Big data visuality and interstitial spaces of autonomy: Drones and blockchains in and around Myanmar's civil war

Abstract

Emergent technologies – from blockchains to drones – have sparked debate over their benefit to marginalized populations. When used in humanitarian contexts, proponents laud their ability to facilitate service delivery while critics hold that these technologies enact new regimes of control. Yet, both advocates and adversaries alike presume that the form of big data visuality generated by these technologies operates to intensify and perfect knowledge over these populations. We dispute this assertion, observing instead that this gaze both obscures even as it enhances, leaving gaps in putative control regimes. In this article, we consider instead how various projects have been improvised around humanitarian crises in Myanmar – blockchain for stateless Rohingya in Malaysia and drones for Burmese revolutionaries fighting against the country's military regime – appropriating some of these same technologies for their own purposes. These technologies interact with and draw upon broader milieus – areas not worth controlling, people not worth regulating – to enable projects that attempt to generate interstitial spaces of autonomy. Such spaces are defined not as circumscribed zones – plotted two-dimensionally on a map and (relatively) fixed temporally across time – but as mutating, rhizomatically interlinked spheres of connections. The creation of these interstitial spaces is hardly a good in itself, but can be interpreted as an indictment of the failures of the humanitarian regime. Indeed, these projects are not simple repudiations of humanitarian care and the ‘international community’ that deploys it; rather, they are reactions to the material neglect that manifests in the regime of biopolitical control deployed by states and their multilateral institutions.

This article is a part of special theme on Commodifying Compassion in the Digital Age. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/commodifying_compassion

Introduction

From the use of apps for gathering information from, or disseminating information to, displaced people; to the use of facial recognition software for reuniting separated family members; to the United Nations Refugee Agency's (UNHCR) registration of refugees through its biometric identity management system, emerging technologies have become a key component of humanitarian work, with many of these uses being treated as exemplary of what has been termed ‘Tech for Good’ (Powell et al., 2022). Adoptees from organizations including the UNHCR, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Economic Forum cite numerous benefits in terms of saving money and time, of improving security or reducing inaccuracy within reporting systems and of enhancing humanitarian aid and reducing suffering overall.

For many critics, however, these technologies are not necessarily ‘good’, but rather, they are the kind that would keep refugees as such ‘for good’. Scholars have noted that power asymmetries between those who use such technologies and those to whom the technologies are subjected often map back onto historical colonial relationships (Madianou, 2019a, 2019b); that emerging technologies often involve data collection activities that enable ‘biometric control’ (Ajana, 2013), ‘data colonialism’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2019; Squire and Alozie, 2023) and ‘platform-mediated surveillance’ (Masiero, 2023); that these technologies can foster a form of ‘surveillant humanitarianism’ (Latonero, 2019) that nonetheless often does not intervene to save victims (Jackman, 2023: 507); and that, finally, despite these harms, immanent data logics and discourses imbue data as ‘immaculate’ – objective and hence antipolitical (Bronson, 2022) – thereby undermining objection to their effects. Many of these arguments can be situated within the broader field of critical humanitarianism studies, which seeks to address the normative structures of humanitarian claims and the dynamics of agency and power which undergird relationships between typically Western humanitarians and non-Western humanitarian subjects (Moore, 2013).

We contribute to this discussion by asking how marginalized populations – people whom some might suggest are ‘subjected’ to the use of technology for humanitarian purposes – repurpose these technologies for their own designs. This is not to ignore the fact of the material power relationships that structure Western humanitarian work and the way that reliance on new technologies to obtain care in the first place can further entrench both the technology and the Western provider's presence at humanitarian sites to keep refugees ‘for good’ (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022). However, acknowledging and examining a technology's unruly paths in terms of its diverse uses, adaptations and consequences is necessary for providing a more nuanced picture of how technologies are actually used on the ground, not least by marginalized actors. It redresses broad overgeneralizations about the ‘other's’ technological illiteracy. It also gestures towards what politics may lie ahead for the proliferation of emerging technologies into spheres they were not originally intended.

While critical humanitarian studies asks, ‘for whose good?’ within a broad binary of Global North VS Global South, aid worker or agency VS those needing aid, this question can be even more complex and fraught depending on the specific geography, and the specific crisis, being addressed. To this end, we ground our theoretical contribution to what vexed ‘good’ a technology provides around a specific context: Myanmar and its ongoing wars. We interrogate, and open up, politico-ethico questions around how ‘humanitarian’ and ‘good’ are being redefined in these spaces by those who all but seem to have been abandoned by the international community. For Myanmar, after the country's 2021 military coup d’état, has been embroiled in what has become a ‘forgotten emergency’ (UNOCHA, 2023: 4). Since then, Myanmar has hosted a ‘people's defensive war’, which includes the junta's forces, a variety of rebel groups with divergent demands and interests, as well as a civilian population with differing levels of commitment to resistance. The recent escalation in the conflict has been devastating for those not directly participating in revolution as well: according to UNOCHA, since December 2023, 2.6 million people have been displaced, and one-third of Myanmar's population – about 18.6 million people – require humanitarian aid (UNOCHA, 2023: 4).

