Visual Biopolitics of Multiple Insecurities: Anthropological Inquiries in Eastern Europe

In 2021–22, independently of each other, two academic publications on visual biopolitics appeared. One was a book called How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics by Fatimah Tobing Rony; another was a thematic section published by the Journal of Illiberalism Studies. These two parallel projects opened different research perspectives at the intersection of biopolitical scholarship and visual analysis.

Fatimah Tobing Rony, already well-known for her earlier book The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996), defined visual biopolitics as “the system, shored up by iconographies of justification found in photography, cinema, television, national monuments, and the internet, that underscores pre-existing structural race and gender representations in language, politics, and the unconscious.” Therefore, visual biopolitics is a semiotic system that “produces empty signifiers and visual myths” (Rony 2022, 7) to “interpellate citizens” (ibid., 9). Visual biopolitics is part of the disciplining mechanism that “governs life and death, the body, subjectivity, and relations of periphery and center. In a sense, the visual—whether it is painting, photography, or film—mythologizes the work of biopolitics. Moreover, biopower operates through ways of seeing, valorizations of the visual, and hegemonic representational practices.” Rony thus seeks to “unravel the skein of visual vocabularies in media that reinforce biopolitics” (ibid., 12) and its violent potential (ibid., 16). In her interpretation, “visual biopolitics determines who can be visualized and who can’t, and how they are visualized, who has subjectivity and [of] what kind (and thus what can happen to them), and for what purposes” (ibid., 17).

Thus, for Rony, visual biopolitics is located at the intersection of ontological conditions (“pre-existing” social structures of domination and hierarchy) and epistemic constructs (representations that generate specific regimes and mythologies of visibility). This combination points to a type of oppressive agency that needs to be resisted, one which resonates particularly strongly in an explicitly post-colonial context of such countries as Indonesia: a book reviewer thus assumed that visual biopolitics is “weaponized against Indonesian women” (Roberts 2022).

Another relevant publication was a section on visual biopolitics in the Journal of Illiberalism Studies. Its three articles shared a common understanding of visual biopolitics as an epistemic category and a new research sphere that is particularly relevant for studying non-democratic regimes. In this interpretation visual biopolitics embraces a broad spectrum of issues–from street stickers as a means of visual communication (Cole 2021) to trans-gender festivals as a particular “state of exception” (Siva 2021). In all these cases the epistemology of visual biopolitics is premised on an assumption of imageries, signs, and symbols as co-producers of such key biopolitical concepts as biopower, sovereignty, governmentality, immunity, medicalized society, biosecurity, and some others.

In this interpretation, visual biopolitics is an epistemic category that is not reduced to studying corporeal oppression, and it embraces all practices of the politicization of human bodies, including multiple forms of resistance and visual activism (Bryan-Wilson, González, and Willsdon 2016, 5–23). Biopolitics may conceptualize political power as oppressive corporeal force, a type of material or physical possession that should be protected for the sake of “national survival”; yet at the same time, biopolitics may also unveil multiple facets of freedom and democracy as key components of liberal rule. In other words, the term “biopolitics” is said to reveal both exploitative and resistive qualities of power relations.

This research logic is consonant with the extant literature that challenges “the violences of medical visualities” and looks for “alternatives to biopower and its attendant visions” (Hannabach 2016, 366). In particular, the current research on Russian biopolitical actionism (Hanukai 2022) as an aesthetic practice of resistance seems to be helpful for promoting the idea of visual biopolitics as a broad research field, one that accommodates different agents, intentionalities, and narratives.

This Special Issue of Visual Anthropology is a follow-up to the earlier publication project aimed to unpack the idea of biopolitics in the Journal of Illiberalism Studies. Since then our team has expanded, yet illiberal contexts remained in the limelight of our attention, which distinguishes the authors of this Special Issue from scholars who address the biopolitics of images and visual representations predominantly from a neoliberal perspective (Väliaho 2014). The focus on illiberal regimes as producers of new insecurities became even more topical against the backdrop of political dynamics in Russia and Belarus—two countries that recently became major sources of insecurity for their Western neighbors.

Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, which restarted on 24 February 2022, has added a particularly important dimension to studies of the visual biopolitics of security. There are three major reasons for that. First, in the aftermath of absolutely shocking human experiences, discourses need time to emerge, develop and mature, while security events might temporarily remain under-conceptualized. This deficit of shared narratives may to a large extent be filled out with visual evidence as an integral part of the empirical base for future research. Studying wars beyond their visual representations might be simply unsustainable, especially when it comes to such concepts as human security, resilience, or responsibility to protect. Visuals not only complement but also substitute and compensate for a lack of immediate interpretations and explanations of mass-scale violence and military atrocities. This is particularly so since some of the visual genres (for example, video blogs) don’t have textual equivalents.

