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Visualität und Internationale Beziehungen
Abstract
Bilder und Dokumentationen menschlichen Leids, seien es Massaker, Hunger, Vertreibung oder die Zerstörung ganzer Dörfer und Städte sind wiederkehrende Begleiterscheinungen von Bürgerkriegen und internationalen Gewaltkonflikten. Diese Tatsache wurde zumindest in Teilen der Disziplin der Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) schon vor vielen Jahren anerkannt (Campbell 2003b, 2007; Hoskins und O’Loughlin 2010; Kennedy 2008). Visuelle Repräsentationen prägen nicht nur die kollektiv geteilten Vorstellungen von Krieg und dessen Folgen, sondern vermitteln oftmals darüber hinausweisende, politisch und normativ aufgeladene Narrative über Täter und Opfer eines Konflikts.
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This article examines the ways in which cinematic film underscores the latency of structural violence in its visualization of peace, specifically through the juxtaposition of the life world of the two main protagonists in the Danish film A War (2016): Captain Claus Pedersen who serves as a Danish soldier in Afghanistan and his wife Maria who takes care of the family in peaceful Denmark. The analysis centers on the internationally acclaimed film A War, directed by Thomas Lindholm, which received an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language film. In contrast to many other films about war in general and the Afghanistan war in particular, it intimately portrays how the young family struggles with the consequences of a war taking place in faraway country and right in the middle of their life.
This article proposes the methodological framework of visual narrative analysis through the study of images and narratives. We are interested in the appeal of political storytelling. In applying an approach of layered interpretation, we study images and slogans to consider the more complex underlying narratives in their political and cultural context. Our exploratory case studies draw on material from right-wing populist parties, namely election campaign posters from Germany and the UK as material for the analysis. We find that narratives operate with a ‘fantasmatic logic’, which adds fantasy to politics, to depoliticise and camouflage their radical intent and gain approval by making consent desirable. We identify two exemplary narratives (honest men under threat; proud mothers) that entrench traditional gender roles in accordance with patriarchy and nationalism. Theoretically, our approach contributes to debates in IR on cultural underpinnings in international politics and the construction of collective identities through shared/divided narratives. Visual narrative analysis provides a promising methodological tool for analysing visual representations in their productive relationship with text. This perspective foregrounds the power of political storytelling through fantasmatic appeal and fosters a better understanding of the global rise of populism.
How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual ‘inner states’. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as ‘the father’. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. ‘Kurdi’ became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.
Political scientists have discovered that most political categories (political authority, democratic legitimacy, identity building) are closely linked with the concept of narrative. We demonstrate the relevance of narrative analysis in politics by analyzing two cases of urban riots (Paris 2005, Baltimore 2015). We propose a micro-oriented perspective focusing on people's everyday life experiences and cultural practices of storytelling. The analysis dissects state narratives, which discredit protests through the language of criminality. Our case examples show that sudden violence in urban riots is often a desperate expression of marginalized voices articulating moral claims of justice, particularly concerning everyday racism.
In this paper, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography into IR's emerging agenda on peace. Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large-scale violence and interstate war. In contrast, we provide an alternative approach which aims to broaden our understanding of (the study of) peace in IR. First, we explore a positive conception of peace at the individual and everyday level of analysis. Second, we advocate methodological pluralism by examining different analytical sites of peace photography. Third, we concentrate on the potentialities of peace photography in Colombia and Brazil-notorious spaces of everyday violence. We argue that the analytical perspectives developed in this paper have also relevance beyond our examples: if peace photography can be found here, than it can also be found elsewhere. Put differently, everyday visions of peace constitute particular instances of the international.
In his interview with CBS News on 4 May 2011, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the power of images when he explained that his government would not release a photo of the dead Osama bin Laden due to moral considerations and security-related issues. How is it possible that a photo is perceived as too horrific to be published and as a powerful threat to national security? In this article, I argue that the concept of performativity helps to acknowledge the iconic power of an image as well as its discursive contextualisation. Yet, the meaning of a picture is not only discursively constituted but made possible by a performative act of showing/seeing. Empirically, I focus on pictures that refer to the killing of Osama bin Laden, based on a critical reading of three defining and prominent images in the US public discourse (that circulated worldwide): the Situation Room photo by Pete Souza, a photo-shopped image purporting to show the terrorist’s dead body and the iconic X-ing out of bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine. This reading looks at three dimensions of performative pictures: (1) their success and failure, (2) their self-reflexivity and sociability and (3) their performativity.