At the same time, preceding this most recent crisis is a complex history of state and ethnic violence. Before the coup, Myanmar's military had been conducting protracted ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya minority population – another all-but-forgotten emergency, as millions of Rohingya were driven into greater Asia (Bangladesh, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Pakistan) and continue to live in poorly resourced refugee camps. Further back still, for the better half of the twentieth century, Myanmar has been characterized by ‘hybrid governance’ comprised of cooperation and contestation among different groups (South, 2018). As scholars have pointed out, the concept of the ‘state’ is not straightforward in Myanmar (see, inter alia, Boutry, 2016; Buscemi and Proto, 2024; Kyed, 2020; Lefebvre, 2025). In Myanmar, authority and state formation are endeavours shared by many: not only the central government, but the military and the ethnic armed organizations that have fought for many years against it, some of whom have their own governance institutions and territorialization strategies (Bachtold, 2023; Brenner and Tazzioli, 2022; Buscemi, 2023; Hong, 2017; Saw Day Chit Htoo and Neil, Forthcoming).

Emerging technologies have long played a central role in the variegated performance of statehood in Myanmar, but recent events are altering that performance in real time. With its 2021 coup, the military blocked certain social media platforms (Freedom House, 2021) and amended the cybersecurity law to legalize both such actions and digital surveillance, all the while prohibiting critique against the junta (HRW, 2022). The military uses the digital to ‘perform authority and reach directly into people's lives’ (Bachtold, 2022: 302). Local Burmese have been employing these technologies to fight back – for instance, through sharing and amplifying their acts of resistance through internet posts and live-streamed videos (Ryan and Tran, 2022); using VPNs to circumvent social media blocks; and developing apps like Way Way Nay, which helps consumers identify their products’ provenance in order to boycott military-funded or affiliated companies.

Two emerging technologies, drones and blockchains, are further complicating versions of statehood for different groups, often in ways that go towards dissolving boundaries between war and humanitarian regimes. By regimes, we mean those systems and frameworks of power which underlie humanitarian care work and which necessarily affect who accesses aid, who uses emerging technologies, and who has a say in how these technologies are used. In the case study of Myanmar, many Burmese mobilize these technologies either for control and repression or for their own struggles for freedom and justice, both of which can involve either exclusionary or violent means and ends.

This article focuses on Burmese projects which use ‘low-level’ mobilizations of drones and blockchain (‘low’ when compared with the level of the regime) that attempt to generate interstitial spaces of autonomy. Such spaces are defined not as circumscribed zones – plotted two-dimensionally on a map and (relatively) fixed temporally across time – but as mutating, rhizomatically interlinked spheres of connections. The creation of these interstitial spaces is hardly a good in itself, but can be interpreted as an indictment of the failures of the humanitarian regime. Indeed, these projects are not simple repudiations of humanitarian care and the ‘international community’ that deploys it; rather, they are reactions to the material neglect that manifests in the regime of biopolitical control deployed by states and their multilateral institutions.

The article proceeds as follows. First, we engage with work in science, technology and society studies to reflect on the ‘Tech for Good’ debate, focusing in particular on some of the ways that drones and blockchains are being presented as ‘good’ technologies in humanitarian spaces. Building on theories of visuality and visualization which critique the claim that technology and big data in particular help one to ‘see’ and help distant others, we consider how the people thus sited may not align with their representations as data points collated in spreadsheets or hashes encrypted on blockchains. We offer empirical substantiation by drawing on fieldwork and research in Myanmar and its neighbouring countries to examine how drone and blockchain technologies are being used on the ground in response to the violence that Myanmar is conducting against its own people. We observe that drones and blockchain technologies, despite their differences, are coming together in new ways vis-a-vis their enabling of interstitial spaces of autonomy, whether from state power or from humanitarian regimes. The article concludes with a reflection on how to theorize emerging technologies’ relationship to humanitarianism when they are being mobilized in unintended ways that eschew the typical appeal to the international community, perhaps even remaking what the technologies mean and ‘do’ to and for the marginalized in the process.

‘Seeing’ distant others: big data visuality and Tech for Good

Science, technology and society studies have long stressed Melvin Kranzberg's truism that, ‘Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral’ (Kranzberg, 1986). As Langdon Winner writes in ‘Do Artifacts Have Politics?’, his synthesis of materialist and social constructivist perspectives on technology, ‘scientific knowledge, technological invention, and corporate profit reinforce each other in deeply entrenched patterns that bear the unmistakable stamp of political and economic power’ (Winner 2017:126). Winner argues that the political effects of most new technologies depend on the broader political regimes into which they are inserted; while nuclear weapons will necessitate hierarchical organizations to manage immense risk to planetary life and while, conversely, solar power can be more easily distributed to diffuse autonomous social formations, most technologies become captured and made meaningful by the extant regimes which they then come to reproduce. Following from this, the analytical task in assessing an emergent technology is three-fold: to (a) determine any innate political content of the new technology (is it more like a nuclear bomb or a solar panel?); (b) assess the contours of the extant socio-political regime in which it will nest (a late-capitalist control society or an underdeveloped periphery, for example?); and (c) consider the interaction of the technology with the regime (how will they come to co-constitute one another as they interface?). As Jairus Grove puts it, ‘we have to look for a kind of consistency between the world that emerges with [a] technical object’ (2016: 340).

The question of what consistency, and what political and economic power, undergirds the use of emerging technology in humanitarian spaces has been amply covered (Fejerskov, 2022; Madianou, 2019b). Here, we focus on the examples of drones and blockchains, where a ‘Tech for Good’ framing has coalesced around the two technologies’ distinct potentials for contributing to social good while creating profit for technology-makers.

