereign power’s reach and modality. That said, this chapter addresses a question that precedes Gottweis’s analysis: how do new technologies come to be applicable as techniques of power in the first place. Rather than assuming that new technologies and inventions are readily available to be deployed by states as technologies of power, this chapter will instead explore the practices of experimentation that take place between initial laboratory findings and the emergence of a new technologies as legitimate technologies of power. In the molecular vision of life, living organisms are not conceived of as distinct species with different logics of formation (Dillon 2007; Deleuze 1995). Rather, each living organism comprises discernible molecules whose code or system of formation can be studied – and known. In this sense, molecular genetics entails a specific conception of ‘the nature of being’: an ontology in which all living matter exists as bundles of interchangeable units whose composition can be altered endlessly (Deleuze 1995). This ‘ontology of code’ (Dillon 2003) is not only influential within the scientific domain, it also impacts upon dominant political conceptions of how to define the border of the political subject’s body. With reference to this ontological change, Deleuze and Dillon have both called for a careful analysis of the risks entailed in this new political ontology (Deleuze 1995; Dillon 2003). As Dillon explains, the new ‘threats’ that advances in molecular genetics make it possible for sovereign power to define, stem from the ways in which genetic engineering renders ‘bodies-­in-formation’ open to knowledge and to power. When this happens, sovereign power might, in the name of security (Foucault 2003), use information about the molecular body to legitimate an ostensible necessity of intervention into those ‘bodies-­in-formation’ that it finds betrays ‘a virtual potential towards becoming dangerous’ (Dillon 2003: 531). Thus, with the constitution of molecular science as authoritative and politically relevant we also see a redefinition of what aspects of life it is legitimate and relevant for power to intervene into but, crucially, from the simultaneous constitution of genetic information as valid knowledge, as a foundational authority in which to anchor a specific definition of what counts as a valuable versus a worthless (or dangerous) body. But in what ways may humanitarian uses of new GM-­products feed into these constitutive processes? To address such questions, this chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part, the notion of vilization technology (Chamayou 2013) will be used to frame important questions about how certain bodies are produced as ‘vile’ and hence as suitable subjects of experimentation (see Chapter 3). In the second part of this chapter, we turn from the constitution of humanitarian subjects as vile, to their subjection to a specific strain of unapproved GM maize. More specifically, we shall draw upon the literature on humanitarian medical experimentation and the medical notion of risks stemming from technology failures, in an exploration of

GM food aid   91 the sense in which such risk of failure may give rise to harmful effects as we move from the medical domain to the domain of bioengineering. Finally, in the third part, we shall explore how humanitarian uses of unapproved GM maize may contribute to the successful constitution of molecular genetics as a reliable scientific authority – an analysis which will also address the critical question of what this could in turn imply for how the scope of legitimate intervention into political subjects is constituted.

Background to case study: humanitarian uses of unapproved GM foods One element of the humanitarian commitment to improving the lives of others is the objective of ensuring ‘food safety’ for all people globally. In the context of famine, humanitarian interventions often seek to deliver safety to the affected populations through the distribution of food aid. Whilst such efforts may well have valuable effects, we should not neglect the risk that they – at the level of technology and materiality – may also give rise to various unintended consequences. As I shall demonstrate below, certain humanitarian food aid endeavours have had a different and largely overlooked effect. Rather than simply alleviating starvation, experimental distribution of unapproved products of biotechnology have, instead, delivered potential insecurity to the affected population in cases where humanitarian zones have served as laboratories in which to distribute unapproved GM foods. There is a long history of humanitarian food aid being shipped from prosperous locations in tame zones to perilous locations in wild zones experiencing conditions of famine. The World Food Programme (WFP) was founded in 1963 as the food aid branch of the United Nations. Its stated goal is two-­fold: to alleviate immediate suffering by providing emergency food aid and to eliminate the need for food aid in the long run. To achieve these goals the WFP works closely with various partners including the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). Yet, it has sometimes proved difficult to achieve these goals – often due to insufficient donations from UN member states. In 2002, WFP provided food aid in response to a number of disasters in Latin America and Southern Africa. On 17 August 2002 fire broke out in a tropical dry forest in the Bolivian highlands and in just a few days it had ruined about 30,000 hectares of the forest and the surrounding grazing lands (WFP 2002). Due to the destruction of these ‘important livelihood sources’ people living in the area were now confronting conditions of starvation. In response to this – and in close collaboration with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) – WFP mobilised sufficient food donations to delivering about 36,000 food-­rations, thus saving the affected population from starvation (WFP 2002). Also in 2002, WFP responded to what has been described as ‘Central America’s worst drought in more than a decade’ which had caused ‘the deaths of more than 125 children in Guatemala’ (Sullivan 2002). Guatemala was the hardest-­hit country and thousands of lives

92   GM food aid were threatened by the failing crops and the spread of hunger that resulted from this drought. On a different continent, a severe drought affected all of Southern Africa and millions of people in Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe, were suffering from food shortages (Mano et al. 2003; Zerbe 2004). In response to these disasters, WFP initiated a food aid response and called upon its partners to make donations. At first WFP reported that donor responses had been ‘sluggish’ but later this problem was resolved as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) decided to donate a large amount of maize to this humanitarian cause. This large donation – that would come to form the main part of the food aid shipped to Bolivia and Guatemala as well as to the starving populations in Southern Africa – contained a variety of genetically modified maize named ‘CBH-­ 351’, more commonly known as ‘StarLink’. Besides the fact that the safety of genetically modified organisms in general was a widely debated issue, what must be said about this specific case is that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had only approved StarLink maize for animal consumption. However, although StarLink had been solely approved for animal feed, the supply chain for maize in the US is such that StarLink was soon found in the food supply (Salazar et al. 2006; Lin et al. 2002: 31–34). It was in response to this failure to keep the genetically modified StarLink maize from making its way into the human consumption channels, that USDA announced, on 13 March 2001, that it would ‘offer to purchase corn seed contaminated with the protein Cry9c, the protein found in the controversial StarLink corn, from small seed companies’ to ensure that this unapproved GM would not be consumed by US citizens (Transgenic Crops 2002). Yet, offering to purchase the controversial StarLink maize was only a solution to the problem of further contamination in the US. For instead of being destroyed, the StarLink maize was then donated to WFP and shipped to Bolivia, Guatemala and Southern Africa as humanitarian food aid. Now, to appreciate the kinds of risks which it was feared that this could create, let us now explore the controversy that confronted the StarLink producers, as it was discovered that the GM maize had made its way into human consumption channels in the US. Using the latest techniques of genetic engineering, Aventis CropScience (the producer) had sought to produce an insect-­resistant and herbicide-­tolerant type of maize that, endowed with these attributes, was expected to deliver greater yields. With genetic engineering it had become possible to determine what specific properties a particular gene was the carrier of and to transfer this to a different organism. Applying this technology, Aventis discovered that the Cry9C protein was the carrier of the sought-­after attribute which made it toxic to certain corn insect pests, such as the European corn borer, and if this toxicity could be engineered into maize a more resistant variety would thus result. Aventis was therefore keen to use genetic engineering technology in an attempt to inject this Cry9C protein into an existing maize line (the Zea mays L. maize) with the aim of transferring this toxicity and producing an insect-­resistant maize line. This was the genetically modified maize that later came to be known as StarLink. Endowed with this protein, StarLink was expected to be more resistant to insects

GM food aid   93 than any other variety of maize. Based on this expectation, Aventis believed and claimed that its newly engineered maize would provide a solution to the problem of harvest failure which in turn could ensure greater yields and make more food available. This was how Aventis envisioned the role that StarLink maize would presumably play in helping turn the vision of ‘global food security’ into a reality. In his speech at the International Food and Nutrition Conference in October 2002, Dan Glickman (then US Secretary of Agriculture) echoed this faith in a positive relation between the realisation of global food security and advances in biotechnology. He stated that: ‘I’m of the belief that promoting new technologies – biotechnology, pest management (Jacobsen 2015b) and more – will continue to be the cornerstone of our efforts to feed a growing world population. . . . It is advances in technology that will help us to find the many answers we need.’ Similarly in August 2002, when James Morris (director of WFP) was asked about the distribution of genetically modified food as humanitarian food aid, he expressed the organisation’s complete confidence in this new technology as he stated that: ‘This is food we have complete confidence in’ (Maharaj and Mukwita 2002). As such, genetic engineering was believed to be capable of delivering crops that would provide the longed-­for solution to the problem of insufficient donations, given the assumption that with greater yields more food would become available for humanitarian operations, thus helping WFP achieve the objective of saving populations from starvation.

Humanitarian vilization – distribution of unapproved foods A paradox thus emerges already at this point. On the one hand, in the US, the fear that StarLink maize could be unsafe for human consumption was so pronounced that it gave rise to an executive ban agreed upon by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) – a ban that, amongst other things, was designed to prevent this GM crop from entering the human consumption channel. Yet, on the other hand, the distribution of the very same GM crop – namely, the StarLink maize – to starving populations in remote locations was marked by optimism in the ability of this StarLink maize to form ‘the cornerstone’ of emergency operations, which the implicated humanitarian agencies believed could ensure food safety for the affected populations. Now, irrespective of whether these humanitarian uses of StarLink maize as food aid would turn out a success or a failure (e.g. if negatively affecting the health of the affects populations), a certain risk had arguably already emerged the moment these humanitarian endeavours contributed to the possibility of considering these starving populations fit for the consumption of an elsewhere-­banned GM crop. For, in doing so, the starving populations were rendered suitable for exposure to products that had been deemed unsafe, indeed disallowed for consumption by people living in the US. As such, we arguably see an illustrative example of the workings of a set of important dynamics, which Gregoire Chamayou refers to as

94   GM food aid v­ ilization technologies. More specifically, we see how, in the context of food aid, humanitarian populations come to be regarded as suitable and legitimate human test subjects; that is, for consumption of foods that have been deemed unsafe for other (more valuable?) bodies. Now, in this specific context, legitimate human test subjects were, in a certain sense, much ‘needed’ since animal tests had previously proven incapable of serving as reliable sources of knowledge about the safety of the GM maize in humans. In attempting to address the abovementioned concerns about the StarLink maize’s suspected allergenicity, the Cry9C-expressing maize had been tested in various animal experiments prior to 2002 – i.e. prior to being delivered as humanitarian food aid. Regarding the question of concentration levels, one example of an animal experiment was ‘an acute, single-­dose toxicity study in mice’ that Aventis carried out (Bucchini and Goldman 2002), which had showed that a ‘30-day repeated dose study in mice’ produced ‘no immunological effects at any dose level’ (Aventis 2000a, 2000b). Other animal experiments had studied the allergic potential of processed/unprocessed StarLink maize. Still other animal experiments had addressed the unresolved question of whether ‘at risk individuals’ would be more likely to develop particularly severe reactions to the Cry9C-expressing maize. One example of this was the testing of genetically modified maize in pregnant mice (Smith 2005). Rather than producing the longed-­for, conclusive evidence about the StarLink maize’s allergenicity, these animal tests had delivered contradictory results: some concluded that consumption of the Cry9C protein produced ‘no severe effects’ while others concluded that the consumption of StarLink had resulted in ‘pigs giving birth to bags of water’, in mice with lower fertility rates (Smith 2005) and in ‘rats with damaged immune systems’ (Brown 2007, Pusztai and Bardocz 2005). Not only were these and other results contradictory, disagreements in the scientific community over the extent to which results from animal experiments could be regarded as reliable evidence of a GM crop’s safety when consumed by humans further contributed to contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it was argued that even if animal experiments demonstrated that a given GMO was safe when consumed by animals, this could not be regarded as reliable evidence that the same GMO would be safe if consumed by humans (an approach that informed EPA’s decision not to approve the StarLink maize for human consumption). On the other hand, it was being argued that even if a genetically engineered organism had proved unsafe in animals (producing adverse effects), this might not mean that the specific organism would have similarly unsafe effects if consumed by human beings. Here scientists pointed out that due to the difference in immune systems – humans generally having a stronger immune system than the animals used in laboratory experiments – humans might not encounter adverse effects even if animal experiments had shown adverse effects (Ames et al. 1987; Gold et al. 1992). As such, although animal tests had been carried out to address various aspect of the StarLink maize’s potential allergenicity, the reliability of these results as indicators of whether the GM maize could safely be consumed by humans remained largely unknown.

GM food aid   95 Crucially, these conflicting interpretations of the usefulness or not of animal tests as evidence of the effect of feeding GM-­maize to humans gave rise to a demand for more testing to be carried out before the StarLink maize could be approved – ideally through experiments capable of delivering more reliable evidence of the maize’s safety (or not) when consumed by humans. In other words, the emerging science of genetic engineering seemed in need of a test population of human beings, for only when tested in such a population would it be possible to determine whether GM products could be authoritatively defined as safe for human consumption. In the context of this unspoken demand, humanitarian actors, by accepting the controversial GM maize as a suitable donation, seemed willing to make their subjects available as ‘ideal test settings’. To use Chamayou’s terminology, humanitarian practices thus contributed to the production of their subjects as vile bodies legitimately available for experimental endeavours. Indeed, humanitarian settings seem to have produced just the kind of legitimate human test populations that an emerging western science desired. As such, these bodies confronted a certain risk regardless of how the experiment would turn out: the risks associated with having been produced as ‘vile bodies’ and legitimately available for practices of experimentation, in this case the consumption of GM foods deemed too risky for other bodies to consume. Already, at this early stage, it thus seems that even well-­intentioned humanitarian practices may entangle with scientific quests for recognised authority and with Western states’ quest for greater safety within. And crucially it seems that this entanglement of a threefold promise of humanitarian morality, scientific progress and sovereign security, entails an often overlooked facet; its sought-­for materialisation seems to come at the expense of exposing external, vilized bodies to increased insecurity.

Humanitarian GM foods and risks of failure Let’s now examine two aspects of the likelihood that risks of failure could emerge during this humanitarian distribution of unapproved GM maize as food aid. First, the question of how these humanitarian locations served as ‘ideal’ settings in which to test uncertain aspects of the StarLink maize’s safety. Second, the question of how the humanitarian subjects formed an ‘ideal’ population in which to test whether or not StarLink maize could be safely consumed by human beings. Cry9C – cultivation in a new location Despite the promise that the Cry9C-expressing StarLink maize would yield greater harvests (as the Cry9C protein was expected to confer resistance against insect-­pests such as the European borer) and despite the fact that the maize had been field-­tested prior to its appearance in humanitarian locations in 2002, important aspects of the GM maize’s real-­world performance remained unproven. Whilst in theory advances in genetic engineering would seem to have

96   GM food aid turned the making of new living organisms into a simple technological task, in practice this promise had to be adjusted. For example, it soon became apparent that even if a desirable trait in a gene could be transferred to another organism, undesirable effect may arise when the newly engineered organism is moved from the laboratory to the real world. So although molecular genetics had made it possible to study living organisms at a previously inaccessible level – turning molecular processes into knowable and alterable matter – one aspect of this science which could not be studied in the laboratory was the effects of a newly engineered organism on non-­target organisms in its real world environment. Such effects could only be discovered in real-­world field tests, but conducting such tests was associated with pronounced fears that ‘if dangerous new forms of life begin to reproduce in nature and spread, it is improbable that they could be recalled’ (Regal 1996: 1). StarLink maize had been tested prior to 2002, but only in fairly small laboratory trials. The aim of such tests had been to produce knowledge about the GM maize’s effect on non-­target organisms – animals as well as plants. This was an issue that it was deemed important to gain further knowledge about before releasing this new GM maize into the open environment. To achieve this – that is, to test StarLink’s potential effect on non-­target animals – laboratory tests were conducted and, in a request for approval submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the manufacturer (Aventis) noted that: ‘no evidence of acute toxicity in laboratory mammals, birds or non-­target beneficial insects has been reported’ (GM Crop Database MON809). Furthermore, Aventis also emphasised that these laboratory tests had demonstrated that ‘the Cry9C protein poses no foreseeable risks to non-­target organisms’ (Shelton 2002). Yet, the status of these tests as authoritative evidence of the Cry9C-expressing maize’s safety was soon called into question. Critics pointed to a number of factors that should be expected to impede the reliability of laboratory tests as evidence of the GM maize’s effects on non-­target animals. One example was the fact that while ‘most experiments were conducted for 1–4 weeks, some of the tested [non-­ target] species can live a year or more and [might therefore] experience much longer periods of exposure’ to this GMO – the effects of which Aventis’ short laboratory tests would not have been able to detect (Marvier 2002). Notwithstanding such uncertainties about the StarLink maize’s impact on related organisms in its external environment (and although it had proven impossible to contain this GM maize in the US), StarLink maize was nonetheless delivered as food aid to different locations in Southern Africa and Latin America – deliveries that arguably were experimental in the sense that these new locations would challenge the claim that StarLink posed no risk to organisms in its external environment. First, the performance and stability of the GM maize was challenged when delivered to Bolivia and Guatemala because, in these new locations, it was exposed to extreme temperatures, which was expected to have an effect on the expression of the Cry9C protein in the StarLink maize. In addition to this, both Bolivia and Guatemala were locations with a great variety of species closely

GM food aid   97 related to the ‘Zea mays L.’ maize and, as such, they were locations that would reinforce rather than minimise the risk of contamination related to the cultivation of StarLink maize. The humanitarian agencies involved in distributing this GM maize were not unaware of these conditions. As stated in a USAID report concerning the conditions in Bolivia, this particular location was marked by ‘agricultural conditions that are largely unfavourable’ (USAID Case Study). Mr. Humboldt (Friends of the Earth) had also pointed this out to the various humani­ tarian organisations attending the World Food Summit in June 2002. On this occasion he had warned that these locations in Central America are ‘the birthplaces of corn’ (OCA 2002) and the home of a great number of different species. As ideal as these new locations may have seemed from the point of view of experimentation, considerable risks could be expected to accompany the distribution of GM maize in these specific locations, thus potentially obstructing rather than aiding the humanitarian intention of improving food security. To understand how organisms in these experimentation locations – including some that were vital to the livelihood of the local populations – were made potentially unsafe with this distribution of the Cry9C-expressing StarLink maize, it is important to bear in mind two additional aspects of this food aid endeavour. The first aspect is that, in these humanitarian emergency zones, the StarLink maize was initially offered as whole kernels, a condition which meant that it was highly likely that local farmers would plant these kernels in their fields and, as a consequence, the open-­pollinated maize would (as had been suggested in relation to StarLink’s escape in tame zones) be likely to enter different locations, even neighbouring countries and ‘invisibly’ grown alongside non-­GM crops with no solid evidence that the maize could safely co-­exist with other organisms in its external environment. But where milling had been demanded by the recipient country as a condition for accepting the StarLink maize as humanitarian food aid, such milling still did not eliminate this risk of ‘escape’. This was so for two reasons. The first reason was that the bags of StarLink maize were stored in local warehouses, some of which were looted, with the result that the StarLink maize would then make its way into countries that had explicitly rejected its distribution. The second reason was that, in contrast to the precautionary measures that were put in place at mills in the US,1 no such steps were taken to ensure that no escape and no mixing would occur at the places where StarLink was to be milled in these new experimentation locations. A second aspect to bear in mind when considering how the circumstances surrounding this delivery of StarLink maize as food aid may have provoked, rather than prevented, undesirable side-­effects in the new locations, is the fact that the countries experiencing ‘food emergency’ were confronted with an either­or choice. Either they could accept the StarLink-­tainted food aid or they would receive no food aid at all.2 There was, in other words, no possibility of saying ‘no thanks’ to the GM maize that had only been approved for animal consumption and instead receive aid consisting of food that had been approved for human consumption. This was not because non-­GM maize was unavailable as an alternative to the StarLink-­tainted food aid (FAO 2002). Now, the implications of this

98   GM food aid either-or choice can, for example, be discerned when looking at the case of Zambia. Here, the Zambian government’s decision not to allow the distribution of US-­maize which could not be certified as ‘StarLink-­free’ meant that Zambia’s starving population was offered no alternative and received no humanitarian assistance at all. To quote James Morris (then director of WFP): ‘There is no way we can help them if they don’t accept the food. . . . No one is going to step up with donations of non-­GM corn to fill the gap’ (Maharaj and Mukwita 2002). Now, even if a country experiencing famine would not allow the distribution of unapproved GM maize to its starving population, such a decision may not have been sufficient to guarantee that GM maize (and the associated risks) would not enter the country; the occurrence of cross-­pollination, looting and/or cross-­ border smuggling all increased the likelihood that the associated risks may even enter countries that had rejected the StarLink-­tainted food aid as well as countries that had demanded the GM maize to be milled before distribution. In this way, this humanitarian distribution of unapproved GM maize entailed a risk of introducing new insecurities not only to the countries that accepted this food aid, but also to countries that rejected it. Cry9C – consumption by a new population In addition to the uncertainties surrounding the question of how the Cry9Cexpressing GM maize would interact with other organisms in its environment, there was also another important category of uncertainties: namely, questions about the safe digestibility of StarLink maize when consumed by humans. For indeed the promise of greater yields would only translate into greater ‘food security’ if these yields were edible; that is, if the GM maize could safely be consumed by human beings. As we already know, StarLink had been genetically modified to express the phosphinothricin acetyltransferase (PAT) protein (which confers resistance to glufosinate herbicides) and the Cry9C protein (which is toxic to the so-­called European corn borer). However, it soon became apparent that the Cry9C protein, as expressed in StarLink maize, did not only confer the desired trait which made it insect-­resistant but also a property that made it ‘resistant to degradation in gastric juices’ – i.e. resistant to be broken down by the fluids (‘gastric juices’) in the human stomach that are vital to the process of digestion (StarLink Fact Sheet). Resistance to stomach acids and enzymes are features typical of allergens; unable to be broken down in the human digestive system, the Cry9C protein might stimulate the production of antibodies which would mean that subsequent exposure to the allergen could lead to the release of chemicals that would cause allergic symptoms. The concern was therefore that this Cry9C-expressing maize may act as an allergen and that it may belong to a category of allergen that can cause nausea (sickness and vomiting) and anaphylactic shock (sudden, severe and potentially fatal allergic reaction in persons sensitive to a specific substance; a drop in blood pressure, itching, swelling, and difficulty in breathing). Yet, despite numerous studies of the Cry9C-expressing maize’s potential allergenicity, no conclusive evidence had been produced. The

