Space-Based Earth Observation Imagery & Wartime Atrocities in the International Legal Imagination

This article examines the encounter between the legal gaze and Space-Based Earth Observation (SBEO) as a technoscientific medium that, in its content, informs the procedural work of international lawyers and, in its form, opens new possibilities for seeing and interpreting phenomena under international law. As the world’s attention turns to conflicts in Sudan, Ukraine, and Israel-Palestine, the data derived from SBEO techniques and the subsequent ‘sense-making’ of technicians and jurists have become critical commodities in global sensory economies, delimiting what is visible and thereby legally actionable under international humanitarian and criminal law. Through its rhetorical capacity and sensory techniques, especially recent innovations in hyperspectral and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging, SBEO produces new ways of quantifying and visualising harm across temporal and spatial scales in these armed conflict zones, particularly for environmental and infrastructural damage. Through case studies of emerging legal proposals for the international criminalisation of ‘ecocide’, ‘domicide’, and ‘urbicide’, the article considers SBEO’s contribution to the reimagination and qualification of atrocity crimes within the thresholds of international criminal law, as well as the relevance of academic scholarship and grassroots civilian science to these projects of international justice. In doing so, it contends that the technoscientific nature of SBEO and the increasingly legal character of work conducted by remote sensing researchers, civil society actors, and interdisciplinary scholars are bringing these domains into ever closer proximity, producing a diffuse and participatory landscape of legal imagination that reshapes formal and informal discourse within IHL and ICL alike.