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

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?