Images, emotions, and international politics: the death of Alan Kurdi

Abstract

How are images, emotions, and international politics connected? This article develops a theoretical framework contributing to visuality and emotions research in International Relations. Correcting the understanding that images cause particular emotional responses, this article claims that emotionally laden responses to images should be seen as performed in foreign policy discourses. We theorise images as objects of interpretation and contestation, and emotions as socially constituted rather than as individual ‘inner states’. Emotional bundling – the coupling of different emotions in discourse – helps constitute political subjectivities that both politicise and depoliticise. Through emotional bundling political leaders express their experiences of feelings shared by all humans, and simultaneously articulate themselves in authoritative and gendered subject positions such as ‘the father’. We illustrate the value of our framework by analysing the photographs of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian-Kurdish boy who drowned in September 2015. ‘Kurdi’ became an instant global icon of the Syrian refugee crisis. World leaders expressed their personal grief and determination to act, but within a year, policies adopted with direct reference to Kurdi's tragic death changed from an open-door approach to attempts to stop refugees from arriving. A discursive-performative approach opens up new avenues for research on visuality, emotionality, and world politics.

The use of pseudo-causal narratives in EU policies: the case of the European Union Emergency Trust Fund for Africa

“…Hence the resolution to directly address the root causes of the 'problem', i.e., the reasons why migrants leave their home countries. Another 'problem' that a stronger focus on 'root causes' (rather than border or return policies) could address was the significant loss of human lives occurring in the Mediterranean, represented in the media by the death of refugee child Alan Kurdi (Adler-Nissen et al, 2020).…”

Introduction

“…In an article in Nordicom Review some decades back, Jostein Gripsrud (1998) pondered on this confluence, concluding that there were more humanities scholars who had learned to understand social science perspectives than vice versa. However, it seems that with social media exploding as a research field both in the humanities and the social sciences, and with social sciences showing more interest in analysing the increased use of images in political conflict and the role that images play in world politics (Adler-Nissen et al, 2020;Hansen, 2018), new cross-disciplinary forms of media studies have emerged.…”

Visual Militarization During Crisis: The Lenin Moreno and Sebastián Piñera's Cases During the Protests of October 2019

“…De este modo, el trabajo se inscribe desde un prisma teórico en la incipiente bibliografía sobre política visual aplicada a las relaciones internacionales, dentro de los denominados estudios de seguridad visual −VSS, por sus siglas en inglés− (Vuori y Andersen, 2018), y la Visual Global Politics (Bleiker, 2015). Se atienden, así, los efectos performativos que generan las imágenes; es decir, cómo estas últimas y las subjetividades políticas se articulan para intentar legitimar un abanico de respuestas políticas (Adler-Nissen et al, 2020). Como plantea Roland Bleiker (2015), para un análisis de la política visual global, se adoptará una metodología pluralista que, en este caso, se materializa en un análisis de discurso visual y verbal, a partir de fuentes primarias (imágenes difundidas y discursos retransmitidos, respectivamente), y completado con fuentes secundarias vinculadas con esos acontecimientos (artículos de prensa y especializados).…”