Finnovation : the case of financializing humanitarian interventions in Lebanon

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INNOVATION

The Case of Financializing

Humanitarian Interventions in Lebanon

Cybele Atme

International Development Studies Research MSc 2017 – 2019

Date: 09.08.2019

Supervisor: Professor Dr. Dennis Rodgers Second Reader: Dr. Nora Stel

Word Count: 35,054 University of Amsterdam

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5 These illustrations were produced by Lynn Atme, who visually captured the descriptions of some of the scenarios I encountered whilst on the field. The texts are quotes

from the various interviews that I conducted. Some of the characters represented in the illustrations are also introduced in this thesis. The purpose of displaying them here is depict

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for everyone who has supported me in the past two years, I am also grateful for the experience of doing research, if it weren’t for the various encounters inflicting oscillating emotions, this thesis would have taken an entirely different form.

I would like to thank my parents who have supported me and provided me with comfort and Lynn for always being there, listening and being attentive to detail. Thank you, Liz for inspiring me and believing in my potential, and Katharina, for having been a source of encouragement throughout the process, especially in times of severe stress and doubt, and Paco for lavishing me with optimism and emotional reassurance. I would like to especially thank Dennis, for being a remarkable supervisor, exceptionally patient, and constantly motivating me to improve.

I would also like to mention my appreciation to all my friends who have taken the time to read my thesis. Thank you to Kristian for meticulously engaging in my thesis, being interested, and providing me with new ideas. Thank you, Hani, Hanna, Imad, Lucy, Sara and Zalfa for warmly supporting me, and for copy-editing.

If it weren’t for the participants of this research none of this would have been possible, so I greatly appreciate them for taking the time to answer my questions, and for going above and beyond with sharing their experiences and insights. I hope that I have managed to represent them fairly and that I can do more in the future.

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7 ABSTRACT

The implementation of innovative technologies for humanitarian interventions has increasingly been contested for satisfying donor-demands rather than the beneficiaries. This thesis explores the socio-political consequences of a particular type of such an endeavor. It targets digitized cash-assistance as introduced by humanitarian organizations in Lebanon to cope with the recent influx of Syrian refugees. I argue that the deployment of such technology stems from a modern humanitarianism which is dictated by a marketized rationality. There has been a growing critique that technologies borrowed from the market have been commoditizing humanitarian interactions. However, being a country with the highest number of refugees per capita, with no coherent refugee policy, the case of Lebanon provides new insights on the ‘auditing’ roles that technologically innovative humanitarian interventions may encapsulate. As such, this research seeks to answer the question of how and why financial technologies are introduced as a mode of humanitarian intervention in Lebanon. Drawing upon five months of primary qualitative research in Lebanon on a digitized cash-assistance project, known as the Red Card, I find this phenomenon as a form of governmentality that radically transforms the direction of modern humanitarianism beyond commoditization. Being an endeavor that is borrowed from the market, in an environment that is unconducive for refugee livelihoods, I demonstrate that the Red Card is being justified by its commodifying effects to divert the structural issues of refugee precarity in Lebanon to that which is technocratically solvable, whilst reinforcing dominance over refugee subjectivities. I shed light upon the broader changing relations between beneficiaries and humanitarian actors, and the role of technologies and the market within these encounters, by revisiting the concept of the gift. As such, this research contributes to the critical literature on modern humanitarianism in Anthropology, Development Studies and Security and Technology Studies. It also provides foundational grounds for re-evaluating the ‘success’ of introducing financial technologies for humanitarian interventions.

Key Words: Modern humanitarianism, cash-assistance, financial technologies, Lebanon, refugees, governmentality, commodity, gift.

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Acronyms

ACF Action Contre la Faim

ADE Analysis for Economic Decisions

AUB American University of Beirut

CaLP Cash Learning Partnership

CAMEALEON Cash Monitoring Evaluation Accountability & Learning Orhanizations Network

DFID Department for International Development

DG ECHO Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations

DRC Danish Refugee Council

ECHO European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations

EU European Union

GS General Security

GSO General Security Office

INGO International Non-Governmental Organizations

IRC International Rescue Committee

LCC Lebanon Cash Consortium

LCRP Lebanon Crisis Response Plan

LRC Lebanese Red Cross

MoSA Ministry of Social Affairs

NGO Non-Governmental Organizations

ODI Overseas Development Institute

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13 SI Solidarites Internationale

SVI Save the Children International

UN United Nations

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund

VASyR Vulnerability Assessment for Syrian Refugees

WFP World Food Program

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Part I

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1 Introduction

Founded upon the principles of neutrality and impartiality, humanitarianism has been challenged for its relationship to politics, power and ethics since its emergence in the 19th century (Barnett & Weiss, 2008). Humanitarianism’s transformation along the years has not only been dictated by ‘forces of salvation’ but also by ‘forces of destruction and production’ (Sözer, 2019). As such, modern humanitarianism today has been characterized by a change: from that which is right-based to market-based. Thus, a shift in the perception of humanitarian aid as a ‘gift’ to perceiving it as a ‘commodity’ seemingly arises.

There has been a long legacy of literature about humanitarianism on the question of reciprocity and charity, by means of the anthropological gift (Kowalski, 2011; Mauss, 1954; Rozakou, 2016; Stirrat & Henkel, 1997). However, given the dominant political-economy, the increased reliance on private-funding significantly changed the humanitarian sector: it specialized their functions (such as sanitation, shelter, basic assistance), embraced accountability based on business principles (which privilege the donors over the beneficiaries), emphasized efficiency (which meant utilizing quantitative indicators to evaluate success), and prioritized the ultimate outcome of creating self-reliant entrepreneurial beneficiaries (Barnett & Weiss, 2008; Sözer, 2019). Accordingly, humanitarianism is increasingly being conceived as a commodity (Jacobsen, 2017; Neocleous, 2007; Reid-Henry, 2014; Scott-Smith, 2013; Sözer, 2019). The distinction between the system of the gift and the market is simply that the former is concerned with establishing relationships, whereas the latter is about reducing the relationship to a utility-exchange (Kowalski, 2011, p. 193).

