Do humanitarian workers really trust numbers? In the realm of the DATAWAR research project, this article aims to investigate the interest that humanitarian workers have developed towards quantitative data in the last two decades. The ‘needology’ approach (), growing expectations of donors since the 2000s, and the professionalisation and rationalisation of the humanitarian field are all factors that have contributed to the massive use of quantitative data. Discourses promoting ‘evidence-based humanitarianism’ have fostered massive hope in the humanitarian community: a good use of quantitative data could enhance contextual analyses, intervention monitoring or even the safety and security of humanitarian workers. However, this study has discovered that these narratives overestimate the ease with which humanitarian workers deal with numbers. In fact, it shows that the use of quantitative data is mainly determined by a specific, restrictive, hierarchically oriented evidence-based system which nurtures bottom-up accountability rather than day-to-day project management. As a result, the datafication of the humanitarian field does not seem to have been accompanied by an improvement of the data literacy of humanitarian workers.
The article shows how the data of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) remain ‘poor numbers’. First, because of the intrinsic uncertainty that presides over their production, but above all because of their necessary translation into the media system to trigger responses to crises. Drawing on Boltanski’s thesis on the politics of pity, it emphasises how figures are seen as a partial element of media rhetoric. The figures becomes a performative number when combined with registers of emotion and collective representations of famine. Two examples are developed through interviews with humanitarian practitioners: the crisis in Yemen (2018) as an ‘overexposed crisis’ and the crisis in Madagascar (2021) as a ‘silent crisis’.
In this interview, Irina Mützelburg discusses the production and spreading of humanitarian numbers in the on-going Russian–Ukrainian war since February 2022. She traces the emergence of the announced number of Ukrainian refugees several months before the beginning of the full-scale invasion and analyses the ways in which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) compile statistics respectively on Ukrainian refugees abroad and internally displaced persons (IDPs). Numbers are produced to be coherent and higher, to illustrate the need for attention and funding. Furthermore, the debated issue of Ukrainians who (were) moved to Russia since the invasion is reviewed, discussing not only the numbers, but also the ways the Ukrainian and the Russian states frame the ways and reasons for which Ukrainians came to Russia. Finally, the interview covers the term ‘evacuee’ and ‘evacuation’ that both Russian and Ukrainian politicians and media use in unusual ways and which have been taken up by international media outlets.
Irina Mützelburg is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and a co-coordinator of the German-French ANR-DFG project, Limspaces, researching everyday life in Moldova and Ukraine. Currently she studies the educational situation of displaced pupils from Ukraine in Germany. She holds a PhD from Sciences Po Paris and has published on Ukraine, migration policies, norm transfer and public policy analysis in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, European Journal of Migration, Revue française de science politique, Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest, Revue Gouvernance and Trajectoires. Her book Transferring Asylum Norms to EU Neighbours: Multi-Scalar Policies and Practices in Ukraine has been published with Palgrave Macmillan (London) in 2022.
This article describes and analyses the tensions linked to the flaws in the system of a randomised clinical trial conducted by Epicentre, an epidemiological research centre created by the non-governmental organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, in southern Niger. It presents an ethnography of the practice of therapeutic experimentation in the context of a clinical trial in which we observe the meticulousness of a set of monitored practices, framed by a bureaucracy and a hierarchy specific to the medical profession, intended to reduce bias as much as possible in order to produce reliable data. Based on an ethnographic survey with the combined use of participant observations (interviews as part of the real-time follow-up of this clinical trial), this article is part of the literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which consists in describing the science in the making (, ; ; ). It shows the difficulties of a trial that has not taken into account the local contexts of its implementation, the ‘real life’ and its unexpected effects.
The modern humanitarian sector is gripped by a data frenzy. How can we take a step back and critically engage with what datafication means? This introduction to the special section begins by outlining three broad theoretical positions within the literature: positivist, constructivist, and reflexivity of actors. To dive deeper, and to tie together the four pieces in this special section, we point to ‘ten things we know about humanitarian numbers’. The ten points cover issues of epistemology, institutionalisation, linguistics, social justice, technology, theorisation and power. Taken together, they offer different springboards from which academics can launch into critiques of data in the humanitarian sector.
