Description
Open-source (OSINT) researchers tend to concentrate on individual, prominent events of violence, parsing through details to uncover hidden causal chains and establishing evidence of responsibility. Alongside these episodic investigations, however, the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza have led researchers to use OSINT techniques to represent large scales of systematic violence, such as attacks on cities, housing destruction, or the decay of agricultural land. These investigations force researchers to grapple with expanded scopes of violence, both temporally and geographically. This presentation, therefore, interrogates how visual OSINT investigations can grapple with conceptions of violence that take into account systematic campaigns of violence, structural forms of violence, and mass destruction.
This presentation, furthermore, will investigate how these representations of expanded acts of violence shapes the experience of war that is transmitted to domestic publics. Building on research into the politics of casualty counting and of American campaigns of targeted killing in the War on Terror, and supported by interviews with researchers and OSINT investigators, this presentation will suggest that increased visual representations of systemic violence can change democratic debates and pressures concerning (Western) responsibility for military force.
