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"We live in a visual age. Images and visual artefacts shape international events and our understanding of them. Photographs, film and television influence how we view and approach phenomena as diverse as war, diplomacy, financial crises and election campaigns. Other visual fields, from art and cartoons to maps, monuments and videogames, frame how politics is perceived and enacted. Drones, satellites and surveillance cameras watch us around the clock and deliver images that are then put to political use. Add to this that new technologies now allow for a rapid distribution of still and moving images around the world. Digital media platforms, such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, play an important role across the political spectrum, from terrorist recruitment drives to social justice campaigns.This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in todays world."--Provided by publisher.

Popular dissent, such as street demonstrations and civil disobedience, has become increasingly transnational in nature and scope. As a result, a local act of resistance can acquire almost immediately a much larger, cross-territorial dimension. This book draws upon a broad and innovative range of sources to scrutinise this central but often neglected aspect of global politics. Through case studies that span from Renaissance perceptions of human agency to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the author examines how the theory and practice of popular dissent has emerged and evolved during the modern period. Dissent, he argues, is more than just transnational. It has become an important 'transversal' phenomenon: an array of diverse political practices which not only cross national boundaries, but also challenge the spatial logic through which these boundaries frame international relations

Writing in the context of the call for greater diversity, this short commentary makes a dual argument about the need to 'un-discipline' the discipline of International Relations. First: I return to an argument I made many years ago: the need to 'Forget IR Theory' and to explore the key issues in global politics without being constraint by the boundaries of existing debates. Key political problems, from climate change and pandemics, are far too complex to be understood as uniquely international phenomena and through the lenses of disciplinary debates. Second: to un-discipline is not to abandon the study of international relations. Quite the contrary, forgetting the constraining boundaries of academic disciplines can involve engaging back with the discipline of International Relations but, crucially, not on its own terms and not through the debates that have pre-set the boundaries of what is and is not thinkable. Un-disciplining is a process that entails convincing disciplinary scholars of the need to see key dilemmas in global politics in new and creative ways.

The visual is central to global politics. Over the past two decades, scholars in the field of international relations have increasingly recognized and examined the numerous and complex ways in which the visual, the political and the international are intertwined. They have scrutinized how a diverse range of global political phenomena – from war, diplomacy and development to election campaigns and refugee policies – are shaped by images and visual artefacts, such as photographs, film, videogames, satellite images, art, surveillance technologies, monuments and architecture. The purpose of this commentary is two-fold. First: I overview this bourgeoning body of literature on visuality in international relations. I discuss the emergence and evolution of this field of research, drawing attention to the significance of the ensuing contributions. Second: I highlight three key challenges that lie ahead: understanding the changing relationship between visuality and digitalization; embarking on more cross-disciplinary inquires; decolonizing research on visual communication. I end with highlighting that understanding the role of visuality goes far beyond appreciating the political impact of images. Visuality goes to the very core of politics because it shapes how we – as individuals and as collectives – see, perceive and enact the political world around us.

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to introduce and explore the political potential of visual autoethnography. I do so through my experience of working as a Swiss Army officer in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Drawing on my own photographs I examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas. I argue that visual autoethnography can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot – but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses are so widely rehearsed and accepted that we no longer see their partial, political, and often problematic nature. I illustrate this potential in two ways: (1) how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities; (2) how my positionality and my photographs of everyday life in North Korea show that prevailing security discourses are highly particular and biased, even though they are used to justify seemingly objective policy decisions.