Paper details

Paper authors	Malay Firoz
In panel on	Optimizing humanitarian needs assessment
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Humanitarianism has recently undergone what scholars call an “innovation turn”, drawing on a gamut of cutting-edge technologies to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. This paper explores one such innovation in humanitarian data practices, introduced with the Syrian refugee crisis response in Jordan and Lebanon. Specifically, aid organisations have revolutionized the way they assess household vulnerability among refugees in urban areas, drawing on increasingly abstract, quantitative systems to measure and classify refugees into standardised vulnerability categories. I argue that this process of vulnerability indexing is mired in messy inter-subjective encounters between refugees and assessment officers, which belies its purpose as an objective basis for determining eligibility for humanitarian assistance. Contrary to technocratic expectations that “better data” improves aid distribution, I show how vulnerability assessments institutionalize a hermeneutics of suspicion towards refugees, whereby refugee testimonies are deemed potentially unreliable unless authenticated by expert observers. Vulnerability thus becomes a symbolic property that belongs to the refugee only within humanitarian grids of intelligibility. I conclude the paper by pointing to vulnerability assessment as one node within a larger apparatus of interlinked data systems governed by the UN, which poses grave privacy risks for refugees and centralizes power within the humanitarian industry.

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