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Sensing the ground: On the global politics of satellite-based activism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2018

Delf Rothe  and
David Shim
Delf Rothe*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, Hamburg
David Shim*
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor, University of Groningen
*
*Correspondence to: Dr Delf Rothe, Institut für Friedensforschung und Sicherheitspolitik an der Universität Hamburg, Beim Schlump 83, 20144 Hamburg, Germany. Author’s email: Rothe@ifsh.de
**Correspondence to: Dr David Shim, University of Groningen, Department of International Relations and International Organization, Oude Kijk int Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK, Groningen, The Netherlands. Author’s email: david.shim@rug.nl
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Abstract

In recent years, satellite imagery, previously restricted to the defence and intelligence communities, has been made available to a range of non-state actors as well. Non-governmental organisations, journalists, and celebrities such as George Clooney now use remote sensing data like digital Sherlock Holmeses to investigate and reveal human rights abuses, political violence, environmental destruction, and eco-crimes from a distance. It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it. We will bolster our arguments in this regard in two prominent fields of non-governmental remote sensing: human rights and environmental governance.

Keywords

Environmental ActivismGeopoliticsHuman Rights AdvocacyNGOsVisualityTechnology
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 414 - 437
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2018 

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References

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16 World Resources Institute, ‘Global Forest Watch: Monitoring Forests in Near Real Time’, available at: {http://www.globalforestwatch.org} accessed 20 February 2017.

17 While we acknowledge the critical impact of organisations drawing upon other geospatial technologies like the Rainforest Foundation UK (in the field of deforestation) or the Missing Maps Project (in the field of humanitarian governance) these cannot be considered as examples of satellite-based activism in the narrow sense; available at: {http://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/what-we-do/projects/mapping-and-forest-governance}; {http://www.missingmaps.org/about} both accessed 18 September 2017.

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21 For an exception to this, see Litfin, ‘Public eyes’.

22 Brannon, Monica M., ‘Standardized spaces: Satellite imagery in the age of Big Data’, Configurations, 21:3 (2013), pp. 271–299 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parks, ‘Satellite views’.

23 Kenneth P. Thompson, ‘A Political History of US Commercial Remote Sensing, 1984–2007’ (PhD Thesis, Alexandria: Virginia State University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2007).

24 Today the satellite remote sensing industry is a massive and complex global market, with a projected size of US $2.6 billion by 2020. Available at: {http://www.strategyr.com/MarketResearch/Satellite_Remote_ Sensing_Market_Trends.asp} accessed 27 January 2017.

25 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’.

26 Mark Duffield, ‘Disaster-Resilience in the Network Age: Access-Denial and the Rise of Cyber-Humanitarianism’, DIIS Working Paper (2013).

27 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’; Elodie Convergne and Michael R. Snyder, ‘Will politics keep peacekeepers from harnessing satellite imagery?’, The Global Observatory (6 April 2015), available at: {https://theglobalobservatory.org/2015/04/satellites-peacekeeping-united-nations/} accessed 1 March 2017.

28 Baker and Williamson, ‘Satellite imagery activism’.

29 Different strands of critical scholarship in the humanities and social sciences address, like the present article, the politics of aerial vision and its counterhegemonic potential. These include feminist, postcolonial, surveillance, and visual studies. See, for example, Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2013); Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Satia, Priya, ‘The pain of love: the invention of aerial surveillance in British Iraq’, in Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead, and Allison Williams (eds), From Above: War Violence, and Verticality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. While we acknowledge, and partly engage, their important contributions, we focus here on explicit debates on visual activism and non-governmental remote sensing, which so far have taken place mainly in geography.

30 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’, p. 65. See also Baker, John C., O’Connell, Kevin M., and Williamson, Ray A. (eds), Commercial Observation Satellites: At the Leading Edge of Global Transparency (Santa Monica: RAND, 2001)Google Scholar.

31 Aday and Livingston, ‘NGOs as intelligence agencies’, p. 515.

32 Campbell, David and Power, Marcus, ‘The scopic regime of Africa’, in Fraser MacDonald, Klaus J. Dodds, and Rachel Hughes (eds), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), pp. 167–198 Google Scholar.

