Mirca Madianou’s Technocolonialism explores how digital technologies used in humanitarian contexts perpetuate colonial legacies. Taking an interdisciplinary approach and spotlighting topics from biometric surveillance to extractive AI systems, the book powerfully exposes how digital infrastructures reinforce global inequalities while also being sites of everyday resistance, writes Josué García Veiga.
Technocolonialism: When Technology for Good is Harmful. Mirca Madianou. Polity. 2025.
The rise of technocolonialism
Technocolonialism is a powerful and well-documented examination of how digital technologies are transforming humanitarianism in ways that reinforce colonial structures. Its author, Mirca Madianou, is a researcher with almost a decade of experience in this area, and she recently led a British Academy-funded project on digital identity programmes in refugee camps in Thailand. The research for this book involved an ethnography of the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan (2013-2015); an ethnography through the “digital humanitarianism project” with interviews conducted online and in person with people based in London, Cambridge, Athens, New York and Washington between 2016-2021; and extensive secondary research.
The volume examines multiple cases across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas to identify recurring patterns in digital humanitarianism in recent decades. These patterns are theorised into six main “logics” (accountability, audit, capitalism, technological solutionism, securitisation, and resistance) presented in Chapter One. Together, they form the main concept “technocolonialism”, capturing how colonial genealogies persist in today’s digital humanitarianism. With this, the author contributes to ongoing debates about how digital technologies are reshaping humanitarianism in ways that reproduce colonial relations, extractivist structures, and new forms of inequality. Scholars such as Vicki Squire and Modesta Aloize have referred to this dynamic as the “coloniality of humanitarianism”. On other hand, Olivier Jutel employs the term “crypto-colonialism” to critique blockchain-based humanitarian interventions as forms of techno-experimentation rooted in neoliberal and colonial logics. More broadly, postcolonial and decolonial scholars such as Gertjan van Stam, Shakir Mohamed, Marie-Therese Png, William Isaac have explored how digital technologies perpetuate colonial legacies in multiple ways.
Biometric surveillance of refugees
The book explores how the six logics interact and materialise in various contexts as distinct forms of technocolonialism, with one chapter for each. Madianou offers an original approach by connecting decolonial and postcolonial perspectives with infrastructural and platform frames in digital technology studies. In Chapter Two, she focuses on the use of biometric and blockchain technologies in Jordan’s Za’atari Refugee Camp, the largest Syrian refugee camp in the world, granting aid only to those refugees who submit to biometric identification. They are also limited to purchasing goods in designated stores whose prices are usually higher than local alternatives. Madianou critiques biometric systems as instruments of epistemic violence, grounded in “infrastructural whiteness”. She posits that they reproduce racialised logics of exclusion by classification categories and surveillance practices imposed from the outside.
Extractive AI support systems
In Chapter Three, Madianou examines digital humanitarian responses following Typhoon Haiyan, a category-five typhoon which struck the Philippines on 8 November 2013 at 4.40 am. Her research reveals how digital feedback systems are narrow, extractive, and embedded in Western epistemologies, reinforcing Eurocentric systems of knowledge and control. Much of the digital applications such as chatbots used for empowering affected communities were designed in the Global North and coded in English. As result, this apps designed by and for international actors, not local communities, excluded many local voices that were invisible to the system. Chapter Four then presents how digital humanitarianism experimentation mirrors colonial science practices, particularly in the field of medicine under imperialism. Today, such experiments occur outside the traditional laboratory walls in humanitarianism zones as refugees’ camps, where data and value are extracted through digital infrastructures that are increasingly invisible and normalised. Madianou calls this dynamic “surreptitious experimentation”, often conducted without meaningful consent or processes of accountability. One example is the untested chatbot “Karim”, launched by a Silicon Valley start-up X2AI and designed to provide mental health support to Syrian refugees in Lebanon. This was not created with the input of human therapists, but rather a language-processing AI that imitated human conversations. Refugees did not give their informed consent for the use of their data, nor were they offered alternative forms of support if they refused to engage with Karim.
The humanitarian machine
In Chapter Five, the author proposes the concept of the “Humanitarian Machine” as the concrete representation of material and digital infrastructure that brings together private companies, governments, donors, policies and affected populations alongside innovations like biometrics, chatbots, and satellite data. By focusing on infrastructure, Madianou tracks how data flows between these actors and identifies who benefits most. She argues that digital infrastructures perpetuate colonial genealogies by reproducing hierarchies and automating mechanisms of exclusion and inequalities. In Kenya, for example, the Proxy Means Test algorithm worked with machine learning models to determine who needed help and who did not. The error rate excluded several thousand people who were left without assistance. Support staff were unable to provide solutions or override the automated results as the system was surrounded in bureaucratic opacity and lack of transparency.
Everyday acts of resistance
In Chapter Six introduces the concept of “mundane resistance”, challenging the view of technocolonialism as a monolithic force. Instead, Madianou shows how digital infrastructures are always contested spaces, where control coexists in tension with everyday acts of resistance. This co-production of digital humanitarianism reflects the constant interplay between structure and agency in specific contexts. This includes the collective mobilisation of people in the Philippines who refused to use the SMS service implemented after Typhoon Haiyan because its automatic messages failed to provide clear answers. It encompasses video and photo testimonies and social media campaign led by refugees in the Moria camp in Greece documenting poor conditions and human rights violations, which served as evidence in the defence of six young refugees accused of arson. In this way, Madianou attests to the agency and resistance of those receiving aid who reappropriate digital devices to challenge the system.
Infrastructural violence and colonial legacies
The final chapter reiterates the conceptual importance of technocolonialism, which, Madianou argues, should not be used metaphorically, or to suggest a new historical phase. Rather, it is intended as a tool for analysing the material continuities of colonial legacies in the nexus of states, capitalism, humanitarianism, digital technologies and infrastructures. For Madianou, digital infrastructure is the connective tissue that shapes the humanitarian space. She emphasises the concept of “infrastructural violence” to frame how harm is embedded, normalised and legitimised within these digital technologies. Applications like biometrics, chatbots, feedback loops, and AI do not merely replicate colonial power dynamics; they amplify them in new forms of inequalities between the Global North and South.
With this book, Madianou offers a compelling intervention in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s call to “brush history against the grain”. She achieves this by revealing the interrelation between current technological systems used within the humanitarian sphere and traditional colonial systems of extraction, exploitation and control. The resulting volume is a powerful reflection on how technology under capitalism not only creates dependencies and inequalities that enrich the few while claiming to support the most vulnerable; it also perpetuates colonial legacies that reach far beyond the humanitarianism sphere in any other daily uses.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Mirca Madianou spoke about the book at a public LSE event in 2024, Technocolonialism: when technology for good can be harmful. Watch it on YouTube.
Main image: Biometric scanning of a refugee child in Chad by EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid on Flickr. License: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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