Lately, but without surprise, both images and emotions have gained great attention in political science and international relations theory (IR), although studying images and emotions remains a challenge. In this chapter, I address two questions in relation to this challenge. First, I reflect on the relation between images, emotions, and politics, with the aim of ‘theorizing the process through which individual emotions become collective and political’ (Bleiker & Hutchison, Theorizing Emotions in World Politics. International Theory, 6, 491–514, 2014). Focusing on visual representations of emotions, I argue that images depicting moments of distress and misery can be both, powerful in the sense that they raise awareness and provoke emotional responses, and powerless in the sense that they de-politicize the suffering of others. Second, I sketch out a multilevel methodology that intends to capture and study emotions at different sites, including the image itself, its production, circulation, media(tiza)tion, audiencing, and intertextuality.
In contemporary international relations, we are facing a lively discussion among scholars who are using all sorts of visual artifacts. Since representations of international politics in popular culture and mass media have been theorized more systematically, fictional films, TV series, as well as non-fictional documentaries have become relevant research objects. What is still missing is a conceptualization of the genre located between fictional and non-fictional film—docudrama. This genre is highly relevant for IR because many filmmakers have specialized in docudramatic depictions of historic events or more recent issues in international politics in which facts and fiction are combined into narratives about the events and the behavior of the people involved. But analyzing films is not unproblematic. Although a debate on the importance of film analysis in IR is occurring, methodological reflections have only just begun. Accordingly, this article draws on a film analytical methodology developed by Bordwell, which is applied to a docudrama about the Kunduz airstrike of September 2009.
This paper analyzes how Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) creates a narrative identity through articles published in the magazine named Dabiq. Drawing on an iconological approach, the analysis of this paper is based on two articles in which ISIS legitimizes its existence and justifies the terror attack in Brussels. The main findings of the analysis are that the identity of ISIS rests on three main narratives. The first narrative draws on the claims that the West has subjugated Muslims and the Caliphate was founded to protect Muslims and to fight back Western dominance. This narrative claims that Muslims are ‘victims’ and therefore have the right to defend themselves. It draws on commonly known ‘fight against oppression’ and taking revenge-logic to gain legitimacy. The second narrative reveals the religious supremacy of ISIS interpretation of Islam. As a result of this, ISIS establishes a totalitarian identity which separates humanity into ‘real Muslims’ who are followers of the Caliphate and the ‘others’ who are either infidels or apostates who deserve death if they refuse to bend over and pledge allegiance to the Caliph Al-Baghdadi. The third narrative is tightly interlinked with the second as it reveals ISIS aspiration for a global dominance due to the religious supremacy of Salafi-Jihadist Sunnis.
Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. More specifically, it examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the Bundeswehr’s, the German Armed Forces, official channel on Facebook. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the Bundeswehr’s frame of visibility and what remains out of its view.
A response by Laura Shepherd is available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2017.1337981
The enduring war in Syria is the most recent case that has triggered fierce debates within the international community, including at the UN Security Council, about how to respond to massive human rights violations in conflicts. In August 2013, one outrageous incident – the use of chemical weapons in the Ghouta area – (initially) seemed to push some liberal democracies towards military intervention in Syria. Although the videos showing the death of civilians spread worldwide via YouTube, the political impact of these images was mixed. Reflecting on the relation between the circulation and display of video images of suffering and their impact on US politics, we address two related questions in this article: first, how did the US administration react to the terrifying videos of people dying in Syria, people who had presumably been attacked by chemical weapons? Second, how was this incident framed in political discourse in the United States? The aim of this article is to understand the ambivalent and contingent effects of media images on decision-making processes regarding the use of force by liberal democracies in response to massive violations of human rights and international law. We argue that the publication of the videos in question initiated a policy change on the part of the US administration, although it did not result in a military response to massive human rights violations.
