Introduction to the Symposium on Forensic and Counter-Forensic Approaches to International Law: A Cartography and Anatomy of Genocide

[Stefania Di Stefano is a postdoctoral researcher in online content moderation at Cnam, Paris. 

Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi is an assistant professor of public international law at Sciences Po Law School, Paris.

Barrie Sander is an assistant professor of international law at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs.

Dimitri Van Den Meerssche is senior lecturer in law at Queen Mary University of London.]

At a time when we are increasingly confronted with the question of whether international law is damaged beyond repair, this year’s ESIL Annual Conference was devoted to the project of Reconstructing International Law.

Questioning how international law must evolve to respond to contemporary challenges is a futile endeavor if it fails to confront the genocide in Gaza, the role of the discipline in perpetuating double standards, and the current and troubling pattern of suppression of academic freedom and of freedom of expression more generally, which particularly affects Palestinian voices and those critical of Israel’s policies. As recently underscored in the latest report by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, the genocide in Gaza “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest” and “[t]he world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal.” This renewal, and reconstruction perhaps, “is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld”.

In the context of international law and technology, putting the spotlight on these issues includes also a thorough engagement with forensic and counter-forensic methodologies. These methodologies, as the contributions to this symposium highlight, bear the potential of uncovering hidden violence, countering structural inequalities in access to knowledge and vision, and challenging dominant legal narratives. 

Inspired by the pioneering work of Forensic Architecture, the pre-conference workshop of the ESIL Interest Group on International Law and Technology at the 2025 ESIL Annual Conference examined how forensic investigations – through satellite imagery, open-source intelligence (OSINT), digital modeling or counter-mapping – are reshaping evidentiary practices and redefining accountability in international law. By putting Forensic Architecture’s Cartography of Genocide in conversation with the Anatomy of a Genocide report by Francesca Albanese, we explored how these investigations can complement and challenge each other in factually and legally reconstructing the patterns of genocidal violence in Gaza. We thereby highlighted the intersections of forensic methodologies and international law, revealing how digital evidence can both challenge and substantiate legal accounts, exposing inconsistencies and reinforcing accountability structures.

Forensic Architecture’s groundbreaking work, Cartography of a Genocide, demonstrates how new technologies expose violations of international law that might otherwise remain invisible. The concept of forensic architecture reconfigures traditional legal fact-finding by incorporating spatial analysis, architectural modeling, and digital reconstruction to counter state narratives. This approach provides a profound contribution to international accountability, enabling new forms and fora of legal advocacy. This is a particularly powerful practice in a context where, as argued in the Anatomy of a Genocide report, the invocation of international law functions as a form of ‘humanitarian camouflage’ which aims to conceal material structures of violence and the intent behind them.

The methodologies deployed by Forensic Architecture provide a mapping of the spatial, temporal and material scales of genocidal erasure that international legal concepts often fail to capture. While international legal analysis often remains confined to spectacular, event-centered frames – thereby obscuring and camouflaging slow and structural patterns of violence –counter-forensic methods can reconstitute settler-colonialism as an extended, sedimented, infrastructural formation rather than a short-term punctual event. Through their capacity to track cumulative, long-duration processes across spatial and material registers, counter-forensics enable an expanded and deeper understanding of harm and intent over time, enriching and redirecting legal advocacy (as exemplified by legal accounts focused on the slow genocide unfolding in Gaza).

Yet, as the incisive contributions to this symposium signal, it would be mistaken to portray the deployment of new digital and forensic technologies – from Earth observation and OSINT to remote sensing and computational photography – as a straightforward pathway to international justice, accountability or collective resistance. 

One strand of critique in this symposium questions the promise of forensic technologies to provide an unfiltered access to reality. As exemplified by the visual evidence conjured by the IDF to justify the bombing of Al Shifa hospital, forensic aesthetics can equally be leveraged as instruments of obfuscation or omission – as an instantiation of “forensic camouflage”. The synthetic, socio-technically mediated, often speculative qualities of forensic media might thereby serve precisely those seeking to evade legal attribution and accountability. This requires critical inquiry into the performative effects of law and visual media alike: how are legal or visual delineations drawn between what matters and what is excluding from mattering (quite literally)? Whose accounts are authorized and (in)visibilized? How can counter-forensics be mobilized to resist the skewed sensory economy of international law where capacities of authorized sight are unequally distributed, manipulated, policed, and, as we explicitly observed in the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, formally inhibited?

A related critique developed in several contributions is the risk that forensic techniques – in viewing scenes of destruction from above (through satellite imagery, for example) – do not merely observe but may actively curate a visual register that fuels dynamics of dehumanization. Viewed from an elevated technological vantage point, suffering and starving Palestinian people are seen as abstract pixelated entities or, as in the infra-red footage of what we now know as the flour massacre, as masses of swarming dark dots. Such scalar and spectral framings – where altitude and sensor choice pre-structure what can be seen and felt – operate as aesthetic technologies of distance. Rather than revealing and countering structures of violence and suffering, this visual register risks reproducing the troubling scales of control, classification and domination central to campaigns of colonial erasure. This critical observation, as argued in multiple contributions, underlines the importance of resisting claims to neutrality and the ‘view from nowhere’ as a contemporary manifestation of what Edward Said has long observed as a denial of the ‘permission to narrate’ to the Palestinian people. It calls, instead, for counter-forensic practices that restore proximity, context, and voice—foregrounding testimonies, ground-level sensory evidence, and situated knowledge—to resist the dehumanizing aesthetics of distance and to re-anchor accountability in lived experience.

As argued by Eyal Weizman at the workshop, any “hope for renewal” of international law requires confronting what is happening in Gaza. This entails recognizing a larger genocidal event and process in which denial is not epiphenomenal but constitutive: an integral modality shaping intent, participation, and the very conditions of possibility of genocidal violence. This concealment finds expression through the murder of journalists, the way the media report on the process, the criminalisation of protest, and the different forms of institutional silencing that we are witnessing around the world. This is, as Eyal Weizman made clear, one of the key differences between judging what has happened in the past and exposing the process as it is unfolding. The exposure of the genocidal process is also one that demands connecting material facts on the ground with ideological formulations and practices across longer historical trajectories.

Crucially, this process of exposure – documenting, naming and resisting denial in real time – is central to the aim and purposes of the Genocide Convention, whose objective is not just to punish the crime of genocide but, importantly, to prevent it from happening. An alignment of international law with these normative commitments requires that everyone, from States to businesses, to universities to international law scholars, reckon with how a genocidal process is rendered not only possible but even ordinary through law, markets, and media, and interrogate our material and epistemic entanglements with it. In this sense, the genocide exposes, beyond direct perpetration, the infrastructures, norms, and solidarities that organize our societies, revealing who we are and the polities we sustain.

In light of the imperative to document, name, and resist denial, and to confront the infrastructures and norms deployed to normalize atrocity, these contributions turn to the practice of forensic and counter-forensic investigation. In assembling this collection, our hope is that the contributions will offer readers generative insights for future engagement against genocidal and colonial violence.