Visual Security Studies

Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War

Juha Vuori, Rune Saugmann, Juha Vuori, Rune Saugmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781315387567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The present volume engages visuality in security from a variety of angles and explores what the subfield of Visual Security Studies might be.

To structure this experimentation, and to encourage a more careful and multifaceted approach to visuality and security, the main conceptual move in this volume is to envision three different transversal meeting points between security and visuality: visuality as a modality (active in representations and signs of security), visuality as practice (active in enacting security), and visuality as a method (active in investigating security). These three approaches structure the book together with three areas in which we see visuality as especially pertinent in relation to security: in security technologies that (en)vision security and are themselves the objects of visions of security; in spectacles of security and security spectatorship; and in ways of making security visible.

In this way, the volume works to sensitize International Relations research to visual forms of knowledge and practice by examining visual aspects of security. At the same time, it allows for debate on how this particular modality of the sensible not only affects what is visible and what is not, but also how authority and truth-claims come about, and how they are compared and evaluated. Through engagement with security via the 'language' or 'code' of the visual, it is possible to interrogate how scholars in the field understand visuality as well as the economy, grammar, and performativity of visual articulation and the production of knowledge. The volume also examines how visuality can be used as a method in doing research, and as a way of presenting research results.

Visual Security Studies is not a new theory of security or its study; instead, the present volume suggests that visuality should be envisioned as an aspect of security studies that can be incorporated into pre-existing approaches. The aim is to highlight how much of contemporary practice is visual and to foster an increased attentiveness to visuality in security politics, security practice, and to the possibilities of employing visual research methods in security scholarship.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security, media studies, surveillance studies, visual sociology, and IR in general.

1 Introduction

Visual security studies

Rune S. Andersen and Juha A. Vuori

In the opening of Writing and Difference, Derrida (2002: 1) describes the structural project with a bold claim: ‘What is at stake, first of all, is an adventure of vision.’ Fifty years later, what he termed the ‘structuralist invasion’ continues to occupy parts of the social sciences through post-structuralist camps as well as visual and aesthetic turns, and the adventure of vision is still ongoing.

As part of this adventure, a Visual Security Studies is emerging as a subfield of (critical) Security Studies. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s terms, this new subfield is an ‘interdiscipline’, that is, ‘a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines’ (Mitchell 1995: 540). Visual security studies is thus indebted to multiple disciplines, even though it is primarily nested in and descending from security studies. Indeed, the importance of visuality for security and conflict is indicated by the rising numbers of scholarly works devoted to visual aspects of security within disciplines such as international relations and security studies, media and visual culture studies, urban geography, surveillance studies, anthropology, and sociology. It is possible to interrogate the economy, grammar, and performativity of visual articulations and the production of security by engaging them via the languages, codes, modalities, media, and emotional registers that connect with visuality. As a multidiscipline, scholars from different fields that touch upon the visual production of contemporary security bring with them different understandings of visuality and of how visualities intersect with (in)security, just as they do in regard to security (Bourbeau 2015).

To give but a few examples of developments in such connected fields, media studies has paid increasing attention to topics at the heart of traditional security studies. The journal Media, War and Conflict is the clearest expression of this sustained interest. Here, visualities of security are often seen in a wider contemporary media landscape, rather than as a separate modality of knowledge. Important recent work has, inter alia, studied the changes in the digital mediation of crises, disasters, and wars (Seib 2008; Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2011), as well as the roles played by institutions and citizens in such mediation (Chouliaraki 2006, 2013). In a similar vein, war and conflict have become important research topics for visual culture studies with a number of works devoted to the visual cultures of the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the way in which these impact and interact with larger cultural currents in Western culture (Mirzoeff 2005; Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011). More historically minded explorations have interrogated how the visual colonial experience and the visual cultures of Western art continue to inform visualities as well as scopic regimes of war and conflict (Mirzoeff 2011). Focusing on the mundane of urban life, surveillance studies has since its inception cultivated an acute attention to the workings of the electronic eye of the surveillance apparatus (Lyon 1994). Together with sociological and criminological insights, these studies have produced both works on visual knowledge production, and in a more Foucauldian tradition, on the structuration of society through visual surveillance practices (Finn 2012; for such concerns in visual security studies see, e.g. Andersen and Möller 2013).

