The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence, and the Darfur Conflict

Abstract

Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict, and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500 children's drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evidence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from this event, and the attention that the Darfuri children's drawings have garnered internationally, this article explores the role that drawings, and children's drawings in particular, play in the visualization of conflict and violence. Rather than focusing primarily on the relation between image and text, the article argues that visuality needs to be understood as both an aesthetic and social object, whose production, circulation, and reception transform its political effects. It then shows how children's drawings are both differentially produced, and productive of difference and ambivalence, in the “truthfulness” of conflict.

Data witnessing: attending to injustice with data in Amnesty International’s Decoders project

“…Drawing on previous projects which used satellite imagery to 'watch over' vulnerable villages (Aradau & Hill, 2013;Parks, 2009), Alt Click would address the research challenge of 'data overload' while enabling volunteers to contribute and participate beyond established action formats. Alt Click gave rise to two initiatives: a 'Digital Verification Corps' training volunteers in 'open source investigation' methods over several months; and another part in which 'anyone can be involved' which became Amnesty Decoders.…”

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“…In this sense, the denotative meaning of an image-the explicit, literal meaning (Barthes 1977,17)-that captures or depicts embodied acts holds regardless of genre. What changes is the (truth) value ascribed to different genres of representation (Aradau and Hill 2013).…”

“…Drawn representations provide the opportunity for illustrators to accentuate and call attention to certain ideas, events and experiences that have perhaps been silenced/made invisible (Aradau and Hill 2013;Chute 2016). Through drawing, bodies are/can be visualised and, thus, the interaction and inseparability of text-image-practice analysed.…”

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“…According to Möller, the ambiguity of the visual implies that "no image can be reduced to the meaning assigned to it in a given [verbal/textual] speech-act, politically motivated or otherwise" (2007: 185). In turn, visual security scholarship has since shown how the polysemy/ambiguity of art can create disruptive post-colonial narratives (Bleiker & Butler 2016), different constitutions of imagery in legal and humanitarian contexts (Aradau & Hill 2013) and the construction of binaries in racialised and gendered discourses (Aradau & Hill 2013, Cloud 2006, Schlag & Heck 2013.…”