GM food aid   99 EPA announced that it was ‘seeking advice to determine the risk that exists from exposure to this protein [Cry9C] based upon two of its biochemical characteristics (stability to heat and gastric digestion)’ (SAP 2000). And similarly the Genetically Engineered Food Alert (GEFA) noted that the expression of the Cry9C protein in StarLink maize ‘requires further testing to determine its specific effects’ (Herman 2001). In short, since it remained unknown whether the Cry9C-protein would act as an allergen, the EPA and GEFA both called for further studies before the maize could be approved for human consumption. Specifically three aspects of the newly engineered maize’s potential allergenicity remained unknown. First, it was uncertain at what level of consumption the StarLink maize would be likely to trigger allergic reactions in humans. Second, it remained unknown whether StarLink’s potential allergenicity would increase if humans consumed the maize in an unprocessed form. And third, whilst it had been anticipated, it had not been verified, whether the Cry9Cprotein would be likely to pose more severe reactions in particularly vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women and immune-­compromised individuals. Regarding the first aspect – the link between consumption levels and the likelihood that StarLink maize would act as an allergen – important questions about the safe/unsafe concentration of the Cry9C remained uncertain and were widely discussed. For Aventis, the manufacturer of the maize, this was one of the key questions that the company was keen to gain further knowledge about in order to support its appeal to EPA, calling upon the regulatory agency ‘to allow a tolerance level for StarLink in human food’ (Norfolk Genetic Information Network 2002). Similarly, it was also of critical importance for EPA to gain further knowledge about this issue as such knowledge was needed in order for the agency to respond to Aventis’ appeal as well as to establish a threshold level at which EPA could safely recommend that ‘monitoring for StarLink’ in the human food channel could be ceased (EPA 2007). Whilst some countries (such as Japan) had set a strict zero tolerance level, EPA believed that below a certain level of concentration StarLink maize would cease to pose a risk to human health. Yet, it remained unknown at what concentration-­level this threshold value could be set. Regarding a second unverified aspect of StarLink’s potential allergenicity – whether processing of the GM maize would affect the likelihood of allergenicity – the details of this link remained uncertain, as was, for example, evident in an EPA ‘Assessment of additional scientific information concerning scientific information concerning StarLink Corn’ (2001), which among other things comments on efforts by Aventis ‘to determine the impact of various types of processing on the levels of Cry9C protein in finished foods containing corn’ (EPA 2001: 4). Finally, regarding the third aspect – how a subject’s susceptibility would affect the likelihood of allergenicity – Aventis had conducted experiments that reportedly demonstrated how the protein did not elicit allergic reactions when tested using the blood of persons susceptible to food allergies – also referred to as ‘at risk individuals’. Yet, Aventis’ study of ‘individuals at risk’ only included

100   GM food aid ‘presently corn-­allergic individuals’ which meant that a significant number of other groups commonly regarded as particularly susceptible and ‘at risk’ (such as infants and children) had not been included in this Aventis study. As independent allergy experts on EPA’s Scientific Advisory Panel had pointed out, ‘testing conducted by the FDA and CDC could easily miss possible allergic reactions to StarLink’s Cry9C protein’ given that ‘special risks to infants and children were not taken into consideration’ (Scientific Advisory Panel 2001). Added to this, it was suspected that the risk of encountering adverse effects from the consumption of StarLink maize could be particularly pronounced for pregnant women. As noted during a question-­session before EPA’s Scientific Advisory Panel, existing tests ‘completely ignores the potential of fetal exposure’ and the risk that such exposure ‘might seriously threaten or impair the life of the unborn fetus’ (FDA 2000). In fact, these uncertainties surrounding the genetically modified StarLink maize had given rise to a quest for further experimentation, as was, for example, evident in the recommendation that ‘StarLink’s allergenic potential needs to be addressed in all segments of the population’, including infants and pregnant women (FDA 2000). As such, these weaknesses of Aventis’ study had cast doubt on the conclusion that Aventis had drawn from it, namely that: ‘StarLink corn is not a threat to “at risk individuals”’. Indeed, this conclusion was greatly discredited given that the study on which it was based did not provide reliable knowledge about whether this Cry9c-expressing maize may provoke allergic reactions if consumed by other groups of ‘at risk individuals’ than ‘presently cornallergic’ subjects. In short, it remained unknown which groups of ‘at risk individuals’ may be at risk of encounter allergic reactions as a result of the consumption of StarLink maize. By way of summary, three crucial aspects of the Cry9C-expressing StarLink maize’s and its potential allergenicity remained unknown and given this level of uncertainty the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approved the gene-­spliced variety of yellow corn in 1998 for use only as animal feed and set a zero-­ tolerance level for its use in human food based on the fact that this particular protein could prove allergenic. (Segara and Rawson 2001) Yet, as we already know, the maize was nevertheless delivered as food aid intended for human consumption by a number of starving populations in Latin America and Southern Africa. However, in order to appreciate how this exposed these humanitarian populations to various risks and insecurities, it is necessary to recognise that not only was StarLink maize itself deemed ‘unsafe for human consumption’, these humanitarian populations were also made unsafe by a number of decisions concerning the manner in which the StarLink-­tainted food aid donations were to be distributed. Again, three characteristics of the distribution of these food aid donations meant that the recipient populations represented a particularly challenging test population vis-­à-vis the three aforementioned

GM food aid   101 aspects of StarLink’s presumed allergenicity. First, the level of consumption was extraordinarily high. Second, the maize was likely to be consumed in an unprocessed form, where unprocessed refers to products such as maize flour (Miraglia 2004). Third, the new consumption populations encompassed large numbers of particularly susceptible individuals including children, elderly, and pregnant women. Regarding the first unproven aspect – the level of consumption – StarLink maize was distributed in this new location in such a way that it would form the main, possibly even the sole, source of food for the subjects to whom it was delivered. According to EPA estimates, the dietary intake of whole maize grain in the US is estimated to be 62 grams per day and even for the segment of the US population with the highest level of maize consumption the intake of maize is estimated to be 88 grams per day (Pelletier 2005), which means that the unintentional exposure to StarLink maize was comparatively low. By contrast, these levels are only a small fraction of the daily intakes that are common in populations in the southern African region (Pelletier 2005: 138) – maize has long been a staple food for these populations. What is more, this specific humanitarian food aid basket was designed such that the Cry9C-expressing StarLink maize would be the main source of food. This did not just produce an increase in the level of consumption compared to the unintended tests population previously exposed to StarLink, it also produced a notable increase in the risk that individuals in this new experimentation population might encounter adverse effects from the consumption of StarLink maize in this unprecedentedly high concentration. Concerning the second unproven aspect (processed/unprocessed), distributing StarLink to this new test population would challenge Aventis’ claim that StarLink was safe for human consumption. Previously StarLink had only been found in small amounts in processed food, but in this the new location StarLink was to be delivered as whole kernels. What is more, ‘the processing methods used in that region [southern Africa] were unlikely to denature and degrade the proteins to the same extent as those used in the US context’ (Pelletier 2005: 138). Similarly Taylor and Lehrer stressed that processing methods can greatly affect the stability of potentially allergenic proteins and toxins during processing and after ingestion (Taylor and Lehrer 1996). Bearing in mind these observations, we see why it was to be expected that the distribution of the StarLink maize as whole kernels would pose a particularly challenging condition in which to test whether the maize would cause allergic reactions when consumed in an unprocessed form. Not only could this condition be expected to make the Cry9C-expressing maize unsafe (in order to test it), it could also be expected to make the new experimentation population unsafe. And given that this (besides the accident in the US when small amounts of StarLink entered the food supply) was the first time that unprocessed StarLink maize would be consumed by human beings; it was unknown before the experiment whether the distribution of StarLink maize to this humanitarian population would produce adverse effects or not. Concerning the third unproven aspect, it is important to note that whilst it was known that certain individuals were more ‘at risk’ of developing allergic reactions

102   GM food aid than others and whilst previously such individuals had not been included in tests, the distribution of the StarLink-­tainted food aid in the new location produced a new experimentation population, one that did include both children and pregnant women. This did not only challenge Aventis’ promise that the newly engineered maize was perfectly safe even for ‘individuals at risk’, it also jeopardised the safety of these already vulnerable subjects who were expected to be particularly likely to develop adverse effects from the consumption of StarLink maize. As noted in a report from Friends of the Earth, much of the food aid that Bolivia received was part of a humanitarian program designed ‘especially for poor children, who are the most vulnerable population in the society’ (Friends of the Earth International). Echoing this concern, Julio Sánchez from Centro Humboldt in Nicaragua noted that: ‘The WFP by introducing food aid with GMOs is placing at risk our children and pregnant women, the most vulnerable people in our society’ (Sanchez 2005). Although these observations would suggest that StarLink maize should not have been distributed in these specific ways – high concentration and unpro­ cessed and to populations with numerous ‘at risk’ individuals – paradoxically, from the point of view of gaining new knowledge about important but as-­yet unproven aspects of this new GM-­crop, these very circumstances contributed to making these populations ‘ideal’ for the testing of StarLink’s anticipated allergenicity. Indeed, if it could be proven that StarLink maize would not cause allergic reactions in human beings even if consumed in a high concentration, in an unprocessed form and by especially susceptible individuals, then such results could provide important ‘evidence’ to help advance the approval of StarLink maize for consumption in the US and other states, where it would most likely neither be consumed in an unprocessed form nor as the sole source of food.3 Yet, although these conditions could be regarded as ideal from the point of view of experimentation and the desire to certify the newly engineered maize, from a humanitarian perspective, however, this was certainly not the case. For whilst experiments deliberately place an object in a knowingly challenging condition as a method to gain new knowledge about hitherto unproven aspects, the implications of such testing in settings that implicate human beings is that they too are made potentially unsafe – a risk that accompanied this distribution of StarLink-­tainted maize as humanitarian food aid. In a certain sense, subjects in a Zambian refugee camp composed an ideal test population; the refugee population entailed a large number of children and other ‘at risk’ individuals including pregnant women and elderly and a number of the refugees had weak immune systems. Moreover, in this refugee camp StarLink-­tainted food aid would become the sole sources of food for the refugees. In this sense, the composition of the refugee population combined with the design of the endeavour would challenge StarLink maize’s safety as a source of human food. As we can now appreciate, the decision to accept StarLink-­tainted maize as a ‘solution’ to the problem of insufficient food aid donations from donors was entangled with the risk of introducing new problems in the context of these food aid endeavours. With the amount of StarLink-­tainted bags of maize that donors

GM food aid   103 made available for these humanitarian endeavours, WFP assumed that it would now be possible to solve the inveterate problem of insufficient donations. But not only did WFP mistakenly equate available food with edible food – in a certain sense WFP also equated its recipient subjects with less valuable humans in the sense that their exposure to negative side-­effects did not prevent the delivery of StarLink maize from being regarded as a humanitarian solution. Although Aventis eventually decided to cancel its registration of StarLink maize at the urging of EPA, this should not lead us to conclude that this case of humanitarian experimentation was an isolated and trivial instance. The remaining StarLink maize had not been destroyed and, in 2005, StarLink maize again appeared in the context of humanitarian food aid – this time it was found in food aid that had been shipped from the US to Guatemala. Furthermore, following the StarLink incident, Aventis was acquired by Bayer which inherited the knowledge that Aventis had gained about genetically engineering crops to be herbicide-­tolerant. This knowledge then proved useful in the production of a new genetically modified organism: the herbicide-­tolerant LibertyLink rice (LL601). And, in 2006, a similar pattern could then be discerned: although LibertyLink had not been approved for human consumption by EPA the rice nevertheless appeared in new locations, more specifically, in humanitarian emergency zones in Ghana and Sierra Leone where it was being distributed as humanitarian food aid to populations confronting starvation. As such, humanitarian uses of a variety of unapproved GM-­products exposed a number of starving populations in different locations and at different points in time to considerable risks of encountering undesirable side-­effects from the consumption of food aid delivered to them in the name of a humanitarian intention of ensuring their survival and wellbeing. In each case, the humanitarian distribution of GM foods did not simply protect these populations from starvation. Crucially, these endeavours also entailed a risk that these subjects would encounter new forms of insecurity – e.g. in the form of sudden, severe and potentially fatal allergic reactions.

Successful experimentation and the emergence of new risks Whilst the kinds of harmful effects that technology failures can give rise to are certainly important, they are, however, not exhaustive: beside vilization and the threat that harmful effects could transpire from this distribution of unapproved GM-­maize that could potentially fail to serve as a safe source of human food, we also need to appreciate an additional type of effect from these humanitarian technology uses. And these effects do not stem from failures but from constitutive processes that can have contributed to the successful representation of this disputed technology as normatively acceptable and/or scientifically reliable – effects that, as we shall see below, can also give rise to harmful effects.

104   GM food aid Constitution of GM as scientifically reliable and/or as normatively acceptable A number of conditions meant that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain scientifically reliable data about the effects of the consumption of GM-­ maize in these contexts. Data was not collected systematically among the implicated refugee populations, no post-­consumption monitoring was carried out, and under such conditions it would of course be difficult to determine whether instances of swelling, sickness or vomiting had been caused by the refugees’ consumption of StarLink maize or whether such symptoms were simply to be ascribed to the dire circumstances and poor conditions that faced these refugees irrespective of their consumption of this unapproved GM-­maize. Yet, as our STS-­inspired approach helps us appreciate, it is not only interesting to look at whether these endeavours produced presumably objective and accurate scientific data – rather when examining the issue of humanitarian technology uses through a framework that calls attention to the question of how social processes affect the constitution of a given technology, we come to recognise why the fact that there may not have been any explicit attempts to generate scientific data from the distribution of unapproved GM-­maize to these starving populations, should not lead us to conclude too swiftly that these instances had no ‘positive’ effects on the constitution of GM-­products and the science behind it. For, indeed, another constitutive function seems to be of great importance. For in this case of GM products, ‘scientific evidence’ was proclaimed by contestants on either side of the debate and further scientific evidence would not, in itself, be capable of ‘closing’ the GM debate. And such contestation – including the inability of scientific evidence to firmly counter challenges to claims about the ‘safety’ of this new science – helps us appreciate one of the reasons why the issue of the normative acceptability of bioengineering and its products became increasingly important, and also one of the reasons why it becomes important to appreciate the constitutive capacity of humanitarian uses of GM-­maize. For this humani­ tarian distribution of the contested, indeed unapproved, StarLink-­maize had a potential to deliver success stories that, in turn, could contribute to the constitution of this new technology as normatively acceptable, with reference to its (now ‘proven’) ability to save the lives of disaster-­affected populations. Indeed, a number of humanitarian success stories circulated with a potential to feed into the constitution of GM crops (and the science behind it), within at least three different – but closely related – arenas. Humanitarian GM-­acceptance and constitutive effects within the public arena ‘Consumer acceptance is critical’ – headlines such as this clearly convey the importance not simply of more scientific evidence, but of processes that can feed into efforts aimed at winning ‘consumer acceptance’ of new GM products (Cole­Turner 2003). Considering this focus on consumer acceptance, it seems crucial

GM food aid   105 to consider how humanitarian uses of new GM-­products may feed into the constitution of genetic modification and its products as something which consumers can more easily be convinced to accept. Humanitarian uses of GM-­crops were indeed a story that made its way into Western media in a manner that was not only critical but also capable of buttressing its moral acceptability. For example, an article in The New Yorker would refer to ‘humanitarian ambitions for GMOs’ and to ‘circumstance in which he felt GMO crops were acceptable’ (Little 2014, italics added). Indeed, such humanitarian success stories would emerge about a range of GM-­crops, including also GM-­rice and GM-­banana. In the Independent we were, for example, presented with an account of how ‘biotechnology also has been used for humanitarian purposes, such as the much-­touted golden rice’ (Wilkinson 2013, italics added). Similar stories about the humanitarian potential of GM crops – and the attending moral acceptability of GM products – have also been referred to in popular media more broadly. In a blog post entitled Humanitarian applications, the real reason for genetically modified crops we find an account of the importance of recognising the ‘humanitarian reasons that lie behind some of the big biotech initiatives’ (Bernardo 2013). Now humanitarian actors cannot, of course, control how their use of a given technology or food crop is portrayed in the media. Yet, at the same time, nothing prevents them from voicing any disagreement they may have with various representations of GM products as ‘humanitarian’. Indeed, it is helpful to consider how humanitarian acceptance of GM-­maize as suitable food aid seems to have fed into public acceptance of this otherwise controversial crop. Humanitarian GM-­acceptance and constitutive effects within the industry Besides the capacity of humanitarian uses to feed into the constitution of GM as morally acceptable at the level of public debate, humanitarian uses were certainly also used deliberately by producers. As others have already noted, ‘these humanitarian efforts are key to rehabilitating Monsanto’s tattered public image’ (Shen 2013). Indeed the producers of GM crops explicitly refer to humanitarian usages and needs in the marketing of their new products: ‘Biotech’s next harvest aims to benefit consumers, meet humanitarian needs’ (Roseboro 2000). And besides the ability of producers to draw upon the humanitarian acceptance to gain public support, humanitarian acceptance of GM crops as food aid also has constitutive effects stemming from how it is being evoked in public debates as well as in scientific accounts. Humanitarian GM-­acceptance and constitutive effects in scientific accounts Not only producers but also scientists refer to humanitarian concerns as capable of contributing to the legitimacy of an otherwise disputed science: ‘The biologic imperatives for achieving nutrient and food security, as well as humanitarian

106   GM food aid concern, are the driving forces behind efforts to achieve equitable food distribution among today’s global population’ (International Union of Nutritional Sciences 2012). And, more broadly, we find references to the potential for humanitarian uses of GM-­crops to be cast as a normative success story, capable of cultivating greater consumer acceptance, in statements such as this: ‘Crops that aid humanitarian causes may soften opposition to genetic modification’ (Lynas 2013). In a scientific article, published in The Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, GM rice has even been described as a ‘humanitarian Golden Rice project’ and we are informed that ‘the motivation for this ‘scientific tour de force’ was from the onset a humanitarian one: to contribute to a reduction in vitamin A malnutrition in developing countries’ (Potrykus 2005). In scientific accounts of a more popular nature we can also find similar references to how ‘the development of the rice is taken as a humanitarian effort’ (Hensel 2014). In these ways, various actors display considerable faith in the ability of humanitarian uses of GM-­crops to boost the normative acceptability of GM-­products and the science behind it, and, in this sense, humanitarian distribution of new GM-­maize is thus expected to feed into the very constitution of GM-­products in a specific capacity, namely as normatively acceptable to a sceptical audience of Western consumers. An aspect of this which is often disregarded is the way in which humanitarian contributions to the constitution of GM as morally acceptable – at least in the context of food aid – implied that it may have become far more difficult for humanitarian subjects and governments to legitimately oppose GM food when offered to them as aid: ‘Once the GM food is accepted as humanitarian aid, it would be politically difficult for the African governments to oppose’ (Sharma 2003). Now, in order to appreciate another aspect of how such ‘success stories’ about the seeming ability of GM crops to help save lives, ‘meet humanitarian needs’ and ‘aid humanitarian causes’ may entail a set of risks, we need to understand the counterpart of these constitutive processes: the emergence of the molecular level of human existence not only as knowable but as relevant to the authoritative determination of political identity (to the distinction between safe and unsafe forms of existence). Constitution of the molecular body as authoritatively knowable and politically relevant Yet another common assumption inhibits our appreciation of the various risks that humanitarian uses of new technology may potentially give rise to or contribute to. It is commonly assumed that the body encountering the new technology exists in a fixed capacity prior to this encounter. This assumption fails to consider the constitutive dimension that STS insights have alerted us to: social order and social identities co-­emerge with the constitution of new technologies as authoritative and politically relevant source of knowledge about new dimensions of the body encountering the technology. We thus need to explore these humanitarian uses of unapproved GM-­maize in light of how such practices may

GM food aid   107 potentially feed into the constitution of new aspects of life not just as knowable but as relevant to the political determination of safe versus unsafe forms of life. The molecular vision of life and the co-­constitution of new forms of political subjectivity Genetic engineering and molecular biology have implications not only for our assumptions about what exists, but also about what exists as politically relevant and about what exists as authoritative knowledge in which to anchor authoritative judgements about safe versus unsafe forms of life. I refer to these two dimensions as onto-­politics (politically relevant aspects of human existence) and epistemic-­politics (politically relevant knowledge). These concepts correspond to two constitutive aspects of technologies – aspects that humanitarian uses of new GM-­products should be careful not to disregard the significance of. For when we begin to consider how the constitution of genetic engineering (and its products) as scientifically reliable and/or normatively acceptable may have implications for what aspects of life it becomes legitimate to regard as relevant to the determination of the political status of that life, we can then begin to appreciate an additional set of risks stemming from practices of ‘successful’ experimentation. A few scholars have already alluded to this issue of how ‘the molecular vision’ (Kay 1996, also referenced in Dillon 2007) entails a distinct conception of life with implications for practices of security (Dillon 2007; see also Dillon and Reid 2001). Michael Dillon has argued that with the growing impact of molecular sciences, the vision that they embody occasions a change in the very ‘bios of biopolitics’ (Dillon 2007); that is, in the understanding of what aspects of life sovereign power can legitimately seek to secure. Specifically, Dillon argues that in a ‘molecularized biopolitics of security’ the problem of life and how to secure it is now experienced differently (2007: 13). In short, the molecular vision affects the very exercise of sovereign power in the name of security. Indeed, Dillon points out that the dimensions of life which sovereign power seeks to secure are not just changing, but expanding – an argument that builds upon Foucault’s account of how, with advances in medical technology, it became possible not simply to ‘gaze’ into the innermost of the body but also to consider these newly accessible aspects of human existence as relevant to the determination of the political status of the individual body.4 Using these insights to frame the last part of our analysis of humanitarian uses of unapproved products of GM-­ technology enables us to appreciate how ‘successful’ uses of GM-­products may give rise to new risks given their potential contribution to the constitution of the molecular level of life as open to manipulation – as a precondition for sovereign security. To appreciate this effect, we need to let go of the idea that the human body exists as a fixed entity prior to its encounter with new technology; what Foucault and STS together helps us see, is that such encounters contribute to the constitution of specific aspects of human existence as relevant to the determination of

108   GM food aid political identity. Such a perspective then invites us to examine how humanitarian uses of new GM technology may feed into the constitution of specific aspects of human existence, its genetic make-­up, as relevant to the determination of safe/unsafe life forms. Making life safe by controlling its emergence As Mitchell Dean notes, ‘a new biotechnological discovery or application . . . allows us to manipulate the processes of life itself for any number of ends’ (Dean 2004: 16). In a somewhat similar vein, Dillon has argued, ‘[t]he state of emergency which governs western security politics is the emergency of emergent life itself ’ (2007: 7). Considering such a political aspiration to control ‘emergent life’, the development of humanitarian success stories about new GM products may not just foster greater consumer acceptance – such practices may also contribute to an implicit legitimation of an expansion of sovereign power into new aspects of human existence. Concerning the constitution of ‘the genetic code’ as relevant to the determination of political subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari have called attention to how the role of the state expands, given this aspiration to regulate previously inaccessible structures. Perhaps more importantly, they also call attention to the risks involved when states assume responsibility for controlling genetic emergence (1987: 10; Parisi 2004).5 Now the emergence of a new technology can not only affect the reach of power (seizing more aspects of life) but also the modality according to which a ‘racist’ border (divisions between the aspects of life within sovereign power’s dominion) is introduced – a modality which is now based upon a calculus that includes these newly accessible aspects of human life. With the constitution of the molecular vision as normatively acceptable – and with humanitarian practices feeding into this – we see the co-­constitution of a racist modality, which is no longer based upon observable features such as ‘skin colour’ but upon the newly knowable genetic structure. In this new molecular modality of power, the presence of a ‘crime’ gene or a ‘homo’ gene (see, for example, Glenn Walters 1992) has not only been made ‘knowable’ but also the potential basis for an authoritative determination of undesirable/undesirable identities. Indeed, ‘uses of genetic information by governments’ (Dean 2004: 16) have prompted concerns that the knowledge made available with advances in genetic engineering would contribute to the constitution of a ‘genetic under-­class’ (Kelly 2002; Meyer 2004: 32) of ‘un-­enhanced life’ versus the genetically desirable forms of life as captured in the phenomenon of designer babies. Nikolas Rose has called attention to how the use of genetic as a new ‘control strategy’ is inseparable from ‘the emergence of new conceptions of the individual “genetically at risk” of offending’ and of new forms of genetic discrimination (2000: 5). Whilst these concerns are definitely important, we also need to recognise another type of risk, namely the kinds of risks that may emerge if successful humanitarian experimentation contributes to the solidification of the authority of molecular genetics and biotechnological explanations which, in turn, can buttress

GM food aid   109 the acceptability of these technologies as unyielding sources of knowledge about a given body’s true political identity. And one illustrative example of such risks can be appreciated if we look at the use of information about the molecular body as a seemingly unyielding source of knowledge upon which to determine the political identity of asylum seekers in the United Kingdom.6 These struggles demonstrated how this new science, molecular genetics, did not simply exist as an epistemologically superior source of knowledge but, rather, had to be constituted as such. An analysis of humanitarian experimentation must be attuned to the constitution of technological authority as politically relevant as well as to the implications of this for the co-­constituted body whose political identification this technology is called upon to establish. What we therefore need to look at when analysing this case of experimentation in the domain of genetic engineering is the question of how these endeavours might have contributed to the constitution of molecular science as a valid and unyielding source of knowledge about new aspects of a given body (here the human body’s genetic make-­up), knowledge that is constituted as relevant to the determination of that body’s political identity.