The ‘innovation turn’ in humanitarianism illustrates this change towards market-oriented approaches for interventions. This turn embraces new ideas that emerge from the market to create new collaborations and improve the delivery of humanitarian assistance. These range from ideas about products, such as portable water filters to provide clean water and sachets of peanut butter paste to tackle malnutrition, to services concerned with datafication, monitoring and targeting assistance (K. B. Sandvik, Jacobsen, & McDonald, 2017; Scott-Smith, 2018). Critics of such innovations have found that labeling the vast range of ideas under the category of ‘helping refugees help themselves’, epitomized the commoditization of humanitarianism (Sandvik, Jacobsen & McDonald, 2017). Innovation in the humanitarian sector is thus not just a buzzword, but in reality strongly impacts the sector: such as power dynamics, resource distribution and governance (K. Sandvik, 2017). This is especially seen

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16 when innovations take the form of technologies to solve the problems of efficiency (Dietrich, 2013). As such, innovative data technologies are particularly celebrated for their capacity to reduce operational costs and provide monitoring mechanisms simultaneously, which satisfied donor demands for evidence on efficacy and efficiency in spending funds (Scheel & Ustek-Spilda, 2019). The unprecedented potentiality these technologies have thus legitimized the implementation of untested technological approaches on vulnerable bodies in uncertain environments, such as: surveillance drones in peacekeeping missions, biometric registration technologies for managing refugees in development contexts, GPS and others (Jacobsen, 2015; K. B. Sandvik et al., 2017). Resorting to what has been deemed surveillance technologies, humanitarianism has been relying on ethical consequentialism, which triggered research on the ultimate motives of their utilization (Jacobsen, 2015; Neocleous, 2007; K. Sandvik, 2017).

Research in STS has found that the innovative surveillance technologies embraced by the change in humanitarianism has commodified the endeavor, whereby structural problems became regarded as being tech-solvable (K. Sandvik, 2017). Some researchers have found that these technologies have been fetishized and hence concealed their inherent determents towards the recipients in emergencies (Neocleous, 2007, Jacobsen, 2015). Also, new problems emerged that were framed according to data justice, privacy, consumer risks, customer support and training (K. Sandvik, 2017). The mechanisms of converting aid interventions from physical to digital have thus been contested for reducing the relationship between the aid workers and recipients to purely material transactions (see Barnett & Weiss, 2008 and Jacobsen, 2015). This has been especially argued when using digitized cash-assistance, which combines the potentialities of providing the means to self-resilience, through cash, and to efficiency, through technology (Jacobsen & Sandvik, 2018; Sözer, 2019).

Using technologies to include the unbanked in humanitarianism include: providing cash through ATM machines that are linked to iris scanners, the use of blockchain technology for cash transfers, and providing debit cards that are linked to algorithmic targeting methods (see Jacobsen & Sandvik, 2018; Sözer, 2019; Tazzioli, 2017). By valorizing efficiency and transparency in humanitarianism, this endeavor has been critiqued for encapsulating what has been termed “audit culture” (Strathern, 2000), and creating a new frontier for profit-making and accumulation (Gabor & Brooks, 2017; Jacobsen & Sandvik, 2018; Scott-Smith, 2016), whereby the product of the relationship became a humanitarian reason that governs precarious lives by protecting and revealing them (Fassin, 2011, p. 253). However, cash-assistance first emerged from a different way of understanding the meanings of social shares. It began as a

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17 rightful share, whereby payments are transferred to their owners who were deprived of money due to events beyond their control, rather than the conventional meanings of aid programs offering generous help (Ferguson, 2015). This optimism has mostly been conveyed in the literature on mobile money, which illustrates how poor households are able to accumulate new sources of profits with the use of a multiplicity of formal and informal financial instruments (de Bruijn, Butter, & Fall, 2017; Maurer, 2015). As such, the use of digitized cash transfers in humanitarianism was legitimized for being a form of cash-assistance in conjunction with the appealing connotations of empowerment, dignity and inclusion. Consequently, coupling cash-assistance with surveillance technologies brings forth a unique form of commoditization. This research aims to explore the emerging phenomenon of digitized cash assistance in modern humanitarianism.

I use the Foucauldian notion of governmentality as an appropriate analytical tool to tackle this financialization of humanitarianism in the context of Lebanon. Biopower is traced along three dimensions: rationalities of governance, technics of governance and the subjects of governance. As such, I conceptualize digitized cash transfers in humanitarianism as programs that emerge from a modern form of governance and designate them as finnovations. In 2016, the humanitarian community in Lebanon announced the implementation of the biggest finnovating programs for Syrian refugees, it took the form of a debit card and was celebrated for adopting a harmonizing approach. The Lebanon One Unified Inter-Agency System for E-cards (LOUISE), known as the Red Card, was a collaborative system managed by UN agencies which various NGOs could take part of. The system was not only unified in its card, but also in its package and targeting strategy (Battistin, 2016). Thus, the Red Card was renowned for encapsulating advanced technologies, including algorithmic formulae and online data platforms, to enhance efficiency for collaboration, monitoring and evaluation1. In addition, it has been publicized for empowering Syrian refugees whilst simultaneously pumping money into the local market (UNHCR & Government of Lebanon, 2019). As such, the way in which the Red Card has been implemented in Lebanon caters to modern humanitarianism’s aim of producing market-opportunities. What makes the context of Lebanon interesting, is that it is also a country that hosts the greatest number of refugees per capita, with no coherent refugee policy (see Lebanon Support, 2016; Mufti, 2014; Nassar & Stel, 2019). Thus, due to the no-camp policy for refugees and high cost of living in Lebanon, displaced Syrians receiving the assistance still opt for getting employed, either in low skilled jobs or in the informal economy

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18 (Bou Khater, 2017). Therefore, various studies have touched upon humanitarianisms’ lack of attention to the specificities of refugee needs in Lebanon (Janmyr & Mourad, 2017; Nassar & Stel, 2019). According to a commentator on the distribution of debit cards in Lebanon, it is “a system that doesn’t see people but data sets, no individuals but numbers, no families but scores, where families lose cash-assistance as a consequence of being shifted between categories of vulnerability” (Jacobsen & Sandvik, 2018, p. 8). Consequently, datafying Syrians refugees with the Red Card, given the context of Lebanon runs the risk of decontextualizing collective issues to that which is individually diagnosable.