Although drones rose to geopolitical prominence with their role in surveillance and targeted killing in the US-led ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), since then, drones have not only proliferated beyond American dominance to become a feature of contemporary warfare more generally, but they have expanded enough into non-militarized, non-violent domains, used notably for environmental conservation, documentary filmmaking and commercial package delivery. This has permitted broader resignification of a drone's general meanings, enabling the rise of the narrative of ‘the good drone’ (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2020). In the humanitarian realm, the WFP first put a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) into the field in 2007, and humanitarian organizations have since been using drones for search and rescue, environmental mapping of inaccessible or precarious landscapes and the delivery of medical supplies (WFP, 2024; Sniderman and Hanis, 2012). The WFP drone platform cites numerous use cases for drones, all of which relate to the varied uses of drone visuals and the kinds of ‘payloads’ (such as critical humanitarian goods) they can carry.

A much-touted example of ‘the good drone’ concerns the US-based start-up Zipline, which started operations in Rwanda in 2016. In partnership with the Rwandan government, it began transporting blood and emergency medical supplies to remote hospitals. As one emergency doctor stated, ‘I knew there were drones for surveillance, and I knew that militaries use them to kill enemies, but I didn’t know that drones could save lives’ (Baker, 2018). Zipline launched the world's first commercial drone delivery service, and it has since expanded to food, retail, agriculture and other products, operating in countries including Ghana, Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire and Kenya. The power structures behind its ‘good’, however, have not gone unquestioned. Some have argued that Zipline's success relates to long-standing risks of drone use as contributing towards data colonialism (Greenwood, 2020), as Zipline's drones need to collect data about the people to whom they fly, and many African countries do not have laws and regulations that would otherwise restrict the use of experimental technologies (Zhang, 2021). For Rene Umlauf and Marian Burchardt (2022), these vulnerable countries ‘serve’ Zipline as much as the companies serve them in the start-up's development. Not unlike the recent claims that surveillance drones can be ‘recuperated’ as tools for monitoring human rights abuses (Giardullo, 2021), drone use in such scenarios needs to be considered within the consistency of the world in which they have been deployed, and this is one in which aerial imaging has long collaborated on the production of geopolitical knowledge and geopolitical power (Kaplan, 2017).

There is also a ‘Blockchain for Good’ movement, particularly in the development spheres where data is often shared among many actors and aid organizations (Semenzin, 2023). Originally designed to create an anonymous payments mechanism that displaced middlemen (credit card companies, states with fiat currencies), thereby even enabling applications by radical anti-capitalists (e.g., Massumi 2018: 106), blockchain has recently been adopted by financial oligopolies as another asset class and has been applied to objects (car software; coffee makers) as part of the Internet of Things. Carrying a libertarian promise of freedom from regulation that makes it useful for transactions outside the state, blockchain remains primarily known as the engine behind cryptocurrency, although its technology is being used in other sectors involving money or data transfers, including healthcare and logistics.

Given the affordance of blockchain for non-state or extra-state transactions, it has been used as a means of permitting humanitarian subjects to receive and use aid more directly and efficiently (WFP 2017; UNOCHA 2021). The largest and most well-known humanitarian use of blockchain technology in the world, WFP's Building Blocks, currently facilitates the sharing of information among different organizations and supports four million people each month through its network (WFP, 2024). The programme states that it has saved over $3.5 m in bank fees and cash transfers; it attributes its efficacy to ‘the unique features of blockchain, particularly its neutrality–all organizations using the platform are equal owners and managers, with no hierarchy’ (WFP, 2024). But given blockchain's foundation in the idea of immutable ledgers, critics have argued that blockchain can be used to track people, regulate objects, and control people through those objects (Herian, 2018; Käll, 2018). This is no different in the humanitarian spheres, where Madianou (2019a) sees humanitarian blockchain as operating within certain ‘distant’ logics, like accountability and solutionism, which are removed from the ground of humanitarian action, with problematic consequences for humanitarian subjects. Cheesman (2020: 147) also identifies conflicting logics related to the perceived neutrality of blockchain, notably drawing attention to the role of the nation-state whose ‘prerogative is to control the legitimate means of movement’, and to how identification systems are central to the enablement or disablement of mobility. She observes that mistrust of blockchained data often entails an ironic move away from the radical ideals of self-sovereign identity to which blockchain was initially tied, towards the reinforcement of ‘the ultimate power of established intermediaries, such as states, as “anchors of trust”’ (2022: 148).

Returning to Kranzberg and Winner, drones and blockchains have innate political content as drones go where the human body cannot normally go, for better and for worse, and as blockchains bypass certain regulations to create new interactions and relationships, likewise for better and for worse. Paying attention to how they relate to existing socio-political regimes like data colonialism, and how they interface with those regimes to reinforce or enable structural power, belie the false binary of emergent technologies as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as other scholars have recently demonstrated (Weitzberg et al., 2021). Andrew Herscher has shown as much in his work examining the use of satellite imaging by human rights NGOs, observing that emerging technologies often create the figure of a ‘geo-witness that has been deputized to discipline human beings in the course of rendering them visually apprehensible’ (Herscher, 2014: 473). Nevertheless, many continue to see remote sensing imagery as providing a needed, if mediated, perspective on human rights violations, including in Myanmar (Walker, 2023).

