Visual Global Politics Paperback – Illustrated, 7 February 2018
by Roland Bleiker (Editor)
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We live in a visual age. Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments and videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns.
This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world.
Paperback : 390 pages
ISBN-10 : 0415726077
ISBN-13 : 978-0415726078
Product Dimensions : 17.4 x 2.36 x 24.61 cm
Publisher : Routledge; Illustrated Edition (7 February 2018)
Language: : English
Best Sellers Rank: 356,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
433 in International Relations Textbooks
491 in Political History Textbooks
2,233 in Philosophy Textbooks
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Review
"This book is a landmark step in addressing the role of visuality in global politics. Rich, diverse, and innovative, it represents a vital contribution to understanding some of the most pressing analytic and political questions of our time."
- Michael C Williams, University of Ottawa, Canada
"This is a wonderful anthology. Typically these alphabetical collections are best for reference, but I was surprised to find myself reading through from one to the next. Many of the entries speak to each another, and together they paint the best available picture of images as "political forces." Visual culture studies has often made the promise of being political in a way that art history hasn't, but this is the only book that puts the politics first. It will be a useful reference for the current political moment, in which each of us has the responsibility to witness, interpret, and also produce political images."
- James Elkins, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
"This sparkling collection of essays brings the visual aspects of global politics to the fore, challenging the traditional scholarly focus on texts. It illuminates the power of images in shaping the way we interpret and respond to global phenomena. The book will quickly become an indispensable resource for all scholars of international politics and law."
- Hilary Charlesworth, Melbourne Law School, Australia
"We live in an age of the visual turn in politics, one in which images work upon several registers of life. But the professoriate still mostly responds to politics through the hegemony of the textual. Visual Global Politics takes several huge steps to redress this imbalance. Consisting of multiple image-rich essays, it engages bodies, borders, torture, climate, democracy, security and several other domains by addressing their image/word intertexts. A timely and indispensable volume."
- William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, USA
About the Author
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, where he directs an interdisciplinary research program on Visual Politics. Over the past twenty years he has played a leading role in introducing aesthetics, visuality and emotions to the theory and practice of world politics.
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Thinking and Writing Visual Global Politics – a Review of R. Bleiker’s Visual Global Politics (2018, Abingdon and New York: Routledge)
Gabi Schlag
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society volume 32, pages105–114(2019)Cite this article
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Abstract
Any reader who is interested in the rich and diverse relations between the visual, the political, and the global should look out for Roland Bleiker’s edited volume with the simple, yet programmatic title Visual Global Politics (VGP). In my review, I critically reflect the many virtues but also missed opportunities and suggest ways how this excellent edition could further develop as a living and creative project.
The last time I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I had the luck to see Gerhard Richter’s work “18. Oktober 1977” (1988), colloquially referred to as the “Stammheim-Zyklus”.Footnote1 This cycle consists of 15 paintings that refer to the death of leading members of the German left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF) at a prison in Stammheim.Footnote2 Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe committed suicide in the night of October 18th. Thirteen months before, guards found Ulrike Meinhof hanged in her cell. Well known for his esthetics, Richter transfers official photographs of the arrest, the dead bodies, a recorder, the young Ulrike, and the funeral to panels of wiped motifs painted in shades of gray. I recall this visit because Alex Danchev wrote a beautiful piece about the cycle, published in 2010 in the journal Alternatives: “For Richter, the paintable and the unpaintable are shifting sands: not a question of taboos or proscriptions, given or handed down; rather an exercise of individual artistic conscious. Such an exercise might well traverse issues of taste, or discretion, and also issue of scale, but in the end paintability is a matter of judgment” (Danchev 2010: 98). Given Danchev’s reflection upon the paintable/unpaintable, Richter is indeed a master of liberating the image (effigy/“Abbild”) from any representational function by transforming it into a piece of contemplation.
I recall this story because both Richter and Danchev made me think about the conditions and possibilities of writing about art and politics at a time when visual global politics was widely unknown at the center of International Relations Theory (IR), at least in Germany. Since then, a variety of scholars in IR (and beyond) have turned to the visual site of politics, the political site of visuals as well as the global dimensions of both. Therefore, any reader who is interested in the rich and diverse relations between the visual, the political, and the global should definitely look out for Roland Bleiker’s edited volume with the simple, yet programmatic title “Visual Global Politics” (VGP). It is no coincidence that this compilation of sophisticated essays is dedicated to Alex Danchev who unexpectedly died in August 2017. All contributors to this volume, and I guess Richter and Danchev might too, share what Bleiker lately called a “search for thinking space: to explore ever new ways of writing, seeing, hearing and sensing the political” (Bleiker 2017: 258). This edited volume continues this search in a masterful way.