33 Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance; Tidy, Joanna, ‘Visual regimes and the politics of war experience: Rewriting war “from above” in WikiLeaks’ “Collateral Murder”’, Review of International Studies, 43:1 (2017), pp. 95–111 (p. 102)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Perkins and Dodge, ‘Satellite imagery’, p. 548.

35 On the debate on the knowledge politics of satellite remote sensing see, for example, Campbell, David, ‘Tele-vision: Satellite images and security’, Source, 56 (2008), pp. 16–23 Google Scholar; Crampton, Jeremy W., Mapping: A Critical Introduction to Cartography and GIS (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010)Google Scholar; Dodge, Martin and Perkins, Chris, ‘The “view from nowhere?” Spatial politics and cultural significance of high-resolution satellite imagery’, Geoforum, 40:4 (2009), pp. 497–501 Google Scholar; Elwood, Sarah, ‘Geographic information science: New geovisualization technologies – emerging questions and linkages with GIScience research’, Progress in Human Geography, 33:2 (2009), pp. 256–263 Google Scholar; Harley, J. Brian, ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1988), pp. 277–312 Google Scholar; Parks, Lisa, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

36 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’, p. 67. Further questions that point to the epistemological problems of satellite imagery are for instance: what does a satellite image tell us about the intentions of an actor? How can we ensure the ‘proper’ interpretation of satellite images when they lack any inherent meaning? What is a ‘correct’ interpretation? Who decides whether these media are compelling sources or nothing but an artificial view constructed from outer space? See also Shim, David, ‘Satellites’, in Roland Bleiker (ed.), Visual Global Politics (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 265–71.Google Scholar

37 The counterhegemonic potential of remote sensing technologies, as one reviewer rightfully suggested, directly speaks to the notion of ‘sousveillance’ – a concept that denotes the inverse surveillance of the powerful (the state) by the powerless (the individual). See, for instance, Mann, Steve, Nolan, Jason, and Wellmann, Barry, ‘Sousveillance: Inventing and using wearable computing devices for data collection in surveillance environments’, Surveillance & Society, 1:3 (2002), pp. 331–355 Google Scholar, who speak of ‘surveilling the surveillers’. The examples discussed here complicate the understanding of sousveillance. On the one hand, satellite-based activism can be regarded as a form of sousveillance, because it contests state practices of looking. On the other hand, however, those monitored states are all from the Global South. These are watched by influential and potent organisations from the Global North. ‘Sousveillant’ satellite activism is hence characterised by a neocolonial rationality, which permits surveillance only of certain geographies in the Global South.

38 See also Butler, Judith, ‘Torture and the ethics of photography’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25:6 (2007), pp. 951–966 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Veeren, Elspeth, ‘Captured by the camera’s eye: Guantánamo and the shifting frame of the Global War on Terror’, Review of International Studies, 37:4 (2011), pp. 1721–1749 Google Scholar.

39 Geographic information systems (GIS) are computer-based tools that allow for the generation, management, analysis, and display of spatial data. GIS essentially connect data with geography, and thus help to locate events and developments on maps (mapping tool).

40 AI, ‘Remote Sensing for Human Rights: Eyes on Darfur’, available at: {http://www.eyesondarfur.org} accessed 27 February 2017.

41 AAAS, Geospatial Technologies Project.

42 The diagrams presented in Figures 1 and 3 are based upon our analysis of the web-repository of AI and AAAS human rights remote sensing projects, available at: {https://web.archive.org/web/20170417024037/http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/science-for-human-rights/remote-sensing-for-human-rights} accessed 21 September 2017. The repository provided detailed reports for every remote sensing project. We compiled these reports and analysed them along the line of the following categories: subject under investigation (types of human rights abuse), regional focus, actors involved, methods applied, and imagery/data sources. We do not claim objective representation of the human rights remote sensing field with these graphs. Obviously, diagrams like the ones used here always involve subjective decisions and thus highlight certain aspects of reality while leaving out others. Nevertheless, the figures provide a comprehensive and accessible overview of the complex field of human rights remote sensing in a way that a mere textual description could not achieve.

