William A. Callahan - Sensible Politics - Visualizing International Relations-Oxford University Press (2020)

Sensible Politics
Sensible Politics
Visualizing International Relations
WILLIAM A . CALLAHAN
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN: 978-0-19-007174-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-19-007173-8 (hbk)
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Paperback printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
To my teachers Mike Shapiro and Andy Lawrence,
and to my students in IR318
CONTENTS
List of Figures ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Visualizing International Relations 1
PART I VISIBILIT Y/V ISUALIT Y: A FR AMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS
1. Visibility: The Social Construction of the Visual 19
2. Visuality: The Visual Performance of the International 32
3. Dynamic Dyads: Visibility/Visuality and East/West 46
PART II VISUAL IMAGES
4. Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking 61
5. Visualizing Security, Order, and War 90
6. Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance 117
PART III VISUAL ARTIFACTS AND SENSORY SPACES
7. Maps, Space, and Power 147

viii Contents
8. The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender, and Faith 178
9. Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and the Sublime 209
10. Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace 239
11. Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance 271
PART IV CONCLUSION
Conclusion: Sensible Politics 303
Selected Bibliography 317

Index 341
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009) 23

2.1 “Europe in 2035,” map 2 (2012) 33
2.2 Jia Zhangke, Smog Journeys (2015) 41
4.1 “To fully carry out a patriotic public health movement” (1963) 87
5.1 Bill Anders, Earthrise (1968) 93
5.2 George N. Barnard, City of Atlanta GA No. 2 (1866) 103
5.3 Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe (1770) 104
5.4 Screenshot of Health Services in The Islamic State (2015) 110
5.5 Screenshot of Administration of Bakeries and Ovens (2015) 113
6.1 Selfie of Ai Weiwei offering tea and a blanket to a refugee, Human Flow
(2017) 133
6.2 Drone’s-eye view of a refugee camp, Human Flow (2017) 134
7.1 Chinese U-shaped line map on PRC passport (2016) 150
7.2 Perpetual All-under-the-Heavens Map of the Unified Great Qing Empire
(1811) 158
7.3 Ch’eonhado (ca. 19th century) 161
7.4 Map of Civilization and Barbarians (1136 ce) 164
7.5 Map of China’s Lost Sovereign Land and Maritime Territories
(1927) 168
8.1 NiqaBitch Shakes Paris (2010) 179
8.2 A “white British Muslim convert” (2015) 183
8.3 “Ten Types—One People” pageant winners (1955) 189
8.4 De-veiled woman in The Battle of Algiers (1966) 192
8.5 Visual cultural resistance by Princess Hijab 197
8.6 Official mural for the Beauty Engineering Project, Kashgar (2015) 200
9.1 Immigration counter at Haikou International Airport, China (2016) 213
9.2 Inside and Outside the Gate of Mountains and Seas (1760) 216
9.3 Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrada (2010) 219
ix
x List of Figures
9.4 Chinese ambassador presents Great Wall tapestry to Foreign Ministry of

Pakistan (2014) 221
9.5 Cai Guo-Qiang, Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000
Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (1993) 235
9.6 Negotiating a border wall (2016) 236
10.1 Disaster in Jinling, Nanjing Massacre Memorial (2017) 261
10.2 Disaster in Jinling, close up (1999) 261
10.3 Peace Tower (2009) 262
10.4 Peace through strength (2013) 263
10.5 Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo (2004) 265
10.6 Yasukuni Shrine, Sacred Pond Garden (2016) 267
11.1 “Some tips for internet” at a Chinese hotel (2018) 287
C.1 Patricia Nixon at the US-Mexico border (1971) 309
P R E FA C E
Sensible Politics argues that students of social theory and international relations
(IR) need to appreciate politics as a multisensory performance. This quest to de-
center discursive analytical strategies is the result of my practical experience as a
student and a teacher; in 2010–2011, I took a course titled Japanese Garden Design
in Kyoto and one called Filmmaking for Fieldwork in Manchester, and since 2014
I have taught the course on Visual International Politics at the London School of
Economics.
As a student in the garden design and ethnographic filmmaking classes, I lis-
tened to lectures and studied texts to survey history and theory, but the most inter-
esting part of the courses was their practical instruction. Filmmaking for Fieldwork
is organized around making a set of three films, including the final assignment of
conceptualizing, shooting, and editing an original documentary short; mine was
about pre-teen “girl geeks” who meet on weekends at a museum to do scientific
experiments. In the other course, we performed the aesthetics of Japanese gar-
dens by trimming an imperial garden in Kyoto, and in the “final exam” each stu-
dent designed and constructed a garden in the mountains above the city. People
built different styles and types of gardens. To create a water garden of waterfalls and
pools, I re-arranged rocks and plants along a stream in the valley, while a classmate
integrated rocks, plants, and human artifacts to build a garden on the mountainside.
But we both played with the same conventions to create an aesthetic view of “na-
ture.” In both classes I not only learned new ideas and information, but viscerally felt
the giddiness and cringes of multisensory experiences in ways that arrested rational
understanding.
I try to reproduce this thinking/feeling dynamic each year in my Visual
International Politics class, in which students engage in both the discursive anal-
ysis of visual images and the creative production of a short documentary film. It’s
fascinating to see how students struggle with the challenge of telling stories vis-
ually, and heartening to see how happy they are with the resulting film. Learning
xi
xii Preface
(and then teaching) these aesthetic conventions and practical techniques—which

generally are not discussed in academic literature—pushed me to think about
meaning, value, and politics in less textual and more multisensory ways. These
experiences thus raised many of the questions addressed in Sensible Politics. They
led directly to the book’s chapters that explore film-making and garden-building as
theory-building practices. And they also inform the book’s more general questions
about theory, method, and ethics: What is the relation between the verbal and
the visual, meaning and feeling, the iconic and the everyday, and the West and the
non-West?
I am happy to be part of the recent advances in visual IR and visual culture
studies that take seriously the role of images in international politics. But this
book is also a reaction to frustration with (1) the narrow focus on visual images
of war and violence that come from Euro-American sources and (2) dominant
strategies that turn visuals into texts for discursive analysis. While filmmaking
highlights the importance of visual images, garden-building points to a politics
of visual artifacts and multisensory spaces that also appreciates sound, smell,
touch, and taste. The Asian studies and ethnographic focus of the gardening and
filmmaking courses underlined how concepts, practices, and experiences emerge
from beyond Euro-America. To put it another way, while my previous research
used theory (e.g., poststructuralism) to explain “China,” this book uses “China”
(and other non-Western examples) to make theory. Sensible Politics revisits
previous work in which I conducted discursive analysis of visual images and
artifacts—that is, the politics of films, maps, and gardens—but addresses these
topics in new ways to explore them as visual and multisensory experiences and
performances, where “sensible” also means an attention to everyday pragmatic
practices.
In addition to highlighting the multisensory politics of sight, sound, smell, and
touch, the garden-building final exam also demonstrated the need to appreciate the
spatial and temporal limits of the practice. We were allotted half a day to design and
build our gardens. Because I chose to build a large water garden in a deep valley, it
got dark before I could finish. My classmate’s garden, on the other hand, was not
only beautiful but also complete. That classmate better understood the performa-
tive possibilities of this late Autumn assignment: the tiny garden on a West-facing
hillside took advantage of the golden light of the setting sun. The lesson for me
is that you need to get the right balance of time, space, and place; a professional
doesn’t just create a compelling garden, but makes it the right size in the right place
so it can be finished on time.
Visual and multisensory politics is a growing field that addresses an entangled
ecology of concepts, practices, and experiences. Rather than build a huge garden
to reproduce this expanding world, Sensible Politics is a medium-sized project that
considers a particular set of concepts, practices, and experiences to make some
general points about meaning, value, and ethics. This book aims to decenter our
P reface xiii
understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from the

verbal to include the visual and the multisensory, (2) expanding from Eurocentric
investigations of visual IR to a more comparative approach that looks to Asia and
the Middle East, and (3) shifting from critical IR’s focus on inside/outside and self/
Other distinctions to see politics in terms of creative processes of social-ordering
and world-ordering.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am happy to acknowledge the friends and colleagues who have helped me write
Sensible Politics. Many people have given generous feedback and support over the
years, and I want to especially thank Elena Barabantseva, Roland Bleiker, David
Brenner, Cho Young Chul, Andy Lawrence, and Michael J. Shapiro. I also thank the
students in my Visual International Politics class for helping me work through the
arguments in this book. At Oxford University Press, I thank David McBride and
Emily Mackenzie for their enthusiasm and support for this project.
For hosting presentations and for feedback on chapters, I thank Jonathan Luke
Austin, Tarak Barkawi, Geremie R. Barmé, Oleg Benesch, Franck Billé, Kelly-Jo
Bluen, Clemens Buettner, Kevin Carrico, Pheng Cheah, Timothy Cheek, Carina
Chotirawe, Gloria Davies, Andrew Dellatola, Prasenjit Duara, Mark C. Elliott,
Magnus Fiskesjö, Simon Glezos, Sophie Harman, Christopher R. Hughes, Lene
Hansen, Mark Hoffman, Emma Hutchison, Justyna Jaguscik, Leigh Jenco, Malte
Philipp Kaeding, Wybe Kuitert, Milli Lake, Wendy Larson, Martin Lavicka,
James Leibold, Andy Hanlun Li, Debbie Lisle, Timothy Luke, Aaron McKeil,
Katharine M. Millar, Guanpei Ming, Darren Moon, Naruemon Thabchumpon,
Iver Neumann, Kiri Paramore, Pinitbhand Paribatra, Stephanie Perrazzone, Frank
Pieke, Claire Roberts, Carlos Rojas, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Florian Schneider,
Shawn Smallman, Kaat Smets, Graeme Smith, Vira Somboon, Song Xinning,
Verita Sriratana, Sukunya Bumroongsook, Sumalee Bumroongsook, David Tobin,
Rex Troumbley, Heidi Wang-Kaeding, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Cynthia Weber, Peter
Wilson, Christian Wirth, Yue Zhuang, and Jinghan Zeng. The editors and reviewers
at Millennium (2014), International Political Sociology (2017), and the Review of
International Studies (2018) also helpfully shaped this work.
Valuable research assistance was provided by Lana Bilalova, Daniel Fitter, Kim
Min-Kyoo, Andy Li, Till Schöfer, and Yi Jael Tan.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, two research grants aided this book. The
Leverhulme Trust fellowship supported my participation in The Japanese Gardens
xv
xvi Acknowledgments
intensive seminar at the Kyoto University of Art & Design in 2010 and in the
Filmmaking for Fieldwork intensive seminar at the University of Manchester in
2011. The Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore supported
a visiting research professorship (2012–2013), during which I started the research
for this book. The International Relations Department of the London School of
Economics and Political Science generously supported the “Visual International
Politics” workshop in 2016, the book scrub in 2019, and two undergraduate re-
search assistants. The LSE’s Knowledge Exchange and Impact fund supported the
production of my film Great Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience (2019),
which was an important part of the book’s research project.
Chapters 4, 9, and 10 are refined versions of, respectively, the following
publications:
“The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method,”

Millennium 43:3 (2015):891–910.
“The Politics of Walls: Barriers, Flows, and the Sublime,” Review of International
Studies 44:3 (2018):456–481.
“Cultivating Power: Gardens in the Global Politics of Diplomacy, War and
Peace,” International Political Sociology 11:4 (2017):1–20.
I thank the publishers for their permission to use this material.

Finally, I thank Sumalee for all her help and support: Chaiyo!
Introduction
Visualizing International Relations
Sensible Politics argues that visual international politics is important and different.
First, the visual is important; in our post-literate age, most people get their infor-
mation about international affairs from visual media. Images thus shape our view
of the world, by making some things visible while at the same time making other
things invisible. As illustrated by the widely circulated photograph of the dead
toddler Alan Kurdi lying on a beach in Turkey during Europe’s migration crisis in
2015, iconic photographs can put issues on the international relations (IR) agenda,
even provoking Chancellor Angela Merkel to allow over one million refugees into
Germany. This attention to the politics of framing—who and what are included in-
side the frame of the political, and how people and issues are excluded from the
international—shows how visual media impact international politics. Iconic images
can be very powerful, even demanding an ethical and political response. This book
therefore shows what images can tell us about the elite politics of the state and for-
eign policy, as well as about the non-elite “intimate geopolitics” seen in everyday
self/Other and inside/outside relations. It follows the “aesthetic turn” in IR to argue
that the practice of representation is the site of politics. This attention to the social
construction of the visible is what I call the “visibility strategy,” and it is a powerful
and popular approach to visual international politics.
Second, Sensible Politics’s contribution is not just that images matter, but that
they matter in different ways from what we’re used to and have come to expect.
To get a critical appreciation of international politics, we need to do more than
“add visuals and stir.” This book argues that visual images and artifacts provide an
opportunity to appreciate international politics in a different register that values
both thinking and feeling; it also looks beyond iconic images to the performative
experiences of visual artifacts such as veils, walls, and gardens. Sensible Politics thus
explores how visuals are more than the technical issue of a new way of transmitting
information in a “battle of images.” Because visuals can viscerally move us in un-
expected ways, the book argues that they need to be appreciated not just in terms
Sensible Politics. William A. Callahan, Oxford University Press (2020). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
2 Sensible Politics
of their ideological-value, but also in terms of their affect-work: not just what they
mean, but also how they make us feel, both as individuals and as collectives. The
horrible photo of Alan Kurdi did not simply provide information for a greater un-
derstanding of the plight of migrants; it viscerally moved and connected people in
ways that mobilized “affective communities of sense.”
Although it is common to respond to the challenges of the “post-truth” era by
deconstructing “fake news,” Sensible Politics argues that political critique also needs
to creatively produce sensory artifacts that can move and connect people to fight
such populism. While much visual IR research focuses on inside/outside and self/
Other as sites of identity, security, and exclusion, Sensible Politics also works to re-
frame the questions (and answers) to highlight how visual images and multisen-
sory artifacts are better appreciated in terms of ordering processes: social-ordering
and world-ordering. Ordering here is less a technical problem and more a political
and moral performance, in which people actively visualize the world they want to
live in, as well as the societies that they don’t want to see and feel. The book thus
explores not only how visuals illustrate international events as visual texts, but also
how they can actively create international politics as nonverbal and nonnarrative
performances and experiences. While the visibility strategy works to reveal the
social construction of the visible, here we examine the visual construction of the
social—and the multisensory performance of the international. This is what I call
the “visuality strategy,” and Sensible Politics pursues it to highlight the broader issues
of how visual images and multisensory artifacts can actively provoke “affective com-
munities of sense” that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought,
and done.
The importance of nonverbal, nonlinear, and nonnarrative visual politics is a
tough argument to make. It’s easy to point out the irony of writing a book about
nonverbal politics. But the objective of Sensible Politics isn’t just to convince readers
cognitively, but also to start to move and connect them affectively. As the book’s
chapters illustrate, the purpose is not to switch from one approach to another—
from visibility to visuality, from ideology to affect, from images to artifacts—but
to appreciate how international politics can come alive in different ways through
the productive tension of visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, and images/artifacts.
In other words, the goal is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel
visually—and to creatively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.
To summarize, Sensible Politics makes four key scholarly contributions:
(1) To show how visual international politics is important, it provides a critical ex-
amination of how images shape the way we think about IR in our post-literate
age, in which, for most people, visual media are the main source of information
about the world (i.e., the visibility strategy).
(2) To show how visual international politics is different, it explores how visuals
don’t just illustrate international events as visual texts but also can actively
Int roduc tion 3
create international politics as nonverbal and nonnarrative experiences and

