Does transnational contention lead to transnational memory? The online visual memory of the February 2003 anti-Iraq War protests

Abstract

In the last weekend of February 2003, between six and ten million people in 60 different countries protested against the imminent Iraq War. Commentators quickly described the worldwide protests as a manifestation of a new form of transnational contention, which would lead to new forms of transnational memory and identity. Building on efforts to connect social movement and memory studies, this article examines if the massive size and transnational nature of the February 2003 anti-war protests resulted in an equally widely shared and transnational form of memory. Following research that describes the crucial role of visual communication for social movements and memory, it approaches this question by studying the size and shape of the online visual memory of the 2003 anti-war protests. Applying the Google Cloud Vision API to retrieve and analyse 1746 online circulations of twenty-five photographs of the 2003 anti-war protests in the period 2003-2019, we find that, compared to other famous images of protest, the online circulation of images of the protests remains limited. This suggests that the massive protests of 2003 did not result in a widely shared and transnational form of memory. Rather than focusing on individual images, this article argues that studying patterns in their online circulation can explain why some movements remain in the public eye, while others quickly disappear from it.