Visualizing international politics: From visual securitization to visual governance

Publication Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-2025

Abstract

This chapter explores visual international politics (VIP), comparing visual securitization and visual governance as two approaches to appreciating the political work of images. Securitization theory helps to unpack how visual images can shape foreign policy events through their immediacy, circulation, and ambiguity. It outlines how visual governance can address the political problems provoked in less official spaces, especially when they impact the wider issues of social ordering and world ordering. The chapter shows the visibility strategy’s hermeneutic approach to reading visual securitization, and the visuality strategy’s exploration of how images can actively provoke affective communities of sense that complicate what can be seen, said, thought, and done. The chapter concludes that more attention needs to be paid to (i) the roles of race, colonialism, and intersectionality; (ii) the impact of digital technology; (iii) audience interpretation methods; (iv) the practices of making and producing audio-visual media; and (v) the global politics of the everyday.

Keywords

visibility, visuality, security, governance, hermeneutics, affect

Discipline

International Relations | Political Theory

Research Areas

Political Science

Publication

Oxford handbook of international political sociology

Editor

GODDARD, Stacie; LAWSON, George; SENDING, Ole Jacob

First Page

254

Last Page

272

Identifier

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198854708.013.12

Publisher

Oxford University Press

City or Country

Oxford

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198854708.013.12

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