Archiving War and Crisis: Digital Evidence, Ethics and Future Justice

The War Crimes Research Group is pleased to invite you to a panel discussion examining how civil society initiatives document conflict and crisis in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. In a world where footage from a smartphone can become the frontline record of a war, understanding how we capture and protect these fragile digital traces has never been more important. This panel brings together leading practitioners and scholars who are shaping the future of war documentation from building groundbreaking archives in active conflict zones to leveraging digital evidence in the pursuit of justice.
Taking the Ukraine War Archive as its starting point, the event will explore how evidence is collected, verified, preserved, and safeguarded for future use. Join us as we explore how everyday digital content can help uncover the truth, support justice efforts, and ensure that the stories of those affected by conflict are curated and preserved for the future. The panel will address questions of data authenticity, verification standards, chain of custody, and long term preservation. Panellists will explore the opportunities opened up by digital archival practices in capturing different, plural, accounts of harm, as well as the responsibilities and risks that accompany large scale digital archiving, including the potentials and pitfalls of new technologies. A central focus will be the collaborative possibilities between organisations working across different contexts, alongside the practical, and ethical challenges that such cooperation can entail.
Drawing on experience from multiple documentation efforts, the panel will reflect on whether existing models can be adapted to other conflicts and crises, including protest movements and climate related disasters, and what it takes to ensure that collected material meaningfully supports future pathways to justice.

Maksym Demydenko is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Ukraine War Archive and Founder of Infoscope. With over 20 years of experience spanning sound design, film post-production, digital product development, and human rights advocacy, Maksym has dedicated his career to leveraging technology for social impact. His current work focuses on preserving crucial documentation of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and developing innovative tools for human rights defenders worldwide.

Alex Jeffrey is Professor of Political and Legal Geography at the University of Cambridge. His work has explored access to justice in the wake of mass atrocities, first in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, more recently, in Myanmar. He is author of a number of books and articles in this field, most notably The Improvised State (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and The Edge of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has a particular interest in the gathering and admission of evidence in war crimes and genocide trials and is keen to develop future work in this area.

Emily Tripp is the Executive Director of the UK-based civilian harm watchdog organisation Airwars. Before joining Airwars, Emily had a career in humanitarian response – living and working primarily in the Middle East, managing closed source information in highly volatile contexts to inform humanitarian action. After taking over the leadership of Airwars in 2022, Emily has overseen the expansion of the organisation into new conflicts, including a substantive effort to document civilian casualties in Gaza, and has pushed forward the application of Airwars’ work in litigation, advocacy and media. Airwars sits between the fields of investigative journalism, human rights, policy, and humanitarian response – with a mission to ensure that human lives are acknowledged, accounted for and better protected in conflict.

Eoghan Darbyshire is an environmental scientist who has spent the last six years using and developing remote open source methods to robustly understand, track and report on harms at the Conflict and Environment Observatory. CEOBS uses this information to support policy and advocacy work to bring about restoration, accountability and justice.

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Host or Publisher School of Security Studies