Problem Statement:

Modern humanitarianism has been contested for borrowing commodities from the market, for its interventions, to satisfy the donors rather than the beneficiaries. This endeavor has been evidenced with the case of digitized cash assistance in Lebanon. Being technologically innovative, the Red Card has been celebrated for its efficiency in mitigating precarity for displaced Syrians, in a context that has been described as a “no policy policy” for refugees (see Mufti, 2014). As such, there seems to be a discrepancy between the perceived assurances of the humanitarian actors and the specific needs of the beneficiaries - being displaced Syrians. The case of Lebanon portrays that the constitutive effects of adopting such commoditizing interventions in uncertain environments, is beyond reducing the relationships in humanitarianism to purely digital transactions. To this end, this research fills the gap in the literature where a form of modern humanitarianism, finnovations, constitute subjectivities for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. It contributes to the critical literature on modern humanitarianism, and its commoditizing effects, in Anthropology, Development Studies and Security and Technology Studies. In addition to that, it provides insights on the consequences that financial technologies may have, given our present era of datafication. I so doing, this research answers the following overarching question: how and why is finnovation experienced and understood in the context of Lebanon’s modern humanitarianism. To explore this, my research is directed by the following sub-questions: 1. Why was the Red Card introduced as a form of humanitarian assistance in Lebanon? How do humanitarians perceive this and what do they say about its disadvantages and pitfalls? 2. How has the material delivery of the Red Card influenced humanitarian practices in Lebanon? What do beneficiaries have to say about receiving the Red Card, what are their experiences? 3. How has the Red Card commodified humanitarian culture in Lebanon? What are the consequences of such changes in humanitarian practices?

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19 To answer these questions, the thesis will be structured in two parts: the first lays out the theoretical grounds which this research is based on, and the second part empirically delves into the world of humanitarianism in Lebanon, and the different realities that emerge from it. The first part is made of 6 chapters: Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical framework by setting the scene of modernity in humanitarian interventions to clarify the relevance of using the Foucauldian notion of power as an overarching theory that encapsulates modern forms of governance. I use the three dimensions of Foucauldian power as my main concepts: 1. rationalities, 2. practices and 3. constitutive effects. These three dimensions are also reflected in the sub-questions respectively. I end the chapter by presenting a particular case that emerges from modern humanitarianism, which I call finnovation, to encapsulate the phenomenon of technologically innovative financial interventions. Chapter 3 contextualizes modern humanitarianism in Lebanon and ends with the specific finnovating program which I explore in the research, known as the Red Card. Chapter 4 summarizes my theoretical framework and presents my research questions which I operationalize in Chapter 5 to inform my methods. I also describe my methodological approach to collecting the appropriate data in three phases that reflect the three dimensions of power: the first phase is the perceptions of humanitarian actors to tackle the rationalities, the second phase is the experiences of the Red Card which tackles the practices, and the third phase is the contextual factors which greatly contributes to the constitutive effects. Chapter 6 provides a narrative of my ethical reflections, I present ethical dilemmas that I encountered, the limitations of the research and the precautions that I took to mitigate them. Part 2 is made of four chapters which follow the same sequence of my research questions and hence the dimensions of governmentality. Chapter 7 maps out a top-down perspective of the humanitarian actors to tackle the rationalities behind implementing the Red Card. Chapter 8 maps out the bottom-up perspective of displaced Syrians receiving the Red Card to tackle the practices of the card on the ground. Chapter 9 is more analytical in nature, it brings the previous two parts together in order to bring to light the subjectivities that emerge from the implementation of the Red Card given the context of Lebanon. Chapter 10 is the concluding chapter which summarizes the findings, which answer the overarching question, and provides a discussion on the implications of finnovation for the humanitarian culture as a whole. As such, I end by presenting finnovation as both a gift and a commodity.

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2 Theoretical Framework

Ever since the end of the Cold War, humanitarianism has increasingly become interconnected with global ideologies and international norms, especially concerning the compliance of states with the discourses of development, such as the ways to eradicate poverty i.e. through financial inclusion. Thus, humanitarianism’s peace and security agenda expanded as a medium whereby post-conflict states were also able to instigate basic welfare functions on aid agencies and focus on the needs of the private sector. As such, modern humanitarianism has become ever more intermingled in the “development apparatus” which Escobar (1988) conceptualizes as techniques of power and knowledge.

Humanitarianism as a we know it today has been reconfigured by the state’s role in society and the funding environment, making it particularly driven by forces of production (Sozer, 2019). Recent literature, most prominently emerging from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Anthropology, has particularly shed light on modern humanitarianism’s entanglements with neoliberalism (Reid-Henry, 2014; Sözer, 2019; Swamy, 2017). Evidently, humanitarian interventions have shifted from providing gifts in the form of material goods, to the means for producing self-reliant beneficiaries who make ‘rational choices’. More emphasis is being placed on finding the most ‘efficient’ way of delivering assistance, leading the humanitarian community to turn to technological innovations and financial circuits for solutions (Dietrich, 2013). These innovative humanitarian technologies are not only shaped by circumstances, but also creates new ones, particularly, new ways in which those on the receiving-end of aid experience these technologies. Critics of the changes in aid intervention claim that such mechanisms encompass neoliberal elements that satisfy the donors and conceal the potential determents experienced by the beneficiary (Jacobsen, 2015; K. B. Sandvik, 2016). In this case, receiving assistance is conditional at best, while at worst, “the gift may be a form of patronage and means of control” (Stirrat & Henkel, 1997). As such, these endeavors have thus been contested for encapsulating commoditizing effects which reduce the relationship between the aid workers and beneficiaries to purely material transactions (Jacobsen, 2015; Neocleous, 2007; K. Sandvik, 2017).

In order to provide a holistic understanding of modern humanitarianism’s institutionalization, I will deconstruct its commoditizing effects within the framework of governmentality by conceptualizing the rationalities behind implementing new interventions and the practices and subjectivities which they elicit. Through the Foucauldian notion of power,

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21 I shall demonstrate the relationship between humanitarianism and modernity as dialectical in nature (Sozer, 2019, p. 4).

