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Decolonising Digital Design in Humanitarian Governance : A Case Study of the UNHCR’s Intervention in the Rohingya Refugee Emergency

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-52669
Date January 2022
CreatorsMcCollin-Norris, Symone
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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