2025 Theses Master's

Proximity to Violence: How Digital Evidence Shapes Knowledge and Brokers Power in the Human Rights Movement

Azulay, Nicholas

The rapid proliferation and deployment of digital evidence as a method of human rights documentation, and the subsequent meaning-making this technologized evidence imparts, requires urgent critique. Visual evidence uploaded to social media and top-down photographs taken from satellites have the potential to shape legal advocacy, grassroots outreach, and the politicization or depoliticization of rights more broadly. However, this shifting information ecology and the subsequent mobilization of digital evidence by NGOs risks positioning human rights fact-finders as participants in the thanatopolitical and voyeuristic gamification of human rights investigations to the detriment of the needs of victims and survivors.

This thesis employs theoretical critique, qualitative interviews, and quantitative analysis to assess the vulnerability of the current human rights digital investigative regime to three gazes: that of the algorithm, the state, and what will be explained and examined as Western conceptions of data and professionalization. Findings show that the technologization of violence by NGOs and the media frequently fails to meaningfully counter the violence of powerful gazes and instead reproduce them within frameworks that risk severing human rights reporting from the needs of survivors.