2.1 Modernity and Humanitarian Intervention

Foucault’s work on analyzing knowledge and the will to power has long been used in investigating the institutionalization of development endeavors. Such a perspective is helpful to understand the power struggles prevalent in aid-receiving countries, in which development approaches are arranged in a way that tries to conform people to specific economic and cultural behavior (Escobar, 1984, p. 377). Looking through a post-structuralist lens, I will use Foucault’s theory of Governmentality to conceptualize humanitarianism as a politics of life and uncover the “mutually constitutive relationship” between humanitarianism, state sovereignty and markets (Reid-Henry, 2014, p. 35). As such, the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics has been used by various scholars in social and political sciences to deconstruct and understand the contextual practices of humanitarianism:

“humanitarianism is a biopolitics insofar as it sets up and manages refugee camps, establishes protected corridors in order to gain access to war casualties, develops statistical tools to measure malnutrition, and makes use of communication media to bear witness to injustice in the world. (Fassin 2007, 500, quoted in Reid-Henry, 2013, p. 35)”

Foucault analyzed modern forms of government, identifying them as “any rational effort to influence or guide the conduct of human beings by acting upon their hopes, desires, circumstances or environment” (Xavier-Inda, 2005, p. 1). To Foucault, such a definition goes beyond sovereign power in the classical sense of being repressive, and extends to what he calls ‘biopower’, or an ‘art of government’. This form of governmentality is concerned with territory only as a secondary matter, the main target is rather managing the complex of subjects and things in an optimal manner (Xavier-Inda, 2005). Foucault nevertheless examined modern sovereignty, whereby biopower is concerned with the “improvement of life itself by state regulation” (Rottenburg, 2009, p. 426). The case of humanitarian interventions differs from the Foucauldian case in two aspects: firstly, because people are being governed on the presupposition of universal human rights rather than on citizenship, and second because these interventions “are tied to conditions that are classified as exceptional” (Rottenburg, 2009, p. 427). For that reason, some scholars have preferred to use the term ‘experimentality’ as a form of governmentality in the context of international humanitarian interventions (Rottenburg,

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22 2009). Regardless of the contextual differences on the origins of governmentality, I use biopower as an analytical tool to map out the ways in which power in modern humanitarianism transgresses through its interventions and is internalized by the subjects of governance. There are three dimensions of governmentality that may be identified (Xavier-Inda, 2005). The first dimension is the ‘reasons of government’, this entails the rationalities, forms of knowledge and expertise that justify the political programming of humans. The second dimension entails the ‘technics of government’ which are the mechanisms, instruments and programs that mediate, shape and instrumentalize human conduct. The third dimension is the ‘subjects of government’, which are the identities that arise from and shape governmental activity (Xavier-Inda, 2005, p. 2). The use of the three dimensions of Foucauldian power as an analytical method is conducive to follow the terrain of humanitarianisms’ “will to govern”. I identify the three dimensions of biopower in humanitarianism as the following: 1. Rationalities: are the ways in which humanitarians justify the implementation of certain humanitarian programs 2. Practices: are the ways in which the humanitarian program is implemented and embodied 3. Constitutive Effects: are the different subjectivities that arise and reproduce such modes of government.

Using a Foucauldian lens, Fassin (2007) finds humanitarianism’s politics of life as inherently paradoxical, whereby the act of ‘saving lives’ and ‘defending causes’ is selective in legitimizing who to save and which causes to present (Fassin, 2007, p. 500). In addition to that, by giving aid-recipients their basic needs as a humanitarian endeavor, rather than on the basis of rights, institutes a radically unequal order that characterizes the modern humanitarian relationship (Fassin, 2011, p. 253). As such, modern humanitarianism has been approached as a ‘value rational’ making any action it takes self-justifying, even though it has increasingly become instrumentalized by “donors with demands for evidence of efficacy and efficiency, and a profession with its own standards of good performance” (Calhoun 2008, p. 95 quoted in Reid-Henry, 2014, p. 5). However, Fassin (2007) takes a step further by conceptualizing it as an anthropological gift, whereby an inequality is manifested when a seemingly disinterested gift assumes reciprocity in the form of obedience.

Given the context of embracing modern ideals, humanitarian culture has undergone commoditizing effects. In order to bring forth the emerging complex relationship this has on humanitarian ‘subjects and things’, the rationalities, practices and constitutive effects of modern humanitarianism must first be mapped out.

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2.2 Rationalities of a Modern Humanitarianism

In this section I will describe the rationalities of modern humanitarianism according to being ‘intellectual machineries’ that legitimize governing human conduct as calculable (Xavier-Inda, 2005). These rationalities are firstly attributed to modern humanitarianism’s commitment to the market, hence the commodification of humanitarian assistance. By borrowing the notion of ‘innovation’ via private-public partnerships, the humanitarian community then uses these commodities to instigate the appropriate change for professionalizing the sector. Emerging from the notion of innovation; technological commodities are thus utilized as modes of interventions to increase effectiveness and efficiency in the sector. In an attempt to verify efficiency, modern humanitarianism finally embraces financial technologies, with monitoring and surveillance features, as tools of governance.

2.2.1 Marketization, Treating Humanitarian Assistance as Commodity

The rationalities of modern humanitarianism begin in the ways in which it engages with commodities from the market for humanitarian causes. Humanitarian assistance is thus treated as a commodity, as though being ‘purchased’ by the aid-recipients.

In the mid-1970s, with the increased demand to include humanitarianism on the global agenda, the discourse of humanitarianism witnessed a significant shift to market-based approaches. Mark Duffield was one of the first to recognize this shift in humanitarianism, which he described as oriented towards producing good neoliberal citizens (Duffield, 2010, 2012, 2015; Scott-Smith, 2016). In addition to humanitarianism being appropriated as a justification for action by international forces, it adapted with the changes in the liberal conception of the subject and the reconfiguration of the state sovereignty (Sozer, 2019). As such, humanitarianism witnessed a significant change in the rationalities for implementing aid programs (Sozer, 2019). Due to increased competition for funding, NGOs and INGOs became more specialized in their functions (Sozer, 2019, p.4). The evaluation of the projects became focused on efficiency, whereby audit and ranking instruments were used to promote ‘quality’. Accountability thus meant justifying project-spending to donors, rather than the project incentives to the broader public. As a result, humanitarian actors have adopted the language of consumerism, whereby a major criterion for success in any humanitarian program was in relation to efficiency, budget and beneficiary headcount (Sandvik, 2017). Finally, in terms of outcomes, the ultimate aim of the humanitarian machine became the production of self-reliant, resilient, entrepreneurial beneficiaries, who make rational choices through new forms of assistance (Sozer 2019, p.4). The aim of humanitarianism thus shifted towards the logic of

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24 helping aid-recipients live without the state (Duffield, 2012), but also increasingly rely on the private-sector. This logic is most evidently seen with the exacerbated reliance on public-private partnerships for funding, and the consequent emergence of the ‘innovation turn’ in humanitarianism.

2.2.2 Private-Public Partnerships and the ‘Innovation Turn’ in Humanitarianism

The reliance on the private-sector is a key factor in the change of modern humanitarian interventions. It has been commonly argued that “business increasingly plays a central role within humanitarianism, including through philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, innovation, and core business activities (OXHIP 2015 quoted in K. Sandvik, 2017, p.3). However, innovative commodities in the humanitarianism are different than commodities in the regular market due to their assumed success in improving the humanitarian sector (K. Sandvik, 2017).

