Human rights intervention as digital business, or the making of a righteous fix

Forskare: Florencia Enghel

Finansiär: Partial support from Helge Ax:Son Johnsons Stiftelse (granted in June 2017).

Sammanfattning (only in english):
This research project examines the link between the stance that the digital economy will save the world adopted and promoted by global governance institutions (World Bank, OECD, UN), and the digitally-driven interventions in recipient countries of bilaterally funded human rights organizations. I scrutinize this link via a combination of the qualitative content analysis of documents and a case study of The Natalia Project, launched in 2013 by Civil Rights Defenders with support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, in order to understand how it reshapes media practices as well as ideas about communication’s role in bilateral humanitarian assistance. Theoretically, the project contributes to understanding the role(s) of mediated communication in the combined-but-competing domestic and foreign scales of the governance of international development cooperation. Analytically, it tests an approach aimed at connecting the specific interventions of Western civil society organizations to the global structure of international development cooperation and the 'rules of the game' that govern it.