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Third World Quarterly

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The humanitarian cyberspace: shrinking space oran expanding frontier?

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

To cite this article: Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (2015): The humanitarian cyberspace: shrinkingspace or an expanding frontier?, Third World Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/01436597.2015.1043992

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1043992

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Third World QuarTerly, 2015http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2015.1043992

The humanitarian cyberspace: shrinking space or an expanding frontier?

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

Peace research institute oslo (Prio), No-0186 oslo, Norway

In the face of growing operational and financial deficits governments and humanitarian organisations have limited ability to respond to humanitarian crises; one consequence has been a call for changes in the ways that such crises are understood and managed.1 The turn to information and communication technology (ICT) has been one high-profile response. According to the 2013 World Disasters Report:

New ICT tools for humanitarian action are proposed with the potential to detect needs earlier and predict crises better, enable greater scale, speed and efficiency of response and assistance delivery, enhance the specificity of resource transfers to match needs of communities at risk, and increase accountability and transparency.2

Assertions that ‘humanitarian information is humanitarian aid’ and that ‘information is a basic need’ have become commonplace. Despite strong scholarly interest in humanitarian technology,3 however, there have been few attempts to critically assess the turn to ICT in relation to the challenges facing humanitarian action. As Duffield has observed, rather than uncritically embracing cyber-humanitarianism, humanitarian agencies need to understand exactly what they are buying into.4

This article attempts to help bridge this gap by exploring the topography of ‘humanitarian cyberspace’ since the mid-1990s, when humanitarian technology first arrived on the inter-national policy agenda.5 The goals are to offer some observations about the conditions of humanitarian cyberspace, and to reflect on the relationship between the persistent features

ABSTRACTIn an effort to contribute to a more critical understanding of the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in humanitarian action, this article explores the topography of the ‘humanitarian cyberspace’ – a composite of ‘cyberspace’ and ‘humanitarian space’ – as it has emerged since the mid-1990s. The goals are to offer some observations about the conditions of the humanitarian cyberspace and to reflect on the relationship between the persistent features of humanitarian action and new developments brought on by ICT. The prism through which the role of ICT in humanitarian action is explored is that of the ‘shrinking humanitarian space’.

© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com

KEYWORDSCybersecurity cyberspace humanitarianism humanitarian space iCT technology protection of civilians

ARTICLE HISTORYreceived 8 april 2015 accepted 20 april 2015

CONTACT Kristin Bergtora Sandvik bergtora@prio.no

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of humanitarian action and new developments brought on by ICT. The prism through which the role of ICT in humanitarian action will be explored is that of the ‘shrinking humanitarian space’ – the notion that denial of access, decreasing respect for international humanitarian law (IHL), and humanitarian worker insecurity are gradually shrinking the field of human-itarian action. The article also offers some reflections on the future of the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space.

On the one hand, the humanitarian cyberspace is much like the traditional humanitarian space: humanitarians interact with other actors (eg people of concern, host states, non-state actors, the private sector, donors and the global public) and try to assist those in need while avoiding doing harm. The difference, however, is that that these undertakings occur through, or are enabled by, ICT. Sometimes these endeavours are relatively successful; at other times they fail. On the other hand, the emergence of the humanitarian cyberspace has also brought about a set of changed conditions. Specifically technology has altered the modes of inter-vention, the relationships between actors and the nature of relief itself. The emergence of ‘digital humanitarians’ is just one example of how technology has broadened the nature of intervention, with respect to both the professional background of the aid provider and the possibility of providing aid from a distance. As illustrated by the increasing reliance on mobile cash transfers in food aid, the humanitarian cyberspace also offers new options for the con-stitution and distribution of relief. Finally, the notion that access to information constitutes a form of relief in itself exemplifies how technology is reshaping the very definition of aid.

Over the past decade countless reports, policy documents and academic articles have claimed that the humanitarian space is shrinking. Nevertheless, no systematic attention has been paid to how this narrative will evolve as humanitarianism becomes more technol-ogy-driven, and is increasingly played out in cyberspace. To begin this work, I offer three tentative readings of the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space: first, I propose that the traditional threats to the humanitarian space persist, in ways that are sometimes slightly modified and sometimes reinforced by technology. Second, I propose that the humanitar-ian cyberspace has engendered a new set of threats, which impinge on the humanitarian space. Third, I suggest that the humanitarian cyberspace broadens the scope of humanitarian action – which means that, instead of shrinking, the humanitarian space is actually poised to enter an expanding frontier. Taken together, these propositions yield a research agenda for future work on the humanitarian cyberspace.