Recent critical work on technology, especially big data, increasingly highlights how technologically mediated forms of vision or of ‘siting’ the marginalized conceal even as they reveal. For example, Daniela Agostinho observes that while big data is often presumed to enable an enhanced, microscopic visual capacity able to uncover obscured social realities, this material-discursive phenomenon itself elides a different revelation: rather than ‘extend[ing]… the fantasies of control and mastery offered by modern optics’, big data instead ‘opens up space for the unknown and unknowability’ (Agostinho, 2019: 4–5). Tahani Nadim identifies that the ‘omissions’ produced in these apparatuses of visuality ‘are not only due to technical limitations but also connected to limited imaginations about Big Data’ (Nadim, 2016: 4): they cannot see socio-political dimensions such as ‘migrant workers and labour relations… longterm environmental and public health effects… agricultural subsidies, futures traded on crop forecasts, or mycorrhizal entanglements’ (ibid). Andrea Brighenti and Andrea Pavoni argue that ‘the more we see… the less we actually know’, as the same apparatus that enables vision simultaneously undermines ‘our very capacity to relate to the environment’ from which that visual data is gleaned (Brighenti and Pavoni, 2024: 51, see also Krupar and Ehlers, 2024). Finally, Andersson (2016: 707) describes how ‘a relationship by remote control’ develops when conditions of extreme inequality produce violent environments that in turn produce in those from privileged spaces an ‘aversion towards entering’ particular ‘dangerous’ spaces. While technological mediators can compensate for this distance, they often do so while simultaneously obscuring the object seen. As such, Chouliaraki (2010) observes that even as vision of distant worlds is enhanced, this very feature has enervated demand for that data: many audiences of humanitarian discourses no longer want the intimacy – whether of horror or of positivity – that was provided in earlier versions of humanitarian periscoping.

We therefore encourage scholars to foreground the perspectives of subjects of aid intervention in all their diversity, ambivalence, and contradictions when considering the use of emerging ‘humanitarian’ technologies. As other scholars are observing, whether regarding drones (Millner et al., 2024), practices of hacking and making (Ames et al., 2018), environmental management (Goldstein and Faxon, 2022), agricultural technologies and social media (Faxon, 2023), (counter)mapping (Bowe et al., 2020), digital identity (Cheesman, 2020) or blockchain protocols (Hung, 2024), to name just a few applications, technologies can either be harmful to, or appropriated by, local communities – and can sometimes be both simultaneously. As Goldstein and Faxon put it, technology can act either as ‘control – functioning as coercive surveillance – or ... meet demands for increased data transparency with implications for broader democratic participation’ (2022: 41).

However, one critical substrate that links both techno-optimistic endorsement and techno-pessimistic condemnation is that both presume that the technologies work more or less as designed. Seen through this paternalistic gaze, objects of these technologies are passive recipients, immured in spaces politically distantiated from sites of power and privilege. While techno-optimists might ignore how technologies tighten exclusion by making particular populations legible and containable, pessimists refuse to identify opportunities for creative redeployments of such technologies.

There are immanent spatial dynamics to both ‘Tech for Good’ and ‘Tech for Bad’ approaches. While techno-pessimists and optimists alike produce, or are content with, spaces of containment and control of marginalized populations, we hold that emerging technologies can in some cases have spatial consequences, arguing that they can enable the creation of interstitial spaces of autonomy. We will advance this argument in the remainder of this article by examining the variegated uses of drones and blockchains surrounding the ongoing war waged by Myanmar's military against various Burmese populations. Drones and blockchains in their deployment by rebels and refugees each mutate sovereign space in particular ways. Stateless blockchain users irrupt sovereign space from its abdicated edges; DIY rebel drones interpolate space in volumetric (three-dimensional) and temporal (four-dimensional) ways. Both enable spaces of inchoate alternative political formations.

As Faxon et al. put it, ‘Data practices’ of the marginalized ‘are marked by silences, absences, and coded acts of resistance that can only be interpreted through… localized lexicons’ (Faxon et al., 2023: 12). Moreover, with luck, these populations can capitalize on the way they are misapprehended to develop alternative deployments of the technologies that would regulate them. And yet, such appropriations do not wholly invert the paradigm of big data domination, leading ineluctably to liberation or justice. Rather, they impel us to note the formations and reformations of political possibility as emerging technologies intersect with mutating material conditions particular in, but not limited to, the Global South. Marginalized populations use these spaces and actions therein as a hedge against abandonment by the international community, as a way to perform their worth of visibility and care.

Methodology

Before moving forward, a note on method: As authors of this article, we have each studied drones and blockchains respectively and independently for several years, in very different contexts to one another. We are both ‘technographers’, in the sense that we are concerned with how technologies are described and used within social and cultural life and in the sense that we examine technologies ethnographically, ‘as themselves active participants in everyday social situations’ (Berg, 2022) rather than as passive objects of inscription. One of us conducts long-term fieldwork in Myanmar and its neighbouring countries. Fieldwork on stateless Rohingya blockchain experiments has involved periods of participant observation in Malaysia (in Klang Valley and Langkawi Island) spanning 2018 to the present. The author has worked closely as an academic advisor to the Rohingya-led social enterprise featured below; during this time, this same author has also researched with migrant Rohingya communities in Thailand and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh camps. Fieldwork on drone use has involved three trips totalling 6 weeks in 2022 and 2023 to the Thai-Burma border (Mae Sot) where interviews were conducted with drone operators and logisticians. Follow-up conversations with those working in the drone chain were conducted over the messaging app Signal. While we draw on these research data as the fieldwork foundation of what follows, in our discussions below, we necessarily generalize about some of the specifics of the people and data to protect those who are vulnerable or who are involved in war.

