How Contestations over New Geospatial Technologies are Shaping International Justice
New technologies now make it possible to render visible – literally – what has long been hidden in dominant institutional approaches to mass atrocity crimes: the social, political, and historical contexts in which these crimes occur. By focusing on specific incidents, international law and human rights advocacy de-contextualises and reframes mass violence according to legal logics. The proposed research aims to disrupt these framings by exploring various legal cases related to police violence in the United States, making visible what falls outside the rubric of international institutions, such as the United Nations Human Rights Treaties. It seeks to do so by developing a novel 3-Dimension computer-generated platform for showing what is otherwise not seen. Through an innovative transdisciplinary approach that brings insights from anthropology, history and law together with architectural practices of modelling and visualisation, the project collaborators explore ways of depicting layers of violence beyond what legal forms ‘see’ in order to advance a new optic of representation for memorialisation, pedagogy and advocacy.