Zusammenfassung
Der Beitrag führt Street Art als Analysegegenstand in den Internationalen Beziehungen ein und untersucht die in ihr verhandelten politischen Narrative des Widerstands. Um einen methodischen Rahmen für die Analyse von Street Art zu schaffen, werden Anregungen aus der Protest- und Bewegungsforschung und der Visual Culture Studies in ein methodisches Modell überführt. Anschließend werden zwei Beispielfälle analysiert. Dabei zeigt sich, dass Street Art als transnationales Kommunikationsmittel angesehen werden kann, das visuelle politische Narrative als Teile von Widerstands- und Konfliktdiskursen transportiert.
This book introduces a constructivist approach to the study of terrorism and shows how language in the media affects our perceptions of 'terrorists' and how particular constructions of 'terrorist' automatically make certain counter-terrorism policies possible, logical and seemingly appropriate.
Images play an increasingly important role in global politics but pose significant and so far largely unexplored methodological challenges. Images are different from words. They circulate in ever more complex and rapid ways. I argue that the political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods, even if they are at times incompatible. I defend such a pluralist approach as both controversial and essential: controversial because giving up a unitary standard of evidence violates social scientific conventions; essential because such a strategy offers the best opportunity to assess how images work across their construction, content and impact. I counter fears of relativism, arguing that the hubris of indisputable knowledge is more dangerous than a clash of different perspectives. The very combination of incompatible methods makes us constantly aware of our own contingent standpoints, thus increasing the self-reflectiveness required to understand the complexities of visual global politics.
Methods have increasingly been placed at the heart of theoretical and empirical research in International Relations (IR) and social sciences more generally. This article explores the role of methods in IR and argues that methods can be part of a critical project if reconceptualized away from neutral techniques of organizing empirical material and research design. It proposes a two-pronged reconceptualization of critical methods as devices which enact worlds and acts which disrupt particular worlds. Developing this conceptualization allows us to foreground questions of knowledge and politics as stakes of method and methodology rather than exclusively of ontology, epistemology or theory. It also allows us to move away from the dominance of scientificity (and its weaker versions of systematicity and rigour) to understand methods as less pure, less formal, messier and more experimental, carrying substantive political visions.
Referring to the recent 'visual turn' in Critical Security Studies, the aim of this article is threefold. First, by taking the concept of visual securitization one step further, we intend to theorize the image as an iconic act understood as an act of showing and seeing. This turn to the performativity of the visual directs our attention to the securitizing power of images. Second, this article addresses the methodological challenges of analysing images and introduces an iconological approach. Iconology enables the systematic interpretation of images as images by also taking their social embeddedness into account. In the third part of this article we apply this theoretical and methodological framework to analyse a cover of the TIME magazine published in summer 2010. The cover shows a young Afghan woman whose ears and nose were cut off accompanied by the headline: 'What happens if we leave Afghanistan'. This cover image not only provoked a heated debate in the USA about the (ab)use of images in order to legitimize the continuity of the war in Afghanistan, but shows how gender and the body are visually securitized.
This book is a comprehensive introduction to media ethics and an exploration of how it must change to adapt to today's media revolution. Using an ethical framework for the new 'mixed media' ethics – taking in the global, interactive media produced by both citizens and professionals – Stephen J. A. Ward discusses the ethical issues which occur in both mainstream and non-mainstream media, from newspapers and broadcast to social media users and bloggers. He re-defines traditional conceptions of journalistic truth-seeking, objectivity and minimizing harm, and examines the responsible use of images in an image-saturated public sphere. He also draws the contours of a future media ethics for the 'new mainstream media' and puts forward cosmopolitan principles for a global media ethics. His book will be invaluable for all students of media and for others who are interested in media ethics.
