Paper details

Abstract

Impelled by the conjoined pursuit of effectiveness and accountability, leading to a push for innovation and deployment of emerging technology, contemporary humanitarianism is characterized by a strong sense of experimentation that foregrounds issues of deep uncertainty.

This poses fundamental challenges to the humanitarian industry, for whom effective knowledge-use is an imperative as it operates in situations where decisions have crucial implications. Consequently, the industry has sought to mitigate the complexity and ambiguity of humanitarian settings by employing and developing advanced risk identification and mitigation systems to minimize the probability of unforeseen or harmful consequences transpiring.

The need for risk mitigation is accentuated by the present spread of radical technologies such as biometric registration systems, block chain or UAV services. These introduces a further layer of non-knowing that goes beyond existing conceptualizations of uncertainty and risk. To enhance our understanding of new forms of non-knowledge arising from experimental humanitarianism, this paper introduces the notion of ignorance – literally the absence of knowledge – to humanitarian studies. We situate ignorance in the intellectual architecture of humanitarian conceptions of knowledge, information, uncertainty and risk to explore what ignorance is and what it implies for humanitarian studies and operational humanitarian affairs.