Abstract
Through the ongoing work of leak sites, public inquiries, criminal investigations, journalists, whistleblowers, researchers and others, the public has gained access to a growing number of videos of live military operations in recent years. Capturing such things as friendly fire attacks, civilian deaths and extrajudicial or illegal killings, these videos have attracted public and academic attention due to their ‘revelatory’ qualities. Through an analysis of two particular instances, WikiLeaks’ Collateral Murder and footage of a targeted assassination by the Israeli Defence Force, we argue it is important to analyse exactly how such deaths are digitally re-presented if we are to make use of videos as data in the study of episodes of military violence and the evidential politics they give rise to.
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Notes
- 1.
In Asylums, Goffman’s (1991) discussion of what he terms the ‘workshop complex’ starts with the situation of professionals in technical occupations who perform their work out of sight of those on behalf of whom that work is conducted. War typically now takes place ‘away’ from civilians and their scrutiny, and they can remain largely ignorant of the way in which it is conducted. In their ‘technical’ role, military operatives are thus typically left to assess their own work. This changes when videos of that work are made public as that exposure leads to a reversal in opportunities for judgement, censure and blame, something which gives these artefacts their revelatory character—once revealed, others are in a position to assess the adequacy, propriety and legitimacy of what was done, not merely its consequences.
- 2.
These are, then, canonical examples of conditional or ‘if, then’ arguments. That is, if we accept the visual evidence ought to be seen in the way the analyst suggests, then we must accept a more general argument about the illegitimacy of the structures that it has been said to be a display of.
- 3.
Although WikiLeaks did release the unedited footage, it was the edited version that went ‘viral’ and became the focus of attention.
- 4.
The videos can be accessed at the following links: https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6U2ZQ0EhN4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
Video recordings of operations are collected by the US military as standard practice but as ‘evidence’ for internal investigations, rather than for external public consumption.
- 8.
See, for example, https://twitter.com/idfspokesperson/status/268795866784075776.
- 9.
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Mair, M., Elsey, C., Smith, P.V., Watson, P.G. (2016). The Violence You Were/n’t Meant to See: Representations of Death in an Age of Digital Reproduction. In: McGarry, R., Walklate, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43170-7_23
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