Visualizing War through Satellite Footage: Technological Capacity,Truth,and the View from Above

Abstract

Visualizing war is increasingly mediated through technology. Accompanying photographs from on the ground, media outlets often include satellite footage to offer context. Human rights organizations also rely on satellite imagery as a tool to confirm the veracity of images – as one example, Human Rights Watch used satellite footage to help confirm the authenticity of the Caesar images of Syrian torture victims. In the current context, where some critique the biased nature of media outlets, the infallibility of the photograph has perhaps been put into question. Satellite footage has become almost indispensable in response, as a tool to contextualize images and thus reinforce their positioning as authoritative. This contribution asks two key questions: first, how does satellite footage work in partnership with photographic imagery to invoke a sense of the real in media coverage of war? Second, how does the positioning from above affect the way we come to know war? Satellite footage changes the angle from which the viewer engages war, raising questions about how technological ways of seeing emerge, circulate, are framed, and function in wider narratives. Satellite imagery draws on the rhetoric of truth and, as noted, is widely used as a tool for human rights promotion and understanding of the realities of war. So how has satellite imagery come to function as a tool for ‘properly’ understanding war, how does this shift our understanding of what war is and what it looks like and how is this embedded in particular scopic regimes?

Visualizing war is increasingly mediated through technology. Media outlets often include satellite footage to offer context. Human rights organizations rely on satellite imagery as a tool to grant access to inaccessible areas and confirm the veracity of images. Amnesty International (AI), which has a dedicated team to analyze satellite images (Van Wyck, 2019: 32), notes that

the images allow us to cut through the fog of war and help us establishing indisputable facts, such as a damage count and a timeline of events. Additionally, the images provide compelling visual evidence that allow us to shine a much-needed light on an overlooked crisis. (AI, 2015)

In addition, it is increasingly being used to ‘address societal and developmental needs’ (Van Wyck, 2019: 33) – its uses range from environmental early warning systems to military use to forensic identification of mass gravesites.

In this environment, where satellite images are increasingly being mobilized by a whole host of state and non-state actors for various ends, it bears examining the impact on how we understand and visualize war. What does war look like from the perspective of a satellite? This is particularly salient in the current context as, with the advent of artificial intelligence and the editing of images more broadly, the infallibility of the photograph has been put into question. In this vein, the photograph no longer provides the raw truth that it may have been seen to do in the past. Satellite footage has become almost indispensable in response, as a tool to contextualize images and thus reinforce their positioning as authoritative. This contribution asks two key questions: first, how does satellite footage invoke a sense of the real in media coverage of war? Second, how does the positioning from above affect the way we come to know war? Satellite footage changes the angle from which the viewer engages war, raising questions about how technological ways of seeing emerge, circulate, are framed, and function in wider narratives. Satellite imagery draws on the rhetoric of truth and is widely used as a tool for human rights promotion and understanding of the realities of war. So how has satellite imagery come to function as a tool for ‘properly’ understanding war and how does this shift our understanding of what war is and what it looks like? These questions are significant simply because of the ways in which satellite footage has become ubiquitous in the media coverage of contemporary conflict, the strategic development of military action, and the toolbox of human rights organizations.

This article first offers an overview of the literature on ways of seeing. This allows me to centralize the question of how we see and think through some classic assumptions about how we understand war through imagery, exploring the question of truth related to visual representation, as well as larger questions of perspective and distance. Second, I look at some examples to explore how satellite footage is used and framed, illustrating the construction of scientific authority and the way satellite footage shifts the way we understand war. Finally, I conclude with wider reflection on the impact on how we understand and narrate war and violence more broadly, including what is left invisible in this perspective. The project seeks to inquire into the larger politics of scientific authority linked to the visual representation of war.

Ways of seeing: Narrating war visually

Scholars of visual culture and politics have suggested that ‘systematised practices of seeing are central to world politics’ (Grayson and Mawdsley, 2019: 432) and that ‘wars have always been shaped by (and have in turn shaped) visual fields’ (Gregory, 2013: 150). This section focuses on two key framings that are relevant to this project in the context of ways of seeing: the question of perspective and the question of distance.

Despite the cautionary notes of scholars, photographers, and photojournalists, the photographic image has typically been seen to represent brute reality, especially in the context of war. Bleiker and Kay (2007: 142) refer to this as the naturalist view of photographs, noting that

it was for long commonly assumed that a photographer, observing the world from a distance, is an ‘objective witness’ to political phenomena, providing authentic representations of, say, war or poverty . . . Theoretically, such naturalistic positions hinge on the belief that a photograph can represent its object in a neutral and value-free way, transferring meaning from one site to another without affecting the object’s nature and signification in the process.

