Using GIS to understand how humanitarian aid moves: response to Syrian refugee migration

Over the last three decades, an increasingly formal and bureaucratic aid industry has sought stronger empirical grounds for their distribution and denial of aid in the Middle East and turned to geospatial data. As the Covid-19 pandemic highlights and exacerbates existing political and social inequalities in the politics of care and control, there are opportunities to learn from efforts to map hazard, exposure, and vulnerability by humanitarians, as well as scholars of health and conflict. In this piece, I describe how geospatial analysis and mapping is being used to explore humanitarian health response in the Middle East and amongst refugees. I identify pathways to collecting and analysing spatial data in response to three challenges political scientists might face: difficulty measuring baseline needs or specifying vulnerable groups, gathering data sub-nationally, and incorporating non-geographic features into spatial analysis. I then discuss ethical implications of an accelerated mapping of vulnerable groups ‘from above’ due to the global pandemic.