Inextricable from a refuge-seeking experience of violent and forced displacement is the prevalence of trauma, and repeated trauma. Trauma refers to the physical, emotional or psychological harm caused by a deeply distressing experience or injury. Research [136] on the Rohingya community residing in Bangladesh (as of 2020) indicated 99% of respondents have experienced exposure to gunfire in Myanmar, more than half incurred torture, and more than half were found to present recurring PTSD symptoms. Experience of forced labour, sexual assault, and other extremely distressing events course through the community. Further documented [137] in the case of Rohingya refugees is associations between past trauma and post-displacement stressors (within camps), and the significance of the latter toward negative mental health outcomes. The repeated traumatisation of an already lacerated community and psyche is witnessed - through consistent harassment, deprivation of rights, a lack of safety, and an overarching disembowelment of autonomy and agency. 

Rohingya refugees, understood by global actors to be the most persecuted minority in the world, have faced generations of violence and state suppression in their home state of Rakhine in Myanmar - but also continue to face adversity once they have fled to refuge. Undertaking arduous journeys across the border, many do not make it. The 2017 exodus saw bodies consistently wash up on beaches near Cox’s Bazaar. Our time on field collected stories of trudging through mud for days, with no end in sight. For children growing up in camps, a complete absence of cultural or social tether, and families struggling with routine violence and regimented lives. Continued journeys to find fulfilling and stable environments see scores of refugees fleeing camps as well, making dangerous trips in crowded boats to Indonesia, Malaysia and further. It is hard to underestimate the lived impact of trauma, and its repercussions to the social fabric, family systems, collective resilience and individual lives of refugees. 

The immense degree of trauma found in refugee populations [138] has been well-documented, and affects long-term, critical aspects of a person’s life. These effects range from physiological disadvantages across neural, biological and cognitive challenges to social and cultural challenges. The impact of continually diminished agency, coupled with a struggle to self-determine identity, social fabrics and aspirations creates a cognitive world that is diminutive in one’s ability to engage, live and thrive freely. In the concerning landscape of technology deployed [139] in displaced populations, the refugee is transformed into a testing ground for efficiency, predictability, and knowability of systems. Overwhelming surveillance, and surveillance technology shapes the lives refugees encounter within camps, and long after. 

Research with communities that may experience high rates of trauma has shown that digital technologies can create or exacerbate traumatic experiences. [140] In the case of refugees, for whom a significant facet of PTSD is the fear of refoulement or return to violent circumstances, digital systems have consistently and aggressively validated this fear. Hyper-vigilance, an inability to negotiate with technology in later life, and a pervasive sense of vulnerability have been researched in non-refugee populations as well, and can do indelible damage to the trauma brain. The impact of surveillance tech on mental health and on traumatised psyches has been documented as leading to the exacerbation of pre-existing conditions.

As found in our field and secondary research, in the case of the Rohingya community, there is a pervasive sense of chaos associated with who or which of the many actors on-ground in camps may be handling one's information. Respondents recounted a concerning lack of clarity not only on who holds their data, but how it is used. This lack of trust manifests in cognitive lives that perceive spaces of refuge as ones of datafication and continued persecution at worst, and spaces of continued control at best. The inevitable and mushrooming presence of technology and datafication in the lives of refugee populations will need great intervention to ensure more than digital rights - instead, mandating trauma-informed approaches. This need is particularly pertinent for consideration in the humanitarian sector, to ensure that the sector's efforts to better manage logistics and delivery do not result in the further victimisation of already vulnerable populations. 

In order to build for a digital ecosystem that holds in tow the lived realities and often traumatic realities of crisis displacement, tenets of collective rehabilitation, transparency, trust and preservation - explicated below. Emerging scholarship on trauma-informed computing [141] and technological design detail the role of intra-community solidarity as a crucial pillar in sensitive design. Creating avenues for not only individual agency, but collective conceptions of participation in decision making can foster a greater degree of trust in systems and also serve to repair fraught links in community resilience. While frameworks for trauma-informed technology are yet emerging, learnings from other sectors such as digital healthcare [142] carry weight if we are to work toward a coherent pathway to acknowledging and committing into design, the trauma held within refugee communities. 

Consent mechanisms must also be reimagined as more than a gating criteria for the collection and use of individual and community data. Instead, it is important for actors on ground and consequently, the design of technologies they rely on, to frame consent as the first ‘outstretched digital hand’, shaping an individual’s, a family’s, a group’s first act of trust. This must be experientially and functionally a trust-building process, working to create a relationship of clarity and transparency between the data requester and principal - one that is reflective of a duty of care. Community or collective consent mechanisms can also reduce the burden of participation on individuals, but only serve to build trust across a group if they are conceptualised with consistent, visible and direct inputs from community members. Unidirectional data flows hold steep power dynamics, and must be articulated and then implemented as data used toward a common purpose, purpose that is defined in unison with refugee communities. 

