Decolonizing visuality in security studies: reflections on the death of Osama bin Laden

Abstract

This article examines connections between visuality and security, utilizing United States (US) representations of the death of Osama bin Laden to call for decolonizing visuality in security studies. While there has been increasing research in visuality and International Relations, there is less emphasis on a postcolonial visuality approach to security studies. Concerns raised by postcolonial scholars regarding power relations, being looked at (and categorized) and issues of race and gender can inform theorizing and understanding of visuality in security studies. This article analyzes pictorial, textual, and architectural representations of the death of bin Laden in order to note what was made invisible and thus forgotten in the construction of official US accounts of the killing. It argues that adopting a decolonial approach not only identifies these invisibilities in the dominant US narrative, but also directs attention to how a shift in standpoint leads to other issues, identities, and meanings about the event (and about ‘security’) being foregrounded.

Keywords:

• security
• visuality
• Osama bin Laden
• postcolonialism
• representations

Acknowledgments

Parts of this article were presented at the International Studies Association Annual Convention, San Diego, USA (2012) and Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought Workshop, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA (2012). I am grateful to my discussants (Lene Hansen in San Diego; Kent Morris and Madhavi Murty at Blacksburg) and participants, especially Robert Ralston, in helping me develop the ideas expressed in this article. The editor and reviewers of this journal also contributed greatly to making this article as it is now. My thanks to them.

Notes

1. Carby’s work is exemplary of feminist Black/African/Africana studies literature which emphasizes the visualizing relationship between the observer and the observed in terms of women’s (or minority) bodies. Her essay was originally published in 1982. Blanchard (2003), Guégan (2011), Hunt and Rygiel (2006), Spivak (1994, 2004), Tickner (2002), and Trinh (1989) are other feminist scholars who have written about visualization and the production of (raced and gendered) narratives.

2. See Stump and Dixit (2013), especially Chapter 5 ‘Postcolonial and Feminist Approaches to Terrorism.’

3. In IR, Riley and Inayatullah (2006) and Riley et al. (2008) examine imperialism and terror(ism) as do Barkawi and Laffey (2006). Boehmer and Morton’s (2010) collection of essays include postcolonial approaches to terror. Other discussions of postcolonialism and security/terrorism are found in Barkawi and Stanski (2012) and Sylvester and Parashar (2009). More generally on postcolonialism and IR, Chakrabarty (2000), Spivak (1994), Chowdhry (2007), Chowdhry and Nair (2002), Darby (2006, 2009), Darby and Paolini (1994), Davies, Nandy, and Sardar (1993), Doty (1996), Fanon (2004), Gruffyd Jones (2006), Inayatullah and Blaney (2004), Krishna (2001), Mohanty (1988), Said (1995), Sharpe (1994), and Shilliam (2008) discuss postcolonial critical interventions; Chowdhry and Ling (2010) outline how race can be used as a category of analysis; and Gupta (2006) traces connections and disconnections between ‘women’s studies’ (in the US) and the ‘war on terror’.

4. I have my own experiences with the death of Osama bin Laden: I was living in Washington DC in May 2011 and went to observe the crowds who gathered outside the White House. It was Sunday evening, raining and late (around 11pm) but the area was filled with young people shouting and cheering. I did not stay long – just enough to realize I felt out of place. However, to a casual observer or to someone taking a photograph at that moment, I would be hailed as part of the celebratory crowd. My experience parallels how some places and peoples (and ‘critical’ theorizing) remain invisible and silent in IR and only enter the picture (or IR) through their representation by others.

5. Parts of the Tweet exchange between Athar and others can be found at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/sohaib-athar-tweeted-the-attack-on-osama-bin-laden–without-knowing-it/2011/05/02/AF4c9xXF_blog.html (Accessed 22 July 2014).

6. The full document is available online at: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/binladenfiles/2013/07/201378143927822246.html. Summaries of it can be found at: Al Jazeera (2013). The document was the outcome of the Pakistani government’s Abbottabad Commission. The Commission’s task included investigating ‘how the US was able to execute a hostile military mission, which lasted around three hours, deep inside Pakistan’ and the intelligence failures of Pakistan’s government and military.

7. As a reviewer correctly claimed, the women are still part of various other narratives (official Pakistani, gender politics, family, etc.) and are thus ‘re-visualized’ within such narratives. However, my argument is that they were present and able to speak and express their views in the Pakistani accounts, while they were silenced in US narratives.

8. His followers went up to 62,000 in the days following bin Laden’s death. On 23 March 2012, Athar had 73,467 followers and had recently returned to Pakistan from a trip to the SXSW festival in the US. On 31 March 2014, Athar had 58,900 followers.

9. A series of headlines from CNN, The Daily Dot and Techland on SXSW all use the phrase ‘citizen journalist’ to describe Athar: http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/10/tech/social-media/twitter-osama-death/index.html http://www.dailydot.com/society/sohaib-athar-osama-bin-laden-interview-sxsw/ http://techland.time.com/2012/03/11/sxsw-the-man-who-live-tweeted-the-bin-laden-raid/

10. Weldes et al. outline how insecurities are social constructions and write, ‘…discourses [of security and insecurity] are themselves not perfectly coherent but always entail internal contradictions and lacunae’ (Weldes et al. 1999, 16).

11. Mustich (2011) also analyzes the photograph and asks, ‘What is Obama Watching Here?’

12. Grayson (2012) has a detailed list of research concerns and ethical issues regarding ‘drones’.

13. Graham’s work on ‘new military urbanism’ is useful to understand these connections between technological developments (e.g. drones for killing as well as satellite technology and surveillance drones) and the spaces wherein such surveillance and killing occurs. Graham writes how ‘cities’ communal and private spaces as well as their infrastructure – along with their civilian populations – [are considered] a source of targets and threats’ (2011, xii). It is this mode of thinking (and visualizing) that maintained Pakistani spaces under surveillance but, as I argue here, also led to a not-seeing of a big city as somewhere where bin Laden could be living. I am grateful to a reviewer of this journal for introducing me to Graham’s work.

14. Architectural details about the compound can be found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13332623

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priya Dixit

Priya Dixit’s research is on critical theories in International Relations, especially related to security and identity. She is a co-author (with Jacob Stump) of Critical Terrorism Studies: An Introduction to Research (Routledge, 2013). Currently, she is researching the role played by Gurkhas in global security, taking a historical and comparative approach. She is also working on how the ‘war on terror’ (and terrorism in general) is visualized and communicated by different social actors.