The article consists of four main sections: the first describes the nature of the humanitarian space as traditionally conceived, summarises the narrative of a shrinking humanitarian space and offers several coexisting perspectives on the humanitarian cyberspace. The second and third sections examine some persistent characteristics of humanitarian action, along with some new threats that have emerged as humanitarianism embraces cyberspace more fully, and is embraced by everything cyber in return. The fourth section revisits the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space, and offers some thoughts on the future of that narrative. A brief conclusion follows.

Humanitarian space

A multitude of humanitarian spaces

‘Humanitarian space’ is a term specific to the field of humanitarian action. Practitioners and academics working in the field employ several different notions of the humanitarian space:6

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as a space within which nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) operate, as a field of human-itarian governance, and as a site where people of concern can claim protection and relief.7 The first two views are ‘actor-oriented’; the third is ‘beneficiary-oriented’.

The notion of the humanitarian space as ‘NGO space’ was popularised by rony Brauman, of Médecins Sans Frontières, who used the term ‘espace humanitaire’ to refer to an environment in which humanitarian agencies can operate independently of external political agendas, and in accordance with the principles of humanitarian action.8 It should be noted that the role of humanitarian principles in the humanitarian space depends, in part, on who the actors are: if the right to deliver humanitarian relief (particularly as regulated in common article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Convention and the 1977 additional protocols I and II) is central, humanitarian principles – in particular, impartiality and neutrality – are paramount. But, as Collinson and elhawary have observed, humanitarian actors may implement the principles differently, depending on whether they are working from a rights-based or solidarity-based perspective, or are subject to multiple mandates.9

Humanitarian governance is generally understood as the attempt to govern individuals and human collectivities in the name of the preservation of life and the reduction of human suffering.10 It occurs mainly in the so-called humanitarian emergency zone, where a global system of international organisations, donors, troop-contributing nations and NGOs operates in parallel with, as well as across, domestic state structures to respond to and administer a permanent condition of crisis.11 It is in this zone that organisations such as the Office the united Nations High Commissioner for refugees (uNHCr) fulfil their obligations to pro-vide civilians with international protection – through relief, legal protection and the type of deterrence that is (allegedly) provided by the humanitarian presence on the ground.12 Humanitarian governance also involves the united Nations, which coordinates international aid. In the uN context the humanitarian space is integral to a broader field of governance that includes peace enforcement and stabilisation, peace building, development and inter-national criminal justice.13

The conception of humanitarian space that is focused on the right, for persons of concern, to receive protection and assistance has historically gone hand in hand with a rights-based approach to humanitarian aid, which is intended to transform the relief agenda from a philanthropic model, with no accountability, to a transformative model designed to achieve social change. Oxfam, for example, defines humanitarian space as ‘an operating environment in which the right of populations to receive protection and assistance is upheld, and aid agencies can carry out effective humanitarian action by responding to their needs in an impartial and independent way’.14

It is notable that the beneficiary-oriented understanding of the humanitarian space may be shifting. Over the past five years rights-based approaches to humanitarian aid have been increasingly viewed as difficult to conceptualise and implement, and have lost significant policy traction as a result. (Participation and empowerment, in particular, tend to be seen as hard to operationalise.)15 At the same time there has been an increasing focus on resilience, and on people of concern as first responders in humanitarian crises. Mills, for example, in his definition of humanitarian space includes the local and global physical, ideational, political and strategic environment in which individuals attempt to claim their right to assistance and protection, and in which humanitarian actors operate, emphasising that individual benefi-ciaries ‘play a significant role in creating their own humanitarian space’.16

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Humanitarian technology is both a driver and a result of this development, as can be seen in the notion of information-as-aid (which corresponds to an emerging notion of a right to humanitarian information), and in the stated objective of humanitarian technology to help communities obtain life-saving information through which to rescue themselves.17 Thus current discourse regarding the perspective of persons of concern focuses on participation through technology, but without the objective of structural transformation characteristic of rights-based approaches.

A shrinking humanitarian space?

As the humanitarian community has struggled with the emergencies in Afghanistan, the Democratic republic of the Congo, Darfur, Haiti, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria, a persistent concern has emerged that the humanitarian space is shrinking – a shift that is resulting in serious consequences for both the protection of civilians and the security of humanitarian workers. Collinson and elhawary have observed that the various definitions of humanitarian space in circulation tend to coalesce around this ‘shrinking’ notion:18 the space has been described, for example, as being under siege and in need of safeguarding.19 The notion of the shrinking humanitarian space is both a normative claim about the proper role of humanitarian actors and a set of claims about the nature of threats to the humanitarian space.