Drones: Between emergency response and armed resistance

In 2017, WFP worked with the non-profit drone organization WeRobotics to develop guidelines and training workshops for the use of drones in humanitarian disaster response across four countries: Peru, Dominican Republic, Indonesia and Myanmar. Localizing drone expertise through their Flying Labs network, the organization employs AI to analyse the geospatial and earth observation data acquired through drones. Drones, they state, are needed for responsible emergency response because they allow local community members to become part of the data production process, where satellite imagery tends to remain within the purview of the distant humanitarian (WeRobotics, 2017). It was a timely project: weeks after WeRobotics trained a team of Burmese drone pilots to survey a simulated flood zone (including collecting aerial imagery and conducting search and rescue of roleplaying survivors), severe flooding affected villages in Pakkoku District. A UAV team made up of the WeRobotics workshop participants, led by the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, put their new skills to work and captured real-time imagery of disaster-afflicted areas to support relief efforts.

‘The future of emergency response is here and now’, one workshop drone pilot stated (WeRobotics, 2017). The workshop took place in mid-July 2017, a few weeks before Rohingya insurgents attacked a local military outpost and the Burmese military engaged in a violent crackdown, driving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees across the border. Since then, the use of drones for emergency response has centred on Cox's Bazar in neighbouring Bangladesh, the world's largest refugee camp thanks to the persecution of the Rohingya, and which also happens to be situated in a location prone to severe floods, cyclones, landslides and monsoon rains. In Cox's Bazar, the International Organization for Migration and the UNHCR have been using drones to source images for modelling landslide and flood risk (Lanclos, 2020) – although more recently, the Bangladesh police forces have also been using drones to surveil the camps to curb what they observe as a spike in criminal activity and drug and human trafficking (Sumon, 2022). This surveillance contributes to a curtailment of free movement, demonstrating the intertwining of contradictory uses of ‘good’ drones in this area.

Apropos of this Myanmar example, Fish and Richardson (2021: 5) trace drone use in four areas – environmentalism, humanitarianism, securitization and militarization – to argue that drones need to be understood as ‘an existential technology’: one that can enable death (as in the case of drone warfare) as well as save lives (as in the case of drone humanitarianism). Because the drone ‘migrates between biopolitics and resistance’, it is a part of ‘sociotechnical systems of life and death’ (Fish and Richardson, 2021: 3). We are interested in the way these ‘genealogies’ of environmentalism, humanitarianism, securitization and militarization variously diverge and intersect in Myanmar precisely because local actors are using drones in ways that combine or fuse such categories. We are especially concerned here with a slippery logic between militarization and humanitarianism – a slipperiness that we have critiqued before in relation to other geographies (Pong, 2024; Prasse-Freeman, 2012) – but that, with Myanmar, has added complexity because drones are being used by non-state actors in violent ways to fight against an authoritarian regime.

From the start of the 2021 coup, Myanmar's military has held massive materiel superiority, particularly in the domain of airpower, where they procure sophisticated military and defence drones from China and Iran, among others (Bociaga, 2023), which they have trained on their own civilian population (HRW, 2024; ACAPS, 2024). But in recent years, diffuse resistance fighters have been increasingly using low-cost commercial UAVs like DJI drones in addition to building their own models. These developments are part of what some have termed ‘the second drone age’ (Rogers, 2023) – the turn to cheap commercial drones instead of purely military ones from the first age of the GWOT. Drones now occupy an elongated vertical spectrum at both the top of the battle airspace (where traditional combat drones loiter) and at the bottom (where improvised drones are becoming a part of the ground action) (Clarke, 2023).

Frontline reporting on this rebel drone use in Myanmar has gone from observing little more than drones causing ‘demoralization’ and fear in the part of junta forces (Kyi Sin 2023), to adducing how drones have been instrumental in changing the entire dynamic of the war. Beech and Mozur (2024) conclude that ‘rebel drone units have managed to upend the power balance in Myanmar’, while Banerjee (2024) has called them ‘a critical game changer’. In terms of their operational capacity, drones in Myanmar are used for reconnaissance to identify critical targets (high-ranking soldiers called ‘strategists’; supply depots; soldier barracks). They can also have explosive payloads attached to them which the controller can drop on targets. If ‘jammed’ by Myanmar military's frequency scramblers, they can be programmed to turn into ‘suicide drones’ and smash into targets, destroying themselves. More recently, the newly developed technical ability to manoeuvre around such jammers has, according to even typically pessimistic analysts, evened the playing field significantly (Mathieson, 2023). Indeed, while the use of drones at first was mostly defensive in nature – like improvised explosive devices in the sky, in the sense that they demarcate a territory below which is dangerous to penetrate – there is now a reasonable expectation, from both revolutionary drone pilot and the military, that drones will accompany battalions on the ground, will defend their positions and may even enter enemy territory. Both the successful drone attack on the Myawaddy army base in August 2023 (Irrawaddy, 2023) – which approximated what an Air Force might have achieved – and the Three Brotherhood Alliance's massive, coordinated attack, ‘Operation 1027’ in October 2023, demonstrate this dynamic. The latter attack, which overran hundreds of military bases, relied on ‘drones to map territories, assess troop strength, and effectively dismantle the regime outposts and stakeout groups. During October–November last year, the ethnic armed forces dropped more than 25,000 bombs… using drones on the military bases’ (Banerjee, 2024).

