The dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of the convergence of journalism and human rights advocacy in the work of non-governmental organisations documenting war crimes in the context of an international armed conflict. The relevance of the study is determined by the scale of documented Russia's war crimes against Ukraine, the digital transformation of documentation practices, institutional changes at the national and international levels, and the need of civil society organisations to conceptualise their own role. Documentation functions are now performed not only by state law-enforcement bodies and international investigative mechanisms, but also by NGOs that combine field documentation, verification, advocacy, interaction with justice mechanisms, journalistic work and strategic communication.
The aim of the study is to develop and verify a theoretical and analytical framework for the convergence of journalism and human rights advocacy in NGOs' documentation of war crimes and to substantiate an integrated model of this convergence. The object of the research is the convergence of journalism and human rights advocacy in the work of NGOs documenting war crimes. The subject is the dimensions, mechanisms and integrated model of this convergence. The methodology combines general scientific methods, the systems approach, actor-network theory, the sociology of professions and field theory, the theory of hybrid organisations, the concept of boundary objects, semi-structured in-depth interviews, case studies, document analysis and modelling.
The dissertation substantiates war crimes documentation as an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of journalism studies, human rights work and the memorial-accountability domain. Five analytical dimensions of convergence are distinguished: normative, media-visual, epistemic-methodological, institutional and transformational. The communicative and technological dimension of convergence is examined, especially the role of digital technologies and OSINT in cross-verification, geolocation, metadata analysis, attribution, archiving and preservation of the evidentiary trail. The ethical, security and verification challenges of convergent documentation are identified, together with institutional responses to them.
The scientific novelty lies in substantiating, for the first time, the convergence of journalism and human rights advocacy in the work of NGOs as a multidimensional social-communication phenomenon in war crimes documentation. The author's integrated model of convergence is developed; it includes actor, procedural, instrumental, regime and dimensional components and explains the movement of material through the regimes of public witnessing, analytical research, advocacy pressure and criminal proceedings. A typology of NGOs' functional roles in the documentation chain is proposed: documenter, communicator, advocacy actor, justice intermediary, methodological innovator, archivist and keeper of memory, and ecosystem coordinator. The practical value of the results lies in the possibility of using the model by NGOs, journalists, media organisations, law-enforcement and judicial institutions, as well as in teaching courses on human rights journalism, war journalism, war crimes documentation, digital investigations and OSINT.