The reliance on public-private partnerships for funding and methods meant embracing the ‘theory of change’ to instigate the professionalizing of the sector (K. Sandvik, 2017). Humanitarian innovation instigates a seemingly ‘positive’ change with the use of new technologies, processes and approaches to improve humanitarian aid (K. Sandvik, 2017, p. 1). Consequently, studies on the potential of ‘innovation’ in humanitarian response popularized the term and became frequently used in donor speeches and policy documents by UN agencies and NGOs. The ‘innovation turn’ in humanitarianism evidently emerges from the rationality that the market will provide the appropriate ‘technological fix’ to improve aid delivery and provision. As such, to ‘innovate’ means to indicate a change in the framework of a humanitarian market to a regular free market. However, there is a fundamental difference between the humanitarian and regular market in the context of humanitarian innovation, whereby aid agencies are producers, donors are buyers and aid recipients are the consumers (K. Sandvik, 2017, p. 5). The main difference is that the relationship between the producer and the consumer is mediated by a third actor – rendering it a “quasi-market” (Binder & Witte, 2007 quoted in K. Sandvik, 2017, p. 5). Unlike purchasing commodities in the regular open market, the consumers in the humanitarian market do not purchase the innovative services, so they have a limited means in airing their complaints, and donors have difficulty knowing whether the aid has adequately been delivered. Nevertheless, embracing modern innovative technologies caters to the donor-demands for efficiency.

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25 In line with the rationalities of a marketized humanitarianism, modern innovative technologies are embraced for their capacity to provide efficiency and accountability to the donors. As such, they satisfy the expectation that the private sector brings new ideas to solve the malfunctions of humanitarianism.

2.2.3 The Focus on Efficiency, Embracing Technologies

The purpose behind embracing innovative modes and methods of humanitarianism is to satisfy private-public partnerships. Having the donors most prominently concerned with the private sector resulted in efficiency becoming a priority (K. B. Sandvik et al., 2017). While technologies are perceived as ‘efficiency boosters’, embracing financial technologies is particularly utilized to improve both efficiency and accountability towards the donors, since they provide monitoring mechanisms that verify the optimal usage of donor funding (Jacobsen & Sandvik, 2018).

The expectation that the market and private sector will self-regulate legitimizes the use of technologies for humanitarian causes. By relying on private-public partnerships for funding, there has been an optimism in embracing innovative technologies as a ‘quick-fix’ to the efficiency problems of humanitarianism. Such optimism is explicitly seen in the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 which concluded that “technological innovation allows the humanitarian community to function ‘efficiently’ and makes the humanitarian system more malleable to current and future challenges” (quoted in Sandvik, 2017). This resulted in policies designed according to funding, budgeting and institutional support, and has been a driving force for instigating technologies in humanitarianism. In addition, there has been increased pressures by donors on the humanitarian community to provide more accountability on whether such efficiency is being achieved. As such, the humanitarian sector embraced technocratic methods from financial institutions to justify that donor capital has been optimally spent. Embracing financial technologies, not only as modalities of aid, but also to manage the new humanitarian order, signifies the rationalities behind modern humanitarianism (Sozer, 2019). The marketization of humanitarianism, private-public partnerships, and hence the focus on efficiency, consequently catered to embracing financial technologies as technocratic methods of governing aid-recipients.

The commodification of humanitarian assistance can be seen in the ways in which modern humanitarianism is being performed through financial technologies. A certain kind of reasoning stems from an unconditional commitment to the market for funding: aid-recipients

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26 must be provided with the means to becoming good entrepreneurs to achieve long-term resilience.

2.3 Practices, Technics and Implications

I conceptualize the rationalities for implementing technologies in humanitarianism as emerging from a market-oriented approach. Due to the resounding commitment to the market, humanitarianism has embraced technologically innovative instruments that allow an optimized mode of distributing and managing assistance. However, in practice, technologies not only emerge from social structures, but also reinforce them. Thus, they are not neutral endeavors that contribute to technical changes nor are they merely buzzwords that are empty in their application. In the next section I will portray these technologies as mediums in which power structures are being instigated, in Foucauldian terms known to be ‘technics of governance’ (Xavier-Inda, 2005). This can be seen by acknowledging technologies as social entities to bring forth the power imbalances which they emerge from and create. I will first map out how technologies have always emerged from certain social structures and have been used as a means to instigate particular practices. Then, I will delve into the peculiar practices of technological innovation in humanitarianism, which have been fetishized for their ‘success’. I will discuss the virtualization of resources as a modality of aid separately, which is a particularly remarkable case of a technologically innovative commodity in humanitarianism. It stems from two rationalities of modern humanitarianism: providing aid recipients self-resilience via money and providing accountability and efficiency to the donors via financial technologies.

2.3.1 Technologies as Social Entities

From the beginnings of ‘print-capitalism’, technology has been essential to modern social structures (Anderson, 1991; Escobar et al., 1994). According to Anderson, the nation is socially constructed by the perception of living in an imagined community; mediated by novels and newspapers. Hence, Gutenberg’s technological innovation of the printing press, characterized by information, science and technology, was vital in constructing the world of nations (Smith, 1991). This point of departure is the belief that technology represents a cultural invention; “it emerges out of particular conditions and in turn helps create new ones” (Escobar, 1994, p.221). Heidegger treats technology the same way, as a pragmatic practice of modernity, ways of creating new realities and manifestations of being (Escobar, 1994). Escobar goes even further, by identifying the political economy of cyberculture. The concept of cyberculture deals with how technological innovations could bring about new mechanisms of local and global interaction. Particularly, the ways in which technological innovations and world views

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27 transform each other to legitimize and “naturalize the technologies of the time”, and shape perceptions of modernity and development (Escobar, 1994, p.221). In agreement with the idea that technologies have defined the modern, Hornborg (2014) adds that it has been used to expand appropriation of resources from the rest of the world creating an economic articulation of the Old and New Worlds (Hornborg, 2014). Finally, technology has the capacity to shape interactions and worldviews, which is attributed to its societal and political implications.

Through this lens, I conceptualize technologies in the humanitarian setting as social entities that have active and political roles in producing social order rather than being politically innocent (Latour, 1996). In so doing, the complex social conditions they emerge from, and simultaneously mediate, are manifested. Consequently, the ways in which technological innovation in humanitarianism are practiced emerge from, and reproduce, the structures that accompany the modern socio-economic conditions.