performances (i.e., the visuality strategy).
(3) Recognizing that visual IR is dominated by symbolic analyses of “visual
images”—photographs, film, online video, television, and visual art—Sensible
Politics expands the critical gaze to consider how “visual artifacts” and sensory
spaces—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—can shape international
political phenomena, our perception of them, and popular responses to them.
(4) Since critical analysis is dominated by deconstructions of “Western” visual
images, the book explores how an examination of non-Western visual images
and artifacts challenges our understanding of international politics.
The third and fourth scholarly contributions have been implicit thus far and thus re-
quire further discussion. Both address the empirical issue of what counts as a source
for visual international politics: just images, or artifacts, too? And what happens
when we employ Asian and Middle Eastern examples to argue general points
about IR?
Expanding analysis from two-dimensional visual images to three-dimensional
visual artifacts aids the switch from the symbolic analysis of the politics of repre-
sentation to the affect-work done in multisensory spaces where one can be an ob-
server, a participant, and when things go awry, even a target. It follows from Cynthia
Enloe’s argument that to gain a critical bottom-up understanding of international
politics, we need to switch from research in the halls of power to taking “notes in a
brothel, a kitchen, or a latrine.”1 As Chapter 4, “Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking,”
shows, it is profitable to appreciate such fieldwork sites as sensory spaces, material
modalities, and visual artifacts that can be experienced both individually and collec-
tively. Attention to visual artifacts does not deny that many people experience them
as moving and still images, for example, videos of people partying on the Berlin
Wall in 1989. And this works the other way around, too. Visual images can take on
material form as artifacts and practical experiences; photographs are also material
artifacts that people produce, display, archive, and exchange. Sensible Politics’s goal
is to appreciate visual artifacts as sensory spaces in which international politics is
represented, performed, and experienced through more embodied, affective, and
everyday encounters on the local, national, and world stages. Here “sensible poli-
tics” isn’t just sensory, but looks beyond icons and ideology to the pragmatic poli-
tics of everyday life.
The fourth contribution of Sensible Politics is an empirical expansion of sources
from familiar sites in Euro-America to new and different sites in Asia and the
Middle East. Eurocentrism increasingly is seen as a problem in IR, and much
visual IR addresses this issue through a robust critique of Euro-American images
Cynthia Enloe, “The Mundane Matters,” International Political Sociology 4:5 (2011): 446.
1
4 Sensible Politics
of the non-Western Other. My concern is that Eurocentrism is not simply about

content—such as analysis of the global power of Hollywood—but also about
theory and method, in which the “West as method” dominates discussions of Asia
as well as of Euro-America. How can we address this Eurocentrism of theory and
method? One response is to reverse the East/West power dynamic to see China/
Asia not just as the site of alternative perspectives, but also as the source of a ready-
made, comprehensive, alternative theory: for example, China’s All-under-Heaven
(Tianxia) system as an alternative to the Westphalian system. However, rather than
replacing “Eurocentric” theory with “Sinocentric” theory, Sensible Politics aims to
explore visual international politics through an assemblage of concepts that are
Chinese, Asian, Islamic, Western, traditional, and contemporary. The goal here is to
use Asian and Middle Eastern concepts, practices, and experiences as a critical jux-
taposition to decenter (but not necessarily discard) critical IR discourse that char-
acteristically generalizes from Euro-American examples.
Since my expertise is in Chinese and Asian politics, the analysis often starts from
that point. This oblique entry into social theory and international politics underlines
how the critique of “Western universals” cannot produce any new universal theory.
It also highlights the value of a comparative approach to visual IR that engages with
different places and times, in ways that acknowledge the partiality of the project.
To put this another way, it’s one thing to open the critical door to new conditions
of possibility, as many theorists suggest. It’s another to walk through the door to do
the detailed empirical research that is necessary to see how alternative social orders
and world orders are being visualized in the present: for example, the Islamic State’s
utopian Caliphate, a revived Chinese world order, Russian Eurasianism, and partic-
ipatory surveillance on the World Wide Web.
Positionality and Theory
East/ West and West/ non- West are presented here not as exclusive binary
oppositions, but as fluid dynamics (explained more in Chapter 3, “Dynamic
Dyads: Visibility/Visuality and East/West”). This is not just an academic argument,
but also a personal one. Growing up in the “utopia” of a middle-class small town
in suburban New Jersey, I experienced a heavy dose of what I now understand as
white privilege and male privilege. This has greatly benefited my life-chances and
continues to frame my professional research opportunities (in ethically problem-
atic ways). I try to address this privilege first by acknowledging and problematizing
it. I also try to take a critical view of the male gaze and the white/colonial gaze by
taking seriously the concepts, practices, and experiences offered by feminist theory
and Asian studies. My interest in everyday politics, intimate geopolitics, body pol-
itics, reason/emotion, and world-making comes from a long-term engagement
with women’s studies and feminist theory. My interest in social relations (rather
Int roduc tion 5
than binary oppositions), reflexivity, social-ordering and world-ordering, and cul-

tural governance/resistance comes as much from my time spent in China, Taiwan,
and Thailand as it does from post-positivist theory classes. My experience living
for many years in a multi-generational Sino-Thai household continues to guide my
understanding of Confucianism, Buddhism, and family as much as my academic
studies of Asian thought and society.
This engaged positionality works itself out theoretically in Sensible Politics’s atten-
tion to identity politics—the politics of “visible minorities,” for example—as well
as its concern with the problems raised when identity becomes reified into a multi-
cultural menu of essentialized choices. The book thus aims to pursue what Michael
J. Shapiro calls a “critical attitude” of self-reflection that goes beyond “merely
serving particular social segments or disempowered groups.” Instead, it needs to
“present a challenge to identity politics in general, . . . even those on which some
social movements are predicated.” Rather than stake out political positions, Sensible
Politics seeks to “displace institutionalized forms of recognition with thinking. To
think (rather than to seek to explain) in this sense is to invent and apply conceptual
frames and create juxtapositions that disrupt and/or render historically contingent
accepted knowledge practices.”2
The chapters of Sensible Politics employ such new conceptual dynamics and un-
expected juxtapositions first to deconstruct how state and corporate power pro-
mote ideology by making some things visible and other things invisible; it thus
makes visible both the hidden power relations and a different range of actors and
issues. It then addresses the more difficult task of appreciating how visuals can work
in nonlinear, nonnarrative, and nonverbal ways that excite affect through visceral
connections and performative experiences. Importantly, this critical attitude of self-
reflection works against the analytical urge to make simple reversals—from West to
East and from Right to Left—to complicate our appreciation of the sensible politics
of entangled relations.
The role of theory here is not to provide comprehensive or universalizable
explanations. Rather than engage in high theory, the concepts in Sensible Politics
often are taken from what some media theorists call “medium theory” (pun in-
tended). The book figures concepts in terms of dynamic dyads—for example, vis-
ible/visual, center/periphery, concealing/revealing, loosening/tightening—that
often grow out of the practical conventions that guide picture-taking, film-making,
map-making, veil-wearing, wall-building, garden-building, and Web-surfing.
Craftspeople here intentionally create meaning; but meaning and value also emerge
through the social practices of the exchange and circulation of visual images and
multisensory artifacts.
2 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-

Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 8, xv.
6 Sensible Politics
The goal is not a universal “theory of pictures” but, as W. J. T. Mitchell explains,
to “picture theory” itself in a complex and entangled way and thus “to ‘perform’
theory as a visible, embodied, communal practice, not as a solitary introspection
of a disembodied intelligence.”3 While critical theory characteristically works to
problematize conventions in order to speak truth to power, this book is skeptical of
such emancipatory projects. Rather than criticize conventions, it seeks to recognize
them, see how they work, and play with them to see how they can creatively make
interesting and different social orders and world orders. This is where the symbolic
analysis of visual images is complemented by the practical experience of building
theory through, for example, making films and building gardens.
Likewise, Sensible Politics does not aim to offer a comprehensive survey of the
growing field of visual international politics. Rather, it seeks to act as a provoca-
tion that challenges the assumption of what counts as “visual” in international poli-
tics, that is, photography and film from Euro-American sources. As the title Sensible
Politics suggests, the book is also self-critical of the ocular-centrism of visual IR re-
search. Its focus, especially in the first few chapters, certainly is on the visual in inter-
national politics as a way to highlight and critique the hegemony of verbal strategies
of analysis. This project addresses the visual in much more detail than the other
senses, for two reasons: (1) visual culture studies provides a fertile terrain to start
the discussion of sensible politics, and (2) visual IR remains an under-studied field.
The goal of Sensible Politics, however, is to expand from the verbal to include the
visible and the multisensory; the visual here is but one entry into the larger field of
sensible politics, where the hear-able, smell-able, touch-able, and taste-able matter
alongside the see-able. Film and video, remember, include sounds (both verbal and
nonverbal) as well as images. The book’s chapters that discuss walls and gardens
highlight the multisensory regimes of what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution
of the sensible.”4
The focus on the visual, therefore, is only a problem (i.e., ocular-centrism) if it
marginalizes the appreciation of other senses; for example, if it silences other voices.
The analytical framework developed in Part I—the visibility strategy’s analysis of
the social construction of the visible and the visuality strategy’s appreciation of the
visual performance of the international—can also be employed to understand and
appreciate the international politics of other senses, such as the social construc-
tion of the audible and the sonic construction of the international. The purpose of
Sensible Politics is not to create a new hegemonic approach, but to appreciate politics
in terms of a complex multisensory ecology. In this way, the project also moves from
criticizing how elites use visual images to manipulate the masses to considering how
3 W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 355.
4 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004).
Int roduc tion 7
these multisensory experiences can move and connect people in affective networks
and communities of sense. Sensible Politics is about multisensory politics, but it also
concerns “sensible” in the sense of the pragmatic politics of everyday life.
Structure and Content of the Book