43 AI, ‘Technology for Human Rights: Evaluation of the Science for Human Rights Project 2008–2011: Executive Summary’, available at: {https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/doc23/002/2011/en/} accessed 28 February 2017.

44 Ibid.

45 AAAS, ‘Human Rights Applications of Remote Sensing’, available at: {https://www.aaas.org/report/human-rights-applications-remote-sensing} accessed 28 February 2017.

46 AI, ‘Technology for Human Rights: Evaluation of the Science for Human Rights Project 2008–2011: Executive Summary’.

47 AI, ‘Remote Sensing for Human Rights’.

48 Cited in Herscher, ‘Surveillant witnessing’, p. 486.

49 See, for example, O’Connell, Tommy and Young, Stephen, ‘No more hidden secrets: Human rights violations and remote sensing’, Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, 8:3 (2014), pp. 5–31 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinbarger, Susan R., ‘Remote sensing as a tool for human rights fact-finding’, in Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey (eds), The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 464–487 Google Scholar.

50 See, for example, Brown, Wendy, ‘Suffering the paradoxes of rights’, in Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (eds), Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 420–434 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kennedy, David W., ‘The international human rights regime: Still part of the problem?’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 14:2 (2002), pp. 101–125 Google Scholar; Mégret, Frédéric, ‘Do facts exist, can they be “found”, and does it matter?’, in Alston and Knuckey (eds), The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, pp. 27–48 Google Scholar; Mutua, Makau W., ‘Savages, victims, and saviors: the metaphor of human rights’, Harvard International Law Journal, 42:1 (2001), pp. 201–245 Google Scholar; Sharp, Dustin N., ‘Human rights fact-finding and the reproduction of hierarchies’, in Alston and Knuckey (eds), The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, pp. 69-87 Google Scholar.

51 See Shim, David, ‘Remote sensing place: Satellite images as visual spatial imaginaries’, Geoforum, 51:1 (2014), pp. 152–160 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Marx, Andrew and Goward, Samuel, ‘Remote sensing in human rights and international humanitarian law monitoring: Concepts and methods’, Geographical Review, 103:1 (2013), pp. 100–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; O’Connell and Young, ‘No more’; Wolfinbarger, ‘Remote sensing’.

53 For example, this is illustrated by Adrian Myers, who used the satellite imagery of Google Earth for a virtual investigation of the Camp Delta prison camp at Guantánamo Bay – certainly one of the most sensitive spaces of US security interests. Myers, Adrian, ‘Camp Delta, Google Earth and the ethics of remote sensing in archaeology’, World Archaeology, 42:3 (2010), pp. 455–467 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Parks, Lisa, ‘Zeroing in: Overhead imagery, infrastructure ruins, and datalands in Afghanistan and Iraq’, in Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (eds), Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 78–92 Google Scholar.

54 AAAS, ‘Lebanon: Destruction in Civilian Areas Case Study Report’ (last update 5 August 2016), available at: {http://www.aaas.org/content/lebanon-destruction-civilian-areas-case-study-report} accessed 27 February 2017. In Israel, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year prevents the commercial distribution of any high-resolution satellite imagery of Israeli territory.

55 Trevor Paglen’s work is a good example by which to illustrate this claim. Paglen uses visual media to make visible secrets sites of the US government – CIA prisons, listening stations, and military bases – thereby contesting hegemonic state as well as non-state practices of (not) showing spaces of exclusion. Paglen’s work is available at: {http://www.paglen.com/?l=work} accessed 27 February 2017.

56 McLagan, Meg and McKee, Yates (eds), Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012)Google Scholar.

57 See also Hevia, James, ‘The photography complex: Exposing Boxer China, making civilization (1900–1901)’, in Rosalind Morris (ed.), Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 79–119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 Poole, Deborah, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

59 Dodge, and Perkins, , ‘The “view from nowhere?”’, pp. 497–501 (p. 498)Google Scholar; Brannon, , ‘Standardized spaces’, p. 273 Google Scholar.

