Visualizing violence: aesthetics and ethics in international politics

Introduction

US President Donald Trump’s daily use of twitter and his attack on what he calls ‘fake news’ reminds us that media, either ‘old’ or ‘new’, are sites of power and conflict. Tweets, meme and videos seem to be the favored communication, entertainment, even disinformation tool not only for President Trump but many people worldwide.

It is well acknowledged that new technologies are changing the conditions of production, distribution, circulation, remediation, consumption and reception of communication. Advancements in internet technologies and new forms of equipment have extended access to the World Wide Web (although not in all parts of the world), and billions of images of different type, genre (and partly unclear) origin are available to a virtually global audience ‘24/7ʹ. In everyday life, Nicholas Mirzoeff writes, seeing has become the dominant mode of postmodern cultures with ‘the visual as a place where meanings are created and contested’ (Mirzoeff 1999, 6).

As a consequence of these trends, scholars from different disciplines have been interested in understanding the ambivalences and contingencies, and the normative and ethical questions that are related to communication in general as well as to images in particular. While images play a role in all realms of politics, their significance and impact are far more obvious if they depict violence. Governments and belligerent armed groups have tried to control images depicting or indicating violence at all times. Pictures of unrest, riots and violence travel easily and render it difficult to ignore ‘the pain of others’ (Sontag 2003). Perhaps, there is no other realm in politics where images can have such great legitimating or delegitimating effects than when it comes to violent actions. In a time of global digital media, social networks and a mass production of images by all types of actors, images themselves are considered a weapon of war.

One commonly ascribes images’ specific qualities that words lack such as immediacy and authenticity. They possess mimetic qualities and have a visual circulability, i.e. the ‘capacity to transgress linguistic boundaries – that visuals can be “read” by all’ (Hansen 2011, 57). However, social scientists have to focus on the construction of the meaning of images, the political use and misuse of images and the surrounding discourses. Equally important to what is shown is that which is not shown, which is not seen, which is excluded from a visual representation. Thus, tremendous political power resides in deciding on the visibility or invisibility of someone or something.

Images of war and violence

For a long time, studies (in International Relations (IR) and beyond) focused on iconic war images of the twentieth century, taken by famous photojournalists such as Nick Ut, Robert Capa and Don McCullin. These images have certainly shaped our historical (even ‘Western’) memory of war and warfare. Historically, war reporting by professional journalists started with the Crimean War (1853–1865) in the mid-nineteenth century while it had been the responsibility of the military staff before. First documentary images from the battlefield date back to this time (for a comprehensive overview, see Paul 2004). One can see that the keen interest of the army and the governments to control war reporting by civilian journalists is nothing new. During World War I and World War II, a close network of the media and the military evolved where the army itself produced and distributed battle field images.

Independent war reporting and photography grow with the foundation of non-state agencies, in particular, Magnum and journals such as Life and Vu. Now, reports from the battle fields in Europe and abroad seemed to be less controllable for war-making governments. The Vietnam War certainly marked a peak in this development. For the US audience, it represented the image war par excellence with all its ambiguities. On the one hand, the government and army established a systematic public relations policy (critics would say ‘propaganda’ machinery) while, on the other hand, a growing number of journalists reported on excessive violence in the US-led war (Griffin 2010, 13).

As regarding the post-Cold War era, the Gulf War in 1991 exemplified the new possibilities to reporting ‘24/7ʹ and in real time via satellite from all over the world. Operation Desert Storm, CNN and Peter Arnett produced well-known icons of how the ‘post-modern’, ‘clean’ war looks. The agenda-setting and agenda-following power of media networks have then been a major topic in research on the so-called CNN-effect (Gilboa et al. 2016). For many commentators, however, it is the ‘global war on terror’ that produced and is produced by a flood of images ranging from professional military pictures and videos, documentary journalistic accounts to photos and videos shot by civilians. It is certainly the ‘war on terror’ with its ambivalent images of war and a contested war of images that has fostered the academic interest in visual politics as an inter- and trans-disciplinary research field (see e.g. Debrix 2006; Amoore 2007; Delmont 2008; Shepherd 2008). The collapsing Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, US President George W. Bush’s statement on ‘Mission Accomplished’, Secretary of Defence Colin Powell’s multimedia presentation at the UN Security Council and the pictures of Abu Ghraib – all these images have already become global icons.