Data-related actions and technological mediation that follows must prioritise the long-term resilience and cross-generational repair of communities; offering avenues for more than ad-hoc services, but fostering a degree of connection with the spaces, stakeholders and systems that refugees come in contact with. In order to do so, data use and reuse policy and scaffolding around it must first uphold protection and preservation of community needs, preferences and ideals. Recognition, reciprocity and reflexive engagement [143] can be systematised into design, upholding social justice as a basis for digital interactions. Social licensing, [144] for example, can be envisioned as a means to embed meaningful value-compatibility of data practices with subjective and culturally specific moral conceptions of a community.  

Finally, an important facet of this preservation is to create significant avenues for cultural preservation and remembrance of generational and traditional ways of knowing within a community. Loss must be conceptualised as no longer a mere outcome of displacement, but its defining factor. The absence of many of these crucial elements, coupled with an overt data maximalism is swiftly proving to be a recipe for retraumatization, further disillusionment and lifelong loss of trust in inhabiting a necessarily digital world. ‘Do No Harm’ tenets require a reimagining of harm - one that can be digitally delivered, but also one that digital systems can serve to hold delicately.

Technology design and dissonance with crisis 

An overarching issue in the design of technology for crisis situations, particularly for displacement, is the fragmented nature of build and deployment. Currently, stakeholders that operate in crisis management, ranging from state, multilateral, humanitarian and private actors to civil society, non-state and community-led initiatives, do not operate on a set of established standards for technology design and implementation. Digital identification is now acting as the first building block, forming the bedrock upon which other digital systems for service delivery are being constructed. Identification, as discussed previously, carries the weight of social contracts with a state actor, and the very legitimacy and dignity of a life, a group and body politic within it. 

Due to mandates that require them to be first-movers in conflict and emergency, digital identity has traditionally been under the control of state and multilateral actors. The UN network, other legacy humanitarian actors that are closely associated with them, and private sector actors involved in developing these technologies are familiar with how to operationalise digital identity and activate digitally-mediated service provision at population scale, often acting as the custodians for these systems during crisis management.

The severe lack of public accountability regarding technological design, data management and adherence to rights-preserving governance standards remains a grave concern, especially within a digital ecosystem that is catered to serve affected populations. Important questions arise about how data that is collected through large-scale digital infrastructure that is managed by the state, the multilateral-private sector nexus, or humanitarian agencies is flowing between entities, and whether data principals (members of the affected population) remain in the know, and have agency to negotiate for autonomy over who has access to their data.

Within an ecosystem that does not create adequate provisions for participation from local actors, non-state actors, civil society organisations and community-led initiatives, digital infrastructure tends to be designed to meet the needs of the service provider, leaving the affected population outside the boundaries of technology design, development and deployment. This has been observed [145] as the reframing of refugees as customers, and humanitarian agencies as providers of market-based solutions, focused heavily on logistical procedures and process efficiencies, but failing to meet the basic requirement for protection of affected populations in the digital realm.

The political economy within which humanitarian service provision is partly to blame for this growing dissonance between service provision and refugee needs. Currently, the sector operates like a competitive marketplace, in which aid organisations must compete for funds provided by humanitarian donors. Humanitarian service providers holding beneficiary data are able to deliver services faster with more accuracy, and are incentivised to hoard data to more effectively compete in the humanitarian marketplace. In such a scenario, building systems that focus on providing refugees with agency to negotiate with where their data is used is challenging to implement. 

The humanitarian sector has also long suffered from a growing focus (and consequently, funding) toward logistics and supply chain as the bastion of humanitarian aid delivery. While logistics remain essential to a network of aid delivery, many have argued that this hyperfocus has resulted in years of funding and resources redirected to tranches of aid that deal with supply chains, private partnerships and logistics, in direct detriment to the actual efficacy, delivery and meaningfulness of aid. As described above, the growth of technology and digital mediation in the sector has been fraught with not dissimilar, but distinct issues. The esotericization of technology marks a staggering departure from reliance on local actors, local contexts and community involvement in the imagination of crisis management. 

Instead, what is needed is a move toward serving longer term resilience and self determination of communities. The reality of many displaced populations is a state of limbo, considered a crisis in its management but playing out as longer term, often generational, stays in camp or quasi-camp scenarios. Crisis, or conflict-related crisis displacement is hard to see as an exception but now the proliferation globally of subjugated and discriminated communities that have a history of being ‘othered, and an ensuing industry of itself’. In this context, self determination, and the ability to receive legitimacy through social contracts is crucial. This can and must be facilitated through online and offline inroads for local contexts to inform the design of technology, mediation and technological mediation. As discussed in previous chapters, the learnability and interoperability of systems can sustain consistent global commitments to rebuilding and repairing the effects of crisis. While there is no one universalist fix, there is room yet to design digital infrastructure to sojourn with cultural contexts and needs. Learnability through systems and their deployment must be an active and longitudinal process - across crises over years and across cultural variation over regions.