In recent years, humanitarian organisations increasingly embraced biometric technologies to respond to refugee crises. Therefore, this thesis studied the features and effects of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ (UNHCR) biometric cash transfer programme in Jordan. The method that has been used is an analysis of relevant academic literature, reports, policies, and news articles examining biometric tools and the varying uses of biometrics in humanitarian contexts. In particular, attention has been paid to the effects of biometrics on refugee management, as well as on UNHCR and its beneficiaries in Jordan. The analysis uses the concepts of accountability, humanitarian neophilia, and humanitarian technology governance to improve understanding of what the use of biometrics means for the humanitarian sector and those dependent on it. The analysis shows that UNHCR’s biometric cash transfer programme has improved downward accountability by speeding up registration processes, thereby ensuring quicker financial inclusion of refugees. Biometrics also improve upward accountability by providing instant metrics regarding beneficiaries, distributions, and other audit trails. Yet, the analysis also reveals serious concerns about experimentation with new technologies in humanitarian settings, a lack of informed consent and data safeguards for refugees, and UNHCR’s increasing dependence on the private sector. UNHCR’s use of biometrics also improves the reputation of these technologies, generates new protection challenges, and increases exclusion risks for non-registered refugees.

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The impacts and influences of globalised digitalisation has increased its presence within the political structures of both international economic and international security regimes, and the rise of e-governance systems and digital security technology has probed IR scholarship to study this policy shift from traditional forms of governance to digital ones. Less considered here is how digitalisation has been extended to the international humanitarian governance regime. Digital tools are increasingly being produced and employed within international humanitarian interventions. However, despite the rapid mobilisation of these digital technologies, humanitarian crises and their corresponding interventions are becoming more frequent and more prolonged and the assumed benefits of these well-intending digital tools are failing to improve the lives of their beneficiaries. While evaluations of these interventions are not lacking, the preoccupation of material, quantitative assessments of humanitarian missions erroneously neglect the perspectives and experiences of their intended beneficiaries. In this regard, the paper seeks to problematize the methods in which humanitarian practitioners produce and implement their digital aid in a critical study into the political and normative structures which shape the design of digitised humanitarian governance. Post Colonial theory is recalled as a central, anchoring framework from which its concepts of racialisation, hegemonic identity reconstruction, and exploitation will be theory-tested via public policy analysis to the research’s case study. Here, the ‘neutrality’ of humanitarian governance is debunked, and hidden lineages of coloniality within the UNHCR’s mandate in the Rohingya refugee emergency are brought to the fore.