The surveillance of ecological violence from space
Satellite imagery has become critical in documenting the environmental impact of armed conflicts. Damaged resource infrastructure and industries, burned forests, polluted rivers and oceans, and flooded villages are increasingly captured by high-resolution imagery or open-source satellite data and used to document, monitor, and verify environmental damage, as well as advocate for environmental protection in conflict situations. Mapping this damage in times of violent conflict has incredible potential for the legal prosecution of environmental crimes, post-conflict environmental reconstruction, and governing the treatment of the environment during armed conflict. However, unconditional applications of satellite imagery also run the risk of advancing various political and military objectives, normalizing existing and limited imaginaries of what environmental justice and sustainable futures may look like. While often presented as ‘objective’ technologies of earth observation and conflict monitoring, the surveillance of ecological violence from space is subject to conflict dynamics and embedded in anthropocentric ramifications of planetary consciousness.
This interdisciplinary project is a collaboration between researchers in social sciences and humanities and PAX, a Dutch NGO that is experienced in the use of satellite imagery and actively monitoring ecological violence in conflict zones, with dedicated projects on the wars in Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza. Following their work, this project investigates the (1) production, (2) analyses, and (3) afterlife of satellite images, explaining the motivations and technological factors behind visualizations, how they are used and understood by advocacy groups such as PAX, and how they are inserted in existing juridical paradigms as forms of potential legal evidence of environmental crimes, injustice, or ecocide.
Initial findings highlight the complexity of the production of these visualizations, showing that they are often constellations of different images taken at different times. This is especially the case in protracted conflicts: settings where prolonged fighting takes place across a large geography. For example, the available sources of information and humanitarian needs of the recent crisis in Gaza are substantially different from those of a more protracted conflict such as Syria. As such, how practitioners find and use satellite data and evidence in these two conflicts is entirely different, influencing the types of qualitative data that corroborate their evidence, as well as the extent to which local organizations and citizens are included in collaboration processes.
While satellite technology is commonly understood to be a form of remote sensing, we find that there is a strong connection between local actors and external monitoring, obscuring the complex relationships between the people and places being monitored and those doing the monitoring. Finally, we note that there is a strong need for the development of legal and ethical frameworks that guide the production and processes of the continuously growing amounts of data available. Much of the work that is done has a strong informal character, where researchers and analysts make use of a rich social network of experts.
We will produce a co-authored journal publication answering some of the aforementioned research questions, as well as publicize our findings through non-academic platforms. Team members will present our research as part of a panel discussion on Geopolitical Ecologies of Extractivist Empire-Making at the POLLEN24 conference in Lund, Sweden. We will also be part of a collaborative workshop prepared with PAX that is held during the Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week in Geneva. This workshop will allow a wider community of practitioners and experts to gather and share knowledge about the technical and logistical realities as well as the ethical concerns of using satellite imagery to monitor the environmental harms of armed conflicts. Not only will this workshop constitute a vital part of the participatory methodologies of this research project, but it will also contribute to long-term community building and knowledge-sharing between different academics and experts in the field. Moreover, it will directly contribute to the production of ethical guidelines for PAX and other organizations seeking to identify and make explicit best practices and critical considerations when it comes to the surveillance of ecological violence from space.