Can George Clooney’s spies in the sky ever prevent war?

It’s a grand vision – preventing wars by telling the world what’s going on. Could George Clooney be onto something or is it naive to think war can be stopped this way? The actor’s Satellite Sentinel Project sees UN experts examine commercial satellite imagery and checks them against reports on the ground from aid agencies, journalists and other sources. They have already produced some pretty amazing images from Sudan including tanks and apparently destroyed villages which can be viewed here.

Clooney has declared it is “undeniable proof of the Khartoum regime’s war crimes in Abeyei” and he is calling on the UN Security Council to protect the hundreds of thousands of people at risk around the disputed town ahead of independence being declared in the south following the recent referendum. “We focused satellites on Abyei because everyone concerned believed that if the Sudan government would try to undermine the North-South peace, it would do so through Abyei,” he explained. “We’ve captured visual evidence of the Sudan Armed Forces ransacking and razing Abyei town. This was a plan to disrupt the South’s peaceful independence that everyone knew was coming”.

The project’s aim was to act as a red flag on wrong doing and help prevent conflict escalating, assuming the world would step in when it saw hard evidence. So far it seems to have only managed to document what is going on. That may have something to do with which conflict is being chronicled. Sudan seems to be one which the world has largely ignored – although that may have something to do with the relative lack of television coverage (when TV teams have reported from there it has usually been to report the aftermath of attacks or refugee crises). Obviously it relies on mass media exposure and politicians being pressured into action. Similar online warning websites such as Ushahidi are using similarly innovative techniques to gather data (in their case by crowdsourcing). As discussed at a recent Google Big Tent seminar the TV documentary maker Brian Lapping is also launching something similar with similarly grand ambitions called Pax. It might seem easy to write these initiatives off as naive, but these are early days. They are worth watching.