Es seien Welten – so ein häufig vorgebrachter Kritikpunkt –, welche die Analyse von Kultur und die der internationalen Beziehungen trennten. Dafür werden im wesentlichen folgende drei Punkte genannt: In ihrer Universalität und Vieldeutigkeitentziehe sich Kultur der empirischen Analyse und Meßbarkeit sowie der Feststel-lung kausaler Zusammenhänge (Faure/Rubin 1993b: 228; Zartman 1993). Als inter-subjektives Phänomen sei Kultur nur durch eine interpretative Methode zu fassen(Eriksen/Neumann 1993: 234; Walker 1990: 9).1Weil Kultur auf die Einzigartig-keit einer Gemeinschaft und die Differenz zwischen verschiedenen Gemeinschaftenverweise, lasse sie sich nicht in universelle, d.h. akteursunspezifische Theorien, wiesie in den Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) dominieren, integrieren (Walker 1991:166; vgl. Smith 1996). Auf den Punkt gebracht: »Kultur [...] scheint alles zu verkör-pern, was gute, positivistisch ausgebildete IB-Spezialisten hassen sollten. Sie ist einunvermeidbar vages Konzept, versperrt sich Stringenz und Präzision und ist offenfür unendliche Reinterpretationen« (Rengger 1992: 85; unsere Übersetzung).
Ist die Einbeziehung von Kultur in die empirische Analyse der internationalenBeziehungen somit ein Ding der Unmöglichkeit? Wir wollen in diesem Literaturberichtder Frage nachgehen, ob die angeblich so unterschiedlichen Herangehenswei-sen von IB-Analysen und Kultur-Ansätzen nicht doch füreinander fruchtbar gemachtwerden können.
This book provides a major review of the state of international theory. It is focused around the issue of whether the positivist phase of international theory is now over, or whether the subject remains mainly positivistic. Leading scholars analyse the traditional theoretical approaches in the discipline, then examine the issues and groups which are marginalised by mainstream theory, before turning to four important new developments in international theory (historical sociology, post-structuralism, feminism, and critical theory). The book concludes with five chapters which look at the future of the subject and the practice of international relations. This survey brings together key figures who have made leading contributions to the development of mainstream and alternative theory, and will be a valuable text for both students and scholars of international relations.
Das Handeln von Fotojournalisten in Konflikten stellt einen bisher wenig beachteten Teilbereich des Auslands- und Konfliktjournalismus dar. Felix Koltermann wirft erstmals in Form einer vergleichenden Kommunikatorstudie einen differenzierten Blick auf journalistisches Handeln internationaler, israelischer und palästinensischer Fotoreporter in Israel/Palästina. Ausgehend von 40 qualitativen Interviews arbeitet er Unterschiede in den Routinen und Praktiken der Nachrichten- und Dokumentarfotografie heraus und rekonstruiert den Einfluss des israelischen Besatzungsregimes auf die Akteure und Strukturen des internationalen Fotojournalismus in der Region.
Feminist scholars have provided important analyses of the gendered and racialised discourses used to justify the Global War on Terror. They show how post-9/11 policies were made possible through particular binary constructions of race, gender, and national identity in official discourse. Turning to popular culture, this article uses a Queer feminist poststructuralist approach to look at the ways that Ms. Marvel comics destabilise and contest those racialised and gendered discourses. Specifically, it explores how Ms. Marvel provides a reading of race, gender, and national identity in post-9/11 USA that challenges gendered-racialised stereotypes. Providing a Queer reading of Ms. Marvel that undermines the coherence of Self/Other binaries, the article concludes that to write, draw, and circulate comics and the politics they depict is a way of intervening in international relations that imbues comics with the power to engage in dialogue with and (re)shape systems of racialised-gendered domination and counter discriminatory legislation.
Dibujando miedo a la diferencia: raza, género e identidad nacional en Ms. Marvel Comics
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41358-019-00188-1
Wie alle sozialen Phänomene liegen auch die analytischen Entitäten der Politikwissenschaft nicht mit naturgegebenen Eigenschaften vor, sondern sie entstehen in sozialen Konstruktionsprozessen, die im Zuge wissenschaftlicher Forschung einer neuerlichen Interpretation unterzogen werden. In diesem Sinne ist jedes politikwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, ob positivistisch oder konstruktivistisch, ob verstehend oder erklärend, (in je spezifischer Weise) mit der Herausforderung des regelgeleiteten und nachvollziehbaren Interpretierens konfrontiert. Vor diesem Hintergrund führt der Artikel in den Sonderband der Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft ein, der das Ziel hat, eine Bestandsaufnahme zum Status, zur Praxis und zu den Implikationen von Interpretationen innerhalb der Politikwissenschaft vorzulegen und diese zugleich systematisch und über Teildisziplinen hinweg voranzutreiben.