60 Parks, ‘Digging into Google Earth’, p. 541.

61 It could of course acquire imagery that is already available in the image archives of satellite businesses or resellers such as Harris MapMart, available at: {http://www.mapmart.com} accessed 27 February 2017. Yet, as mentioned, the stock of available imagery is highly fragmented so that it is hugely improbable that the required one is already available.

62 AAAS, ‘High-Resolution Satellite Imagery and the Conflict in South Ossetia’ (2008 [last updated 5 August 2016]), available at: {https://www.aaas.org/content/high-resolution-satellite-imagery-and-conflict-south-ossetia-0} accessed 27 February 2017.

63 Google Earth Outreach, ‘United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Darfur-Crisis’, available at: {https://www.google.com/earth/outreach/stories/darfur.html} accessed 27 February 2017.

64 Campbell, David, ‘Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict’, Political Geography, 26:4 (2007), pp. 357–382 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mitchell, William J. T., ‘Showing seeing: a critique of visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture, 1:2 (2002), pp. 165–181 Google Scholar.

65 See Herscher, ‘Surveillant witnessing’.

66 Campbell and Power, ‘The scopic regime of Africa’.

67 See DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, ‘Satellite planetarity and the ends of the Earth’, Public Culture, 26:2 (2014), pp. 257–280 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jasanoff, ‘Heaven and Earth’; Cosgrove, Denis, ‘Images and imagination in 20th-century environmentalism: From the Sierras to the Poles’, Environment and Planning A, 40:8 (2008), pp. 1862–1880 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Rothe, Delf, ‘Seeing like a satellite: Remote sensing and the ontological politics of environmental security’, Security Dialogue, 48:4 (2017), pp. 334–353 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Adams, ‘Geographies of conservation II’; Baker and Williamson, ‘Satellite imagery activism’, p. 2; Litfin, ‘Public eyes’; Thompson, A Political History.

70 See Baker and Williamson, ‘Satellite imagery activism’, p. 10.

71 Global Forest Watch (GFW), ‘The GFW Partnership’, available at: {http://www.globalforestwatch.org/about/the-gfw-partnership} accessed 27 February 2017.

72 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’, p. 83.

73 Parks, ‘Digging into Google Earth’, p. 537.

74 Litfin, ‘Public eyes’, p. 85.

75 With this feature GFW follows a broader trend towards volunteered geographic information, participatory mapping, and citizen science. A good example of this trend in the field of deforestation is the Rainforest Foundation UK. The latter uses participatory mapping to help indigenous communities in rainforests creating an awareness for their rights and articulating social and political demands, see Rainforest Foundation UK: {http://www.rainforestfoundationuk.org/what-we-do/projects/mapping-and-forest-governance}. Here, geospatial technologies are used to create novel understandings of the problem of deforestation and empower local communities. The participatory element of the GFW, on the contrary, is limited and artificial: it only allows users to map a story onto a pregiven, Western representation of deforestation (see next section). It thus comes as no surprise that most user stories are copy-and-pasted parts of academic publications and NGO/think tank papers rather than views of affected populations. See: {http://www.globalforestwatch.org/stories} accessed 28 August 2017.

76 Crystal Davies, ‘Tackling the Forest Information Problem with Global Forest Watch’, GFW blog post (21 March 2014), available at: {http://blog.globalforestwatch.org/data/tackling-the-forest-information-problem-with-global-forest-watch.html} accessed 24 February 2017.

77 Patrick Goymer, ‘Forest vision’, Nature Ecology & Evolution, early online (21 February 2017).

78 USAID, ‘Satellite Data for the People: USAID Supports Launch of New Forest Watch Tool’, USAID Impact blog, available at: {https://blog.usaid.gov/2014/02/satellite-data-for-the-people-usaid-supports-launch-of-new-forest-watch-tool} accessed 22 February 2017.