Such examples are important for visual security studies when it combines insights from multiple fields in regard to understanding the role visuality can play in the expanded field of security studies. They can allow leveraging some of the previous research gains by paying attention to disciplines that are more advanced in their engagements with visuality. In this way, VSS builds on the pictorial turn in the social sciences, the related aesthetic turn in international relations research (Bleiker 2001), and innovative research programmes in security studies. The incorporation of first the use of security language (e.g. Buzan et al. 1998) and then practices of enacting security (e.g. Huysmans 2014) into the study of security have taught us much about the politics of security during the past quarter of a century. From these viewpoints ‘security’ is a modality (Hansen 2000: 296) or a rationale (Huysmans 2006: 147) that can operate in the absence of ‘security words’. These kinds of studies have highlighted the negative side of security, and participated in elucidating how the logic of considering security to be inherently positive is faulty. Rather than a positive or a good for all, the increase of security for some often means its sacrifice for others (Bigo 2008: 124). In the everyday, and beyond security speech, this field explores security practices that focus on bodily movements such as saying and doing, both explicit and tacit knowledges, and objects (Bueger 2016), as well as networks of security actants (Schouten 2014). Visual security studies do and can benefit from such viewpoints by paying attention to institutional practices of visuality, affects and emotions, and media environments in the investigation of visual security practice.

As already suggested above, the critical study of security has emphasized the ambiguity of international security. Security, accordingly, is something that we cannot fully grasp. This is the case whether it be understood in more abstract terms as states of being, sets of relations, modes of reasoning and acting, identities and understandings, or more concretely connected to episodes of violence conceptualized as rebellions, wars, systematic repression, and so on. Visuality is deeply implicated in events, relations, and identities, in how we get to know them, and in how we can critically engage them. This volume works to sensitize research dealing with visualities of security and the international to visual forms of knowledge through a series of adventures in visual security. These open up what visuality might mean for the study of security and explore how different conceptions of visualities are implicated in security practice and politics. It allows for debate on this particular modality of the sensible (Barthes 1973; Rancière 2004): how it affects what is visible and what is not, how it affects the ways in which knowledge, authority, and truth-claims come about, are compared, and evaluated, and how it intervenes in security and the daily experience of it. This hopefully opens up for further ocular investigations and critiques of security, its politics, and its practice. It is in this sense that we quote Derrida to the effect that what we put at stake is ‘an adventure of vision’: the aim of this project goes in line with Derrida’s remark upon the structuralist project, to effect ‘a conversion of the way of putting questions to any object posed before us’, with that object being security (Derrida 2002: 1).

Indeed, despite its parentage in international security studies, VSS is not a new theory of security or its study; instead, VSS is here envisioned as an aspect of security studies that can be incorporated into pre-existing approaches. The aim is to highlight how much of contemporary practice is visual and to foster an increased attentiveness to visuality in security politics, security practice, and the possibilities of employing visual research methods in security scholarship.

To encourage a more careful and multifaceted approach to visuality and security, the main conceptual move in this volume is to envision three different transversal meeting points between security and visuality: visuality as a modality (active in representations and signs of security), visuality as practice (active in enacting security), and visuality as a method (active in investigating security). These three approaches structure the book, together with three areas in which we see visuality as especially pertinent in relation to security: in security technologies that (en)vision security and are themselves the objects of visions of security; in spectacles of security and security spectatorship; and in ways of making security visible.

In fostering such encounters, the present volume brings together scholars from a number of disciplines to engage with visuality in security (for a similar multidisciplinary engagement with security as such, see Bourbeau 2015). What is shared across these different disciplines is the problem of the irreducibility of images to words (and vice versa), the problem of their non-equivalence. In Foucault’s (2007: 10) words from his oft-cited meditation on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, it is ‘in vain’ that we use words to describe images (or vice versa) since ‘what we see never resides in what we say’. Different semiotic modalities (Jewitt 2011) provide for different affordances (Kress 2010) as vehicles of political communication, identification, governance, and social sorting. The investigation of multimodal political communication and practice has become an ever more pertinent problem for research and teaching across disciplines. Images, whether still or moving, captured, rendered, or drawn always contain a ‘surplus of meaning’ compared to verbal interpretations of them. Yet this surplus and this irreducibility is politically productive, whether we think of it in the day-to-day meetings between security infrastructures and citizens, or in the representations of politics. The task for research is to find ways to work with these issues rather than deny them, ‘to treat their incompatibility as a starting point […] instead of as an obstacle to be avoided’ (Foucault 2007: 10).

