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Taboos have long been considered key examples of norms in global politics, with important strategic effects. Auchter focuses on how obscenity functions as a regulatory norm by focusing on dead body images. Obscenity matters precisely because it is applied inconsistently across multiple cases. Examining empirical cases including ISIS beheadings, the death of Muammar Qaddafi, Syrian torture victims, and the fake death images of Osama bin Laden, this book offers a rich theoretical explanation of the process by which the taboo surrounding dead body images is transgressed and upheld, through mechanisms including trigger warnings and media framings. This corpse politics sheds light on political communities and the structures in place that preserve them, including the taboos that regulate purported obscene images. Auchter questions the notion that the key debate at play in visual politics related to the dead body image is whether to display or not to display, and instead narrates various degrees of visibility, invisibility, and hyper-visibility.

1. Ghostly politics : an introduction -- 2. 'We're all of us haunted and haunting' -- 3.Bones in a brown bag : haunting and the place of the body in Rwandan genocide memorialisation -- 4. Border monuments : memory, counter-memory, and (b)ordering practices along the US-Mexico border -- 5. Vanishing monuments : absence and 9/11 memorialisation -- 6. After ghostly politics : some conclusions.

"International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology to consider the politics of life and death, Auchter traces the story of how life and death and a clear division between the two is summoned in the project of statecraft. She argues that by letting ourselves be haunted, or looking for ghosts, it is possible to trace how statecraft relies on the construction of such a dichotomy. Three empirical cases offer fertile ground for complicating the picture often painted of memorialization: Rwandan genocide memorials, the underexplored case of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border, and the body/ruins nexus in 9/11 memorialization. Focusing on the role of dead bodies and the construction of particular spaces as the appropriate sites for memory to be situated, it offers an alternative take on the new materialisms movement in international relations by asking after the questions that arise from an ethnographic approach to the subject: viewing things from the perspective of dead bodies, who occupy the shadowy world of post-conflict international politics. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, security studies, statecraft and memory studies"--

"International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology to consider the politics of life and death, Auchter traces the story of how life and death and a clear division between the two is summoned in the project of statecraft. She argues that by letting ourselves be haunted, or looking for ghosts, it is possible to trace how statecraft relies on the construction of such a dichotomy. Three empirical cases offer fertile ground for complicating the picture often painted of memorialization: Rwandan genocide memorials, the underexplored case of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border, and the body/ruins nexus in 9/11 memorialization. Focusing on the role of dead bodies and the construction of particular spaces as the appropriate sites for memory to be situated, it offers an alternative take on the new materialisms movement in international relations by asking after the questions that arise from an ethnographic approach to the subject: viewing things from the perspective of dead bodies, who occupy the shadowy world of post-conflict international politics. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, security studies, statecraft and memory studies"--

This article analyses the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror. The author particularly focuses on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, she tells the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whose body has been destroyed by the body of another, even as the technology of drone strikes also operates by exploding bodies, but through the purported precision of techno-military operations. Such technology re-categorizes civilian death as collateral damage, defining these deaths as technological effects rather than as biological, embodied ones. This acts to disembody dead civilians even as increased attention is being given to soldier bodies (both dead and injured). In this sense, the author is not arguing that civilian death has become disembodied by virtue of the distancing caused by the drone apparatus. Rather, she seeks to tell a more complicated story of how the drone gaze functions as a perpetrator gaze, and who and what it sees.

Noelle Kateri Brigden's The Migrant Passage offers a masterful interweaving of rich ethnographic story-telling and theory-building. The book is the result of more than two years of field work in El Salvador and Mexico, along key routes for border crossers. Brigden draws on an anthropological orientation to theorize crossing itself, focusing on how migrants' journeys are characterized by improvisations, and how these improvisations shift and alter the political and material landscapes of Mexico.

Drawing on the purported relationship between trauma and the desire to generate collective identity, this paper uses the framing of ontological security to examine burial as a mechanism of memorialization. I argue that states often turn to dead body management as a means of securing themselves and their identities. Burial and reburial can function as a mechanism of governance by states seeking ontological security. What happens to the dead is often politically contested. Because of this, states seek to intervene in contested spaces to solidify their identities through the mechanism of dead body management. I consider burial as a mechanism of state identity construction. Because graves, particularly mass graves, are sites where questions of human dignity are explored, they are also productive sites of examination of the logic of memorialization governing political violence. As a result, I seek to examine the processes by which gravesites and burial and reburial become mechanisms of the state performing ontological security.

The after-effects of mass atrocity – bodies and bones – struggle to be defined
within memorial projects. This article seeks to examine the politics at play in
displaying dead bodies to interrogate the role of materiality in efforts to
memorialise and raise awareness about on-going violences. It focusses on the
nexus between evidence, dignity, humanity and memory to explore bone display in
Rwanda. It then takes up two artistic projects that play on the materiality of
human remains after atrocity: the art of Carl Michael von Hausswolff, who took
ashes from an urn at the Majdanek concentration camp and used them as the
material for his painting, and the One Million Bones Project, an installation
that exhibits ceramic bones to raise awareness about global violence. In
thinking about the intersections between human biomatter, art and politics, the
article seeks to raise questions about both production and consumption: how
bones and ashes of the dead are produced, and how they are consumed by viewers
when placed on display in a variety of ways.

A wise philosopher once said that "wars do not make one great". Yet the idea of war as a test of power remains a strong disciplinary norm within international relations. Disciplinary history is temporalized, with key eras defined as significant, as in the key division of the study of international politics into eras (the interwar period, the post‐Second World War international order, the post‐Cold War era), and wars demarcate these eras and act as defining moments in international politics. As we now reflect on the centenary of the First World War, it bears reflecting on the position this particular war occupies within the study of international politics.