Introduction to the Symposium on Visual Investigations: Best Practice in Collaboration and Community-led Approaches

[Georgia Edwards leads Visual Investigations at WITNESS as a Training and Partnerships Manager.]

Over the past decade, the rise in community-filmed evidence, OSI (open-source information) and visual investigations has brought methodologies and models that have profoundly reshaped human rights investigations, yet the most visible investigative labs, methodological standards and verification infrastructures are still embedded in Global North newsrooms, universities and NGOs. How can open-source investigations be reworked in contexts where data access is uneven, state denial is routine and institutional protection is fragile?  This shift is codified in WITNESS’ methodology which moves away from extractive, remote models and practices to recognise communities as primary analysts. Our aim is not to export the standards, but make them interpreted and grounded in local conditions.

WITNESS is a global civil society organization focused on making truth undeniable. Across Africa, Asia Pacific, Middle East and North Africa and Latin America, we equip frontline defenders to document, verify, and preserve audiovisual evidence, and work to ensure the systems and infrastructure around that evidence enable it to survive, be trusted, and drive accountability.

We are delighted that Opinio Juris is hosting a symposium on our frontline work over the past year – 2025 – 2026. We curated these articles to reflect upon the emergence of new collaborations and strategies within visual investigations, particularly from the Global Majority. Our symposium consists of a series of blogs authored by WITNESS colleagues, community partners, and collaborators, highlighting the development of tools and techniques that have significantly enhanced community-led approaches to accountability. These approaches include using LLMs for audiovisual analysis, community-based visual  investigations, and owned digital archives documenting state violence, among others.

In recent years, the explosion of audiovisual content online has been compounded by the rapid rise of synthetic media and generative AI capable of fabricating increasingly convincing realities. While perpetrators have long weaponised and politicised documentation to obscure or discredit facts, these developments raise the burden of proof even further for community documenters. The “liar’s dividend” compounds the problem: harmful actors can dismiss authentic evidence as fake while flooding the information environment with manipulated images and fabricated narratives, eroding trust in what people see and hear.

At the same time, we are seeing states and perpetrators become increasingly adept at using this technology – some even replicating the aesthetics of visual investigations and mimicking their credibility to advance false narratives. As civic and digital spaces continue to shrink, the need for more collaborative and creative responses becomes increasingly urgent.

Furthermore, the fast-moving, widespread Gen-Z protests of 2024–2026 demonstrate the power of collective action: in Bangladesh, for example, mass protests led to the ousting of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. At the same time, slow-moving but persistent crises such as the environmental violations affecting generations of communities in Syokimau, Nairobi, Kenya leave residents fighting for decades against the impacts of mega-extractive projects. Both contexts demand sustained efforts and innovative collaborations to build investigations and documentation that can advance justice and accountability.

In this symposium, we spotlight the projects we’ve developed with our partners this year. These are collaborations that have built community-based, sustainable, and scalable solutions. We also highlight cross-border and international partnerships offering innovative models and labs that support shifting the growth of visual investigative units beyond the Global North.

What can we learn from these collaborations? We hope these blogs spark interest and inspiration, and reflect some of the ethical and practical lessons learned from working with technologists and university labs, to supporting the mainstreaming of community-led practices in visual investigations.

Photo attribution: and machines on Unsplash