CKS Director Participates in DIIS Tech Panel in Copenhagen

The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) in Copenhagen hosted a public seminar on 17 September 2024 on "Conflict, Crisis, and Connectivity: The Role of Digital Devices from Ukraine to the Sahel." The event was a launch of the July 2024 special issue of the journal International Affairs, entitled "The crisis in the palm of our hand: smartphones in contexts of conflict and care.”

The event was well attended at DIIS and online. It featured presentations from scholars and practitioners on how smartphones and social media are transforming armed conflict, humanitarian response, and citizen engagement, with case studies from Iraq, Mali, Somalia, Ukraine, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other civil society cases.

CKS director Mike Innes presented observations from his research and from his service in Iraq with the UN Investigative Team for the Accountability of Daesh (UNITAD).

• Documentation projects, despite claiming to be comprehensive, present an inherently incomplete picture of events. This is more than just a philosophical point, as the decision to document some items inevitably implies the exclusion of others.

• UNITAD’s implementation logic was fundamentally prosecutorial. This was a practical necessity, but it constrained the scope of investigations to evidence that supported specific lines of criminal inquiry. The result is an incomplete evidentiary record.

• As a matter of context, conflict zones where fact finding missions like UNITAD operate are competitive research environments where academic researchers, criminal investigators, journalists, and others operate to different goals, standards, and ethics.

• In historical terms, since the mid-20th century there has been an increased forensification of research and evidence collection standards in relation to such competitive research environments, as has been well noted in academic literature.

• Practical examples include the incorporation of forensic standards in military document and media exploitation (DOMEX) doctrine, Eurojust’s reframing of battlefield intelligence in evidentiary terms, and the emergence of NGOS like Forensic Architecture.

• Similarly, hyper-specialisation in open-source intelligence has moved some of its practices into the realm of digital forensics, a point highlighted by the publication of manuals like the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations.  

• The prevalence of international human rights and international humanitarian law violations suggests it might be necessary for non-judicial actors (like academics or NGOs) to include forensic standards of information collection and preservation in their approaches to wartime or post-war data collection.

The day concluded with Acting Tech Ambassador Ditte Bjerregaard, of the Office of Denmark’s Tech Ambassador, discussing Denmark's technology diplomacy and policy, followed by a lively Q&A session with attendees and a closing wine reception.

The event was livestreamed, and a full recording can be viewed on the DISS YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/live/meS9q2-93wQ.