Concluding remarks Rather than assuming that risks only stem from experimentation failures, it is important first of all to look at the kinds of risks that emerge irrespective of the outcome of an experiment – the prior vilization of certain humans – and at the risks that emerge in the context of successful experiments. As has just been illustrated, to grasp these additional risks we need to conceptualise technology differently: rather than seeing technology as either inevitably capable of advancing humanitarian objectives or as capable of causing harm only as a result of technology failures, we can recognise a broader range of effects from humanitarian technology uses if we turn our attention to the co-­constitution of technological authority and bodily boundaries. Only then may we begin to appreciate how successfully contributing to the constitution of genetic engineering as normatively acceptable on account of its ability to ‘aid humanitarian causes’ may entail a range of risks stemming from the simultaneous constitution of the new aspects of existence as legitimate basis for the enforcement of new lines of discrimination. A fundamental paradox that the first storyline highlights is that despite good intentions – e.g. of feeding starving populations – humanitarian actors’ technology uses can be implicated in vilization processes when they deem technologies that elsewhere have been opposed, indeed banned, suitable for use in humanitarian settings. Indeed, accepting that humanitarian populations be exposed for example to unapproved StarLink maize, implies that such populations are thought of and constituted as vile in the sense of being degraded to a position that allows us to see them as suitable for subjection to controversial and unapproved technologies. The second storyline also highlights an important paradox:

110   GM food aid the manner in which humanitarian endeavours seek to protect humans from the dangers of famine and starvation may sometimes end up producing new risks and dangers that confront the humanitarian test subject as well as the citizen whose body is now opened up to new levels of penetration – whose agency is subordinated to the voices of science and technology concerning that human being’s ‘safety’. Rather than defending human life from the dangers of sovereign power, humanitarian experimentation instead risks feeding into the very extension of sovereign power. Finally, the third storyline deepens this analysis by calling attention to what can be summarised as the potential for ontological and epistemological consequences of ‘successful’ humanitarian experimentation. Also the successfully tested technology may be accompanied by risks: once a new technology is constituted as normatively acceptable it is more likely to be called upon successfully as a source of authority in which to anchor a determination of the political status of a given individual. The important question that Foucault reminds us to pose is whether this new surface and the attending mode of discrimination are at once more subtle and ‘harder to renounce’ (Foucault 2003). In the case of GM, the basis of discrimination has certainly become more subtle (genes versus skin colour) and one risk for humanitarian actors is that they, through normative success stories, may contribute to making this new divisibility harder to renounce. In this sense, practices of humanitarian experimentation are implicated in the making of a political ontology in which the body, given its new penetrability, confronts a new set of vulnerabilities from which humanitarianism offers no protection. For these reasons, we should not disregard the significance of humanitarian experimentation on the basis that they may not qualify as experiments in a strictly scientific sense. What is important is not the definition of the practices as an experiment but its effect on a specific set of concerns – in this case about the acceptability of this new technology. Feeding such acceptability may then affect the legitimacy of regarding new dimensions of human existence as relevant to the determination of political identity. As such, the case illustrates the point that we need to explore how various social practices contribute to the making of new sciences and new technology as not just scientifically reliable but also acceptable.

Notes 1 ConAgra Foods, Inc. had, for example, decided to halt its work at its mill in Kansas, US because the company feared that this mill might have received StarLink maize. 2 ‘In the minutes of its meeting with aid agencies it is made clear that US Aid Agencies are expected to immediately report any opposition to GM food imports by recipient nations to USAID, that they are to make investigations to enable USAID to classify objections as either “political” or “trade” related and that USAID will then take the necessary “diplomatic action” (sanctions?, WTO prosecutions?, aid cancellations?, IMF action?) to ensure that the shipments are accepted’ (SOS Food 2003). ‘The simple fact is that USAID has chosen to supply GM maize as food aid, even though there are numerous companies in the US from whom they could supply certified non-­GM grain’ (Greenpeace 2002).

GM food aid   111 3 In this sense, there was also a constitution of scientific validity which is an important point that I will return to later in the analysis. 4 In The Birth of the Clinic (1973) Foucault meticulously explores the points of convergence between the emergence of a new medical vision of the body and changes in the political consciousness with respect to how the border of political subject’s body was conceived. 5 As Anna Powell puts it, Deleuze can be read as cautioning against ‘a becoming enforced by genetic engineering’ as the tool of the sovereign imagination (2007: 74). 6 In September 2009, UK immigration authorities’ use of DNA tests to supply evidence of the identity of certain bodies – namely those of asylum seekers – generated debate throughout the UK. As the BBC reported on 30 September 2009, ‘Scientists say that plans to DNA test asylum seekers to prove their country of origin are “shocking” and scientifically flawed’ (BBC 2009). On the other hand, the British immigration authorities argued that this DNA test will help limit claims by people pretending to have fled war zones – on the assumption that the DNA test could provide reliable ‘evidence’ of the person’s nationality (Doward 2009).

6 Humanitarian vaccination, vilization and expansion of power

The administration of vaccines has long formed an important part of humani­ tarian efforts aimed at improving the wellbeing of populations experiencing high rates of deaths as a consequence of vaccine-­preventable diseases. On the one hand, humanitarian vaccination programmes designed to prevent the outbreak of vaccine-­preventable diseases are often represented as unambiguous symbols of how technological and scientific progress can help improve the wellbeing of sub­ jects, whose health and welfare a particular state has failed to attend to; in other words, as an expression of a humanitarian compassion that transcends state borders and challenges the idea that the sovereign state (with its discriminatory concern with the safety of some individuals over and above the safety of others) is the ideal guarantor of security. However, on the other hand, from a different perspective, humanitarian practices are also often critiqued for having no signi­ ficant impact on the dynamics of state power in international relations. Yet, as will be suggested in this chapter, both of these perspectives fail to engage with the crucial question of how humanitarian practices – e.g. within the domain of preventative vaccination – affect the mode of sovereign state power. And one way to address this important issue is by zooming in on the question of how humanitarian uses of new vaccination technology can potentially affect the means, mode and scope of state power – and in a manner that cannot be assumed to inevitably advance the wellbeing of humanitarian subjects. Humanitarian provisions of ‘charity medicine’1 vary in kind. Besides medical assistance to civilians in the context of emergency (natural or man-­made), medical humanitarianism may also take the form of preventative programmes designed to ‘ensure basic preventative and curative care’ for populations at risk of exposure to vaccine-­preventable disease, but with little or no access to vac­ cination. Focusing on a specific type of preventative medical practice – namely humanitarian vaccination programmes – this chapter adds a third type of context to the forms of humanitarian practices addressed in this book: in addition to emergency relief (food aid) and post-­conflict repatriation, preventative medical interventions represent another type of humanitarian intervention context. Whilst there are limitations to the comparability of case studies that span such a great variety of contexts, this variety arguably also comes with an important strength, namely the ability to indicate that humanitarian uses of new technology may

Humanitarian vaccination   113 have harmful side-­effects regardless of whether the humanitarian practice is of a preventative nature, or undertaken in response to the outbreak of an emergency or a reduction in the level of violent conflict. In addition to this contextual breadth, the term ‘humanitarian’ also encom­ passes a broad range of actors (see Chapter 1): from agencies, such as USAID, with close ties to the policy priorities of a specific state, through agencies such as the UN (and its many sub-­units) with structures designed specifically to tackle the difficulty of balancing donor demands and humanitarian principles and prior­ ities (Betts et al. 2012), to humanitarian agencies with a mandate and a structure that places them even further distanced from policy priorities of individual donor governments (MSF, ICRC). The aim here is not to provide a decisive definition of what qualifies as a ‘true’ humanitarian organisation. On the contrary, as explained in Chapter 1, this diversity is approached as an important part of the complexity that surrounds contemporary humanitarian practices, including humanitarian uses of new technology. As we shall see in the third part of this chapter, claiming to act in the name of a humanitarian cause is pivotal to the ways in which uses of new technology that involve populations in the global periphery is sought legitimized. And instead of excluding these morphological struggles through a tight definition of the term, the aim here is to contemplate what the elasticity of the humanitarian terminology implies for the issue of ‘humanitarian’ uses of new technology.

Rotavirus: humanitarian uses of new vaccine candidates The World Health Organization’s (WHO) administration of rotavirus vaccine candidates in humanitarian settings between 1998 and 2008 is one example of a preventative humanitarian practice, aimed at improving the life chances of peripheral populations. Rotavirus is a common childhood disease that affects almost every child in developing as well as developed countries. The severity of the disease varies but if the child has access to sufficient food and water and receives hospital treatment then the virus only very rarely causes death. And it is often the case that children will naturally develop immunity to rotavirus follow­ ing an initial infection. Yet, significant resources have been devoted to the devel­ opment of a vaccine against rotavirus. The development of a vaccine candidate named RotaShield in the early 1980s was one of the first efforts; it went through numerous tests (Glass et al. 2005) and in 1998 it was licensed for use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Less than two months after the FDA approval, the vaccine was recommended, by the Advisory Committee on Immu­ nization Practice (ACIP) and by the Amer­ican Academy of Paediatrics, for routine immunization of Amer­ican children. During the following nine months more than 600,000 Amer­ican children between two and six months of age received more than 1.2 million doses of the newly approved rotavirus vaccine. However, in July 1999, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System of the National Immunization Program, at the Center for Disease Control (CDC), iden­ tified 15 cases of intussusception (CDC, 28 October 2010). Intussusception is a

114   Humanitarian vaccination rare type of bowel obstruction that occurs when the bowel folds in on itself, which causes a painful obstruction and is regarded as a serious intestinal dis­ order (CDC 2010). Following the identification of this adverse effect, citizen resistance to the vaccination programme grew significantly and, shortly after, FDA withdrew its recommendation and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ‘quickly recommended that use of the vaccine be suspended and immediately started two emergency investigations to find out if receiving RotaShield® vaccine was causing some of the cases of intussusception’ (CDC 2010). Yet, the unearthing of this undesirable side effect did not mark a complete end to the aim of developing a safe rotavirus vaccine. Other candidates were already in the pipeline, notably Merck’s RotaTeq and GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) Rotarix. However, the possibility that these new vaccines could also cause ‘intussusception events’ gave rise to fears and worries which made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out human experiments with the new vaccine candid­ ates. Animal experiments were therefore carried out instead but a crucial problem remained for, as Offit and Clark note, ‘the limited availability of gnoto­ biotic large animals has hampered animal model studies’ (1985). So despite animal tests there was still a demand for experiments that could deliver reliable knowledge about the risk of intussusception and other undesirable effects stem­ ming from the administration of these vaccines in humans. And in the context of this desire for safe rotavirus vaccines combined with widespread fears of harmful side effects, we shall see below how a variety of rotavirus vaccine trials moved to peripheral ‘humanitarian’ contexts. Whilst it has already been acknowledged elsewhere2 that humanitarian vac­ cination programmes have at times given rise to a number of ethical concerns, we shall now use Gregoire Chamayou’s notion of vilization to explore the important question of what processes and practices allow for the emergence of conditions under which it becomes possible for such experimental practices to unfold in humanitarian contexts. And following this exploration, we shall then examine the question of what possible side effects such practices may entail and, finally, we shall use the concept of co-­constitution to explore how humanitarian uses of an unapproved vaccination candidate can have ‘productive’ effects on the scope and mode of sovereign power – that is, on the ability of states to claim legitimacy when intervening into and drawing new lines on the basis of previ­ ously inaccessible dimensions of human existence; in this case, the manipulation of processes under the skin on the basis of statistical knowledge of their fre­ quency combined with new medical developments.

Humanitarian vilization: the making of subjects fit for vaccination experimentation At the heart of humanitarian discourse is a proclaimed commitment to deliver pro­ tection to those individuals or populations to whom the landscape of sovereign states fails to offer protection. Yet, as critics have already argued, humanitarian

Humanitarian vaccination   115 discourse is not always capable of offering an alternative to the state-­centric understanding of protection which it claims to oppose. Instead, humanitarian dis­ course often engages a definition of ‘deserving humans’ that resonates with, rather than challenges, the definition of deserving humans as provided by sover­ eign power (Dillon and Reid 2001; Jabri 2006). Only once the possibility of such a resemblance or ‘secret solidarity’ (Agamben 1998: 113) is acknowledged can we begin to recognise how, despite humanitarian ambitions, this shared assump­ tion between humanitarianism and state power, at the level of discourse, implies that alternative forms of life are left exposed and insecure (Dillon and Reid 2001; Agier 2010). In a certain sense, Grégoire Chamayou’s recent work can be interpreted as an elaboration of these critical remarks. Through the notion of vilization, Chamayou calls attention to an important function, which these abovementioned critics have thus far overlooked, namely the production of ‘vile’ bodies, i.e. foul bodies to be regarded as suitable subjects of experimentation (Lambert 2013). For Chamayou, vilization does not only take place at the level of discourse, vilization technologies are also physical (if such a dichotomy even makes sense):3 starving someone to constraint him to accept an offer, for instance, can be considered as a vili­ zation technique just as much as the various discourses in order to convince this person of his inferiority. (Lambert 2013) In the context of humanitarian practices which entail that certain bodies – i.e. humanitarian subjects – are exposed to technology uses that other bodies – citizens – would not be exposed to, such technology uses entail a process of vilization in the sense that they contribute to the instantiation and constitution of the inferiority of those persons whose exposure to risks of failure and neg­ ative side effects is considered more acceptable. In other words, insofar as humanitarian use of technology opens up the possibility of considering human­ itarian subjects as bodies whose wellbeing can be cared for through the delivery of vaccines that are not regarded as suitable for populations in the ‘global core’, this is an illustrative example of how such humanitarian prac­ tices feed into a production of differently valued bodies, vile bodies to be con­ sidered suitable as subjects of experimentation.4 Chamayou’s work also offers another important insight: once rendered ‘vile’ these bodies can then serve an important – albeit often-­overlooked – function vis-­ à-vis state power’s relentless efforts to overcome challenges to the legitimacy of its means, mode and scope. For, as Chamayou notes, ‘what is peculiar to humans, we might say, resides in their ability to contest their exclusions from humanity’ (2012: 8); in other words, the authoritative divides that states enforce within humanity in the name of security are never left entirely unchallenged but will always spur resistance. States may then seek to overcome such challenges to their legitimate enforcement of these divisions (including the parameters of legitimate

116   Humanitarian vaccination use of force) by reinventing the means, mode and scope of power. Considering this, we need not only recognise the potential for humanitarian discourse and prac­ tice to bring about ‘vile’ subjects, or entire populations, that can be acceptably sub­ jected to practices of experimentation – we also need to consider how such practices may in turn, and possibly in conflict with humanitarian ambitions of pro­ viding indiscriminate protection, assist the development of new (more subtle and more meticulous) technologies of power. Thus, besides recognising the possibility of a resemblance at the level of dis­ course between humanitarianism and sovereign states in terms of what forms of life to consider worthy of protection, Chamayou invites us to also investigate how those subjects that do receive humanitarian protection may nevertheless also be at risk if the way in which humanitarian subjects are represented in dis­ course and approached in practice entails a hierarchically differentiated valu­ ation of human life, in which they come to be considered less valuable. For, when this happens, when humanitarian protection involves a simultaneous process of vilization, then a condition transpires in which the subjects of humani­ tarian protection will paradoxically become prone to being considered suitable subjects for experimentation. In what follows, I take these critical analyses as the starting point for an exploration of how the use of vaccine candidates in humanitarian settings has entailed a risk of exposure to various failures.

Risks of failure: medical experimentation in the global periphery With specific attention to the medical domain, others have explored this issue of how experimentation and risks of failure are being outsourced to the global peri­ phery transforming populations in these locations into test subjects. In The Body Hunters, Sonia Shah demonstrates how contemporary drug trials are ‘going global’ in a manner that takes ‘the world’s poorest patients’ as suitable subjects of experimentation (2006). Whilst focusing mostly on the role of pharmaceuti­ cals, Shah also notes that ‘if the history of human experimentation tells us any­ thing . . . it is that the potential for abuse falls heaviest on the poorest and most powerless among us’ (2006) and, in this book, we shall begin to explore what role humanitarian actors play in relation to this trend. Approaching the issue of clinical trials from a medical anthropology perspective, Adriana Petryna also shows how medical experiments are being ‘off-­shored’ to the global periphery (2009: 6). Petryna’s analysis of how peripheral populations are being enrolled in scientific trialling as ‘experiments travel’, charts the complex social and political implications of these practices of peripheral experimentation. Now, building upon these critical analyses of the contemporary landscape of body hunting and off-­shored medical experimentation, our approach to the issue of humanitarian uses of vaccine candidates suggests that we need to pose an additional question: what constitutive processes unfold in the context of these peripheral practices of medical experimentation? And what is the political significance of such constitutive

Humanitarian vaccination   117 processes? Accordingly, in what follows, the aim is not so much to meticulously detail the chronology of the vaccination experiments that are analysed. Rather, the aim is to build upon and further these existing analyses in which such chro­ nologies have already been established, and to do this by calling attention to the productive effects of these practices as they unfold in various humanitarian settings. The use of the new vaccine candidate in these peripheral locations sought to address a series of unresolved questions. Some of the most pertinent questions were: to what subjects could the new vaccine safely be administered? At what level of concentration would it be safe to administer a given vaccine? Although the two vaccine candidates had been tested before, these questions remained unanswered and, as such, they called for further investigation. Yet, given the failure of the RotaShield vaccine, such experiments were deemed very risky and it therefore proved difficult to address these questions in further experiments. This did not, nevertheless, mean that experiments were terminated altogether. Instead experiments capable of addressing these uncertainties would now unfold in the context of preventative humanitarian vaccination programmes. However, testing the safety of a vaccine candidate involved exposing the subject into whose body the vaccine had been injected to the risk of encountering adverse medical side effects. To trace how this happened, I explore how three ‘risky’ questions were explored in the context of different humanitarian vaccine endeavours. Tolerance in immune-­deficient subjects At a WHO consultation in Mexico City, it was noted that factors such as ‘mal­ nutrition, other enteric infections, parasitic infection or immune suppression’ should be expected to ‘affect vaccine efficacy or safety’ (Wood 2005). For as had already been stressed in a scientific report, ‘live oral vaccines, such as rota­ virus vaccines, require the organism to replicate in the gut and induce a good immune response, a process which is quite dependent upon the infant host’ (WHO 2005). Consequently, in an immune-­deficient subject a live rotavirus vaccine could not be expected to have the desired effect since a ‘good immune response’ is highly unlikely. In other words, the WHO was aware that the admin­ istration of rotavirus vaccination to immune-­deficient children might expose those children to unsafe side effects. What was also noted at this WHO consulta­ tion was a demand for further experimentation designed to address the issue of whether rotavirus vaccination could safely be administered to vulnerable chil­ dren. Feeding into the WHO’s call for more testing of the vaccine was the fact that such tests could serve as evidence of the vaccine’s general safety: ‘These vaccines must be shown to be safe in general, and in HIV-­infected [immune-­ deficient] children in particular’ (WHO 2006). However, in the section entitled ‘Warnings and Precautions’ in the prescribing information for Rotarix (approved in the US in 2008) we are informed that: ‘Since Rotarix is a live virus safety and effectiveness in infants with known primary or secondary immune-­deficiencies