Writing Visual Global Politics
In the beautifully written introduction, Bleiker makes clear that the aim of VGP “is to open up debates as widely as possible” (Bleiker 2018: 4). It cannot be mentioned too often that this attitude is exactly and essentially what is needed more. This volume, then, offers “a comprehensive overview of and engagement with the role of visuality in politics and international relations” (Bleiker 2018: 1).Footnote3 Therefore, I recommend VGP to anyone who is “interested in understanding the central role that images play in today’s world” (Bleiker 2018: 1) but does not care much about disciplinary boundaries or conventionally designed edited volumes with neat sections on theory, methods, and case studies. Bleiker brings together a diverse and excellent group of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds and methodological positions. Because it is designed as an eclectic, yet potentially infinite “dictionaire” or “encyclopédie” in alphabetical order—an esthetic form used by diverse figures such as Denis Diderot or Reinhart Koselleck—every reader is free to choose one chapter after another or select single chapters of interest.
Given its alphabetical order, this volume is not a disciplinary introduction to a rich and diverse field. The single contributions range from B as “Body” to W as “Witnessing” with nearly 50 entries in between. The short essays, compiled without strict selection criteria as it seems, refer to various political concepts, approaches, and issues. This absence of an ordering principle besides the alphabet, however, makes this volume highly accessible with surprising and sometimes contra-intuitive insights for a reader. Each contribution is indeed opening up thinking space because the editor and the authors do not even try to define “visual global politics” properly or to provide an authoritative access to a selection of theories and methods. Thus, the volume’s major shortcoming for some readers might be exactly its primary strength in the long run. It is about the pluralism and diversity of studying visual global politics.
Within this diversity, however, each contribution refers to at least one major theme summarized by Bleiker in his introduction. Entitled as “mapping visual global politics,” he refers to the power of images, to the affective and emotional capacity of visuals, to the mimetic illusion of photography, esthetic choices, the need of interpretation, and finally the “impact” of visual artifacts. All these themes refer to broader and interdisciplinary debates that slowly but inexorably gain common ground in IR. Bleiker centers his introduction mainly around two essential themes: the power and politics of images.
The question of what kind of power images possess and how it can be studied is a central question for many IR scholars. First, icons are powerful by definition as “they are part of the collective fabric through which people and communities make sense of themselves” (Bleiker 2018: 8). They shape public opinion, and they inform how “we” think about politics. Translating an icon’s power in conventional terms, they can be causal as well as constitutive. However, often we do not know the conditions under which icons—or more generally images—reveal power very well and are less clear in defining what kind of power they possess at all (Hansen 2015; Schlag 2018b). Second, images are unique because they “generate excitement and anxieties” as Bleiker (2018: 9) writes. Although the emotional and affective capacities of an image are most apparent when it expresses pain and misery, its political effects can be quite ambivalent (Hutchison 2014; Schlag 2018a). Again, the challenge is to understand in more detail where this emotionality comes from and how it works.
Politics and the political (often with a capital P) are highly contentious terms. The politics of images, then, reminds us of the disciplinary mechanism that is associated with dominant ways of showing and seeing (Sturken and Cartwright 2009). There are undoubtedly many different dimensions to the politics of images, including the illusion of photojournalism’s authenticity, the esthetic choices made when pictures are produced, and the sites of displaying and interpreting images in a political context (Bleiker 2018: 12–17). As Rancière pointed out, esthetic regimes are “co-producing the limits and boundaries of what is done and what can be done” (Rancière 2011: 99; cited in Andersen et al. 2015: 89). Hence, the ability to depict implies a power to define politics and policies. Thinking about the politics of images, then, implies a sensibility for power and resistance, too.
While the power and politics of images are certainly two essential themes, the volume’s strength is its richness of how one can think and write about visual global politics. Let me illustrate this richness along three lines.
