Law Commons^™

Making Visible The Invisible: Nighttime Lights Data And The Closing Of The Human Rights Information Gap, Xi Chen

Societies Without Borders

War, poverty, geographical remoteness and political isolation all contribute to unreliable or non-existent data for developing regions of the world. As a consequence, research within these areas has been hampered by an abject lack of data in underdeveloped regions. The satellite-based nighttime lights data introduced here may hold the potential to overcome this problem by providing a proxy measure for large numbers of variables dealing with second and third generation human rights issues. The images presented here represent some of the newest forms of data available to social science investigations and those interested in human rights studies, and are already …