Recent conflicts in Libya and Syria show how significant new media sources such as Facebook and Twitter have become in distributing information and images of violent conflicts. The same networks also provide a platform for the obscure self-promotion and sexual satisfaction of soldiers and perpetrators as the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and the beheading videos of the so-called Islamic State revealed (Friis 2015). The digital production and distribution of images, as well as the empowerment and self-promotion of people through social networks in the World Wide Web, are confronted with well-known problems: the manipulation and instrumentalization of pictures and videos, discrimination and cyber mobbing, voyeurism and even ’war porn’.

Every image is a social construction with a framing of its content when it is taken, how it is presented to an audience and how it is understood by different audiences. There is not only one interpretation of an image but many regarding the discourses in which they are embedded and genealogies they produce (Hansen 2011; Hansen 2015; Heck and Schlag 2013). One case in point is the well-known picture of the girl Kim Phuc taken by the Magnum photographer Nick Ut in 1972 which exemplifies the cruelties of the Vietnam War. The political consequences one could draw from this photo are nevertheless quite different: Should the US withdraw its troops from Vietnam? Should they just change their way of fighting, abandoning the use of Napalm and risking more US casualties? Or should the US government intensify its engagement to win this war?

Ways of showing and seeing

In IR theory, it can be credited to the so-called ‘esthetic turn’ that prepared the ground for the study of visual representations. As Roland Bleiker argued, ‘there is always a gap between a form of representation and what is represented therewith. Rather than ignoring or seeking to narrow this gap, as mimetic approaches do, esthetic insight recognizes that the inevitable difference between the represented and its representation is the very location of politics’ (Bleiker 2001, 510). In a recent personal note, Bleiker adds that ‘[t]he task today, then, is no longer to legitimise aesthetic approaches but to reflect on their contribution and to contemplate opportunities and challenges that lie ahead’ (Bleiker 2017b, 259).

This special issue is an attempt to do so. While photojournalism and its representation of war and violence remain at the center of the debate, IR scholars have opened up to the more general role of vision, visuality and in-/visibility as the collection of contributions to this special issue illustrates. It is not only about iconic war images but about ways of seeing and looking. As John Berger reminds us, ‘[e]very image embodies a way of seeing’ (Berger 1972, 2).

As the literature on vision, visuality and visual representations in IR has steadily grown, this short introduction and the special issue cannot do justice to the diversity of established and emerging approaches (Andersen, Vuori and Mutlu 2015; Hansen 2015; Bleiker 2017a). The scope of a special issue is inevitably limited, but we do hope that it continues a global discourse on the esthetics and ethics of visualizing violence (e.g. Croft 2006; Campbell and Shapiro 2007). The authors of this special issue investigate and reflect on the relation between visuality and violence, both broadly understood. They focus on ways of seeing and showing as political practices and critically reflect on the power of vision and visuality for global politics. They embrace an empirically grounded and ethically reflected perspective based on the insight that every image is already a representation of someone or something.

The contributions to this special issue highlight once more the ambivalences and ambiguities of studying vision and visibility in a broader conceptual and empirical sense: concerning ways of envisioning, understanding different media and genres, their circulation, and reception, the impact of digitization and the politics and ethics of visual representations. Therefore, we advocate a broad conception of vision, visuality and visual representations reflecting on the possibilities and limits of our ways of seeing.

