Summary points “BIMS registers every refugee life event: from marriage, to education, to death. More than 90 percent of Syrians residing in Za’tari have been forcibly registered into the system as a precondition for receiving aid. “The involvement of tech companies and their products in state-led and international humanitarian work raises serious concerns about how their profit motive might compromise humanitarian principles. In particular, the absence of strong data protection laws renders data a profitable commodity to be bought and sold. “Knowledge about emergencies and those affected by them is no longer being produced in context but rather through machines and artificial intelligence that dictate how humanitarians should intervene in crisis situations. “There are good reasons to believe that the Herberts of the humanitarian world will save lives and protect humanitarian workers in dangerous situations. But they also represent a new form of robotic intermediation that thr...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51