118   Humanitarian vaccination have not been evaluated’ (GSK 2011). As such, what remained unknown was the question of whether the vaccine would be safe if administered to immune-­ deficient children. Indeed, the RotaShield guidelines specified that the vaccine should not be administered to infants/children with immune-­deficiencies, as it had never been tested in this particularly susceptible population. Yet, with a change in the experimentation location, a new experimentation population was effectively ‘produced’: as part of a humanitarian vaccination pro­ gramme rotavirus vaccines were being administered to HIV-­positive – and thus immune-­deficient – infants in South Africa and Malawi. In the Interim Analysis of Rotavirus Vaccine Efficacy Trial in South Africa it was noted that there was a ‘high prevalence of pediatric HIV 30% of newborns HIV-­exposed and 5–6% of birth cohort HIV infected’ (CEAG 2008). In other words, whilst it was known that the vaccine would be more likely to produce undesirable side-­effect when administered to immune-­deficient infants, the vaccine was nevertheless adminis­ tered to this new experimentation population known to encompass a high number of HIV-­positive infants. Given this knowledge, it was to be expected that admin­ istering the rotavirus vaccine to this specific group of newborns would be likely to expose these infants to new risks in the form of adverse medical side effects. Yet, the humanitarian vaccination endeavour nevertheless went ahead. In one such rotavirus programme ‘1952 vaccinees (RIX4414 pooled) and 976 placebo recipients’ were enrolled, all of whom came from ‘communities that have high prevalence of HIV infection’ (Madhi 2008). Not only were experiments of this kind conducted on immune-­deficient infants whose vulnerable immune system was caused by illness (notably HIV), the rotavirus vaccine was also delivered to infants whose immune-­deficiency was caused by malnutrition. Again, these chil­ dren’s immune systems would most likely be poor, and consequently it was to be expected that this group of children would most likely experience unsafe side effects. Nevertheless, the RIX4414 vaccine was delivered to malnourished chil­ dren in ‘an efficacy study conducted in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela’ (Perez-­ Schael et al. 2007). Based on the results of these experiments, the risk was substantiated as it was found that ‘an impaired nutritional condition affects the immune system [and] as a consequence, the interaction between nutrition and the immune system could interfere with the efficacy of rotavirus immunization’ (ibid.: 537). Although the findings substantiated the anticipated risk, this did not prevent the authors of the study from calling for further experimentation by con­ cluding that, to ‘determine whether malnutrition affects the efficacy of RIX4414 vaccine, a secondary analysis of data from the efficacy study was conducted in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela’ (ibid.: 537). (Un)safe dosage Vulnerable children were not just made further vulnerable when subjected to experiments aimed at making vaccines safe. They were also made potentially unsafe when being used as test subjects in trials designed to address another uncertainty, namely the question of vaccine dosage. Already in 1989, rotavirus

Humanitarian vaccination   119 vaccination experiments were conducted with the aim of determining the ‘safe and sufficient dosage’ in which to administer this vaccine. One example of an experiment that unfolded in a humanitarian setting was the ‘phase 1 studies of an oral quadrivalent rotavirus vaccine’ administered to 130 Venezuelan infants (Perez-­Schael, et al. 1990: 553). In this experiment, three different doses of rota­ virus vaccine were tested to determine their respective safety (ibid.: 553) and it was found that ‘transient febrile episodes began on day 2 or 3 after vaccination and lasted 1 to 2 days in 15 to 30% of the infants’ (ibid.: 553). Yet, as we know, after the withdrawal of RotaShield there was a strong interest in knowing whether other candidates might be safe and to address that question further experimentation unfolded in humanitarian locations. In 1998, a journal article in The New England Journal of Medicine reported on the results of a rotavirus vaccine trial in which Venezuelan infants had been used as test subjects. Supported by grants from the WHO, the Venezuelan rotavirus trial was initiated in March 1992 and continued through to October 1995 (Perez-­Schael et al. 2003). In these experiments, designed to address the issue of dosage and con­ centration safety, three oral doses of rotavirus vaccine at 4*105 were adminis­ tered to 2207 Venezuelan infants. The knowledge gained was that ‘fever (38.1°C) occurred significantly more often in vaccinated infants than in placebo recipients on day 3 after the first dose of vaccine or placebo (5 per cent vs. 1 per cent) and overall during the six days after the first dose (15 per cent vs. 7 per cent)’ (Perez-­Schael et al. 1997: 1181). It was suspected that this undesirable outcome was linked to the high dosage given to infants in this trial compared to the dosage given to infants in studies conducted in Peru and Brazil. But even a lower dosage would not necessarily offer safety to the child in the form of protection against rotavirus. Although no significant cases of fever were observed in the vaccinated infants, another problem had surfaced in trials where lower doses had been administered. It was noted that some doses may have been too low to effectively protect vaccinated infants against rotavirus: ‘the lesser efficacy observed in the Peruvian and Brazilian studies may have been due to the lower dose of vaccine used in those trials’ (ibid.: 1185). In a WHO-­supported dosage trial in Brazil, Rotarix was administered to healthy Brazilian infant to determine the safety of administering the vaccine in a two-­dosage schedule. Rotavirus vaccine trials were ‘conducted in Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela [where] healthy infants were given two doses of vaccine or placebo at age 2 and 4 months’ (Linhares et al. 2006: 3784). And by testing these different vaccine concentrations it was found that: ‘higher vaccine efficacy for severe disease and hospitalisation was associated with viral titres above 105.2 ffu. [And] the effi­ cacy rate against hospitalization after two doses of RIX4414 was as high as 93%’ (ibid.: 3785). As it became evident from these experiments that Rotarix should ‘be given in a two-­dose schedule’ to produce the desired immunity in the subject, we cannot neglect the possibility that this knowledge-­production can subsequently have fed into the production of revised guidelines for how to safely administer the vaccine. And insofar as that occurred, these experimental vaccine endeavours,

120   Humanitarian vaccination carried out in humanitarian settings where they jeopardised the safety of vulner­ able children, may have contributed to the production of knowledge about how to protect ‘valuable’ children from undesirable side effects. Broadly speaking, these two aspects addressed the use of vaccine as an iso­ lated phenomenon in the sense that the experiments sought to determine the safety – or not – of administering the vaccine to a single individual. However, the effectiveness of rotavirus vaccination is not simply a matter of safety or not at the level of the individual body. To achieve the desired effect of herd immu­ nity, it was necessary that at least 90 per cent of the population received the vaccine. This additional aspect occasioned another set of questions about the administration of the vaccine on a population-­wide scale. For, when adding the issue of scale – when moving from the individual to the social body – a dif­ ferent set of failures and risks were of concern. And to address these risks, a dif­ ferent kind of experiment was needed to deliver ‘evidence’ about this question of scale and safety. As indicative of this, Jacobsen writes that Pre-­licensure studies examine thousands of subjects and not hundreds of thousands. A sample size of 10,000 subjects may provide excellent estim­ ates of efficacy, but cannot provide an adequate denominator to rule out rare adverse events. It lacks the power. Just as with the rotavirus vaccines, only after hundreds of thousands of doses of vaccines are distributed, will such rare events appear often enough to permit detection. (Jacobsen, et al. 2001) In short, a different kind of experiment had to be conducted to detect the risks that might surface when a rotavirus vaccine is applied on a large scale. Large-­scale and long-­term: discovering rare side effects According to US FDA, ‘A post-­marketing study must be conducted [and] it will need to be of sufficient size to capture intussusception events’ (US FDA 2008). Hence, what was required to deliver the sought-­after evidence was ‘an observational cohort study of sufficient size to address concerns regarding intussusception’ (US FDA 2008). As O’Ryan notes, ‘longitudinal studies are better able to confirm exposure to rotavirus than the vaccine trials’ (O’Ryan 1998: 620) and as Bonah points out: ‘the evaluation of safety and especially of effectiveness require long periods of observation’ (Bonah 2006: 16). Whilst such large-­scale experiments were required to deliver sufficient ‘evidence’ about this risk, it was, however, impossible to conduct such trials in ‘developed’ zones – particularly in the wake of the above-­mentioned cases of intussusception. However, this hindrance seemed to change with a shift in experimentation location. In 2005, GSK’s Rotarix vaccine was administered on a large scale to children in Mexico. Regarding the issue of scale, it was noted that ‘in Mexico, an annual birth cohort of two million children is assumed’ (Valencia-­Mendoza et al. 2008). This large-­scale launch of Rotarix

Humanitarian vaccination   121 was not merely a humanitarian endeavour aimed at protection children in Mexico from rotavirus infection – it was also an experiment. Another large-­scale experiment was conducted in South Africa from 1910 to 1945 and, more recently, another one was conducted in Bangladesh where a rotavirus vaccination experiment was carried out between January 2001 and May 2006. The data produced during such experiments subsequently made their way back into ‘developed’ zones. In this case, the data came to play a crucial role as ‘evidence-­base’ in various authoritative (governmental and non-­governmental) bodies’ decisions about whether or not to approve and recommend population-­ wide administration of the new vaccine. As indicative of this, the FDA notes about its approval of Rotarix that its decision was ‘based on one of the largest clinical development plans undertaken by a vaccine manufacturer and included data from nearly 75,000 infants’ (GSK 2008). Furthermore, the data acquired during these experiments occasioned a demand for more testing. As was noted in relation to a WHO- and USAID-­sponsored rotavirus trail in Bangladesh, ‘the newly-­developed human rotavirus vaccine (RIX4414) shows promise and larger trials are needed to confirm its safety, immunogenicity, and efficacy’ (Zaman et al. 2009). Although humanitarian aid workers may very well have had the best of inten­ tions, wishing to improve the safety of infants suffering from rotavirus, these uses of ‘experimental’ vaccine candidates were inseparable from a considerable risk of failure in the event that a latent danger would emerge during these large-­ scale and long-­term trials designed to detect precisely such ‘latent’ risks. And in this sense, good intentions were arguably caught up in this logic of experimenta­ tion, with the effect that the safety of humanitarian subjects was rendered subor­ dinate to the aim of delivering knowledge about the safety of the new rotavirus vaccine. Beyond rotavirus: humanitarian locations and practices of experimentation Now, as with the case of biometric registration as well as with the case of GM food aid, this humanitarian use of an unapproved vaccine candidate cannot easily be disregarded as an isolated and insignificant instance. Numerous vaccine experiments unfold in the global periphery, including various humanitarian set­ tings. Other examples are meningitis trials in Vietnam (UNICEF 2012) and HIV trials in Kenya (IRIN 2011). Considering the issue of vaccine trials in the global periphery, it is necessary to ponder the distinction between humanitarian organisations and other actors seeking to capitalise upon the moral power of the humanitarian terminology to confer normative legitimacy to practices that, in non-­humanitarian settings, would be deemed unacceptable. Indeed, experimental uses of new vaccines may well unfold in humanitarian settings with the involvement of other actors than only humanitarian agencies. In January 1996, a particularly severe epidemic of meningitis broke out in Nigeria and several aid agencies rushed to the region to

122   Humanitarian vaccination provide medical assistance. But within the setting that materialised, not only humanitarian agencies but also pharmaceuticals – in this case Pfizer – avowed humanitarian incentives. Now, tragically, in the context of Pfizer’s administra­ tion of ‘an experimental meningitis drug’ – more specifically, the new antibiotic ‘trovafloxacin’ (Pannu et al. 2001), which was sold by Pfiser as Trovan – five of the 100 Nigerian children who had received trovafloxacin lost their lives (McNeil 2011). Pfizer has since maintained that ‘the children died from menin­ gitis, not the drug trial’ and the pharmaceutical continues to describe its trial as ‘a humanitarian effort aimed at saving lives during a 1996 epidemic that killed 12,000 Nigerians, many of them children’ (Forbes 2009, italics added). In a similar vein, others noted how Pfizer was responding to criticism (indeed to a lawsuit filed against Pfizer by the Nigerian government) by insisting that the experimental endeavour in Nigeria was a ‘humanitarian gesture’, indeed, ‘an act of compassion’ (Goos 2007). Indeed, drawing upon a humanitarian vocabulary and claiming to have been ‘acting on humanitarian grounds’ (Coleman 2001) were pivotal to Pfizer’s efforts at constructing its practice as a morally accept­ able response – albeit with a tragic outcome. In such instances, how are we to understand the role of humanitarianism? Médecins Sans Frontière (MSF ) explicitly contested Pfizer’s humanitarian claims, stating that ‘Pfizer promoted misleading and false accusations of MSF ’s involvement in unethical drug trials the company conducted in Nigeria in 1996’ (MSF 2011). However, this objection was only voiced after Pfizer had directly charged MSF with being involved in the drug trials. Arguably, humanitarian organisations often fail to object when the humanitarian morphology is abused. And, what is more, insofar as humanitarian practices entail a process of viliza­ tion that – often in a pleasantly understated manner – invites a view of humani­ tarian subjects as fit for treatment of a lesser standard than that offered to citizens in the global core, then humanitarian actors cannot easily be considered entirely external to such cases of fatal technology trials. Instead, these instances of humanitarian uses of new technology and of non-­humanitarian actors’ eagerness to capitalise upon the humanitarian terminology can be considered illustrative of the need for a thorough revision of humanitarianism’s morphology. For, indeed, this case seems a powerful illustration of the risks that may emerge when accept­ ing ‘good intentions’ and humanitarian ambitions as sufficient grounds for moral acceptability, whether on the part of humanitarian organisations or other actors. It arguably seems more in keeping with the humanitarian commitment to offer­ ing protection – not just from excess or deficient state power, but also from potentially undesirable implications of technology uses – to pay careful attention to the possibility of adverse effects, also when technologies are used with the best of intentions. Yet, this would require greater attention to the possibility that humanitarian uses of new technology may contribute to the emergence of an additional set of risks. On that note, let us now consider how insights from Foucault and STS can help us recognise how processes at the level of materiality may feed into the constitution of technologies and social imaginaries accom­ panied by distinct risks.

Humanitarian vaccination   123

Foucault and STS: endorsing new technology and new vision of power’s scope and mode At the beginning of the nineteenth century an important transformation in the techniques through which sovereign power was exercised took shape as we saw the emergence of new techniques of power, namely bio-­political technologies.5 And vaccination technology formed part of this transformation. In his analysis of the emergence of these new bio-­political technologies, Foucault calls attention to the relationship between these new technologies and the appearance of a kind of political subjectivity that was new in two senses: with respect to the scope of aspects of human existence that were now regarded as politically relevant and with respect to the mode of demarcation that power would enforce following the logic of security through exclusion. Regarding the expansion in scope, it must be said that, for Foucault, ‘the subject is an effect of knowledge, not a source of knowledge’ in the sense that rather than uncovering an essence, technologies of power serve to produce an alleged ‘truth’ about the subject – and its political identity (Bastalich 2009). And with the emergence of new technologies (such as vaccination) additional aspects of human existence were to be considered rel­ evant to this production of ‘truth’, this demarcation of political identity. In other words, not only were these new technologies referred to as anchors of author­ itative knowledge about new aspects of existence, these additional aspects were also constituted as relevant to the sovereign task of securing by identifying – and eliminating – unsafe elements within. For, as Foucault reminds us, sovereign power assumes a link between the objective of security and the implementation of ‘racist divides’ defined as the introduction of ‘a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control’ (2003: 254). In the name of providing security, sovereign states see it as legitimate, indeed necessary, to enforce authoritative divisions between forms of life that deserve protection and forms of life that do not. In relation to vaccination, Durbach draws upon this insight to suggest that whether the subject being vaccinated experienced undesirable side effects and would survive a vaccination both immune from a given disease and relatively unscathed is only part of the issue (Durbach 2005: 4). What must be added is the function of vaccination as a positive technology of power insofar as it helped bring ‘state control home to the body’ – thus facilitating an extension of the scope of state power into processes beneath the skin of the body that were previ­ ously considered inaccessible (Lee and Fulford 2000). Indeed, vaccination is an example of a technology that helped render new aspects of human existence accessible and ‘amenable to modification’ to and through acts of power (Coole 2013: 465). To deepen our appreciation of constitutive processes at the level of techno­ logy, Foucault’s work can fruitfully be combined with insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS). A central concern of STS is to explore the social practices that feed into the constitution of new sciences and new technology. And this focus on the constitution of new knowledge and new technologies (as

124   Humanitarian vaccination authoritative and politically relevant), on the one hand, and on the constitution of political identity (and discriminatory demarcations), on the other hand, can be read as compatible with Foucault’s work on biopower (Latour 2004; van der Ploeg 2004). Through the notion of co-­constitution, STS scholars have explored not only how scientific knowledge is constituted as authoritative but also how this produc­ tion of new sources of seemingly authoritative knowledge feeds into a concomitant constitution of a specific social order with a particular constellation of social iden­ tities (Jasanoff 2004). The concept of co-­constitution calls attention to two critical aspects: ‘the dynamic and multiple forms of constitution that are evident in spe­ cific socio-­material assemblages’ and ‘the politics of difference within those assemblages’ (Suchman 2007). And, with specific attention to medical practices, Annemarie Mol has used STS insights to show how ‘medical practice did not just construct new discursive identities, but acted on the body, multiplying its forms of existence’ (Barry 2013: 423). In short, drawing upon STS insights, Mol has con­ vincingly explored ‘the ways in which medical practice creates new biomedical objects and materials’ (Barry 2013: 423). On this note, we shall now move from Mol’s analysis of constitutive effect in the hospital to an analysis of constitutive effects in the context of a specific case of humanitarian medical intervention. Contemporary humanitarian uses of new vaccine candidates do, of course, not contribute to the same kind of constitutive processes that unfolded in the early days of the emergence of vaccination technology. Yet, humanitarian uses of new vaccination technology must be understood in the context of this legacy, for although they do not directly feed into the constitution of vaccination as a new positive technology of power they may nevertheless serve a number of signi­ ficant functions. When feeding into the production of normative success stories about how a new vaccine is capable of preventing fatal diseases, then humani­ tarian uses of new vaccine candidates may contribute to an expansion in the use of vaccination as a technology of power. However, beyond the individual vaccine, humanitarian uses of new vaccine candidates may also feed into the social constitution of a specific logic in a form where this logic – primarily its normative aspect – comes to seem ‘harder to renounce’. Moving from the spe­ cific vaccine to the logic that it entails – the logic of immunization – we can begin to recognise how humanitarian uses of new vaccines may feed into pro­ cesses of solidification and expansion. Harder to renounce: the logic of rendering the individual subordination to the safety of ‘society’ Continuous experiments with, and the production of success stories about, the potency of new vaccines may of course benefit people suffering from certain ill­ nesses. However, these practices may nevertheless entail an often-­overlooked type of risk that differs from the likelihood of side effects identified above; they pose a different type of risk insofar as they contribute to legitimising a logic in which the safety and wellbeing of the individual is acceptably rendered subordi­ nate to the safety of ‘society’ (Foucault 2003).

Humanitarian vaccination   125 With the emergence of the new ensemble of power that vaccination techniques formed part of, an important shift occurred. Insofar as the state was concerned, it was no longer simply the diseased body that represented a treat: now the unvacci­ nated body was regarded as a threat to the safety of the general population and the (economic) wellbeing of the state. In other words, what this new imagination makes possible is the constitution of an individual that is ‘dangerous’ merely on account of this person’s non-­adherence to specific norms, which would not previ­ ously have been regarded as ‘unsafe’. In the context of this new distinction between safe and unsafe bodies, the states’ conception of ‘valuable, vaccinated bodies’ was fortified and the state could legitimately exercise its power to punish unvaccinated bodies. Consequently, a subject’s normative value was now defined in relation to the safety that would presumably result from their penetrability by means of vaccination, because of how this new technology – linked, more broadly, to the medical gaze6 – was seen as capable of uncovering truths about the human body that would make it possible to determine what interventions were needed in order to solve this problem of deadly disease affecting society. Thus, when successful experiments result in the production of inventions (e.g. vaccination) that can be used as a political intervention technology this will not only produce risks that confront test subjects exposed to failures. It also produces risks confronting the states’ own citizens when the new technology is used in such a way that the border of their political body is redefined to allow sovereign power to penetrate ever deeper into it. Whilst these risks are important, Foucault reminds us that the effect of vaccination is not only to be located at the level of the individual body – vaccination forms part of a set of technologies that con­ tributed to the development of a new form of power, one that addresses not the individual body but the social body, the population. Logic: extension of the logic of immunisation to all sectors – dovetailing into new ones As Roberto Esposito has recently argued, immunisation is not simply a thing of the past, nor simply a technology that gained political currency in the eighteenth century. Rather, an aspect of immunisation that ‘seems to have eluded Foucault’ (2008a: 45) is that the logic of immunisation has now become a profound dynamic of the present; according to Esposito, immunisation has become that of the present, which we assume as given (2008b). At the level of logic, immunisa­ tion is about exemption and about sheltering from dangers as well as obligations (Esposito 2008b: 3). And it is this logic that Esposito argues has been extended to all sectors: beyond the medical to the juridical, the ethical, to that of informa­ tion technology and to global politics. And a crucial point to consider when con­ templating how humanitarian technology uses may contribute to this extension of the logic of immunisation is Esposito’s point that beside the emergence of ‘new lines of separation’ (2008b: 5) what must be recognised is that this logic of immunisation entails a ‘terrible contradiction’; ‘if carried past a certain thres­ hold, immunity winds up negating itself ’ (Esposito 2008b: 7).

126   Humanitarian vaccination Now, the emergence of a new technology of power does not simply imply that the technology of power that preceded it will disappear. Rather, as Foucault also reminded us, they will dovetail and find ways to coexist (Foucault 2007). This is certainly an important point in the context of contemporary vaccination technology. On the one hand, vaccination has effects at the level of the indi­ vidual body whilst, at the same time, the use of vaccination technology feeds into the emergence of a new type of political body that exists at a different level than the individual body – namely the population. With the successful develop­ ment of vaccination technologies it became possible to intervene into previously ungovernable domains of life and to legitimate this with reference to the aim of assuring an optimal level of ‘health’ in the population in general rather than at the level of the individual. Accordingly, the individual and the population would now co-­exist as complementary aspects of human existence, as layers with dis­ tinct processes that could not only be known but also authorised as the basis for lines of discrimination between safe and unsafe – and, thus, as the threshold for determining which processes (which subjects) were ‘in need of ’ manipulation/ modification. Added to this, contemporary humanitarian vaccination practices reveal an additional layer of technology that dovetails into the above: not only does the logic of immunisation extend and ‘dovetail into’ the discursive render­ ing of problems and threats within the domain of information technology, but new uses information technology also dovetail into and alter contemporary vac­ cination practices. When paying attention to processes at the level of materiality we come to see a new trend, namely that humanitarian vaccination programmes are beginning to dovetail with the use of biometric registration. A brief explora­ tion of this trend will then close our case study analysis by bringing this final case study (humanitarian vaccination) into conversation with the case of biomet­ ric refugee registration with which I opened this book.

