ABSTRACT
This chapter builds upon a series of earlier studies about the use of satellite and aerial imagery to represent world confl icts: the 1990s pogroms in Rwanda, the civil war in former Yugoslavia, and the ongoing US war against Iraq.1 In each study I explored how particular satellite images of confl ict zones became part of mass media culture and how they were used by different agencies to draw world attention to historic events. Through these analyses, I set out to show that high-resolution satellite images, initially designed for military intelligence purposes, could become useful to world citizens in their efforts to understand the complexities of world confl icts and political violence and, in some cases, to contest the claims of those in power and insist upon alternate interpretations. More to the point, I explored whether the satellite could be appropriated as a technology of witnessing, and how we might use the satellite image to hold states and corporations with enormous visual capital accountable for what they see and know and how they act (or do not act) based on that vision and knowledge.
