William Goodhind is an investigator and researcher with Contested Ground, an open-access research project that conducts satellite imagery analysis on war and armed conflict. William previously worked with the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine as a Monitoring Officer, patrol leader and imagery analyst between 2015-17 and 2020-22. He was also an OSCE observer in Ukraine’s presidential elections in 2019. Since the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war in 2022, William has worked on war crimes investigation and military analysis. He is a deployable civilian expert with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Earlier in his career, William was a civil servant with the UK Ministry of Defence and Cabinet Office.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
Digital technologies are having a profound effect on how we, as members of the public and civil society, can observe, track, and analyse armed conflict. Russia’s war against Ukraine has seen the rapid democratisation of data – an exponential growth in the availability of images, videos, datasets and mapping, each detailing wartime developments at an intimate and often first-hand level. These technologies are not new, but there has nonetheless been a seismic shift in the ubiquity of data, in digital inter-connectivity, and the simple bandwidth capacity to share multimedia files between handheld devices. This is therefore an exciting time for data analytics – how we collate, interpret, and use this data, with implications for academic scholarship, legal practice, and journalism.
Through Contested Ground, my work centres on the analysis of open-source satellite imagery to document observations that hold military, political or humanitarian significance. Just as with other digital technologies, the remote sensing field is also facing questions of best practice, data integrity and novel approaches to its application. In academia, a lot of research has been done on methodological innovations, such as in object identification, change detection, and Artificial Intelligence-assisted processing. But I have seen less of an emphasis on the primary data potential of satellite imagery. I am encouraging scholars in international relations to consider how imagery as an empirical resource can support or challenge theories and conceptualisations of war: its origins, causes, junctures, characteristics, and the timing and consequences of state actions.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
A seminal moment for me was 9/11 and watching on TV as planes hit the World Trade Centre in New York. It was a horrifying, tragic and enraging spectacle. Up until that point, international affairs, and politics in general, was on the periphery of my interests. Afterwards, I started to follow international relations more closely. At the University of Sussex, I learned about securitisation, the humanitarian imperative, democratic peace theory, genocide studies, and the politics of rentier states. However, looking back at that time, my reflections on armed conflict thereafter were too narrowly focused. What with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism took centre stage in academic and public discourse for the best part of a decade. I was a product of that time, where asymmetric warfare and ‘small wars’ dominated thought and practice.
Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine in 2014 prompted a sea-change in my thinking. Hybrid and non-linear warfare were now the in-vogue terms, and the insurgency/terrorism duo were comparatively old news. We were back to covert operations, tank battles, artillery barrages, trench warfare, and territorial conquests, all bound up in Russia’s ‘(im)plausible deniability’ that it had nothing to do with these events. My appreciation of geopolitics and military strategy broadened, moving beyond the Afghanistan and Iraq epoch. But it was my deployment to Eastern Ukraine with the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission that really brought it all together.
Being a Monitoring Officer on the ground in Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts saw theory and practice coalesce. This was the most significant shift in my worldview. My first two years in Ukraine, spent almost entirely in separatist-held territories, gave me a........