Vaccination and biometric registration7 Since 2013, the non-­profit organisation VaxTrac has been using mobile finger­ print scanners from Lumidigm Inc. as part of a system designed to help eliminate waste and improve vaccination campaigns in Kenya, Uganda, Benin and Zambia (Robinson-­Avila 2013). From the outset VaxTrac had stressed that this novel use of biometrics can help ‘improve healthcare delivery in developing countries’ – indeed, we are informed that: ‘biometrics can serve as the cornerstone of a system to improve vaccine delivery in developing countries’ (Thomas 2014). In somewhat similar terms, Lumidigm announced in November 2013 that its new fingerprint sensors would now be used to catalogue ‘biometric vaccine records for tens of thousands of adults and children in Kenya, Uganda, Benin and Zambia’ – adding that this would allow ‘the healthcare worker to deliver appro­ priate care’ (BusinessWire 2013). The representation of the use of biometric technology in this new context of vaccination was not only portrayed as more efficient but as normatively acceptable, on the basis that the initiative was driven by a humanitarian intent. Indeed, Lumidigm emphasises that the use of this new

Humanitarian vaccination   127 biometric registration technology can help ‘stop vaccine waste for the millions of Africans not yet vaccinated’ further adding that, ‘without a proper and reliable means of identification, vaccine wastage rates are higher than 50 per cent in some of the most challenging geographies’ (BusinessWire 2013). This representation does not only resonate with that of VaxTrac, it also circu­ lates in news stories more widely including headlines stating that ‘Fingerprint sensors help improve vaccination management in Africa’ (Wicklund 2013) and, indeed, the humanitarian dimension is also stressed in the decision to grant the project funding: ‘Fingerprint Scanning Leads to Improved Vaccination Rates in West Africa’ (Sanchez 2013). Besides the humanitarian aim of the non-­profit organisation, the project also serves an explicitly political function insofar as VaxTrac is ‘collaborating on a new pilot project in Indonesia with the Ministry of Health, and the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’ (VaxTrac 2013). Now such collaborations, with their capacity to help test how different technologies of power can co-­exist and simultaneously address several aspects of human existence as relevant to the determination of safe/unsafe polit­ ical identity, represent an additional type of experimentation. And in the context of humanitarianism, a crucial question is how humanitarian uses of new technologies may contribute to the constitution of new combinations of complementary technologies of power as normatively acceptable – as well as the question of what risks it may give rise to when different technologies of power form new and ever-­more complex associations. Accordingly, the influences of the molecular vision (Dillon 2007) on ideas about what aspects of human existence contemporary sovereign power can legitimately traverse in the name of security have not been replaced by this humanitarian turn to, for example, biometrics. Insofar as humanitarian experiments help discover ways in which different tech­ nologies of power can co-­exist in normatively acceptable ways, thus rendering it legitimate to include ever more aspect of human existence into the sovereign demarcation of safe versus unsafe political identities, this seems an additional sense in which humanitarian experimentation facilitates rather than challenges the workings of state power that ‘classifies the life it controls not by its content, but by its subjection to sovereign power’ (Caldwell 2004).

Concluding remarks Following this analysis, we can now recognise four important points. First, by bringing Chamayou’s notion of vilization to bear on our appreciation of humani­ tarian uses of new technology in the domain of medicine, we can begin to recog­ nise how the implications of humanitarian discourse and practice that does not accord the same value to all forms of human life, is the potential materialisation of a conditions that allows for humanitarian subjects to be regarded as suitable for exposure to experimental uses of new technologies. Although humanitarian programmes designed to deliver medical assistance to populations in need may very well be based on good intentions, the fact that technologies are sometimes applied to humanitarian subjects in a manner that differs considerably from how

128   Humanitarian vaccination the very same technology could possibly be applied in contexts that involve citizens in the global core, implies an often-­overlooked process of vilization at the level of technology – a process that may contribute to the constitution of sub­ jects and settings rendered open to being regarded as appropriate for the trialling of unapproved technologies, medical or otherwise. A second important point concerns a certain reversal of how we are accus­ tomed to thinking about which subjects deliver medical safety to whom in the context of humanitarian programmes. As our analysis of the likelihood of fail­ ures served to illustrate, it is not the morally self-­assured humanitarian practi­ tioner that delivers medical safety to vulnerable humanitarian subjects. For when humanitarian subjects are transformed into subjects of experimentation it is the humanitarian subject that will encounter failures – failures that, once known, can then subsequently be corrected and, in this sense, the humanitarian subject thus protects the citizen from undesirable side effects. However, when we look at the political risks that successful experiments might give rise to, then the relationship between human life and security is complicated even further. For even if a vaccine is made safe in the sense that the risk of harmful side effects has been minimised, this provides no guarantee against the use of the medically safe device in politically unsafe ways. New political insecurities might confront subjects when what the state power regards as a ‘safe’ body is represented as a result of a truth uncovered by the new intervention technology. For what happens is that a certain subject is produced as an effect of the intervention process – not as a truth that existed as such already. This was, for example, the case when unvaccinated subjects, after the emergence of vaccination as a politically relevant technology, came to be regarded as an unsafe body. Thus, when practices of humanitarian experimentation are analysed as constitutive practices that may potentially feed into the constitution of new aspects of human existence, as rel­ evant to the determination of safe/unsafe political identity, then humanitarian experimentation must arguably be recognised as serving a crucial function vis-­àvis the continued dominance and expansion of a form of state power from which it claims to offer protection. As such, the humanitarian subject as test subject can be regarded as the backbone against which the means, mode and scope of state power is constantly seeking to counter challenges to its legitimacy. Finally, drawing on the work of Esposito in understanding the significance of vaccination experimentation in our present condition, we may add another aspect to the ‘terrible contradiction’ that Esposito alerts us to: namely, the question of whose immunity humanitarian vaccination practices contributes to – the humani­ tarian subjects’ immunity to deadly disease and/or the humanitarian organisa­ tion’s immunity from obligations.

Notes 1 As Jean-­Hervé Bradol and Marc Le Pape (2011) sarcastically put it as they challenge conventional ideas about ‘humanitarian medicine . . . as a means of recycling second-­ hand products for use in precarious situations.’ 2 See, for example, Laplante and Brunea (2003).

Humanitarian vaccination   129 3 As explained in Chapter 3, this book does not regard a focus on constitutive processes at the level of materiality as a ‘complete rejection of the more constructivist approaches associated with post-­structuralism’ (Coole 2013: 451). 4 This is not to say that no guidelines exist for the conduct of clinical trials in the global periphery. However, the making of specific guidelines suggests a difference at the level of vaccination practice. Whilst such difference can possibly be ascribed to the differ­ ence in context in the case of emergency medicine in humanitarian emergencies the ‘difference in context’ argument loses its convincing feel when the case being con­ sidered is a preventative humanitarian vaccination programme. Also, this is not to say that such vilization does only occur in the context of humanitarianism – Israeli soldiers and, historically, other populations have been produced as ’vile’ (orphanages, prisons, etc.). 5 Foucault (1978). 6 Foucault (1973). 7 Again, this is not a singular case: ‘During a randomized controlled trial in Vietnamese adults of an oral killed whole-­cell cholera vaccine, we piloted fingerprint scanning for the verification of participant identity.’ As described by the authors of an article in Bulletin of the World Health Organization (2007), ‘the potential for misidentification of trial participants, leading to misclassification, is a threat to the integrity of randomized controlled trials.’ In an attempt to overcome this supposed problem of misidentification of trial participants, fingerprint recognition technology was then introduced as a pos­ sible solution. More specifically, during this randomised controlled trial, ‘the finger­ print template of each participant would be used to verify his or her identity during eight follow-­up visits’. In 2007 fingerprint technology had already been ‘widely used in security and commercial contexts’ – yet, the use of fingerprint technology in the context of clinical trials represented a ‘novelty’. On the basis that ‘all participants’ identities were verified in the trial’ the study concludes by recommending that ‘[f]ingerprint recognition should become the standard technology for identification of participants in field trials.’ However, the article also notes that ‘fears exist, however, regarding the potential for invasion of privacy. It will therefore be necessary to con­ vince not only trial participants but also investigators that templates of fingerprints stored in databases are less likely to be subject to abuse than currently used information databases’ (2007: 65).

7 Humanitarian aspirations and technology expectations

Humanitarian actors face enormous challenges and these challenges constitute an important aspect of the context within which to appreciate the issue of humanitarian technology. For example, aid workers in conflict zones are increasingly experiencing kidnappings and attacks. In the past year, we have seen Red Cross staff being kidnapped in northern Mali, staff from Médecins Sans Frontières being kidnapped in Northern Syria and UN staff being kidnapped in South Sudan – and these are only but a few examples. Indeed, a recent report describes ‘the kidnapping threat’ that confronts humanitarians working in volatile situations as ‘the new normal’ (Humanitarian Outcomes (2013)). And, concerning the issue of targeted attacks against aid workers, figures publicised by Humanitarian Outcomes on World Humanitarian Day 2014, showed that the year 2013 had been the most dangerous year thus far for humanitarian workers (Humanitarian Outcomes 2014). In 2013, 133 international NGO staff, 110 UN staff and 14 ICRC staff were amongst the groups of aid workers being killed,1 a trend that Larissa Fast has recently described in greater detail (2014; see also UN General Assembly, A/69/406, Report of the Secretary-­General, 29 September 2014). Adjacent to this distressing trend, the business of providing assistance to populations affected by violent conflict has reached a magnitude, the equivalent of which has not been seen since the post-­WWII era. As was recently reported by the UN refugee agency, ‘the number of refugees, asylum-­seekers and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post-­World War II era, exceeded 50 million people’ (UNHCR 2014a). But not only has the current number of violent conflicts globally (and the protraction of some of these conflicts) generated a remarkable number of refugees, what is more, the magnitude of the task that humanitarian refugee agencies currently confront has also grown as a result of other dynamics. Whilst UNHCR has been recognised as an international actor with a certain degree of institutional autonomy (Loescher 2001), it should of course also be recognised that powerful states have played an important role vis-­à-vis UNHCR’s undertakings. In the post-­Cold War era, we have, for example, seen a ‘global shift in the North’s response to refugee crises’, and in this context ‘UNHCR has been pressured to play an increasingly expanded role’ (Gorlick 2003: 82). More specifically, this ‘expanded role’ has, for example, involved more emphasis on repatriation; in the

Humanitarian aspirations   131 early 1990s ‘UNHCR began to emphasize the role that repatriation . . . could play in international security’ (Loescher 2001: 47), a development that largely happened ‘in response to demands from host and donor states’ (Betts et al. 2012: 51).2 In short, there are also important political dimensions and dynamics which have influenced the scope of the tasks and challenges that humanitarian refugee agencies (UNHCR and its partners) currently confront. In short, UNHCR’s own ambitions, in combination with pressure from donor states, have meant that UNHCR has ‘extended its services to a much wider range of people who were in need of assistance, including returnees, internally displaced people, war-­affected populations, the victims of mass expulsions, and unsuccessful asylum seekers as well as refugees’ (Loescher 2001: 43). And this point is important when thinking about the kinds of challenges that new technologies can be expected to offer a ‘solution’ to. Indeed, all of these aspects (aid in danger, large numbers of refugees, UNHCR’s own role as well as the role of donors) constitute an important part of the context within which to situate the issue of humanitarian technology. For example, the immensity of the current task of providing protection to refugees globally, and related problems such as delays due to cumbersome registration processes combined with new accountability demands from donors, are part of the context within which it understandably becomes attractive to welcome the introduction of new biometric technologies that pledge to make refugee registration more efficient and streamlined whilst at the same time offering enhanced accountability. For example, in the Dadaab refugee camp complex, UNHCR and WFP have introduced new biometric registration technologies, based on expectations about the ability of this new technology to ensure ‘efficient and accountable use of donor resources’ (2013).3 And, in a similar vein, ‘an Associate Registration Officer with the UN refugee agency’ who has recently developed a new rapid food distribution tool which uses biometrics, said about this new tool that ‘it was designed to improve efficiency and accountability’ (UNHCR 2013a). More generally, as we saw in Chapter 1, different humanitarian actors, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the International Federation of the Red Cross, have published official reports in which a broad range of new technologies – from Global Positioning Systems to mobile phones – are applauded on account of their empowering potential and their capacity to improve humanitarian tasks such as registration, cash assistance and disaster mapping. High expectations and a profound sense of optimism about the ability of new digital technologies to improve humanitarian tasks was, for example, also evident in the case study explored in Chapter 4: a UNHCR staff member, for instance, described iris recognition technology as capable of solving problems of inefficient and biased registration procedures and, more generally, UNHCR news stories about their use of biometric registration technology convey a profound confidence in the ability of this new technology to improve current registration processes (UNHCR 2013b). And, in the case of Afghanistan, biometric technology was expected to put an end to the problem of refugees who ‘double-­dip on one-­ time aid grants’ (Bloomberg 2003). Thus, in official accounts but also in news

132   Humanitarian aspirations stories and at the level of implementation, central humanitarian actors look favourably upon new technologies as capable of easing the realisation of humani­ tarian objectives. Whilst it is important to appreciate various dimensions of the contemporary context within which humanitarian technology uses unfold (magnitudes, optimisms, politics, etc.), this book suggests that it is also important to appreciate that humanitarian technology uses have a history. For one thing, such a history highlights that technological optimism within the humanitarian community is not new. Indeed, humanitarian hopes vested in new technology predate the current turn to digital technology. For example, as we saw in Chapter 5, when confronted with large numbers of famine-­affected populations and with a recurring problem of insufficient food contributions from donor states, then humanitarian actors have also been keen to welcome (even unapproved) products of genetic engineering technologies in their search for ways to resolve this double-­problem of starvation and insufficient food supplies. Besides this fairly recent case (2002), we can also find examples from the more distant past of humanitarian aspirations mixing with a faith in the ability of scientific and technological progress to offer new solutions. Dating back to the late nineteenth century, Rima Apple has documented how humanitarian desires ‘to alleviate the high rates of infant mortality’ (1987: 55) have been underwritten by hopes that physicians would be able to discover ‘an efficacious method of artificial infant feeding’ (1987: 57). Bearing in mind the history of humanitarian technology uses does not only call attention to this sustained humanitarian techno-scientific-optimism. Crucially, this history also highlights a number of ‘downsides’ related to the introduction of new technologies in humanitarian settings. One type of ‘downside’ which has received attention in popular media as well as in Hollywood productions (such as the British documentary The Constant Gardener), is cases of ‘experimental’ medicine in humanitarian contexts causing undesirable effects for the implicated humanitarian populations. For example, as we saw in Chapter 6, unapproved vaccines have been distributed in various humanitarian contexts, but we have also seen examples of expired medicine (Hechmann and Bunde-­ Birouste 2007) or of approved drugs being used in new ways for which they have not been approved. Such cases have sometimes reached the media (as in the case of Pfizer testing unapproved drugs on Nigerian children in the context of a humanitarian crisis (BBC 2001; Independent 2009; see also Chapter 4)) and thus a broader western audience. Importantly, in such cases of experimental medicine, we are familiar with the kinds of undesirable side effects that experimental medical practices could entail and to which humanitarian populations are thus exposed. Now, we shall return in more detail to the different ways in which a history of humanitarian technology uses presents us with perspectives that challenge humanitarian confidence in the ability of new technologies to instinctively aid the realisation of laudable humanitarian objectives. By bringing this history to bear on our appreciation of current debates about humanitarian technology we can, for example, come to recognise why – when approaching the

Humanitarian aspirations   133 issue of humanitarian technology uses – it is important, but not sufficient, to take account of how various medical failures have transpired in humanitarian contexts. As has been argued throughout this book, the type of downside that we should pay attention to goes beyond the risk of technology failures exposing humanitarian subjects to different risks. To facilitate an appreciation of how humanitarian technology uses may be implicated in the emergence of a much broader range of risks, this book proposed starting our analysis from a conceptualisation of technology that calls attention to the politics of technology both in terms of its political use and in terms of the political significance of various constitutive processes.

Humanitarian technology matters: constitutive dynamics at the level of materiality The book’s main theoretical contribution has been to broaden the critical humanitarian research agenda by showing how a combination of insights from Michel Foucault, Gregoire Chamayou and the Science and Technology Studies (STS) literature, can help us appreciate significant but commonly overlooked aspects of humanitarian technology uses. Broadly speaking, this contribution was made through two moves (as explained in Chapters 2 and 3). One move (Chapter 3) was to combine Chamayou’s notion of vilization with aspects of Foucault’s thinking about how power operates at the level of materiality and with selected insights from the STS literature, notably the concept of co-­ constitution. Based on sufficiently compatible notions of how technology is politically significant, these insights were combined into an analytical framework, which invites us to pay careful attention to the role of technology in relation to vilization processes whereby certain bodies come to be regarded as vile and worthy of being despised (Chamayou 2010), and in relation to co-­constitutive effects (Jasanoff 1995) with implications for the reach and rationale of sovereign power (Foucault 2003). By drawing upon the notion of co-­constitution in combination with some of Foucault’s ideas about how power operates at the level of materiality, we were, for example, able to appreciate how technology uses do not only give rise to harmful effects when they ‘fail’ but also when they ‘successfully’ contribute to the constitution of new dimensions of human existence as open to political interventions in the name of security. So, although Foucault (who passed away in 1984) did not specifically address the issue of digital technology (see Deleuze 1992) new ways of operationalising his insights – e.g. in combination with insights from the STS literature – can nevertheless still help us shed light on important, but commonly overlooked, aspects of how power in contemporary societies operate at the level of materiality and also internationally – including in humanitarian settings. But, as was also explained in Chapter 2, in our framings of analyses of humanitarian technology uses, this revised notion of technology (that brings out its different political dimensions) cannot stand alone: ‘humanitarian technology’

134   Humanitarian aspirations must also be understood in the context of a manifold critical humanitarian literature and a history of humanitarian challenges. Accordingly, the other, concurrent move (Chapter 2) was to situate this conceptualisation of technology as political in the context of a literature that in different ways challenges the notion of humanitarian neutrality by highlighting the various ways in which humani­ tarian discourses and practices are political – be it in the form of feeding into local conflict dynamics (Keen 2008; Polman 2010) or in the form of linkages to the discursive basis of sovereign power as the power to enforce authoritative divisions between safe and unsafe forms of life, in the name of ‘security’ (De Larrinaga and Doucet 2008; Dillon and Reid 2009; Reid 2010). Thus, through the combined theoretical endeavours of Chapters 2 and 3, the book explained how, by conceptualising technology as political in a Foucault- and STS-­inspired sense (that, for example, helps move us beyond the politics of ‘outsourcing’ harmful side effects from failed experiments), we are better placed to appreciate a broad range of political effects that can arise in the context of humanitarian technology uses and whose significance we should not too readily dismiss. In other words, by bringing the abovementioned theoretical insights and concepts into conversation with this critical humanitarian literature (the ‘negative effects’ debate, humanitarianism and sovereign power, the history of humanitarian experimentation), the book drew attention to the importance of exploring how humanitarian technology uses can affect the contours of local and global power dynamics: how do humani­tarian uses of a given technology affect the relationship between humanitarian practices and the reach and rationale of sovereign power? By deliberately situating this conceptualisation of how technology is political (vis-­à-vis various constitutive effects and the distribution of exposure to technology failure) in relation to insights from critical humanitarian literature, the intention was to illustrate the relevance and added value of calling attention to constitutive processes at the level of materiality. But, importantly, this focus on technology and materiality is not to be understood as a focus that should supplant analyses of discursive effects and linkages (Coole and Frost 2010). A number of critical humanitarian scholars (and, well before that, several critical International Relations scholars including Richard Ashley, Michael Shapiro, R.B.J. Walker, David Campbell, Michael Dillon, Cynthia Weber and James Der Derian) have focused on the level of discourse in their operationalization of Foucault’s ideas about how power operates (see Chapter 3) – for example, by looking at how discursive structures influence our comprehension of ‘reality’ and political responses to the thus constructed reality. This book adds to this rich literature by showing how a somewhat different aspect of Foucault’s insights about the workings of power can serve as the conceptual base for a framework through which to explore how not only discursive processes but also processes of the level of materiality, in important ways, have a bearing on how we conceive of ‘reality’ as well as how this ‘reality’ is acted upon politically.4 As explained in Chapter 3, attention to this material dimension has recently entered into the field of International Relations,5 but in the sub-­field of Critical Humanitarian Studies explicit attention to how

Humanitarian aspirations   135 power operates at the level of materiality has only received very limited attention. In short, through these two moves, the book’s theoretical contribution has been to bring insights about the politics of technology (from Foucault, Chamayou and STS) into the field of critical humanitarian studies thereby beginning to outline the contours of a new research agenda set to explore the politics of humanitarian materiality, including humanitarian uses of new technology. Put differently, by bringing Chamayou’s notion of vilization, Foucault’s attention to how power operates at the level of materiality, and the STS notion of ‘co-­constitution’ into the realm of critical humanitarian studies, this book has begun to highlight the value of the material dimensions of Foucault’s work when contemplating issues of power and humanitarianism that critics have thus far primarily addressed at the level of discourse. In short, the book has combined an historical and a contemporary appreciation of how humanitarian endeavours have in various ways had ‘unintended consequences’ (prolonging conflict, feeding rebels, terrorists or what Gil Loescher calls ‘refugee warriors’ (2001: 45)) with a theoretical framework that calls attention to different dimensions of the politics of technology (vilization, technology failures, and constitutive effects) into a framework that, for example, allows us to appreciate how, in a certain sense, not all unintended consequences of humani­tarian technology uses are altogether unpredictable. Following an STS approach we should, for example, expect that technology uses can give rise to constitutive effects of political significance. And, to elaborate on the kinds of constitutive effects that this framing has helped us appreciate, we shall now explore how our three case studies have helped add further nuances to the sense in which even well-­intentioned humanitarian technology uses may feed into constitutive processes that can give rise to harmful effects. Referring back to our prior conceptual framings, the case study findings suggest that at least three different types of constitutive effects require further attention, namely political conceivability, normative acceptability and humanitarian problems.