In terms of organization, Sensible Politics is neither a linear narrative that develops
arguments in a progressive style nor an assemblage of stand-alone essays that dance
around certain themes. Theories and methods are introduced in the first four
chapters and then are developed in later chapters to show how the visibility/visu-
ality dynamic comes alive through a diverse set of images and artifacts. Theory here
is valuable when it works to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. The
chapters move back and forth between familiar sites of hard politics—war, maps,
border walls—and strange sites of aesthetics—visual art, women’s fashion, gardens.
They work to see the aesthetics in politics and the politics in aesthetics. Because few
people now read a book from beginning to end, there is some repetition of theo-
retical arguments across the chapters, but following Mark Twain, I hope that such
repetitions actually rhyme in interesting ways: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it
often rhymes.”
This introduction is a sampling of arguments that are made in more detail (and
with copious references) in the first three chapters and throughout Sensible Politics.
The main body of the book is divided into four parts: Part I, “Visibility/Visuality: A
Framework for Analysis”; Part II, “Visual Images”; Part III, “Visual Artifacts and
Sensory Spaces”; and Part IV, “Conclusions.”
Part I includes three chapters—Chapter 1, “Visibility: The Social Construction
of the Visual”; Chapter 2, “Visuality: The Visual Performance of the International”;
and Chapter 3, “Dynamic Dyads: Visibility/Visuality and East/West”—which
unpack arguments raised in the introduction. While it is popular to use the term
“visuality” to discuss how images are more than objective reflections of reality, Part
I argues that we need to differentiate between “meaning” and “doing.” Chapter 1
develops the visibility strategy, which aims to shift the critical gaze away from
empiricism’s attention to the “what” issues of accurately reflecting reality to consider
the “who, when, where, and how” issues of how images take on meaning through the
social construction of the visual. It traces the strategy’s suspicion of images, arguing
that this is part of a wider critique of the ocular-centrism of European thought. To
solve the problem of visual images, Chapter 1 explores how critics use the herme-
neutic mode of analysis to reveal hidden ideological meaning and thus speak truth
to power.
While Chapter 1 examines what is important about visual IR, Chapter 2 explores
what is different about visual IR: that is, how images can actively create sensible
politics as visual performances that viscerally move and connect people. It develops
8 Sensible Politics
the visuality strategy’s analysis of how images take on meaning and value through
the visual construction of the social and the multisensory performance of the in-
ternational. It thus expands from Chapter 1’s symbolic analysis of visual images to
consider how “visual artifacts”—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—can
shape IR as material modalities and sensory spaces that are experienced both in-
dividually and collectively in affective communities of sense. In this way, it moves
from assessing the ideological-value of visuals to appreciating their affect-work.
Chapter 2 thus challenges the critique of ocular-centrism by outlining how the vis-
uality strategy can help us appreciate how multisensory spaces can provoke social
orders and world orders as affective communities of sense.
Rather than see visibility and visuality as opposing strategies, Chapter 3 argues
that both are valuable for an analysis of sensible politics. It figures them as com-
plementary opposites that are joined in the productive tension of a dynamic dyad.
It shows how dynamic dyads offer a critical approach to Eurocentrism and East/
West figurations and introduces some of the other dynamic dyads—inside/out-
side, Civilization/barbarism, civility/martiality—that are further developed in later
chapters. In this way it looks to Chinese concepts, practices, and experiences to en-
gage in a comparative analysis of visual international politics.
Part I’s analysis illustrates that it is not helpful to switch from one approach to
another: from visibility to visuality, from ideology to affect, from images to artifacts.
It seeks to appreciate how visual international politics comes alive through the pro-
ductive tension of visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, and images/artifacts. Part
I thus presents both a literature review of visual culture studies and visual IR re-
search and an original analytical framework for understanding visual international
politics.
Part II engages with existing debates in visual international politics through
chapters addressing the aesthetic turn in IR (Chapter 4), visual securitization
(Chapter 5), and ethical witnessing (Chapter 6). To make these arguments, it uses
a range of visual images—photographs, documentary films, feature films, online
videos, and visual art—to discuss visibility/visuality and ideology/affect. Using
these examples, Part II argues that we need to shift from the verbal to the visual in
our analysis of international politics.
Part II starts with Chapter 4, “Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking.” One of the main
analytical approaches to visual international politics is the “aesthetic turn in IR,”
which argues that we need to more directly address the interpretive aspects of poli-
tics and to look at poetry, art, and film as alternative sources of international politics.
The chapter analyzes research films in IR to evaluate these hermeneutic approaches,
arguing that the visual turn in IR is more than an elaboration of the aesthetic turn.
While analyses of visual culture that deconstruct the “social construction of the
visual” are characteristically suspicious of the power of images, the chapter argues
that making films provides a creative opportunity to explore the “visual construc-
tion of the international,” especially in terms of affect, bodily sense, and experience.
Int roduc tion 9
The chapter develops these theoretical discussions through an autoethnographic

account of the methods used to produce a research film. Chapter 4 thus shows what
research filmmaking can “do” by providing an innovative method for creating new
sites and sensibilities of international politics.
Chapter 5, “Visualizing Security, Order, and War,” critically examines another
dominant approach to visual international politics: securitization theory, which
argues that visual images can shape foreign policy events through their immediacy,
circulation, and ambiguity. It uses the North Korea-US national security crisis pro-
voked by the feature film The Interview (2014) to question securitization’s focus on
the state, official elites, and the close relationship between existential threats and se-
curity problems. It then introduces the cultural governance/resistance conceptual
dynamic to examine how Islamic State videos witnessed the creation (and destruc-
tion) not just of a sovereign state, but also of a new social order/world order: the
transnational utopia of the Caliphate. Chapter 5 thus shows, on the one hand, the
visibility strategy’s hermeneutic approach to reading visual securitization, and
on the other, the visuality strategy’s attention to the broader issues of how social-
ordering and world-ordering images can provoke affective communities of sense
that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done.
Chapter 6, “Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance,” engages with an-
other popular approach to visual international politics: visuals as a site of resist-
ance to power, both through producing critical artwork and by ethically witnessing
international crises. To trace these issues, it analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a
world-famous artist-activist whose ethical witnessing creatively resists China’s au-
thoritarian party-state. It shows how Ai’s art presents ideological resistance to state
power, in both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state op-
pression and the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work
for its “meaning” as the social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers
how Ai’s documentary film Human Flow (2017) provokes transnational resistance
through its “visual construction of the social” and of the global. Chapter 6 thus
considers how visual art can serve as an ethical witness to resist reigning political
regimes, as well as how it can excite affective communities of sense to creatively re-
sist reigning political aesthetics.
Part II thus accomplishes two things. First, it critically engages with existing
scholarship on visual IR that looks to the aesthetic turn, securitization, and ethical
witnessing. It does this through an analysis of visual images that develops the vis-
ibility/visuality and ideology/affect dynamics, while also introducing the cultural
governance/resistance dynamic. Second, in this way, Sensible Politics expands from
verbally-inflected analysis to appreciate how visual images can mean and do things
in a different way.
Part III moves beyond existing debates in visual IR to see how visual artifacts can
provoke a different kind of sensible politics. The chapters highlight a broad range of
visual and multisensory experiences—making maps, wearing a veil, building a wall,
10 Sensible Politics
enjoying a garden, surfing the Web—to argue that visual artifacts not only mean
things but can also “do” things and “make” things in nonnarrative, multisensory, and
performative ways. Part III’s short introduction explains what is new and different
about visual artifacts and sensory spaces. Part III then continues to develop the
visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, and cultural governance/resistance dynamics
while introducing specific conceptual dynamics for each chapter: center/periphery
for maps (Chapter 7), concealing/revealing for women’s fashion (Chapter 8), loos-
ening/tightening for walls (Chapter 9), civility/martiality for gardens (Chapter 10),
and back to visibility/visuality for surveillance (Chapter 11). Part III, again, de-
liberately juxtaposes the familiar and the strange, with chapters switching from
hard politics to high aesthetics and back again. Importantly, it starts and ends with
examples—maps and cyberspace—that complicate the verbal/visual and image/
artifact distinctions, in order to develop the analysis of multisensory space.
Part III begins with Chapter 7, “Maps, Space, and Power,” highlighting how car-
tography is a practice in which the visual and the verbal coexist in objects that can
be both two-dimensional visual images and three-dimensional visual artifacts and
material modalities. Since the 1980s, critical cartography has questioned mimetic
understandings of maps as accurate representations of the earth to show how maps
are social constructions that reflect broader political and cultural agendas. This
chapter builds on this questioning to show how maps themselves can also “do” things
as visual artifacts, especially when they are empire-maps and world maps. Maps are
an important part of warfare and lawfare (the use of law for strategic purposes),
and the chapter proposes the new concept “map-fare” to explore how maps visu-
ally construct the social—and the imperial. It introduces and develops the center/
periphery dynamic of empire-maps to question the inside-outside logic of national
maps. In particular, it considers how the center/periphery logic of Chinese empire-
maps is visually shaping the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) current world-
ordering projects, in comparison with a briefer consideration of map-fare in Russia
and the Islamic State. The chapter argues that map-fare is about more than ideas;
the world-ordering of such maps is starting to be enforced on the ground in Ukraine
and the South China Sea. The chapter concludes that we need to understand maps
as active interventions that can shape international politics, because such map-fare
combines word and image, and image and artifact, to visualize and promote partic-
ular (imperial) world orders.
Chapter 8, “The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender, and Faith,” explores
visual body politics through the unlikely juxtaposition of young women (1) wearing
Islamic veils and (2) participating in beauty pageants. These two practices are ex-
emplary cases of the visibility strategy, especially where veil-wearing’s invisibility
tactic makes women hypervisible. The chapter uses the conceptual dynamic of
concealing/revealing to analyze how various groups—women and men, states
and corporations—expend considerable resources negotiating, performing, legis-
lating, policing, and resisting such sartorial practices. Using examples from Europe,
Int roduc tion 11
the Middle East, and Asia, the chapter first decodes how such practices take on
meaning as the individual choices of many women, then considers how the discur-
sive structures of the male gaze and the white/colonial gaze can shape these choices.
While much of the debate is located in Europe and the Middle East and is framed
by the East/West distinction, the chapter juxtaposes these sites with China to show
how structures and agents are mutually constituted through cultural governance
and resistance. Finally, the chapter examines how these sartorial performances vis-
ually construct the social and the international: you don’t just take the veil, the veil
also takes you in an experience that is creative as well as disciplinary. Because these
are not just visual performances, but also involve touch, the chapter develops the
idea of visual artifacts as material modalities. It argues that such material sartorial
performances push us to think visually and feel visually in unexpected ways. In
other words, does veiling, as a performance of both invisibility and hypervisuality,
mark the ethical limits of visual international politics?
Chapter 9, “Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and the Sublime,” examines how, as
Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While “glob-
alization,” with its free flow of capital and goods, characterized international politics
after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of
cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticize such post–Cold War
walls, especially the US-Mexico barrier and Israel’s West Bank barrier, as ineffective
and immoral. This chapter, however, problematizes such arguments by using the
unlikely juxtaposition of the Great Wall of China and the conceptual dynamics of
gaps and loosening/tightening to explore (1) how walls can be a rational security
policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex gateways for flows;
and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded but are also sites of
nonnarrative and nonlinear affective experience that can even excite the sublime.
This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the pol-
itics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, then considers how, as infrastructures
of feeling, walls are examples not simply of ideology, but also of the affective expe-
rience of horror and wonder.
Chapter 10, “Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace,” notes that while gardens
are typically appreciated as peaceful spaces of apolitical serenity, they also can pro-
vide new sites and sensibilities that complicate our understanding of international
politics. Although gardens are a popular location for diplomatic performances
(e.g., the Treaty of Versailles after World War I), the international politics of gar-
dens itself is under-researched. The chapter thus examines gardens as contingent
social constructions of social-ordering and world-ordering that both shape and
participate in international politics. In particular, it develops the civility/martiality
dynamic to explore the sensible politics of how two key national war memo-
rial sites—the Nanjing Massacre Memorial in China and the Yasukuni Shrine in
Japan—work as gardens to creatively perform international politics in unexpected
ways. Chapter 10’s conclusion shows how we can use this analytical framework to
12 Sensible Politics
better understand (and feel) the sensible politics of other key national memorial
spaces, such as the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York.
As with picture-taking, film-making, map-making, veil-wearing, and wall-building,
here garden-building is theory-building: by producing new sites and sensibilities, it
creatively shapes our understanding of international politics.
Part III ends with Chapter 11, “Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance,”
which, like Chapter 7, addresses a crossover domain in which the visual and the
verbal can coexist in media that can be both two-dimensional visual images and
three-dimensional visual artifacts—as well as nondimensional sensory (cyber)
spaces. As in Chapter 8, the analysis turns the question of visibility around: not just
what we see, but how we are seen, including how we are constituted through various
gazes. Chapter 11 explores this through an analysis of the visual international poli-
tics of surveillance that looks to historical and social trends. Although it is common
to focus analysis and critique on the United States/West, the chapter shows how
China is at the cutting edge of surveillance practices both at home and abroad.
While most analyses of surveillance look to technology and security, this chapter
explores the “culture of surveillance,” wherein surveillance is an interactive prac-
tice of social-ordering and world-ordering. It examines the visibility/visuality and
ideology/affect dynamics through the juxtaposition of European, American, and
Chinese surveillance concepts, practices, and experiences. To avoid the problems
of an East-West binary opposition, the chapter employs three historical models
of social-ordering: the pre-modern society of sovereignty, the modern society
of discipline, and the contemporary networked society of control. In this way, it
compares how surveillance provokes censorship, self-discipline, and creative social-
ordering in China and Europe. The conclusion is that these are political rather than
technical or cultural issues, and that it is important to move beyond questions of
cybersecurity to appreciate surveillance as a social-ordering and world-ordering
project. The visual politics of surveillance thus is not just about how we are captured
by the surveillant gaze; it is also about visualizing what kind of world we want to live
in, as well as what kind of world we don’t want to see and feel.
Part III develops the concept of “visual artifacts” and uses the visibility/visu-
ality framework to analyze them. It highlights how visual artifacts not only mean
things but can “do” things in nonnarrative, multisensory, and performative ways.
Once again, it stresses how Asian and Middle Eastern visual artifacts provide im-
portant concepts, practices, and experiences that can aid us in understanding sen-
sible politics both beyond Eurocentrism and within Euro-America. In this way, Part
III argues that to understand social theory and international politics, we need to ex-
pand from analysis of visual images to appreciate visual artifacts as material modal-
ities and sensory spaces.
Part IV includes “Conclusion: Sensible Politics.” It notes that many of the book’s
chapters speak to each other (e.g., veils are walls, and gardens require wall-building)
and considers how film-making and garden-building experiences can reframe
Int roduc tion 13
questions of theory, method, and ethics. It recounts how using the visibility and
the visuality strategies to examine images and artifacts from Euro-America, the
Middle East, and Asia allows us to address questions of ideology and affect in in-
teresting ways. It argues that we need to think beyond critical IR’s focus on inside/
outside and self/Other as sites of identity, security, and exclusion, to better appre-
ciate how visual images and multisensory artifacts are involved in much broader
projects of social-ordering and world-ordering. While it is common to respond to
the challenges of the “post-truth” era by deconstructing “fake news,” the conclusion
argues that political critique also needs to creatively produce sensory artifacts that
can move and connect people to creatively build affective communities of sense to
fight such populism. Although the book focuses on visual IR to critique verbally-
inflected modes of analysis, it concludes that we also need to expand from our
focus on the visual to appreciate multisensory IR, while reconsidering the role of
the verbal/multisensory dynamic in international politics. Finally, it argues that it is
best not to frame sensible politics merely as a subdiscipline of IR, because sensible
politics can serve as an oblique entry into a broader consideration of social theory
and international studies.
PA RT  I
VISIBILITY/VISUALITY
A Framework for Analysis
One eye sees, the other feels.
—Paul  Klee
The attack on the office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in
2015 demonstrated how visual images—including cartoons—play an in-
creasingly important role in shaping international political events and
our understanding of them. Gunmen associated with al-Qaeda in Yemen
stormed the Paris office of this magazine, killing twelve people, including
the editor, cartoonists, columnists, and the police who were guarding them.
And this was not an isolated case: in 2005 the “Muhammad cartoons”
published in a Danish newspaper provoked protests in five Muslim-majority
countries, resulting in torched diplomatic missions and nearly 250 deaths,
while in 2013 Edward Snowden’s revelations about the US National Security
Agency’s global mass surveillance project provoked an international debate
about security, privacy, and global governance.
The influence and impact of the visual on international politics continues
to grow. In 2017 Cisco predicted that by 2021, 82 percent of all Internet
traffic will be video, up from 73 percent in 2016.1 As this example shows, the
technical change in visual media is not only swift but increasing in speed;
any prediction about the growth and spread of visual media quickly becomes
1 “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2016–2021” (September 15,
2017) https://goo.gl/SrpKbL (accessed January 8, 2018).
16 Visibility/Visuality
outdated. In addition to the quantitative speed of technological change,

