Evidence everywhere, justice nowhere? Techno-humanitarianism under pressure

In an era when wars and humanitarian catastrophes arrive on our screens in real time—satellite images of razed neighbourhoods, geolocated videos of massacres, dashboards that translate devastation into data—visibility itself has become a promise. Techno-humanitarianism names this promise: the growing effort to fuse optical and geospatial technologies with human rights advocacy and legal accountability, powered by the belief that more documentation will yield more justice. But what happens when the capacity to see expands faster than the capacity to intervene?

This lecture maps the rise of techno-humanitarianism and argues that its ambitions are increasingly constrained by the legal forms and institutions it seeks to mobilise. At the intersection of law, science, and visuality, a new regime emerges—juriscopic—in which technologically mediated ways of seeing are translated into admissible facts, expert testimony, and courtroom narratives. Yet this translation is never neutral: legal thresholds (relevance, reliability, probative value), scientific presumptions of universality, and the authority of specialised expertise work together to amplify certain truths while occluding others—especially long-term structural violence and grassroots modes of knowing.

Drawing on multi-sited research (with co-authors Sara Kendall and Jennifer Burrell) spanning the International Criminal Court, families searching for disappeared loved ones in Mexico, and communities displaced by violence in northern Nigeria, the lecture traces how “evidence revolutions” can paradoxically narrow what counts as harm, who counts as an expert, and what justice can mean. The result is an urgent question for our moment: when accountability is built around ever-more precise optics, what becomes invisible—and what alternative forms of truth, care, and political possibility might still be reclaimed?

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Host or Publisher LSE Sociology