This project conceptualizes and makes significant contributions to the anthropology of expertise and evidence, and to the anthropology of science and new technologies more broadly. Our research illuminates the benefits and methodological challenges concerning how technology works to produce forms of advocacy that inspire social movements. By tracking how new technologies and platforms can lead to the democratization of judicial knowledge and evidence, this research makes a substantial contribution to a nascent field of study—the anthropology of geospatial technologies—with relevance for several related disciplines and bodies of literature. Our research demonstrates how citizen-activists organized through collectives are learning how to use geospatial technologies to help find the missing. In sites such as Mexico(Phase I) and Nigeria (Phase II), citizens and advocates are challenging the hierarchization of knowledge production and valuation. Our findings through multi-sited fieldwork in and beyond The Hague (Phase III), which was focused on elite sites of technical and legal knowledge production centered around accountability mechanisms, illustrate the challenges of translating new technologies into evidentiary forms of knowledge. The project also contributes significantly to the Anthropology of Expertise and Evidence. Our research yielded significant findings in relation to contestations of expertise. We observed how legal and technical experts seek to govern the means of making the reality of human rights violations and grave crimes visible and knowable, and how their monopoly over the production of rarified knowledge is being challenged by new alliances that include previously disenfranchised constituencies, such as families of victims who lack prior access to financial or political power. The emerging field of forensic analysis relies heavily on a small number of experts who argue that certain technologies require technical expertise, yet they have also worked directly with collectives and activists through providing trainings and support.
A main goal of this project was to understand how geospatial technologies and the data they produce are creating new opportunities for, tests of, and conflicts around international justice. This research explores how new technological tools—such as satellite technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”), GIS, GPS, and artificial intelligence (AI)— may give rise to innovations in legal evidence, which in turn have the potential to transform our understandings of justice in the 21st century. In the context of a lack of legal accountability for forced disappearances, for example, victim’s families are turning directly to experts and geospatial data in some jurisdictions to help locate the disappeared. This project—shaped by current theoretical debates in the anthropology of evidence and expertise—also foregrounds how evidence related to geospatial technologies can be produced and used for advocacy by regular citizens and what are its effects on the way that individual and collective suffering as well as bodies of the disappeared are interpreted and seen. In this context, the project aims to determine how are geospatial and surveillance technologies and the creation of evidentiary platforms both democratize access to the means of producing justice, while also bringing the limits of those processes into stark relief. Each phase of the project focused on a different site, and access to geospatial technologies and awareness of these technologies by affected communities were distinct across each of the three phases. The extensive data gathered across all three phases enabled the team to capture a diverse set of perspectives across the scientific and technical community, communities who are contending with forced disappearances, non-governmental organizations and legal advocates, and those working within the institutional domain of international (criminal) justice.
The research benefitted families of the missing and murdered, human rights advocates and organizations, academics, lawyers and law enforcement officers. Families, human rights advocates, and lawyers: The team worked collaboratively with human rights advocates, trainers and researchers from Universidad Iberoamericana and their partners at GIASF/CIESAS and Centro Geo to provide a technology training for the collective FUNDENL whose members include families of disappeared in Nuevo León, Mexico. About 100 lawyers were trained in Nigeria on presenting geospatial data as evidence in cases prosecuted at the global, regional and national levels of jurisdiction. Academic sector / peers: The project contributes significantly to the Anthropology of Expertise and Evidence. Science and technology studies elaborated a study of expertise, revealing the ways that scientists generate and validate knowledge (Latour 1988; Latour and Woolgar 1986), socialize new experts (Matoesian 1999; Mertz 2007), represent specialized knowledge in broader society (Lynch and Woolgar 1990; Coopmans, Vertesi, Lynch and Woolgar 2014; Collins and Evans 2007; Randalls 2017), and imbue knowledge within institutional structures (Carr 2009; Good 2004, 2007), political movements, and processes (Epstein, 1996; Collier, 2017; Newman, 2017). Additionally, the project contributes to the ethnographic literature on human-technological interactions, revealing culturally situated ways and processes of “seeing” (Goodwin 1994). Visual media have been crucial to the practice and projection of international law (Schuppli 2014) and human rights law (Swilinksi, 2011), yet international legal scholarship has under-theorized the “optics of seeing” within today’s international tribunal settings. Our research contributes to this area through the development of the affiliated project ‘Visualizing Justice’, which produced a visual representation of the larger causes of mass atrocities, such as colonial dispossession and institutional racism, aspects which are usually rendered invisible in adjudication. This “way of seeing” through data visualization allows users and observers to foreground and “see” the structural causes behind major human rights violations that formal legal settings often obscure.