The title of this special issue – visualizing violence: esthetics and ethics in international politics – indicates that the authors share an interest in images and practices. As Jessica Auchter (2017) aptly writes, the contributors to this issue focus on the political work visualization do. Nevertheless, they address the politics of vision, visuality and visual representations from different perspectives highlighting pluralisms and ambiguity. By visualization, we broadly refer to ways of showing and seeing, hence forms of knowledge production that are often informed by institutionalized practices (Auchter 2017; Möller 2017; Vuori 2017). It encompasses internal, non-material images (Steele 2017) as well as the frames and symbolic modalities where images materialize (Geis and Schlag 2017; Heck 2017). As visualization is a powerful practice itself, it refers not only to what is (made) visible but also to what is not shown and not seen. Hence, the modes of visual representation are as important as the modes of absence as the contribution by Shim and Stengel (2017) illustrates.

Summary of the contributions

Brent Steele takes the ambiguity and contestedness of intervention politics as a starting point for his ‘politico-normative polemic’ (Steele 2017) pointed at ‘liberal internationalists’ and how they justify the use of force. He argues that calls for military interventions – for example, in the case of Syria made by Anne-Marie Slaughter – are ‘not based on what is seen before or during an intervention’ (Steele 2017, 202), but on hallucinations: ‘A hallucination is about what is not seen but asserted’ (Steele 2017, 203, italics added). Although the notion of hallucination is rather unconventional for IR scholars, Rune Saugmann illustrates in his response that ‘security knowledge is always in a sense hallucinatory, it is always about future ”bads”, threats or disasters to be avoided – incalculable and ultimately unknowable, but at the same time imperative to act on’ (Saugmann 2017, 221).

Anna Geis and Gabi Schlag focus in their contribution not on the hallucinatory side of a military intervention in Syria, but on the actual visual politics of its justification. Referring to videos that are documenting the intoxication of civilians, made and circulated by activists on Youtube, they show that ‘the mediatization of violent conflicts in mainstream and social media nearly renders it impossible to ignore atrocities and can put tremendous pressure on democratic governments to react’ (Geis and Schlag 2017, 287). How graphic images are consumed and interpreted, however, highly depends on their political context, framing and interpretation. In this sense, Michelle Bentley reminds us not to forget that the difference pictures of atrocities might make ‘does not occur within a political vacuum’ (Bentley 2017, 304).

Jessica Auchter addresses these ambiguities of context, framing and interpretation in the case of cultural taboos of viewing dead bodies. While this taboo is certainly well established within Western regimes of in-/visibility, she explores ‘the political work these taboos do to enact particular performances of rehumanization and dehumanization of the dead’ (Auchter 2017, 223). While images of atrocities are often ‘accompanied by a command to look’, the display of graphic images also renders visible the ambiguities of response when dead enemy bodies are presented. As taboos are socially constructed, it is important to explore not only ‘how dead bodies became taboo in Western European and American societies’ but also why that is the case, Charlotte Heath-Kelly writes in her reply (Heath-Kelly 2017, 240).

While Auchter’s contribution reflects on the cultural taboo viewing the ‘real’ dead, movies and TV shows can fictionalize violence and death. In the case of the popular Star Trek series, Juha Vuori demonstrates how representations of torture change over time, reflecting social imaginaries of a more general kind. Thus, he argues that ‘[b]y examining the representational practices that reproduce social imaginaries we can estimate not only changes in the representations but in the moral visions and politics they produce’ (Vuori 2017, 310). Because popular culture, by definition, is consumed by a broad audience, it raises the question of the viewing subject. In his reply, Kyle Grayson argues that this subject ‘centres on what kind of viewing capacities, understandings, and limitations are produced in and through the viewer such that the artefact in question is (or becomes) sensible to them’ (Grayson 2017, 328). For Grayson, this also poses a methodological challenge how to study images and imaginaries beyond established methods.

Such methodological questions are discussed in the contributions of David Shim and Frank Stengel and of Axel Heck. Shim and Stengel investigate the mundane practices of self-representation of the German armed forces in their Afghanistan ISAF mission via photographs they have posted on Facebook. Based on their in-depth empirical study, they conclude that the representations of soldiers are highly gendered. Representing the soldier as a cyborg ‘makes him appear less prone to breakdowns, emotional or physical, and more machine-like, invincible and in control’ (Shim and Stengel 2017, 333). These images, though, affirm and reproduce the political discourse in Germany with its displacement of ‘war’ itself. In her reply, Laura Shepherd emphasizes ‘that the representational practices used by military actors on social media is not only an understudied area of the mediatisation of war […] but also a critical way in which militarism in society is (re)produced’ (Shepherd 2017, 351).