visual artifacts have provoked qualitative shifts. On the one hand, smart-
phone cameras have empowered people to tell their own stories in a new
global visual economy that runs parallel to the state and corporate media
institutions that dominated the twentieth century. For some, this provides
the opportunity for a new, unified world, in which the emerging global so-
ciety is transnational and visual.2 The challenges for this global society are
technical: overcoming the digital divide between rich and poor, North and
South. But they are also political. There is a persistent anxiety over the power
of the visual image; while some are concerned about the Islamic State and
its successors using visuals to recruit new terrorists, others are concerned
about how hidden powers can manipulate voters through “fake news” on the
Internet, such as in the Brexit vote and the Trump election.
This speaks to what is different about the visual: it has a way of viscerally
grabbing people in ways that are both immediate and intense, with the ca-
pacity to provoke “affective communities of sense.” Indeed, while warnings
are rare for verbal descriptions of atrocities, it is common to see explicit
warnings about visual images, for example, “Warning: Graphic images
some viewers might find disturbing.”3 In his response to the Muhammad
cartoon controversy, United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan spoke to
this new visual form of transnational political action: “Incidents like a carica-
ture of the Prophet, or a death threat to the artist who drew it, make far more
impact on the popular imagination than pious statements issued by foreign
ministers and secretaries-general.”4
Part I enters into the debate over the power of the image by addressing the
theoretical and methodological issues raised in the introduction. (There is
some repetition of the introduction’s chapter summaries here, so if you just
finished reading them, please skip to Chapter 1.) It considers what is impor-
tant and what is different about the visual’s impact on international politics.
Although it is popular to use the term “visuality” to discuss how images are
more than objective reflections of reality, Part I argues that we need to dif-
ferentiate between “meaning” and “doing.” Chapter 1 explores “visibility”
2 Nicolas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (New York: Pelican Books, 2015), p. 6.

3 Roger Tooth, “Graphic Content: When Photographs of Carnage Are Too Upsetting to Publish,”
The Guardian ( July 23, 2014) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/graphic-content-
photographs-too-upsetting-to-publish-gaza-mh17-ukraine (accessed October 17, 2017).
4 Kofi Annan, quoted in Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual
Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,” European Journal of International Relations 17:1
(2011):68.
Vis ibilit y / Visuali t y 17
to show the hermeneutic search for the meaning of visual images, while
Chapter 2 explores “visuality” to appreciate critical aesthetic explorations of
how visual artifacts can themselves actively “do” things, often in unexpected
ways. Chapter 1 is part of the “visual turn” in international politics that has
inspired the serious study of photographs, film, television, online video,
maps, visual art, and cartoons/graphic novels. Chapter 2 expands from the
symbolic analysis of such “visual images” to develop the concept of “visual
artifacts” as material modalities and sensory spaces, for example, maps, veils,
walls, gardens, and cyberspace. The first two chapters thus flesh out the vis-
ibility/visuality dynamic’s relational understanding of the visual and the so-
cial; in addition to tracing the “social construction of the visual,” they argue
that we need to appreciate the “visual construction of the social” and the
visual performance of the international. They also examine the interplay of
ideology and affect in sensible politics: the visibility strategy works to reveal
hidden ideologies, while the visuality strategy appreciates how visuals can
move and connect people in “affective communities of sense.”
Chapter 3 examines how the visibility/visuality relation is different from
the fixed binary distinctions characteristic of Enlightenment modernity. It
explores the uneasy relationships between word and image and between
ideology and affect to suggest that we need to think in terms of dynamic
dyads that are relational, contextual, contingent, and fluid. It argues that
dynamic dyads offer a critical approach to Eurocentrism and East/West
figurations and introduces other important conceptual dyads—inside/out-
side, Civilization/barbarism, civility/martiality—that are developed in later
chapters. Sensible Politics thus engages in comparative analysis that looks to
different times and places in order to problematize the present.
The chapters in Part I show how the analysis of visual IR does not re-
quire a shift from one approach to another: from visibility to visuality, from
ideology to affect, from images to artifacts. Rather, Sensible Politics seeks to
appreciate how social theory and international politics are provoked and
performed through the productive tension of visibility/visuality, ideology/
affect, and images/artifacts. It argues that these dynamic dyads provide an
analytical framework for the book’s exploration of the sensible politics of
both iconic images and everyday experiences. Here “sensible” refers both to
sensory politics and the pragmatic politics of the everyday.
While visual culture studies is dominated by the disciplines of media
studies, cultural studies, and art history, Part I shows the value of figuring
visual international politics in a transdisciplinary context that also looks to
history, sociology, border studies, Asian studies, and visual anthropology, as
well as the conventions and creative practices of picture-taking, film-making,

map-making, veil-wearing, wall-building, garden-building, and Web-surfing.
Part I thus presents a literature review of visual research done in art history,
media and communications, and IR, as well as an original analytical frame-
work for understanding visual international politics.
1
Visibility
The Social Construction of the Visual
The task of Sensible Politics is to deconstruct visual images in order to lay bare the
ideologies that they illustrate. But it also has the more creative goal of seeing how
visual artifacts are more than illustrations of ideology, because they can have their
own agency: visuals can actually “do” things, and “make” things. It is popular to use
the term “visuality” to discuss how images are more than objective reflections of
reality.1 But for this analysis, I differentiate between “meaning” and “doing”; here
“visibility” involves the search for the meaning of the visual, while “visuality” entails
an appreciation of how visual artifacts can themselves actively “do” things, often
in unexpected ways. The visibility/visuality dynamic builds on W. J. T. Mitchell’s
dialectical understanding of the relation of the visual and the social: he argues that
in addition to tracing the “social construction of the visual,” we also need to appre-
ciate the “visual construction of the social.”2 In other words, it is necessary to not
simply deconstruct how visual images reflect social, political, and economic power
relations; we also need to consider how they can visually provoke new and different
social, political, and economic dynamics. While the analytical and political goal of
visibility is to “speak truth to power,” the aim of visuality is more akin to Umberto
1 Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (New York: Pelican Books, 2015); Hal Foster, ed., Vision
and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972);
Debbie Lisle, “Learning How to See,” in Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, ed-
ited by Xavier Guillaume and Pinar Bilgin, (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 299–308. For another
definition of visuality that stresses its coercive aspects, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A
Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 13–34.
Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 343ff.; also see David Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the
Darfur Conflict,” Political Geography 26 (2007):379; Rune S. Andersen, Juha A. Vuori, and Can E.
Mutlu, “Visuality,” in Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis, edited by Claudia Aradau,
Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 85–117; Gillian
Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th ed. (London: Sage,
2016), p. 10.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
Eco’s understanding of semiotics as “the discipline studying everything which can

be used in order to lie”3—especially when we understand lying as an alternative
mode of truth-telling. While visibility deconstructs, visuality creates.
To understand this seemingly straightforward visibility/visuality dynamic, it is
helpful to consider how it grows out of complex theoretical and methodological
debates, particularly discussions about the relation of word and image, ideology and
affect, and hermeneutics and critical aesthetics. Rather than suggesting that either vis-
ibility or visuality is the definitive strategy for studying visual international politics,
Part I considers how they complement each other; instead of understanding them as
competing definitions, it is profitable to figure them as a contingent complementary
dynamic.4
Visibility and visuality are both critical approaches to the mimetic understanding
of knowledge as the “mirror of nature,” in which visual images are evaluated in terms
of how accurately they reflect reality.5 As Michael J. Shapiro notes for photography, “Of
all the modes of representation, it is the one most easily assimilated into the discourses
of knowledge and truth, for it is thought to be an unmediated simulacrum, a copy of
what we consider the ‘real.’ ”6 The reality-effect of photography and film is important
because once these images are seen as empirically reflecting objective truth, they can
be used as “evidence” to judge criminality and deviance in both domestic and interna-
tional space; the police use visual technologies to profile ethnic and racial minorities,
and the national security state uses satellite photography to sort out rogue states—and
rogue peoples, such as migrants—from normal ones.7
3 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 7.

4 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), p. 9.
5 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1981); Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
6 Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and
Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 124.
7 Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 135, 141; also see Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and
Klaus Dodds, eds., Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010); David
Shim, Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is Believing (London: Routledge, 2013); James Leibold,
“Surveillance in Xinjiang: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement,” Journal of Contemporary China
(May 31, 2019):1– 15, https://doi.org/10.1080/ 10670564.2019.1621529 (accessed August 23,
2019); Martina Tazzioli and William Waters, “The Sight of Migration: Governmentality, Visibility, and
Europe’s Contested Borders,” Global Society 30:3 (2016):445–464; James Scott, Seeing Like a State;
How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998).
Vis ibilit y 21
For the “visibility strategy,” the goal is to understand how the meaning of an image
is not referential to the “real” world, but is constructed by its social context.8 The task
is to show how the meaning of the image grows out of an overarching “scopic regime,”
the “who, what, where, and when” of its production, mediation, and consumption.9
Rather than accept the objective truth of photographs, it is necessary to see them as
partial images that not only include people, places, events, and institutions, but also
exclude them. Alan Trachtenberg explains how historians and photographers both are
confronted with an “opaque mass of facts.” To make them intelligible, “[t]‌he historian
employs words, narrative, and analysis. The photographer’s solution is in the view-
finder: where to place the edge of the picture, what to exclude, from what point of view
to show the relations among the included details.” The compositional conventions of
photography thus are not simply technical, but political: “[T]he viewfinder is a polit-
ical instrument, a tool for making a past suitable for the future.”10
The camera viewfinder’s convention of the single-point linear perspective, which
is now taken for granted as “natural” in visual culture, is interesting because it has its
own history. It was first systematized in fifteenth-century Europe, then “conquered
the world of representation under the banner of reason, science, and objectivity
(with help of European imperialism).”11 Cartesian perspectivism’s “tyranny of the
picture”12 led Martin Heidegger to declare that we are living in the “age of the world
picture,” which “does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and
grasped as a picture.”13 Hence, rather than a singular “world-mirroring,” we need to
think about how world-picturing functions as “world-making.”14 As we will see in
Chapter 7’s discussion of maps, there is a close relation between your view of the
world and your worldview.15 The philosophical and technical ability to picture the
8 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 2; Stuart Hall, ed., Representations: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997).
9 Jay, Downcast Eyes.
10 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker
Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. xiv; also seeRoland Bleiker and Amy Kay, “Representing
HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and Local Empowerment,” International Studies Quarterly
51 (2007):140.
11 Mitchell, Iconology, 37. Also see Antoine J. Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the
Telescope to the Drone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), pp. 21–39; Berger, Ways
of Seeing, 16ff.; Hal Foster, “Preface,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press,
1988), p. xiv.
12 Mitchell, Iconology, 37; also see Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996); Jay, Downcast Eyes.
13 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (London: Garland
Publishing, 1997), p. 130; also see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xiv.
14 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xv; Nicholas Onuf, World of Our Making (Columbia: University
of South Carolina Press, 1989).
15 See Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 36.
world as a whole was a “defining element” of European modernity, and mapping

the world as a picture enabled European powers to colonize the globe.16 These new
maps not only shaped the material politics of claiming imperial space and sover-
eignty, but also worked to “colonize the imagination” of both the conquered and the
conquerors.17
To decolonize the imagination from the scopic regime of Enlightenment moder-
nity, it is helpful to think of visual images in terms of the inside/outside dynamic
seen in the practice of framing. Like the camera’s viewfinder, the frame is com-
positional, and it also is ideological.18 Inside/outside, in many ways, is the master
distinction of philosophy, social life, and IR, especially when it works in terms of
the self/Other dynamic.19 To put it another way, the frame determines the limits
of visibility/invisibility, and thus the limits of politics: who is included and who
is excluded, what is revealed and what is concealed, who/what is veiled and who/
what is unveiled.20 The photograph tells us who we are (and who we aren’t); this is
the ideology of the image.21
Indeed, one way of understanding the US civil rights and women’s rights
movements is to see how African-Americans and women, who have been histor-
ically excluded from politics, empowered themselves by getting into the cultural,
social, and political picture frame.22 Lorraine O’Grady’s “Art Is . . .” (1983) pro-
ject operationalized the technique of framing by mounting a nine-by-fifteen-foot
16 John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2003),
pp.  15–16.
17 Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 218.
18 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 20; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
(London: Verso, 2016); Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds, “Introduction,” in
Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture, edited by Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and
Klaus Dodds (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010), pp. 2, 12.
19 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 211–231; R. B. J.
Walker, Inside/ Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political
Paradox, expanded ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 36–63; W. J. T. Mitchell,
Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1995), p. 42; MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 13; Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity
in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Oxford: Polity Press, 2013); Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image
for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,” European Journal of
International Relations 17:1 (2011):58.
20 See R. B. J. Walker, Out of Line: Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the Limits of Modern
Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 26; Butler, Frames of War; MacDonald et al., “Introduction,”
6; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 215.
21 Hall, Representations, 128, 166; Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang,
1981), p. 28.
22 Mirzoeff, How to See the World, 48; Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 58.
Vis ibilit y 23
Figure 1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009). Courtesy