First, some contributions deal with the visual as an artifact, for example, a specific medium and genres like a video game, a photograph, or a (fictional and documentary) film. This implies that visuals are made facts. Therefore, they encompass a context of production, distribution, and reception (Rose 2012: 21). Although not a new phenomenon but enhanced by digitization, scholars also focus on processes of re-mediation and forms of inter-visuality/inter-iconicity (Hansen 2015: 269). Based on this, other contributions reflect in detail on the visual rather as a practice and performance than as a materialized object, for example referring to the performance of veiling or surveillance. Finally, many contributions transcend artificial boundaries by combining the artifact-site and the practice-site as well as the context of production, circulation, and interpretation on the one hand and images on the other hand.
Second, authors refer to different terms and concepts, in particular vision, visuality, invisibility, visualizing, visuals, visual representations, and performances as well as icons, images, and pictures. A broader semantic field is invoked and mobilized here that certainly connects each contribution to different disciplines and sub-fields.
Mitchell, however, reminds us that writing about images is complicated by the fact that the word is “notoriously ambiguous” (Mitchell 2004: 2). It refers to a family tree including verbal, mental, perceptual, optical, and graphic images (Mitchell 1984: 505). For him, images “mean any likeness, figure, motif, or form that appears in some medium or other” (Mitchell 2004: xiii). A medium is a carrier, either physical or not, and channels our perception (Belting 2005: 304). Modality, in contrast, refers to the multiple communicative practices that are used to produce and convey meaning, e.g., textual, aural, linguistic, spatial, and visual modes of expression (Kress 2010). The contributions to this edition speak to these different notions of images, media, and modes showing the variety of perspectives and disciplines that inform global visual studies. For a reader, though, it is sometimes difficult to figure out the connections between single essays to see a broader picture.
The challenge of translatability is even more complicated when we move beyond the Anglophone community.Footnote4 How similar “turns” evolve in different academic circles shows the exchange of letters between Gottfried Boehm and WJT Mitchell reprinted in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique (2009). While both came up with the notion of a “pictorial turn” in the mid-1980s, Boehm and Mitchell depart from different intellectual traditions (which is hermeneutics for Boehm and poststructuralism for Mitchell). As a result, language games vary and are not that easily translated from one context to another. I think it is necessary to acknowledge that we not only operate within a complex semantic field in one language but face severe challenges if and when we are translating concepts from one disciplinary context (e.g., art history, esthetics, semiotics, and communication studies) and/or another language (German, French, Arabic, and Chinese) to a global field of studying visual politics (Elkins 2013a).
Third, and framed in methodological terms, some authors are more interested in causal interference while the majority of contributors more or less refers to non- or post-positivist perspectives. They emphasize the conditions of possibility of policies and politics that are “shaped” by visuals, either conceptualized as artifacts or practices. A few entries are explicitly explanatory, e.g., the “CNN-Effect” or “Compassion Fatigue” while most contributions celebrate either a reflexive and/or normative agenda. Such a neat distinction between causal and constitutive approaches, however, might overlook the fact that methodological traditions are more diverse than a two-by-two matrix suggests.
Along with my honest appraisal of the volume so far comes a critical reflection on VGP’s missed opportunities:
First, the introduction only presents a mapping of visual global politics but fails to reconsider the evolution of the “visual turn”—if it is a turn at all—within a broader interdisciplinary context. No doubt, we can and should discuss whether it is necessary (for what?) to understand why and how “we” came to understand the visual the way “we” do. Elkins (2013a) and Moxey (2008), for example, do an excellent job in contextualizing visual studies by highlighting the different histories and legacies of this field. I believe there is a value in writing such a genealogy of visual IR as a reflection upon the conditions of possibility of research practices for two reasons. It helps to keep in mind that there is not one but many ways to study visual global politics. To historize means to make the contingent choices visible and thus criticizable. Moreover, it makes us more aware how concepts, theories, and methods travel; how research agendas evolve; and why some studies on visual global politics are still dismissed as “non-IR” or even worse “non-scientific.”
