Witnessing Violence
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Published:January 2024
Chapter 1, “Witnessing Violence,” examines the nonhuman witnessing of the violence of increasingly autonomous warfare as it is mediated through technology, bodies, and environments. Its title references both the witnessing of violence and the violence that can be done by witnessing. The chapter proposes and elaborates the original concept of violent mediation, which names material processes of mediation that are constitutively harmful to human or nonhuman entities and environments. Engaging with critical security studies and international relations scholarship, the chapter examines: individual and collective experience of living under drones, military drone sensing and targeting systems, wide-area motion imagery (WAMI), the drone-mounted edge computing platform Agile Condor, and projects by Conflict Urbanism and the Aleppo Media Center to witness the destruction of the Syrian city.