Cutting Through The Clutter: A critical analysis of the use of open-source investigations to construct a visuality of environmental violence, using the Wadi Gaza as a case study

Abstract

This thesis combines theoretical and practical approaches to open-source investigations (OSI) on conflict-induced environmental violence, using the Wadi Gaza nature reserve in Palestine as a case study. The environment remains an overlooked dimension in Conflict Studies and dominant visual and narrative logics of war reporting. Insufficient attention is paid to how environmental harm operates across multiple temporalities (past, present, and future), and how it tends to manifest in cumulative, latent and often invisible ways. Inadequate attention has also been paid to how we recognise and represent such harm from above.

OSI is a form of grassroots journalism that uses publicly available digital sources to uncover and document human rights abuses. It uses satellite imagery to access regions of the world that might otherwise be inaccessible or too dangerous go to. This has made OSI crucial for investigating and visualising how conflict damages and destroys the environment. However, existing environment OSI tends to focus on large-N quantitative analysis, yet these tend to fall into fallacies that satellites are objective windows into reality. Instead, satellites are technically, politically, and epistemologically mediated representations of the Earth. In this thesis, I employ Mirzoeff’s concept of (counter)visuality to interrogate the politics of seeing, asking not only what is visible from above, but also what remains hidden and what conditions shape and control that vision.

Through my own practical experience and training in OSI methods, I provide key insights into how theorists and future practitioners may incorporate more critically reflexive methods in OSI that foreground the fundamental ambiguities of environmental violence, and remain critical of the anthropocentric practices of OSI. I conclude with a call for living archives of environmental harm, that remain adaptive to both ongoing conflicts and to the long-lasting consequences of environmental harm.