Key findings: humanitarian vilization and harmful effects beyond technology failures Having analysed three cases – and having paid specific attention to various downsides on the basis that a broad range of new opportunities and possibilities have already been stressed vehemently – the aim of this book has not been to reach generalizable conclusions about humanitarian technology uses. That said, exploring three cases through this combination of insights from Chamayou, Foucault and STS has, however, still shed light on a number of politically significant effects. First, in all three cases, humanitarian technology uses contributed to processes of vilization, that is, to processes through which humanitarian populations came to be regarded as ‘vile’, which then in turn allowed for their ‘legitimate’ exposure to various experimental technologies. Gregoire Chamayou’s notion of vilization enabled us to recognise how vilization (the production of humans as miserable and worthy of being despised) is not only discursive but also physical, ‘if such a dichotomy even makes sense’ (Lambert 2013). To

136   Humanitarian aspirations restate a central point that Leopold Lambert notes in his translation of Chamayou: ‘Starving someone to constraint him to accept an offer, for instance, can be considered as a vilization technique just as much as the various discourses in order to convince this person of his inferiority’ (Lambert 2013). And what our cases added to this observation about the materiality of vilization is that one of the characteristics, which is specifically pronounced in humanitarian contexts, is this issue of constraint in the sense that access to humanitarian assistance is made dependent on subjection to experimental technology: repatriation assistance was made conditional on subjection to experimental iris technology (Chapter 4) and access to food aid was made conditional on acceptance of a produce of GM-­technology which was elsewhere only approved for animal feed (Chapter 5). As such, the introduction of new technology in humanitarian settings seems prone to contribute to the constitution of humanitarian subjects as ‘vile’, with the implication that the need for justification when exposing humani­ tarian subjects to experimental technologies evaporates. This dearth of justification becomes more recognisable when contrasted with how similar technology uses would have given rise to legal and ethical criticism had they involved rights-­endowed citizens. For example, in all three cases the humanitarian use of a new technology, which had elsewhere been contested and regarded as highly controversial, was deployed in the absence of explicit justifications or considerations of legitimacy. In Chapter 4 we saw how products of genetic engineering technology, which had only been approved for animal feed, were nonetheless distributed to starving humanitarian populations without much attention to the ethical dilemmas involved in exposing these bodies to risks that legal and regulative frameworks elsewhere had deemed it important to protect rights-­endowed citizens from. In this sense, the constitution of humanitarian hierarchies does not only unfold at the level of discourse but also in constitutive vilization processes at the level of materiality, processes that we need to consider more carefully when debating the issue of ‘humanitarian technology’. Second, in all three cases, laudable humanitarian intentions of using new technology to aid vulnerable populations more effectively were challenged by the likelihood that variously ‘experimental’ technologies can fail. Concerning this aspect, it must be said that the three case studies did not only differ with respect to the type of humanitarian task and contexts which the technology was introduced into – prevention (of disease), alleviation of immediate suffering (starvation), and assistance in the aftermath of conflict (repatriation) – but also with respect to the type of technology being introduced. And from this we can observe an important limitation in the extent to which a medical analogy can help us grasp the kinds of ‘harmful effects’ that technology failures can give rise to. It has already been documented how various medical experiments have been outsourced to location in the global ‘periphery’ (Petryna 2009; Shah 2006), including humanitarian settings, and how this has resulted in a transfer of exposure to various harmful side effects to populations in these locations. Adriana Petryna has, for example, detailed how populations in ‘peripheral’ settings have been enrolled in various clinical trials ‘without fully comprehending the risk of

Humanitarian aspirations   137 injury or death’ (2009: 76) and a few scholars have also called attention to what has, for example, been referred to as ‘medico-­humanitarian interventions’ (Towghi and Vora 2014) and humanitarian ‘charity medicine for the global poor’ (Pringle 2014). In keeping with this attention to medical experiments in humani­ tarian contexts, Chapter 6 offered an exploration of the distribution of experimental rotavirus vaccine to candidates in humanitarian settings, notwithstanding the suspicion of undesirable side effects. In short, this link between humanitarian contexts and the use of experimental medical technology is a reasonably well-­ researched area (although more such cases have arguably still to be accounted for in greater detail). Yet, far less attention has been paid to the fact that, as our case studies illustrate, in addition to medical inventions, other ‘experimental’ technologies are also deployed in humanitarian zones, with different types of related technology failures. In the case of experimental iris recognition of Afghan returnees we saw at least two important things. First of all, the technology was not ‘unapproved’ or at a specific trial stage. However, it was used in a manner that was far more challenging than any previous application and which would therefore jeopardise the proclaimed capabilities of the technology. And we then saw how this implied various risks of failure ranging from failures to capture a usable iris image (e.g. due to the prevalence of cataract), to failures to match iris images (e.g. due to unprecedentedly large databases and scalability challenges). Second, medical technology failures differ from biometric technology failure with respect to the way in which they jeopardise the safety of the implicated humanitarian subjects. For example, if the biometric technology fails to match an iris image correctly then this does not immediately pose a risk to the physical wellbeing of the concerned individual. Yet, at the same time, we also saw that an ‘absence’ of the type of side effects that we recognise from the context of medical trials should not lead us to conclude that biometric failures pose no risks to the implicated refugee population. First of all, technology failures may translate into a humanitarian failure to assist legitimate and ‘deserving’ refugees. Second, the sense in which biometric technology may jeopardise refugee safety cannot be understood simply with reference to the physical body but must also include an analysis of possible implications for the security of the digital refugee body (see Chapter 4). We shall return to this point shortly as we summarise some of the key findings that the notion of co-­constitution helped us appreciate. Although the type of failure that the delivery of unapproved products of new genetic engineering technology to variously vulnerable humanitarian populations (elderly, malnourished etc.) could give rise to needs further exploration (Chapter 5), we can, however, still conclude that together the three cases illustrate an important point: they show how contemporary humanitarianism is implicated in experimental technology uses beyond the medical domain, be it in the domain of genetic engineering or biometric identification. Put differently, the cases illustrate the relevance of adding a new dimension to the existing literature on ‘technology failures’ in the medical domain, in recognition of the relevance of exploring in greater detail what different types of harmful effects other technology

138   Humanitarian aspirations trials, and other types of possible technology failures, may entail. Of course, technology failures differ from one technology domain to another, and so too does the kind of harmful effect to which a technology failure might expose the implicated subject. Arguably, an important task before us when considering the issue of humanitarian technology uses beyond the medical domain, is to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how different technologies can ‘fail’ when deployed experimentally, and what this implies for humanitarian aims of providing security to populations exposed to the perils of violent conflict. Third, by using the notion of co-­constitution (Jasanoff 1995) to frame our case study analyses, we were also able to recognise how, in addition to various forms of ‘harm’ stemming from technology failures, successful technology uses can also give rise to a different type of ‘harm’ which transpires when constitutive processes give rise to politically significant effects. But these additional types of harmful effects only become visible if we take seriously the constitutive dimensions of technology uses and their potentially significant political implications. Therefore, instead of focusing on ‘scientific’ practices as unfolding in sealed-­off laboratories or controlled ‘real-­world’ environments, through which rational and orderly processes generate ‘objective’ knowledge as new dimensions of a pre-­given ‘reality’ are uncovered, the notion of co-­constitution helped direct analytical attention to how constitutive effects unfold in a much broader range of social practices (including humanitarian technology uses). As such, by using the notion of co-­constitution as a lens through which to approach the phenomenon of humanitarian technology uses, the analysis was not intended as a detailed exploration of whether experimental humanitarian technology uses helped produce new ‘scientific data’. Instead the aim was to conceptualise the potential implications of humanitarian technology uses from a perspective that explicitly appreciates the role of social practice (and also humanitarian practices) in the constitution of new technology, whilst at the same time also paying careful attention the politics of constitutive processes at the level of materiality as technology, constituted in a specific capacity, ‘loops back’ with implications for the constitution of social order and social identity. More specifically, our case studies called attention to at least three ways in which humanitarian technology uses can have constitutive effects of political significance. Constitutive of political conceivability To disregard that scientific and technological developments have brought about various advantages would, of course, be foolish. Yet it would also be foolish to ignore the politics of the knowledge-­production that often attends scientific and technological advances. As Foucault has already shown, making new knowledge available bears with it the possibility that such knowledge can come to be regarded as politically relevant – for example, as relevant to the sovereign state’s task of distinguishing safe from unsafe forms of human existences, and of enforcing such distinctions authoritatively in the name of security. Yet, the role of humanitarian technology uses in relation to the constitutive processes whereby

Humanitarian aspirations   139 available knowledge gets constituted as relevant to this task of authoritatively distinguishing safe from unsafe human beings, has thus far remained largely unexplored. Although three case studies can of course not serve as the basis for any generalisable conclusions, we can nevertheless still identify one type of constitutive effect of relevance to this issue of how knowledge about new aspect of human life comes to be regarded as politically relevant: humanitarian technology uses can, for example, help illustrate – and thus make conceivable – how newly accessible knowledge can be made relevant to the sovereign task of enforcing authoritative divisions. In that sense, humanitarian technology uses can feed into the constitution of a new type of political conceivability. And, as our three cases illustrate – insofar as they show a move from ‘processes beneath the skin’, to ‘genetic structures’ and ‘biometric characteristics’ – this new conceivability can entail an expansion in the reach of authoritative and divisive power, insofar as additional and previously inaccessible aspect of life come to be conceived of as politically relevant to the task of distinguishing certain individuals from others. As such, humanitarian technology uses may not simply aid the realisation of humanitarian objectives, they can also help illustrate how new aspects of human existence can be made accessible not only to knowledge but also to power. This can be described more clearly with reference to a historical example (which is explained in more detail in Chapter 6): for many years, it was considered impossible to know, let alone manipulate, complicated biological processes ‘beneath the skin’ of the human body. Yet, in the late eighteenth century, with the advent of the science of vaccination and its attending technologies, we did not only see the emergence of a new technology, we also saw the emergence of a new political conceivability: processes beneath the skin were now considered open to legitimate political interventions in the name of population safety. Put differently, as we saw in Chapter 6, the emergence of vaccination technologies ran parallel with a redefinition of what aspects of human bodies it was possible to conceive of as open to political intervention – a redefinition which was also an expansion in the sense that otherwise private and ungovernable aspects of the human body had now come to be considered open to legitimate state intervention (e.g. in the form of mandatory vaccination). And this development gave rise to resistance: a number of people feared the consequences of this political expansion (see Chapter 6). Now, the argument presented in this book is that this history forms an important part of the context within which we can come to appreciate commonly overlooked aspects of contemporary humanitarian technology uses. As illustrated in our analysis of the more recent case of genetic engineering, the possibility that technologies can have constitutive effects of significance for ‘political conceivability’ and with implications for the reach and the rationale of sovereign power is not a thing of the past. And in the case of biometrics, we saw how humanitarian uses of biometric registration technology were constitutive of a population of digital refugee bodies, i.e. of biometric templates that are inseparable from the physical body of the refugee. And, with this new type of refugee body – the digital refugee – biometric profiles and ‘future becomings’ (Hildebrandt 2007) had not only come to be regarded as ‘knowable’,

140   Humanitarian aspirations it had, at the same time, become possible to conceive of biometric dimensions of human existence as open to political intervention. In this sense, one aspect of humanitarian technology uses which is commonly overlooked, but which this Foucault and STS-­inspired framing helps us recognise, is that such technology uses can feed into an expansion of the dimensions of human existence that can be conceived of as open to political intervention in the name of providing security. Of course, it is not the case that any new knowledge being produced about any additional aspects of human existence will automatically be accepted as relevant to the ‘political imagination’ and to the sovereign task of providing security – let alone to the ‘task’ of distinguishing safe from unsafe, worthy from unworthy, forms of life. And because this does not happen automatically, we need to pay careful attention to social constitutive processes at the level of materiality through which various social actors, including humanitarian ones, may partake in the constitution of a given technology and the knowledge it produces as politically relevant, or not. Constitutive of normative acceptability In addition to how humanitarian technology uses can have constitutive effects on the boundaries of political conceivability vis-­à-vis governable dimensions of human existence, the case studies also pointed to another important type of constitutive effect, namely that humanitarian technology uses can feed into the constitution of a given technology (in each of the cases an otherwise controversial technology) as normatively acceptable. Biometric technology has, for example, been surrounded by a considerable amount of controversy; various academics and advocates have, for example, voiced concerns about a loss of privacy (see Chapter 4). And these concerns are not only about the risk of technology failures, they are also about the ways in which successful biometric registration and identification can affect power relations by enabling political interventions into new domains of human existence. Now, the point to stress here is that such controversies illustrate how ‘scientific accuracy’ is not the only factor that affects the societal embrace – or not – of a new technology. Normative aspects are also of crucial significance, yet it has proven a challenge to the normative acceptability of biometric registration technology that this technology (fingerprinting in particular) has a history that ties it to contexts of punishment and control as criminals and colonial subjects were amongst the very first population segments to be subjected to biometric fingerprint technology (Pugliese 2012). Now, considering these current concerns and past uses, it is important to recognise how humanitarian uses of biometrics can affect the normative dimensions of biometrics. As we saw in our analysis of humanitarian uses of biometrics in refugee registration contexts, such technology uses gave rise to ‘success stories’ that reach not only the readers of humanitarian news stories (IRIN, UNHCR News, ReliefWeb, etc.), but also a much wider policy audience as these humanitarian ‘success stories’ were, for example, mentioned in EU reports6 and in industry contexts (e.g. as successful case studies presented on company

Humanitarian aspirations   141 websites or in ‘business news’ about the ‘successful trial of iris recognition technol­ogy’ (BusinessWire 2003)), as well as in keynote presentations at biometric conferences. As such, representations of biometrics as a successful humanitarian technology with a potential to ease the realisation of laudable humanitarian objectives, can affect the technology’s normative acceptability. Now although this type of constitutive effect may not arise in the context of all humanitarian technology uses, the point to stress here is that humanitarians need to take account of the extent to which their normative power can potentially feed into a specific constitution of the technol­ogy that they have decided to embrace. This seems most pertinent in cases where the technologies that humanitarian actors decide to introduce are surrounded by controversy. In such cases, it seems necessary to consider how humanitarian technology uses can contribute to the constitution of normative acceptability, which can then serve to implicitly relegate concern and criticism – as in the case of refugee privacy (Hosein and Nyst 2013). Constitutive of humanitarian problems Reflecting upon our case studies, another point to stress is that they arguably allude to an important issue that this book has only just begun to unravel: how do ‘available’ technologies affect humanitarian actors’ definition of problems and preferred solutions. Whilst various new technologies may well be able to help ease certain types of problems and challenges (e.g. by making refugee registration more efficient), there is, however, a limit to the kinds of problems to which technology can be considered capable of providing a solution. Yet, within the field of critical humanitarian studies, the question of how new technologies and humanitarian problems are being ‘co-­defined’, and with what effects and implications, has only received very limited attention. Based on our findings from the case of humani­ tarian biometrics, it would seem that the emergence of new technologies affects definitions and framings of long-­standing humanitarian problems. For example, as new biometric technologies have become available in humanitarian contexts, the long-­standing political challenges in relation to the issue of refugee identification tend to get lost in favour of more narrow conceptions of identification as merely technical issues, and thus as an issue that the introduction of these new biometric technologies can resolve. This co-­constitution of biometrics as solution, and of accurate identification as the problem, leaves out the history of the politics surrounding the issue of identifying and determining who is worthy of humanitarian assistance: who is to be labelled as a rebel (or a potential terrorist) and who is not? And should humanitarians offer assistance to all victims, even if this prolongs the conflict? (Polman 2010) These are some of the tremendously difficult issues that humanitarians confront – yet they are also issues to which we should not expect new and more accurate identification technologies to provide a simple solution. Importantly, they are merely contemporary versions of difficulties that have been at the heart of humanitarian aid in the context of conflict since the inception of the ICRC-­humanitarianism that we are familiar with today (see Chapter 2). Indeed, humanitarianism has a long history that in many ways bears witness to the politics

142   Humanitarian aspirations of this issue of identification, and what the findings presented in this book have added to this history is that in many humanitarian contexts there is hardly no limit to the kinds of problems (technical, political, ethical) that new identification technologies are being considered capable of offering a solution to. In the case of GM maize we saw a somewhat similar co-­constitution of new products and humanitarian problems: the problem of too little funding came to be regarded as a more technical matter of finding technologies that could ensure sufficient yields. In this sense, we see a tendency to ‘co-­constitute’ technologies as solutions and humanitarian problems as technologically solvable – a tendency that calls for further exploration in order to better understand the implications of such co-­constitutive processes, including the implications of defining ever-­more aspects of humanitarian problems as technologically-­solvable – rather than as political or as ethical or moral dilemmas to which we should not expect to find a technological solution. Now, in a certain sense, this aspect of humanitarian technology uses – this constitution of humanitarian problems as technology-­solvable – also has an important history. For as has been pointed out by critics of Mary Anderson’s ‘Do No Harm’ approach, a limitation of this approach is that it lends itself to an interpretation in which ‘the minimisation of harm’ could be seen as ‘little more than a tactical question’ (Campbell 1998: 500). A similar concern with such co-­constitution of humanitarian problems and new technologies as solutions is that the humanitarian ambition of aiding as many people in need as possible – i.e. of ‘maximising good’ – comes to be understood as little more than a technical question, a legacy that we shall return to shortly. But first, in support of the book’s broader claim about the relevance of a Foucault- and STS-­inspired approach to the issue of humanitarian technology, our three case studies also indicate that an additional dimension of constitution in humanitarian technology contexts requires further attention and exploration: when taken together, the three cases also begin to suggest the relevance of another Foucault notion, namely the idea that, importantly, new technologies do not simply supplant ‘old’ ones. Rather, new technologies dovetail into existing technologies – as we saw in the case of biometrics and vaccination where humanitarian settings have become zones in which to test the use of biometric registration in vaccination programmes. This is certainly an aspect of humani­ tarian technology uses that calls for further exploration. Certainly, more work is needed to understand the role of humanitarian technology uses in facilitating the processes whereby new political technologies come to dovetail into and modify existing ones. When considering the turn to biometrics in humanitarian vaccination programmes, one question to be explored in greater detail is, for example, that of what happens to ideas about safety and security when the logic of pre-­emption, which underwrites the use of biometrics, dovetails with and modifies/is modified by the logic of immunization, which rationalises the subordination of the individual to the safety of ‘society’ and which underwrites the use of vaccination. In short, the three case studies demonstrate one way in which ‘co-­constitution’ offers insights into dimensions of humanitarian technology uses that are too readily

Humanitarian aspirations   143 overlooked when addressed from a perspective that accepts humanitarian neutrality and technological objectivity as undeniable assumptions. But at the same time, the aim has not been to offer the way of using STS-­insight to frame analyses of humanitarian practices. Arguably, this only strengthens the argument presented in this book, namely that a combination of STS insights and the material aspects of Foucault’s work can prove valuable when seeking to deepen our appreciation of the issue of humanitarian technology uses. On that note, let us now turn to the question of how to interpret the broader significance of the theoretical endeavours and the case studies presented in this book and summarised above.

