Violence and Visibility: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Martschukat, Jürgen; Niedermeier, Silvan

doi:10.1057/9781137378699_1

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…As part of a broader discussion on the representation of war and violence, the concept of in/visibility as related to the military use of force has attracted new attention in recent years; for instance, Butler (2009), Martschukat and Niedermeier (2014), Simons and Lucaites (2017) and Welland (2017) all touch upon questions related to war's in/visibility. In line with definitions brought forward in previous accounts, invisibility may essentially be thought of as the removing out of sight or the slipping out of view; it may be an act of concealment and hiding but also a consequence of the heightened visibility of something else.…”

Section: In/visibilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

Sandman

2021

Critical Military Studies

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The present article advances a conceptual framework for the critical study of the representation of war and military violence. Essentially, it offers a conceptualization of dis/appearances of violence in public discourse, which combines the concepts of in/visibilization, de/ naturalization, and dis/identification. Though they overlap and interweave in terms of what they capture, all three are considered relevant to fully elaborate how violence may dis/appear in narratives on war-like operations. Furthermore, the article exemplifies how one may make use of the conceptual framework, by exploring the representation of violence in Swedish public political debate at the time of active engagement in peace-enforcement and offensive military operations. More specifically, the empirical illustration critically examines the parliamentary debates on ONUC in Congo 1960-1964 and ISAF in Afghanistan 2002. The analysis reveals and details how violence continuously tends to disappear as a reality, as a dilemma and/or as Sweden's own practice and choice. At present, the scholarly debate mainly focuses on the US or the UK. To advance our understanding of the ways in which violence is normalized and made possible, we need refined conceptual tools that allow us to explore the complexity and political work of representations of war and violence in various contexts.

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Section: In/visibilizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

Sandman

2021

Critical Military Studies

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“…Several authors (Han, 2018;Martschukat and Niedermeier, 2013;Tyner, 2016) have pointed out the need to analyse violence in terms of its specific historic conditions of possibility, its changing forms, victims, perpetrators, functions, and perceptions. According to James Tyner (2016), there is no such thing as a trans-historical concept of violence, but rather contexts and contingencies in which violence is socially produced: 'What we understand (and potentially criminalize) as violence is itself the outcome of political practice -practice that is conditioned by any given social formation' (8).…”

Section: New Violent Configurations: From Enclosure To Abandonmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Death by ‘nature’: The European border regime and the spatial production of slow violence

Schindel

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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The logic and temporality of the ‘border spectacle’ have dominated public reception of the violence endured by migrants and refugees on their journey to Europe, thus occluding the manifold ways in which daily, silent, slow violence unfolds through the EU border regime. The claim of this essay is that border assemblages are involved in the deployment of spatialized slow violence, especially through what I define as the political production of exposure to the elements. Scholars have shown how geographic and topographic factors are included in the strategies of border control and have become active factors in the policies of deterrence and ‘neo-refoulement’. Building on this work, I elaborate on the mediated agency of the environmental or ‘natural’ forces in the production of border-related violence. This is a violence that expands in space beyond the location of the geographical state border and extends in time beyond the concrete instance of border crossing. Here, sovereign violence operates not only through an unconditional power of death but also through the abandonment and exposure of migrants to the elements and therefore the production of a zone of mere biological survival, while accountability chains are concealed. What in the Western view is understood as ‘nature’ can be produced, mobilized and instrumentalized as an active factor in the infrastructures of border enforcement, producing spatialized forms of slow violence. This operation does not imply, however, that the possibilities of agency and resistance are neglected. Rather, it points to the allegedly neutral dimension of ‘nature’ towards which border struggles are being displaced.

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Shot/countershot: Essaying images of war and violence in the work of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué

Fletcher

2022

Philosophy of Photography

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This article examines the work of three artists – Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué – who in different ways mobilize the cinematic device of ‘shot/countershot’ in two distinct post-cinematic contexts (the moving image installation and the performance lecture) as a tool for scrutinizing images of war and violence from divergent historical, socio-economic, geopolitical and ethical perspectives. In returning to and reworking this classical cinematic device as an experimental and essayistic mode of montage and critical reflection, all three artists, as I argue, variously seek to counter the ideological naturalization and interpretive framing of representations of war and violence under conditions of digitalization and globalization, as well as to interrogate the interconnections between forms of direct, symbolic and systemic violence.

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Violence and Visibility: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives

Cited by 4 publications

References 21 publications

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

Death by ‘nature’: The European border regime and the spatial production of slow violence

Shot/countershot: Essaying images of war and violence in the work of Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué

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