Rebel drone use compels volumetric understandings of space that challenge regnant two-dimensional presumptions about territoriality (Elden, 2013; Jackman, 2023; McCormack, 2018). Stuart Elden argues that in incorporating the vertical dimension, volume subverts ‘standard political geographical definitions [that] describe [territory] as a “bounded space” or the “area controlled by a certain kind of power”’ (2013: 35). If entities exist not on two-dimensional planes but within three-dimensional volumes, then by attending to the properties of the medium that occupies that volume, we can identify opportunities and constraints for social actors. Specifically, various media will have differing viscosities, along various dimensions, allowing us to ask: is the medium more transparent or opaque (vis-a-vis visualizability); is the medium more impermeable or porous (vis-a-vis traversability); and in what ways can these properties be capitalized upon for those pursuing degrees of freedom?

Moreover, we follow Derek McCormack as he pushes the concept of volume further still, combining the sense of measurable volume advocated by Elden with another sense of the term, in which volume ‘resists calculability, which does not become the object of recognition but which can nevertheless be sensed by a body as the force of something excessive of that body’ (2018: 102). We see space created by these appropriated technologies as that kind of excess, parasitic off sovereign space, and hence not conceived of as a circumscribed zone – plotted two-dimensionally on a map and (relatively) fixed temporally across time (four-dimensional) – but as a continually mutating, rhizomatically interlinked mesh of connections.

Especially notable here is a radical re-working of what scholars of the first drone age called ‘the kill chain’. During the GWOT, a drone strike involved a long chain of actors across the globe: from analysts who parse live drone video, to the drone sensor operator, to the decision-making commander officer, to jet fighter pilots and ground troops who provide additional intelligence (Cockburn, 2015). The chain is conceived of as a form of space-time compression between that of the watcher and that of the target, powering the asymmetrical control of the former over the latter. Drone warfare in Myanmar, however, is more about the crude bootstrapping of supplies to create devices with potential for damage at all costs, at low cost: about David balancing the power of Goliath (Bender and Kanderske, 2022).

While still necessary to deploy drones at all, the ‘chain’ here is diffuse and one of creative crowdsourcing drawing from the broader milieu (Aung, 2024; Grove, 2016). The technical challenge required to outfit and deploy a revolutionary drone in Myanmar's war theatre is effectively two-fold: it first requires building the logistical procurement, transportation and assembly supply chain to deliver the drone plane parts together to the correct place within Myanmar for ultimate reassembly and deployment (as their drones currently have limited maximum flight radii, and they cannot be launched from hundreds of miles away). This entails a distributed network of individuals, sourcing parts from online vendors – mostly commercial and from China, although sometimes supplemented with parts made from 3D printers (Wesdorp, 2023) – and moving the parts into Myanmar through various means. The teams developed for these logistical aspects are quite diverse in terms of the kinds of skills necessary. Those on the frontlines assemble parts, translate military intelligence into battle plans, conduct the computer programming of the drone, launch and operate it and train others on the same; those on the backend deal with supply logistics, fundraise and manage the allocation of resources to different domains in the various war fronts. In Grove's terms, building on the work of Felix Guattari, the rebel drone takes on an ‘enunciative consistency’ (Grove, 2016: 340) with its ecology – coordinated with, dependent or parasitic on, and even co-constitutive of broader geographies and infrastructures, with spatial consequences.

What we are seeing in the Burmese rebels’ current response to their own crisis is an exploitation of the drone's potential for insecurity. Like the bootstrapping, disassembling and re-building of parts to create their drones, Burmese rebels are remaking space. In this version of the drone assemblage, the drone's enablement of interstitial spaces of autonomy, space contributes not to an open-air ‘prison’ that scholars of GWOT drone use had observed (Edney-Browne, 2019: 1351) in relation to aerial surveillance – but to (however potentially ephemeral or not fully realized) a kind of freedom.

Blockchains: Between persecution and self-sovereign identity

If drones have gone from a tool serving states’ panoptic ambitions to a problematic but potential-filled device of the marginalized, it would appear at first glance that blockchain has moved in the opposite direction. It became apparent that refugees themselves suspected as much when, in Cox's Bazar camps in 2018, Rohingya refugees organized massive protests against the collection of their biometric data for the construction of ‘Smart’ identification cards. As these refugees saw things, such data harvesting could limit Rohingya life opportunities: as the humanitarian regime would share data with the host state, Bangladesh, the Rohingya expected the latter to develop a database with which to identify any Rohingya interdicted outside of the camp (Prasse-Freeman, 2022: 564–65). Their fears turned out to be well-founded, as identified by a Human Rights Watch exposé that revealed that UNHCR indeed transferred data to Bangladesh (and Myanmar as well) (HRW, 2021). Through this perspective, the blockchain solution had a sharp double-edge: while some aspects of day-to-day life might improve, that improvement would come in exchange for that life being spent immured inside a squalid camp. As it renders displaced subjects into both representability and obscurity, it misapprehends their challenges; nowhere is this clearer indexed than by the thousands of refugees fleeing the camps, preferring to take their chances with traffickers on the dangerous seas (Frontier, 2024).

Outside of that camp and the humanitarian regime of control, however, the blockchain's substantive affordances transform – at least potentially. A Malaysia-based Rohingya-led and Rohingya-staffed social enterprise called the Rohingya Project (RP) has proposed to employ blockchain to circumvent state exclusion faced by the stateless, even as it avoids the forms of hyper-efficient existential asphyxiation encountered by the encamped (Prasse-Freeman, 2022). At first glance, Malaysia is a challenging place to launch such a project, as the country, as a non-signatory to the Geneva convention on refugees, renders Rohingya technically illegal. ¹ This means Rohingya can neither officially work, access affordable health care, nor send their children to public school. Hence, because they receive no humanitarian support, they are compelled to eke out a living as illegal labourers. Against a hyper-exploitation that feels perpetual, RP imagines using blockchain to build digital identities that not only allow stateless people to prove they are themselves (no small feat for people often lacking birth certificates or UN registration) but which operate as platforms for building personhood itself – ones that in turn may allow them to transform their life trajectories.