As Zylberman and Sánchez-Biosca (2018: 2) note in their overview of images in genocide studies,

one major ramification of the invention of photography has been that the seeming visual reproduction of ‘reality’ would ascribe specific functions to the image that modified notions of objectivity and imposes an effect of how we perceive reality (effet de réel) that carry with them significant consequences . . . images now operate as a form of testimony, which is regularly used to assess the accuracy of other forms of documentation (eyewitness accounts, documents, etc).

Images are seen to act as key visual witnesses to historical events, such as war and genocide, often referred to as a pedagogy of horror.

However, in recent years, the reliability of the image has been put into question. Digital technologies such as artificial intelligence have rendered the image manipulable in new ways. Similarly, scholars have revisited historical images, seeking to understand photographs as primary sources in their own right, meaning they were created with a set of particular intentions and do not necessarily accurately reflect a pre-existing reality (Umbach and Mills, 2024: 47; Zylberman and Sánchez-Biosca, 2018: 9). Thus, we have both the scholarly/interpretive turn towards reading photographs as social and political artefacts and inquiring after their construction, and a wider trend towards disbelief or attention to bias of images in the media sector. These two shifts have thrown the photograph’s ‘truthiness’ into question, leading to questions about how we validate or confirm the truth of photographic images, and it is here that satellite imagery comes in to reestablish a sense of objective truth.

The literature on images has also sought to raise questions of perspective and distance. Holocaust images, initially seen as key mechanisms of proof of genocide, have in recent years been examined more reflexively. While debates immediately after the Holocaust focused on the question of the representation gap, and whether it was truly possible (and/or ethical) to represent the Shoah, more recently, attention has been drawn to the mechanisms of production of these images. More specifically, the two main types of images are those taken by liberators and perpetrators (Koppermann, 2019). Indeed, images of the Holocaust taken by the Nazis are often framed as illustrative, simply providing information about the Nazi death machine: they ‘are taken as authentic reflections of a historical truth’ (Umbach and Mills, 2024: 57). In other words, in visual representations of the Holocaust, the perpetrator gaze has become normalized as the objective gaze, raising important questions about how we should examine issues of perspective and ways of seeing.

Some have suggested that we should not use images produced by perpetrators in our contemporary study of the Holocaust (Koppermann, 2019: 102) because they depict the victims as the Nazis saw them (Crane, 2008). As Crane notes, few of the victims pictured in the best-known images of the Holocaust were willing subjects, suggesting that these photographs are ethically compromised. Linfield (2010: 69) has emphasized that looking at atrocity photographs may be to place ourselves ‘not just physically but morally, too – in the position of the original photographer, which is to say of a killer’. It has become all too easy to see those depicted as their deaths rather than their lives, something with which museum curators struggle within the context of genocide memorialization: how to represent the dehumanization of genocide to understand its causes while also dignifying the lives and deaths of those killed. This centralizes the question of the angle of view that has also been discussed in the context of humanitarian images (Bleiker and Kay, 2007).

The literature on the visual culture of humanitarianism has often suggested that much of the visual representation of disasters, poverty, famine, etc. is premised on a stereotype of the passive recipients of aid, and the Western savior who is personified in the viewer. The replication of the colonial gaze (Hutchison, 2014) draws on gendered tropes of vulnerability that often commodify those in need and reinforce stereotypes of the developing world. Yet this colonial gaze is not solely a function of the content of an image, but also of the angle of view. Many iconic images are taken from above, looking down on the famine victim, the refugee, the disaster victim, etc. That is, the viewer is not only placed in a position of a savior (and ‘parentified’ through the depiction of children alone in some instances), but also in a position that is all-seeing, god-like, and premised on the view from above.

This is also connected to the emergence of the representation of ‘teeming masses’ related to those in need in the context of humanitarian crises. Johnson (2011: 1016) has traced the evolution of refugee representation from the single, dignified individual (Soviet defector) to the ‘nameless flood of poverty-stricken women and children’. Fair and Parks (2001) have also noted the way in which news coverage of Rwandan refugees positioned close-up images alongside aerial images from afar as a means to understand the conflict but, in portraying ‘refugees as electronic dots on a high tech map’ (p. 38), this elided the context of what pushed the refugees out of Rwanda in the first place, instead representing the ‘refugees as a deterritorialized mass unanchored from the historical realities that unfolded in Rwanda in 1994’ (p. 37). That is, there are multiple ways of viewing from a distance: the photo of a suffering individual taken from a higher angle of view and the image of teeming masses of suffering people.