Humanitarian aid – humanitarian harm: interpreting the significance of our findings In addition to how humanitarian success stories can have political effects beyond the zones in which humanitarian actors deploy various new technologies, there are at least three additional arguments as to why the framings and findings presented in this book are relevant beyond the individual cases explored and beyond humanitarian contexts. However, before we elaborate on these arguments, it is of course important to recognise the opposite viewpoint for, of course, the question of how to understand the significance of the findings presented in this book can be responded to differently. In other words, it is one thing to suggest that, if we frame the issue of humanitarian technology as suggested in this book, then we can begin to recognise a number of otherwise overlooked aspects. Yet, it is a different thing to agree upon how to then interpret the significance of the ‘otherwise overlooked aspects’ that have thus come into view. ‘Small instances’ of harm as insignificant in view of the bigger picture One response is that harmful effects such as those pointed out in this book, must be understood in view of a ‘bigger picture’ in relation to which they, in one way or another, are just minor and trivial. This interpretation can be recognised in at least two prominent versions. One ‘bigger picture’ argument is the liberal account of history as progressive; in contrast to the idea that global politics is an anarchic realm in which the sovereign state is the only feasible guarantor of security, the liberal humanitarian sentiment and the laudable humanitarian endeavours that this way of thinking enables, represents a profound sign of progress in the conduct of global politics. Indeed, a number of scholars have described how such liberal conceptions of humanitarianism draw upon notions of enlightenment, modernity and progress (Escobar 2005; Barnett 2001),7 according to which human reason has proved capable of bringing about moral progress and betterment so much so that our contemporary condition is now characterised by a profound ‘decline in violence’ compared to earlier periods in history (Pinker 2011). Steven Pinker has, for example, recently argued that despite war and violence we live in an increasingly more peaceful and enlightened world, indeed ‘more peaceful than any previous

144   Humanitarian aspirations period of human existence’, with ‘The Humanitarian Revolution’ as an important part of this profoundly progressive development. Now, the point to stress here is that such underlying narratives and notions give rise to a specific type of response to findings such as those presented in this book. Indeed, from the perspective offered by such framings, we are invited to think of present instances of violence as insignificant in view of this more profound state of moral and human progress. From this perspective the argument is that in view of this bigger picture of modernity, enlightenment and profound progress, a few examples (such as those presented in this book) of cases where humanitarian endeavours have had harmful effects, are trivial and insignificant. Another ‘bigger picture’ argument is that not only are specific instances of humanitarian harm trivial in view of the more profound historical progress that humanitarian sentiments represent, such instances are also insignificant in view of the current number of cases where humanitarian endeavours deliver lifesaving aid and assistance to people in need; considering the vast number of positive effects that humanitarians deliver, we should not allow undue attention and importance to a few instances in which unintended side effects materialise.8 The important point to stress here is that what these representations have in common is that they, in different ways, belittle the possibility that past and present cases of humanitarian harm should be interpreted as having potentially significant implications for how we think about contemporary humanitarianism. However, the argument presented in this book suggests otherwise and by way of conclusion we shall now explore three alternative perspectives on the significance of the framings and findings presented in this book. Humanitarian technology: a new dimension to an old ‘Do No Harm’ debate Instead of interpreting these instances as insignificant, the findings presented in this book can also be seen as an invitation to look more carefully at how various downsides can accompany humanitarian technology uses. As described in Chapter 2, and as mentioned above, the importance of debating cases of ‘humanitarian harm’ has already been acknowledged within the humanitarian community. In the context of what is often referred to as the ‘Do No Harm’ debate (with reference to Mary Anderson’s ‘Do No Harm’ approach from the late 1990s), a number of critical scholars have detailed how humanitarian practices can affect local conflict dynamics in ways that can exacerbate violence and harm (e.g. by feeding local rebels) and these examples of humanitarian endeavours causing harm have in turn been addressed by humanitarian practitioners who have formulated new principles and codes aimed at ensuring that such harm is minimised or eliminated. As described in a report by UNICEF, ‘[t]he “do no harm” principle, developed by Mary Anderson in the 1990s, has developed into an approach, inspiring a series of training workshops for humanitarian workers’ (UNICEF 2003) as well as a series of reports (OECD 2010), professional standards (ICRC 2009) and guiding principles on ‘conflict sensitivity approaches’. And in a UN peacekeeping handbook

Humanitarian aspirations   145 we are reminded that ‘sensitivity to the local context is essential’ (UN DPKO/DFS 2012: 50, italics added). Now, in relation to the issue of humanitarian technology, the important point to stress is that this debate can help us see how there is precedence for taking seriously (rather than belittling) examples of humanitarian harm. And as such, this Do No Harm debate – which indeed is still relevant and on-­going (Polman 2010; Terry 2002, 2013; Janmyr 2013) – allows for a different framing of the relevance of the examples of ‘harm’ stemming from humanitarian technology uses that have been presented in this book. However, the book does not only draw upon this long-­standing and still highly relevant debate, it also adds to this debate in that it argues, that an additional dimension should be added to this Do No Harm debate: examples of the kinds of harmful effects that humanitarian technology uses can give rise to should be seen as indicative of a need to add a new dimension to this ‘old’ debate, a dimension that specifically addresses the question of how humanitarian technology uses can generate harmful effects, for example, by feeding into conflict dynamics but also in other ways. As the cases explored in this book have served to illustrate, various harmful effects do sometimes emerge when humanitarians, even with the best of intentions, use new technologies. And even if it is impossible to predict all the negative effects that the introduction of a new technology can occasion, humanitarians could at a minimum do two things. One is to approach this issue of ‘humanitarian technology’ from a set of assumptions about the nature of technology that allows for a sufficiently broad assessment of the kinds of harmful effects to which technology uses can give rise. Another thing is to ensure that harmful effects are shared and reviewed when they do materialise, in order to learn from such ‘failures’ and thereby take more responsibility for minimising the risk that humanitarian technology uses can inadvertently do more harm than good. This could, for example, also help identify different categories of technology in an effort to gain a better understanding of the broad range of potential downsides that different technology uses entail – when technology is applied with good humanitarian intentions as well. For it would, of course, be insincere to suggest that all humanitarian technology uses have important negative consequences. There are surely examples of technologies that have aided humanitarian aims, e.g. the introduction of solar cell technology in Uganda as a safer source of light than indoor fireplaces (UNRIC 2014). Although one immediate difference between solar cell technology and the technologies explored in this book is the issue of knowledge production and with that, questions of authority and power, a more systematic exploration of different types of technologies could prove valuable when adding a new focus on humani­ tarian technology to the ‘old’ Do No Harm debate. In other words, whilst we struggle to find ways of addressing more fundamental issues (such as humanitarian vilization), one way to avoid causing more harm could be to at least make sure that the various difficulties encountered in the field are attended to and minimised in future technology uses. This may seem obvious. However, more than 10 years have passed since UNHCR first used biometric technology and still neither UNHCR nor the implicated NGOs, or states

146   Humanitarian aspirations for that matter, have taken an initiative to systematically collect and evaluate the various challenges that these biometric technology uses have given rise to in different contexts; for example, in refugee camps and in urban settings, in conflict zones and in more peaceful contexts. Now we can, of course, find examples of critics within the humanitarian community who are sceptical about the introduction of certain new technologies. Concerning biometric refugee registration NGOs have, for example, voiced disagreement with UNHCR policies and practices at an annual consultation (NGO Liaison Unit, 2002; see also Chapter 4). Yet, besides an annual consultation, with no specific focus on technology, there is currently no other forum where concerns (whether technical, political, ethical or otherwise) can be voiced, nor is there a forum to ensure that examples of technology failure or, perhaps more importantly, of the materialisation of unexpected and harmful downsides related to specific technology uses, are being shared among relevant actors – such as different actors within UNHCR (office level/ field level, including staff from different field locations), implementing partners from the NGO community and possibly also from the industry. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has, however, recently invited the humanitarian community and technology experts to attend an expert meeting on humanitarian UAVs, the aim of which is to address some of the difficult question that the humanitarian use of UAVs, more commonly referred to as drones, gives rise to. Although such initiatives represent an important initial step, it is at the same time important to stress that such initiatives are also needed in relation to humanitarian uses of other technologies whose links to war and state power are perhaps less obvious. In its approach to the issue of humanitarian technology uses, the book drew attention to the significance of donor states whose earmarking practices, demands for new accountability mechanisms, anti-­terror legislations etc. constitute a significant part of the context within which humanitarian actors decide to use various specific technologies. And this now brings us to an important point. One of the things that the notion of technology as having politically significant constitutive effects invites us to investigate, and which the case studies helped illustrate, is that in different ways technologies can have an effect on the character of the relationship between humanitarianism and sovereign power – for example, when influencing political conceivability. And this represents another type of challenge, which humanitarian actors need to find ways of responding to – challenges of a political character and challenges to which ‘lessons learned’ may not be a sufficient response. One reason for this is that important aspects of the challenges of ‘humanitarian technology’ that this book has called attention to transpire prior to the challenges experienced during implementation. As mentioned above, we may see a co-­constitution of humanitarian challenges and new technologies as solutions, and the limitations that stem from such co-­constitution cannot necessarily be ‘resolved’ through shared experience and lessons learned alone. More generally, if we begin from a framing that does not take account of the difficulties that the notion of co-­constitution helped call attention to, then arriving at a set of ‘lessons learned’ will not help address underlying question

Humanitarian aspirations   147 such as how a given technology has contributed to a specific framing of what the problem was in the first place – let alone questions of what such a framing may imply (for example, if the political and ethical challenges that surround the issue of identification are simply framed as technical issues which can be resolved with technologies that add greater accuracy). Humanitarian harm and global political technology We need to do more than merely add a focus on technology to the Do No Harm debate. By paying attention to ‘harm’ in relation to humanitarian technology uses we have also come to recognise that a crucial aspect of the sense in which humanitarian technology uses can generate ‘harm’ stems not just from entanglements with local conflict dynamics (as has been the focus of the Do No Harm debate), but also from entanglements with political dynamics at the global level. In other words, various harmful effects may also stem from the ways in which humanitarian technology uses can feed into global ‘conflict’ dynamics. As described in the case of refugee biometrics (Chapter 4), the collection and storage of biometric refugee data unfolds in a context where a number of influential states see biometric profiling as a favoured counter-­terror technology, and, in view of this, our consideration of how humanitarian technology uses can potentially cause harm needs to acknowledge the relevance of – and possible linkage to – this political context of a Global War on Terror, including the role of new technologies such as biometrics in various anti-­terror endeavours. In an important sense, this aspect of the book’s argument about the significance of humanitarian technology uses does not only challenge Idealist assumptions about inevitable progress and benevolent humanitarianisms (as explained above). Arguably, this interpretation of the significance of humanitarian technology uses – which emphasises the politics of constitutive effects at the level of materiality – also challenges the Realist interpretation of humanitarian practices as peripheral to explanations of how state power operates globally.9 Adding further to this, other insights from the work of Foucault can help us recognise an additional sense in which humanitarian technology uses are significant beyond presumably distant and confined humanitarian settings. More specifically, by combining the idea that even successful technology uses can give rise to potentially harmful effects (e.g. by contributing to an expansion of power) with Foucault’s account of what he refers to as a ‘Boomerang effect’ (Foucault 2003),10 we can begin to appreciate an important point, namely that some of the harmful effects that transpire in humanitarian settings may provide insights into the harmful effects that may also accompany the successfully tested technologies that ‘boomerang’ back into metropolitan cores where their usages may come to have a bearing on the reach and rationale of sovereign power. In other words, from this perspective, we should be careful not to dismiss the kinds of undesirable effects that ‘successful’ humanitarian technology trials give rise to as ‘only’ being illustrative of how various undesirable effects have been exported to peripheral populations in humanitarian locations.

148   Humanitarian aspirations And, in an important sense, downsides and harm stemming from the political implications of constitutive technology do not only follow the successfully tested technology that expands into cosmopolitan cores where it confronts citizens. Indeed, our case studies also add another important point to Foucault’s idea of a Boomerang effect: the likelihood that new technologies may give rise to new forms of harm and insecurity can also follow the newly constituted digital refugee body – whom the technology ‘helped’ constitute as such when deployed in the humanitarian ‘periphery’ – when this body confronts the political system of which the biometric technology has become an integral part. We have, for instance, seen examples of digitalised refugees burning or in other ways seeking to alter their fingerprints when they confront the biometrically-­enhanced asylum systems in Europe (Grant 2011). And UNHCR has also noticed such incidents. As we are informed in a recent article on UNHCR’s website that ‘[t]hey [refugees] are burning themselves with hot metal rods or using razors to slice off skin to beat fingerprint analysis machines’ (Martin and Allen 2009). The question now is how to find a humanitarian response to this and other unintended consequences of humanitarian refugee biometrics. Humanitarian harm beyond codes: constitutive effects and uncertainty as morality Finally, the theoretical framing offered in this book entails a crucial premise that must be considered when taking the Do No Harm debate as the starting point for an interpretation of the significance of our case study findings: accepting the politics of humanitarian practices and the notion of technology as constitutive (the relevance of which has been argued and illustrated throughout the book) implies that we cannot agree to a core premise that underwrites the Do No Harm approach, namely – as David Campbell points out – that ‘it is possible to find at least one option that does not reinforce patterns of conflict and, thus, do no harm’ (1998: 500). Also in the context of humanitarian technology uses – as has also been illustrated throughout the book – can it be said that ‘the faith invested in the existence of options which will do no harm seems misplaced’ (Campbell 1998: 500). Indeed, when confronted with the materialisation of various ‘downsides’ in the context of humanitarian technology uses, then it seems urgent to consider what such findings imply for the more profound question of ‘how to frame a sense of responsibility’ within the humanitarian community (Campbell 1998: 498). As Campbell noted in 1999, it can also be said today that ‘the faith invested in the existence of options which will do no harm seems misplaced’ (1999: 500). Arguably the recent humanitarian turn to new digital technology seems to heighten, or at least call attention to, the continued relevance of this remark – albeit in a different version. As suggested above, humanitarian actors invest great faith in the existence of technologies that are expected to help maximise humanitarian good doing (rather than minimise harm). However, as Campbell also notes, addressing this problem of misplaced faith in the existence of such options or such technologies, requires more than the formulation of regulative

Humanitarian aspirations   149 frameworks or, for that matter, evaluations of lessons learned. We should not expect new technologies in themselves, nor the frameworks designed to minimise the risk that new technologies may be harmful, to entirely do away with the possibility of harmful consequences. Therefore we need to think about the more profound question of how to frame the issue of humanitarian responsibility in the context of technology uses that we recognise as potentially involving risks of various kinds. In making such calls, we also need to understand what prevents us from seeing technology downsides (such as those presented in this book) as more than trivial instances that minimisation approaches can do away with. And here, in addition to a somewhat misplaced humanitarian optimism, a largely unchallenged set of assumptions about the nature of technology also stands in the way of interpreting examples of harmful effects, as an invitation to engage in questions of humanitarian responsibility. Importantly, these assumptions draw upon elements of the same Liberal Modernity narrative that humanitarian optimism feeds on. As Campbell has used Wendy Brown’s ideas to remind us, the inclination to see moral issues as resolvable through frameworks anchored in assumptions about epistemological certainty has its origins in Modernity’s profound ‘preference for deriving norms epistemologically over deriving them politically’ (cited in Campbell 1998: 501). This underlying preference then explains why ‘we are inclined to believe that the construction of normative frameworks can resolve political questions’ (1998: 501). However, the argument presented in this book suggests otherwise: each case study provided illustrative examples of the sense in which the technology being used was capable of a certain sense of agency or transformative quality. As was illustrated in different ways, not only can humanitarian technology uses feed into the social constitution of technology (in ways that cannot automatically be belittled as insignificant or external), technology can also ‘strike back’ in ways that should be expected to affect the constitution of social order and identity. And, as our case studies also illustrated, we should not too readily expect that such effects will necessarily be compatible with humanitarian aims of delivering improved safety to intended beneficiaries. Put differently, the book also challenges us to interpret the findings presented as having implications for more fundamental questions about humanitarian ethics and responsibility. The point to emphasise here is that accepting the value of conceptualizing technology as constituted and constitutive has moral implications: if technology is constitutive and constituted rather than a politically neutral means to an end, then this has implications for the underlying quest for certainty that – as we see in the context of humanitarian technology – has made its way into a realm of ethics and morality. This brings the theme of this book into conversation with broader debates about contemporary ethics. More specifically, the framing and findings presented in this book can be interpreted as buttressing the relevance of Zygmunt Bauman’s suggestion to embrace, rather than vehemently eradicate, ambivalence and uncertainty as the basis of moral reasoning, and bringing this sense of morality into our debates about humanitarian technology uses. And this

150   Humanitarian aspirations suggestion, this idea of humanitarian morality as uncertainty, is actually not new. As Chamayou reminds us through historical citations (‘I love only charity . . . but I am afraid, nonetheless, that I am not fundamentally good’ (2012: 84)) and as figures such as Florence Nightingale have also reminded us (Moorehead 1999; Polman 2010), there has always existed a sense of humanitarian ambivalence. And in relation to current debates about humanitarian technology, this book has shown why we need to bring this humanitarian ambivalence to bear on these debates instead of allowing a quest for extra-­political ethics (Zehfuss 2012), epistemological certainty and epistemologically derived norms (Campbell 1998) to inhibit an appreciation of the ways in which humanitarian technology uses may cause harm, let alone of the broader significance and politics of humanitarian technology uses. In other words, we should recognise that reflections and lessons learned can help humanitarian actors think through the sense in which humanitarian technology uses add a new dimension to the Do No Harm debates given the range of harmful effects that such technology uses can give rise to. Yet, it is also necessary to find a way of thinking about humanitarian responsibility and morality that allows humanitarian actors to admit – and only then to respond to – this more profound difficulty; namely, that despite good intentions and despite various check-­list exercises, technology uses can still give rise to harmful effects for the intended beneficiaries. Thus, an important difficulty before us is that the conceptualisation of technology which allows us to recognise a number of ways in which humanitarian technology uses can give rise to harmful effects cannot easily (if at all) be combined with a humanitarian insistence on the sufficiency of the principle of neutrality. Can humanitarians, for example, still claim to be ‘neutral’ if they accept that the technologies which they use can have a number of politically significant effects?

Notes   1 See https://aidworkersecurity.org/incidents/report/summary   2 And, similarly, in a political context with large numbers of states eagerly insisting on the importance of ‘assist[ing] IDPs so as to prevent them from seeking asylum abroad’ (Betts et al. 2012: 56), UNHCR has taken on ‘ever greater responsibility for the protection of internally displaced persons’ (Betts et al. 2012: 3). As noted in a policy document from the United States Department of State, UNHCR has, since early 2006, placed even more emphasis on ‘new responsibilities for IDPs in the areas of protection, camp management and coordination, and emergency shelter in the context of the UN “cluster leadership approach”’ (US DOS 2009: 23). Internally displaced persons (IDPs) have, of course, long been amongst the populations of concern to UNHCR.   3 This is an example of how such expectations are evident in job descriptions from UNHCR and the World Food Programme as they are looking to hire new ‘biometric monitoring and evaluation experts’ to work in the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps. See http://alljobskenya.blogspot.dk/2013/03/monitoring-­evaluation-expert-­ biometrics.html   4 Of course, some of the material aspects of Foucault’s work – such as his focus on power, architecture and the build environment more broadly – have been used in other disciplines such as sociology (Law and Mol 1995; Fox 1998; Greve 2013).

Humanitarian aspirations   151   5 See, for example, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 41 (3), June 2013. See also Chapter 3 in this book.   6 For example, in a 2005 ‘Humanitarian Aid Decision’ from the European Commission Directorate-­General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) we are informed that ‘[e]xperience with iris recognition technology experiments has been quite good’, suggesting that wider use of this technology could save UNHCR ‘substantial resources’ – an argument which is premised on a reference to the UNHCR’s use of biometrics in the Afghan–Pakistan borderland (see also Chapter 4).   7 See also Aamir R. Mufti’s critique of Talal Asad’s account of ‘a benevolent and humanitarian modernity’, available online at http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/ talal_asad_on_violence_law_and_humanitarianism_a_response/   8 On other occasions, the significance of specific cases of humanitarian harm has been belittled when presented as primarily a managerial matter, rather than as a downside with broader implications for humanitarianism’s confidence in progress and inevitable betterment. For example, in a report by the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services on the issue of sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in West Africa (2002), we are informed that in response to these revelations an appropriate response by UN and its partners is to implement ‘the necessary management and operational changes’ (2002). And, moving to the individual level, scholars have examined the issue of humanitarian moral identity and found that ‘humanitarian experts displayed more explicitly self-­important moral traits’ (Reimer et al. 2011). Such confidence in one’s moral authority as a humanitarian can also be discerned in recent statements from central humanitarian figures: when recently asked how she tackled criticisms whilst serving as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (2008 to 2014), Navi Pillay replied that ‘comments do not disturb me at all’ since she was and still is ‘supremely confident that I speak with moral authority’ (Hullah 2014). Although this humanitarian moral confidence is, of course, not shared by all humanitarian actors (Allié 2011), a sense of humanitarian confidence and optimism has nevertheless made its way into current framings of the issue of humanitarian technology.   9 On the reasons why humanitarian downsides, limitations and productive effects are also of relevance beyond humanitarian zones, Giorgio Agamben has offered one powerful argument (1998: 133) and so has Hannah Arendt. ‘The calamity of the rightless,’ wrote Arendt, ‘is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them’ (Arendt 1951; see also Ilana Feldman). See also Jacobsen 2010 on this link between humanitarian technology experiments and the boundaries of citizenship. 10 See also Graham 2010.

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Index

Afghan biometrically registered refugees 68, 70, 86n1; biometrics deployment 74, 79; borderland 85; Pakistan borderland 57, 59, 74, 151n6; refugee camps 66; refugees 58–65, 70, 83–4, 87n7; repatriation 61, 66, 70, 74, 81, 85; returnees 11, 59, 73, 137; women 73 Afghanistan 34n4; biometric technology 62–3, 71, 74, 76, 82, 131; border territories 58–9; Encashment Centres 85; repatriation assistance 60 Africa 127; North Africa Post 24; South 118, 121; Southern 91–2, 96, 100–1; West 151n8 African 45; governments 106; peacekeeping 32; southern region 101 Agamben, G. 20, 35n9, 68, 115, 151n9 Agier, M. 20, 27, 34, 68, 83, 115 aid workers 1, 59, 86n2, 121, 130, 151n8 allergenicity 94; anticipated 102; potential 94, 98–100; presumed 101 allergic reactions 99–103 America 45, 74 American 7; Academy of Paediatrics 113; black 52; children 113 Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch 12 Anderson, M.B. 5, 23, 142, 144 Anderson, W. 7, 47, 52 Angola 32 anonymisation 63–4, 72–3 Arendt, H. 35n8, 151n9 assistance packages 8, 59, 61 Associated Press 85 asylum seekers 67, 130; biometricallyenhanced systems 148; DNA tests 111n6; political identity 109; Syrian 78; unsuccessful 131 Aventis 92–4, 96, 99–103

Barnett, M. 20, 23, 68, 143 Barry, A. 56n26, 124 Bauman, Z. 20, 149 BBC News 12, 80, 87n8 Benin 126 Bennett, J. 10, 49–50 Betts, A. 61, 68–9, 71, 74, 113, 131, 150n2 BioID 59–­60, 65 biometric 4–5, 36, 39, 54, 60, 65–9, 75, 79–80, 126–7, 142; applications 72; Australian airports 85; in EU passports 83–4; fingerprinting 74, 140; food distribution tool 131; humanitarian 76, 82; identification 29, 58, 137; information 71, 78; introduction 63; monitoring 150n3; profiling 73, 147; recognition system 64, 87n6; refugee 148; represented as successful 86, 141; stored 62; technology 57; templates 139; UNHCR 77, 81, 151n6; use of 30, 59 biometric data 2, 55n5, 66–7, 73, 83; collection 67, 71–2, 78, 83–4; digitalised 68; leaking 76; sharing 2, 71, 76, 78 biometric refugee data 63, 69–70, 78, 147; database 78; registration 4, 13, 62, 68–70, 72, 75–6, 79–80, 126, 146 biometric registration 39, 71, 81, 83, 86n1, 121, 126, 142; exercise 79; refugee management 59–62, 67–8, 76, 80, 87n4; successful 140; technologies 8, 13, 16, 57–8, 61, 74, 80, 83, 127, 131, 139–40 biometric technologies 8, 13, 17–18, 39, 57, 60–1, 65–6, 72, 79, 131, 148; contemporary 58; controversy 140; developments 83; failure 137; humanitarian uses 84; new 2, 59, 131,

