In a cooperation with Tiffany Fairey, we have contributed the chapter “Peace Photography, Visual Peacebuilding and Participatory Peace Photography” to The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding Communication, edited by Stacey Connaughton and Stefanie Pukallus (chapter 36). The handbook was published online on 29 October 2024.
In this chapter, we argue that peace photography as both a concept and a practice communicates, and contributes to, peace and peacebuilding. We explore the complex relationship between photography and peace with emphasis on participatory peace photography projects and visual peacebuilding.
Images shape politics by conditioning what is visible and what is not and, accordingly, determine what matters politically and what does not. It is tremendously important, therefore, to focus attention on the visualization of peace because what we see determines what we deem possible.
In order to qualify as critical interventions, peace images have to refrain from merely recycling the visions of the world that conventional photojournalism and image-savvy policymakers deliver.
Among other things, peace images have to move from a merely documentary to an explicitly pro-active form of representation that can hold plural perspectives and engage with complexity; understand the aftermath of a violent conflict as an event that is worthy of visual representation; cultivate a different and, perhaps, less spectacular aesthetics than war photography; change people who have been the objects of others’ photography into agents of their own image with own, individual visions of peace; focus on the process of image generation, not the end product; and, whilst engaging with what was and what is, push beyond the past and present to imagine a new future and create the notion that peace is possible even in adverse circumstances.
According to the publisher, this handbook, edited by Stacey Connaughton (Purdue University) and Stefanie Pukallus (University of Sheffield), provides a comprehensive review of research in conflict and peace communication and offers readers a range of insights into foundational, ongoing, and emerging discussions in this field. It brings together peace studies, conflict studies, and communication studies to acknowledge the power of communication—both cooperative, solidarizing, and integrative as well as destructive and divisive—in constituting social relations.
Rasmus Bellmer, Tiffany Fairey and Frank Möller, “Peace Photography, Visual Peacebuilding and Participatory Peace Photography” in The Routledge Handbook of Conflict and Peacebuilding Communication, edited by Stacey Connaughton and Stefanie Pukallus (chapter 36), New York: Routledge, 2025, ISBN 9781032490489, 462 Pages, 25 B/W Illustrations.
The book can be accessed here.