There is also the modern drone, an entirely new way of seeing from a distance (from above). While an exhaustive summary of this literature is infeasible, I instead describe how scholars have discussed drones as a ‘view from above’ that shifts the way we visualize war as a means to frame the discussion of satellite footage that follows. Drones have inaugurated a particular visual logic primarily associated with the war-on-terror (Gregory, 2011; Wilcox, 2015). As Wall and Monahan (2011: 239) draw attention to, the ‘corporeal politics of space, place, and identity are powerfully inflected by technological systems of remote surveillance and violence’. Similarly, Bracken-Roche (2016) has drawn attention to the way drones encourage a reconceptualization of space centered on the idea of verticality (Weizman, 2002), while Adey (2016: 320) has focused less on the vertical view than on the ‘side-long view’. Wilcox (2015) has argued that drone warfare reorganizes space to materialize the bodies of killable enemies, and Daggett (2015) has argued that drones queer the distance–intimacy continuum. Indeed, all suggest that there is something important about space and distance with regard to how drones function.

Here I am primarily concerned with how this dynamic is visual, what I have described elsewhere as ‘the fantastic and mythological in the visual politics and culture of the drone and the drone strike’ (Auchter, 2022: 536). In that work, I suggested that the drone gaze was framed technologically as the ability to look everywhere and see everything, and that this was equated with the solution for defeating evil in both moral and strategic terms, drawing on this language of mythical figures (Adey, 2016: 319). This all-seeing gaze focuses on visual superiority through asymmetry: the terrorists don’t know we are watching them, but our gaze sees everything, we are everywhere, what Laperruque (2017) has referred to as the ‘aerial panopticon’.

However, even in the all-seeing technological gaze of the drone, the view from above, there are some things that are rendered unseen: civilians. The gaze only goes from the drone to the ground, and not the other way around. Those on the ground, and their humanity, are invisible. In reference to drone technology being used at the US–Mexico border, one agent notes that ‘everyone looks like germs, like ants, from the Hunter’s 15,000-foot point of view. Especially when the ant hill breaks apart, and everybody scatters in a dozen different directions’ (Schachtman, 2005). This language emphasizes the way in which visual distancing not only turns humans into data, but into movement that is deemed less-than-human (the scurrying away, the paths in the landscape, the patterns of movement that humans see when they look at insects). This visual regime depicts the targets of drones as simply the excesses of military strategy, where they are rendered both invisible and also not worthy of seeing in return (Auchter, 2022). Some have also suggested that drone pilots experience a unique marriage of spatial distance and temporal proximity through the surveillance of the banal lives of targets (Huntington and Eckert, 2022).

All of this research suggests that we would do well to pay attention to the ethics and politics of the birds-eye-view. While it raises important questions about the dehumanization of distance, it also suggests that new technologies and ways of seeing from a distance that are connected with the all-seeing surveillance that typically accompanies them may be more complex, due to their presumed ability to capture a truth from a distance. Related to this body of work on drones, and largely drawing from the larger conversation about the ethics of war from a distance, scholars have recently suggested that the battlefield has been transformed by digital technologies, formulated by Merrin and Hoskins (2020) as ‘tweet fast and kill things’, emphasizing how an emerging ‘military-social media complex’ has shifted the very idea of war and accountability itself.

To sum up, recent technological developments increasingly frame technological ways of seeing as more truthfully. Under this paradigm, drones are not simply safer, but better at seeing than boots on the ground, and the view from above is more reliable than the fallible photographic image. This different way of seeing conditions us towards technological development as a tool of evidence and truth, in both the military and humanitarian arena. I illustrate this dynamic in the following section with regard to the construction of scientific authority in the context of satellite footage.

