Images and International Security

TY - CHAP

T1 - Images and International Security

AU - Hansen, Lene

PY - 2018/4/5

Y1 - 2018/4/5

N2 - Photographs, cartoons, video—in sum, visual representations—are crucial to how security problems become known and debated. Yet, images have only recently entered security studies as a particular topic in need of research. This chapter shows how technological innovations, major events, and theory development within the larger fields of humanities and the social sciences explain why and how images have entered security studies. Images are important to security politics because they are capable of evoking emotions and they travel across national and linguistic boundaries in ways that words cannot. Striking images have supported the calls for expanding the concept of security to include non-military threats, such as for example HIV/AIDS or famine. But images may also cause conflicts when they are seen as insulting to core values and identities. The study of images is so complex that a pluralistic methodology and multiple epistemologies are warranted.

AB - Photographs, cartoons, video—in sum, visual representations—are crucial to how security problems become known and debated. Yet, images have only recently entered security studies as a particular topic in need of research. This chapter shows how technological innovations, major events, and theory development within the larger fields of humanities and the social sciences explain why and how images have entered security studies. Images are important to security politics because they are capable of evoking emotions and they travel across national and linguistic boundaries in ways that words cannot. Striking images have supported the calls for expanding the concept of security to include non-military threats, such as for example HIV/AIDS or famine. But images may also cause conflicts when they are seen as insulting to core values and identities. The study of images is so complex that a pluralistic methodology and multiple epistemologies are warranted.

KW - Faculty of Social Sciences

KW - aesthetic politics

KW - cartoons

KW - concepts of security

KW - emotions

KW - epistemology

KW - methodology

KW - photographs

KW - technology

U2 - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198777854.013.39

DO - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198777854.013.39

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9780198777854

SN - 9780191823329

T3 - Oxford Handbooks

SP - 593

EP - 606

BT - The Oxford Handbook of International Security

A2 - Gheciu, Alexandra

A2 - Wohlforth, William C.

PB - Oxford University Press

CY - Oxford

ER -