178   Index biometric technologies continued 141; provider 75; registration of refugees 82; trialling 76–7; in UNHCR refugee management 68–9; unregulated use 70; use of 85, 126, 145–6 Biometric Technology Today 60 biopolitical technologies 32, 123 Bonah, C. 120 Bonditti, P. 39­–­40, 43 Bosnia 16, 21 Bowcott, O. 21–2 Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) 78; Interior Ministry 78 Burkina Faso 7, 82 BusinessWire 126–7, 140 Cambodia 21–2, 32 Campbell, D. 16, 134, 142, 148–50 CARE International 75 Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 100, 113–14, 127 Chamayou, G. 11, 14, 20, 31, 33–4, 44–7, 51, 53, 55n12, 56n25, 82–4, 90, 93, 95, 114–16, 127, 133, 135–6, 150 Chandler, D. 16 Childers, E. 32, 35n17 children 78, 120; abuse of 9; application of biometrics 77; biometric vaccine records 126; cross-border recruitment 7; deaths in Guatemala 91; experimentation population 102, 121; immune-deficient 117–18; immunity to rotavirus 113; Nigerian 122, 132; vulnerable 99–­101 conflict 19, 25, 74, 116, 130; with counterterrorism legislation 18; feeding into 6; in Mali 79; patterns 148; post 32, 112, 136; prolong 135, 141; sensitivity approaches 144; strategy to contain 32; in Syria 77; violent 7, 15, 24, 113, 138; zones 23, 130, 146 conflict dynamics 15, 145; feeding into 7, 14n3, 23, 145, 147; local 2, 6, 12, 22–3, 25, 28–9, 134, 144, 147; violent 5–­8, 21, 23 Conneally, P. 8, 30 control 7, 9, 55n14, 105, 140; biopolitical technologies 32, 39, 71–2; birth 55n13, 89; Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 113–14, 127; of the city 24; emergent life 108; government 19; legitimating 20; power’s 43–4, 123; of supplies 23; technology 40 Coole, D. 40, 50, 56n28, 123, 129n3, 134 Coomaraswamy, R. 22

Countdown Equity Analysis Group (CEAG) 118 counter-terrorism 65; Donor Measures 18; laws 35n6; legislation 18 Cry9C protein 92, 94–6, 98–100 Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs 87n4 Daugman, J. 59–­60, 62, 70 de Coning, C. 8, 32, 35n18 Dean, M. 108 Deleuze, G. 90, 108, 111n5, 133 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 6, 21, 24, 82; use of peacekeeping drones 30; see also Zaire Department of Homeland Security see US DHS Department of Homeland Security Transportation Security see US DHS TSA Dillon, M. 20, 68, 90, 107–8, 115, 134 donors 23, 34n4, 66, 69, 77, 81; accountability demands 131; demands 71, 86; governments 113; influence 74, 79–80; insufficient donations 102; neutral 25; policies 12, 14, 28–9, 82; reports 87n4; responses 92; states 13, 17–18, 77 Douzinas, C. 7, 20–1 drones 16; humanitarian 141, 146; peacekeeping 30; surveillance 57 Duffield, M. 8, 12, 14n2, 15–17, 20–1, 26, 30, 32–4, 35n13, 40, 55n8, 83, 87n3 Durbach, N. 123 East Timor 21, 35n18 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 93–4, 96, 101, 103; Scientific Advisory Panel 99–­100 Erdos, D. 84 Esposito, R. 125, 128 EU Directive 95/46/EC 83 eugenics 89 European Commission 72, 83–4; Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid (ECHO) 66, 81, 151n6 European Council draft Regulation 83 European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) 78 experiment in world government 35n18 extra-political 16; ethics 16, 150; power of humanitarian language 17 Farraj, A. 57, 71 Fassin, D. 20, 68

Index   179 Feldman, I. 20, 31, 35n16, 68, 151n9 fingerprint analysis machines 148; digital technologies 4; mobile technology 69, 126; recognition 58, 129n7, 140; scanning 127, 129n7 fingerprinting 13, 16, 30, 57–8, 74, 140; 3M systems 76 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) 91, 97 Former Yugoslavia 32 Foucault, M. 10–11, 19–20, 28, 33, 35n9, 37–44, 46, 48–9, 51, 53, 54n3, 55n12–13, 55n15–25, 81, 88–90, 107, 110, 111n4, 122–6, 133–5, 138, 140, 142–3, 147–8, 150n4 Fox, B. 64, 150n4 Friends of the Earth 97, 102 future becoming 73, 139 genocide in Rwanda 6–7 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) 114, 118, 120–1 Global Positioning Systems 30, 131 Global War on Terror 86, 147 GM (genetically modified) 104–6; crops 93–4, 102; Crop Database 96; products 90, 95, 103, 107–8; technology 88, 107, 136 GM (genetically modified) food 95, 103; aid 11, 121; banana 105, 110; imports 110n2; rice 105–6; unapproved 88–9, 91–2 GM (genetically modified) maize 11, 88, 92, 96, 142; allergenicity 99; consumption 104; distribution 97, 106; humanitarian uses 104–5; safety in humans 94–5; supply 110n2; unapproved 89–­91, 95, 98, 103–­4, 106 GMO 88, 94, 96, 102, 105 Gottweis, H. 89–­90 Greenpeace 110n2 Guardian 21, 35n6 Gulmire, K. 62, 87n5 Haiti 21, 57 Hammerstad, A. 16, 34n2 Hansen, L. 16 Hao, F. 62, 87n6 Hildebrandt, M. 55n5, 68, 73, 139 HIV 117–18; experiments on pregnant women 52; trials 121 Hollywood productions 2, 132; style 76 Homeland Security Today 75 Hosein, G. 4, 29, 71, 80, 141 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 7, 12

humanitarian 1–2, 8–9, 11–12, 16–18, 20, 41, 57–9, 76–7, 81, 86, 105, 109, 122, 131–2, 142, 150; actors 3, 5, 13, 19, 22–4, 29, 32, 34, 35n6, 53–4, 67–8, 95, 110, 146; ambitions 1, 115–16; biometrics 74, 76, 82–3, 141; contexts 10, 28, 30–1, 49, 65, 87n3, 133, 136; efforts 6, 14n3, 79, 106, 112; harm 4, 7, 15, 21, 143–5, 147–8, 151n8; objectives 14, 26–­7, 36, 139; Outcomes 130; peripheral 114; principle of neutrality 25; principles 66, 113; problems 135; workers 130, 144 humanitarian aid 6–7, 23, 25, 65, 78, 106, 141, 143; European Commission Directorate-General 66, 81, 151n6; workers 121 humanitarian assistance 6, 14n3, 17, 32, 47; dependent on experimental technology 98, 136; deserving or undeserving 55n6, 61–2, 141; distribution 62, 70; donor-neutral 25; eligibility 86; neutral 23; programmes 81; well-intentioned 76 humanitarian experimentation 2, 9, 11, 30, 32–3, 49, 51, 54, 58–9, 64, 67, 79, 103, 108–10, 127–8; experiments 32, 54, 64, 127; experts 151n8; medical experiments 137; neutrality 3, 10, 37, 79, 134 humanitarian practices 9, 12, 14, 14n2, 25–6, 29, 40, 47, 68, 108, 112–13, 115, 122, 134, 138, 143–4, 147; causing harm 5; feeding into violent conflict 7, 14n3; negative effects 21–3; politics of 2–3, 37, 41, 148; in refugee contexts 6, 23; refugee management 27; unintended consequences 8; well-intentioned 95 humanitarian refugee 32; agencies 130–1; biometrics 74, 148; camps 6–7, 23–4, 27; management 29, 68; registration 18 humanitarian subjects 106, 116; constitution vile 90, 136; implicated 2, 26, 137; safety jeopardised 67, 112, 121, 133; test population 95, 115, 122, 127–8; vulnerable 128 humanitarian technology 8–9, 14, 14n1, 18, 130–1, 136, 151n8; application 85; experiments 151n9; Global Conference 1, 14n1; successful 66, 141, 147; trials 53, 65, 147 humanitarian uses 10, 134; StarLink maize 93; technology 31; unapproved GM products 89, 103–6; UAVs 146; vaccine candidates 113–­14, 116, 121, 124

180   Index humanitarian uses of technologies 1, 5, 10­–13, 15–­16, 19, 21, 36–­7, 41, 48, 103–4, 109, 125, 132–­4, 138, 141–­50; biometric 2, 17, 54, 75, 77, 81–4, 86, 139–40; experimental 7, 88; GM-technology 88–91, 106–7; lesscontroversial 14; new 2–4, 28, 30, 33, 44, 49, 51, 53, 89, 106, 108, 113, 122, 127, 135; new vaccination 112, 124 humanitarianism 1, 4–5, 7, 12, 15–16, 20–1, 25, 27, 29, 36, 47, 57, 61, 81–2, 110, 115–16, 122, 127, 134–5, 146, 151n8; benefits 9; benevolent 147; biopoliticization 55n10; collusion of technologies 28; conduct of 10; contemporary 11, 31, 34, 137, 144; cyber 8, 30; ICRC 141; language of 17; liberal conception 143; medical 112; neutral and impartial 21, 33; normative authority 14; normative power 64; politics of 37, 68; post-Cold War 32–3; power 20; state 6, 79; vilization 129n4; well-intentioned 26 Hussain, M. 81 Hyndman, J. 22–3, 26–7, 32, 41, 55n14 Independent 105, 132 infants febrile episodes 119; immunedeficient 117–18; immune response 117; mortality 132; rotavirus vaccine 121; susceptible 100; vaccinated 119; Venezuelan 119 insecurity 4, 83, 91, 95, 103, 148 internally displaced people 130–1 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 9, 12, 16–17, 21, 34n1, 57, 77, 113, 144; humanitarianism 33, 141; staff kidnapped 130 International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) 1, 8; World Disasters Report 30, 57 International Organization for Migration (IOM) 12, 57 International Union of Nutritional Sciences 106 Iridian Technologies 60, 65 IRIN 57, 66, 75, 76, 81, 86n2, 121, 140 iris 64, 70; camera 73; image 60–1, 87n5, 137; IrisGuard 75–7; patterns 60; registration 60–1, 63, 86; scanners 77; scanning 11, 16, 57, 69, 74, 78, 85; screening 63; technology 58, 76, 136; template 60, 62–3, 73; testing 58–9, 65–6

IrisGuard 75–7 iris recognition 11, 13, 29, 58, 64, 67, 72–3, 87n8; in Afghan repatriation 70–1, 74, 137; equipment 77; methods 87n5; new applications 85; refugee context 83; registration 60–1, 63; technology 8, 36, 58–60, 62–6, 70, 75–6, 81, 84, 85, 131, 140, 151n6 Jabri, V. 35n9, 68, 115 Jacobsen, E.K.U. 69 Jacobsen, K.L. 30, 57–9, 62, 73, 86n1, 151n9 Jacobsen, R.M. 120 Jain, S. 31, 35n16 Janmyr, M. 23, 145 Jasanoff, S. 49–51, 54, 56n26, 56n29, 124, 133, 138 Keen, D. 14n2, 23, 134 Kenya 25; biometric processing 74, 150n3; government 4, 25; HIV trials 121; postindependence 55n14; near Somali border 7, 24; Somali refugee community 25; vaccination campaigns 126 Khaw, P. 59, 87n8 kidnappings 12, 130 Knutsen, E. 78 Lambert, L. 31, 33–4, 47, 115, 135–6 Latin America 91, 96, 100 Latour, B. 49–­50, 54, 89, 124 Lebanese government 78; refugee camps 24 Lebanon 74; refugee biometrics 78–9; refugee workers 37 legislation: counter-terrorism 18, 146; data protection 72 Lester, A. 7, 31 Liberia 22, 35n18, 82 Lischer, S.K. 7, 12, 14n3 Loescher, G. 16, 61, 130–1, 135 Long, G. 60 Lumidigm Inc. 126 Mackintosh, K. 13, 18, 34n5, 35n6 Macrae, A. 18, 34n4 Maharaj, D. 93, 98 Malawi 82, 92, 118 Mali 79; Red Cross staff kidnapped 130; refugee crisis 7; terrorist groups 24 Malian refugees 74, 79–­80 Malkki, L. 27, 61, 68 mass expulsions 131

Index   181 Mauritania 7, 24, 79; biometric refugee registration 80–1 Mauritanians 80–1 Medair 57 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) 6, 12, 81, 113, 122, 130; Speaking Out Case Studies 23 Migration Policy Centre 75 Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark 87n4 Moore, M. 55n19, 64, 73 Mozambique 22, 32, 92 National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) 68 negative effects 4, 7, 28, 34, 36–7, 39, 58, 145; debate 14, 35n13, 134; elimination 29; of humanitarian practices 9, 12, 21–3, 26; incidents 25; potentially 14, 22, 27; risk 9, 23, 30, 79; sources of 57 NGOs 11–12, 17, 67, 145; biometric refugee registration 146; Liaison Unit 146; international staff 130 Nicks, D. 7, 24 Niger 7, 24, 82 Nigeria 122; children 122, 132; epidemic of meningitis 121; government 122 Norfolk Genetic Information Network 99 North Africa Post 24 Nuremberg Code 52 OAU (Organization of African Unity) 24 OCA (Organic Consumers Association) 97 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 144 O’Ryan, M. 120 passports 80; biometric 83–4 peace-building post conflict 32 peace-enforcement 32 peacekeeping 32; drones 30; MONUSCO mission 57; operations 8, 22; UN forces and staff 22; UN handbook 144 Pelletier, D. 101 Perez-Schael, I. 118–19 Petryna, A. 31, 52, 59, 116, 136 Pinker, S. 9, 143 political 2, 4, 27, 41–4, 48–9, 86, 89, 107–9, 110n2, 116, 123, 127–8, 133–5, 138, 142, 147; ambitions 79; body 126; challenges 141; conceivability 146; consequences 25; context 59, 66, 68, 70, 150n2; debate 56n26; decision-making processes 58; dimensions 131; dynamics

23, 26; effects 143; emergencies 14n2; identity 51, 106, 124; imagination 140; implications 148; interests 50; intervention 42, 139–40; landscape 9, 20, 32, 69; ontology 90, 110; order 13; organisations 12; power 28; procedures 55n3, 55n19; problem 21; questions 71, 149; rights of refugees 67; significance 3, 38; status 88; subject’s body 91, 111n4; technologies 10, 29, 37, 46–7; see also biopolitical technologies, extra political, politically relevant politically relevant 40, 42, 44, 48–9, 64, 88–90, 106–7, 109, 123–4, 128, 138–40 Polman, L. 6, 23, 134, 141, 145, 150 post conflict peace-building 32; repatriation 112 privacy 4, 72, 77, 83–4; implications 13; invasion of 129n7; loss 140; protection 63–4; refugee 141; threats 73 Privacy International 71, 84 Projected Global Resettlement Needs 74 Puerto Rico 7 Pugh, M.C. 33 Pugliese, J. 58–9, 70, 140 Rabinow, P. 38–9, 54n1, 55n24 racism 59 racist 51; border 108; break 43–4; divides 48, 123; modalities 88, 108 recyclers 59, 62, 65–6; double-dip 132; recycling problem 61 refugee 2, 5–6, 8, 29, 69–71, 80–1, 86, 130–1, 137; Afghan 28, 58–64, 68, 83–4, 86n1, 87n7; biometric data 63, 69, 78, 147; contexts 3, 23; crisis 7, 57, 81–2, 85; data 71; database 73, 78; digital body 68, 72–3, 86, 137, 139, 148; digitalised 148; false 4, 59; falsely matched 64; fleeing genocide 6; GM foods 104; identification 67–8; Iraqi 70; lack of protection 35n8; Malian 74, 79; management 27, 32, 55n14; matters 87n4; movements 30; Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) 34n5; privacy 72, 84, 141; problem 35n14; protection 66, 73; recognition 36; recruitment 25; 60; rights 67; at risk 102; securitization 20; sexual exploitation 1, 151n8; suspicion 35n11; Syrian 74–8; UN agency 65; warriors 135; workers 37; see also recyclers, refugee camps, refugee population, refugee registration, repatriation

182   Index refugee camps 8, 11, 24, 27, 146; Afghan 66; Burkina Faso 7; Dadaab 7, 24, 27, 74, 131, 150n3; Goma 24; Honduras 6; humanitarian 6–7, 23–4, 27, 32; infiltration 24–5, 77; Jordan 24; Kakuma 150n3; Lebanese 24; Malawi 82; Maritania 7, 79; networks of power 23, 26; Niger 7, 24; Pakistan 8; Palestinian 27, 41; spatial layout 41; Syrian 77; Tindouf 24; women trafficked 22; Zaatari 75, 86n2; Zaire 6; Zambian 102 refugee population 62, 68–71, 84, 102; civilian 24; implicated 71, 74, 86, 104, 137; Somali community 25; undesirable surplus 83 refugee registration 2, 30, 59–60, 65, 82, 141; biometric 4, 13, 17–18, 57, 62–3, 68–9, 72, 75–6, 79–80, 126, 131, 140, 146; biometrics success 66–7; digitalised 60; falsely matched 63–4, 80; iris 63, 86; iris scanners 77; potentially biased 58 Reid, J. 20, 40, 55n10, 68, 107, 115, 134 ReliefWeb 37, 140 repatriation 11, 130–1; Afghan 74, 81, 85; Afghan refugees 58–60; assistance 60, 136; endeavour 60–3, 70, 86; postconflict 112, 136; program 59, 61; refugee 11, 60; system 72; UN Program 65; use of biometrics 66; Voluntary Repatriation Centres (VRCs) 59–60, 73 resettlement 69, 74 Rieff, D. 6, 22, 25, 30–1 Rose, N. 38–9, 54n1, 55n24, 108 Rwanda 6, 32; genocide perpetrators 7; Rwandan Patriotic Front 24–5 Sanchez, D. 127 Sanchez, J. 102 Sandvik, K.B. 16, 68, 141 Sasse, A. 59, 85 Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) 99­–100 second timer 60–1, 70; see also recyclers security 4, 11, 21, 55n22, 74, 79, 90, 107, 115, 127–8, 129n7, 133–4, 142; border 68; dialogue 86n1; digital refugee body 137; donor policies 29; through exclusion 123; food 93, 97–8, 105; foreign national agencies 26; guarantors 9, 112, 143; hard-core contexts 65; homeland 67, 69–70; human 55n8; international 131; national 82; practices 16; priorities 18, 23; provision 24, 138, 140; sovereign 19­–20, 95; Syrian

refugees 78; transportation 85; western politics 108 Senegal 82 sexual abuse of minors 22 sexual exploitation of refugees 1, 3, 151n8 Seybolt, T. 21, 23, 25–6 Shah, S. 31, 59, 116, 136 Sierra Leone 21–2, 103 Slim, H. 16, 23, 29, 32, 35n10 Smith, G. 30 Smith, J. 94 Smith, K. 70 Somali armed group 7, 25; border 4, 7, 25; refugee community 25 Somalia 18, 25, 32, 35n18 SOS Food 110n2 South Sudan 12, 33, 82, 130 StarLink maize 13, 92–6, 103, 110n1; potential allergenicity 99–102; tainted food aid 97–8, 100, 102; unapproved 104, 109 Statewatch 70–1 surveillance 27, 41; drones 57; technology 55n14 Sykes, P. 78 Syria 7, 9, 18, 24, 77; Northern 130; refugee crisis 57, 85; southern 75 Syria 360° 24 Syrian aid in the tech age 74–5, 79; armed forces 24; asylum seekers 78; authorities 76; Free Syrian Army 7, 24; government 78; IrisGuard 76; Syrians 77–8; woman 78 Syrian refugees 74; camps 77; crisis 7, 75–6, 79; in Jordan 75–7; in Lebanon 78; negative implications for safety 79 Taylor, S. 101 terror 147; anti-terror laws 13, 18; antiterror legislations 146; Global War on Terror 86; lists 71 terrorism 68, 141; combating 79 terrorists 20, 71, 135; groups 24; Interdiction Program (TIP) 4; material support 19; organizations 18, 35n6; posing as refugees 4; potential 141 Terry, F. 6, 23, 26, 145 Ticktin, M. 20, 31, 35n11, 35n16, 69 trafficking 3; human 2, 9; women 22 Transgenic Crops 92 Turner, S. 32, 41 Uganda 82, 126, 145

Index   183 U-landsnyt 8 UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) 6, 8, 16, 18, 23–4, 32, 36, 57–9, 61–3, 68, 70, 72–3, 76, 78, 81–2, 85, 130, 145, 148, 150n2, 150n3; application of iris recognition 65, 77; News 140; NGO Liaison Unit 146; operation 60, 64, 71, 80; practices 86; policies and practices 74, 146; refugee camps 12, 79, 86n2; refugee management 69, 87n4; refugee worker 28; Registration Officer 75, 87n9; Situation Update 79; spokesman 66, 87n7; staff 67, 131; use of biometrics 65–6, 151n6 UNICEF 121, 144 United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations and Department of Field Support (UN DPKO/DFS) 145 United Nations News Centre 8 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) 1, 4, 8, 34n5, 78, 131, 146 United Nations Office of Internal Oversight Services 1, 151n8 United Nations peacekeeping 32; handbook 144 United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC) 145 United Nations Security Council Report 7, 130 United States (US) 13, 97, 110n1–2, 117; access to European financial transactions 84; anti-terror laws 18; Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 100, 113–14, 127; Department of Agriculture (USDA) 91–3; Department of Defence (DOD) 69–70; Department of State (DOS) 69, 150n2; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 93–4, 96, 99–101, 103; Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 92–3, 100, 113–14, 120–1; GM maize 96, 98, 102–3; government 4, 77–8; Government Accountability Office (GAO) 69; Homeland Security policy 79; monitoring 71; resettlement processing 74; Secretary of Agriculture 93; Supreme Court judgement 35n6

United States (US) Agency for International Development (USAID) 6–7, 91, 110n2, 113; Case Study 97; sponsored trial 121 United States (US) Department of Homeland Security 69­–70, 74, 79; Transportation Security Administration (US DHS TSA) 85 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) 16, 57, 146 vaccination 54, 114, 123–4, 139; humanitarian practices 126, 128; humanitarian programmes 11, 118, 129n4, 142; management 127; rotavirus 117, 119–21; techniques 125; technology 112, 139 van der Ploeg, I. 72, 124 VaxTrac 126–7 Vietnam 121; French colonial 31; Vietnamese adults 129n7 vile bodies 2, 33, 45–7, 52, 83, 95, 115 Vogler, S. 24 Vrankulj, A. 82 Walby, S. 48 Walters, G. 108 Walters, W. 40, 55n9 Washington, H. 51–2 Weiss, T.G. 6, 15, 23, 29 Weizman, E. 20, 27–8, 35n14, 41 West Africa 127, 151n8 WikiLeaks 4 women 78; face shielding 72; oral contraceptive field studies 7; pregnant 52, 99–102; trafficked 22; violence against 9, 22 Woodward, J.D. 58, 70 World Food Programme (WFP) 29, 91–3, 98, 102–3, 131, 150n3 World Health Organisation (WHO) 113, 117, 119, 121 Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) 6–7; humanitarian efforts 14n3 Zambia 92, 98; vaccination campaigns 126 Zambian government 98; refugee camp 102 Zehfuss, M. 16, 150 Zimbabwe 92