The Scientific Real: Satellite Images, Truth, and Legitimacy

Digital technologies are deeply connected with the aura of legitimacy and credibility, lent by their scientific framing. The literature on drones, for example, has drawn attention to the functioning of techno-scientific discourse (Wall and Monahan, 2011, 246) in its self-legitimation. This fits with Grayson and Mawdsley’s (2019: 432) characterization of ways of seeing which make possible the resonance of ‘particular representational practices and outputs . . . within broader discourses as authoritative, truthful, and/or emotively powerful’. In other words, how we see is intimately connected with what touches us emotionally and what we see as truthful, part of the key framings of digital technologies. It is thus no coincidence that such technologies are increasingly being mobilized in the human rights sector (Farfour, 2019), including the identification of mass graves (Muhammed, 2023), the management of infectious disease outbreaks (Peckham and Sinha, 2017), and the ICC using digital reconstruction with historical satellite imagery, geospatial information, and open-source video to represent a destroyed cultural heritage site in a 2016 prosecution (MacLean, 2023).

As MacLean notes with the latter example (p. 85), the digital reconstruction was seen to ‘speak for itself’, eliding the analytical decisions, methodological techniques, and political choices that were used to create the interactive digital platform, which he notes ‘fashioned the “facts” presented at trial, rather than transparently conveyed them’. The scientific credibility of these digital technologies drew on the language of truth and reliability in many of the same ways we see originally attributed to photographs in the naturalist conception. But since the reliability of photos has come into question, scientific technology provides the truth of omniscient vision we crave.

This section asks about the construction of scientific legitimacy for satellite imagery, within the wider framing of this digital technology turn in human rights, and the ways this narrative has been mobilized in various ways in recent conflicts. Specifically, how do satellite images become vested with scientific authority in ways that equate them with a real and legitimate representation of the conflict in ways that are apolitical? Rather than accepting the scientific authority as given, I view it as constructed, which means we can look for it in discourse, in this case in human rights discourse and specifically in how satellite footage has been framed and deployed. Following Van Wyck (2019: 34), I view satellite footage as ‘not only a source of knowledge, but . . . also a technique to acquire knowledge’.

To assess this, this section first explores the language of satellite footage (how it is framed when it is discussed in the context of stories about human rights) and then examines several cases where satellite footage was considered to provide determinative proof within a context of contested narratives. The wider argument here is that satellite imagery has become imbued with a sensibility of truth that draws on its framing as ‘scientific’ and ‘technological’. The end of the section examines the impact of this framing.

When examining the media reporting or human rights organization reports on use of satellite footage to identify human rights violations, one stumbles across a specific type of scientific jargon that lends the identification process a sense of scientific legitimacy and credibility: satellite imagery ‘reveals’ and ‘pinpoints’ (Human Rights Watch, 2017b), measurements are ‘calibrated’ and places are ‘geolocated’ (Muhammed, 2023), ‘levels of altered soil profile deformation’ are estimated. Metadata is verified and witness testimonies are confirmed. As I have noted elsewhere (Auchter, forthcoming), expertise in these contexts often relies heavily on quantification which constructs particular ‘categories and indicators that stand above politics’ (Lühe, 2023: 1869), of which metadata is a key example.

In 2017, announcing their partnership with Planet, a data analytics company providing satellite imagery to verify human rights violations, Human Rights Watch noted the scope of Planet’s vision: it can image the entire landmass of Earth in one day (Human Rights Watch, 2017a). The connection between the emphasis on data visualization (the language of technology) and confirmation and verification (the language of witnessing that was already being used by human rights organizations) emphasizes the growing importance of scientific legitimacy to underpin human rights work.

Even in other arenas, such as mapping war, scientific objectivity is emphasized. In reporting on the use of satellite footage to monitor the war in Ukraine, Sylvain Barbot (2024) notes: ‘Sensors on satellites record electromagnetic waves radiated or reflected from Earth’s surface with wavelengths ranging from hundreds of nanometers to tens of centimeters, enabling semi-continuous monitoring on a global scale, unimpeded by political boundaries and natural obstacles.’ The emphasis here is on the scientific omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of this form of technology. As Parks (2001: 593) notes, ‘because of its remoteness and abstraction, the satellite image functions as an over-view of the war, and it draws upon the discursive authority of meteorology, photography, cartography and state intelligence to produce its reality and truth effect.’

While much of the research addressing the digital turn in the work of human rights organizations mentions concerns of authentication and verification (Poblet and Kolieb, 2018), the way this work is used alongside images is largely framed as self-legitimating. In other words, science is legitimate because it is scientific: satellite footage is reliable because by definition it is a real depiction that is (seen to be) without human, and thus political, intervention. By emphasizing how satellite footage can act as a mechanism of verification through the use of jargon and scientific rhetoric, it becomes in and of itself a tool of verification, not in need of verification. It is through the discursive construction of a legitimacy that need not be verified but which rather provides that verification for less reliable forms of evidence, such as photographs or witness testimony, that satellite footage comes to be the sine qua non of visual representation of conflict and atrocity.

