#Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order

by Fleur Johns

Overview

Like many other areas of life, humanitarian practice and thinking are being transformed by information and communications technology. Despite this, the growing digitization of humanitarianism has been a relatively unnoticed dimension of global order. Based on more than seven years of data collection and interdisciplinary research, #Help presents a ground-breaking study of digital humanitarianism and its ramifications for international law and politics.

Global problems and policies are being reconfigured, regulated, and addressed through digital interfaces developed for humanitarian ends. #Help analyses how populations, maps, and emergencies take shape on the global plane when given digital form and explores the reorientation of nation states' priorities and practices of governing around digital data collection imperatives. This book also illuminates how the growing prominence of digital interfaces in international humanitarian work is sustained and shaped by law and policy.

#Help reveals new vectors of global inequality and new forms of global relation taking effect in the here and now. To understand how major digital platforms are seeking to extend their serviceable lives, and to see how global order might take shape in the future, it is essential to grasp the perils and possibilities of digital humanitarianism. #Help will transform thinking about what is at stake in the use of digital interfaces in the humanitarian field and about how, where, and for whom we are making the global order of tomorrow.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197648872
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2023
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	9.32(w) x 6.48(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice at UNSW Sydney. She is also an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Fleur has held visiting appointments in Europe, the UK, the US, and Canada, and currently serves on a range of editorial boards, including those of the American Journal of International Law and the journal Technology and Regulation. She is a graduate of Melbourne University and Harvard University, and a member of the New York Bar.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Interfaces: New media of humanitarian relation

Chapter 2: Maps: Historical snapshots and digital rewriting

Chapter 3: Populations: From statistics to data science

Chapter 4: Emergencies: Waiting and watching in the palliative present

Chapter 5: States: Analogue and digital

Chapter 6: Law and policy: Infrastructures of interface

Chapter 7: Uses: Using, disusing and misusing digital humanitarian interfaces

Editorial Reviews

"What happens when the objectives, beneficiaries, and participants of humanitarian activism are framed by digital technologies? When the door to humanitarian relief is opened or closed by algorithms? #Help lays out the distributive effects of recourse to digital interfaces by humanitarian actors: the re-ordering of powers and vulnerabilities between human groups, the routinization of emergencies, and the redirection of political action. This is a hugely interesting, politically relevant, and altogether new analysis of the transformations of the humanitarian imaginary resulting from its integration in the global digital revolution." — Martti Koskenniemi, Emeritus Professor of International Law at the University of Helsinki and Director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights

"How does the diffusion of digital interfaces transform the practice, philosophy, and politics of humanitarian work? This essential and richly documented book discusses the normalization of binary thinking and datafication, the rise of new actionable objects and relations, and shifting temporalities and governance models. #Help offers an invaluable perspective that challenges what we thought we knew about how people today ask for help, and how others respond." — Marion Fourcade, Professor of Sociology and Director of Social Science Matrix at the University of California, Berkeley

"Philosophically grounded, historically rich, and analytically sharp, this book brings much needed clarity to the complex field of digital humanitarianism. Johns shows how humanitarianism is changing in relation to computational practices, and why this matters for law and politics on a global scale." — Kate Crawford, Research Professor at USC Annenberg and Senior Principal Researcher at MSR New York

"As humanitarianism has become a global language meant to represent and alleviate the suffering of the world, Fleur Johns critically explores its latest avatar: digital humanitarianism. Through fascinating case studies of recent tools claiming to characterize populations, map needs, and organize responses, #Help offers an original, rigorous and much-needed analysis of the ambiguous promise of this technological turn in the politics of compassion." — Didier Fassin, Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study

"Books are rarely as prescient as Fleur Johns's #Help... It is a master class in theoretical synthesis and granular case work. #Help does not hesitate to take on big topics in big ways." — Wendy H. Wong, The American Journal Of International Law

"#Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order is a characteristically rich, intricate, thoughtful and insightful intervention from one of international law's most consistently enlightening contemporary scholars, Fleur Johns. It is a thoroughly enjoyable read and, on its face, a succinct descriptive account, infused throughout with sharp analytical observation." — Stephen Humphreys, London Review of International Law

"The book is interspersed with 'prospects for doing otherwise',...It is a crucial contribution of the book that it hones its analytical apparatus to pay attention to dissensus and divergence and to keep questions of digital humanitarian futures open." — Claudia Aradau, London Review of International Law

"The theoretical offerings of the book can be mobilised and adapted in research attuned to the modes of freedom and safety people create collectively among themselves and against social sorting, detention, violence, policing and its technologies." — Margie Cheesman, London Review of International Law

From the Publisher