In January 2026, 25 people gathered in Dhaka to focus on strengthening the Bangladesh Protest Archive (BPA) and thinking more rigorously about how its material could turn into visual investigations capable of carrying legal and public accountability. The BPA is a collective, community-led effort dedicated to preserving documentation of human rights violations committed during the July 2024 Uprising, ensuring that videos and digital evidence could support accountability processes. The archive currently includes over 5,000 videos of state violence.
The workshop included activists, journalists, and students who had filmed protests, preserved footage, supported injured protesters, or contributed materials to the archive. Some had documented the July 2024 Uprising and its aftermath, when hundreds of thousands protested against Sheikh Hasina, and thousands were reportedly killed, resulting in a reckoning on memory, struggle, and the path forward.
The workshop was not about introducing documentation, but rather how to activate it and how open-source intelligence (OSINT) and verification techniques, such as video-based strategies for content analysis, AI detection, and geospatial analysis, can be used to build rigorous investigations of the events.
Organized by WITNESS and Activate Rights, a group supporting justice and accountability efforts in Bangladesh, and co-facilitated by Airwars, an organization that investigates and documents civilian harm from military actions, the training focused on strengthening verification practices, clarifying archive workflows, understanding best-practice approaches, and aligning community documentation with the realities of legal and accountability processes in Bangladesh.
Throughout the workshop, we sought to answer these central questions:
- How can we move from archiving footage to building visual investigations based on community-collected evidence?
- In a complex political and legal environment, how can this evidence be credible to simultaneously contribute to ongoing justice proceedings, support and sustain BPA’s ongoing partnerships with newsrooms such as Netra News and The Dissent, and serve Bangladeshis as a testimony to the memory of the July Uprising?
From Archive to Investigation
Video-based investigations of human rights violations have often relied on images already circulating in public discourse. Linking these clues to specific places, people, landmarks, and events has become an established field. Courts, including at international levels, have increasingly recognized such audiovisual material as evidence, while visual investigative newsrooms offer credible counternarratives to hegemonic discourse using these verified audiovisual collections.
Bangladesh now recognizes digital records as evidence under the amended Evidence Act. But recognition on paper does not remove the burden of proving authenticity, integrity, and proper handling. For community archives like BPA, that means thinking carefully about how materials are collected, preserved, labeled, and analyzed.
Over the three-day workshop, the conversation kept returning to the method. Participants reflected on approaching archiving and investigation with more structure. Rather than collecting everything, they would only select clearly defined incidents of harm. When searching for videos online, they employed terminology used by those on the streets, rather than generic terms like “protest” or location names.
Crucial evidence of harm was often found in descriptive video titles or captions. For instance, one post on Facebook by Arefin Mohammad wrote, “Two sisters are marching with their brother’s body on their shoulders. Do they want to erase the memory of these martyrs from our minds?”
Not reacting immediately to what circulates online, but tracing origins and corroborating details. Not simply preserving memory, but preparing material so it can stand up to scrutiny.
Panorama created during workshops of archived video from Bangladesh Protest Archive, reconstructing an incident where security forces shot at protesters.
Shoeb Abdullah from Activate Rights, who leads BPA, developed a methodology with a clear directive to “only collect instances of violence, where harm has occurred.” From there, videos are verified through a community-based approach, where the community itself implicitly has a “right to reply,” ensuring that these models are built from the ground up rather than imposed from outside. BPA’s verification model is collective, grounded, and transparent.
Verify the Truth and the Power of the Collective
For participants in Dhaka, building visual investigations is critical. The BPA holds thousands of videos documenting state violence against protesters, including injuries and deaths, which the now-deposed authoritarian government vehemently denied. As Bora Erden of the New York Times Visual Investigations unit has argued, visual investigations often operate in this “space of contested narratives and abundant source material.” The practice of using this material can then “turn the juridical gaze back onto the state or corporation – [which is] what some describe as counter-forensics.”
This “humanity-wide repository of audiovisual evidence” found online was built in Bangladesh when protesters filled the streets holding cameras and smartphones. The task now is not only to preserve video and memory, but also to transform them into structured investigations: geolocating footage, verifying weapon use, establishing timelines, identifying patterns of harm, and the perpetrators’ chain of command. Increasingly, in an age of synthetic media and AI manipulation, OSINT methodologies must address both content and provenance.
There have been campaigns in Bangladesh that have focused on the use of lethal and so-called non-lethal weapons, including the type reportedly used to kill protestor Abu Sayed. Investigating such cases requires verifying not only the claim—what happened—but also the authenticity of the video itself. In some cases, like the Forensic Architecture investigation “Shoot me, I bare my chest,” they reconstructed the incident to expose how Abu Sayed was shot in close range using lead pellets, in both the chest and face.
The Airwars Approach: Best Practices to Monitoring and Investigating Civilian Harm
As co-facilitators, Airwars brought years of experience in developing an open-source, accessible methodology to build incidents of civilian harm from militaries across the world. Projects Manager Ryan Geitner and Conflict Assessor Lily Donoghue shared their methodology, as their archive has grown to be the largest publicly available archive of civilian harm, while Joel Schülin, Airwars’ geolocator, gave a deep dive into their geolocation processes.
Watching “The Killings They Tweeted,” Airwars investigator Rowena De Silva hosted a workshop on the collection, geolocation, and analysis of hundreds of IDF videos of Israeli airstrikes and how they were able to link and verify these with incidents of civilian harm in the Airwars archive. The investigation found that more than 400 civilians were killed as a result of these strikes.
Airwars, WITNESS, and Bangladesh Protest Archive will continue our collaboration, with ongoing work to strengthen BPA’s data design and harm modelling of their video collection, using Airwars’ open-source “codebook,” which has been created as a key to support and maintain their database as robust as possible.
The codebook has recently been made public on GitHub to highlight the importance of shared terms of categorized harms in audiovisual documentation, and will support greater understanding of equitable documentation, crucially for WITNESS, working to ensure that more community-filmed footage can be seen as credible evidence.
In publishing the codebook, Airwars recognises that “there are many different methodologies aiming for the same result. They hope to create a discussion among the research community on the ways in which data is collected, methods defined, and archived that enable the conditions for collaboration at the dataset design level. WITNESS and BPA see Airwars’ model as an innovative solution: one that we hope the Bangladesh Protest Archive codebook can contribute to and facilitate wider collaboration to monitor other instances of state violence, such as the Gen Z protests, which took place across the region in countries like Indonesia and Nepal.
This broader partnership between Airwars, SITU Search, and the Bangladesh Protest Archive is being formally announced, signaling a shared commitment to advancing rigorous, community-rooted visual investigations and opening new pathways for sustained institutional support and funding for this work.
Clive Vella, who is leading this work at Airwars, said that a “codebook” should be thought of as a “constellation of terms and their values which represent the mission of an organization and its practical processes. When these concepts are achieved at the documentation level, it can then supplement collaboration and exchange of knowledge between organizations working in the fields of human rights, because it leads to the development of a common language.”
Tightening Practice, Strengthening Trust
Following the workshops, several participants described feeling more confident taking on investigations. Others spoke about using geolocation more systematically in their work and being more deliberate in how they document incidents in their own communities . The shift was not about discovering something entirely new, it was about tightening practice.
Abdul Mokim, a journalist and participant of the workshop, wrote in their reflection, “Although I have been enthusiastic about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) for almost two years and started working professionally a few months ago, this informative training provided me with the opportunity to become familiar with several key elements and tools essential to being an OSINT investigator.”
That line captures the tone of the workshop well. The responsibility discussed in the room was practical. If we understand how verification works, we also see where gaps exist. We recognize what might be questioned later and how easily material can be dismissed if it is not carefully preserved.
There was also a strong emphasis on community. BPA is not an archive owned by a single organization. It is built from contributions by people who decide whether and how their footage is used. Strengthening it, therefore, means strengthening shared standards and trust. Participants spoke about contributing more actively and ensuring that the archive reflects the communities it comes from.
The workshop was also held at a critical moment. On 12 February 2026, Bangladesh held its first national election since the fall of the authoritarian government. For many in the room, documentation is part of how they understand the present political moment. Strengthening the archive now means being better prepared for what the next phase of the country’s political transition might bring in the streets, in institutions, or in courtrooms.
Verify & Resist did not create a new movement. It strengthened an existing one. It aligned people who are already documenting, archiving, and questioning, and helped ensure that the record they are building can carry weight in the years ahead.