You Already Know Enough: Certainty and Ignorance in Data-Driven Humanitarianism

Abstract

How are the dynamics of certainty and ignorance entwined within the logics of humanitarian reason? In what ways does data-driven humanitarianism (re)shape different forms of knowledge and non-knowledge? What is revealed and what is obfuscated through the proliferation of humanitarian data? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of 174 interviews conducted in 2021 and 2022 with humanitarian data experts, regional stakeholders and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in north-eastern Nigeria and South Sudan. It explores the contested and incomplete nature of data in the sector, to consider how different forms of knowledge and ignorance intersect, are resisted, and sustained through humanitarian reason and practice. The article argues that the proliferation of data across the humanitarian sector obfuscates non-knowledge of issues that are controversial or challenging to address, with knowledge and non-knowledge existing in complex entanglements that reinscribe humanitarian reason and the multiple forms of ignorance that this perpetuates.