If you pick up Mirca Madianou’s Technocolonialism, the first thing you see is a metal grid sitting uncomfortably over the face of a woman standing against an undisturbed black background. Madianou says of the image that it (Face Cages by artist Zac Blas) “dramatizes the abstract violence of the biometric diagram”. The image is uncomfortable because the polygons, points, and lines of the biometric diagram that exist to represent the singular form of a person’s face–even if only by flattening it into information about the distance between the eyes or the width of a nose–become a mask that stops us from recognizing it. The “irreconcilability” of data that is supposed to perfectly represent a face with the materiality of the human face itself is our visual entry point into Madianou’s argument. This irreconcilability between the technological “solutions” that are supposed to address the deficits and power asymmetries in humanitarianism with the real needs of affected people animates the violence of technocolonialism.

The book opens with a story about the collection of biometric data from Rohingya refugees by the UNHCR and the Bangladeshi government. This becomes our introduction to the field of digital humanitarianism which has come to refer to the adoption of digital technologies and data in the field of humanitarianism. The author then narrates her own point of entry into this field in the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan which hit the Philippine archipelago in 2013. Madianou has closely followed the technologization of humanitarian operations over the past decade in a way that very few scholars have, and her familiarity with the field leads to the thinking in this book. Technocolonialism offers us a framework to interpret this field.

Technocolonialism, as a concept, emerges amidst a range of formulations that seek to name how our world is structured by technology, capital, and coloniality. Technocolonialism cannot be accounted for by terms such as digital colonialism and data colonialism. While these terms also see colonialism as a central organizing principle, their focus remains on capital, extractivism, and labor. But, the most significant way in which they differ from technocolonialism is that they see a discontinuity between “classical” or “historical” colonialism and the digital or data colonialism of the present. Technocolonialism, on the other hand, starts with the recognition of the persistence of colonial structures. Madianou, in the introduction, takes us through an extensive literature review, locating her position among infrastructure studies, decolonial , postcolonial, and Black radical thinking and acquainting us with her interlocutors, assuming no disciplinary familiarity.

She also alerts us to humanitarianism’s contested “apolitical” or neutral character that needs to center “emergencies” or “disasters” as it cannot address the failing structures that cause them. For Madianou, colonialism is not a metaphor or in the past.

Humanitarianism is concerned with the alleviation of the suffering of distant others. It is a “historical phenomenon, an industry, a profession, an ideology, and a moral discourse” all at once. As an industry, it sees the involvement of a variety of actors ranging from nation states, humanitarian organizations, and increasingly, the private sector, to the communities affected by disaster. As a historical phenomenon, humanitarianism has an intimate relationship with empire and colonialism as it “institutionalizes compassion,” having served as a justification for colonial expansion. Meanwhile, it also sustains the legacies of empire through the sustained asymmetry between aid givers and receivers. In more recent history, the writer points us to the use of humanitarian projects that act as a vehicle for capitalist expansion. She also alerts us to humanitarianism’s contested “apolitical” or neutral character that needs to center “emergencies” or “disasters” as it cannot address the failing structures that cause them. For Madianou, colonialism is not a metaphor or in the past.

The Five Logics of Digital Humanitarianism

Having set up humanitarianism as a site in which colonial presence can be reworked and revitalized, Madianou sets up the stakes for unpacking the digital turn in humanitarianism. Digital humanitarianism emerges in a “complex moment of global instability and mounting emergencies, sector growth, combined with immense funding pressures and internal demands for objectivity, neutrality, accountability and transparency…”. She offers five logics: the logic of humanitarian accountability, the logic of audit, the logic of technological solutionism, the logic of capitalism, and the logic of securitization. These five logics provide us with the vocabulary to articulate the imperatives of digital humanitarianism today.

In attending to the critique that humanitarianism entrenches the power asymmetries between the givers and receivers of aid that centralizes relief and creates new dependencies, Madianou charts a turn toward digital technologies arising from a demand for “participation” from affected people in the sector. The logic of accountability addresses a gap in the “participation” of affected populations through feedback mechanisms enacted via digital technologies. The logic of audit addresses the marketization of the humanitarian field in how organizations need to compete for scarce funding by optimizing the complex logistics of their work and providing metrics that demonstrate the impact, efficiency, and transparency of initiatives obtained through digital innovation. The logic of capitalism operates through the emergence of private actors, including the tech industry, in the humanitarian field in the form of corporate social responsibility, philanthrocapitalism, and public-private partnerships. The logic of technological solutionism arises from a desire to find technological solutions for complex social problems which finds its strongest advocates in the private sector and, to a lesser extent, from counterculture tech utopianism. The logic of tech solutionism also captures the tendencies of “tech for good” fields that create solutions for which it needs to find problems in order to perform solidarity with affected populations without the moral or emotional weight of such engagement. The logic of tech-solutionism combined with the logic of capitalism, Madianou claims, leads to “the normalization of technological pilots of experiments among people made vulnerable by crises or displacement”. The logic of securitization operates through the control of migration, whose infrastructures depend on biometric technologies and its attendant racialized classifications and data extractivism.

