Project Launch: From Conflict and Chaos to Justice and Understanding

“When documentation of civilian harm doesn’t speak the same language, accountability becomes almost impossible. By supporting Airwars, we are helping to create shared definitions that make reporting, journalism, and legal accountability stronger and more effective. Through this project, the Postcode Lottery Foundation enables a system change that ensures civilians affected by war are not overlooked.”

— Andreas Eriksson, Secretary General, The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation

From Sudan, to Ukraine, to Gaza, civilians caught up in war risk their lives recording and sharing violent events unfolding around them. These accounts establish facts on the ground and form the backbone of accountability efforts.

In theory, access to more information about what’s happening should benefit communities in harm’s way. Instead, a fragmented and siloed approach to interpreting this evidence has emerged. Different organisations working on humanitarian, human rights and legal responses use their own definitions for all key conflict terms – from simple terms like ‘airstrike’ or ‘shelling’, to expansive terms such as ‘civilian infrastructure.’ These tend to be uncodified, not informed by local understanding and rarely shared with others.

This lack of shared understanding is not merely a definitional issue. It leads to duplication and wasted resources, stifles collaboration by restricting the ability to readily cross-compare findings, and leaves conflict-affected communities disempowered, with their vital observations under-utilised and not reflected in the wider accountability space.

With new funding from the Swedish Postcode Lottery, Airwars is piloting a radical new approach to improving the way these testimonies are documented.

At a particularly complex and destabilising time globally, this project will co-design a common dictionary with local experts and accountability actors to navigate and categorise conflict events.

This work builds upon a decade of work led by Every Casualty Counts setting standards on casualty recording, as well as countless other organisations looking to find meaningful ways to make sense of complex information in conflict. With ECC’s support, we will work with and learn from members of the Casualty Recorders Network, to ensure we understand and can capture all the ways that frontline actors document violence. This will also involve working in lock-step with the new Rights Cooperative group, an initiative guided by Alexa Koenig and Jackie Geis at UC Berkeley to better connect justice mechanisms with documentation actors. This project will also draw on our editorial role on the Explosive Weapons Monitor and the wider role we play in the International Network on Explosive Weapons (including the on-going task of capturing the reverberating effects of warfare), as well as our participation in groups such as the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition.

The project allows us to welcome back Airwars co-founder Basile Simon, a specialist in digital archiving and data management, to lead our mapping exercise and the development of the language prototype. The project will also be steered by Airwars’ data manager Clive Vella, who has led our internal codebook development work including releasing our first fully publishable codebook on GitHub. And over the next two years Airwars’ specialist Casualty Recording Unit will test, deploy and iterate this work as we continue to document and preserve casualty claims around the world.

Want to get involved? Contact info [at] airwars [dot] org.