Despite the ‘pictorial turn’ in peace studies, integrating visual research methods remains challenging.[i] Academia seems hesitant to put the visual at the heart of its endeavors. Scholars tend to ‘capture’ and categorize meanings by ‘reading images’ instead of allowing themselves to be ‘captured by’ the image and its evocative and imaginative potential.[ii] The image as data, however, demands the researcher to first ‘sit’ with the image and question which certainties might be disrupted. We often approach the image as text, while visual analysis may require alternative methodological steps and reporting techniques.[iii] It is important to ask: ‘What does the image do to us?’ Instead of: ‘How can we label it?’.

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At the time of writing more than 26.000 black and white ‘Peace Now’ posters are spread and attached to public spaces across the Netherlands. The organizers of the initiative, which started in the ‘peace city’ Utrecht, describe the free poster (image 2) as a ‘positive conversation starter’ in the context of increasing polarization.[i] Citizens are, by making the peace sign visible, enabled to express their feelings of powerlessness and ‘wishes for the world’, while wars at a distance continue to rage. According to its makers, the black and white colors represent current societal contrasts. The bold lines also shape the dove and olive branch, two popular examples of peace symbolism. The font of the poster recalls memories of the ‘60s and ‘70s anti-war protests.

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Kurdish cinema is often considered a typical case of ‘cinemas of conflict’ (Smets 2014) and in the common understanding, the Kurds themselves are generally associated with the idea of conflict. In our blog contribution¹ we argue that films can offer views on Kurdish life outside of conflicts and thus contribute to peace. Our article examined how four Turkish–Kurdish films (Kilamek Ji Bo Beko, Güneşi Gördüm, Min Dît-The Children of Diyarbakır, and Meş) understand and represent the Kurdish Question, the Kurdish self, and the opposing other and how this influences the scope of plausible political behaviour. We highlight how both visualizations of negative and positive peace are present in the films, but also in what the films enable and produce. 

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A lot of museum space has been dedicated to war. Libraries and bookshops contain countless volumes of military history. Most of us can think of multiple war films. There are well-established traditions of war reporting and conflict photography. Peace, on the other hand… 

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Given the forum that this blog post^[i] is written for I should state straight away that I consider the arts (visual and performative) to be a form of communication and to have the same kind of transformative power that the more ordinary forms of communication (talk, writing, news media) have. In this I follow Cooley and Dewey – the latter argued that art was the ‘most universal and freest form of communication’, one that is able to break ‘through barriers that divide human beings, which are impermeable in ordinary association’ (Dewey 2005[1934]: 254). Others have argued that art ‘can influence the way people interpret, perceive, and ultimately act in their communities’ (Hawes 2007: 18), ‘communicate and transform the way people think and act’ (Shank and Schirch 2008: 218). Overall, what ‘is expressed within the imagination of art simultaneously constitutes and is constituted by the society; both a reflection of society and a key agent of its transformation’ (Premaratna 2018: 8). It is particularly effective when words don’t seem to be able to capture experiences, trauma, wishes and desires. Understood in this way, the arts are fundamental to and constitutive of civil society and as such, cannot be dismissed as entertainment or ‘add-on culture’; as something peacebuilding missions do not need to prioritise.

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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. 

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