Alexander Gray Associates, New York
antique-style gold frame on a float in Harlem’s African-American Day Parade.23

O’Grady’s purpose was to include people who typically are excluded from the avant-
garde art world by literally framing their neighborhood with the large frame and
framing individual people with smaller frames that were carried by fifteen dancing
actors. As documented in photographs, this performance art piece was experienced
as joyous, playful, and empowering (see figure 1.1).
The struggle for visibility continues in gendered images as well; the British
Film Institute noted that there were proportionally fewer women acting on screen
in 2017 (30 percent) than in 1913 (31 percent)—although in 2017 many more
women were included behind the camera.24 The politics of visibility/invisibility can
also be seen in the controversies about “whitewashing” and cultural appropriation
in the cinema, for example, Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese character in Ghost
23 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . .” (1983/2009) http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/ (accessed

September 23, 2017).
24 “British Cinema’s Gender Imbalance Worse in 2017 Than 1913, Says BFI Study,” The Guardian
(September 20, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/20/british-cinema-gender-
imbalance-worse-2017-bfi-filmography (accessed September 22, 2017).
in the Shell (2017)25 and Matt Damon as pre-modern China’s “white savior” in The
Great Wall (2016).26
While O’Grady’s “Art Is . . .” (1983) project had dancing African-American ac-
tors include Italian-American cops in the celebratory golden frame, more recently
framing has shifted to include documenting police brutality against blacks. This “cit-
izen documentation” movement works to erase the invisibility of police shootings,
with activist groups providing video-training as well as creating and distributing
“smartphone apps that allow onlookers to observe, record and report.”27 Likewise,
as Sarah Glidden’s award-winning Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria,
and Iraq shows, citizen journalists are using the long-form graphic reportage genre
to get a more diverse range of people into discussions of international politics.28 In
this way, visuals don’t just represent the international, but creatively provoke it: in
the twenty-first century, to transform local political violence into a global political
event, you need a visual (a video, a photograph).29 The Forensic Architecture pro-
ject takes this to the next level by using a multimedia strategy to make visible vio-
lence, war, and environmental problems, with the goal of providing evidence for
“international prosecutors, human rights organizations and political and environ-
mental justice groups.” In this way, Forensic Architecture “actually seeks to invert
the practice of forensics as currently exercised [by the state], and return the forensic
gaze . . . to monitor state agencies (and sometimes corporations).”30
25 Sarah Ahern, “Asian American Media Group Accuses Scarlett Johansson of ‘Lying’ About ‘Ghost
in the Shell’ Whitewashing Controversy,” Variety (March 15, 2017) https://variety.com/2017/film/
news/scarlett-johansson-ghost-in-the-shell-whitewashing-1202020230/amp/ (accessed September
23, 2017).
26 Julie Carrie Wong, “Asian Americans Decry ‘Whitewashed’ Great Wall Film Starring Matt
Damon,” The Guardian ( July 29, 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jul/29/the-great-
wall-china-film-matt-damon-whitewashed (accessed September 23, 2017).
27 Matt Pearce, Molly Hennessy-Fiske, and Erica Evans, “As Police Shootings Continue, Bystanders
Get More Sophisticated at Filming Altercations,” Los Angeles Times ( July 7, 2016) http://www.
latimes.com/nation/la-na-video-shooting-20160707-snap-story.html (accessed July 9, 2016). Also
see Jonathan Finn, “Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice,” in Eyes Everywhere: The
Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, and David Lyon
(London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 76–77.
28 Sarah Gliddens, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (New York: Drawn
& Quarterly, 2016). Graphic reportage was pioneered by Joe Sacco and Guy Delisle; see Joe Sacco,
Palestine (New York: Jonathan Cape, 2003); Guy Delisle, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea
(New York: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
29 Rune Saugmann Andersen, “Videos,” in Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, ed-
ited by Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 260.
30 Forensic Architecture (no date) https://www.forensic-architecture.org (accessed December
7, 2018); Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Cambridge,
MA: Zone Books, 2017), pp. 9–10, 64.
Vis ibilit y 25
The politics of visibility involves more than efforts to get in the picture frame. Rather
than thinking of the inside/outside logic of the frame in terms of absolute exclusion—
that is, invisibility—it is also important to consider how the frame works to include
some people in hierarchical social orders. Hence visibility is more than the statistics
of inclusion that measure it according to gender, race, ethnicity, ability, class, age, sex-
uality, and so on. We need to focus more on the conditions of visibility and thus the
social construction of visual: “the way in which images visualize (or render invisible)
social difference.”31 In this way we can determine the hierarchies of visibility and the
ideologies that they naturalize. As Susan Sontag argues, “In teaching us a new visual
code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what
we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics
of seeing.”32
Indeed, in addition to bringing empowerment, being in the picture can be dan-
gerous. The history of warfare is also the history of visibility: “Battlefields were visual-
ized first in the mind’s eye of the general; then from the air by balloons, aircraft, satellites
and now drones.”33 To frame is to target, in which the military-industrial-media com-
plex “seamlessly merge[s]‌the production, representation, and execution of war.”34 Here
the statecraft of the national security state is closely linked to the stagecraft of the media
industry, merging the reel with the real.35
The hidden visibility politics of statecraft/stagecraft was graphically shown in the
film Wag the Dog (1997), in which the White House distracts voters from an emerging
sexual scandal by creating a war. Importantly, this war does not exist on the ground,
but only in virtual visual media space. The film shows how the statecraft of national se-
curity is created through the stagecraft of constructing “the appearance of a war.”36 As
the president’s fixer explains to the Hollywood producer, we need to think of war “as
a pageant, we need a theme, a song, some visuals. We need, ya know—it’s a pageant!”
Stagecraft as statecraft can also be seen in military parades, which now are
designed for a television audience rather than the dignitaries assembled in the
viewing stands. While it is an honor to be invited to watch China’s military parades
in person, it is also literally a pain in the ass; you have to get there very early, go
31 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 11; Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 63.
32 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 3.
33 Mirzoeff, How to See the World, 15. Also see Bousquet, The Eye of War.
34 David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging
of War,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):62; James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the
Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network (New York: Routledge, 2009).
35 See Der Derian, Virtuous War; MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 10, 12; Campbell, “Cultural
Governance and Pictorial Resistance.”
36 In Barry Levinson, dir., Wag the Dog (New Line Cinema, 1997); also see Campbell, “Cultural
Governance and Pictorial Resistance,” 58.
through invasive security checks, and sit for hours on hard wooden benches.37 But
as a two-minute documentary film produced by the Guardian shows, fast-cut ed-
iting and emotive music can make a boring parade look cool.38 Actually, this is not
a new practice. Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) is best understood
not as a documentary film recording of the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Rally in 1934;
rather, it was the opposite, because the rally was staged for the film: “[T]‌he cere-
monies and precise plans of the parades, marches, processions, the architecture of
the halls and stadium were designed for the convenience of the cameras.” As Sontag
concludes, “In Triumph of the Will, the document (the image) is no longer simply
the record of reality; ‘reality’ has been constructed to serve the image.”39
In the twentieth century, the framing of the battlefield became blurred, thus
making surveillance of everyone one of the “foremost activities of the state in a bid
to sustain or acquire power through the cogency of the visual.”40 The scopic regime,
however, has a much longer history. As feminist analysis of visual art and film has
shown, women’s visibility is determined by the “male gaze,” in which “men act and
women appear.”41 The man is the bearer of the look; hence we do not have “images
of women, but images as women.”42 In a similar way, the “colonial gaze” works to
make non-Europeans visible in specific hierarchal ways.43 As Edward Said explains,
the Occident figures the Orient as part of imperial self/Other relations: the West is
strong, masculine, rational, and scientific only when contrasted against the East as
weak, feminine, mysterious, and exotic.44 These imperial conventions still inform
a photojournalism that visualizes “Africa” as a site of war, famine, and disease that
is either a barbaric Other in the mainstream press or the site of Euro-American
humanitarian intervention in the critical press.45 This is not simply a problem of
correcting whitewashing by getting more positive images of Africans into the global
media, or even getting more Africans behind the camera. We can see this as the
37 David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 1–4.
38 See Dan Chung, “China’s 60th Anniversary National Day—Timelapse and Slow Motion,” The
Guardian (October 1, 2009) https://vimeo.com/6853452 (accessed April 12, 2017).
39 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975):1–20.
40 MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 4. Also see David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as
a Way of Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018); Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang.”
41 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 (1975):6–18; Berger, Ways of
Seeing.
42 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 35.
43 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Malek Alloula, The
Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); also see Mirzoeff, The Right
to Look.
44 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2004).
45 Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality”; Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa”;
Sophie Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in International Relations: Film, Co-Produced Research
and Transnational Feminism,” European Journal of International Relations (2017):1–23.
Vis ibilit y 27
site of intersectional entanglement, where the visibility of women, race, and faith
erupts in the politics of veiling: Are veiled women victims of patriarchy, or are they
empowered by performatively demonstrating their faith? Or something else?
Visibility, once again, is a structural issue of how the visible is socially
constructed. These structures determine resistance. While it is common to declare
that we need to “tear down the Wall”—both Reagan’s demand of Gorbachev in 1987
and the pope’s demand of Trump in 2016—sometimes women fight to maintain
their veils.46 The struggle over visibility thus can be violent. In the sixteenth century,
Irish leaders resisted English conquest by beheading the first English cartographic
surveyor; they didn’t want their country “discovered.”47 Discussing the messy in-
tersectional problems of voyeurism raised by critical exhibits of European imperi-
alism in Africa, Mieke Bal argues that rather than more or better photos, we need
fewer images: “a thoughtful, sparse use of visual material where every image is pro-
vided with an immediately accessible critique that justifies its use with specificity.”48
This suspicion of images is part of a more general critique of the ocular-centrism
of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought.49 Visual images here are prob-
lematic because they encourage a “particular sensibility, one habituated to thinking
less and feeling more, to quick response over deliberative action.”50 Images thus are
dangerous and need to be controlled.
Hermeneutics: The Method for Visibility

One of the great debates in visual culture is about the relation between word and
image.51 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s classical understanding of painting and poetry
explains “the relationship between words and images as potentially a war, but one
which he wants to prevent by establishing firm, clear boundaries.”52 Michel Foucault
likewise sees the relation between word and image in terms of territorial battle: “a
whole series of intersections—or rather attacks launched by one against the other,
arrows shot at the enemy target, enterprises of subversion and destruction, lance
blows and wounds, a battle.”53 While the idiom tells us that “a picture is worth a
46 See Jennifer Heath, ed., The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
47 Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics,  3–5.
48 Mieke Bal, “The Politics of Citation,” Diacritics 21:1 (1991): 41.
49 See Jay, Downcast Eyes.
50 Roxanne L. Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric
and Sovereign Power,” Perspectives on Politics 15:4 (2017):1011.
51 See Mitchell, Iconology; Mitchell, Picture Theory; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?
52 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 70.
53 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 26. Also
see Mitchell, Picture Theory,  70–71.
thousand words,” the urge to control visuals, seen in Bal’s comment, reflects a ge-
neral suspicion among critical scholars toward images and other visual artifacts.54
Michael Ignatieff ’s oft-cited dismissal of the visual in favor of the verbal is exem-
plary: “The entire script of the CBS nightly half-hour news would fit on three-
quarters of the front page of the New York Times.”55
Here the argument is that the meaning of an image grows out of its textual con-
text, especially through captioning. As Nicholas Mirzoeff explains, “[V]‌isual culture
is the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen.”56
The idea is that the image cannot speak for itself and thus needs textual intervention
to fix meaning and understanding.57 To put it another way, visual images are best
understood as illustrations of verbal arguments. This focus on the textual grounding
of visual images is popular in IR scholarship about the global politics of images,
especially for the analysis of iconic photographs.58 Visual images thus can be dan-
gerous; because the emotions of the “unlettered masses” can be manipulated by a
well-crafted image, hermeneutics seeks to deconstruct images to reveal their hidden
power relations.59 The solution to the problem of visuals is to cultivate visual lit-
eracy, which enables us to speak truth to power.
To critique the power of images, visual culture scholars thus seek to problematize
the empiricist methodology that works to accurately reflect reality by “systemati-
cally achieving representations of experience by using reliable (that is repeatable)
techniques of observation.”60 According to Roland Barthes, images are myths
that turn “culture into nature or, at least, the social, the cultural, the ideological,
54 See Jay, Downcast Eyes; Mitchell, Iconology; Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The
Reader (London: Sage, 1999); Rose, Visual Methodologies.
55 Quoted in Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 34.
56 Mirzoeff, How to See the World, 11; Mitchell, Picture Theory; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? For
a different view, see Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs,
Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
57 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 53; Mitchell, Iconology; Mitchell, Picture
Theory; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 140; Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality”; Campbell,
“Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance,” 72; Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images,
Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003):511–
531; Rose, Visual Methodologies, 16, 236; Roland Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics,”
Millennium 43:3 (2015):875.
58 See Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies”; Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security
Studies”; Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality,” 272; Campbell, “Cultural Governance and
Resistance,” 72; Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(New York: Routledge, 2013).
59 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1; also see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 33; Hansen, “Theorizing
the Image for Security Studies,” 56; Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective
Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 142ff..
60 Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 5.
Vis ibilit y 29
the historical into the ‘natural.’ ”61 Images thus do not reflect truth, but rather are
distractions in a society of spectacle that works according to the rule of simulation
and the logic of surveillance.62 Rather than being active citizens, people here are
passive spectators, manipulated by the culture industry into false consciousness.63
As Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culmi-
nate in one thing: war.”64
To decipher such deceptive images, the hermeneutic mode employs a “politi-
cized reading practice.”65 In this sense, we take “photography” literally as “writing
with light” to foreground the importance of word over image. Critical analysis thus
examines “the political rhetoric of photography” to evaluate
photographic statements on the basis of their tendency to either repro-