A number of crises as well as general developments in security politics during the last few decades make it apparent that visualities of various kinds are important to security and its study. The prominence of video in the activities of the now-notorious Islamic State group is but one example here. Beyond using video as a visual medium for their recruitment and other propaganda purposes, visual artefacts and references are used by the group quite effectively as well. The black flag with a white shadada is ubiquitous in their videos and practical operations, and works to bring together and unite separate groups in a diffuse network spanning different regions (on flags, see Andersen et al. 2016). At the same time, ISIS leverages visual references to US practices in Guantánamo – dressing prisoners to be executed in orange jumpsuits made infamous by that prisoner camp – which gives a sense not only of how important visual mediation is to the constitution of security and its actors, but also how the visuality of security and conflict ‘become “not things we think about, but things we think with” and think through’ (van Veeren 2010: 1725, drawing on Gillis) in day-to-day world politics.

Indeed, rather than listing a few other contemporary examples of visual representations that have greatly influenced world politics, we can try the road of falsification: think of a major conflict or security issue where visuality is not important; or think of contemporary security issues without their visual imprint – Islamic State without propaganda videos, the Iraq war without falling statues and the ‘ghost of Abu Ghraib’ (W. J. T. Mitchell 2011), the Iranian nuclear issue without the satellite images of ‘secret’ underground production facilities at Natanz, or the crisis of European refugee politics without images of overcrowded vessels and drowned children’s still bodies on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Such examples display how visualities often take centre stage in the constitution and conduct of security. This has been facilitated by the profound changes in the media landscape where previously separate media and formats have moved online and converged (Deibert 1997; Jenkins 2004). This allows online visual media to play a key role in the practice, the politics, and the protest against security. In this new media environment, the mediation of security not only combines previously separate formats and modalities (e.g. image, sound, and text) but is increasingly driven by the algorithmic mining of user data rather than editorial concerns. This erodes long-established hierarchies of who gets to speak about security and how (Andersen 2015). The online mediation of security allows for expansion of the kinds of visuals as well as the range of actors capable of producing them. The visualization of conflict is no longer only dependent on embedded media professionals, or images released by officials. Private individuals can gain global circulation for their images of conflict and insecurity through online mediation. Yet, the present exploration of the visuality of security is not intended to be about the changing media landscape, and concomitant changes to the sociopolitical constitution of security. As indicated by the three meeting points outlined above, visualities of security are far from only about the representation of something as security (see also Andersen et al. 2015). Studies in the visuality of security, thus, is better understood as an analytical sensibility (see Moore and Farrands 2013; Vuori 2013; Andersen et al. 2015). The importance of such a sensibility is highlighted by recent changes to the mediated constitution of security, but it predates and is not conceptually dependent on changes in the media, as many of the chapters in this volume show.

Three transversal approaches to visuality in security

There is a multiplicity of disciplines at work in any sustained effort to understand the intersection of visuality and security (Bleiker 2014, 2018). At the same time, there is a multiplicity of scopic regimes at work in security practices. Both make it difficult to provide strict guidance on how to begin an adventure into the visual investigation of security – on how to engage the visualities at play in the translation, contestation, or (re)appropriation of the ambiguous symbol of security into practices, policies, and identities. Indeed, what these multiplicities do is to point to the need of a flexible and open approach. Accordingly, rather than seeking to set strict boundaries for the emerging discipline, we take the adventurer’s approach in the present volume to try to explore what visual security studies might be (cf. Aradau and Huysmans’ 2014 approach of experimentation; or Law...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Fm
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: visual security studies
• PART I Visions of security technology/technological security vision
• PART II Security spectacles and spectatorship
• PART III Making security visible
• Index