Sensing Environmental Destruction: Techno-Sensory Politics of Remote Sensing in War Zones

Abstract (English)

As wars and conflicts increasingly damage environments and more-than-human lives, satellite technology promises to make ecological destruction visible. This paper examines how remote sensing assembles with local sensory knowledges to create contested understandings of environmental violence. Through ethnographic engagement with PAX, a Dutch peacebuilding organization, this research explores how remote sensing specialists and activists navigate between algorithmic perception and embodied environmental knowledge. Drawing on fieldwork with practitioners who mediate between satellite data and local communities, the study reveals how ecological violence becomes perceptible through the interplay of remote and proximate sensing modalities. The research interrogates how "ground-truthing" processes transform abstract digital data into meaningful environmental information through the engagement of local sensory epistemologies. When local communities "train the satellite gaze," they bring their embodied knowledge of changing soundscapes, smellscapes, and tactile engagements with damaged landscapes into dialogue with remote technological perception. This multimodal sensing practice challenges boundaries between expert and local knowledge, technology and sociality, while privileging the sensory experiences of affected communities. By examining the cyborg assemblages of human and machine sensing, this work contributes to expanding sensory anthropology's understanding of how technological perception interweaves with embodied knowing. The analysis demonstrates how remote sensing, when entangled with local sensory practices, can become a collaborative tool for documenting environmental transformation rather than an extractive surveillance technology. By foregrounding the sensory dimensions of environmental documentation, this work contributes to understanding how multimodal perception shapes ecological knowledge production and how sensory methodologies can bridge technological and embodied ways of knowing environmental violence. The paper ultimately argues that attending to the sensory entanglements between remote and local knowledge systems—including the cyborg forms of sensing that emerge when machines extend human perception—offers new possibilities for understanding and documenting ecological destruction while centering the experiences of those most affected by environmental transformations.