Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes the datafication of demining in the former Yugoslavia, showing how remote sensing reshapes post-conflict landscapes and how datafication privileges what becomes pixel-visible, algorithmically stable, and institutionally legible.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines the datafication of humanitarian demining in the former Yugoslavia—specifically Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo—by exploring how digital technologies, such as remote sensing, reshape post-conflict landscapes. Mine action in the region is beginning to orient toward digital tools such as satellite imagery, UAV-mounted sensors, machine-learning classification, and GIS-based hazard models that promise scalable and auditable assessments of contaminated terrain. Yet these systems are embedded in extractive and geopolitical relations. All-the-while residents of rural areas must continue to live with the risk of harm due to aging, hidden weapons such as landmines.

Thus, unexploded ordinance (UXO) contamination remains simultaneously a decades-long material residue of conflict and a dynamic ecological process shaped by vegetation change, soil moisture, erosion, land use, and climate variability. Datafied detection translates these shifting terrains into standardized risk categories that organize land release and donor priorities. Meanwhile, the sensors producing these digital landscapes—thermal arrays, hyperspectral cameras, and AI-ready imaging systems—depend on global extractive chains. The tools used to locate war’s residues are thus materially entangled with the extractive economies that sustain contemporary military systems. Despite the hype around digital technologies, deminers’ embodied expertise remains crucial in complex terrain. These frictions illustrate how datafication begins to coexist with other modes of sensing, highlighting how post-conflict landscapes are governed and remade. Drawing on preliminary results from fieldwork with deminers, policy actors, and document analysis of remote-sensing initiatives, the paper argues that datafication reconfigures environmental governance by privileging what (and who) can be rendered pixel-visible and institutionally legible.