Visualising the Russia-Ukraine War: A Semiotic Analysis of Arab Social Media Cartoons

Abstract

This study is a verbal-pictorial analysis of the Russia-Ukraine war in Jordanian cartoons. It examines socio-political contexts related to the Russia-Ukraine war through a semiotic analysis of selected political cartoons posted on the official Facebook accounts of two well-known Jordanian cartoonists, Emad Hajjaj and Osama Hajjaj, between January and September, 2022. These cartoons show the conflict through the eyes of Arabs, who may be considered neutral and distanced from the conflict. As such, the study provides novel insights for semiotics by analysing signs in verbo-pictorial entities and demonstrating how verbal and visual signs can work synergistically to connote powerful messages. Sixty-eight political cartoons were collected and classified into the themes of: negotiation, alliance, economic consequences (the food and energy crisis), the Russia-Ukraine war and COVID-19, the refugee crisis, Putin vs. peace, nuclear war, and the mocking of Putin’s policies. We selected a representative cartoon from each theme and analysed their messages via the Roland Barthes model (1967, 1977) according to three types of message: verbal (i.e., text), non-verbal (i.e., denoted visual signs), and symbolic. These verbal and visual signs were used to clarify and interpret the symbolic messages of the selected cartoons. The thematic findings reflect the views and attitudes of an Arab community (Jordanian, in this case) regarding the Russian-Ukraine war.