2.3.2 Techno-fetishism

Even though according to modern humanitarianisms’ rationalities, innovation has been glorified for improving assistance, in practice technologies that emerge from this notion have been criticized for fetishizing their success instead. The political implications of technological humanitarian innovation are left unnoticed due to perceiving such modern objects as “inanimate things attributed with autonomous productivity or even agency” (Horborg, 2014, p. 121). A few scholars have argued that rendering the social relations which arise from technologies invisible is a fetishization (Hornborg, 2014; Neocleous, 2007; Pfaffenberger, 1988; Scott-Smith, 2013). This in turn obscures the asymmetries of global relations of exchange which can be attributed to the implementation of technologies (Horborg, 2014). Graeber (2005) goes further by stating that techno-fetishism creates a world of social relations and myths where technology defines what works. Consequently, technologically innovative success is constructed with the same political relations that the technology engenders; whereby every technological solution has implications for the societal distribution of “the burden of problem-solving” (Hornborg, 2014, p. 130).

Today, aid recipients embodying innovative humanitarian technologies are witnesses of this burden. With an unconditional commitment to the market, the adoption of technology remains unquestioned. No reflexivity is considered on the societal impacts that they might bring forth. Instead modern humanitarianism has been reliant on ethical consequentialism and resorting to technology as the primary source of humanitarian solutions (Scott-Smith, 2016).

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28 Utilizing technological innovation as an apolitical and technocratic method to increase efficiency, has legitimized the implementation of untested technological approaches on vulnerable bodies in uncertain environments such as: surveillance drones in peacekeeping missions, biometric registration technologies for managing refugees in development contexts, mobile money, GPS and others (Jacobsen, 2015; Maurer, 2012; K. B. Sandvik et al., 2017). Scott-Smith, (2018), characterized these technologies as stiff due to their limited vision, which he calls sticky technologies. He argues that technological innovations that are being implemented with a humanitarian purpose, tackle the symptoms rather than the core problems of humanitarianism, such as longer-term structural change. However, this stickiness allows them to be predictable, a firm and effective intervention, which is deemed successful by the humanitarian community (Scott-smith, 2018). As such, instead of acknowledging the failures of these technologies experienced by the users, their ‘success’ is celebrated under the umbrella of ‘innovation’ to satisfy donors, and eventually translated to the policymaking process - reproducing failures that were left unnoticed (Jacobsen, 2015; Scott-smith, 2016; Sandvik, 2017; Neocleous, 2007).

In the context of modern humanitarianism, I use the concept of fetishism to justify the "disconnection between the enthusiasm of the innovators and the lives of the people they are meant to assist" (Scott-smith, 2016, p.2232). This description raises questions concerning the purpose of humanitarian technological innovation and whom it ultimately benefits. However, the virtualization of resources is a peculiar type of technological humanitarian innovation that begs its own theorization. It brings with it an increased reliance on quantitative methods to verify the success of technologically innovative methods. Using literature from economic anthropology, I will portray the inherent societal features of virtual monetary transactions to later highlight the possible constitutive effects that arise from such an endeavor.

2.3.3 Virtualizing Resources & Audit Culture

Just as technology has been seen as a quick fix for efficiency, money has been utilized as a technical solution to eradicate poverty in modern humanitarianism. The virtualization of resources as a mode of humanitarian assistance is a technological commodity which has been borrowed from the private sector to tackle both issues simultaneously. However, it is not just about distributing money in a more effective way, but it is also about technological methods used to distribute the money in an accountable manner. The development of financial circuits surrounding the aid-recipients are utilized as a form of management and monitoring. According to Maurer (2006) most of the research on the poor and their money overlook such a dynamic.

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29 To him, money is about the form of payment, relations, infrastructure and meaning. Most importantly, it is about relationships because of the ways in which people direct the flow of money to create, reflect and maintain specific social ties (Maurer, 2015, p. 79). Yet, the virtualization of money is accompanied by quantitative principles, which evermore blinds the humanitarian community from the complex social imaginaries created by such financial methods. This is because money in the post-Bretton Woods world has been increasingly detached from political and social control and has collapsed into a phantasm of financialization. Finances’ formulae in such a world are distributed through “calculative networks of human & technological agents” and assumed to be self-governing and remolding an “economy of appearances” (Maurer, 2006; Tsing, 2000, p. 118).

When the humanitarian community uses technology to distribute financial assistance, for increased efficiency, it is not a mere technical strategy but rather entails moral and political implications in practice. This is not only attributed to the inherent distributive effects of money, which escapes into the private sphere, but the ambiguities that are hidden behind the assumed truths of what is rendered a ‘technical fix’ (Ortiz, 2014). Within the financial inclusion design, financial education is assumed to make aid-receivers empowered and dignified by making them resilient to market shocks (Gabor & Brooks, 2017, p.431). However, they also adopt financial strategies, such as “Know Your Customer” policies which legitimize the monitoring of what is deemed the irrational behaviors of beneficiaries. Such practices have been contested not only for privacy issues, but also for shifting the failures of these technologies to the recipients (Sandvik and Jacobsen, 2017). Due to their monitory features, financial technologies that are implemented in modern humanitarianism act as surveillance technologies. Maurer’s studies on mobile money show the social implications of new ‘technologically innovative’ policies for financial assistance on the marginalized. He finds that they create a new category of ‘second class banking’ in the social imaginary, which is merely a way of profiting from beneficiaries’ digital personal data (Maurer, 2015). Gabor & Brooks (2017) also find that the financialization of humanitarian technologies are practically implemented for lenders to monitor the so called “risky populations” (Gabor & Brooks, 2017, p. 430). Consequently, the humanitarian community are increasingly using quantitative methods and statistics as an accurate measure of abstract social processes to prove the ‘success’ of efficiency in implementing humanitarian innovative technologies (Scheel & Ustek-Spilda, 2019). I conceptualize the virtualization of monetary assistance as an exemplary method to the different ways in which the new world order is “governing by numbers” (Shore & Wright, 2015).

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30 From the surveyed literature on technologies, techno-fetishism and virtual monetary assistance, it is clear that performing modern humanitarianism is not merely a technical matter but has social and political consequences. This evident mismatch between the rationalities behind implementing technologies for technical purposes and their social implications in practice, constitutes effects at the level of the subjects embodying these technologies of power i.e. the government of subjects in the Foucauldian sense.