Generally observers have attributed the shrinking of the humanitarian space to the polit-icisation of humanitarian aid, which is viewed as detrimental to principled humanitarian action. In Darfur, rwanda and Sri Lanka, among others, the perceived failure of humanitarian action was closely linked to the idea that humanitarian actors were seen as political actors with particular agendas. This de facto turn away from principled humanitarian action has been blamed, variously, on donors, stabilisation politics, mission creep and the increased outsourcing of aid delivery to commercial security providers.20

As noted earlier, some observers hold that the humanitarian space is shrinking because of declining adherence to humanitarian principles. While the message is largely the same, it should be noted that cause and effect is sometimes also shifted around, so as to argue that the most important consequences of a shrinking space are denial of access to human-itarians,21 increasing insecurity for humanitarian workers,22 and declining respect for IHL.

In academic circles, however, the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space is being met with increasing scepticism. Some observers point to the absence of a baseline from which to assess such claims;23 others question the very notion that the humanitarian space can be identified, represented and maintained separately from the political space at all.24 Still others point to inconsistencies in the claims about the diminishing humanitarian space. Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, for example, observe that for ‘at least three decades it has been commonplace to lament the decline of IHL’; meanwhile, they note that (at the time of writing), there had been a reduction in civil wars, and that fewer people were being killed in conflict. They also argue that claims about the proliferation of non-state groups as key sources of insecurity seem poorly founded.25

rising insecurity among humanitarian workers is a key part of the narrative of the shrink-ing humanitarian space. This aspect of the narrative has been institutionalised through World Humanitarian Day, celebrated annually on 18 August to commemorate the deaths of Sergio de Mello and others in Baghdad in 2003, but also to honour humanitarian workers killed during the preceding year. In a 2013 article Dandoy and de Montclos argued, however, that

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the departure from patterns of the past was not as pronounced as had been suggested, and questioned the perceived deterioration in operating environments.26 Other critics of the ‘shrinking space’ narrative have observed that humanitarian operations now address a broader range of situations in a larger number of places, entailing the expansion of the international humanitarian system into active conflict zones where the objective is to ‘stay and deliver’.27

Claims about loss of humanitarian access are at odds with continuously expanding budg-ets, activities and institutional structures, and other factors that, similarly, contradict the notion that the humanitarian space is shrinking: for example, although international aid decreased in 2011 and 2012, as a result of the worldwide financial crisis, it is now at an all-time high.28 The remainder of this article focuses on the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space in the context of the challenges and opportunities presented by the humanitarian cyberspace.

A humanitarian space in cyberspace

As a point of departure for construing the humanitarian cyberspace as a field of action, I rely on Hilhorst and Jansen’s descriptive notion of the humanitarian space as a social field where actors negotiate the outcome of aid.29 Thus the humanitarian cyberspace is conceived as a social arena where various individuals and organisations (including donors, uN agencies, NGOs, staff, beneficiaries, private sector actors, peacekeepers and other military actors) nego-tiate activities and outcomes in ways that are both enabled and constrained by technology. My premise is that the construction of technology is subject to political contestation – that is, to the realities of professionalism, finance and politics;30 at the same time, the diffusion of non-human objects – including cyberspace – generates new political settlements, which in themselves constitute forms of institutional power.31

In an effort to strike a balance between a view of the humanitarian cyberspace as either technologically determined or socially constructed, I offer two parallel conceptualisations of cyberspace. One influential technical definition divides cyberspace into (1) physical layers, consisting of hardware, cables, routers, and so forth; (2) a syntactical layer, consisting of software and systems operations; and (3) a semantic layer, which holds the types of informa-tion that bridge humans and machines.32 The second way of conceiving of cyberspace has evolved from the long-held notion that the virtual world is a different social space from the real world to an understanding that there is one social world, which contains both traditional and technologically advanced modes of communication and sites of social activity.33 These technologies, in turn, constantly and iteratively shape the prospects for human commu-nication and interaction. For humanitarians, donors, people of concern, armed actors and host-country governments, cyberspace is what Deibert and rohozinski describe as a site of ‘intense competition, one which creates an ever-changing matrix of opportunities and constraints for social forces and ideas’.34

The humanisation of technology, coupled with increasing human dependence on such technology, is profoundly changing concepts of identity and citizenship, as well as the ways in which we govern, are governed and accept being governed. Parallel changes have occurred in the realm of humanitarian governance. While ICT has not transformed the fundamentally undemocratic structure of humanitarian governance, it does allow people of concern a mod-icum of voice. Whereas complaints were previously relegated to more-or-less functional and