Second, and what Jonathan Luke Austin and Stephanie Perazzone lately titled “Doing Visual IR,” a more explicit, yet critical engagement with methods seem to be a blind spot in this volume. While the application of methods is often celebrated as the distinctive characteristic of “science,” my intention is not to impose a “unity of science” approach and canonical repertoire of methods on the study of visual politics. However, how we conduct research in more practical terms is an essential question because most of us indeed struggle with the ambiguity, polyseminess, contestedness, and fluidity of visuals. Debating methods, then, helps to reflect upon the many choices we have to make during a research process and helps to reject allegations that the interpretation of images cannot produce any inter-subjective knowledge. The fundamental difficulty, though, is to understand methods as pluralist, pragmatic, and (self-)reflexive tools.
Third, and this critique applies to my work as well, the selection of contributions and contributors does only partly reflect visual global politics “around the world.” To be honest, entries on “Colonialism,” “Indigenity,” “Nation,” and “Travel” explicitly reflect upon the visual intersection of the global, regional, and local in today’s world. The notion of global, however, remains unspecific for how we theorize the “visual” as well as how we understand “politics.” On the one hand, and thanks to digital globalization, the circulation of visuals is hardly bounded by national or regional boundaries anymore. As Hansen reminds us, “global icons” may function as “visual nodal points (…) that provide a partial fixation to structures of meaning” (Hansen 2015: 265). On the other hand, psychological, social, economic, cultural, and material factors influence the production, perception, and interpretation of images as situated practices. What an image means in a specific context to a defined group of people may change over time as re-interpretations of nude paintings displayed in museums illustrate. While Art History (Juneja and Schenk 2014; Elkins 2007) and History (e.g., Journal of Global History) have gone global recently, VGP could easily follow this path reflecting upon the power struggles that inform not only the world of politics but esthetic regimes as well (e.g., Evans and Hall 1999; Bhabah 2004).
As my knowledge of and expertise in global (art) history and post-colonial approaches is very choosy, I will only discuss the first and second critical interventions in the remainder of this review article.
Thinking Visual Global Politics: Looking Back
If it is true that we are living in a visual age, as the first sentence declares and art historian Ernst Gombrich wrote in the 1960s, we should wonder why it took so long for students of global politics and IR to recognize this “fact.” People have always valued images as an esthetic form and practice of expression, communication, and experience. Since the invention of reproductive technologies, new media, and changing distributive channels, the quantity of images that are produced and circulated has indeed increased. We often associate these developments with digital photography and the internet but should not forget that it was the ability to duplicate an image by the print that started the revolution. The changing nature of time and space through digitization, then, made the production, circulation, display, perception, and interpretation of specific images a genuinely political and global project.
Because it is true that we are living in a visual age, we should look back at the evolution of visual global politics. First, why is IR as a discipline a latecomer to the “visual turn,” “pictorial turn,” or “iconic turn?” Second, how does the visual, then, enter IR? Together, both questions might be able to formulate better responses to those who are skeptical about the “added value” of doing visual global politics. For many readers, including myself, the decade-long ignorance of the visual might not be surprising then. Moreover, as a non-native English speaking and working scholar—I would like to remind readers that there are huge differences between “national” IR communities whether and how they appreciate such a turn to visuality. The caveat is that, I cannot provide a genealogy here, but would like to share some first thoughts with a reader who is interested.
Although the study of images was never exclusive to one discipline, the visual is much more at the center of theoretical, methodological, and empirical debates in media studies, communication studies, and art history. Skeptics, therefore, respond that other disciplines can do it much better while IR, then, should continue its focus on states, power, and politics. Such a distribution of knowledge production, however, ignores that images are political. The most straightforward case to illustrate how visual politics work is a video made with a mobile phone. When videos of dying women, men, and children poisoned by Sarin circulated first on Youtube channels and then in traditional media outlets in 2013 and again in 2018, they revealed a brutal political reality of the war in Syria to a global audience. In summer 2013, these videos shaped emotional responses by leading politicians in Europe and North America who then forced the Syrian government to agree to a destruction of its chemical weapons (Geis and Schlag 2017). Widely discussed as a failure of intervention in 2013, President Trump’s response to comparable videos in early 2018 was a limited military strike that did not change much. These two events, though, illustrate the ambiguity of visuals and the contingent impact of images on policies. Although we know that each image is selected, framed, and vulnerable to manipulation, photographs and videos displaying human misery cannot be easily ignored. Hence, authenticity is as much an illusion (Bleiker 2018: 13) as it is a compelling idea.