Broader Impacts
This ethnographic research project is the first empirical study of geospatial technology uses in international human rights cases among activists in Nigeria and Mexico, two of the key sites in which significant activist mobilizations—and associated prosecutorial and technology procurements—are underway. By using geo-satellite technologies to document visual images taken from the earth’s equator, or by using drones to capture activity closer to the earth with tools such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and by developing programs to interpret such imagery, the PIs have engaged in understanding the way that scientists, technocrats, prosecutors, judges, professional advocates, families of disappeared, and ordinary people are involved in the deployment of tools to search for the missing. The analysis of the data collected has yielded empirical findings which is proving to be of great importance to social policy, providing insights into the motivating factors, experiences, and concerns regarding international justice and human rights. The research has also yielded promising recommendations for documentation, advocacy, and accountability. The findings have provided tools for rethinking the uses of new technologies and the realities of their occlusions. Training Outcomes: Throughout the project, PIs, collaborators, and graduate students have been able to take part in research design, field methods and data analysis. Student researchers have gained exposure to key steps of social science research and will benefit from ongoing mentoring. The project has provided the involved students and post-graduates with opportunities to research outputs and to present at academic conferences. Most importantly, through opportunities to draw connections among primary data collection, analysis, and advocacy, students on the project have been encouraged to cultivate their passion and commitment to their chosen disciplines and to interdisciplinary collaboration. Policy Outcomes: The PIs have been able to bring insights from the research and corollary projects to their work across a variety of realms. The team used university funds to support the funding of an additional Maxar high resolution imagery subscription to allow partners to engage in ongoing investigations of war crimes in Ukraine. This provided unique insights into the strategies and structures of evidentiary analysis using geospatial data. The PIs also continue to collaborate with the African Court Research Initiative Think Tank (funded by the Open Society Foundation) to share findings and receive input. Co-PI Burrell continues to collaborate with the EAAF, a leader in the field of utilizing new technologies in human rights cases, serving on the Commission on the Use of Technology in Searching for Mexico’s Disappeared; the AAAS, where she serves as the American Anthropology Association liaison to the Human Rights and Science Coalition, and the American Anthropological Association, where she has been appointed to the Human Rights seat on the Members Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee. In particular, the team continues to seek opportunities to inform a more constructive and effective US policy towards international justice, especially in relation to this nation’s management of technology in terms of a potential to deter violence and to have an impact on policy strategies in Africa and Latin America. Social Benefits: This research speaks to diverse audiences including those interested in the ethics of justice projects; those interested in civil society and popular participation in ending violence and promoting accountability; and those concerned with engaging judicial possibilities as viable spaces for contesting mass violence. The archive dataset—research presentations, articles, and knowledge mobilization activities—is valuable for multiple publics, including citizens, legal practitioners, technology developers, students, scientists, and policymakers at all levels of government.
Website
Visualizing Justice “Visualizing Justice” was a website created to foreground structural aspects which are the ultimate causes of the violence that international courts seek to bring to justice, but these are rendered invisible in adjudication. For example, the structural violence accompanying large scale resource extraction as well as historical forms of violence, such as slavery and colonial rule, contribute to the conditions of possibility of mass atrocity crimes. Yet due to technical legal considerations that require identifying specific individuals (personal jurisdiction), specific crimes (subject matter jurisdiction) and specific historical events (temporal jurisdiction), the frame of what can be seen within these institutions is substantially narrowed, and other contributing factors fall outside of it. The project sought to represent these deeper causes of violence—such as colonial dispossession and institutionalized racism—and thus to make structural violence more visible. The research explored how we can use digital technologies to read and reconceive the social environments within which violence happens. It investigated how such forms of visualization can be converted to yield insights that are relevant to practitioners in advocacy, policy, and legal fields. The final project outcome was a visual representation of these missing layers through 1) researching social, political and historical contributing factors to these atrocities; 2) exploring different formats for visualizing these missing layers; and 3) developing a pilot platform around one case study to use as a basis for a larger grant bid.
The PIs collaborated with CLEEN Foundation, National Human Rights Commission in Nigeria, the University of Toronto, the State University of New York-Albany (USA), and Kent Law School (UK) to commemorate the international day of the disappeared to draw attention to the ongoing crisis of missing persons around the world which creates a forum where families can reminisce and celebrate the lives of their loved ones and also engage with others on strategies for finding them. The event attracted wide participation and media attention.
Media
NHRC: 22,000 Nigerians Still Missing…Families Narrate Ordeal LINK
YouTube Video: NHRC launches database of missing persons
2021 Int’l Day of The Missing : NHRC launches Nigeria’s Missing Persons Register LINK
Black Research Network – How technologies drive – and challenge – the search for missing people Video