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overburdened formal mechanisms for example, today’s refugees speak out freely on Twitter or Facebook, whether to complain about suspected fraud or poor registration processes at uNHCr, or about inadequate distribution of food rations or cash cards by the World Food Programme (WFP). In this ICT-enabled environment corruption, malpractice, incompetence and illegality have become much harder to hide. At the same time, however, the digital divide persists: access to social media and even basic cell phones is deeply unequal across emergency zones,35 and many of the areas regularly affected by emergencies have poor infra-structure and low levels of technology ownership and network density. As vinck has noted, ‘the on-the-ground-reality is more often than not one of information poverty, limited mobile coverage and little or no access to internet for both humanitarians and communities at risk’.36

Cyberspace is also a site of human insecurity and potential humanitarian crisis. Despite the utopian predictions of early cyber prophets,37 cyberspace has, since its inception, been a site of national interest politics and ever-growing military and civil capacity for, and interest in, mass surveillance. In the 1990s the relatively unregulated World Wide Web was commonly portrayed as an endless and chaotic highway without traffic rules.38 Today the internet is no longer ‘lawless’ or ‘without borders’: both authoritarian and democratic governments have subjected it to tighter regulations and more advanced forms of technological control.39 And, thanks to the growing commercial trade in surveillance and interception technologies, even poor governments (and armed non-state actors) can acquire such tools relatively cheaply and use them to spy on humanitarians and people of concern alike: stealing their data, map-ping their networks and manipulating their activities.40 From a national security perspective cyberspace has become a ‘fifth domain of warfare, on par with sea, air, land, and space’.41 Humanitarian scholars have voiced concern that ‘new threats will emerge in the form of cyber-attacks’, leading to ‘the possibility of a catastrophic event, which will overwhelm both national capacity and the international humanitarian system’.42

The attributes of the humanitarian cyberspace: continuity and change

The humanitarian enterprise has been adapting to ICT for about 20 years and the relatively modest level of technology that has so far been introduced to most field operations does not represent a sudden game changer. As noted by Daniel Gilman, of the uN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), even as ICT innovations are being rapidly adopted, the existing humanitarian information infrastructure is still not that sophisticated. Many humanitarian organisations, for example, still use excel spreadsheets, along with high levels of aggregation and guesswork to produce data for decision making.43

The principal objective of humanitarian action is to assist those in need, in accordance with the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality and universality. To that end, humanitarians interact with representatives of the host state, hostile and friendly non-state actors, civil society, donors, the private sector, and individuals and communities in need of relief and protection. The imperative to do no harm entails keen attention to the impact of interventions and to the security of beneficiaries.44 In addition, the demands of humanitarian reform call for aid to be accountable, and to be provided transparently and efficiently. In settings where authorities view the norms of humanitarian assistance and civilian protection as injurious to the national image, or when assistance and protection are perceived as threat-ening to domestic military or security goals, host countries can and will deny humanitarians access,45 but cyberspace expands the humanitarian toolbox considerably.

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Traditionally humanitarian action has been based on scarce information; ICT, however, has brought some important changes to how humanitarian crises are detected and addressed. Today humanitarian actors and donor governments are investing significant resources in developing better early-warning systems (which are built on big data analytics), and ben-eficiaries’ use of mobile phones and social media platforms has become a valuable means of harvesting data. At the same time, humanitarian actors are grappling with the difficulty of finding actionable and life-saving information amid the deluge of continually updated data.46 In this context the humanitarian cyberspace is increasingly seen a field of aid provi-sion in its own right: as noted earlier, statements such as ‘communications are an important form of aid, and can be of equal importance to survivors as food, water and shelter’ have become mainstays not only of the humanitarian technology discourse but, increasingly, of the general humanitarian discourse.47

Proponents of humanitarian technology emphasise its potential for improving coordi-nation and participation. The 2010 Haiti earthquake was viewed by many observers as the turning point in the chronicles of humanitarian technology.48 However, it was also com-monly considered a humanitarian failure, largely because of a lack of coordination and con-sultation.49 The lesson here would seem to be that technology alone cannot fix broader, long-standing problems, such as ineffectual information management, which can lead good data to go unused. Similarly, as evidenced by the 2011 famine in the Horn of Africa, compre-hensive early warnings do not necessarily translate into effective political action.50

In sum, humanitarians sometimes manage quite well; at other times operations fail for lack of planning, funding or coordination, or through incompetence, mismanagement or fraud. Humanitarian action may also be rendered unsuccessful by external threats, or by operational conditions that are more difficult, more hostile or changing more rapidly than could have been foreseen. Technology will not rescue humanitarianism from its traditional dilemmas, although it may both mitigate them and help humanitarians to deal with them. At the same time the humanitarian cyberspace engenders new threats to, as well as oppor-tunities for, humanitarian action that are not accounted for in the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space.

