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Accepted Paper:
The quality of the quantity: 'baraka' as a lens on blockchain-based aid
Margie Cheesman
(King's College London)
United Nations agencies are experimenting with blockchain tech for aid payments. This paper examines how refugee women in Jordan evaluate these experiments. Drawing on the Islamic concept al-baraka, women define value beyond mere spending power, and beyond the promises of techno-cratic finance.
Paper Abstract:
This paper explores how refugee women in Jordan's Al-Za'atari and Al-Azraq camps evaluated a United Nations aid experiment with blockchain technology. The Islamic concept baraka - similar to Christian grace, Malagasy hasina, or Polynesian mana - was consistently used to critique the 'quality of the quantity' (Ross et al 2020): how technological change depleted the sense of durability and bounty around aid payments. With its material and temporal dimensions, the evaluative lens 'mish [not] baraka' signifies women's collective struggle to define value beyond mere spending power, and beyond the promises of digital financialisation. As blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and other 'web3' technologies are promoted for the financial inclusion of the world's most marginalised groups, this ethnographic research reveals how they are contested in the moral vernaculars of real people living precariously, on the poverty line, with severely restricted political, economic, and mobility rights.