# Remote Sensing for International Peace and Security: Its Role and Implications
## 2 Methodology
### Selection of Related-Articles and Keywords  
This study has approached the literature review extensively, exploring the application of remote sensing in international peace and security. Due consideration was given to the geographic distribution of the origin of articles, the discipline of the journal in which the article is published, online as well as offline, and the publishing type as open access or not, etc., using the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) scheme. With an understanding that the topic should equally relate to science as well as the humanities disciplines, we leveraged our search to all the related disciplines. Among many literature database search engines, we primarily used the most popular ones _viz._--ScienceDirect and Google Scholar, to explore scholarly articles from journals, conference proceedings, book chapters, etc. We searched articles with keywords such as \"remote sensing\" + \"peace and security\", bringing in 3240 results, and \"remote sensing\" + \"natural resources monitoring\" bringing in 854 results. Apart from that, we decided to use many online journals and research databases viz. ScienceOpen, Directory of Open Access Journals, Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), CIA World Factbook, Web of Science, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), ResearchGate, and Public Library of Science (PLoS) for exploring the scholarly articles. While choosing an article for the study, we pondered with great attention that the document is relevant to remote sensing applications for international peace and security in domains such as conflict resources monitoring, disease control and prevention, human rights, and track of genocide, etc., as illustrated in Figure 1. After reviewing articles, we noted salient points of each of the articles and finalized a subset of articles most relevant to this review paper. A large number of papers were collected from a database of published articles. Several case studies were referred from the regions witnessing international conflict and bringing peace and security in the context of social dimensions. The literature identified that several troubled regions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were studied through the use of satellite imagery. Two group discussions were conducted for three months among all authors of this paper. The first meeting resulted in deciding the types of keywords to be used while searching for relevant literature and the second discussion was focused on selecting the relevant examples. The keywords identified were \"role of remote sensing in international peace and security,\" \"international peace and security with remote sensing,\" \"geopolitics and remote sensing,\" \"international conflicts resolution with remote sensing,\" and \"remote sensing-based conflict resolution\" were also chosen as search terms to gather more articles related to this study. To know the trend, the search was carried out using the same keyword for different periods. For example, a keyword phrase of \"remote sensing for international peace and security\" produced a total of 47, 79, 126, 169, 227, and 252 search results for the period 1997-2000, 2001-2004, 2005-2008, 2009-2012, 2013-2016, and 2017-2020, respectively, while keeping the other search filters the same. Figure 3 shows the trend in searched papers. The rising numbers of published studies indicates the growing role of remote-sensing approaches toward international peace and security. We also split the search results obtained in each of the four categories of remote sensing applications in peace and security, as mentioned in Figure 1. The total number of articles found on Google Scholar were 17,900, 13,700, 11,377, and 2510 for the categories of remote sensing applications in epidemics control and prevention, human rights, conflict resources monitoring, and genocide, respectively. However, category-overlapping was encountered among the searched papers since papers were often connected to more than one category.