duce dominant forms of discourse, which help circulate the existing
system of power, authority and exchange, or to look at them on the basis
of their tendency to provoke critical analysis, to denaturalize what is un-
problematically accepted and to offer thereby an avenue for politicizing
problematics.66
To understand the power of visual images, then, we need to discover the

structures of political and economic power that undergird them and unearth the
narratives that give them meaning. The politics of visibility thus is the politics of
representation, where representations do not simply reflect the world but are social
constructions that lend meaning and value to things. Representations are polyse-
mous, containing the possibility of multiple meanings, and thus demand interpre-
tation.67 Lene Hansen thus argues that the Muhammad cartoon crisis, which the
Danish foreign minister called his country’s greatest crisis since World War II, was
a “crisis of representation.”68 Once again, to understand visual international politics,
61 Roland Barthes, Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 165. Also see Roland
Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972), p. 142.
62 See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Jean
Baudrillard, Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); Michel Foucault,
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977); Paul Virilio, The Vision
Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
63 Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso,
2011), pp. 2–3; Jay, Downcast Eyes; Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1, 30; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?,
33, 342; Hutchison, Affective Communities, 145.
64 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 242.
65 Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 131.
66 Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 130.
67 Shapiro, The Politics of Representation, 124ff.
68 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 62.
we first need to appreciate the social construction of the visual and then engage in a
politicized reading practice to interpret its meaning and reveal its ideology.
Wag the Dog provides a rich example because it shows how such a hermeneutic
mode of inquiry works. First, it shows the problem of scandal faced by the incum-
bent president and the solution proffered by his advisers to hide the scandal not
through denial, but by deploying an even bigger news story—here, a war in an
obscure location—to distract the voting public. Second, by laying bare the social,
political, economic, and cultural construction work necessary to manufacture the
(false) images of war, the film is an act of resistance to the combined cultural gov-
ernance of the White House and Hollywood.69 The film thus shows how culture
is transformed into nature by demonstrating how the “truth claims” of war are ac-
tually social constructions that hide ideology. The ideology is not capitalism or
communism, but the elite power politics of a society of the spectacle. As Edward
S. Herman and Noam Chomsky argue, mass media “manufactures consent” for the
status quo.70 In Sensible Politics, “ideology” also refers to the broader sense of how
we understand meaning linguistically through structures and codes, which can be
deconstructed.
A similar hermeneutic strategy can be seen at work in critical approaches to ma-
terial objects such as veils. In their analysis of the trend in continental Europe to ban
the veil, many critical scholars conclude that we should not concentrate on veiling
itself because it distracts us from the real issues of the day: the physical violence and
poverty suffered by women, racism in the West, and the political contradictions that
define the liberal polity.71 Likewise, we should not be distracted by the physical infra-
structure of walls—the US-Mexico barrier or Israel’s West Bank barrier—because
their politics is found in unearthing the discursive distinctions that symbolically
support such barriers: the social and political power to include/exclude, unite/di-
vide, and reveal/conceal.72
Critique here is what Mitchell describes as “iconoclasm”: the goal is to decon-
struct the image to discover its hidden meaning and thus lay bare its ideology.73
Although critical of empiricist methods of cause-and-effect, hermeneutics
works to draw discursive links between images and power.74 In visual IR, often
69 See Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance.”

70 Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the
Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
71 Heath, The Veil; Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007); Christian Joppke, Veil: Mirror of Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009).
72 See Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014); Eyal
Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007); Thomas Nail, Theory of
the Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Yara Sharif, Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating
Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict (London: Routledge, 2017).
73 Mitchell, Iconology, 3.
74 Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods,” 884.
Vis ibilit y 31
these are links between images and policy. For example, there is much discus-
sion of the “CNN-Effect,” in which images drive policy; that is, whether (or not)
the spectacle of war, famine and other atrocities, displayed first on twenty-four-
hour cable news programs and now on popular YouTube and social media sites,
is able to mobilize the viewing public—and ultimately their political leaders—
to respond to injustice.75 As seen in the preceding discussion, another response
to the power of images is to think more about which visuals to employ and
how many. Thus to critique the power of mainstream media and Hollywood
movies, some commentators appeal to “slower” genres: photographs over film,
documentary photos over photojournalism, and visual art over film and pho-
tography.76 Hermeneutics thus engages in “thinking visually” by seeing images
in terms of their (con)textuality so as to deconstruct and reveal their underlying
ideology.
Conclusion
Chapter 1 develops the visibility strategy as part of a new analytical framework for
understanding visual international politics. As part of a critique of empiricism’s
treatment of images as sources of knowledge that accurately reflect reality, it
examines how images take on meaning through the “social construction of the vis-
ible.” Politics thus is about the empowerment of getting inside the frame of the vis-
ible, as well as the problems of becoming a target of dominant gazes. Although this
chapter concentrates on visual IR, the structural logic of social construction can
also be used to understand the workings of other senses, for example, the social
construction of the audible.
The chapter traces the visibility strategy’s general suspicion of images, arguing
that this is part of a wider critique of the ocular-centrism of European thought.
To solve the problem of visual images, Chapter 1 explores how critics use the
hermeneutic mode of analysis to reveal hidden ideological meaning and thus
speak truth to power. Because images can be used by elites to emotionally ma-
nipulate the masses, the visibility strategy argues that they need to be critiqued
and controlled.
75 Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Foreign Policy Intervention (London: Routledge,
2002); Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image; Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa.”
76 See Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 77; Andersen et al.,
“Visuality,” 6; Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics; Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty”; Frank Möller,
Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
2
Visuality
The Visual Performance of the International
As we saw in Chapter 1, the visibility strategy aims to shift the critical gaze away
from content to context—that is, from empiricism’s attention to the “what” issues of
accurately reflecting reality to consider the “who, when, where, and how” issues of
the social construction of the visual. My argument is not that the visibility strategy
or its hermeneutic methods are “wrong,” but that they are not enough. While
“thinking visually” is important, we also need to appreciate the importance of
“feeling visually” in international politics. Critical inquiry here changes from asking
how the image is constructed to how it makes you feel. Feeling thus is not simply
emotions produced by elite manipulation; rather, “feeling visually” appreciates how
visuals themselves can be performative, can do things and make things, and thus
visually provoke social-ordering and world-ordering practices. The guiding meta-
phor shifts from the precarious fixity of “framing” to the productive contingency
of “moving” and “connecting”: connecting people through moving images, moving
bodies, moving emotions, and even moving policy.1 Here we shift from the visibility
strategy’s analysis of the social construction of the visible to the visuality strategy’s
appreciation of how images take on meaning and value through the visual construc-
tion of the social and the visual performance of the international.
To understand how the visuality strategy works, it is helpful to look at an odd
set of maps called “Europe in 2035” that were published in 2012 (see figure 2.1).2
This exercise in medium-term futurology employs visual artifacts not simply to rep-
resent the world or an ideology, but to “do” something: to creatively make a new
regional order, and perhaps a new world order. In general, the maps show Western
European nation-states fracturing along subnational lines (although Germany and
1 See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).
2 See Frank Jacobs, “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035 If Putin Gets His Wish,” Foreign Policy
( June 4, 2014) http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/04/what-russia-could-look-like-in-2035-if-putin-
gets-his-wish/ (accessed June 6, 2017).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
Figure 2.1 “Europe in 2035,” map 2 (2012). Courtesy Ekspress Gazeta
Ireland expand), while Russian territory grows to include much (although not all)
of the former Soviet Union. Indeed, the futurology project successfully predicted
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Meanwhile, countries that have been “dis-
loyal” to Moscow are dismembered, especially Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania,
and Estonia. As Frank Jacobs concludes in an online article about the maps in Foreign
Policy, “This cartographic fantasy panders to Russia’s foreign-policy frustrations by
predicting future defeats for its ‘enemies’ and future victories for itself.”3
Here, the dream of a glorious future is intimately tied to the nightmare of the recent
past. Recall Vladimir Putin’s declaration that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the
biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century. For the Russian people, it
became a real tragedy. Tens of millions of our citizens and countrymen found them-
selves outside Russian territory. The epidemic of disintegration also spread to Russia
itself.”4 Russian public intellectuals such as Alexander Dugin provide more nuanced
arguments for this expansionist ideology of “Eurasianism” and policy prescriptions
for “New Russia” that include vast maps that are remarkably similar to Samuel
P. Huntington’s mapping of Russian Orthodox civilization.5 Indeed, reportedly a large
map of the Soviet Union still hangs on the wall of Russia’s visa office in New York.
Of course it is easy to dismiss such maps as unscientific fantasies that are merely
propaganda. Indeed, if we use hermeneutic methods to deconstruct the maps, we
can see how Foreign Policy was duped into broadcasting to an international audience
the “fake news” of right-wing propaganda from Russia. Jacobs’s English-language ar-
ticle reports on a Russian-language article from Russia’s most popular sensationalist
tabloid, Ekspress Gazeta.6 But Ekspress Gazeta is not the original source for these
maps, which first appeared on a popular Ukrainian website, Obozrevatel’. While the
authorship of the Ekspress Gazeta article is anonymous, the author of “Europe in
2035” in Obozrevatel’ is Igor Lecev, who describes himself as “a deeply intelligent,
talented, and, above all, humble journalist . . . [who] is passionate about literature
(author of the novel ‘23’), horror films, and women.”7 Hence, rather than present
3 Jacobs, “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035.”

4 Quoted in Claire Bigg, “World: Was Soviet Collapse Last Century’s Worst Geopolitical
Catastrophe?,” Radio Free Europe (April 29, 2005) https://www.rferl.org/a/1058688.html (accessed
October 7, 2017).
5 See Alexander Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism (London: Arktos
Media, 2014); Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd
ed. (London: Routledge, 2003).
6 “Rossiya pomenyaet Kavkaz na Belorussiyu i Ukrainu” [Russia swaps the Caucasus for Belarus
and Ukraine], Ekspress Gazeta ( July 9, 2012) http://www.eg.ru/daily/politics/32691/ (accessed
April 28, 2012). Many thanks to Daniel Fitter for translating these Russian-language sources.
7 Igor Lecev, “Evropa 2035: iz otkrȳtȳkh istochnikov TsRU i GRU” [Europe 2035: From CIA
and GRU open sources], Obozrevatel’ ( July 3, 2012) https://www.obozrevatel.com/abroad/01548-
evropa-2035-iz-otkryityih-istochnikov-tsru-i-gru.htm (accessed April 28, 2017).
Visualit y 35
a sober analysis of Europe’s future that is based on interpreting secret Russian in-
telligence sources, the “Europe in 2035” maps were created by a Ukrainian horror
novelist. Although it appears to be an official plan for Putin’s preferred world order,
it could very well be a prank.
But the impact of the “Europe in 2035” maps is not limited to empiricist questions
about their scientific accuracy, hermeneutic questions about their secret hidden
sources, or even questions about authorial intent. The maps took on weight and influ-
ence not based on their truth-value or ideological-value, but because they circulated
around cyberspace, first in Russian-language networks through the online tabloid
newspaper and then around the world again through Foreign Policy’s online English-
language article. Because of their prominent display on an influential Western media
platform, the “Europe in 2035” maps then gained even more traction back in Russia.
“Europe in 2035” was popular in Russia because it speaks to (and further mobilizes)
already-existing segments of elite and public opinion that long for “New Russia.”8 It was
important in the West because it speaks to (and mobilizes) already-existing segments
of elite and public opinion that are concerned about such a resurgent Russia. In both
cases, it underlines how visual artifacts can mobilize people in ways that differ from
state policy decisions that are the result of rational policy analysis or critical textual
analysis. These affective communities of sense were excited not necessarily because the
maps were given meaning by texts. Although the maps have textual labels, they are in
Russian and thus for an international audience do not function as captions to anchor
the images’ meaning. People thus responded viscerally to what they saw, rather than
rationally to what they understood. The maps became important not due to their truth-
value or ideological-value, but through “their capacity for circulation and exchange.”9
The “Europe in 2035” episode also shows how almost anyone—including a young
Ukrainian horror novelist—now can make a map that does things: here provoking new
social configurations of Russian-European-American relations far beyond the imagi-
nation or intent of any particular actor. This odd episode shows how visual images can
work in nonnarrative and nonlinear ways to construct social relations by provoking
emotions—pride, awe, disgust, outrage, fear, and hope—that are themselves political
performances. In this way, the “Europe in 2035” maps work to create new visions of
social order and world order.
The visuality strategy thus sets aside the iconoclastic view of images that figures
the visual as a dangerously powerful mode of manipulation and domination, to con-
sider what images can do and what they can make.10 Once again, it examines how
8 See Andrei P. Tsygankov and Pavel A. Tsygankov, “National Ideology and IR Theory: Three
Incarnations of the ‘Russian Idea,’” European Journal of International Relations 16:4 (2010):663–686.
9 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, quoted in Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary
Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 4.
2011), p. 96.
the visual constructs the social, especially how the visual can provoke new social-
ordering and world-ordering dynamics. The logic of the sensory construction of the
social is not limited to the visual but can be used for other senses, such as the sonic
performance of the social—and of the international.
Critical Aesthetics: Methods for Visuality

