In a NYT op-ed today, Genocide Intervention Network* co-founders and genocide prevention stalwarts Mark Hanis and Andrew Sniderman make the case for a humanitarian use of surveillance-drone technology, presenting the technical platform as a worthy tool in the “arsenal of human rights advocates.” For Hanis and Sniderman, drone technology presents a preferable, more politically malleable, more accessible alternative to the complex, biased, and politically fraught process of human mass atrocities monitoring. Nowhere is this clearer than in present-day Syria, from whence the Arab League has withdrawn its hapless human rights monitors, and where the Assad regime’s atrocities against civilian populations continue to escalate:
We could record the repression in Syria with unprecedented precision and scope. The better the evidence, the clearer the crimes, the higher the likelihood that the world would become as outraged as it should be.
Hanis and Sniderman ground their analysis of drone technology’s effectiveness in their persistent emphasis on the importance of “bearing witness.” The operationalization of surveillance aircraft in Syria may violate international legal standards, Syrian sovereignty, and the normative basis of international civil society mobilization, but the moral responsibility of bearing witness–that is, facilitating the public display and condemnation of mass atrocities and human rights violations–transcends political barriers. For the Baby Boomers, the TV revolution and the emergence of mass media were the defining technological characteristics of witness-bearing; for millenials, with transformative communications technologies and gradually democratizing technical platforms, drone systems represent an opportunity for dynamic, widespread engagement in preventing and responding to mass atrocities.
Hanis and Sniderman’s “humanitarian drones” are not, by the authors’ own admission, a new concept. Pentagon planners–most of them associated with the DoD/Policy office on humanitarian policy and the rule of law–have toyed with various mass atrocities response policy approaches to surveillance and detection; in a February 2011 interview with Danger Room’s Spencer Ackerman, former Pentagon adviser Rosa Brooks went so far as to suggest that gathered intelligence may serve as a public deterrent for trigger-happy perpetrators. And, in an excellent 2010 chapter on social networks, new media technologies, and mass atrocities prevention, Cornell professor Sarah Kreps detailed the existing and potential role of unmanned aerial vehicles in monitoring, surveilling, and clarifying mass atrocities. In a 2008 analysis of airpower’s role in genocide prevention, Douglas Peifer proposed UAVs as one among a variety of technological systems for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations.
As Hanis and Sniderman observe, increased surveillance capacity will hardly resolve the political inertia characteristic of the intelligence/policy nexus. When it comes to human rights monitoring, international “surveillance” efforts are rarely centered on heightened transparency and accountability–as in the case of the failed Arab League observer mission, national and international institutions frequently deploy human rights missions as performative demonstrations of political will. As with any intelligence-gathering process, surveillance missions necessarily operate in a political, rather than neutral space. As I discussed in last week’s blog post on the intelligence community and mass atrocities prevention, improvements in commercial (that is, non-governmental) technology only supplement one component of the intelligence cycle–collection. Drone technology is more precise, but drone-operating advocates would still contend with the myriad of technically superior, more comprehensive collection resources at the global intelligence community’s disposal. And, as Michael Dobbs has demonstrated, institutional cultures in the analysis and policymaking communities provide a persistent barrier to the effective mobilization of mass atrocities intelligence, even when it’s accessible, clear, and unequivocal (as in the case of Srebrenica, in contrast to Hanis and Sniderman’s assertions).
Surveillance drones’ functional utility to the advocacy community relies on a basic question: “What’s the point of diminishing marginal returns on ‘bearing witness’?” Hanis and Sniderman present a compelling moral case for heightened mass atrocities documentation. However, with limited resources etcetera etcetera, the comparative advantage on technological platforms lies with foreign governments, rather than the NGO community. In a recent essay, Joshua Foust highlighted the relative decline of human intelligence (HUMINT) tradecraft and capacity as a decisive consequence of the Obama administration’s drone-heavy ISR operations. Human rights organizations confront a similar dilemma–often, relative to the official intelligence community, monitoring-and-reporting groups like Human Rights Watch, International Crisis Group, and Amnesty International operate more advanced, broader, and deeper human intelligence networks in conflict-affected states. Local partnerships, empowerment networks, and storytelling capabilities represent the life-blood of an effective human rights organization. It’s easy to see how, with an increased emphasis on drone technology, those capacities would wither, with unfortunate consequences for the crucial art of human rights advocacy.
*Full disclosure: STAND’s former parent organization, prior to GI-NET’s merger with the Save Darfur Coalition.
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