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Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful
With over 300 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, and with emergencies and climate disasters becoming more common, AI and big data are being championed as forces for good and as solutions to the complex challenges of the aid sector.
This book argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need.
Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, the book examines a range of from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies.
This book argues, however, that digital innovation engenders new forms of violence and entrenches power asymmetries between the global South and North. Madianou develops a new concept, technocolonialism, to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial legacies. The concept of technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that digital infrastructures, data and AI play in accentuating inequities between aid providers and people in need.
Drawing on ten years of research on the uses of digital technologies in humanitarian operations, the book examines a range of from the normalization of biometric technologies and the datafication of humanitarian operations to experimentation in refugee camps, which are treated as laboratories for technological pilots. In so doing, the book opens new ground in the fields of humanitarianism and critical AI studies, and in the debates in postcolonial studies, by highlighting the fundamental role of digital technologies in reworking colonial genealogies.
- GenresNonfictionTechnology
256 pages, Hardcover
Published January 13, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 21, 2025
Mirca Madianou's Technocolonialism shows how six logics of digital humanitarianism - humanitarian accountability, audit, capitalism, technosolutionism, securitization and resistance - together combine to reproduce colonial practices of extraction, paternalisation, marginalisation and disempowerment through digital solutions.
Using examples from fieldwork in multiple geographies, Madianou first provides a brief history lesson on the logics of colonialism, demonstrating its far-reaching echoes into our societal and institutional configurations of today. She shows how humanitarianism joins capitalism through the desire to corporatise humanitarian organisations, leading to the need for accountability and audit.
Next, she shows how biometric infrastructures perform both data extraction and oppression, drawing on the work of Bowker and Star to illustrate how "categories have consequences" in the delivery of humanitarian aid - and how those categories are both created, and unable to be effectively contested.
Madianou then critiques accountability of humanitarian efforts, showing how feedback mechanisms are often performative and a poor way to evaluate the effectiveness of programs - mirroring in many ways broader themes within the project management literature of how to measure outcomes.
She proffers the term "surreptitious experimentation" to point to humanitarian aid sites as laboratories for testing new technologies on an audience unable to provide informed consent - and where the harms of experimentation are borne by those, paradoxically, that technology is intended to aid.
Painting digital humanitarianism as an inexplicable "black box" - a machine - she lays out an argument that shows how multiple stakeholders are imbricated in digital humanitarianism and its harms, however, in my view, stops short of identifying specific leverage points (in the parlance of Donella Meadows) for changing or re-configuring the machine.
Following, Madianou coins the term "mundane resistance" to point to actions of those who refuse to engage with the digital humanitarianism machine as it intends them to - by usurping feedback mechanisms to request songs from a radio station - for example. Here, I found the term "mundane" jarring - resistance in situations where one has little power are not acts of mundanity, but bravery, confidence, rebellion.
This book sits within infrastructure studies because technocolonialism is deeply infrastructural - technologies, institutions, funding mechanism, and the flow of data - combine to create a technocolonialist infrastructure in which digital humanitarianism operates.
The key weakness, in my view, in this book, is the lack of attention paid to how to undo the logics of technocolonialism; while Madianou points to concepts such as design justice and human-centred design, these by themselves are too vague. What is the prescription for de-technocolonialism? I see perhaps a confluence of Dan McQuillan's desire for "decomputing" coupled with the de-colonial efforts of academics such as Timnit Gebru, Deb Raji and Joy Buolamwini. But where are the leverage points in the technocolonialist system? Madianou correctly points to funders - who themselves are not neutral actors. What I would have liked here instead is a blueprint for unwinding the six logics set out at the start - humanitarian accountability, audit, capitalism, technosolutionism, securitization and resistance - which would be another volume on its own - and one I hope Madianou is able to find the time and space to pen.
I'd recommend this book for scholars of science and technology studies (STS), and qualitative researchers who are looking for a way to structure arguments that intersect multiple concepts - as Madianou does this exceptionally.
Using examples from fieldwork in multiple geographies, Madianou first provides a brief history lesson on the logics of colonialism, demonstrating its far-reaching echoes into our societal and institutional configurations of today. She shows how humanitarianism joins capitalism through the desire to corporatise humanitarian organisations, leading to the need for accountability and audit.
Next, she shows how biometric infrastructures perform both data extraction and oppression, drawing on the work of Bowker and Star to illustrate how "categories have consequences" in the delivery of humanitarian aid - and how those categories are both created, and unable to be effectively contested.
Madianou then critiques accountability of humanitarian efforts, showing how feedback mechanisms are often performative and a poor way to evaluate the effectiveness of programs - mirroring in many ways broader themes within the project management literature of how to measure outcomes.
She proffers the term "surreptitious experimentation" to point to humanitarian aid sites as laboratories for testing new technologies on an audience unable to provide informed consent - and where the harms of experimentation are borne by those, paradoxically, that technology is intended to aid.
Painting digital humanitarianism as an inexplicable "black box" - a machine - she lays out an argument that shows how multiple stakeholders are imbricated in digital humanitarianism and its harms, however, in my view, stops short of identifying specific leverage points (in the parlance of Donella Meadows) for changing or re-configuring the machine.
Following, Madianou coins the term "mundane resistance" to point to actions of those who refuse to engage with the digital humanitarianism machine as it intends them to - by usurping feedback mechanisms to request songs from a radio station - for example. Here, I found the term "mundane" jarring - resistance in situations where one has little power are not acts of mundanity, but bravery, confidence, rebellion.
This book sits within infrastructure studies because technocolonialism is deeply infrastructural - technologies, institutions, funding mechanism, and the flow of data - combine to create a technocolonialist infrastructure in which digital humanitarianism operates.
The key weakness, in my view, in this book, is the lack of attention paid to how to undo the logics of technocolonialism; while Madianou points to concepts such as design justice and human-centred design, these by themselves are too vague. What is the prescription for de-technocolonialism? I see perhaps a confluence of Dan McQuillan's desire for "decomputing" coupled with the de-colonial efforts of academics such as Timnit Gebru, Deb Raji and Joy Buolamwini. But where are the leverage points in the technocolonialist system? Madianou correctly points to funders - who themselves are not neutral actors. What I would have liked here instead is a blueprint for unwinding the six logics set out at the start - humanitarian accountability, audit, capitalism, technosolutionism, securitization and resistance - which would be another volume on its own - and one I hope Madianou is able to find the time and space to pen.
I'd recommend this book for scholars of science and technology studies (STS), and qualitative researchers who are looking for a way to structure arguments that intersect multiple concepts - as Madianou does this exceptionally.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews