Commodifying compassion

its aid budget by $3.5 billion compared to the year before. Indeed, as recently as 2021, in what is perhaps the most recent manifestation of a decade-long trend of decreasing government spending on humanitarian and development assistance, another of the world’s largest state donors, the United Kingdom, lowered its aid budget from 0.7 to 0.5% of GDP.⁹

But while humanitarian organizations—like so many others— emerged from the 2000s and early 2010s disillusioned by violence-induced fear and austerity-fuelled uncertainty, somewhat paradoxically, the sector’s belief in

‘the market’ as the best solution to the self-perceived crisis that it suddenly found itself in not only persisted but intensified in the years that followed the War on Terror and the financial crisis. Indeed, during the past decade or so, in what is often described as a neoliberal turn that promotes market-oriented solutions to humanitarian issues, aid organizations have become increasingly interwoven with, and reliant on, the public and the corporate sector and less dependent on state funding. The use of celebrities for humanitarian advocacy (Bergman Rosamond, 2019), the rise of corporate partnerships (Gregoratti, 2014), the increasing influence of philanthropy and private foundations in humanitarian affairs (Fejerskov, 2020), as well as the emergence of ethical consumption (Richey and Ponte, 2011) as central to global helping are just a few examples of how the full power of markets, corporations, and global capitalism have become implicated in, and reshaped, the humanitarian sector in recent years. Consequently, as Richey, Hawkins and Goodman (2021: 3) observe:

The state is no longer the repository for responsibility and power in solving humanitarian crises or development needs. States are now facilitators and/or

‘invisible hands’ in for-profit partnerships that turn on the reputational and real capital of […] global corporations, the personal, media and celebrity capital of global mega-stars, the marketing power and capital of charities and the ‘choice’ power of consumers.

No longer just a moral endeavour—if it ever was—the humanitarian sector has brought the market in and transformed into a multi-billion dollar industry

9 For reference, the UN recommends that high-income countries spend at least 1% of GDP on aid and humanitarian assistance.

fuelled by private donations and bolstered by marketing techniques honed by corporations (Kennedy 2009). It should come as no surprise, then, that humanitarian organizations and non-profits spend a significant portion of funds on public communication and fundraising. Though actual figures are rare, a recent survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation (2015) found that ActionAid, one of the world’s largest international NGOs, spends 17.4% of its financial resources on marketing and fundraising, Plan International 14.2%, and MSF 13.8%. Even if they are few and far between, these numbers are nevertheless testament to the fact that the neoliberal turn in global humanitarianism has also been accompanied by a ‘competitive commodification of compassion’ (Lawrence and Tavernor, 2019). That is, in order to succeed in a market-driven aid field, humanitarian organizations must

‘sell’ humanitarian disasters as objects of emotional and moral concern, and must do so in competition with other NGOs also appealing for funding.

Consequently, while humanitarianism is essentially ‘the act of people helping people’, most scholars and observes thus acknowledge that, today,

‘humanitarianism is also a business driven by market forces and by agencies seeking to maintain and expand market share’ (Smillie and Minear, 2004: 11).

The re-articulation of humanitarianism as a commercial activity was initially seen by many as introducing a moral conflict by staging distant suffering as media spectacles. Because images of disaster are everywhere, or so the argument goes, we become ‘so used to the spectacle of dreadful events, misery or suffering that we stop noticing them’ (Tester, 2001: 13, see also Moeller, 1999). But if compassion is a commodity with market value then, certainly, ‘compassion fatigue’ must be detrimental to an aid industry that relies on being able to appeal to, and shape, the emotional engagement and moral responsibility of publics in the Global North when faced by distant suffering. Indeed, the humanitarian sector seems to think so. Indeed, in recent years—as e.g., Vestergaard (2008) has shown—the marketing and branding strategies of humanitarian NGOs have become increasingly reflexive with regard to the perceived threat of compassion fatigue to global humanitarianism. As a consequence of this, more and more often, such strategies are intended to inform ways of ‘selling” humanitarian disasters and global helping that rely on positive messages that appeal to the moral responsibility and -agency of the audience in mundane and sometimes even

playful ways rather than through spectacular and shock-inducing frames’ (see also Chouliaraki, 2010).

As an example of this, Vestergaard (2008) emphasizes Amnesty International’s (AI) internet-based campaign ‘See what you can do’ which promotes the agency of the individual in creating global change: ‘By using the interactive affordances of this medium [i.e. the internet],’ Vestergaard (ibid:

488-9) writes, ‘AI do not push themselves upon the audience, cry for help or even indicate that they need support’ but rather offer ‘the public an opportunity to respond morally [to] their knowledge of suffering and thus provide them with the means to defy compassion fatigue.’ The argument I want to state here is not that campaigns such as AI’s ‘See what you can do’ are more or less market-oriented than those that employ spectacular images of dismemberment, suffering and pain. Indeed, as Chouliaraki (2010: 120) has argued,

both “shock effect” and “positive image” campaigns are situated squarely within a market logic of persuasion, insofar as they communicate emotion to their own ends. The production of negative or positive emotion, in these appeals, are at once articulations of political passion at the service of legitimizing public action on suffering and simultaneously strategies of the market at the service of legitimizing the humanitarian brand itself.

What the AI campaign ‘See what you can do’ is indicative of is rather a broader shift in the sensibility of neoliberal, commercialised forms of humanitarian communication. Chouliaraki (2010: 108) has described this shift as the emergence of a ‘post-humanitarian logic,’ which is characterized by ‘a clear, though not linear, move from emotion-oriented to post-emotional styles of appealing’ that privileges ‘a short-term and low-intensity form of agency, which is no longer inspired by an intellectual agenda but momentarily engages us in practices of playful consumerism.’ Another key feature of ‘post-humanitarian’ campaigns such as AI’s ‘See what you can do’ is thus also that they emphasize the simplicity of actions required to help rather than the reason for the suffering such actions are meant to alleviate. In doing so, they depart from the assumption that knowledge about the suffering of distant others can generate the feelings that will prompt people to respond. Rather than justifying their appeals by educating the public about the causes or consequences of disasters, post-humanitarian campaigns thus instead present

people with simple, less time-consuming ways in which to help alleviate the suffering of distant others anytime, anywhere.

Yet, such campaigns not only provide the public with new opportunities for altruism. The rise of the post-humanitarian sensibility described above has also been accused of being ethico-politically problematic because what matters in post-humanitarian appeals are not the beneficiaries but the benefactors.

That is, they focus on what you (the Western spectator) can do rather than the moral question of why you should do something. As Chouliaraki (ibid:

121) argues, by ‘removing the moral question of “why” from humanitarian communication’ post-humanitarianism may thus lead to a ‘perpetuation of a political culture of communitarian narcissism [that] renders the emotions of the self the measure of our understanding of the sufferings of the world at large.’ More worryingly, ‘this narcissistic sensibility fails to recognize is that [it] is actually inscribed in systematic patterns of global inequality and their hierarchies of place and human life – hierarchies that divide the world into zones of Western comfort and safety and non-Western need and vulnerability’

(ibid). What is at stake with the rise of post-humanitarianism is thus not only a shift in the rhetorical and aesthetic style of humanitarian appeals but also a profound shift in the ethics of global humanitarianism.

While not necessarily unique to the digital age, the rise of a post-humanitarian sensibility in post-humanitarian communication is emphasized here because it coincides with, and frames, the emergence and proliferation of the use of new digital media technologies in recent years. Indeed, like the early forms of online humanitarianism, such as the internet-based campaign analysed by Vestergaard (2008), the kinds of digital media technologies that have emerged in recent years, often referred to as web 2.0 applications, are similarly claimed to engage the public and enable them to act at a distance in new and innovative ways (McPherson, 2007; Watson, 2010; Meijer, 2012;

Mortensen, 2015; Papacharissi, 2015). For example, McPherson (2007) argues that humanitarian organizations and non-profits should regard social media platforms as ‘social movements’ because they contain a wide range of tools that allow users to create change by responding to, sharing, and creating online content. Similarly, the growing use of virtual reality technology in humanitarian communication has been framed as supplying the aid sector with ‘the ultimate empathy machine’ with which to appeal to and cultivate

the engagement of Western publics and political decision-makers by offering a see-for-yourself style experience of humanitarian disasters and the misfortune of distant others (Nash, 2017). Like the examples provided earlier, these emergent media technologies are thus framed primarily in post-humanitarian terms that emphasize the convenience and (pleasurable) experiences they offer audiences as much as their ability to educate the public about the human consequences of catastrophes and injustices.

In addition to being prescient examples of how the humanitarian sector thinks about the possibilities offered by digital media, these arguments are also symptomatic of a more general attitude in the aid sector towards technological innovation as providing politically neutral tools that improve global helping. As Jacobsen (2015) has argued, the increasing focus and reliance on technological solutions to humanitarian issues in the aid sector in recent years is informed by ‘a powerful humanitarian–technology nexus through which humanitarian actors assert that new technologies enable humanitarianism to become more efficient, neutral and uncorrupted and technology companies assert that the deployment of new technologies in the humanitarian field demonstrates that they are neutral, positive and beneficial to humanity.’ What is concealed by such arguments, however, is the fact that digital media technologies are far from neutral. For one, while providing new opportunities for humanitarian organizations, digital media technologies such as social media platforms and smartphones are also ‘commodities crucial for the expansion of global capitalism’ (Enghel, 2015: 15). According to Zuboff (2019), the proliferation of digital media technologies should even be grasped as an enabling condition for the emergence of an entirely new socioeconomic doctrine described by her as ‘surveillance capitalist’.

Crudely put, ‘surveillance capitalism’ is a mode of accumulation that is unique to the digital age and which relies on the collection of vast amounts of data through which corporations seek to ‘know’ and predict our behaviour as consumers (see also Beer, 2018).¹⁰ Indeed, today, with every online donation,

10 The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have further consolidated the influence of surveillance capitalism in our social and political lives by ushering in what Klein (2020) refers to as a ‘pandemic shock doctrine’ that has further strengthened ties between

surveillance-every ‘share’ on Facebook, surveillance-every tap of the finger on your keyboard and movement of your mouse, data is being collected, stored, and added to an ever-expanding database of user data. But it is not only what we do online that is increasingly monitored. Ubiquitous mobile media such as smartphones, home assistants, and other ‘smart’ devices can record the conversations we have in their presence or map the paths we travel (Ash, 2018). And with the application of neural networks and artificial intelligence to these data, we have become subjects of corporately-owned, algorithmic models of prediction which claim to ‘know’ our most intimate emotions and desires (McStay, 2018).

The turn to digital media has thus not only provided the aid industry with new communication tools. It has also introduced new actors and new kinds of economic interests to the field of global helping that are not necessarily congruent with the ethico-political ambitions of humanitarian NGOs and non-profits (Fejerskov, 2020; Olwig, 2021). As a case in point, what is often referred to as ‘digital humanitarianism’ (Meier, 2015) to describe new kinds of humanitarian action, has been accused of exacerbating global inequalities.

For one, these ‘new technological approaches to ameliorate humanitarian work,’ as Shringarpure (2018) argues, are accompanied by a ‘“Digital Savior Complex” [sic] which not only transforms complex crises into quotidian cyber realities but also furthers existing colonial hierarchies between the savior and the saved.’ What is at stake in this new technopolitics of compassion, as Madianou (2019: 10) demonstrates in her critical analysis of the growing reliance on data analytics and biometrics in the management of refugees, is thus the entrenchment of already-existing power asymmetries between benefactors and beneficiaries, which has resulted in a ‘technocolonial’ regime of global humanitarianism in which ‘beneficiaries produce value through their data and participation in humanitarian experiments, which is then used for the benefit of stakeholders, including private companies.’

Taken together, the critical work of these and other authors thus demonstrate how the neoliberal logic underpinning the sector’s turn to digital media is rearticulating and extending the humanitarian sector’s colonial

capitalist corporations and public institutions in the effort to fight the global spread of the disease (see also Ølgaard, 2020a).

heritage into the digital age by perpetuating a hierarchy in which the commercial interests of a global elite of multinational corporations are increasingly allowed to shape global helping in problematic ways. In this sense, as Duffield (2016) argues, we might say that, when harnessed for neoliberal ends, the use of digital media for humanitarian purposes risks locking in the existing negativities of both colonialism and capitalism.

Therefore, we must dig deeper into the details of global humanitarianism in the digital age; that is, into the platforms, devices, and messages that humanitarian organizations use to elicit, govern and ‘sell’ compassion as well as the unequal power relationships that they reify, expand, and deepen in the process. These are the issues to which the chapter now turns.