As a result of the framing of satellite images as scientific truth, more and more human rights organizations are relying on such tools to do their work, framing the satellite image as a ‘powerful advocacy tool’ (Fair and Parks, 2001: 45). However, they are increasingly not seen as only useful, but as necessary to access the truth. Parks (2001: 585) suggests that the delay in US intelligence release of satellite footage related to Srebrenica should be considered an atrocity in itself. Another brief example is illustrative, borrowed from Fair and Parks’ (2001) work on the visual representation of Rwandan refugees. Amidst a refugee crisis in 1996, the organization Refugees International began calling on US President Clinton to release satellite photos: ‘to give top priority to providing the best photos from satellite and other sources to enable the best emergency response from UN and other relief agencies and to focus the international community on the need for urgent action’ (as cited in Fair and Parks, 2001: 43). The organization’s president, Lionel Rosenblatt, emphasized that ‘only satellite images could help relief workers locate hundreds of thousands of lost refugees in desperate need of assistance’ (p. 44), but also suggested that, in addition to functioning as ‘useful mapping tools for refugee monitoring and tracking’, they were also necessary as ‘spectacular news images’ which were needed to make people believe that the humanitarian catastrophe was really happening. He suggested that people would only believe that if they saw the satellite footage on television, thus framing his call to Clinton to release the images. In this vein, the satellite footage was necessary to properly understand the crisis because it provided the viewer with an angle of view that is imbued with the reliability of the technology used to access it.

As noted above in the discussion of drones and the view from above, the all-seeing nature of visual technologies of surveillance (and militarism) often emphasizes the equation of all-seeing with omniscient, supported by the use of the scientific jargon described above. To see all is to know all, which is part of the reinforcement of the scientific legitimacy that satellite technology brings to the arena of human rights policy and practice. Below I examine a few examples of the documentation of human rights violations through satellite footage to examine the language of documentation and confirmation, and the functioning of claims to truth that draw on this equation of all-seeing with all-knowing. While an exhaustive discussion would be impossible here, I have sought to select some representative examples that illustrate the how possible of the connection between satellite footage, scientific legitimacy, and truth in the context of human rights more broadly.

One of the first cases where satellite images were used to identify human rights violations was in the 2003 report by the US Committee on Human Rights North Korea, which used satellite footage to provide visual evidence of the prison camp system to document a widespread network of human rights violations in North Korea (Koettl, 2017: 42). As Koettl notes:

Amnesty International released findings that suggest that authorities are expanding its detention infrastructure, by setting up a new security zone adjacent to Camp 14. This determination was made by analyzing satellite imagery that showed the construction of fences and controlled access points, which limited the freedom of movement of people living within the newly created control zone . . . The use of satellite images in human rights documentation has become standard since HRNK’s 2003 report. (pp. 42–43)

Koettl, who worked for Amnesty International at the time of this publication, highlights how satellite images have become key tools in the human rights toolbox, though he does caution the human rights industry, noting that they primarily function to reduce information uncertainty by adding details, but do not ‘deliver complete truth – let alone provide a shortcut to justice – as they largely capture a limited scope of information’ (p. 36).

Yet it is precisely this language of truth that has come to frame the use of satellite footage. For example, in 2023, Al-Jazeera’s digital investigation unit, Sanad, noted that using satellite footage along with other resources such as architectural archives and interviews, they had ‘disproved’ the Israeli claim that there was a Hamas tunnel under the al Thani Hospital in Gaza (Al Jazeera Staff, 2023). This is particularly interesting because the Israeli military’s announcement that this tunnel had been discovered (as well as the larger accusation about hospitals as staging zones for Hamas militants) also drew on the language of verification, video imagery, and satellite footage to suggest that the evidence this was a Hamas tunnel was incontrovertible (Reuters, 2023). A Sanad investigation of the killing of World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza was also framed using similar language. Though the report notes that witness testimonies and images from the site were used alongside ‘open-source information’, the visual representation of the attack on the NGO workers is almost entirely satellite imagery (Al Jazeera Staff, 2024). This view from above is seen to provide the reader with the ability to definitively conclude that this information is reliable. Another report by Sanad focuses on using satellite imagery to represent visually the before and after of the destruction of hospitals in Gaza (AJLabs and Sanad, 2024), poignant images that are designed to provoke emotion in the reader related to the scale of the destruction, which we can better see because we are looking from the view of the satellite, emphasizing that emotion need not always be decoupled from these ‘technological’ images.