New threats

Structural vulnerabilities inherent in the humanitarian cyberspace can shape the conditions of humanitarian action: like other forms of critical information infrastructure, the information technology that humanitarians use daily to collect data and transfer resources is inherently insecure. By taking advantage of numerous vulnerabilities, attackers can penetrate, disrupt, disable, steal or destroy communications, vital information and operating systems on which humanitarian systems and networks depend. Methods include malware (viruses, worms, logic bombs, rootkits); zero-day attacks; distributed denial-of-service attacks (which are often undertaken through the use of robot networks, or botnets); and human manipulation, also known as ‘social engineering’.

Increasing reliance on ICT means that cyber insecurity has become a fundamental threat to humanitarian action; such threats entail both the ‘ill-understood behavior of systems, as well as barely understood vulnerabilities’.51 As Gilman has noted, cyber-insecure envi-ronments may or may not match with physically insecure ones but must be systematically

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assessed regardless: who are the potentially hostile actors, what strategies might they use and what are they after?52

Furthermore, as a field of action, the humanitarian cyberspace may engender new types of threats, not only to humanitarians but to the credibility of their organisations and the delivery of aid; perhaps most important, the humanitarian cyberspace may transform humanitarian organisations into entities that threaten the privacy and physical security of people of con-cern.53 On the one hand, humanitarian organisations have always relied on visibility as an important strategy for garnering public attention, harnessing political support and raising funds. In recent years the quest for visibility has become linked to the quest for transparency. But, as Cone has pointed out, social media may offer ‘approachability’ – which humanitarian organisations often view as a means of strengthening accountability and transparency, and thereby legitimacy – but openness about partners and programmes bears often-unacknowl-edged risks.54

visibility and information sharing are vital in a crisis but a loss of control over information about disasters or organisational reputation can rapidly produce dangerous dynamics on the ground. excessive sharing of logistical details and procedural standards, for example, can make humanitarian action more dangerous by giving armed non-state actors information about project locations, distribution plans, travel itineraries, the whereabouts of partners, and so forth.55

Humanitarians in the field have always been at risk of misrepresentation of their actions and intentions, either by local or national media, or by special-interest organisations. Today social media’s instant global reach renders the potential repercussions of misreporting even more serious. Social media, in particular, have the potential to compromise the security of humanitarian workers as well as others at risk. Anyone – without revealing their identity – can post rumours on Twitter or Facebook regarding the scale or impact of a crisis, and about the response (or failure to respond) of the government or the humanitarian community.56 The ability of social media to generate impressions of collaboration and affiliation carries risk: in particular, humanitarian organisations that are perceived as being affiliated with local armed actors or with military stabilisation efforts, or as playing the role of ‘force multipliers’ in efforts to control, contain or manage armed conflict or complex emergencies may suffer a severe loss of credibility.57

As information becomes a key humanitarian resource, control, manipulation and denial of access to information will inevitably become important operational concerns. Involuntary sharing of information is an increasing problem for humanitarian organisations, which are regularly targeted by cyber-attacks from governments, armed non-state actors and hackers, as well as being systematically subjected to tracking and surveillance by host states and donor governments alike.58

The level of cybersecurity varies greatly among humanitarian actors and depends on both available funding for such security and the extent to which organisations practice ‘safe computing’. Many humanitarian organisations, for example, lack robust guidelines or profes-sional standards for their own use of information technology, as well as for collaboration with volunteer and technology communities (v&TCs). At worst, poor information management – including inadequate policies and insufficient training – risks turning humanitarians into threat actors in cyberspace.59

As Hosein and Nyst observe, ‘as development and humanitarian donors and agencies rush to adopt new technologies that facilitate surveillance, they may be creating and supporting

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systems that pose serious threats to individuals’ human rights, particularly their right to privacy’.60 According to the uN Global Pulse blog, because data aggregated to produce a better overview of a crisis can be disaggregated to reveal information about individuals or local groups, inadequate security for the collection, storage, sharing and destruction of data can subject individuals and communities to reprisals, including violence.61 Similarly sharing data with third parties or using data for purposes other than those for which they were col-lected can put people of concern at risk. Worries about the personal information of people of concern are particularly serious in low-income countries, where data-protection laws are weak or non-existent. As Gilman has noted, ‘it is absolutely imperative for humanitarians to understand that poor data security generates real-world insecurity’.62

Revisiting the narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space

The discussion of the humanitarian cyberspace has so far focused on the everyday politics of that space and on the new threats associated with it – threats that have not been reflected in the traditional narrative of the shrinking humanitarian space. In this section I consider the future of that narrative by offering an account of the humanitarian cyberspace that can be read as a critique of the shrinking space narrative. The basis of this critique is referred to here as ‘the expanding frontiers view’ – namely, the notion that the merging of cyberspace and the humanitarian space has spatially and demographically expanded humanitarian governance over a global emergency field. Interestingly this expansion has spurred critics to develop a new narrative, centred on the concern that, over time, the humanitarian cyberspace will shrink the humanitarian space.

