Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Surveillant Witnessing: Satellite Imagery and the Visual Politics of Human Rights

Surveillant Witnessing: Satellite Imagery and the Visual Politics of Human Rights In the early 2000s, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to avail themselves of newly commercialized satellite imagery in their advocacy efforts. In human rights contexts, satellite imaging vastly extends capacities to detect and respond to abuses of human rights across the globe, especially in spaces that are seemingly inaccessible to rights advocates. In this essay, I explore human rights satellite imaging as an extension of a surveillance gaze that emerged and developed in the context of a politics of securitization. In so doing, I suggest that satellite imaging not only has been used by human rights advocates to pursue their ends but has also transformed those ends, separating intention from effect, policy from practice, and advocacy’s present from its past. In this process, surveillance states and human rights NGOs have come to collaborate on the production of geopolitical knowledge and the accumulation of geopolitical power through the deployment of satellite imagery. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Public Culture Duke University Press

Surveillant Witnessing: Satellite Imagery and the Visual Politics of Human Rights

Public Culture , Volume 26 (3 74) – Sep 21, 2014

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/surveillant-witnessing-satellite-imagery-and-the-visual-politics-of-AetyTuw9GP

References (29)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0899-2363
eISSN
1527-8018
DOI
10.1215/08992363-2683639
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

In the early 2000s, human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) began to avail themselves of newly commercialized satellite imagery in their advocacy efforts. In human rights contexts, satellite imaging vastly extends capacities to detect and respond to abuses of human rights across the globe, especially in spaces that are seemingly inaccessible to rights advocates. In this essay, I explore human rights satellite imaging as an extension of a surveillance gaze that emerged and developed in the context of a politics of securitization. In so doing, I suggest that satellite imaging not only has been used by human rights advocates to pursue their ends but has also transformed those ends, separating intention from effect, policy from practice, and advocacy’s present from its past. In this process, surveillance states and human rights NGOs have come to collaborate on the production of geopolitical knowledge and the accumulation of geopolitical power through the deployment of satellite imagery.

Journal

Public CultureDuke University Press

Published: Sep 21, 2014

There are no references for this article.