Counting civilian casualties - the impact of perspectives on accountability: Christiane Wilke

Law and the Future of War

In this episode, Dr Lauren Sanders speaks with Professor Christiane Wilke about the problem with accountability following civilian casualty incidents, and the impact of cultural and racial frames in imagining what has occurred on the ground.
Professor Christiane Wilke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University, Canada. She researches how Western militaries and human rights organizations produce knowledge about and legal analyses of armed conflicts, looking at the recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
In particular, she works with visual and cultural assessments of civilian casualties from airstrikes and how their assessments are shaped by imperial imaginaries about race and space. Drawing on Third World Approaches to International Law and critical law & technology scholarship, she ask how international law understands, regulates, and privileges technologically enhanced warfare.
Additional resources:

• Christiane Wilke: Legal Tragedies: US Military Reporting of Civilian Casualties of Airstrikes, Forthcoming in: Alexandra Moore and James Dawes (editors), Technologies of Human Right Representation (SUNY Press, 2022)
• Christiane Wilke and Mohd Khalid Naseemi, ‘Counting Conflict: Quantifying Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan,’ Forthcoming in: Humanity Journal (Summer 2022).
• Christiane Wilke, ‘The Optics of War: Seeing Civilians, Enacting Distinctions, and Visual Crises in International Law’ in Sheryl Hamilton et al (eds), Sensing Law (Routledge, 2017).
• Learn more about Azmat Khan’s work at her website and read her Pulitzer Prize winning report on The Civilian Casualty Files in The New York Times.
• Learn more about Air Wars on their website.
• Learn more about Pax for Peace on their website.
• Learn more about CIVIC on their website.
• Learn more about the members of Wilke’s civilian casualty collective: Thomas Gregory, Helen Kinsella, Craig Jones and Nisha Shah.