Quantifying Vulnerability

Humanitarianism has recently undergone a so-called innovation turn, utilizing cutting-edge technologies to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. This article focuses on novel advances in the way aid organizations record, measure, and classify household vulnerability among Syrian refugees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and Jordan, I explore how the datafication of refugees in humanitarian action not only reveals the constitutive limits of quantitative ontologies but also poses transformative implications for the institutional configurations of humanitarianism. In particular, I suggest that the aid sector’s growing reliance on data systems entrenches an extractive relationship between humanitarian organizations and refugees that conscripts, entangles, and unsettles data practitioners themselves. I conclude by pointing to vulnerability assessments as one node within a larger apparatus of integrated data systems, one that centralizes power within the humanitarian industry and poses grave risks for refugee rights.