New Technology, War, and Human Rights Reporting

This chapter uses the Bellingcat collective of online researchers as an example of the ways in which digital technologies are being used to investigate human rights abuses in areas of conflict. At a safe distance from contemporary battlefields, Bellingcat volunteers and paid staff, as well as professional journalists and personnel from rights organizations, together comprise a distinctive online community which transparently crowd-sources disputed facts in areas of conflict. From its inception, the group has worked with rights organizations on live investigations by discovering, verifying, and interpreting disputed facts in areas of conflict. The group’s founder, Eliot Higgins, began by archiving user-generated data from Libya, Syria, and Ukraine for use in future war crimes investigations. The chapter ends by briefly historicizing such human rights reporting and by linking to other actors in the field puts Bellingcat in a wider context.