Images and International Security

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingBook chapterResearch

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.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Oxford Handbook of International Security
EditorsAlexandra Gheciu, William C. Wohlforth
Number of pages14
Place of PublicationOxford
PublisherOxford University Press
Publication date2018
Pages593-606
Chapter40
ISBN (Print)9780198777854, 9780191823329
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2018
SeriesOxford Handbooks

    Research areas

  • Faculty of Social Sciences - aesthetic politics, cartoons, concepts of security, emotions, epistemology, methodology, photographs, technology

ID: 196908125