Modes of self-representation are also addressed by Axel Heck who investigates how text and images interplay in the case of the so-called Islamic State’s narrative identity construction, as displayed in its online propaganda magazine Dabiq. One story of this identity ‘refer[s] to the ”epic” and ”righteous” fight of oppressed men against powerful forces occupying Muslim lands’ as he shows in analyzing exemplary text-image modes in Dabiq (Heck 2017, 252). Alexander Spencer adds in his reply that such a romanticizing narrative ‘is generally an exciting and entertaining story involving conflict and importantly adventure, it is also a sentimentally emotional story’ (Spencer 2017, 262). Therefore, we should be more open to the question why some narratives – and indeed images – are more compelling to specific audiences than others.

As all contributions emphasize, digitization and social media do play a significant role in the contemporary visualization of violence. The consequences of changing technologies and platforms are most evident if we turn to the field of journalism as Frank Möller’s contribution makes clear. Möller describes the relationship between professional photojournalism and citizen journalism from the perspective of witnessing. While the former shows war and violence as ‘it is’, the latter ‘is showing it like it feels’ (Möller 2017, 265). Although Möller is reasonably aware of the idealization of this typology – and the highly idealized, yet ambiguous rules and conventions of photojournalism in general –, there are indeed different ways of bearing witness with the camera’s eye. Thus, Möller helps ‘to re-imagining the debates over photojournalism – its standards, its account of itself, its abiding importance – through more conceptual and theoretical ideas about witnessing’ (Lisle 2017, 282). Debbie Lisle, however, emphasizes in her reply that if we take Möller’s reflection seriously, ‘we must reveal the work the structuring logic of emotion/reason actually does to our analysis of photographic witnessing’ (Lisle 2017, 283). Hence, emotions and images do speak to each other, but all too often this relation remains empirically and theoretically intangible.

Images, emotions and ethics

The study of emotions in IR has gained significant attention in the last 15 years (e.g. Crawford 2000; Mercer 2010; Bleiker and Hutchison 2014; Clément and Sangar 2017). Emotions, however, have a history, too. How and why we feel the way we do is socially and culturally shaped and framed (Ahmed 2014). Thus, emotions are already mediated by representations, meaning that ‘[a]ll one can understand is the manner in which emotions are expressed and communicated’ (Bleiker and Hutchison 2014, 506). That includes language as much as images as the contributions to this special issue illustrate.

Auchter, for example, argues that the display of pictures of dead enemies are ‘designed to cultivate affective responses of retribution, hatred and satisfied revenge, rather than empathy’, while photographs and videos of atrocities are often framed within the ‘politics of pity’ (Geis and Schlag 2017). Shim and Stengel (2017, 339), though, show how the ‘absence of fear, grief and (emotional) exhaustion’ contributes to the normalization of military life. Heck’s (2017) contribution illustrates how emotions are not only visually represented but are embedded in identity narratives based on notions of revenge and retaliation. Emotions, however, are not only expressed and communicated but might also drive action as Vuori (2017) demonstrates with popular representations of torture in Star Trek. More generally, taking pictures in conflict zones or advocating military interventions is also shaped by feelings or trauma as the reflections by Möller (2017) and Steele (2017) confirm.

Our ways of showing and seeing, one could conclude, are certainly highly emotional and ethical as McCullin writes: ‘Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling. If you can’t feel what you are looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures’ (cited in Campbell 2003, 68). We hope that this special issue contributes to illuminating the political, ethical and normative implications of making, (not) showing and (not) seeing images of violence in the digital age.

Date: 21 July 2017

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Matthew Johnson for his excellent support in publishing this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.