2.4 Constitutive Effects and Subjectivities

In the previous section, I shed light on the practices of modern humanitarianism in adopting technologically innovative aid programs, in order to inspect the problems that occur from their institutionalization. I focused on laying out the terrain that arrives at the virtualization of resources, which is a case of technologically innovative aid-programs. As such, I find that that the various practices it has encompassed work together to produce a specific type of knowledge and power. According to Escobar (1988), in order to examine developmental endeavors thoroughly one must inspect the set of exclusion practices that take place within the “development apparatus”, such as transcribing, managing and controlling labels to affect certain social relations that fit with the aspired ideals. Escobar’s contention is portrayed in Ferguson’s ethnographic work in Lesotho, where the exercise of power is maintained by particular knowledge productions bounded in technocratic practices. To that end, the use of Foucault’s biopolitics is appropriate to manifest the subjectivities that are molded by financial technologies in modern humanitarianism. This allows viewing knowledge production as a technical means to intervene into social processes, thus they cannot be regarded as innocent “contemplative pursuits” but rather “amenable to political programming” (Xavier-Inda, 2005, p. 14). Adriana Petryna’s ethnography on the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster argues that the production of knowledge distances itself from the classical sense of experimentation when it becomes a means to regulate the grounds on which individuals are recognized (Petryna, 2005 quoted in Xavier-Inda, 2005, p. 15). To that end, I elaborate on the notion of experimentality, which examines scientific knowledge-claims, particularly those quantitative in nature, that are politically institutionalized to create the aspired reality. However, by paying attention to the embeddedness of these technologies, I find that they elicit new daily practices, whereby what they portray differs from their actual embodiment. I conceptualize the multiple realities which emerge from these technologies as co-produced. That allows for the understanding of biopower as knowledge-claims infringing forms of subjectivities through which people come to understand themselves. As such, the subjects of

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31 government negotiate the processes of knowledge-claims that they are subjected to. The political essence of knowledge production is thus manifested when identities are regarded as a negotiation between that which is promoted by the practices of government and how subjects resist, adapt and embrace them.

2.4.1 The Politics of ‘Technocratization’

Escobar (1988) describes development programs as “techniques of power and knowledge” (p. 435), which impose a discursive asymmetry between the so called rich and poor countries. He finds that this asymmetry stems from the nature of Western Economy and its significance to the rest of the world. In summary, Escobar finds that social dominance results from the institutionalization of Western economic discourses and their effect on local historical situations, including its resistance (Escobar, 1988, p. 438). Ferguson’s ethnographic work on the failed “Thaba-Tseka Development Project” in Lesotho is an appropriate illustration of the ways in which fallacies are legitimized in development programs due to such dominant discourses.

Other than the fact that the development plan had misunderstood Thaba-Teska people as “farmers” rather than “laborers”, a prominent fallacy issued about Lesotho was that its government’s genuine goal was to enhance the economic situation of their country but did not have the resources to do so. Thus, the discourse of development was implemented under the perception that the government was a neutral machine that provided services and economic growth. As such, the project resorted to the knowledge-claims that poor agriculture resulted from the lack of developmental plans and local ignorance, it did not consider the political feature of the state itself. In addition, the inscribed labels such as “individual farmers” or “decision makers” reduced the apparent problems of poverty to the subjects themselves, disregarding the effects of the political power structures that generated impoverishment. Even though the local development institutions were highly influenced by political parties, they were still seen as “apolitical machines” (Ferguson, 1994, p. 178). Planners assumed that since the deficiencies are technical in nature, technical solutions should also be sufficient (Nilsen, 2016, p. 272). Nevertheless, the development reforms were not technically implemented but were used by the government to maintain their power and expand bureaucratic control. Thus, it was through the technocratic practices of the development project that the government was able to continue pursuing the functions that were not working for the people on the ground, but rather enhancing a repressive political agenda.

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32 While Ferguson’s encounter provides insights on the depoliticizing effects that technocratic knowledge produces to impose implicit power, the notion of experimentality provides an understanding of the way in which such knowledge is produced and staged.

2.4.2 Experimentality: Subjects as Numbers

Experiments in scientific research are generally known as a mode of testing the truth of a hypothesis or a theory within the boundaries of the laboratory. In modern humanitarianism, the notion of experimentation has most prominently seen in its employment of innovations. Sandvik et al. (2017) explain that the uncertain context of humanitarian work makes it inherently experimental. This makes innovations in humanitarianism different from the scientific notion of experimentation, particularly due to the inversion in the relation between knowledge and practice it creates: rather than knowledge informing practice, practice produces knowledge (Rottenburg, 2009, p. 431). Such form of experimentation is thus taken outside of the boundaries of a scientific laboratory’s rationality, spaces and practices. Anthropologists have this termed experimentality, distinct from experimentation, and identified it as a mode of governmentality (Rottenburg, 2009). As such, experimental knowledge does not require any witnesses it only requires bringing together experimental devices in mutable places, without even informing the enrolled subjects being evaluated that they are part of the experimentation (Nguyen, 2009). Jacobsen (2015)’s research on UNHCR’s use of biometrics, manifests the social practices that partake in producing ‘evidence’ from such forms of experiments. She brings our attention to the phenomenon of authoritative knowledge-claims that influential humanitarian actors encompass, such as UNHCR, to dictate the legitimacy of implementing experimental technologies for humanitarian causes. This epistemic authority that influential institutions hold is attributed to their social capital, but also to their reliance on quantification practices, which in our modern world has legitimized control and power (Hansen & Porter, 2012, p. 415). Given the inherently uncertain contexts of humanitarian situations, experimentality is nevertheless an act in “stage-craft” for public recognition, making failures of these technologies mundane or even invisible (Rottenburg, 2009, p. 433).

In the case of financial technologies in modern humanitarianism, experimental results are evermore authoritative because of money’s assumed commensurability. The experts in evaluating the success of virtual monetary assistance are financial actors, who purely rely on quantifications as an irreducible core. Quantification and numbers are authoritative in themselves because they create value, whereby explanation is not deemed necessary anymore – “recourse to some shared domain of unquestioned moral authority” (Jasanoff, 2004, p. 10).

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33 Hence, the social feature embedded in humanitarian experiments is crucial to manifest, because the knowledge-claims that are assumed to be certain are based on what is socially accepted to be ‘uncertain’. Embracing financial technologies based on such moral authority inevitably strikes back by influencing the social imaginary (Latour, 2008). Tazzioli (2019) ‘s study of cash assistance in Greece portrays it’s entanglements in the ambiguities inherent to the “circuits of financial-humanitarianism” which is “not only an epistemic issue but has also tangible effects on lives” of refugees (Tazzioli, 2019, p. 10). Thus, I use the concept of experimentality in conjunction with embeddedness to encompass the multiple realities which emerge from the embodiment of financial technologies, rather than reducing them to merely technical solutions of accessing financial resources.