This example nicely highlights the importance of context. Both the IDF and Al Jazeera used satellite imagery to tell different stories about blame. The ‘truth’ didn’t matter much for those who used satellite imagery to reinforce their preexisting interpretations of the conflict. In other words, audience prioritizes matter quite a bit in constructing how scientific authority is received and circulated (Liebes, 2009), as does the changing nature of events. And, while my focus here is on the construction of this scientific authority and the way it enforces particular ways of seeing, I should note that there is a persistent question here about who gets the privilege or who holds the power to construct meaning, and in this case, the meaning of scientific truth for the broader audience, who then takes that information and enmeshes it in their own background, biases, and predispositions about culpability, reliability, and truth.

While satellite footage often functions in its own self-legitimation, more often than not it works as a verification mechanism for those other forms of evidence that are considered to be unreliable, such as photographs and witness testimony. One example is in the framing of the Human Rights Watch investigation into the photographs taken by Caesar, the code name of a former official forensic photographer for the Syrian military who had been tasked with taking pictures of the dead bodies of those killed by the Syrian regime in detention centers. The more than 50,000 images were smuggled out on a USB key by Caesar, and some were published as part of a report by Human Rights Watch in 2015. Prior to publishing If the Dead Could Speak, Human Rights Watch, along with several government agencies and non-governmental organizations, undertook exhaustive verification of the authenticity of the images. The epithet with which the summary of the report opens nicely highlights how the report is being framed: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s January 2015 interview with Foreign Affairs in which he notes that ‘you can bring photographs from anyone and say this is torture. There is no verification of any of this evidence, so it’s all allegations without evidence’ (as cited in Human Rights Watch, 2015). The report is thus framed to counter this in several ways: first, through the images themselves as forensic images; second, through the testimony of Caesar himself; and third, underpinning both of these, technological confirmation of the authenticity of both through the use of satellite footage, here meaning both satellite images and geolocation related to the images themselves. In other words, satellite footage does not function on its own as a vector of legitimacy and truth: it rather partners with other forms of more traditional evidence, such as photographs and witness testimonies.

These are but a few brief examples that illustrate how the narratives of scientific legitimacy work in the context of wartime, both in terms of how they are used by human rights organizations and by media sources. In examining many of the examples for this section, I found one curious thing. The human rights organizations who use satellite footage for verification purposes often centralize this early on in presenting their results, to bolster the technological legitimacy of their claims. Yet the process of verification they actually undertake often involves a majority of interviews, witness testimonies, and other more traditional (and purportedly more ‘subjective’) forms of information gathering. That is, organizations are positioning satellite images as more central to their verification work than they actually seem to be, which tells us something about the discursive and normative power they hold.

Indeed, part of the advantage of satellite footage for human rights organizations is its reliability in the face of critiques of witness testimony. As Van Wyck (2019: 36) describes, though, this is a bit of a double-edged sword:

it both silenced and raised the voices of the victim and the witness. Where victims and witnesses were no longer alive or willing to testify, satellite imagery could be used as additional corroborating evidence. It could also silence victims and witnesses as satellite imagery could be considered to be more ‘objective’ and thus neglecting human experiences of the perceived crime.

We should consider the move to drones and satellite footage by human rights organizations to be part and parcel of a wider global discursive move, often taken by governments themselves, to undermine the testimony of witnesses, whether through silencing them altogether or questioning their credibility – for the latter, satellite footage can come to save the day through corroboration. Thus, there is a politics to the claims to scientific credibility of satellite footage, not only in bolstering the claims of human rights organizations, but in reinforcing a particular notion of what expertise and truth look like or should look like or need to look like.

But what impact does this have on how we see? To return to the example of the Rwandan refugees, Fair and Parks (2001: 46) note that

the aerial image visually constructs refugees as an enigmatic nationless body, a moving target, a wandering collective rather than as a group of socially situated individuals with distinct histories and interests. Although specific uses of the aerial image were guided by the good intentions of relief agencies like Refugees International, they tended to privilege science over humanitarianism. Historically, such images have been used by military officials to generate strategic data about conditions on the ground rather than to prod citizens to action. The aerial image’s data tell little about the embodied circumstances of exile and displacement. Where the television images expose and even fetishize refugees’ pain, the aerial image completely submerges it in the barren expanse of the panoramic view.

