Introduction, Themes, and Case Studies in Evidence Control (DIIS Talking Points 1)
Copenhagen, 17 September 2024.
This research note introduces and is the first in a series on evidence controls and digital technologies. The series develops points raised at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and of research now part of a larger project on information and communications technology.
This first note in the research series addresses technology contexts, impacts, and governance in fact finding missions and politically contentious wartime and post-war cases. The work stands on the shoulders of numerous others, in the academy and in non-academic professional practice. Key thinkers among them are academic and applied anthropologists, historians, political scientists, and legal scholars. The full cohort shall remain nameless and uncited in this informal note, but they will be acknowledged publicly in due course in more formal, published iterations of the research. Their work is highly regarded, widely recognised, agenda-setting, and easily identified. For ease of reference much of it has been compiled and made available in the General Bibliography of the Conflict Records Unit at King’s College London, which helped set the stage for my work on evidence controls.
What these specialists have achieved sets a compelling stage for deeper thought on three sets of issues: digital evidence in wartime Ukraine, post-war Iraq, and in other cases; the emergence and influence of forensic expectations and protocols; and the challenge of establishing effective multidisciplinary evidence controls. To this corpus of knowledge, I add direct observation and insights from the field gathered during extended periods of applied and institutionalised research in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In this niche but increasingly prominent and policy-relevant area of research, such primary sources and practitioner observations provide an essential update and upgrade. I also offer a number of half-formed and - at this stage - potentially anodyne observations on evidence controls: armed conflict zones are competitive research environments, technology governance is inadequate, infrastructure is critical, and data processing remains a chronically neglected fundamental. Garbage in, to put matters crudely, is still garbage-out.
Some points on context. The work summarised in this series on evidence controls is informed and shaped by a long-standing interest in two topics. One is substantive and one is methodological. The substantive interest is the 20th century history and development of document exploitation (“DOCEX) and document and media exploitation (“DOMEX”) as an evolving intelligence subdiscipline. The methodological interest is applied historical method in rule of law projects, and the interactions between historical and legal practice. Recently, I joined these interests to a more ambitious research agenda and network of researchers dealing with information and communication technology. This series benefits directly from collaboration and discussion with colleagues involved in that effort. Their work on the smartphone as a “crisis in the palm of our hand”, published in a recent issue of the journal International Affairs, has been integral to the framing of my own work. Credit for many of the points below, and especially some that deal with Ukraine, Mali, and other cases, goes to them.
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Author Bio: Dr. Michael A. Innes is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, where he founded and directs the Conflict Records Unit. He maintains an active consultancy portfolio as managing director and lead consultant at Craighead Kellas SAAR.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Dr. Matthew Ford at the Swedish Defence University, Dr. Jethro Norman at the Danish Institute for International Studies, and Professor Myrjam de Brujn at Leiden University. Their publications and arguments on Ukraine, Mali, and digital technology impacts directly inform corresponding elements of this research note.
Author Declaration: This research note summarises unfunded research conducted independently by the author. A variety of tools including generative AI were used to track references, collate notes, summarise findings, and suggest an overall report structure. The author manually drafted this research note in its entirety.