To comprehend RP's proposal, it is useful to juxtapose stateless subjects with their ‘standard’ counterparts. Those subject to state governance experience, as they traverse their lives, the inscription of numerous personal milestones onto various ledgers. Birth certificates, educational diplomas, arrest records, passports, credit scores, professional credentials, property deeds, operating licences and so forth all testify to an individual's achievements and capacities. While these disparate data reside in various databases, an individual can compile them into an ensemble that constitutes their ratified identity. These inscriptions operate to iteratively construct personhood itself, in legal, political and economic ways that mutually reinforce one another: birth certificates permit access to educational diplomas, which allow for attainment of operating licences and professional credentials, which – when intermediated by capital accumulation – allow for the acquisition of credit cards which permit bank loans, mortgages and club memberships. Stateless persons, by contrast, may be denied opportunities or institutional permission to accumulate such signs. Consequently, unable to acquire additional indices testifying to their existence and personhood, semiotic iterativity is foreclosed for them. Indeed, in our fieldwork, Rohingya refugees continually lament the feelings of invisibility that permeate their lives, at both macro and micro levels: from having a government that denies their existence, to not knowing their real birthdays. Such initial effacements entail additional ones, such as not being able to prove one's child is one's own (Prasse-Freeman, 2022: 564).

RP sees blockchain as enabling a rupture in this cycle of perpetual erasure. As blockchain technology has the capacity to store an encrypted hash of biometric material (fingerprint or iris scan), the technology solves an initial problem of self-identification: proving one is who one says s/he is. This, of course, does not on the face of it do much. It merely establishes proof of an absence: the person without an identity can prove she is that biological person, a bare life. More importantly, however, blockchain can be used to record life transactions of the kind listed above – educational diplomas attained through online courses, for instance.

As such, in Malaysia in 2020, RP executed a small pilot (35 users) with its own cryptocurrency ‘R-Coin’, around which it built an insular economy and which it distributed as a substitute for cash. Rohingya and other participating refugees were rewarded in R-Coin for their typical volunteer labour with NGO partners; refugees could spend R-Coin at vendors enrolled into the project that sold hard-to-access items such as health insurance. Critically, each ‘transaction’ – whether getting paid for work completed or spending R-Coin in the network – constituted them further, not only differentiating them from other stateless and identity-less people, but inscribing their experiences and skills on a ledger, and themselves into a network of institutions (NGOs and vendors) that implicitly vouched for them. Moreover, this ledger did not simply exist in a string of ones and zeroes in the digital space of the blockchain, but was represented on the RP smartphone app, called a digital wallet. This device not only stored the acquired R-Coin – and was used to purchase the items described above – but, more importantly, acted to visualize their own lives. Many of those who participated in the project testified to the existential satisfaction in having one's accomplishments present to themselves; others noted the utility in these accomplishments being available to them, so they could re-present them to others, addressing anticipated spatial and temporal dislocations: one participant imagined presenting his wallet as a way to substantiate his identity and potential contribution to society if he ever got resettled to a refugee-accepting country (Prasse-Freeman, 2022: 572).

However, RP – knowing how rare resettlement is – instead directed its efforts into building a space of relative autonomy within the interstices of the Westphalian order in peri-urban Malaysia. As with the drone case, such space does not come prefigured – it must be produced. Yet, simultaneously, it is not generated ex nihilo, but rather so constructed by social actors capitalizing on already extant socio-political affordances. Parallel to the way that drone operators on the Thai border capitalize on the broader milieu – of supply chains, expertise and cheap electronic products – Rohingya capitalize on the Malaysian one: there the country's appetite for cheap and flexible labour filled by illegalized-but-permitted Rohingya migrants (Frydenlund 2020, ch 3) affords them a modicum of spatial autonomy (especially when compared to life in Arakan state or the Bangladeshi camps). Specifically, as Rohingya in Malaysia have been treated as subjects not worth surveilling, regulating and disciplining, they were somewhat free to build their own projects. RP planned to scale-up the R-Coin pilot not only by adding additional vendors and NGO partners, but by recruiting private banks to provide loans and universities to provide tertiary education.

Global events, however, intervened. Despite the pilot's success, the arrival of COVID-19 drastically altered the environment in which RP could operate, contracting the space in which they were experimenting. Not only were jobs eliminated and movement curtailed, but Rohingya became objects of populist demagoguery (Abd Jalil and Hoffstaedter, 2023). Hundreds were detained and deported (Reuters, 2021), and RP put its project on hiatus and moved its interventions entirely online, aiming to train Rohingya solely for online labour through platforms such as Mechanical Turk (see Le Ludec et al., 2023).