Technology offers new sources of information and new ways of presenting and circulating it. At present, humanitarians and people of concern produce and receive more information about emergencies and have more direct (albeit faceless) exchanges than has been the case in the past; humanitarians also undertake more activities in more locations – and, through the humanitarian cyberspace, are able to undertake larger logistical operations and to better monitor relief supplies. Humanitarian micro-drones are just coming into use and may soon facilitate relief and medication drops, in addition to needs assessments, head counts and general information gathering.63 Further into the future automated decision-making systems may play a much greater role in predicting crises and identifying appropriate humanitarian responses than they do today.64

The humanitarian cyberspace offers more extensive possibilities for intervention, includ-ing remote management, and thereby opens the field for new types of actors. According to some observers, such developments have allowed more people to directly engage in aid efforts by managing information flows.65 enabled by technical capacity and low bar-riers to entry, remote v&TCs now play an increasingly visible role in humanitarian action – generating, aggregating, classifying and even analysing data in parallel or in collabora-tion with more established actors and multilateral initiatives. The Standby Task Force, the Humanitarian Open Street Map, and the International Network of Crisis Mappers – three of the most prominent and structured examples of such initiatives, all of which operate under the aegis of the Digital Humanitarian Network – enjoy formal relationships with traditional humanitarian actors.66

The humanitarian cyberspace is also reshaping how relief is distributed – that is, who distributes, who gets what, where and when distribution occurs, and why – as well as what

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counts as relief.67 In the humanitarian cyberspace technical information, algorithms and pieces of code constitute substantive humanitarian aid. The turn to e-transfers – often referred to in the humanitarian realm as ‘mobile money’ or ‘digital food’, reflects the rec-ognition that cash can go where humanitarians cannot. The WFP has taken the lead in this area, as a part of a broader strategy to improve food security by moving away from food aid and toward cash assets. Digital food is distributed through smartcards, or via e-vouchers embedded in short text messages. According to the WFP, people of concern prefer digital food allowances to food distribution because they provide more choice and help avoid the misuse of cash. Digital food is also alleged to be more cost-effective than in-kind aid.68

In opposition to the expanding frontiers view is a scenario in which the rise of the human-itarian cyberspace presages the long-term decline of the humanitarian space – at first through the loss of relationships and knowledge, ultimately through the loss of credibility and legitimacy. Increasing donor funding and growing competition within the sector for those funds have created powerful incentives for aid agencies to operate in conflict-affected countries.69 A 2011 OCHA study on good practice in risk and security management notes that ‘the objective for humanitarian actors in complex security environments...is not to avoid risk, but to manage risk in a way that allows them to remain present and effective in their work’.70 Nevertheless, in practical terms, remote management is a common operational response to insecurity. It often involves overseeing activities from a different location, withdrawing or drastically reducing the number of international and sometimes national staff in the field, and transferring greater programme responsibility (and risk) to local staff or local partner organisations.71 ICT, including social media, has greatly facilitated remote management of hard-to-reach areas; examples include the use of short message service surveys to map basic needs and the integration of Skype into day-to-day management.

Critics hold that the long-term effects of such reliance on technology are profound: Duffield describes remote management as the ‘distancing tendency’ in humanitarian action.72 Face-to-face encounters disappear, normalising a lack of connection between aid organi-sations and their main stakeholders.73 As Collinson and Duffield point out, as technology replaces ‘ground truth’, remote management becomes a way of ‘simulating the experience of proximity’,74 which is intended to help humanitarians address deficits in both local knowl-edge and the quality of assistance, as experienced staff withdraw from the field.75

Conclusion

This article has offered a cyber-specific critique of the narrative of a shrinking humanitarian space. In mapping out the notion of a humanitarian cyberspace, I propose that what goes on in that space changes humanitarianism in important ways.

One of my premises is that humanitarian challenges are not new: the golden age of non-political humanitarianism and unfettered humanitarian access has never existed, and the gap between the guiding ideals of humanitarianism and the political and practical demands of humanitarian practice is as old as the field itself.76 Thus, I would argue that a monolithic notion of a shrinking humanitarian space has little meaning. In fact, the broaden-ing scope of humanitarian actions made possible by the humanitarian cyberspace suggests that, rather than shrinking, the humanitarian space is poised to benefit from expanding frontiers, some of which derive from new technologies.

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used properly, the humanitarian cyberspace can become a field through which humani-tarian organisations can strengthen ground-level situational awareness, improve the target-ing and quality of assistance, and engage in public dialogue with users and governments. As humanitarians struggle to maximise the potential of technology, however, they will find themselves grappling with overlaps between the traditional humanitarian space and the humanitarian cyberspace – in particular, with new threats, generated in the humanitarian cyberspace, that impinge on the humanitarian space. At the same time old threats to the humanitarian space persist, albeit sometimes modified by technology.

In sum, the humanitarian cyberspace brings new dimensions and new opportunities to humanitarian aid work. Nevertheless, it is important to be aware that the humanitarian cyberspace it is not merely a realm of technological adaptation, proliferation and function-ality: it is also humanitarian. Specific features of humanitarianism make the humanitarian cyberspace unique – in particular, the proximity to conflict (including cyber-war) and the role of vulnerable civilians as technological users and purported resilient responders. Hence, there should be little room for a determinist belief in ‘neutral’ technology or in a humanitarian cyberspace that is radically different from the environment on the ground.

By virtue of being situated within the global emergency zone, where things continually fall apart, are destroyed or malfunction, the humanitarian cyberspace is characterised by gaps and shadows – and, importantly, is subject to local context and historical events. At the moment neither practitioners nor scholars have sufficient understanding of current developments or where they may lead. The challenges outlined in this article can contribute to the development of a research agenda for future work on the humanitarian cyberspace.

AcknowledgementsThe author is grateful to Daniel Gillman, Thea Hilhorst, Kristoffer Lidén, Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert, John Karlsrud, Maral Mirshahi and Mareile Kaufmann; and to Mark Duffield for his patience and Patrick Meier for his impatience.

Notes on contributor

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik is Senior researcher at the Peace research Institute Oslo (PrIO) and Centre Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, which aims to promote and facilitate crit-ical and relevant research on key humanitarian issues. Her research focuses on the interface between international law, humanitarianism, technology and violence.

Notes

1. OCHA, Saving Lives. See also OCHA, Humanitarianism in the Network Age. 2. vinck, “Humanitarian Technology,” 14. 3. Couldrey and Herson, “The Technology Issue”; and Meier, “New Information Technologies.” 4. Duffield, Disaster Resilience. Technology and innovation will be one of four tracks at the World

Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016. 5. Of course, humanitarianism has never existed without technology – and a select few scholars

have been interested in it for a long time. See, for example, Stephenson and Anderson, “Disasters.”

6. According to Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?”, the phrase was first used by Loescher to describe the limitations imposed upon the operating environment of

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humanitarian agencies in the highly politicised context of cold war conflicts in Central America. Loescher, “Humanitarianism and Politics.”

7. Taking a temporal view, Beauchamp considers the humanitarian space through a number of historical shifts, including the change in the focus of humanitarian aid from the military to civilians; the institutionalisation of international disaster relief; the institutionalisation of international development; and the changing role of military actors. Beauchamp, Defining the Humanitarian Space. Other observers conceive of the humanitarian space in terms of IHL principles. Thürer, “Dunant’s Pyramid.”

8. Beauchamp, Defining the Humanitarian Space; Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?”; and Collinson and elhawary, Humanitarian Space.

9. Collinson and elhawary, Humanitarian Space.10. This definition is borrowed from ‘united Nations and Global Humanitarian Governance: Critical

Perspectives’, a course offered through the Finnish university Partnership for International Development. http://www.unipid.fi/en/course/29/united_nations_and_global_humanitarian_governance_critical_perspectives/. For discussions of the topic, see Barnett, “Humanitarian Governance.”

11. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 41.12. Mills, “Constructing Humanitarian Space.”13. Metcalfe et al., UN Integration and Humanitarian Space.14. Oxfam, Policy Compendium Note, 2.15. Sandvik, “Introduction.”16. Mills, “Constructing Humanitarian Space,” 610.17. According to Meier, “Strengthening Humanitarian Information,” 73, ‘self-organization in a digital

world affords opportunities unfeasible in the analogue past. Disaster-affected populations now have greater access to information, and many of their information needs during a crisis can be met by mobile technologies.’

18. Collinson and elhawary, Humanitarian Space.19. Oosterveld, ‘Implications for Women’; and Tennant et al., Safeguarding Humanitarian Space.20. Spearin, “Private Security Companies and Humanitarians”; and Metcalfe et al., UN Integration

and Humanitarian Space.21. Such constraints to humanitarian engagement include high levels of violence; the ideology,

objectives, tactics and capabilities of non-state armed actors; and legal and bureaucratic restrictions imposed by donor and host governments, including in relation to counterterrorism strategies. Labonte and edgerton, “Towards a Typology.”

