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Article ID: CBB113464170

Seeing and Unmaking Civilians in Afghanistan: Visual Technologies and Contested Professional Visions (November 2017)

Science, Technology, and Human Values
Volume: 42
Issue: 6
Pages: 1031-1060
Publication date: November 2017
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0162243917703463

Publication Date: November 2017
Edition Details: Special Issue: Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security

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While the distinction between civilians and combatants is fundamental to international law, it is contested and complicated in practice. How do North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officers see civilians in Afghanistan? Focusing on 2009 air strike in Kunduz, this article argues that the professional vision of NATO officers relies not only on recent military technologies that allow for aerial surveillance, thermal imaging, and precise targeting but also on the assumptions, vocabularies, modes of attention, and hierarchies of knowledges that the officers bring to the interpretation of aerial surveillance images. Professional vision is socially situated and frequently contested with communities of practice. In the case of the Kunduz air strike, the aerial vantage point and the military visual technologies cannot fully determine what would be seen. Instead, the officers’ assumptions about Afghanistan, threats, and the gender of the civilian inform the vocabulary they use for coding people and places as civilian or noncivilian. Civilians are not simply “found,” they are produced through specific forms of professional vision.

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Article Lucy Suchman; Karolina Follis; Jutta Weber (November 2017) Tracking and Targeting: Sociotechnologies of (In)security: (Introduction). Science, Technology, and Human Values (pp. 983-1002). unapi

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