Mirca Madianou, "Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful" (Polity, 2024)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Mirka Madiano about her book titled Technocolonialism, When Technology for Good is Harmful, published by Polite in late 2024 in the UK and just out in early 2025 in the US.

which examines a really interesting kind of combination of things. Humanitarianism, humanitarian aid, humanitarian projects happening today have all sorts of different kinds of technology embedded in them. Obviously, shiny ones that are in the news like AI, as well as a bunch of other things that maybe we don't think about as much like biometrics.

What is this doing? What does this mean for people actually on the ground in need of humanitarian assistance? What does it mean for the people who work with them? Obviously, unfortunately, we're in a context of disasters of various kinds becoming more common, making these questions even more important to investigate. So Mirka, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast to tell us about it. Thank you for having me.

Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Sure. So, yeah, I'm a professor in the Department of Media Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

And my work focuses on the social consequences of communication technologies, infrastructures and artificial intelligence, AI, in global self-contexts, especially in relation to migration and humanitarian emergencies.

And over the last 10 years, I've been researching the uses of digital platforms and AI in humanitarian operations. So the book brings together two major projects I have been involved in over the last 10 years.

It was an opportunity for me to synthesize the findings into new theory. So since 2014, I've been developing article publications, reporting on aspects of my research. And in 2018, I started developing the notion of techno-colonialism in a journal article. So the book was an opportunity for the argument to be fully developed in a book, you know, at book length. So that's how it came about.

That's definitely helpful to understand, especially given the, I suppose, false idea that an idea comes to you and you write a book and it's all nice and straightforward and happens really quickly. And it's like, no, of course not. Right. So much goes into writing books and researching these kinds of topics. So can you tell us a bit more about the projects that went into this?

Yeah. So the first was a study of the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, which made landfall in the Philippines at the end of 2013, November 2013. And together with colleagues, we followed the disaster recovery over the course of a year, focusing on the experience of affected communities. So we took a sort of people-centered approach. It was an ethnography. But we also interviewed other people

you know, representatives from organizations involved, NGOs, humanitarian organizations, and government, the local government and the national government. And, you know, 2014, which is when our fieldwork took place, was a time of texting and hotlines,

But even in the earlier stage, I was struck with how the data of affected people, which had been submitted as part of feedback mechanisms, for example, were used for different purposes, such as audit. So that project, the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan,

led me to follow the trails of data. And in so doing, I was able to sort of illuminate the power relations between humanitarian agencies, governments, private companies, and affected people. And following from the Haiyan project, I set out to explore the uses of digital technologies in the humanitarian sector more broadly.

And for that sort of second project, I interviewed humanitarian workers, donors, digital developers, entrepreneurs, private companies, volunteers, as well as affected communities, people from affected communities. And again, my approach was to follow the trails of data from crisis affected people and refugees to humanitarian organizations, technology companies and donors.

And this allowed me to combine different levels of analysis, right? And ultimately be able to see how data and AI practices operate as an infrastructure in this space.

So you can see how also in the course of these 10 years, you know, I started by looking at texting and hotlines and ended up looking at biometrics and chatbots and other AI platforms and algorithmic decision making because there was a huge sort of technological change over the course of 10 years and in the course of the two projects. So as data and AI become more ubiquitous in the sector,

I became aware that what I was observing was sort of a new infrastructure, right, that was underpinning many practices in the sector. And really, that kind of was the approach that I took in the book. I started to really look at these developments as an infrastructure that underpins humanitarian operations and ultimately transforms humanitarianism.

This is very helpful to understand the different parts that went into this. So thank you for that introduction. The other kind of key piece of foundational information I think we should probably discuss at this point is, of course, the title, right? Technocolonialism. Really impactful term jumps off the page. Can you tell us more about what you mean by it and how it's bringing together ideas about technology, ideas about colonialism, and ideas about infrastructure? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, technocolonialism refers to how digital innovation, data and AI practices entrench power asymmetries and engender new forms of structural violence and new inequities between what we call the global north and the global south.

