Frank Möller and David Shim, “Digital Images in Peacebuilding,” pp. 127–147 in Social Media and Peacebuilding: How Digital Spaces Shape Conflict and Peace, edited by Anna Reuss and Stephan Stetter

Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
Frank Möller and David Shim, “Digital Images in Peacebuilding,” pp. 127–147 in Social Media and Peacebuilding: How Digital Spaces Shape Conflict and Peace, edited by Anna Reuss and Stephan Stetter
People on the Move is one of the most pressing and one of the most visualized issues of our time. While human mobility has been the subject of a huge amount of academic research, we still do not know enough about the main questions that the conference Pragmatics of Peace on the Move: Challenging Perspectives on Mobility-related Conflictivity at Bielefeld University’s prestigious Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZIF) addressed: how do “the peace perspectives held by individuals” relate to “forced mobility” and in what ways are these perspectives enacted?
From October to December 2024, Rune Saugmann (Tampere University) and Frank once again introduced the students of Tampere University to a new, interactive mode of instruction, combining visual research and peace education, in a course titled Interactive Peace Imagery: Eastern Europe in Camera.
At the end of the year, reflections on The End of the World – Alfredo Jaar’s new engagement with the capitalist-militarist exploitation of minerals. This exploitation is indispensable to digitisation, the data-based society, energy transition and ostensibly green economies. Combining private capital with state security interests, it results in intensified, ruthless violence exerted on both human beings and the natural environment, turning Earth into waste and treating human beings as dispensable, sacrificed for the pursuit of profit and national security.
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.
It is with deep sadness that we received the news of the untimely death of Paul Lowe, one of the giants of photojournalism.
Winner of the Global Peace Photo Award – Peace Image of the Year 2024, worth € 6000, is Elisa L. Iannacone, Great Britain / Mexico, with an image from her work Dream of Childhood.
Complexity theory alerts us to the limits of disaggregation in complex settings but research and analysis nevertheless often equal disaggregation. Because a complex social situation cannot be analyzed in its entirety, research often focusses on individual component parts of this situation, analysis of which seems manageable. Analyzing several components and subsequently assembling the results of the individual analyses, researchers hope to gain a complete picture of the overall setting or at least a picture that is as complete as possible.
Everybody remotely interested in the history of photography will immediately recognize the famous names featured in this exhibition – André Kertesz, László Moholy-Nagy, Robert Capa – and their contributions to art and photography: Bauhaus, abstraction, surrealism, photojournalism, street photography, war photography and so on. How the world appears in photography even today cannot be separated from the work of these photographers.
Just in time for your midsummer celebrations, we have an exhibition review for you: The exhibition Robert Capa: The Photojournalist, curated by Gabriella Csizek, shows approximately 150 photographs from the Master Collection. Capa’s most famous photographs can be seen here including a considerable number of images taken during the Spanish Civil War and some of the famous photographs from the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944. Often, Capa was not only a witness but also a participant taking pictures in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances, which supported both the authenticity of his images and his influential claim that proximity to action is an essential ingredient of photojournalism.