They draw our attention to the tensions at play between the aims of science (and the search for scientific truth) and the representations that may be effective in the context of humanitarianism, but also to the fraught ways in which the view from above may rely on structures and principles drawn from military strategy. In other words, this scientific authority dimension impacts how we see war differently.

So, how do we understand war (differently) through satellite images? Here I follow Parks’s (2001) injunction to ask what it means to ‘“witness” wartime atrocities from the perspective of an orbiting satellite’ including its ‘aesthetics of remoteness and abstraction’ which ‘make its status as a document of truth very uncertain and unstable’ (p. 589). Despite this uncertainty and instability, such footage is positioned as objectively true and shapes the way we view and understand conflict. Beyond this, it is often framed as necessary, as we see in the context of the war in Ukraine, described by Seale (2023) as ‘a war that has to be seen from every angle to be believed.’ What is in our field of vision and what is obscured, as well as the perspective from which we see, colors our perception of what war is: as Parks (2001: 592) notes, ‘the remote sensing satellite sees for us.’ The remainder of this section draws out two key points about the use of satellite footage and the construction of this view from above.

First, when satellite footage is published in media outlets and human rights organization reports, it is almost always done so with attached labels. For example, one US satellite image from Srebrenica used to condemn the Bosnian Serbs for the massacre has added labels for ‘bodies’, ‘piles of earth’, ‘probable bodies’, and ‘excavator digging’ (as seen in Parks, 2001: 587). In other words, despite the claims that satellite images speak for themselves as a form of evidence, in reality, it is often hard to see what is depicted therein. We cannot necessarily see that there are bodies, and at least for the average viewer they must be labeled as such, and then when we squint we can potentially make out those shapes.

As Parks (2001: 592) notes about the satellite images coming out of Srebrenica:

Although the TV anchors described the satellite images as ‘evidence’ there was nothing evident about them. News producers went to great lengths to decode and interpret these satellite images of Bosnia for viewers. Narration and graphics were applied to the satellite images to make them comprehensible and to embed them within a broader economy of tele-visual signs. In each segment producers used zooms in and out, arrows and shadowing devices to pinpoint the location of suspected mass graves and to orient the viewer within a classified military perspective that is typically unavailable to citizens’ eyes. Since the satellite occupies a position that no human eye can occupy (at least not yet), its views appear to emanate from an unearthly position.

It is precisely this otherworldliness that is emphasized in the narration of satellite footage. The fact that it is a view we cannot fully understand with our own eyes becomes simply another feature of its visual superiority and thus connection to truth. In other words, satellite images often function to render their own content evident, even when visually speaking the meaning of that content may be subject to the same interpretation as other kinds of images. It is the scientific authority of these images, then, that becomes self-evident in ways that legitimize the authority of specific truth claims related to their content.

Second, the most common type of satellite image used in the context of representing war is the before-and-after image, which is framed in such a way as to illustrate what war changes. As one report notes about the before and after images:

before and after photographs show Ukrainian apartment blocks that used to teem with happy everyday life, now with every window blown out; previously magnificent theatres with craters in the roof; and pictures of whole cities which, when overlaid on a map, show the systematic razing of civilian buildings such as schools and health centres. (Seale, 2023)

That is, in place of ‘happy everyday life’ instead we see destroyed buildings. This seems to suggest that we could see that ‘happy everyday life’ from the before image (see, for example, the satellite images cited in Barbot 2024).

One discussion of a before-and-after from the war in Ukraine frames this type of image as ‘visceral’ in the caption: ‘satellite photography like these “before” and “after” images can provide a visceral sense of the destruction in the war in Ukraine” (Barbot, 2024), as if we physically recoil in horror from the emotional response to this image, just as with any image of war. Satellite images often are framed in a way that invokes emotion in the same way as photographs of human beings, an important dynamic of their narration in the context of the depiction of war: that is, they are framed as both scientifically objective truth, and emotionally powerful and impactful.