So technocolonialism illuminates the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian bureaucracies, state power and market forces and the extent to which they reinvigorate and rework colonial relations. So technocolonialism, I think, as you can see already from sort of this definition, it pays attention to the role of humanitarian organizations, whether we're talking about UN agencies or large NGOs or NGOs

national NGOs, as well as nation states. And again, nation states play a role either as host nations in case of refugees or as donor governments which fund aid organizations. And of course, techno-colonialism is also about the role of private companies, including tech companies, which are becoming increasingly present in humanitarian operations. You know, the private sector is increasingly active in the aid space and

So it's important really to emphasize that techno-colonialism is not just an argument about digital capitalism. It's about the convergence of humanitarian bureaucracy, state power, market forces and imaginaries around technology. Perhaps I should say also that, you know,

Through the term techno-colonialism, I recognize that phenomena like displacement, migration, humanitarianism, as well as the development of digital technology are steeped in colonial relations. You know, take humanitarianism, for example, right? It's deeply entangled with colonial histories.

humanitarianism emerged in the colonial expansion of the 19th and 20th centuries. And although, of course, contemporary humanitarianism is a

often understood in moral terms, like the imperative to reduce suffering, to refer to a well-known definition by Craig Calhoun, the structural asymmetry between donors, humanitarian officers and aid recipients reproduces the unequal social orders which shaped colonialism and empire. So you can see a direct link there.

And technology and science are also part of colonial genealogies. You know, science was integral to the civilizing mission of colonialism, a tool used to justify colonial rule. Science was the prime tool used to mold colonial subjectivity. So not just a tool, but actually something more constitutive of colonialism. And we see that everywhere.

very much in the systems of enumeration, measurement and classification that were developed in empires, the British Empire, to control colonial subjects. Biometrics is the typical example, I guess, here, right? You know, biometrics was first used in India as part of British Empire's efforts to control colonial subjects.

And we see these sort of legacies today because biometrics is used in refugee settings, again, to control and manage other bodies. And I spoke about infrastructure earlier. Again, you know, infrastructure is very much steeped in colonial relations. You know, the typical example here is the telegraph, right, which mapped onto the geography of the British Empire and later provided the footprint for the Internet.

So my work builds on this scholarship that recognizes the durability of colonialism well after the end of direct colonial rule. And it's important here to clarify that the emphasis is not on a single sovereign empire. I'm not talking about the U.S. empire here, but an enduring structure of domination.

which is evidenced in the persistent practices of othering, the epistemic violence of Eurocentric systems of knowledge and their claims to universality, and the codification of forms of racial discrimination.

So I should probably add a couple of things here. When I use the term colonialism, I don't use it to refer to a radically new phase of colonialism. I don't use it as a historical prism through which to understand the present. I understand, I argue that colonialism has never really gone away. Empires collapsed, but their legacies and logics have survived and permeate processes such as humanitarianism and its institutions and technology itself. And then technology in turn reworks all these relations.

And I should also emphasize that I do not use colonialism as a metaphor. It wouldn't be appropriate, given the violence associated with colonialism. To use colonialism as a metaphor is to depoliticize the term and the phenomena that it describes. But I want to really argue that we need colonialism as a framework in order to explain why technological experiments take place in refugee camps today.

typically in the majority world or the global south. We need colonialism as a framework to understand why there is no meaningful consent in a refugee camp where refusing to submit your biometric data amounts to refusing to receive aid when you have no alternatives for survival.

And at the same time, techno-colonialism is not the same as neocolonialism. Of course, they are related terms, but techno-colonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital practices play in entrenching inequities, not only between refugees and humanitarian agencies, but also in the global context more broadly. So by adding the term techno to colonialism, I really wanted to emphasize this constitutive work here.

of technologies and data and AI. And yeah, and maybe I should add here that techno-colonialism is about violence.

Which is sometimes something that, you know, I feel we need to emphasize. You know, I am talking about a form of violence in this book. It is a form of structural violence, violence into structural inequities and marginalization, which affect whole groups of people on the basis of their gender, their race, etc.

their class, their ethnicity, disability, or where they live in the world. So as the term suggests, structural violence is systematic, but it is also experienced indirectly. It's felt through daily humiliations and cruelties. So I feel that this dimension of violence is important to keep in the framework when we think

We try to understand what we mean by techno-colonialism. Yeah, no, that's definitely worth adding and emphasising as well as that

explanation more broadly. So thank you for unpacking the term for us. Before we get further then into what this can look like, you know, how does this actually appear on the ground to people and the problems there? I wonder if we can talk a little bit about sort of the idea or ideas, plural, that went into this merger of digital technology, including artificial intelligence, but obviously not just that, in merging those with humanitarian operations. Why did

have these tools been so enthusiastically adopted by these practices? Yeah, I mean, there are a number of factors at play here. I have identified five logics, plus one, I explain by putting it this way. So five logics which explain the push for digital technologies in humanitarian operations. So first of all, we have what I call the logic of humanitarian accountability, which

which is behind the assumption that the interactive nature of digital technologies will correct the deficiencies of humanitarianism and facilitate the participation of affected communities in their own recovery, thus improving the accountability of humanitarian operations.

The criticism of humanitarianism I just outlined when I was making the links to colonialism are well known and established. This is not my critique. It's a well-known critique of humanitarianism. So digital technologies have often been championed as potentially correcting these deficiencies. And that's kind of behind this notion of the logic of accountability, right?

On the other hand, we have the logic of audit, which stems from the constant demand for metrics which humanitarian organizations must submit to donors in order to secure more funding. So you have here a system of funding whereby essentially governments, typically in the global north, fund humanitarian agencies and in turn demand data and metrics from

And also they demand efficiencies and they also demand that there is a reduction of fraud. So there is the emphasis of sort of zero tolerance to fraud. And digital technologies generate metrics and are associated with robust audit trails and efficiencies. So, for example, an often used argument is that biometric technologies will reduce the amount of low level fraud, which occurs when people claim aid twice.

So third logic is the logic of capitalism, which is basically about this dynamic entry of the private sector in the humanitarian space through the now ubiquitous private-public partnerships. There are thousands of such partnerships in the sector. And of course, this logic is driven by the logics of profit, but also the logics of, you know,

realigning sort of business, realigning humanitarian or social problems to business interests more broadly. Work management platforms. Ugh. Endless onboarding, IT bottlenecks, admin requests. But what if things were different? We found love.

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social problems is exemplified by this logic of technological solutionism. And solutionism puts solutions before the actual problems. The emphasis is often about finding problems for solutions rather than the other way around. And coupled with a logic of capitalism, solutionism kind of leads to this normalization of technological pilots or experiments in the global South, you know, among vulnerable people.

And finally, we have the logic of securitization, which at first glance primarily concerns the role of the state and the way it uses technologies to make populations legible and protect borders. But of course, the logic of securitization is not just about the state. We know securitization is big business and it's inextricably linked to capitalist logics. So,

So this really also suggests that all these different logics are interconnected. And in fact, they are all enmeshed. But this is an analytical distinction, you know, when I say five logics here. So securitization is particularly relevant to the response to refugee issues and the use of biometric technologies. But, you know, it actually also permeates other practices here.

So I said in the beginning five logics plus one, because in the book I also discuss a sixth logic, which is the logic of resistance. It doesn't drive digital developments, but we cannot really understand the five logics without understanding practices of resistance. You know, structures of domination produce condensation. And so we cannot really understand these five logics unless we also take into account resistance.

how they are challenged and resisted in everyday life. So I think, yeah, these five logics, which are completely interlinked, I think can help explain why we're seeing this proliferation of digital platforms in humanitarian operations.

Yeah, no, it's very helpful to have them laid out. Obviously, as you said, in sort of neat analytical categories, real life is a bit messier, but still helpful to have that as a starting point to then talk about some of this in some of that messy detail, though obviously less detailed than the book has. But, you know, hopefully we can do a decent justice to an overview of it at least.

And the place I'd love to turn to next is biometrics, right? We've already mentioned that, in fact, a few times. And in the book, you describe it as, quote, most exemplifies the increasing digitalization and datafication of humanitarianism. So given that you've laid out these logics for us, can you help us understand perhaps a bit more concretely how they're expressed through something like biometrics and why this is kind of the point of the sphere, I suppose? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, just to explain this kind of why biometrics exemplifies this increasing digitalization, you know, I think...

we need to really emphasize here that biometrics is really ubiquitous in humanitarian settings, especially in response to refugee flows. And biometrics was introduced as part of the registration of refugees. It was driven by what I termed earlier as the logic of audit, the desire to produce strong audit trails that minimize fraud and

And by biometrically authenticating refugees, humanitarian organizations aim to minimize the instances where people claimed aid twice or claimed aid that they were not entitled to. Of course, biometrics was also driven by the logic of reform or accountability because, you know, having a...

an unambiguous legal identity is seen as a basic human right. And so it's also driven by this kind of logic of reform and sort of the aim to empower affected people.

And it's also driven by the logic of capitalism because, of course, the biometric industry is one of the most rapidly growing industries. And so it's also linked to the logic of securitization and the fact that states want to make populations legible, including refugee populations legible. And there is push from donor countries.

donor governments to use biometrics in humanitarian operations all the time. And the logic of solutionism also comes into play here because biometrics are part of various kinds of solutions that have been proposed and actually rolled out, often in combination with other technologies like blockchain technology, to improve the delivery of biometrics

to streamline cash assistance and to deliver also aid remotely.

As I said before, biometrics was introduced as part of the registration of refugees, which is kind of a very basic practice that takes place when refugees come into contact with humanitarian agencies for the first time or when there is a registration exercised by, let's say, UNHCR. But what we see today is that biometrics...

has a number of very ordinary uses. So, biometric technologies underpin all sorts of key operations, from cash transfers to healthcare.

So in order for a refugee to collect cash assistance, they will have to verify themselves biometrically. In order to collect rations or other resources like charcoal to, let's say, cook a meal, they will have to verify themselves biometrically. They will have to scan their face, possibly. If they want to see a nurse or a doctor, in many settings, they will have, again, to register their biometric data. I mean, all this will vary in parts of the world, but it's...

The direction of travel is that we're seeing a proliferation of biometric technologies and a trivialization of biometric technologies. And by that, I mean that biometrics are used in very ordinary, everyday settings, not just an important moment, which is like the registration of a refugee.

This is very helpful to understand because it sounds on paper in some ways like, oh, that makes lots of sense. And then as soon as you start to go, well, hang on a second, here's what this means every day, it becomes a lot clearer, the intrusiveness of a lot of this that can cause, you know, it becomes pretty easy to see, oh, wait a second. Well, what if you did this? Or what if you didn't do this? Oh, wait, the problems or the potential for problems kind of immediately becomes clear. And of course, to some extent, that seems reasonable.

from reading the book that in some instances of rollouts of this kind of technology, that is understood that the experience on the ground may not be kind of as designed on paper. And that's why some of this technology at least has sort of feedback mechanisms or processes in it. Can you tell us more about why we maybe need to be more critical about this and kind of rather than just go, oh, look, feedback, great, then that'll fix the problem. You know, what more do we need to think about when it comes to feedback?

Yeah, I mean, feedback is collected as part of the logic of accountability that I mentioned earlier. All humanitarian organizations will now have accountability programs. And accountability is defined narrowly as feedback. This is, you know,

there are many ways in which accountability could be defined, but it has been sort of shaped as feedback mechanisms in the humanitarian sector. And feedback is defined even more narrowly as feedback on digital platforms increasingly. That, again, has been my experience. Again, you can collect feedback in many ways through kind of face-to-face encounters with, you know, affected people. But

Increasingly, what I'm observing is that what counts as feedback officially is the feedback that is submitted through various digital platforms. As I said in my earlier research in 2014, there were hotlines where people would text their feedback. Now, in the response to a more recent crisis, what we're seeing is chatbots online.

being deployed which often have sort of prescripted questions and answers and you can choose your problem from a drop down list.

There are a number of observations I think we can make here, right? That those without access to technology or those without access to connectivity are excluded. And we tend to think, oh yeah, there are so many billions of mobile phones or smartphones in the world, but we often forget that

the connectivity is not always great. People don't always have load on their phones and therefore they don't have a seamless kind of internet connection. And very often whole families may have only access to one phone. And very often that phone might be held by a male member of the family. And therefore it's not that everyone has, you know, equal opportunities to access these different devices.

feedback mechanisms. Of course, a lot of people cannot read and write. Sometimes we forget that. But, you know, in countries like Myanmar or DRC, where, you know, there have been studies on feedback mechanisms, there has been a very low response rate. And it's surprising, you know, that these countries have very low literacy rates. So, but even if you

are able to read and write, it's not easy to summarize your problem in 200 or 300 characters, right? And if you're using a chatbot, maybe the chatbot doesn't include your problem in the drop-down list. And therefore, again, you know, to what extent are you able to really express your own thoughts in these situations? And there are a number of implications from all this. If answers are prescripted, are we really talking about accountability here? Yeah.

If answers are prescripted, isn't this an imposition of a Western framework on local people, what we would call epistemic violence? And the whole idea of accountability, actually, I think is Western-centric. In my research in the Philippines,

It was very interesting in the interviews with my interlocutors. There was no cultural feedback. People thought the surveys were weird because they were not really used to being asked to give their thoughts on these practices. And it's no surprise that many of these responses that they recorded were thank you notes because they felt also culturally it was inconceivable that they would express critique or criticism

criticism to those who were helping them. So there was that kind of colonial framework through which aid was filtered through.

And this is important because people in one-to-one interviews with us, they would be very critical of the aid process and the aid operations. So it's not that they were just thankful. They had a lot to say, but the feedback mechanism was not really allowing them to say this. So essentially it became, in many cases, just as a way for people to record their thanks rather than their actual thoughts. Yeah.

And then the most, I guess, striking thing here, which relates to what I said earlier about following the trails of data, is that I found that in my work that many people often don't receive a response directly.

They, you know, they submitted, and this relates more to the Taifun Haiyang response, while they submitted their texts, in that case, to the hotlines, they never got a response back. And this, you know, led me to think,

to think, you know, where does this data go? If it doesn't go back to the affected communities to improve things, what is the purpose of collecting feedback? You know, what happens to the data? So again, following the data, where does the data go? Led me to see that the data actually was being pushed to the national office and then from there to Europe,

back to the headquarters and from there to donors who again demand their evidence of impact. So you can see that then this process of feedback becomes rather extractive rather than a process that is essentially sort of speaks to this logic of accountability and the democratization of humanitarianism.

And in a way, because it's there, because it's offered, it also creates a sort of, you know, it creates a figure, if it justifies some of the practices, because, you know, someone can say, well, we have an accountability program and therefore, you know, we are

taking into account local viewpoints. It's a little bit like informed consent. You know, if you have informed consent in biometric registrations, but people are not really given an alternative if they don't want to give their biometric data, is this really informed consent? Can it be meaningful consent? I don't think so. But because biometrics

a consent process is in place, it can then justify some of the practices that it supports. Yeah, another piece of technology that you talk about in the book that seems to have kind of similar things going on in terms of it looks like it makes communication and two-way communication more possible, but actually maybe it doesn't, is chatbots. So

So I wonder if you can tell us a bit about how these are being used for humanitarian purposes and the way in which maybe they're not as kind of new as we think. Maybe they are actually more related to other colonial technologies, even though they kind of have little happy animal faces on them. Well, I mean, I already mentioned that chatbots are used for feedback, so that's...

one way to, you know, one use of chatbots. I mean, I think we have to understand these developments, including chatbots, in this wider context of what I call in the book, you know, this experimentation, right, which happens in

with technologies. A lot of my participants from the humanitarian sector referred to what they called pilotitis, this constant flow of experiments that are taking place globally. And another term that came up in the interviews was this kind of treating refugee camps as laboratories for experimentation. And

And so in recent years, there have been pilots involving mental health chatbots for refugees or pilots involving algorithmic decision making in terms of who will receive aid and who will not. But chatbots in general have been seen as a sort of exemplar of innovation and AI for social good. And

And so, you know, trying to understand experimentation, I went back and tried to understand experimentation in colonial settings and global South settings. And one important sort of pattern there is that there is a flow of experimentation where experiments take place in the global South and then the value from experiments is exported to the global North. And so contemporary experimentation is,

follows a similar geographic distribution to the medical and pharmacological experiments of the early 20th century. And I think this reveals a persistence of the global geometries of power and why people in the majority world continue to be considered as ready subjects for experimentation. So, you know, when I surveyed

the AI applications for social good in the humanitarian sector in 2021, I found that all were led by organizations in North America or Europe. So again, you can see the kind of geographic unevenness there.

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And this geographic unevenness matter is because it reveals the power dynamics involved, right? Computation depends on classifications, which are inherently political and often reflect the dominant values of the environment. And because classifications are embedded in infrastructures, they become invisible, which renders them even more powerful. And I think this can be really interesting.

seen if we take into account the example of language. And that's why I think chatbots are such a good example to illustrate some of these concerns. So I should probably say here that chatbots, you know, in the humanitarian, we're not talking about chat GPT, you know, we are talking about sort of an earlier generation of chatbots which use natural language processing and

But essentially, mostly provide answers to a list of predetermined questions. So it is not, you know, it's not chatbots running on large language models, but a previous iteration of chatbots, which are built on natural language processing. And there are...

different kinds of chatbots. There are more informational chatbots where you can use one to find out about, you know, where can you go, where is the nearest hospital? Uh, but there could also be, uh, chatbots which help you, um, develop skills like learn a new language. Um,

or mental health chatbots, which aim to provide some form of psychotherapy. And it is really that latter group that I'm mostly concerned with, right? Because the question of language becomes key here. So we know from the work of the colonial writers like Gugi Wat Yong, that language constitutes the body of values through which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world.

So even if a chatbot is translated, let's say, in a local language, the algorithms and the classifications on which it was based were trained in English. And this is very problematic. Like if you're talking about mental health illness, you know, where the cultural specificity of emotions is essential, you know, you really need to understand.

have an understanding of mental health and mental illness that is rooted in local culture. It cannot be a system that is trained in the English language. And postcolonial scholars have long questioned psychiatric classifications for being Eurocentric. So we see now that these chatbots are somehow revitalizing some of these concerns that have been longstanding.

And again, an example, right? If a mental health chatbot is treating refugees for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is a very Western-centric idea, right? When refugees are sort of fleeing war, they're in the trauma. You can really see immediately that they don't really reflect people's realities. And you can see that they could actually be harmful, you know? So in this case, we're not really just talking about a form of data extraction, right?

This is something that is much more profound. You know, we're talking about a form of epistemic violence, this imposition of a framework that is Western-centric on a local culture that also in turn also devalues kind of local language, invalidates local systems of knowledge.

Yeah, that's a whole bunch of problems there. And I think goes back to some of the questions you were raising earlier about violence and the ways in which these things are very much intertwined. We can't just separate the technical from the colonial and therefore need terms like techno-colonialism. The next place I'd love to ask you to tell us more about is you've mentioned a few bits so far around resistance to this. Now,

Now that we've mapped out a bit more of what the problem is, can you tell us of some instances of resistance?

Yeah, I mean, as always, oppression and violence are met with resistance. And colonialism has always been a story of struggle. In recent years, we've seen various protests in refugee camps, you know, refugees protesting about overcrowding. You know, we had the protest in Moria camp in Greece, just to give you an example. But actually, we also had protests because refugees were concerned about biometric registrations. And this happened in Bangladesh, in the camps in Bangladesh.

So most contestation in humanitarian settings, though, is not overt. And I think there is a little bit of a bias in the kind of, again, the largely Anglo-centric literature on protest, which privileges open dissent, which may be tolerated in liberal democracies in the West, but not really an option in many parts of the world where, you know, the cost of

rebellion is prohibitive. So to make sense of these forms of resistance in asymmetrical settings, I develop in the book this notion of mundane resistance. And I draw here on the work of scholars in the Black radical tradition, Orlando Patterson, Cedric Robinson, Anton de Combe. Patterson and Robinson, you know, were observing that in settings like slavery,

where acts of outright defiance are not possible, resistance often took passive forms, including evasion or refusal to go to work or satire or arson. I prefer the term mundane resistance because there's nothing passive about refusal. So mundane resistance takes place below the radar through small, ordinary acts, and

So, for example, in my fieldwork in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, we observed how our interlocutors simply refused to use some of these digital feedback platforms. They were actually not used much. So, yeah.

you know, that is a form of resistance. And it might not register as such in sort of that first look. But actually, I think there is something important there that happens. You know, refusing to engage with a chatbot or a feedback platform

platform can be a political statement in a different voice. And actually, interestingly, also a lot of the psychotherapy chatbots I was talking about earlier, again, they don't really, they don't have much use. And often you see that they kind of, they're discontinued after a little bit of time. So I think that speaks volumes about how people see some of these interventions. However,

refusal is not an option for refugees when they're asked to register their biometric data. In my current research, my interlocutors tell me that even if they're worried about biometric registrations, they don't feel able to raise their concerns with NGO workers because they feel they will be excluded from aid. So we can see here that there are hierarchies of exclusion and agency and resistance within humanitarian structures.

you know, just to give you some examples. Yeah, that's definitely helpful to understand the different examples as well, because it is never just kind of exactly one thing and it may not be what we expect to look for. But that's why the looking closely is important. Speaking of humanitarian workers, I wonder if we can maybe think a little bit about

about what the implications are of what you've been telling us. Because of course, on the one hand, the idea of humanitarianism focuses, as you said, around sort of humanitarian care and a lot of the ways it's talked about kind of officially or talked about in the global north. And yet, then there's also what you've been telling us about in terms of techno-colonialism and the way that's very much embedded increasingly in humanitarian work actually on the ground, especially in the global south.

How do we make sense of that combination and contradiction? Yeah, there is a fundamental contradiction here. The organizations which aim to save lives can also be involved in a system that produces harms. We have to make a distinction here, though, between the people involved in humanitarian work and the institution. So in my research, I've come across some incredible people with great dedication and

And it's actually some of my participants from within the humanitarian sector who have been very critical of some of the practices that we've been discussing here today. I have learned from my interlocutors and I'm fully responsible for the content of the book. I need to make that clear. But what I want to highlight here is that there are very critical and very reflexive voices in the humanitarian sector

But the sector is also very hierarchical. It's not a homogenous sector. Frontline staff have a different understanding of the problems compared to people at the middle or the top of the organization. But frontline staff don't have much leeway. They are asked to implement and they can't deviate, even if they have concerns about

they are also local staff so in some sense you know they're also excluded by the system because you know very often you know they you know

Their voice is not really heard. They may have great ideas, but there isn't really much space for them to make their voices heard. So this is sort of a critique also of localization, which is very much focused on asking local staff to implement things that have been decided elsewhere. But all this is to say that humanitarianism on the whole is a reflexive space and a space where there is a lot of critique and self-critique.

But I'm often reminded here of a quote by Alex de Waal, who said that humanitarianism is reflexive and critical and is able to somehow absorb this critique and emerge unscathed or unchanged, rather.

So, you know, we can see here that people care and workers can be very reflexive, but the system, you know, what I call in the book, the humanitarian machine can actually, you know, carry on regardless. And that is often what causes harm, especially when coupled with processes of automation, algorithmic decision making. And of course,

coupled also with the other logics that I mentioned earlier, the logics of the private sector and the logic of governments, which also become part of the equation. Because it's not just what humanitarian workers here think. It is how all these logics come into play to create this kind of structure of techno-colonialism. And if I said earlier that humanitarian workers are very reflexive, we don't really see the same degree of reflexivity from...

let's say, the tech sector. So I think that's, you know, something that perhaps explained this contradiction that you pointed out earlier on. Yeah, no, that's definitely worth continuing to think through, along with, of course, many of the other things you've raised. Are there any additional implications of this research that we haven't touched on yet that you want to mention? Yeah, I can highlight two things. The first one is that

I mean, what I develop towards the end of the book, I develop this notion of the infrastructuring of humanitarianism. And infrastructuring refers to the fact that humanitarian systems depend on privatized or government networks and systems. And so, for example, biometric systems, which underpin cash distribution programs in refugee camps, are typically run by private companies.

and are often accessed, you know, can be accessed by nation states. And so what we're seeing here is that this, the fact that digital infrastructures exist

permeating many aspects of humanitarianism and basic humanitarian operations. And these systems increasingly become interoperable with those of nation states and private companies, has serious implications for the nature of humanitarianism. You know, humanitarianism has been defined traditionally as, you know, it has been characterized by this kind of

sacrosanct principles of humanity, neutrality, independence and impartiality. So for example, the principle of independence means that aid needs to be independent of state power or private interests. But if these infrastructures are increasingly privatized or accessed by nation states, can we really talk about humanitarianism as independence?

You know, we have examples where the biometric data of refugees have been shared between governments. You know, it happened with the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh where the data were shared with the Myanmar government. So where is the independence here? And then similarly, the principle of humanity means that everyone is deserving of aid with no preconditions. But if we're asking refugees to come

to give their biometric data, and this becomes almost a conditionality for receiving aid. Are we then really upholding the principle of humanity, right? So as digital infrastructures converge with humanitarian bureaucracies, they both inherit and amplify each other's limitations and change the nature of aid.

And this has a further implication, and this is the last thing I'll add here, is that we're seeing here what I call infrastructural violence. I mentioned at the very beginning that colonialism is about violence. It's a form of structural violence. But as digital infrastructures permeate many aspects of everyday life in the refugee camp or the disaster zone, it's

And as infrastructures become almost the ambient environment of everyday life, to use Brian Larkin's definition, the harms are normalized. Right. So the errors of automation can be grave, you know, when an algorithm decides whether a family is eligible for aid or not. Right.

or when an algorithm refuses to authenticate a refugee, right? Or even in less spectacular errors, like, you know, using a chatbot which doesn't include the answer to your problem or the question you want to ask.

or being given an e-voucher in an area that has no opportunities to cash it. These are sort of small, everyday cruelties. And these are all examples of what I call infrastructural violence. Because as infrastructures transcend violence,

Institutional boundaries and humanitarian systems become interoperable with those of private companies and nation states. The opportunities for structural violence are multiplied. Assurability of data and the permanence of records amplify the risks to individuals. So infrastructural violence shares the characteristics of structural violence, but it is even more diffused and multiplied.

As data infrastructures become more ubiquitous, the violence becomes more present and yet more diffused, almost like a form of ambient violence. And what is also diffused to the point of obliteration is any accountability. So yeah, these would be two sort of

further implications from this work. Yeah, definitely worth mentioning both of those. Is there anything that can be done to improve things in the future given all of this? I mean, it's so embedded. Yes. And, you know, I end the book with some reflections on this question, what can be done? And I struggled with this question, I have to be honest, because, you know, I

It's not easy in an unstable world, you know, with conflicts, war and displacement. I felt I couldn't just end with critique. So I took inspiration from Ruha Benjamin's work, you know, to practice hope as well as critique. And I

And of course, hope, first and foremost, comes through people affected by disaster or displacement. You know, those who work in refugee camps know that, you know, encounters in refugee camps can be life-affirming. People do so much with so little, but also they can be very heartbreaking at the same time.

And so there are no recipes, but I end the book with some thoughts of which are only meant to sort of open the conversation, right? And I can share some with you here. I mean, one theme, sort of one idea is to reimagine humanitarianism. And by this, I do not mean sort of a bureaucratic reform, but a more radical rethinking, you know,

you know, more radical approach to localization, for example, you know, localization that actually gives resources to local organizations to decide what would work best for communities. This is in contrast to how localization is currently understood, which is to ask local

local NGOs to emulate Western ones, right? So to build capacities, the term that is often used, and that is very paternalistic. So true localization would mean to allow local NGOs to develop their own systems, to decide what would work best for local communities, and not to just implement ideas that have been developed elsewhere.

Now, of course, ultimately, I mean, I would like to, you know, I would love for the conditions that lead us to humanitarian assistance to be abolished. I mean, that would be my standpoint. But that is the ideal. What do we do until that is abolished?

And I think this idea of reform is useful until that abolition kind of can come, because I think, you know, we need something for those moments when, you know, there is still a need for humanitarian aid.

you know, in the camp where I'm currently working, we're seeing now all aid being paused because US is withdrawing because of the new administration. You know, what happens, you know, that puts into sharp focus the importance that, you know, until we can abolition the reasons why we need refugee camps, we need to have something in place that will provide some aid because otherwise, you know, what will happen?

And I think this kind of more radical approach to humanitarianism and localization is a very small step, but it is one step in the thing in the right direction. The second thing is to reimagine infrastructure, right? And to try to think with the people rather than for people, you know, rather than assume what is good for them, rather than kind of having this idea of for good, is to try to think as humanists

Arturo Escobar says to design in the pluriverse rather than to design for good. And by the pluriverse, he means a world in which many worlds fit, right? A world which allows for all these different voices to flourish. And so rather than deciding what good means, which usually means how can we design technology that meets the UN sustainable goals, is to ask

communities affected, what would be the values that they prioritize? And that's kind of what I'm trying to do in my current work. So, you know, ask people to express the values on which the technologies should be based on. That's, I think, important. And having, you know, cooperative platforms, that, again, something important to emphasize here. And then, of course,

you know, encourage these new solidarities between activist groups, civil society groups, NGOs, and affected communities to emerge. And I end the book with an example, which I felt was quite useful in showing us that some of these practices can be stopped.

What we saw in Ukraine recently is a campaign to stop using biometrics in refugee settings. And this was initiated by both a group of INGO staff,

but also civil society groups. And actually, the Ukrainian government was very keen to campaign against the kind of capturing of biometric data of its citizens.

And GDPR, the General Data Protection legislation, was also called upon because it has special provisions for sensitive data such as biometrics. And this applies to European citizens. Of course, it doesn't apply to citizens in global south continents, but because refugees were in neighboring countries.

in Romania, actually GDPR could be called upon in that context. And actually biometric registrations or a big part of them stopped in July 2023. And this for me is a good example of how these different bodies, you know, citizens, civil society organizations, activist groups, INGOs can come together and stop some of these practices. Of course, you know, in this case, we're

We could think, why did it happen in Ukraine and it's not happening in Bangladesh? Why is it not happening in Kenya or other contexts? So we can see these inequities in sharp focus. But it's an example that, first of all, proves that some of these practices, cash distributions can take place without biometric registrations. And second, it also shows that through this campaigning, perhaps some of the practices

practices, the techno-colonialist practices I've been outlining here can be stopped. It's not impossible. So for me, this reimagining of sort of these solidarities and global solidarities and activism is another important way that answers this question, you know, what can be done?

Yeah, no, definitely some important things there. And of course, it will continue, right? We hope at least the more ideas, more discussions, more change will continue. Speaking then of the future, what might you be working on now that this book is out? Are there any kind of current or upcoming projects you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

Yeah, lots of ideas, but my main current project is a direct extension of some of the issues discussed in the book. Together with colleagues, we're studying the introduction and uses of digital identity systems in refugee camps in Thailand. And this is a project funded by the British Academy. So we're actually in the middle of fieldwork right now. And we take a refugee-centered approach and look at how refugees respond to

practices like face recognition,

And we also develop participatory action research through different art forms. Our refugee interlocutors reimagine the digital identification systems that would work for them, right, and assert their values. And that's something that's quite new. And kind of it goes back to this idea of reimagining infrastructure. So while there is a thread that connects this new project back to the techno-colonialism book,

I'm learning so much from a very new empirical context, a deep dive on digital identity practices, especially facial recognition, and crucially, participatory action research and art-based research, which is quite new to me and quite exciting to explore. Well, that sounds very interesting. Best of luck to you and your team with that project. Thank you.

In the meantime, of course, while you're working on it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Technocolonialism When Technology for Good is Harmful, published by PoliE in late 2024 in the UK and early 2025 in the US. Mirka, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for having me.

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