Yet, before declaring RP's reappropriation of the blockchain a failure, political events again morphed in Malaysia, complicating things still further. In 2023, the Malaysian government announced a new security directive (Government of Malaysia, 2023). Even as it continued its draconian security practices, including work and housing raids of those without identity cards (Zolkepli, 2023), it introduced new provisions to legally permit stateless people to work in Malaysia. Moreover, it declared that those who got refugee cards (‘MyRC’) distributed by the Malaysian state (as opposed to those distributed by the UN) could enrol in vocational training programmes and even access white collar jobs. MyRC is part of a platform called the Tracking Refugees Information System, which registers refugee information through biometric fingerprinting, facial recognition and voice recording. This system holds more information than the data collected by the UNHCR, including the profile of the families of registered refugees and asylum seekers (Government of Malaysia, 2020). RP, whose current programme assists with and records precisely these kinds of vocational trainings, is torn about the opportunity. On the one hand, those who cannot attain MyRC face intensified security, including detention and even deportations. On the other hand, those who have been building skills through RP's support, and who are lucky enough to have attained an MyRC, may have the opportunity to actually use them legally in Malaysia. Taking these together, the directive creates a significant division within the refugee population: more opportunities and protections for those who get the card, but many fewer for those who do not – a split that can even exist within individual families.

How to assess RP's reappropriation of the blockchain? Does this leave RP's imaginations in the realm of science fiction? On the one hand, it could be interpreted as another failure. On the other hand, it has provided an alternative vision of the world to those who had known mostly exclusion. It is one way of ‘infrastructuring hope’ for the stateless (Hussain et al., 2020): of acknowledging refugees’ own aspirations for their lives outside of refugeehood and of giving visibility to the innovative ways they seek, through technology, to improve their conditions.

Conclusion

Drones and blockchains initially seem like antithetical technologies: drones’ origins are embedded in the martial imperative for situational awareness (Suchman, 2020), while blockchains relate to a longer history and desire for decentralized power. But both involve imaginaries of scale and distance and the idea of distributed visuality: of how one can ‘see’ and assess crisis situations better by diffusing human vision to that of machine-enabled vision or data analytics. In this sense, both technologies can be said to engage in a politics of exposure, in that they mediate and determine what gets exposed and made visualizable to select groups in humanitarian situations. In other words, there is a substrate conjoining many humanitarian tech projects that stress a legibility, visibility, and transparency that seems alarmingly synonymous with control. The humanitarian drone (especially when considered in connection with the satellite) creates an imaginary in which the world's atrocities are seen and hence imminently addressed, whether those are natural disasters or human rights abuses. The humanitarian blockchain, for its part, conjures a world in which each refugee is seen as a token of a common type, complete with biometric identity number recorded on an auditable spreadsheet in which service delivery (food packet, etc.) is recorded.

And yet, when perceived from the ground in Myanmar, Malaysia, and Bangladesh, the Tech for Good regime looks different. It becomes clear that as these technologies improve the visibility of certain things, their ability to see others diminishes. So, drones and blockchains that surveil and record the refugee camp identify neither the chaos nor the existential ennui of refugee life, even as thousands flee the putative zone of refuge to take their chances on the seas and then in Malaysia, Thailand, or elsewhere. Consequently, as these regimes expand their in/ability to see, interstitial spaces of autonomy in which the ungoverned can exist expand as well.

Moreover, as these technologies are taken out of the camp, where the volumetric space is largely controlled, they can be redeployed to recreate quasi-autonomous spaces. Revolutionary drone operators, at risk of having their citizenship stripped by the military regime (Nyi Nyi Kyaw, 2022), establish a sphere of relations across areas of Burma and Thailand and use drones to create a volume that impedes state penetration. Stateless Rohingya assemble digital (blockchain, biometric encryption) and material elements (Rohingya bodies) to create a volume that combines opacity and transparency in unique ways: their data and personhood are shielded from some while they are made perceptible to themselves and – with hope – to others as well.

This turn to space provides an alternative way of assessing Tech for Good: not only the question of what ‘good’ means, and for whom, but in relation to geopolitical power asymmetries both in the past and the present. The creation of these interstitial spaces can be interpreted as an indictment of the failures of the humanitarian regime to provide adequate care and political solutions for those subjected to some of the world's worst experiences. At the same time, this orientation towards a space beyond the domain of states and their multilateral institutions is not a simple repudiation or rejection of humanitarian care and the ‘international community’ that deploys it; rather, it is a reaction to the material neglect that manifests in the humanitarian regime's assemblage of control and biopolitics (Minca et al., 2021). Interstitial spaces are carved out with the aid of drones and blockchains as a hedge against abandonment by the international community that has all but forgotten the marginalized, and as an experiment with alternative ways of being seen – even if these are recognized by their creators as neither ideal nor necessarily achievable.

In a deeply unequal world, one which seems less interested in even viewing those excluded from its largesse (Chouliaraki, 2010), refugees and rebels ask for the world's help even as they are aware that the interpellative power of victimization has eroded (Prasse-Freeman, 2023). Their experiments with appropriated technologies can hence be assessed not just for how they remake space, but how they remake the relationship with the field of vision that misapprehends them. Comments by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Burmese government in exile are relevant here: ‘The international community has begun to recognize our struggle because we are engaging in the struggle ourselves. Nobody would have recognized our struggle if we had just hoped for someone else's help without doing anything ourselves… We’ve only made it this far because we depended on no one else but ourselves. However, it is true that we need good allies. We can’t win this fight without any allies’ (quoted in ibid, 106). The Minister acknowledges both the unequal power relations (‘we can’t win this fight without any allies’) and the need to earn that support. As perverse as this is, the marginalized must pursue a new kind of respectability politics in which they must earn recognition and care. Where the efficacy of performing themselves as perfect victims seems to have been exhausted, now technological appropriation becomes a mode of demonstrating their worthiness of attention. This limns both new global realities and the role of emergent technologies in both co-constituting and altering them.