As W. J. T. Mitchell points out, it is easy to confuse a cogent analysis of the social con-
struction of the image with achieving enduring political impact: “We are all familiar
with this ‘Eureka!’ moment, when we reveal to our students and colleagues that vision
and visual images, things that (to the novice) are apparently automatic, transparent,
and natural, are actually symbolic constructions, like a language to be learned, a system
of codes that interposes an ideological veil between us and the real world.” While it
is certainly necessary to trace the source of, for example, the “Europe in 2035” maps,
“[t]‌here is an unfortunate tendency to slide back into reductive treatments of visual
images as all-powerful forces and to engage in a kind of iconoclastic critique which ima-
gines that the destruction or exposure of false images amounts to a political victory.”11
To switch from meaning to doing and from ideology to affect, Mitchell suggests that we
shift from the search for the universal “theory of pictures” to “picture theory” itself in
a complex and entangled way, and thus “ ‘perform’ theory as a visible, embodied, com-
munal practice, not as a solitary introspection of a disembodied intelligence.”12
To appreciate how the visual can provoke new social relations, we can move to-
ward a “critical aesthetic” mode of inquiry that includes (1) a switch from the search
for meaning to an appreciation of what visuals can “do” and (2) a switch from priv-
ileging the word over the image to see a more uncertain relation of word and image,
(3) which enables a shift from the search for ideology to an appreciation of how the
visual works affectively to move people and connect them in affective communities
of sense; finally, (4) this critical aesthetic mode refocuses the critical gaze from the
reformist politics of empowerment by shifting to see critique in terms of unsettling
reigning “distributions of the sensible.”13
Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 344, 351; also see Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds,
“Introduction,” in Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture, edited by Fraser MacDonald, Rachel
Hughes, and Klaus Dodds (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010), p. 14.
12 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 355; also see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6.
13 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by
Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004); Meg McLagan and
Yates McKee, eds., Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone
Books, 2012); Rune S. Andersen, Juha A. Vuori, and Can E. Mutlu, “Visuality,” in Critical Security
Visualit y 37
When I speak here of “aesthetics” in global politics, I am not discussing a theory
of beauty, but am more concerned with modes of social-ordering and world-
ordering that raise ethical questions.14 While the “aesthetic turn” in IR generally
concentrates on criticizing empiricism to allow space for hermeneutic interpreta-
tion,15 critical aesthetics is different; it questions both empirical and hermeneutic
modes of inquiry. As Michael J. Shapiro argues, “[T]‌o interrogate statements is not
to discover either fidelity of what they are about (the empiricist focus on repre-
sentation) or their intelligibility when their silent context is disclosed (a herme-
neutical focus on disclosure).”16 Rather, as Jacques Rancière suggests, we need to
critically analyze politics in terms of particular “aesthetic regimes” that are “a mode
of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of vis-
ibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships.”17 This aesthetically-
inflected politics thus is a specific “distribution of the sensible”: “the delimitation
of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simul-
taneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”18
Sensible politics, therefore, is found not just in the partisan struggle for institutional
power, but also in the configuration of space and sensibility that provokes specific
social orders and world orders. It takes shape in either “policing” the hegemonic
distribution of the sensible or challenging it through dissensus, a redistribution of
the sensible that “disrupt[s] the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and
the thinkable.”19 Aesthetically-inflected politics here emerges in active multidimen-
sional performances that take in all senses of material experience.20 Sensible Politics
thus is not only about “what can be sensed” but also concerns “what makes sense”
in the pragmatic politics of everyday life.21
The critical aesthetic mode thus involves a reconfiguration of the word/image re-
lation. While narrative theory argues that we need to interpret the meaning of texts
in relation to other texts—that is, intertextuality—the visuality strategy examines
Method: New Frameworks for Analysis, edited by Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and
Nadine Voelkner (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 85–117.
14 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Anticipating the Han: Thinking Through the Narratives of
Chinese and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method.
15 See, for example, Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics,  1–47.
16 Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 4.
17 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 10.
20 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 40–41; also see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the
Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006).
21 Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 3.
Also see McLagan and McKee, Sensible Politics.
how images don’t simply illustrate texts, but also look to other images in a process of
“intervisuality” wherein an “image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of vis-
ibility.”22 As Lene Hansen explains, the pictures of emaciated people in concentra-
tion camps in the Bosnian war were compelling, in part, because they intervisually
evoked iconic photos of people liberated from Nazi death camps in World War II.23
In the Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes suggests another appreciation of the
word/image relation. This idiosyncratic work about his experiences in Japan cre-
atively mixes personal writing with photographs and drawings for a new form of
critique in which “[t]‌he text does not gloss the images, which do not illustrate the
text. For me, each has been no more than the onset of a kind of visual uncertainty.”24
This unstable relation of word and image creates fruitful ambiguity. Commenting
on a Japanese calligraphic painting, Barthes asks: “Where does the writing begin?
Where does the painting begin?”25 To answer this question, Barthes moves away
from hermeneutics to suggest that such a critique “paints more than it digs.”26 Value
here emerges in the visceral movement and bodily connections mobilized by this
particular redistribution of the see-able and the say-able.
The hermeneutics/critical aesthetics distinction is also an iteration of the long-
standing philosophical debate over whether value resides in deep principles or in
activities on the surface. Jürgen Habermas praises ancient Greece and other Axial
Age civilizations for “br[eaking] open the chasm between deep and surface struc-
ture, between essence and appearance, which first conferred the freedom of reflec-
tion and the power to distance oneself from the giddy multiplicity of immediacy.”27
Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, argued that it is a mistake to assume that
value is hidden in the depths. He felt that the “giddy multiplicity of immediacy” is
not a problem, but an opportunity: “Oh, those Greeks! They knew how to live: what
is required is to stop bravely at the surface, the fold, the skin, to worship appearance,
to believe in shapes, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance!”28 While
hermeneutics textualizes images to reveal their deep hidden meaning, critical aes-
thetics generally looks for value at the surface in embodied, affective, and everyday
encounters on the local, national, and world stages.
22 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 99.

23 Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the
Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,” European Journal of International Relations 17:1 (2011):53.
24 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. xi.
25 Barthes, Empire of Signs, 21.
26 Roland Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture: College de France,” in A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan
Sontag (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 475.
27 Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions, translated and edited by Max Pensky (Cambridge,
UK: Polity Press, 2006), p. 160.
28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, [1887] 2001), pp. 8–9.
Visualit y 39
In this way, films can be valuable not necessarily for the meaning of their nar-
rative content, but for their affective dynamics. For example, in discussing a film’s
critical contribution, Shapiro explains that “[w]‌hile the narrative of the film reaches
no dramatic conclusion, the film’s landscape and close-up face and body shots carry
the burden of its political thinking.”29 In this decentered world, “time is a function
of the cuts and juxtapositions of the editing rather than linear flowing of the move-
ment of the characters.”30 Shapiro thus encourages us to “avoid argument-marking
meta-statements” in order to allow “juxtapositions [to] carry much of the burden of
the analyses.”31 Chapter 4’s discussion of methods, for example, traces how research
filmmaking can enable us to appreciate the power of the nonlinear, nonlinguistic,
and nonrepresentational aspects of experience: the laughs, sighs, shrugs, cringes,
and tears that are provoked in the on-camera interview process, which then can be
edited into an engaging set of images that, in turn, can produce laughs, cringes, and
tears in the film’s audience. Here we move from an empirical/hermeneutic process
of making subjects more “visible” to the critical aesthetic mode of exploring the
“visuality” of how images themselves can “do” things through nonlinear and non-
narrative dynamics.32 Rancière thus argues that politics emerges not through repre-
sentation, but through mis-en-scène.33
The critical aesthetics mode, therefore, enables us to explore how the visual
provokes social-ordering and world-ordering through opening up new affective
registers. In this sense, it operationalizes “aisthitikos—the ancient Greek word/con-
cept from which aesthetics is derived—[that] refers to the pre-linguistic, embodied,
or feeling-based aspect of perception.”34 “Affect” is a broad and contested concept.35
It generally seeks to shift critical focus from facts to feelings, from stable individual
identity to multiple flows of encounter, from texts to nonlinear, nonlinguistic, and
nonrepresentational genres, from abstract rational knowledge to embodied forms

32 Gillian Rose, “On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual
Culture,” The Sociological Review 62:1 (2014):36–41.
33 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 67.
35 See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2015); Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans-
lated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lyndon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011);
Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, eds., “Forum: Emotions and World Politics,” special issue,
International Theory 6:3 (2014):490–594; Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of
Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25; Brian L. Ott, “Affect,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of
Communication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–26.
of experience, and thus from ideology to affect. Brian Massumi famously argues
that affect is an “intensive force” that emerges through the visceral resonance of
connecting bodies at “the intersection of matter, movement, aesthetics, and sen-
sation.”36 Affect theory generally differentiates between emotion and affect, seeing
emotion as the internal subjective content of the individual, while affect emerges
as a social experience as bodies connect in an “affective economy.”37 This is a com-
plex argument, and the lesson that I take from it is that affect is a useful concept for
appreciating how visual artifacts can act as material modalities and sensory spaces
that move and connect people both individually and collectively.
Affect theory is often discussed in terms of visual experiences because, as
Massumi notes, they are “central to an understanding of our information-and
image-based late capitalist culture.”38 This is because visuals move people in ways
that make them “feel a connection with others” in a visceral way: “If seeing is
believing, then seeing is also feeling.”39 For example, Smog Journeys (2015), a short
advocacy film that top Chinese director Jia Zhangke made for Greenpeace, does
not use words or a linear narrative to discuss China’s environmental problems. It is
a “silent movie” that juxtaposes a series of images and (nonverbal) sounds of pol-
luted/clean air, rich/poor people, and urban/rural life-worlds. The political work of
the film emerges through these relations, and especially in the juxtaposition of the
tragic image of a sick baby’s staccato cough against the comic scene of models pro-
moting fashionable face-masks on the catwalk40 (see figure 2.2). This film is a great
example of the audio-visual creation of meaning and feeling, because it shows the
social construction of the audible and the sonic construction of the social. This is
a different sort of public service announcement (PSA): rather than work through
providing evidence and argumentation, the film mobilizes a reaction (and perhaps
political action) by provoking a visceral response that connects people. As photo-
journalist Don McCullin explains, “Photography for me is not looking, it’s feeling.
If you can’t feel what you’re looking at, then you’re never going to get others to feel
anything when they look at your pictures.”41
For the hermeneutics mode, this would be a problem: hegemonic powers use
emotional images to manipulate the general public. But with affect theory, feelings
are valued in a different register of experience that moves and connects people.
36 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28; also see Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 39; Ott,
“Affect,” 13.
37 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 28; Ott, “Affect,” 3; Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of
Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 44–49.
38 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27.
39 Anderson et al., “Visuality,” 13.
40 Jia Zhangke, dir., Smog Journeys (Beijing: Greenpeace, January 21, 2015) https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=zf F7ZmKMUX0 (accessed October 17, 2017).
41 Quoted in David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the
Imaging of War,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):68.
Visualit y 41
Figure 2.2 Jia Zhangke, Smog Journeys (2015). Courtesy Greenpeace East Asia
Judith Butler, for example, traces how photographs of torture and suffering can
generate affective intensities through an emotional economy of grief.42 Emma
Hutchison goes further to examine the affective register as collective sociality in
international politics, in which intense experiences can mobilize “affective commu-
nities.”43 As Adam Curtis’s innovative documentaries show, international politics
is also about dreams, nightmares, and feelings that move people, connecting and
repelling them.44 Mitchell thus argues that pictures themselves can have the agency
to desire, while Rancière celebrates how spectators are active and political in “com-
munities of sense.”45 Sensible politics thus is collective, affective, and multisensory
in the way that it productively provokes “affective communities of sense” in both
elite forums and the pragmatic everyday.
Critical aesthetics also enables us to take seriously the visual and multisensory
politics of material things such as maps, veils, walls, and gardens by allowing us to
42 Butler, Frames of War.

43 Hutchison, Affective Communities, 4.
44 Adam Curtis, dir., The Power of Nightmares (London: BBC, 2004); Adam Curtis, dir., Bitter Lake
(London: BBC, 2015).
45 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Jacques Rancière,
“Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics
and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth
McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 31. Also see Michael J. Shapiro,
The Political Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic
Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Oxford: Polity Press, 2013); Robert Hariman
and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016); Frank Möller, Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence
get beyond the interpretive search for meaning to consider what work these visual
artifacts can do, including how they can “picture” theory.46 A map thus is more
than a reflection of the contemporary world. As Cordell D. K. Yee explains, it also
can “serve as an instrument of political persuasion, give form to emotional states,
or even afford access to transcendent beings.”47 Maps thus aren’t just images that
represent ideology, because they also can circulate affect as material artifacts in
the classroom, that students touch and that touch students. As heavily-designed
spaces that forge particular relations between the see-able, hear-able, smell-able,
and the touch-able, visual artifacts such as war memorials, monuments, walls, and
gardens are also exemplary distributions of the sensible. These infrastructures of
feeling have what Jane Bennett calls “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate
things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”48 Rather than see
visual culture in terms of “just the study of images or media”—and rather than see
visual international politics in terms of the state-centric study of violence, war, and
security—visual artifacts show that it is necessary to consider visual IR in terms
of the “everyday practices of seeing and showing.”49 Once again, “sensible politics”
is more than sensory; it looks beyond icons and ideology to address “what makes
sense” in the pragmatic politics of everyday life.
Expanding analysis from two-dimensional visual images to three-dimensional
visual artifacts aids the switch from the symbolic analysis of the politics of repre-
sentation to the affect-work done in multisensory spaces wherein one can be an
observer, a participant, and—when things go awry—even a target. Attention to
visual artifacts does not deny that many people experience them as moving and
still images, for example, videos of people partying on the Berlin Wall in 1989.
And it works the other way around, too. Visual images can take on material form
as artifacts and practical experiences; an important part of “going to the movies”
46 MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 15.

