The intimate geopolitics of evidence gathering in war crime investigation in Ukraine

  • The Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the increasingly judicialized nature of international relations and geopolitics. By viewing aspects of the invasion as illegal – in particular through the identification of war crimes and crimes against humanity – the international response draws attention to the political geographies of international criminal investigation. Human rights groups, academics, journalists, and open-source forensic investigations have joined forces to collect, evaluate and analyze the violent nature of war crimes. While similar shifts in evidence gathering have been observed in the case of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war and the Assad regime's violence against Syrian citizens, the use of evidence-gathering technologies and evidence-securing institutions in the case of Ukraine is distinctive. In this scholarly intervention we seek to illustrate the intimate geopolitics of evidence gathering by zooming in on two different elements that shape evidential procedures in Ukraine: i) the blurring of civilian/military boundaries; and ii) the challenges of access. By evaluating what is new and what is similar to previous war sites, we suggest that these two areas reflect a geopolitics of evidence gathering, highlighting its global-local intimacies. Both these areas are well positioned to foster new research on the (geo)legal nature of war crimes in political geography and beyond.

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Author:Sarah KlosterkampORCiDGND, Alex JeffreyORCiDGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-838272
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpgor.2024.100008
ISSN:2772-9990
Parent Title (English):Political Geography Open Research
Publisher:Elsevier
Place of publication:Amsterdam
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2024/04/16
Date of first Publication:2024/03/19
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2024/04/18
Volume:3
Article Number:100008
Page Number:5
First Page:1
Last Page:5
HeBIS-PPN:521023947
Institutes:Geowissenschaften / Geographie / Geographie
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 32 Politikwissenschaft / 320 Politikwissenschaft
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 34 Recht / 340 Recht
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Open-Access-Publikationsfonds:Geowissenschaften / Geographie
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International