In this article we suggest that the call for widening participation as part of the quest for a more localised humanitarianism has overlooked the clash of ethical registers that this would entail. We show that the formal script of the professionalised humanitarian system operates with an individualised ethics, while multiple other actors that exist alongside the humanitarian system operate with a relational ethical register. Based on a literature review on civic humanitarianism and humanitarianism embedded in social practice, we explore dimensions of the web of social interaction within which humanitarian practices often take place. We ask how to conceptualise these humanitarian relationships when relationships in themselves are understood as compromising humanitarian principles. Inspired by decolonial perspectives and relational ontologies and ethics, we then identify key dimensions of a relational humanitarianism: solidarity, responsibility and justice; identity and belonging; social distance and proximity; and temporality. In conclusion we suggest that for calls for localisation to succeed in genuinely changing power relations and practices, better understanding and recognition of relational ethical registers that operate alongside the formal script of the professionalised humanitarian system is required.
Chapter 8 covers the tumultuous events of November 2020 to January 2021 – including the US presidential election and the storming of the US Capitol – arguing that there is a democratic deficit at the heart of nuclear weapons policy. Here, the twin forces of populist authoritarianism and the backsliding of democracy create, as the poet Amanda Gorman eloquently put it in her poem at the inauguration of President Biden, ‘a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it’. This chapter argues that authoritarian conspiracy theories that influence populist movements of the modern era pose a serious threat to the planet, especially in states that have leaders with the sole authority to use nuclear weapons. As the storming of the US Capitol made clear, democratic states such as the United States are not immune to instability and violence striking at the heart of state institutions. Beyond this, the author demonstrates how nuclear weapons undermine democracy itself, and shows that the Third Nuclear Age is wrought with exterminist dangers that threaten the social and political fabric of democracy itself.
The concluding chapter summarises the core arguments of the book and reflects on the dawn of the Third Nuclear Age as well as developments since January 2021. The central argument is that the ills of the Third Nuclear Age have not gone away with the departure of Donald Trump. Instead, as Russia brutally invades Ukraine and Vladimir Putin rattles his nuclear sabre, as India accidentally launches a nuclear-capable missile into Pakistan, as China builds more nuclear missile silos, and as the UK increases the cap on its nuclear warhead stockpile, many of the issues analysed in this book are here to stay. Despite the renewal of nuclear arms control treaties such as New START, alongside the nuclear weapons states’ reaffirmation of the Reagan–Gorbachev principle that ‘a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought’, the chapter argues that the Third Nuclear Age is still a time of potentially unparalleled catastrophe. The final section of this chapter explores what can be done to challenge and overcome the exterminism of the new nuclear age, and draws together some of the positive developments made during the period of analysis – such as the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in January 2021 – to suggest where we go from here.
Chapter 2 directly follows on from Chapter 1 by introducing recent events from the start of the Trump presidency that led to the dawn of the Third Nuclear Age. It then introduces current research on the new nuclear age, pointing out that the dangers of the new nuclear age have not gone away with the departure of Donald Trump from office, and explaining how research suggests that the Third Nuclear Age is characterised by a multipolar world of competitive nuclear relationships, potential nuclear proliferation, the development of new technologies, the unpredictable change of key concepts and theories such as deterrence, the erosion of norms around the non-use of nuclear weapons, as well as the continued persistence of dangers from earlier nuclear ages. The chapter then demonstrates how a novel approach grounded in critical nuclear studies can provide for a richer insight into the Third Nuclear Age by going beyond the state-centric focus on ‘high politics’ of current research and illuminating how the ‘low politics’ of everyday lived experiences matter. It makes the case for critical nuclear studies by drawing together a range of interdisciplinary scholarship that is attuned to the role of nuclear masculinity, nuclear imperialism, nuclear culture, and nuclear exterminism in order to analyse and address the challenges and harms of the new nuclear age.
Chapter 6 begins with the murder by police of George Floyd in May 2020, whose last words ‘I can’t breathe’ resonated across the world as people took to the streets to protest against police brutality and racism. This chapter argues that even though the police murder of a Black American citizen on the streets of Minneapolis may seem a far cry from the realm of nuclear politics, George Floyd’s death occurred due to the structural racism that permeates and shapes state institutions, global politics more broadly, and much thinking and policy about nuclear weapons. To illustrate this point the author examines the role of racism, colonialism, and orientalism in the Third Nuclear Age, as evidenced in renewed calls for the United States to test a nuclear weapon for the first time in decades on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the American atomic bombing of Japan. In tracing the linkages between the racism that underpinned the testing of nuclear weapons on indigenous lands and the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the racism that led to renewed calls to test nuclear weapons today, the chapter argues that the Third Nuclear Age cannot be understood without an interrogation of colonialism and white supremacy in nuclear politics.