From October 2017 to May 2018 the Imperial War Museum London presented ‘the UK’s first major exhibition of artists’ responses to war and conflict since 9/11’, Age of Terror: Art since 9/11. Drawing together 50 works of art by over 40 international artists into four themed sections (‘9/11’, ‘State Control’, ‘Weapons’, and ‘Home’) the exhibition met with mixed responses from critics, as well as mixed reviews by members of the public. Curatorial practices are, however, fraught by virtue of the necessity – an essential part of a creative practice – to leave certain things out. Paying attention to these ‘missing figures’ in Age of Terror in relation to the wider politics and power of the Global War on Terror as it has evolved and been studied offers insight into the everyday cultures of war that go unquestioned. More specifically, we can examine Age of Terror’s encounters with three missing figures of the war: the missing dead of 9/11 and missing information, which are curated as an ‘absent presence’ in this exhibition; the missing figure of the war fighter as opposed to the war casualty, which are only tangentially referenced; and the missing figure of the everyday practices of war cultures, as opposed to the cultures which represent war as spectacular. Collectively these missing figures, under-examined within the exhibition, are part of the forces that help to continue to make the Global War on Terror make sense almost 20 years on.
The picture of 3-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015, was lauded as iconic after it went viral. Within hours, Aylan was a symbol, a hashtag and a meme. This project analyzes funerary Aylan memes to understand their meanings and functions as they proliferated in cyberspace. Through iconographic tracking and visual rhetorical analysis, the project expands the functions of memes from visual jokes and social and political commentary to tools of grieving and atonement. The study demonstrates how memes are deployed to subvert and renegotiate reality, in this case to create a ‘better ending’ for the child and seek reparations for his death. The project also suggests that the rhetorical powers of iconic images may be eroding in remix culture due to their digital appropriations.
The visual politics of “the state” is about the state’s aesthetic representation, about how it is displayed, seen, sensed or felt. One of the best ways to understand how the aesthetics of the state operates is to draw an analogy to the aesthetic practices of individuals. We engage in cosmetic practices so we not only feel good but look good as well. Some of us wear makeup and/or work out to have more “attractive” bodies. We may even go through cosmetic surgery (botox, implants, tummy-tucks, etc.) so that we will look better to others and even to ourselves. Look at how popular media stars are constantly and carefully crafting their “image” in visual ways. Paparazzi often scour beaches and nightclubs to get action shots that catch glamorous individuals offguard - perhaps appearing dishevelled, intoxicated. Such stars otherwise carefully attend to their appearances. The strain of the visuality of individuals is that they cannot “look good” all the time - yet it is precisely the temporal condition of images that makes them so insecure. Captured in a seemingly arbitrary moment, the image can nevertheless last for ever. For those who are especially under the limelight of the media, one cannot look less-than-ideal. Of course, it’s impossible to maintain this cosmetic perfection forever, hence the insecurity that attends to those particularly attuned to their appearances. © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Roland Bleiker; individual chapters, the contributors.
Der Band versucht politik- wie auch kommunikationswissenschaftliche Fragestellungen und methodische Herangehensweisen zusammenzuführen, die sich mit dem Thema Krieg auseinandersetzen. Der Schwerpunkt liegt hierbei in der visuellen Politik, die sowohl das Genre Spielfilm umfasst, aber darüber hinaus auch aktuelle Medienberichterstattung im Fernsehen, z.B. zum Krieg im Kosovo, bis hin zur simulierten Realität in Computerspielen. Neben ausgewählten thematischen Schwerpunkten der Zeitgeschichte, wie dem Vietnam-Krieg, werden allgemeine filmhistorische Fallbeispiele für Kriegs- und Antikriegsfilme sowie Revolutionsfilme präsentiert und filmtheoretische Abhandlungen kritisch reflektiert. Die generelle Frage danach, was bei der visuellen Inszenierung von internationaler Politik und der Darstellung von Gewalt, Konflikten und Kriegen dokumentarisch ist, was manipulierte semi-Realität oder reine Fiktion, verlangt nach exemplarischen Analysen. Hierzu liefern die Beiträge des Bandes Vertiefungen und Fallbeispiele.
In September 2015, the photographs of a dead boy, Alan Kurdi, washed up on a beach near the Turkish city of Bodrum, inspired countless reactions of indignation and protest. To understand the protest dynamic that emerged around these photographs, this article discusses three sets of explanatory observations: (a) that the Kurdi photographs had important aesthetic and inter-iconic qualities, (b) that the central ‘Kurdi on the beach’ photographs were juxtaposed with a range of ‘Kurdi alive’ photographs brought into the public sphere by intimate injustice interpreters and commentators (i.e. Kurdi’s aunt and father), and (c) that they displayed an interpretive openness that allowed for ideological and geographical diversity in political meaning work. In seeking to offer an explanation of the dramatic diffusion of Kurdi, the article also illuminates some new powerful trends in activism around injustice photographs. While the global and protest-driven diffusion of injustice photographs is not historically novel, the new media ecology of Web 2.0 is profoundly transforming the way photographs are politicized. This transformation involves unprecedented opportunities for individualized, creative, and memetic protest.
This article argues that appropriations are central to the production and reception of visual icons: appropriations are instrumental in iconization processes as they confirm and consolidate the iconic status by recycling the image in question. Moreover, appropriations are vital to their reception as they help shape and delimit the publics and discourses surrounding visual icons. This article draws on existing research on icons and appropriations to develop a theoretical framework for how appropriations construct, confirm, and contest icons and how personification constitutes the main link between icons and their appropriations. Three sets of appropriations are analyzed of the iconic imagery of Alan Kurdi, the refugee boy drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. First, the numerous appropriations circulated under the Twitter hashtag #humanitywashedashore. Based on genre analysis of these appropriations, two overall modes are singled out: the appropriations decontextualize or recontextualize the figure of Kurdi. The two next analytical cases test the limits of decontextualization and recontextualization: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei decontextualizes the Kurdi imagery in a controversial reenactment, while a series of cartoons by French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo inserted the photo into contested contexts to critique why and how this imagery was turned into an icon.
Gabi Schlag zeigt anhand einer interpretativen Rekonstruktion der intergouvernementalen Verhandlungen zur Europäischen Verteidigungsgemeinschaft (EVG) zwischen 1950–1954 und der Europäischen Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik (ESVP) zwischen 1998-2001, wie Europa und die EU als globaler Sicherheitsakteur konstituiert werden. Die Autorin kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sich die Sinnstiftung der EVG Anfang der 1950er Jahre auf einer transatlantischen Diskurs- und Praxisgemeinschaft gründet während sich die Diskurse und Praktiken zur Ausgestaltung der ESVP seit 1998 von diesem Verständnis lösen. In Anlehnung an diskurs- und praxistheoretische Ansätze in den Internationalen Beziehungen versteht die Autorin Außenpolitik als eine kulturelle Praxis, die kollektive Akteure durch die Mobilisierung symbolischer Ordnungen und deren praktischen Vollzug stets aufs Neue erfindet. Gerade ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansatz ist somit hilfreich, um den kontinuierlichen Gestaltwandel europäischer Außenpolitik zu analysieren.
Der Inhalt
• Diplomatie und internationale Politik
• Interpretative Sozialforschung
• Europäische und transatlantische Sicherheitspolitik
• EU als globaler Sicherheitsakteur
• Internationalisierung der EU
• Interpretative Sozialforschung
• Europäische und transatlantische Sicherheitspolitik
•
EU als globaler Sicherheitsakteur• Internationalisierung der EU
• Interpretative Sozialforschung
• Europäische und transatlantische Sicherheitspolitik
• EU als globaler Sicherheitsakteur
• Internationalisierung der EU
Die Zielgruppen
• Dozierende und Studierende der Politikwissenschaft, Soziologie, Geschichtswissenschaft
• Praktiker aus dem Bereich der Diplomaten
Die Autorin
Dr. Gabi Schlag ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Otto-von-Guericke Universität Magdeburg.