22. Humanitarian Outcomes, The New Normal.23. Collinson and elhawary, Humanitarian Space, 9.24. Kleinfeld, “Misreading the Post-tsunami Political Landscape.”25. Hubert and Brassard-Boudreau, “Shrinking Humanitarian Space?” For this argument generally,

see Hegre and Nygård, Peace on Earth?26. Dandoy and de Montclos, “Humanitarian Workers in Peril?”; and OCHA, To Stay and Deliver.27. OCHA, To Stay and Deliver.28. Global Humanitarian Assistance, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2014.29. Hilhorst and Jansen, “Humanitarian Space as Arena.”30. Herrera, “Technology and International Systems,” 560.31. McCarthy, “Technology and ‘the International’,” 489.32. Libicki, Conquest in Cyberspace.33. Garcia et al., “ethnographic Approaches.”34. Deibert and rohozinski, “Liberation vs. Control,” 55.35. Commenting on the digital shadow as a cause of and reason for marginalisation, Lerman

observes that data sets can be affected by the ‘nonrandom, systemic omission of people who live on big data’s margins, whether due to poverty, geography, or lifestyle, and whose lives are less “datafied” than the general population’s’. These technologies may create ‘a new kind of voicelessness, where certain groups’ preferences and behaviors receive little or no consideration

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when powerful actors decide how to distribute goods and services and how to reform public and private institutions’. Lerman, “Big Data,” 59.

36. vinck, “Humanitarian Technology,” 30.37. Demchak, Conflicting Policy Presumptions.38. Denning, “Activism, Hacktivism, and Cyberterrorism.”39. Deibert et al., Access Controlled.40. For more on government surveillance, see, generally, the work of Citizen Lab, Privacy

International and the new Coalition Against unlawful Surveillance exports, which includes Amnesty International, Human rights Watch and Privacy International, among others.

41. Lynn, “Defending a New Domain.”42. Ferris, “Megatrends,” 923.43. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”44. Anderson, Do No Harm.45. Labonte and edgerton, “Typology of Humanitarian Access Denial,” 51.46. Meier, “Strengthening Humanitarian Information.”47. GSMA, Key Takeaways.48. Altay and Labonte, “Challenges in Humanitarian Information Management.”49. Binder, “Is the Humanitarian Failure in Haiti a System Failure?”50. Seal and Bailey, “The 2011 Famine in Somalia.”51. Dunn Cavelty, “The Socio-political Dimensions.”52. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”53. New humanitarian actors, such as the volunteer and technological communities, also pose

particular challenges to humanitarian action. See Sandvik et al., “Humanitarian Technology.”54. Cone, “The Promise of Social Media?”55. Sandvik, “The risks of Technological Innovation.”56. Ibid.57. See Collinson et al., “States of Fragility.”58. Many countries with a history of human rights abuse now employ a range of surveillance

technologies – such as Blue Coat Systems and FinFisher – that are capable of censorship, filtering and surveillance; the intent is to gather information to entrap and/or harass civil society actors, including humanitarian organisations. Marquis-Boire et al., Planet Blue Coat.

59. Moreover, countries may impose extensive information-sharing requirements on humanitarian organisations as a condition for issuing host-country agreements. For example, uNHCr does not have complete jurisdiction over the information it collects. Many governments – and not always for benevolent reasons – are interested in integrating uNHCr data into their own registries and surveillance systems. Lindskov Jacobsen, “Making Design Safe.”

60. Hosein and Nyst, Aiding Surveillance, 4.61. “The New Data Landscape.” http://www.unglobalpulse.org/blog/new-data-landscape.62. Gilman, “Humanitarianism.”63. Sandvik and Lohne, “The rise of the Humanitarian Drone”; and Sandvik and Gabrielsen Jumbert,

“Les drones humanitaires.”64. Sandvik et al. “Humanitarian Technology.”65. Brophy-Williams et al., “Technology and the Future of Humanitarian Action.”66. See Ziemke, “Crisis Mapping.”67. Crowdfunding in the humanitarian cyberspace is another example, which will not be discussed

further in this article.68. World Bank, Cash for Assets. But compare Gentilini, Our Daily Bread.69. Collinson and elhawary, Humanitarian Space.70. OCHA, Stay and Deliver, 2.71. Stoddard et al., Once Removed.72. Duffield, Disaster Resilience.73. Collinson and Duffield, Paradoxes of Presence.74. Ibid., 8.

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75. On a related note critics observe that there is currently a great deal of ‘technologising’ going on in the humanitarian space, where problems are redefined and reduced to questions of technological functionality and design. Abdelnour and Saeed, “Technologizing Humanitarian Space.”

76. Donini, The Golden Fleece.

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