Secondly, visuals not only reflect the reality on the ground but also generate transformative changes in public opinion that might affect decision-making. In the past, canonical photos of the Vietnam war contributed to the growth of anti-war attitudes in the USA, and the photos of the dead Syrian boy (Teer-Tomaselli 2021) were a symbolically important factor that altered migrant-wary narratives in Europe. In this vein, the visualized images of recent Russian war crimes in Mariupol, Bucha, and many other Ukrainian cities were powerful shapers of public opinion in the West and produced discourses that made it impossible to marginalize the war in Ukraine.

Thirdly, visuals play a politically important role in collecting and systematizing testimonies for future legal qualifications of Russian military intervention against Ukraine. Multiple video-recorded interviews with Ukrainian victims of the Russian occupation, including filtration procedures, deportation, and displacement, constitute a meaningful database not only for scholars but also for lawyers and security practitioners in the years to come.

The first three articles in this Issue are specifically focused on the biopolitical repercussions of Russia’s military invasion. Evija Djatkoviča’s contribution looks at the full-fledged war that erupted in February 2022 from the vantage-point of her previous anthropological experiences in Ukraine. The value of this approach is in its retrospective outlook that confirmed an interrelationship between the author’s positionality and her conceptual frame: having positioned herself as an observer who was able to get in direct touch with people living on the new borderline between Ukraine-controlled and Russia-occupied territories, this author engaged with a biopolitical understating of the situation on the ground. In this respect biopolitics is, metaphorically speaking, an academic “lens” that gives a people-centric perspective on what otherwise could have been dubbed a geopolitical turbulence. In a meaningful contribution to the growing field of visual border studies (Moze and Spiegel 2022), Djatkoviča has re-signified geographic borderline into a biopolitical borderscape between two different lifestyles and, to put it in Giorgio Agamben’s terms, two “forms of life” (2013, 43–49). Segregation, filtration, physical violence, and forceful mobilization are inherent components of the “Russian world” as a biopolitical construct.

Andrey Makarychev and Sami Siva ground their joint article in a similar script: these two authors look back into the visual genealogy of the war in Ukraine through a series of photographic encounters with ordinary Ukrainians. As a professional photographer, Siva has built a visual archive that requires analytical framing through the language of biopolitics. The visual genealogy of the war portrays both “bare lives” and resilient subjects, which might constitute a meaningful contribution to the debate on human security in critical geopolitics and related academic spheres. The vision shared by these authors seems to be close to the genres of participatory and interpretative photography (Ferhani and Nyman 2023).

Michael Cole’s engagement with visual biopolitics is less explicit: his article discusses how Georgian street artists reacted to the war in Ukraine. However, many of the parallels between Ukraine and Georgia might be discussed in implicitly biopolitical categories, since both countries are objects of Russian biopower as manifested by “passportization” of the population in the occupied territories, propagation of social and religious conservatism by the Russian Orthodox Church, and projection of the “Russian world” agenda. These traumatic experiences of loss and subjugation explain the sense of solidarity shared by Georgian street artists with Ukrainian victims of the Russian intervention, which can be also in necropolitical categories of taking lives and creating such human insecurities as the massive displacement of the population.

Aliaksei Kazharski in his contribution reversed the established tradition of biopolitical victimization of immigrants and the ensuing humanitarian concerns. Instead, he looks at the migration crisis engineered by the Lukashenka regime at Belarus’ northwestern borders with Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland as a case of the weaponization of migration. Lukashenka’s combination of geo- and biopolitics has nothing to do with care and life enhancement and becomes an inherent part of the sovereign appropriation of human bodies for political purposes—a practice that is notoriously found in Belarusian domestic politics. Again, as it is in Djatkoviča’s analysis of Ukraine’s eastern borders, the borderline transforms into a frontline, and biopolitics morphs into necropolitics, a subject which has been already touched upon in the scholarship on immigration (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2019, 318).

Kazharski’s references to Lukashenka’s biopolitical paternalism might be equally applied to Putin’s rule. In both cases the biopolitical gist of the regime is manifested through the double ability of the supreme leaders to produce both “bare lives” (domestic opponents who are repressed and expelled abroad, as well as victims of aggression in Ukraine) and at the same time objects of performative care. Paradoxically the official media in Belarus, according to Kazharski’s findings, purposely humanized migrants, using a variety of visual means, while many Western governments were accused of the dehumanization of refugees and asylum-seekers (Bleiker et al. 2013).

When it comes to Russia, its political regime is characterized by Sergei Akopov in this special issue from the viewpoint of hegemonic masculinity. His storyline starts with gender qualifications of Russian mainstream politics and then extends to broader biopolitical categorizations of power hierarchies. Akopov does not simply apply cinematographic imageries as justifications for Foucault’s and Agamben’s logics, as some other researchers have done (Sattarova 2020). He introduces the concept of loneliness which might be deployed at the intersection of bio- and anatomopolitics of individual bodies. Loneliness can be interpreted as a characteristic of atomized and fragmented society with dispersed identity, and can manifest itself through selfishness, prioritization of singularity over common identity, or else through individualism. Biopolitically, loneliness is encouraged by the sovereign power that sees all forms of sociality and connectivity as a potential threat to the political monopoly of the power holders. And of course, the sovereign function of making lives dispensable is significantly facilitated under conditions of societal loneliness, as opposed to nations with a high level of horizontal coherence, solidarity, and mobility.