79 See Bäckstrand, Karin and Lövbrand, Eva, ‘Planting trees to mitigate climate change: Contested discourses of ecological modernization, green governmentality and civic environmentalism’, Global Environmental Politics, 6 (2006), pp. 50–75 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephan, Benjamin, ‘How to trade “not cutting down trees”: a governmentality perspective on the commodification of avoided deforestation’, in Chris Methmann, Delf Rothe, and Benjamin Stephan (eds), (De-)Constructing the Greenhouse: Interpretive Approaches to Global Climate Governance (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 57–71 Google Scholar.

80 See Brannon, ‘Standardized spaces’.

81 Ibid., p. 296.

82 See Goymer, ‘Forest vision’.

83 Davies, ‘Tackling the forest information problem’.

84 Nancy Harris and Donna Lee, ‘Climate Change Solutions: Bringing Forests to the Centre Stage’, Global Forest Watch blog (21 August 2017), available at {http://blog.globalforestwatch.org/climate/climate-change-solutions-bringing-forests-to-center-stage.html} accessed 28 August 2017.

85 See Oels, Angela, ‘Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government?’, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 7:3 (2005), pp. 185–207 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luke, Timothy W., ‘Eco-managerialism: Environmental studies as power/knowledge formation’, in Frank Fischer and Maarten Hajer (eds), Living With Nature: Environmental Politics as Cultural Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 103–120 Google Scholar.

86 Paterson, Matthew and Stripple, Johannes, ‘My space: Governing individuals’ carbon emissions’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28:2 (2010), pp. 341–362 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephan, ‘How to trade’.

87 Bäckstrand and Lövbrand, ‘Planting trees’; Stephan, ‘How to trade’; McGregor, Andrew, Challies, Edward, Howson, Peter, Astuti, Rini, Dixon, Rowan, Haalboom, Bethany, Gavin, Michael, Tacconi, Luca, and Afiff, Suraya, ‘Beyond carbon, more than forest? REDD+ governmentality in Indonesia’, Environment and Planning A, 47:1 (2015), pp. 138–155 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

88 Stephan, , ‘How to trade’, p. 62 Google Scholar.

89 See Nancy Harris and Fred Stolle, ‘Forests Are in the Paris Agreement! Now What?’, WRI blog (5 January 2016) available at: {http://www.wri.org/blog/2016/01/forests-are-paris-agreement-now-what} accessed 27 February 2017.

90 Ibid.

91 See: {http://climate.globalforestwatch.org} accessed 24 February 2017.

92 See GFW Fires, available at: {http://fires.globalforestwatch.org/home} accessed 24 February 2017.

93 See GFW Fires (fn. 92).

94 For comparison: Google Earth draws on Landsat satellite imagery with a spatial resolution of approximately 15 meters/pixel.

95 Jamie Gibson and Alicia Arenzana, ‘Who Watches the (Global Forest) Watchmen’, Vizzuality blog (14 September 2015), available at {http://blog.vizzuality.com/post/129077179181/who-watches-the-global-forest-watchmen} accessed 28 August 2017.

96 See Hartmann, Betsy, ‘Converging on disaster: Climate security and the Malthusian anticipatory regime for Africa’, Geopolitics, 19:4 (2014), pp. 757–783 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothe, Delf, Securitizing Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity (London; New York: Routledge), pp. 126–127 Google Scholar.

97 See Harwell, Emily, ‘Remote sensibilities: Discourses of technology and the making of Indonesia’s natural disaster’, Development and Change, 31:1 (2000), pp. 307–340 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 See, for example, the Forensic Architecture Project led by scholar-activist Eyal Weizman, See: {http://www.forensic-architecture.org} accessed 23 February 2017 or the Rainforest Foundation UK mentioned above (see fn. 75).

99 Sophie Hackford, ‘Virtual Reality is Going to Become a Surveillance Universe’, Science Focus (16 February 2017), available at: {http://www.sciencefocus.com/article/future/virtual-reality-going-become-surveillance-universe} accessed 23 February 2017.

100 Elkins, James, Visual Literacy (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar.