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This study examines environmental aspects of the conflict between the Turkish state and the insurgent Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan or PKK). Since the early 1990s, several civil society groups have claimed that the Turkish army burned forests and destroyed other livelihood resources in the Kurdistan region of Turkey as it evacuated settlements. This study reports the results of a case study of destruction in Tunceli, eastern Turkey, undertaken in order to evaluate support for such claims. The geospatial techniques in case-specific approaches to the study of armed conflict had been used for this purpose. Through the analysis of satellite images, this study verified eyewitness reports and confirmed that substantial burnings did indeed take place in the study area between 1991 and 1994. It is argued that this destruction was not irrational or wan-ton, but that it was part of a strategy used by the Turkish army in the early 1990s that aimed at actively transforming the war environment

In areas of war and armed conflict it is difficult to get trustworthy and coherent information. Civil society and human rights groups often face problems of dealing with fragmented witness reports, disinformation of war propaganda, and difficult direct access to these areas. Turkish Kurdistan was used as a case study of armed conflict to evaluate the potential use of satellite images for verification of witness reports collected by human rights groups. The Turkish army was reported to be burning forests, fields and villages as a strategy in the conflict against guerrilla uprising. This paper concludes that satellite images are useful to validate witness reports of forest fires. Even though the use of this technology for human rights groups will depend on some feasibility factors such as prices, access and expertise, the images proved to be key for analysis of spatial aspects of conflict and valuable for reconstructing a more trustworthy picture

In Andean countries, widespread protests over violations of traditional rights have resulted in creative reform proposals to secure indigenous water rights and water system management

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Turkish Army was reported to use the burning of forests, fields and villages as a strategy in the conflict against the insurgent PKK. A case study of armed conflict in Tunceli, Eastern Turkey was done to evaluate this claim using satellite images for the verification of eye-witness reports collected by human rights groups. This paper establishes that substantial forest burnings took place between 1991 and 1994 in the study area. Turkey follows an international trend of resource destruction as an intentional goal of its counterinsurgency strategy

GIS projects for Third World governments were expected to lead to better land use policies. Instead computers have not been used, and GIS projects were often referred to as normal'>new white elephants . This book investigates problems of GIS implementation in three Costa Rican ministries.It reveals that embedding technology is part of complex institutional processes where actors and politics shape contexts.By linking an historical analysis of land use planning with case studies, the book demonstrates that GIS implementation was strategically used for new coordinating roles that were ascribed to the Costa Rican State. In this way GIS implementation problems had more to do with the slow process of state reform than with information production and mapmaking.The author explores the idea of 'techno-structuration' explaining that problems of GIS transfer are as much about human agents and organisations as they are about technological issues. GIS implementation projects must therefore take the historical, institutional and political aspects of its application field into account when designing information production and its use. Picturing Planning Perspectives will be of interest to scholars in the field of geography and planning as well as to policy makers and development experts involved in GIS projects, state reform and governance.