International Relations (IR) literature on the visual construction of the international does not systematically engage with the visualisation of peace. In this article, I make photographic discourses available to IR scholars interested in the visual construction of the international and invite IR scholars to substantialise these discourses based on their specialist knowledge on war, violence, conflict and peace. I engage with aftermath photography by challenging its almost exclusive focus on war and the legacy of violence. Furthermore, I engage with Fred Ritchin's notion of peace photography and Cynthia Weber's attempts at visualising peace. Problematising claims to universality, generalisability and causality, I emphasise that the relation between images and peace is episodic, not causal; that visions of peace, reflecting specific cultural configurations, cannot claim universal validity; and that peace photography has to move beyond aftermath photography's focus on the legacies of the past. Finally, I briefly look at the work of Joel Meyerowitz and Rineke Dijkstra, the one displaying aftermath as a beginning sustaining power, the other photographically accompanying a person's adaptation to a new, more peaceful environment.
In 1984, I moved to Paris to begin my undergraduate education at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po). Sciences Po offered a series of seminars ostensibly to help foreigners (including me at that time) pass the entrance exam. What I remember from these is a chain smoking ‘M. Thomas’ doing his utmost to convey the message that Sciences Po was an elite institution, that entering it was like entering a ‘gulag’ and that only the best would ‘survive’ (his expressions). I also recall finding M. Thomas and his universe rather bizarre. A few years later, this was no longer true. I looked at French education in a new way just as Iver Neumann (in this book) looked at women differently after working with fur-coats. But more significantly, I had become intensely aware of the (often inarticulate) hierarchies and power relations of practices.
We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated to great masses soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we accept them as real.
The 21st century is awash with ever more mixed and remixed images, writing, layout, sound, gesture, speech, and 3D objects. Multimodality looks beyond language and examines these multiple modes of communication and meaning making. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication represents a long-awaited and much anticipated addition to the study of multimodality from the scholar who pioneered and continues to play a decisive role in shaping the field. Written in an accessible manner and illustrated with a wealth of photos and illustrations to clearly demonstrate the points made, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication deliberately sets out to locate communication in the everyday, covering topics and issues not usually discussed in books of this kind, from traffic signs to mobile phones. In this book, Gunther Kress presents a contemporary, distinctive and widely applicable approach to communication. He provides the framework necessary for understanding the attempt to bring all modes of meaning-making together under one unified theoretical roof. This exploration of an increasingly vital area of language and communication studies will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of English language and applied linguistics, media and communication studies and education.
World of our Making is a major contribution to contemporary social science. Now reissued in this volume, Onuf’s seminal text is key reading for anyone who wishes to study modern international relations.
In The Right to Look , Nicholas Mirzoeff develops a comparative decolonial framework for visual culture studies, the field that he helped to create and shape. Casting modernity as an ongoing contest between visuality and countervisuality, or “the right to look,” he explains how visuality sutures authority to power and renders the association natural. An early-nineteenth-century concept, meaning the visualization of history, visuality has been central to the legitimization of Western hegemony. Mirzoeff identifies three “complexes of visuality”—plantation slavery, imperialism, and the present-day military-industrial complex—and explains how, within each, power is made to seem self-evident through techniques of classification, separation, and aestheticization. At the same time, he shows how each complex of visuality has been countered—by the enslaved, the colonized, and opponents of war, all of whom assert autonomy from authority by claiming the right to look. Encompassing the Caribbean plantation and the Haitian revolution, anticolonialism in the South Pacific, antifascism in Italy and Algeria, and the contemporary global counterinsurgency, The Right to Look is a work of astonishing geographic, temporal, and conceptual reach.
To be a critical military analyst is to be a sceptically curious military analyst. Using a critical feminist approach to studying the military can help to generate more reliable explanations and more realistic accountings of the creation and role of any given military and of broader processes of militarization. This article moves from a memorial of an army recruitment stand in Somerville, Massachusetts, to broad questions on the strategies of military recruitment and the ways in which masculinities and femininities are used by recruiters. These questions are central for recruiters in meeting their quotas, yet are regularly ignored by military analysts. These questions include: which genders, ethnicities, sexualities and classes are targeted and excluded for recruitment and reenlistment? How are narrow perceptions of manliness used to encourage enlistments? How are the mothers, girlfriends and wives of potential enlistees engaged with by recruiters? These speak to broader questions on how militaries are created, sustained and deployed. The calculations made by recruiters are usually shielded from view to maintain perceptions of legitimacy within the eyes of citizens. A critical approach to military studies brings these calculations into view and calls for scepticism, a deepening curiosity and a serious engagement with feminist questions.