47 Cordell D. K. Yee, “Concluding Remarks: Foundations for a Future History of Chinese Mapping,”
in The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian
Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994),
p. 228.
48 Elena Barabantseva coined the phrase “infrastructure of feeling.” Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A
Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010), p. 6. Also see Hutchison,
Affective Communities, 128; Caitlin Hamilton, “The Everyday Artefacts of World Politics: Why Graphic
Novels, Textiles and Internet Memes Matter in World Politics” (PhD dissertation, University of New
South Wales, 2016); Mark B. Salter, “Introduction: Circuits and Motion,” in Making Things International
1: Circuits and Motion, edited by Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015),
pp. vii–x xii; Carlos Rojas, The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010); Wybe Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650–1950 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
49 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 343; Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (New York: Pelican
Books, 2015); Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, xiii.
Visualit y 43
is its collective social experience, and “with still photographs the image is also an
object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. . . . To
collect photographs is to collect the world.”50 The goal thus is to appreciate visual
artifacts as material modalities and sensory spaces in which international politics is
represented, performed, and experienced through more embodied, affective, and
everyday encounters on the local, national, and world stages.
In a broader sense, the shift from meaning to doing and from ideology to af-
fect entails a reconfiguration of the political away from the issues of framing seen in
the visibility strategy. Certainly, focusing on including a more diverse selection of
people in the picture frame has been an effective strategy for positive social change.51
But what Allan Sekula criticized as the “find-a-bum school of concerned photog-
raphy” shows how “photographs are not necessarily more politicized and less ideo-
logical when they are explicitly called upon on behalf of a political-reform issue.”52
In other words, images of refugees in need of international aid can easily serve to
reify the existing social hierarchies of rich/poor, safety/danger, and here/there.53
A “critical attitude” of self-reflection thus needs to go beyond “merely serving par-
ticular social segments or disempowered groups.” Instead, it needs to “present
a challenge to identity politics in general, . . . even those on which some social
movements are predicated.” Rather than stake out political positions, the goal here
is to “displace institutionalized forms of recognition with thinking. To think (rather
than to seek to explain) in this sense is to invent and apply conceptual frames and
create juxtapositions that disrupt and/or render historically contingent accepted
knowledge practices.”54 Instead of working through either empiricist explanation or
hermeneutic interpretation, critical aesthetics can provide a “heterogeneous assem-
blage” that works to arrest common sense—even the common sense of Left-Right
politics used to critique Donald Trump’s Great Wall of America.55

52 Allan Sekula, quoted in Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in
Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), pp.
162, 130.
53 Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and
Local Empowerment,” International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007):146ff.; David Campbell, “Geopolitics
and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict,” Political Geography 26 (2007):357–382; R. B. J. Walker,
Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
54 Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 8, xv; also see Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of
Shimmers,” 11.
55 Roland Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics,” Millennium 43:3 (2015):882–883;
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone
Press, 1996), pp. 3–25, 377.
If we set aside, for a moment, the familiar measures of partisan politics, how does
the critical aesthetic mode of inquiry evaluate things? How does it figure the relation
between the sensible and international politics? One way is to shift from the symbolic
vocabulary of representation, meaning, and ideology toward a sensible materialist ap-
preciation of intensity, resonance, rhythm, and vibration. To grasp the power of affect,
we do not look for “conformity or correspondence, but rather . . . resonation or inter-
ference, amplification or dampening.”56 Barthes thus calls on us to conduct an “inven-
tory of shimmers, of nuances, of states, of changes” that is attuned to the giddiness of
unexpected and inexplicable experiences.57 As Mitchell explains, “It isn’t simply that
the words contradict the image, and vice versa, but that the very identities of words and
images, the sayable and the seeable, begin to shimmer and shift in the composition, as if
the image could speak and the words were on display.”58 According to Michel Foucault,
the weight of discursive formations, including visual artifacts, is a “value that is not de-
fined by their truth, that is not gauged by the presence of a secret content; but which
characterizes their place, their capacity for circulation and exchange.”59 Rather than test
the truth-value of data or the truth-claims of representations, it seeks to appreciate the
“shimmer-value” of heterogeneous visceral encounters that move and connect people
in affective communities of sense. This book’s discussion of maps in Chapter 7, for ex-
ample, examines how cartographs can creatively generate alternative world orders in
the South China Sea. It looks to the family resemblances seen in a set of maps from early
modern and modern East Asia to show how they collectively produced, promoted, and
circulated an affective atmosphere that mobilized communities of sense. Rather than
search for the “original map” as objective evidence to prove sovereign territorial claims,
the chapter argues that these maps “intervisually” resonate with each other to celebrate
China’s imperial expansion, to lament its lost territories, and to fight to recover them.
The critical aesthetic mode thus highlights how international politics takes shape
through sensibility, experience, performativity, and social-ordering and world-
ordering in affective communities of sense. These contingent dynamics resonate with
each other in complex ways as an assemblage that offers no stable account of cau-
sality.60 Hence, while the international politics of visuality is often overlooked, even in
critical IR, because of its indirect impact on global affairs, Sensible Politics argues that
visuality can do international politics in a broader way by provoking affective com-
munities of sense that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and
done.61
56 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25.

57 Quoted in Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 11.
58 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 68.
59 Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, quoted in Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 4.
60 Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods,” 882.
61 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13; Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of
Aesthetics,” 31; William E. Connolly, Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox,
expanded ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods,” 874.
Visualit y 45
Conclusion
While Chapter 1 considers what is important about visual IR, Chapter 2 explores
what is different about visual international relations: how visual images don’t just
illustrate international events as visual texts, but can actively create international
politics as visual performances that viscerally move and connect people in unex-
pected ways. The chapter shifts from the visibility strategy’s focus on the social
construction of the visible to the visuality strategy’s appreciation of how images
take on meaning and value through the visual construction of the social. While the
visibility strategy looks to the inside/outside dynamics of framing, the visuality
strategy examines how the visual can provoke and perform new social-ordering and
world-ordering activities. Chapter 2 thus develops the idea of sensible politics as a
collective, affective, and multisensory dynamic that excites “affective communities
of sense” in both elite forums and everyday life. Sensible Politics is about multisen-
sory politics; it also looks beyond icons and ideology to “what makes sense” in the
pragmatic politics of the everyday.
Chapter 2 also expands on Chapter 1’s symbolic analysis of “visual images”—
photos, film, television—to develop the concept of “visual artifact”: maps, veils,
walls, gardens, and cyberspace. It argues that such three-dimensional visual artifacts
can shape IR as material modalities, sensory spaces, and infrastructures of feeling
that are experienced both individually and collectively. To evaluate how visual
images and artifacts don’t just mean things, but can actively do things, the visuality
strategy moves beyond assessing their ideological-value to appreciate their affect-
work: not just what they mean, but also how they make us feel. Chapter 2 thus
challenges the critique of ocular-centrism by outlining how the visuality strategy
can help us appreciate affective communities of sense in a different register. The goal
is to make readers not only think visually, but also feel visually—and act visually for
a multisensory appreciation of politics.
Certainly Chapter 1’s discussion of hermeneutics is too narrow; many of the
theorists described in this analysis would say that they are exploring aesthetics.
Similarly, Chapter 2’s discussion of affect theory is too wide; it includes emotions,
whereas some affect theorists argue that affect and emotion need to be differenti-
ated. But I find the ideology/affect and hermeneutics/critical aesthetics distinctions
useful for differentiating between strategies that turn visuals into meaningful texts
in order to reveal their hidden ideology and those that work to appreciate visuals
as multisensory affective performances that excite social orders and world orders.
3
Dynamic Dyads
Visibility/Visuality and East/West
What is the relation between visibility and visuality? From the discussion in
Chapters 1 and 2, it would be easy to conclude that critical aesthetics is the proper
mode for appreciating visual international politics. Indeed, the two chapters’ brief
summary of hermeneutics and critical aesthetics risks descending into a caricature
of pitched battles between words and images. Rather than see visibility and visu-
ality in terms of theoretical battles between opposing positions, perhaps it’s better
to understand them in terms of a historical development from empiricism, to her-
meneutics, and finally to critical aesthetics. Indeed, this movement can be seen in
the intellectual trajectories of many of the key theorists discussed in Chapters 1 and
2, who typically started out using hermeneutic methods, then developed more crit-
ically aesthetic modes for appreciating the visual.1
But Sensible Politics figures visual international politics neither in terms of
pitched battles nor through historical evolution. What we have is an uneasy relation
between visibility and visuality: as W. J. T. Mitchell explains, although he aimed to
“move away from meaning and power, [he] kept circling back to semiotics, herme-
neutics, and rhetoric.”2 Certainly one reason for this is that the political-economy of
the academy values verbally-inflected knowledge production over visually-oriented
work.3 For me, however, it is more than the logistical issue of which genre to em-
ploy. As Chapter 4 on methods recounts, I am part of a growing group of scholars
who explore international politics not only through writing books, but by making
research films. The argument of this chapter (and this book) thus is that we need to
explore sensible politics in terms of both visibility and visuality for theoretical and
methodological reasons. Only in this way can we benefit from understanding visual
1 See, for example, the works of W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael J. Shapiro, and Susan Sontag.
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 46.
3 See Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009),
p. xiv.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
D y namic  D yads 47
international politics in terms of both the “social construction of the visual” and the
“visual performance of social orders and world orders.”
This visibility/visuality dynamic works itself out in several ways. While her-
meneutics privileges the verbal, and affect theory the sensory, some theorists seek
to see visual artifacts in terms of an organic combination of word-image, as seen
with Roland Barthes’s appreciation of calligraphic paintings.4 Jacques Rancière and
Michael J. Shapiro both aim to loosen the hierarchy of word over image by figuring
the relation as a contingent dynamic, so as to probe “the relationship between the
visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.”5 Mitchell suggests that we think in terms of
“image/text,” because “all media are mixed media.”6 Since words and images are in
an “infinite relation” wherein “neither can be reduced to the other’s terms,” Michel
Foucault argues that we should treat this “incompatibility as starting point, rather
than as an obstacle.”7
In light of this hopeful vagueness, it is helpful to consider concrete examples that
play with word and image, and with meaning and doing. For example, the Chinese
character for map, tu (图, which is also used in Korean and Japanese), speaks to a
double-coded understanding of visibility’s “social construction of the visual” and
visuality’s “visual provocation of social relations.” As a noun, tu means a picture, a
diagram, a chart, a table, and a map, while as a verb it means to anticipate, to hope,
to scheme, to plan, to plot against, and even to covet.8 As the “Europe in 2035”
maps discussed in Chapter 2 show, cartographs certainly provide information and
meaning, but they also can—at the same time—express emotions and desires that
covet and scheme in ways that move and connect people in affective communities
of sense.
The distinction between hermeneutics and critical aesthetics was discussed
in Chapters 1 and 2 in terms of Euro-American critical thought and its various
reactions to the theories of objective knowledge and transcendent truth. Classical
Chinese thought is interesting because it addresses many of the same issues but
4 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 21.

Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 162; Jacques Rancière, The Politics
of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 63.
7 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), pp. 9–10.
8 See Cordell D. K. Yee, “Chinese Maps in Political Culture,” in The History of Cartography, Vol.
II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and
David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 79; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial
Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), p. 3. Also see Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), p. 2; Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion
Books, 1997), pp. 104–108.
from a different starting point: that is, of an immanent world that is based on contin-
gent human relations rather than Enlightenment modernity’s external measures of
truth.9 Knowledge production here “is both descriptive and normative. It suggests
how things ought to be” and thus combines meaning and doing.10
Rather than figuring word/image relations in terms of an uneasy armistice or a
fierce battle, “the distinction between word and visual image, so strong in the Western
tradition, is not nearly as sharp in China. . . . [Thus] the usual oppositions between
visual and verbal, cartographic and pictorial, mimetic and symbolic representation may
not apply.”11 While the verbal generally takes precedence in Enlightenment thought,
in Chinese aesthetics the verbal and the visual often work together through a non-
hierarchical co-presence. For example, it is common for a scroll painting to have both
an image and a poem, in which “[t]‌he picture is not an illustration of the poem, nor is
the poem a commentary on the picture.”12
Although this lack of clarity can be criticized as “vague,” David L. Hall and Roger
T. Ames explain that classical Chinese thought’s lack of “univocally defined terms” ac-
tually is its strength; as a non-transcendent thought system, it works through analogy
rather than principles and through historical models rather than abstract norms.13 This
analogical system functions according to an “ongoing process of correlation and ne-
gotiation” in which different things and experiences become noteworthy through jux-
taposition.14 “Reasoning” does not refer to measurement against external standards,
but rather “entails an awareness of those constitutive relationships which condition
each thing and which, through patterns of correlation, make its world meaningful and
intelligible.”15
Once we shift from looking for causality to valuing correlative relations, a greater
appreciation of the relationality of dynamic dyads such as inside/outside is neces-
sary. As we saw in Chapter 1, understanding inside/outside as a complex, overlap-
ping, and contingent relation is popular in critical IR literature. As R. B. J. Walker
argues, inside/outside marks a distinction between domestic politics and inter-
national politics that is not only territorial but also social; “inside” denotes safety,
9 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Anticipating the Han: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese
and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995); