Abstract
Governments, humanitarian agencies, and non-government organizations increasingly resort to data-driven techniques to meet the challenges they face in dealing with growing mobile populations such as refugees. Such techniques originate in bureaucratic administrations of the 19th century and, even earlier, in slave trade and plantation accounting methods. They were then perfected in logistics and global supply chain management of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially with the advent of information technology. We examine the application of these techniques in humanitarian cases, seeking to contextualize them within the framework of logistic security. To understand the drivers of this trend, we introduce the analogy of the “optics of data,” through which we view how data analysis techniques change perceptions. In doing so, we show the differential impact of these techniques on various segments of society, making some “safer” while pushing others to the verge of uncertainty and vulnerability. Using multiple case studies, such as ID cards for Rohingya and LGBTQIA+ data in Afghanistan, we propose to use this lens of vulnerability to examine data issues as an alternative to a security lens.
First Page
1
Last Page
15
Dedication
This article is dedicated to our families.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.17.3.1959
Recommended Citation
Bennett, Nicole M. and Ekbia, Hamid
(2024)
"Security or Vulnerability? The Optics of Data in the Humanitarian Sphere,"
Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal:
Vol. 17:
Iss.
3:
1–15.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933.17.3.1959
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol17/iss3/5
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Human Geography Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Social Justice Commons
