Johana Kotišová

The project seeks to understand the work of journalists and other media professionals investigating war crimes. While there have long been globally operating initiatives collecting evidence of war crimes and relying heavily on open-source investigations (OSINV), the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine led to further institutionalization (and transnationalization) of journalistic war crime investigations through on-the-ground documentation of war crime evidence and its digital archiving. This phenomenon––journalists stepping into legal or criminal investigations––takes diverse forms and brings about many complexities and potential points of friction: the combination of journalistic professionalism with legal and criminal discourses, a variety of epistemological practices and tools, ethical questions, and mental well-being challenges. This INDEX project thus seeks to understand how journalists working on war crimes investigations operate simultaneously in the court of public opinion and the courts of law, and what questions and challenges they face.