Taking for granted that there is a relationship between politics and images, then, one wonders of what kind. I think that one reason why many IR scholars hesitate to study visuals is the challenge to “proof” that they make a difference and, if so, how it works. As long as causal interference and comparative case study design dominate research practices, visual global politics might have a hard time. If we cannot prove that an image/a picture has a causal impact, we fail. In recent years, however, various movements attacked such an exclusive understanding of IR’s epistemological and methodological foundation. Transcending boundaries, then, is a practical accomplishment—doing it better—and not only a critique of the disciplinary mechanisms many scholars face when they want to get published.
As images are not words, IR scholars recognize that they enter unknown methodological, epistemological, and ontological terrain. How to study “something” (if it is a thing at all) that is ambiguous, polysemy, fluid, mixed, and non-verbal? We “need words to assess their political significance,” Bleiker (2018: 11) reminds us, but images are often uniquely emotional and sensible, even mystical. Images work differently from words, but how and why. Because critical IR is still very much focused on theorizing and criticizing, the use of (political) language (e.g., discourses), studying non-verbal phenomena-like emotions, material objects, non-humans, and vision/visuals is also a call for more creativity and openness. Indeed, feminist and post-colonial scholars are those who have been most sensible for the visual dimensions of representations and performances as they understand the gaze as a powerful practice and practice of power (Sturken and Cartwright 2009/2017).
VGP comes not out of the blue. Since the late 1980s, scholars like Michael J Shapiro, James Der Derian, David Campbell, and Jutta Weldes helped to open up the space for visual studies in IR. It might be worth to find out in more detail how the concept of “representations” enabled a widening of approaches and research practices in IR, and in particular for visual global politics. As Bleiker himself wrote in 2001, esthetic approaches “engage the gap that inevitably opens up between a form of representation and the object it seeks to represent. (…). Indeed, they recognise that the difference between represented and representation is the very location of politics” (Bleiker 2001: 512). This nexus between the represented and the representation, then, is a constant struggle.
To be clear, reconsidering the histories of visual global politics is not a search for “who did it first” but a reflection upon when and how it became possible to turn to visual representations and performances. Finally, it is quite telling to look at the repertoire of godfathers (and unfortunately fewer godmothers) that are commonly cited in visual IR: the works of WJT Mitchell, Nicholas Mirzoeff, a little bit of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze (in particular his reading of Foucault), and more recently Jacques Rancière.Footnote5 Elkins (2013a), again, reminds us that intellectual histories in visual studies are more diverse in spatial, disciplinary, and conceptual terms. The growing field of visual global politics could undoubtedly profit from seeing this diversity more clearly as a strength.
Doing Visual Global Politics: A Conversation
Debates on methods easily escalate to the invocation of the “right,” i.e., proper, clean, and neat research designs that endorse a scientific approach. Hence, the rightness of some tools implies that other methods can easily be dismissed as “non-scientific.” Because invocations of “science,” in particular in an Anglophone community, have a disciplinary function (Jackson 2010: 9), we should certainly not worry too much about it. Instead, turning to methods and methodologies implies to understand that the choice for tools depends on the questions we ask. Several publications in recent years indicate that scholars who are working in a non-positivist tradition have recognized that a dialog over methodology is warranted (Aradau et al. 2015; Bleiker 2015; Dixit and Stump 2013; Salter and Mutlu 2013; Klotz and Prakash 2009).
Leander, for example, writes that “methods serve a purpose. One does not drill holes with a hammer or fix nails with a drill” (Leander 2008: 12). She argues that Bourdieu’s La distinction provides “thinking tools” which are “useful for applying any theoretical framework to empirical research” (ibid.), i.e., how we are asking research questions; how we are conceptualizing the world; how we decide on boundaries, level, and scope as well as how we are reflecting the foundations for validity claims that are implied in our research. The “thinking tool” metaphor, then, exemplifies that research is a fluid process where we constantly “move back and forth between theory and empirical observation” (Leander 2008: 27).
