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Forensic conflict studies: Making sense of war in the social media age

Hauter, J; (2021) Forensic conflict studies: Making sense of war in the social media age. Media, War and Conflict 10.1177/17506352211037325. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Online media is a blessing and a curse for academic research on war. On the one hand, the internet provides unprecedented access to information from conflict zones. On the other hand, the prevalence of disinformation can make it difficult to use this information in a transparent way. This article proposes digital forensic process tracing as a methodological innovation to tackle this challenge and make case study research on the causes of war fit for the social media age. It argues that two important features of process-tracing methodology – source criticism and Bayesian updating – are well developed in theory but are rarely applied to the study of armed conflict. Digital forensic process tracing applies these features to online media sources by drawing on the journalistic practice of open source intelligence (OSINT) analysis. This article uses the case of the war in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed methodology.

Type: Article
Title: Forensic conflict studies: Making sense of war in the social media age
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1177/17506352211037325
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506352211037325
Language: English
Additional information: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Keywords: disinformation, open source intelligence (OSINT), process tracing, Russia, social media, Ukraine
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10140901
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