The logic of securitization operates through the control of migration, whose infrastructures depend on biometric technologies and its attendant racialized classifications and data extractivism.

Apart from the logics that drive the processes of technocolonialism, Madianou takes a close look at the use of biometrics and blockchain technologies in a supermarket in Za’atari refugee camp to disburse aid from the World Food Programme’s Building Block scheme. The ubiquity of biometric usage in the humanitarian sector exemplifies the tendencies of digitalization and datafication in humanitarianism. Here too, Madianou traces the history of biometrics as a technology of race and empire with its origins in troubling eugenicist projects. Much like with humanitarianism, colonialism isn’t simply a metaphor to describe the violence of biometric technologies, it is inherent to its history. The piloting of biometrics by the UNHCR in the registration of Afghan refugees to identify people who access aid more than once too closely resembles the piloting of fingerprinting as a means to prevent pension fraud. The revitalization of the biometric project in humanitarianism creates the same relationship of suspicion.

Madianou’s attention to the specific technologies deployed in the projects she discusses allow us to truly appreciate not only the power asymmetries they entrench but also the very real risks of bias, lack of consent, function creep, protection and privacy of sensitive data, and the breakdown of these technologies and infrastructures that the logistics of aid are entirely dependent on.

If the language of participation once gestured toward solidarity, today it is reconfigured as a data point to optimize project performance.

Some of the richest ethnographic work in the book comes through in chapter three, which follows the trails of data across the humanitarian efforts following Super Typhoon Haiyan. It reveals a story of how “accountability” becomes a technical process. We follow the trail of feedback data collected from people affected by disaster, only to watch it become flattened to audit data whose ultimate recipients donors, hollowing out accountability to people. If the language of participation once gestured toward solidarity, today it is reconfigured as a data point to optimize project performance. The promise of giving voice becomes a proxy for listening. Madianou’s careful ethnography lays bare how feedback technologies flatten the texture of people’s lives into administrative signals that can be mapped, measured, audited, but rarely responded to. She alerts us to the growing trend of use of chatbots to collect this information, forcing messy and complex categories to be expressed in small chatbot-legible boxes. People become providers of information, not claimants of rights.

But by the logic of techno-solutionism, the way technologies are mobilized only satisfies the sector’s growing appetite for performance data while leaving the deeper political demands of justice and redress unacknowledged.

Madianou’s critique points to an important moral tension in humanitarianism: if humanitarianism is concerned with alleviating the suffering of distant others, how can space and time gaps be bridged to foster genuine empathy and care for the distant others? Digital technologies offer a simple “fix” to a moral distance that needs to be continuously and sincerely interrogated. But by the logic of techno-solutionism, the way technologies are mobilized only satisfies the sector’s growing appetite for performance data while leaving the deeper political demands of justice and redress unacknowledged. This genuine need for moral proximity has also led to the rise of demands for “localization” of humanitarian projects as a key policy agenda. The recent work of Maria-Louise Clausen, Adam Moe Fejerskov, and Sarah Seddig suggests that digital tools do not erase distance—they simulate proximity while reproducing the structural gaps between givers and receivers. Their concept of “datafied localization” highlights how the integration of big data as a shortcut to localization risks fabricating context and reproducing power imbalances by transforming communities into data sources or limited subcontractors in projects owned by market-driven actors in the Global North.

Doing No Harm

The commercial forces in these projects aren’t simply providers of technologies, but through initiatives framed as “AI for Good” are turned into de facto humanitarians. Chapter four of the book introduces the concept of surreptitious experimentation to describe how digital technologies—particularly biometrics and AI—are tested on vulnerable populations without consent, transparency, or oversight. Madianou traces this to a long history of using marginalized groups as testing grounds for technologies before they are rolled out more broadly.

These experiments, often driven by partnerships between humanitarian actors and tech companies, outsource the risk of experimentation to the Global South, which is seen as more acceptable, all the while enabling positive publicity, visibility, and profit for private actors and the humanitarian organizations that partner with them.

These experiments, often driven by partnerships between humanitarian actors and tech companies, outsource the risk of experimentation to the Global South, which is seen as more acceptable, all the while enabling positive publicity, visibility, and profit for private actors and the humanitarian organizations that partner with them. Surreptitious experimentation, embedded in digital infrastructures, exemplifies technocolonialism’s most extractive and ethically fraught form. It demonstrates in the clearest form how the logic of techno-solutionism, which enables such “experimentation” with solutions looking for problems, is at odds with the humanitarian imperative to ‘do no harm’. Especially when the “experimentation” follows a North-South trajectory lacking linguistic and cultural sensitivity toward the people they claim to serve, the motivations of such projects become clear. However, beyond the explicit experimentation Madianou also makes the chilling connection that the “infrastructuring” of biometric or blockchain technologies that might be used in these settings might serve to diffuse experimentations, because infrastructure has a way of hiding in the background; such that participants may not even know that a pilot is taking place but even if they did, they would not be able to opt out. This is the core of surreptitious experimentation.

She narrates the history of colonial medicine and how it sets up (former) colonies as spaces that become amenable to the “outsourcing” of clinical trials.

It is in this context that Madianou traces the coloniality of technological experiments, not all scientific experiments, but the long legacy of experiments that take place in relations of inequity. She narrates the history of colonial medicine and how it sets up (former) colonies as spaces that become amenable to the “outsourcing” of clinical trials. While Madianou focuses on the history of colonial medicine, it is useful to pay attention also to the eugenicist underpinnings of modern technologies. In Predatory Data, Anita Say Chan issues a powerful call to locate the history of our current data economy, not in the innovation of Western technologists, but around eugenics’ segregationist history. The history of the eugenics information market closely resembles the experimentation in humanitarian projects in the manner in which data was extracted from immigrants, prisoners, and people living in poverty. But this framing also alerts us to the dangerous forms of knowledge that such extractivism facilitates, which are ultimately weaponized against the very populations they study.

In a seminar discussing the book, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen articulates this concern in its most pressing form: “It’s worth thinking about whether extraction sufficiently conveys the message that we risk making subjects more vulnerable. Because extraction can be seen as, you extract gold from a gold mine and then you leave. And of course the village is poorer but they are not newly insecure.” Biometric data, especially, sticks to the body and the extracted data always stands to make the bodies it is attached to newly vulnerable as it flows through porous humanitarian infrastructures.

Infrastructuring and Humanitarian Subjects

Madianou’s attention to the infrastructure is the most powerful throughline in Technocolonialsm. The infrastructuring of humanitarianism entails building upon privatized or government systems or existing technological infrastructure. It also entails humanitarian systems becoming interoperable with other systems owned by governments or private companies. She observes how this transforms the relationship of humanitarianism with states and private actors and leads to a normalization of ‘infrastructural violence”. Madianou leaves us with an important question: “given the reusability, replicability and retrievability of humanitarian data, the boundaries of the humanitarian space become porous. If humanitarian data are reused and repurposed by governments, and if this flow is facilitated by the interoperability of systems and infrastructures, then where does humanitarianism end and where does state power begin?”

Infrastructure as a category is expansive enough to bring together all the actors in the humanitarian machine, including the people that humanitarianism seeks to assist.

Infrastructure as a category is expansive enough to bring together all the actors in the humanitarian machine, including the people that humanitarianism seeks to assist. While the five logics animate the way technocolonialism manifests in digital humanitarianism, Madianou creates a sixth logic, that of resistance, that she calls “mundane resistance” to account for the contestation produced by the people who are subject to the practices of digital humanitarianism. She explores how those subjected to surveillance, data collection, and biometric monitoring contest these impositions not through overt rebellion but through everyday practices of refusal, manipulation, non-use, and tactical engagement. These acts are often small, ambiguous, and informal, yet they represent meaningful disruptions to the technocolonial logics of audit, solutionism, and securitization. Madianou argues that such resistance is rarely acknowledged by humanitarian actors or technology developers, as it does not register as a legitimate protest.  This in turn reveals the limits of participation in asymmetric systems where affected populations are expected to comply with technologies that are imposed upon them. She rejects the notion that refugee camps be seen as a “disaster zone” or a “state of exception” to shift focus to the agency of people.

Madianou only passingly engages with the exceptional nature of refugee camps in producing humanitarian subjects. But this creates a lost opportunity in interrogating the structural violence that non-citizenship creates. While acknowledging that there are crucial differences in people recovering from climate emergencies and people living in spaces of securitization, such as refugee camps, the humanitarian context matters not just in terms of its effects but in structuring the legal, moral, and political impetus of a humanitarian intervention. It is crucial to recognize that not all disasters are equal in marshalling the moral caring that humanitarianism requires. Ariella Azoulay in Citizens of Disaster observes that cyclones, fires, or even terrorist attacks, which are seen as an exception to the rule, bring a sense of urgency to do anything possible to mitigate the impacts of a disaster on the contingent gathering of individuals at the site of the disaster. But under conditions of flawed citizenship or non-citizenship, such as in a refugee camp, disaster is seen as the rule. “For the protected population, disaster is exceptional-an event that creates a state of emergency; the other type of population is comprised of those for whom the state of exception has become the rule, those who are themselves excepted, and therefore constantly exposed to chronic disaster.” The question of citizenship, then, is central to how technocolonialism manifests.

But even as we ask this, we must remember how fraught the moral foundations of alleviating the suffering of distant others already are. States owe different protections to citizens and non-citizens. Humanitarian organizations have a duty of beneficence and a commitment to do no harm to the disaster-affected people. Technocolonialism helps us grapple with the incursions of private actors in this space, which leads us to ask, “Who does the tech company owe care to?”