Besides purposefulness, we expect methods not only to be pragmatic but critical. In IR, “C/critical” is rather invoked as an attribute than a noun leaving the “notion of ‘critique’ suspended” (Koddenbrock 2015: 244). It can refer to dissident voices juxtaposing critique to hegemonic academic discourses about statism or causal interference as, for example, in “Critical Terrorism Studies” (Dixit and Stump 2013). For scholars investigating the politics of security, the common reference point is the “assumption that security threats and insecurities are not simply objects to be studied or problems to be solved, but the product of social and political practices” (Aradau et al. 2015: 1). Critical perspectives commonly challenge established, traditional, yet hegemonic theories while methods (and methodologies) remain second. Aradau et al. (2015: 2), however, rightly argue that we should move away from this “cascading approach” where criticality resides only at the theoretical level. Instead, methods are performative, situated, and reflexive “techniques, devices and acts” (Aradau and Huysmans 2014). In a recent contribution, Bleiker himself has advocated such a critical, yet pluralist engagement with methods as “the politics of images is far too complex to be assessed through a single method” (Bleiker 2015: 873). True as this statement is, it calls for more conversations on doing visual global politics.
Turning to the methods-question, however, might come with a price as well. First, it easily re-invokes clear-cut divisions between efforts to theorize the image/visuality on the one hand and empirical observations on the other hand where methodology and methods, then, function as the bridging element. However, there is no “empirical reality” we observe without a tool (i.e., theories and methods), and there is no theorizing detached from the realities we experience, describe, and try to understand.
Second, a careful observer of the rise of new research agendas in IR might argue that asking the methods-question can signal an unwanted turning point. While lively debates at the intersection between theorizing and researching produce progress, traditional methods tend to control and discipline what we (can) study how. As the turn to methods unravels power relations in any academic field, we should carefully address the multiple meanings of “methods,” why and how we use them.
Living Visual Global Politics: Looking Forward
In his introduction, Bleiker describes the style and format of the book as rhizome-like, a metaphor that was used by Deleuze and Guattari in 1980 for their radical critique of capitalism and rationalism. Rhizomes are “constellations that have no beginning or end but, instead, multiple entryways and exits” (Bleiker 2018: 29). Together with “assemblages” (Bleiker 2014), these are lovely metaphors which could inform research practices in a more profound sense. First, VGP could be turned into a living document that grows infinitely and organically like a digital encyclopedia or dictionary. Putting together entries in alphabetical order already envisions such an open-ended process of re-/writing the visual, the global, and the political.
Second, investigations of visual global politics could move forward as visual documents where imaging and writing intersect, overlap, and criss-cross. They could form arguments as Barthes did in Camera Lucida or John Berger showed in Ways of Seeing. Often, the reproduction of photographs in a book or articles serves as a reminder, example, or illustration (Elkins 2013b: 26). It is a common practice for scholars to create graphics and tables that translate knowledge into a visual mode. By illustrating the complex structuring of a ministry or the EU, organization charts make visible the horizontal and vertical power relations of units. Economic graphs show the wealth and progress of states over time with rising and falling lines. In biology and chemistry, images depict molecular structures that cannot be seen by the eye (Bredekamp et al. 2015). Elkins, however, rightly asks whether and how visuals may function as arguments: “If visual studies is to make good on its promise to be the central discipline that considers the visual, then I think it needs to find ways to be guided by pictures, rather than ways of explaining pictures” (Elkins 2013b: 29). Recent trends to introduce film-making (Callahan 2015), sketching (Gibbon and Sylvester 2017), and the photo-essay (Boulton 2009) to IR scholarship already turn in this direction.
Given these suggestions, I very much hope that VGP will continue in its effort to opening up not only thinking space and writing styles but conversations on the powers, emotions, and politics of images around the world.
Notes
1.
For further information on Richter’s art, see https://www.gerhard-richter.com/de/art/paintings/photo-paintings/baader-meinhof-56.
2.
In Germany, Stammheim is widely known because of this prison that was reconstructed for the detention and trial of the RAF members.
3.
For those readers who are more specifically interested in visual security and conflict studies should look for Vuori and Andersen (2018) as well as Eder and Klonk (2017).
4.
Mitchell’s book Picture Theory, for example, is translated to Bildtheorie by its German publisher while Horst Bredekamp’s Adorno Lectures on “Theorie des Bildaktes” are advertised as “Theory of image act”
5.
This is a highly personal impression and not based on a quantitative study on citations and references. I was wondering about key female intellectuals here as well. The work of Susan Sontag and Judith Butler’s engagement with her essays is often cited; Sturken and Cartwright as well as Mieke Bal are less prominent in IR but may be excellent choices for a reading list.
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Affiliations
Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany
Gabi Schlag
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Correspondence to Gabi Schlag.
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