2.4.3 Embeddedness: Subjects Beyond Commensurability

The financial inclusion rhetoric that the humanitarian community embraces, treats the bigger collective issue of poverty as a problem that can be treated on the individual level (Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007; Sözer, 2019). This is especially seen in the recent technologically innovative financial assistance, whereby there is an emphasis on securing the poor with products and delivery channels rather than targeting structural issues inherent in the political sources of global poverty (Schwittay, 2011). This can be attributed to what Ferguson (1994) calls the anti-political machine of development whereby issues concerning social justice and wealth redistribution are treated with technical prescriptions, such as distributing debit cards, instead of taking on political action (Schwittay, 2011; Li, 2007; Ferguson, 1994). As such, demonstrating the politics hidden behind such technocratic methods, involves conceptualizing them as socially and economically embedded endeavors. Anthropologists have historically demonstrated money’s capacity beyond commensurability (see Bloch and Parry,1989; Gregory, 1997; Hart, 2000; Maurer, 2005), by portraying money’s ability to mediate social projects such as signification, solidarity and dissent (Muir, 2015, p. 311). Recently anthropologists, have been more concerned with demonstrating the social implications of financialization on the private sphere. The main constitutive effect of financialization is in its capacity to blur the lines between the public and private spheres. By reviewing the literature on monetary transactions, Bill Maurer remarks that “monetary meanings cannot be treated in isolation from wider transactional orders” (Maurer, 2006, p. 22). Bayliss et al. (2017), reinforce this argument in their attempt to theorize financialization, which they find is not dependent nor confined to monetary relations. They argue that financialization could impact the consumption in the household itself, which they term the “material culture of the financialization of everyday

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34 life” (Bayliss, Fine, & Robertson, 2017, p. 364). Ortiz (2014), also emphasized that the concept of society itself is “shaped and legitimized by the meanings of money in everyday interactions” (Ortiz, 2014, p. 40).

I conceptualize the use of financial technologies in modern humanitarianism as a form of such financialization, which is embedded socially and economically. Thus, the constitutes effects on the individual subjectivities is created through the co-production of the realities which are staged, embedded and embodied.

2.4.4 Embodiment: Co-production of Subjects and Objects

Paying attention to the constitutive effects of technologically innovative forms of intervention, highlights the politics of seemingly technical matters (Jacobsen, 2015). This entails focusing on the materiality of technologies and its embodiment which is not independent on the world and the surrounding materials but emerges from the intra-action between persons and things (Graves-Brown, 2000, p.4). Accordingly, materiality is co-constitutive of reality and not separate or distinct from it (Aradau, 2010). Perceiving technology as having ‘agentic capacities’, rather than being merely a means to an end, advances a critical approach to such new forms of intervention in humanitarianism. This conceptualization of materialization is used in various fields of the social sciences tackling technologies, prominently in anthropology and security studies (Aradau, 2010; Scott-smith, 2018). It has also been used to conceptualize financialization and its encroachment in the private sphere (Bayliss, Fine & Robertson, 2017; Gabor & Brooks, 2016; Tsing, 2000; Maurer, 2006; Ortiz, 2014). Thus, applying this conceptualization to the case of virtual monetary transactions in humanitarianism, brings to light the agential capacity of both money and technology. The materialization of such technologies involves the intra-action between the actors and the technology itself, which co-produce a new social order in the humanitarian setting. Through a post-humanist lens, performativity rejects materiality as merely an effect of human agency and instead perceives it as an active part of the process of changing relations, differences, and configurations of the world (Barad, 2003, p. 827; Aradau 2010). Barad (2003), who has coined “post-humanist performativity”, conceptualizes matter as materialization, which allows the analysis of financializing humanitarian technologies as constituted and constitutive of matter and meaning; objects and subjects. In line with such conceptualization, I use Jasanoff’s concept of co-production to make sense of the social co-production of knowledge and its material embodiment. As such, the production of scientific knowledge through the use of humanitarian technologies is located as embedded in social dimensions while at the same time emphasizing its epistemic

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35 and material correlates (Jasanoff, 2004). Embodiment is thus central to the case of financializing humanitarian technologies because of the inherent capacity that the virtualization of monetary transactions has on mediating behaviors that aid-receivers are expected to adhere to. Starting with the performative aspects of humanitarian technologies entails that there are different realities of the outcomes of such an innovation.

I conceptualize financial technologies in modern humanitarianism not as an end-product of discursive practices, agreements and policies, but rather as implicated in the process of materialization, its performativity. The discursive practices and evaluation reports that cater to the experimental success of financial humanitarian technologies are also informed by them, even though their embodiment caters to different realities. I call these technologies, finnovations to encapsulate their three dimensions as: commodity, innovation and technology. In the next section, I will discuss these finnovations as technics of power which emerge from the rationalities of a modern humanitarianism, but also create particular subjectivities which reinforces power practices.

2.5 ‘Finnovation’: A Form of Humanitarian Governmentality

Using a Foucauldian notion of power as an overarching framework, I presented modern humanitarian governmentality along the three dimensions of rationalities, practices and constitutive effects. Being market-oriented, modern humanitarianism has adopted innovation to instigate the appropriate change in the sector, which has commoditizing effects. These elements are found in the adoption of financial technological innovations, which have been utilized for humanitarian purposes namely to increase effectiveness, efficiency and accountability. Being mediums of power, humanitarian actors’ practices sidelined the needs of the beneficiaries by fetishizing their capacity to satisfy the donors, as optimized delivery mechanisms which provide monitoring and surveillance accounts. Tazzioli (2017) characterizes modern humanitarianisms increased use of financial technologies “a source of profit for financial actors” which entails “the opening of financial circuits around refugee management operation” (Tazzioli, 2017). As such, what she calls financial-humanitarianism is not only about distributing money in a more efficient way, but it is about the technocratic methods in which money is being selectively distributed and whom it ultimately benefits. Thus, the change in modern humanitarianism is that of commoditization. An obvious discussion to that end, is linking this endeavor to Ferguson’s encounter of the anti-politics machine, whereby the adoption of technocratic methods has reduced the structural problems of poverty to the individuals themselves. In addition to such methods enhancing the structural issues, they create