Exploring Visual Culture and Peace
Within the discipline of International Relations (IR), awareness grows that not only the international system is complex but also IR as a discipline. Considerable growth over the last decades coincides with increasing difficulties both to communicate across intra-disciplinary borders and to reach out to policymakers. The same can certainly be said about recent trends in peace and conflict research.
In our new article “Messiness in Photography, War and Transitions to Peace – Revisiting Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace,” we take a closer look at an interactive photography project published in the New York Times on the Web in 1996, Fred Ritchin and Gilles Peress’s project Bosnia: Uncertain Paths to Peace.
We are pleased to announce that we contributed to the special issue for the 50th anniversary of Kosmopolis, the journal published by the Finnish Peace Research Association. In our article, Soveltava visuaalinen rauhantutkimus: Kuvat, rauhanvälitys ja aktiivinen katsominen (in English: Applied Visual Peace Research: Images, Mediation and Active Looking), we explore how images can contribute to peace processes from a more practical perspective, starting a new line of research: Applied Visual Peace Research. To do so, we look at possible ways images can advance peace processes by examining international peace mediation more specifically.
We are pleased to announce our new publication “Visual appropriation: a self-reflexive qualitative method for visual analysis of the international” with International Political Sociology. The article is the outcome of a long-standing research cooperation with Rune Saugmann Andersen, analyzing the contribution of the Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s images to our understanding of international politics.
One year ago, we started our seasonal greetings by stating that “2020 has certainly been an exceptional year”. Now, a year later, we could very well start this email by saying the same thing. At the end of the previous year, we thought, with vaccination campaigns starting, the new year can only be better. Shortly after, we found ourselves in even stronger lockdown situations than before. After being a bit more relaxed over summer, we are now facing even more shocking news about intensive care units that are reaching the limits of their capacities. Therefore, we hope that you and your families and friends got through this intense period without having to cope with serious physical and mental harm.
The capability of visual images to create compassion with distant others, especially suffering others, has always been regarded as one of the strengths of visual representation, especially photography and video documenting, nowadays almost instantaneously, the plight of others. Social documentary and concerned photography, for example, always expected that a politically powerful community, however defined, would respond to its awareness-raising visualizations and politically intervene in, and ameliorate, the conditions photographers could only depict.
Imaging Peace is a 3-year Leverhulme research project that is looking at how participatory, citizen and community photographic initiatives act as (implicit or explicit) forms of peace photography or strategic visual peacebuilding. The project is exploring how community engaged and participatory photographic practices are being harnessed to foster resilience and dialogue, to embed peace and to support the healing and re-building of people and communities in countries and places with recent histories of violence and conflict.
The decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to honor journalistic work by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize 2021 to the Filipina journalist Maria Ressa and her Russian counterpart Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov shows the importance for peaceful social interaction that the Committee assigns to free reporting:
On October 2nd, the German Peace Prize for Photography was awarded to the Nigerian photographer Emeke Obanor’s photo series ‘Heroes’. In his project, Obanor photographically engages with the stories of young women and girls who have been abducted by the Boko Haram sect.
In a moment dominated by critical investigations of the history, continuation, and resurgence of colonial thought patterns and practices – embedded in continuing interest in questions of identity, history, and memory – scholars and artists alike have rediscovered the archive as one of the places where the above issues come together and condition one another. Archives help us, among other things, to define who we are individually and collectively, who we want to be, how we became what (we think) we are, and how we want to be seen by others. However, archives are also structures of exclusion, invisibility, and marginalization and, as such, structures of power and violence that must be approached critically.