As in the case of Djatkoviča’s study, Akopov’s positionality, drastically reconsidered after the restart of the war, led him from a “male gaze” to a “war gaze,” with the ensuing necropolitical connotations. He implies that both the decision to invade Ukraine and the massive support of the war in Russian society can be explained through the lens of a culture of physical coercion and muscular force, which he has conceptualized as a Russian version of phallocentrism. Along these lines, Russia’s brutal force projection in Ukraine is a spillover of domestic violence and its cultural roots. Such a research vista is an important contribution to the conceptual fine-tuning of the idea of “biopolitical cinema” that, according to Nitzan Lebovic, is meant to question the ability of representative democracies to properly cope with emergencies and crises (Lebovic 2013). What Akopov proposes is a very different reading of “biopolitical cinema”—as a cultural platform for producing “states of exception” and generating domestic and international insecurities by illiberal regimes. It is at this juncture that a transformation of biopower into necropolitics again becomes a crucial point, as has already been duly noticed by some insightful scholars (Ezerova 2023).

Tatiana Romashko in her contribution undertakes an analysis of the visual symbols of Russian aggression. The vacuity of the Z-imagery matches the glaring inconsistency of the “Russian world” doctrine that implied some kind of “protection”—even if unsolicited—of those whom the Kremlin considers Russophone “compatriots living abroad.” Yet the full-scale military invasion resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties precisely among Ukrainian Russian speakers in the regions occupied and devastated by the Russian army. One of the most notorious examples has been Mariupol, a city where the Russian language was dominant and which was almost completely obliterated by the occupiers.

At the beginning of what he dubbed a “special military operation” Vladimir Putin declared two goals that Russia seeks to achieve. One is the so-called “de-Nazification” of Ukraine, a propagandistic cliché that the Russian foreign policy narrative contrived, to misrepresent the democratically elected Ukrainian authorities as not only illegitimate but also dangerous. In a more practical sense, “de-Nazification” could be synonymous with a regime-change in Kyiv. Another of Putin’s strategic purposes was the “demilitarization of Ukraine,” which implied a military defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces on the battlefield. Both tasks obviously remained unfulfilled: the former due to a lack of any fascists in the national Ukrainian government, and the latter because of fierce and unconditional resistance of the Ukrainian army, sustained by the resilience of the society and military support from Ukraine’s numerous Western partners.

Since none of the previously stated goals remained operational, the Kremlin has shifted its aggression toward explicit territorial expansion: in September 2022 four regions of Ukraine were peremptorily declared to become parts of Russia. This move has baffled even those Putin sympathizers who for years were erroneously and naively arguing that Russia is disinterested in a neo-imperial enlargement and won’t try to dismember Ukraine. Yet what is more consequential and noteworthy is that many people in Moscow claim that the war is not about Ukraine at all, since this country, in the imagery of Putin and his associates, simply does not exist at all (Rossiya gotovitsa k bol’shoi voine s NATO 2023). The real target for Russia is the Euro-Atlantic West, while Ukraine, according to this logic, is merely a bridgehead for a much broader and existential confrontation with the whole institutional structure of the liberal international society, as exemplified by NATO and the European Union.

The multiplicity of Russian justifications for the current war is obviously misleading and disorienting. Explanations for this variety of war narratives are many. Some policy commentators might say that Russian foreign and security policy is disorganized and lacks a strategic vision. Others would claim that Putin is intentionally playing with uncertainty, enjoying the reputation of an unpredictable strongman capable of frightening the whole world. Yet other scholars may argue that Russia’s war, with no clear rationale or logic behind it, is an exemplification of the post-modern nature of international relations and their security components. As a Russian author posited, the war in Ukraine is a destruction without a strategy based on an uncertain and liquid ideology that ultimately leads to “a fight for nothing,” a war for the sake of war itself that functions in the regime as a bare hatred and envy of the neighbor (Arkhangel’skiy 2023). The Z-imagery that substitutes national symbols with a Latin letter, one open to multiple interpretations, seems to reflect illustratively the ideological void of Putin’s regime.

Most of the contributors to this Issue would agree that many biopolitical concepts—such as bare life, Homo sacer, the camp, or the King—function as cultural metaphors, and it is in this capacity that they can be used for a better understanding of the functioning of regimes of biopower. The metaphorical connotations of biopolitical language are helpful in establishing relations of correspondence between them and biopolitical agendas and institutions, to which this Special Issue was intended to contribute.