The emphasis on buildings is not unique to the Ukraine conflict. Were one to look at the media coverage of the ongoing war in Gaza, one would be forgiven in assuming that war’s impact falls exclusively on children and on buildings. The destroyed landscape comes to represent the loss associated with war, but a loss that is distanced from the politics of that same war: in the Gaza images, we are not shown or told what or who has caused that destruction, and in the Ukraine satellite before and after images we are not shown a perpetrator. War causes this destruction, war is the agent of the loss of ‘happy everyday life’. As Barbot notes, satellite footage offers ‘unimpeded access to high-resolution, unbiased information, which can help people grasp the true impact of war on the ground. The picture is clear: The real story of war is destruction.’

This connection of the ‘real’ with its own philosophical and scientific legitimation leads viewers to imagine not only that we are seeing everything that needs to be seen, but also that we understand it. In other words, seeing war from the perspective of a satellite is very much to draw on the scientific discourse of legitimacy and the real that suffuse the narrative of satellite footage, including how it is framed as compared to other forms of information about events.

Conclusions: Scientific legitimacy and the view from above

This article has examined the underpinnings and implications of the turn to satellite footage in the representation of war. It explored how satellite imagery’s rhetorical use as ‘truth’ in wartime can obscure other facts and ways of telling war stories. It suggested that satellite images, often referred to as the view from nowhere, are framed and presented as technical, scientific forms of knowledge with a verificatory purpose, contrasted sharply with the forms of situated knowledge such as first-hand accounts that they are there to either substantiate or disprove. They are thus crucial tools for human rights organizations who seek to establish credible evidence of human rights violations and confirm international accountability for atrocity. In war more broadly, they draw on scientific language to present the aerial view as an objective one, despite the way the language of the all-seeing invokes mythological powers that are then often associated with the militarism of states and state power.

As I noted, there is a wide-ranging literature that examines the many ways photographs and other ‘objective’ technologies and evidentiary claims can in fact be subjective or lend themselves to polysemic interpretation. Further, it is precisely the seeming objectivity of these other modes of argumentation and documentation that has often lent them so much power. In many cases, that power is not only profound but legitimate and important, such as photographs and film of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. At other times, images may be ‘true’ in the sense that they capture what happened, but are simultaneously rhetorical, such as pictures used for propaganda purposes or iconic national memory making. Truth is almost always not in the image, but in the construction of the image’s meaning. ¹

I have suggested that we would do well to ask how it is possible that the discourse of satellite footage has been equated with truth, despite the widespread caution, even of those who work in that sector, that ‘no image – and no satellite image – is value neutral and objective. Its meaning is socially constructed and thus can have constitutive effects of political significance’ (Van Wyck, 2019: 37). Though actors are often aware of the limits of these technologies, and the partiality of their view (and perspective), they benefit from the claims to objectivity and omniscience that accompany them, what Parks (2001: 589) calls ‘an attempt to regulate the meaning of the war from orbit’. This is particularly important in the context of disinformation and contested truth claims, as we see with satellite footage in Ukraine, which is framed using the language of truth to counter Russian disinformation, thus depicting this footage as ahistorical and apolitical, as granting access to the purported ‘real story’ of war. This dynamic of disinformation also raises important questions about the future of truth and the image due to the increasing involvement of AI and deep fakes in the way news about conflict is disseminated. People assume satellite images are truth, able to counteract the dynamics of disinformation, but disinformation itself is becoming more technologically savvy. While satellite images often invoke an authority precisely because we can’t trust our eyes, we may be increasingly heading towards a dynamic where we can’t trust the technological eye in the sky either, leading us closer to the ‘truthiness’ discussed throughout this article. I should note that one of my key points here is that regardless of which authority is substantiating truth claims, the truth of the image has since its inception been a matter of perspective and construction, hence my focus on ways of seeing as key to understanding these dynamics.

Satellite images can distance what is being depicted from the very politics that led to the destruction being shown. In other words, satellite imagery seems to tell the whole story objectively but in fact is telling one kind of story that is always subject to interpretation and contextualization. This raises important questions about the empowerment or disempowerment of particular forms of evidence, especially those not seen to be backed by these forms of scientific authority discussed: for example, these truth claims could potentially disempower witness testimony by framing it as biased with reference to scientific mechanisms of truth-telling in transitional justice contexts, furthering the inequalities of who speaks, who sees, and who is seen on the international level in the context of wartime violence. In other words, seeing war from the view of a satellite and the reinforcement of technological and scientific authority has both played a role in warfare and shaped our understanding of it. Specifically, it privileges the idea that one sees better from a distance, that one can better understand war from a distance, and that war is how we see it from above, rather than how those on the ground, its victims, may experience it.