Monitoring Conflict to Reduce Violence: Evidence from a Satellite Intervention in Darfur
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Grant M. Gordon’s research investigates the impact of Amnesty International USA’s “Eyes on Darfur”, the first satellite intervention that aimed to reduce violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. It highlights some important points about unintended consequences of using technology in projects that monitor human right violations, election irregularitiess.
Gordon estimated the impact of Eyes on Darfur by using a dataset from the US State Department’s Humanitarian Information Unit on village population in Darfur, and the year that they experienced conflict in the period 2003-10 - as well as interviews with staff who worked at Amnesty during the programme.
What did he find? Areas monitored by Eyes on Darfur were associated with between a 15 and 20 percentage point increase in violence, compared with unmonitored areas. This wasn’t just during the period of that Amnesty monitoring the areas - violence continued there in subsequent years. (As Gordon points out, this could be because Amnesty didn’t inform the Government of Sudan that monitoring had stopped - but in any case, it doesn’t diminish the overall impact of the trend).
Monitoring also didn't seem to simply displace violence elsewhere - but neither did it seem to protect the area where it was implemented: there was no increase or decrease in violence in villages that neighboured the villages monitored by Eyes on Darfur.
Gordon suggests some reasons why this might be the case (including that Eyes on Darfur may have offered the Government of Sudan a low-cost way of assessing whether the Janjaweed had performed the tasks they had been assigned), but suggests that it was most likely that the Government was attempting to retaliate against Amnesty, dissuade it from monitoring areas and deter other human rights organizations from engaging in the same behaviour. (The Government of Sudan had prohibited most organizations from operating in Darfur, targeted their workers or made it very costly for them to operate - but could not otherwise halt the satellite monitoring.)
Retaliating against Amnesty could only be done by targeting the communities they aimed to protect.
So, what does this mean for human rights organisations? It's important to note that Amnesty started by monitoring a small number of villages because they were concerned about this possibility, and that they decided not to expand the program after getting anecdotal evidence that it had increased violence. More generally, Gordon suggests that the results show that satellite monitoring did have an impact, and that they:
speak to the underlying potential for limited external interventions conducted by human rights organizations to change the strategic calculus of actors involved in genocide, even if they cause violence.
He then suggests “two scope conditions under which advocacy-driven monitoring may fail”: - "Human rights interventions may be more successful in the early days of conflict when actors are still invested in their reputations and believe negotiated settlements are still in sight." [During the period when Eyes on Darfur was in place, the Sudanese Government was already set on its path]. - Monitoring might be less likely to reduce violence in contexts where “actors have strong beliefs and are unlikely to care about international audience costs that fall short of inciting a military intervention.”