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The past decade has seen a growing engagement of tech companies in conflict settings to develop multifaceted technological innovations, including digital biometric identification to register refugees, commercial drones to deliver cargo, and big data-fuelled algorithms to predict the spread of crises. Humanitarian technology has been largely acclaimed as a way of making aid more effective and of triggering a paradigm shift in humanitarian governance by putting crisis-affected communities in what is claimed to be the driving seat of aid programmes. Critics are however wary about the negative impacts these innovations have on humanitarian practices and crisis-affected population. This paper contributes to this debate by assessing whether technological innovations fundamentally alter the politics and spaces of humanitarian governance. To do so, it analyses the way public private partnerships (PPPs) mediate between the interests of the various stakeholders of tech experiments and distribute power among them. Drawing upon the exploratory analysis of 22 tech projects in crisis settings, a typology of PPPs is formalised based on the way they distribute power and resources among their stakeholders. The results show that only one type of PPPs - community-based digital humanitarianism – has the potential of increasing the ownership of crisis-affected communities over aid programmes and localising projects in so-called Global South societies. The two other types – technologising the humanitarian business and externalising the lab to crisis settings – appear as a continuation of neo-colonial practices with a digital touch.

AbstractSomalia is one of the most telling examples of the changes that have affected peacebuilding in recent decades. Building peace in Somalia is a multidimensional endeavour involving a large number of global, regional and non-state actors which raises significant issues around coordination. Based on extensive field research in Kenya, this paper addresses three interrelated issues. First, it fills a gap in the existing literature in peacebuilding in Somalia, concretely examining the various types of relation that exist between global, regional and non-state peacebuilders in Somalia. Second, it draws upon sociological approaches to address the impact of coordination mechanisms on the actors under consideration: what strategies are deployed to resist coordination of dissenting actors’ activities? Finally, the paper examines the impact had by such interactions on the nature of the peacebuilding effort itself. The article highlights the side effects of coercive coordination mechanisms leading to an increased fragmentation of peacebuilding efforts and to a double mechanism of mutual exclusion between state and non-state actors as well as between Western and non-Western actors.

A thorny debate persists as to the causes of the attacks that affected France since 2015. One view is that France is being attacked because of the secular and liberal values it embodies. According to a second thesis, France is attacked in response to its interventionist foreign policy. Our contribution proposes to respond to this debate via a behavioral, statistical and comparative analysis of attacks in the name of the Islamic State around the world from 2013 to 2019. Our analyses reveal that countries with liberal values (right to blasphemy, tradition of press caricature, and tolerance of homosexuality) are on average not subject to an increased number of attacks. Conversely, countries involved in air strikes in Iraq or Syria are significantly more affected. A temporal analysis confirms the causal effect of military strikes on attacks, and not the opposite effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research focuses on inter-organizational cooperation, a neglected theme of the international relations theory. The analysis of the European humanitarian politics emphasizes the factors, dynamics and effects of inter-organizational cooperation inside the NGOs network VOICE and between this network and the European institutions. By linking different but complementary theories, the strategies of cooperation can be divided into three phases. If NGOs gather to be recognized as reliable partners by inter-governmental organizations, the networks they create are characterized by a complex delegation structure which aims to meet the needs of their members and of the targeted institutions. The alleged flexibility of networks does not protect them from the pathologies of international organizations (path dependency, lack of adaptability). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]