Infrastructure justice and humanitarianism: blockchain's promises in practice

Thesis

Proponents of the decentralised database technology blockchain suggest it will revolutionise the aid sector by allowing money and data to be exchanged more equitably, efficiently, transparently, and securely. Blockchain is widely expected to improve refugee identification, cross-border remittances, supply chain management and more. However, humanitarian blockchain projects are nascent and there is a lack of critical scholarship on how the promises for blockchain are playing out in practice. This thesis provides the first comprehensive, theoretically informed, empirically grounded case study of the use of blockchain in humanitarianism. I investigate the imaginaries, uses and effects of blockchain in anthropological terms, based on close-up work with the key stakeholder communities connected to a pilot project in Jordan’s refugee camps, which in 2019 began using blockchain to deliver financial aid to Syrian refugee women. Drawing together a range of perspectives on the same project, I show how the aspirations for this new technology materialise, in support of some priorities—those of UN donors, agencies and their corporate and government partners—at the expense of others—aid workers and refugees.

Building on critical data studies, infrastructure studies, and aid and migration studies, I put forward the theoretical frame of infrastructure justice. With this, I advance scholarship on socio-economic injustices and political hegemonies in the digital age. I argue that injustices are experienced, extended, and contested through three interlocking dimensions of infrastructure: subjectivities, timescapes, and materialities. I demonstrate how strongly affective cultural and subjective experiences with blockchain—involving suspicion, ignorance, mystification, and faith—connect with the asymmetrical regulation of information, material resources and strategic interests over space and time. This thesis gives fresh insight into how radical, emergent technology implemented at socio-economic margins both challenges and is incorporated into the structures of global governance, and in particular how it is experienced by its presumed beneficiaries.

Authors: Cheesman, M

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-pzenojrjn
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: infrastructure; blockchain; web3; justice; refugees; ethnography; aid
• Subjects: Humanitarian aid workers; Humanitarian assistance; Refugees, Arab; Anthropology; Technology