Can your attention save lives? Development cooperation for human rights as digital business and moral fix

• This paper considers how the discourses of global governance institutions about the power of digital technologies to save the world frame the operations of Western human rights organizations (Chakravartty, 2006; Kleine, 2013; Wildermuth & Ngomba, 2016). Starting from a qualitative text analysis of recent World Bank and OECD reports -"Digital Dividends" (WB, 2016) and "The Sustainable Development Goals as Business Opportunities" (OECD, 2016)- I demonstrate the fit between these institutional discourses, the business-driven digitalization of international intervention, and human rights work via a case study of the Natalia Project. Launched in 2013 by a Swedish non-governmental organization funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, the project equips selected human rights activists at risk with a digitally-driven alarm system, and acts as convenor of an online network of the activists’ supporters via Facebook and Twitter under the motto “Your attention can save lives”. Based on the triangulation of project documentation and interviews to participating human rights as well as NGO staff, the paper interrogates the complex links between four inter-linked elements: a) the dangerous labour of local activists in countries where human rights are subject to violation, b) the donor-driven intervention at a distance of the Swedish NGO with the stated goal to protect these activists, c) the uncritical emphasis on the power of loose networks to gather protective response via social media, and d) the pilot-testing of surveillance gadgets by private business companies for market purposes in the context of a humanitarian intervention.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

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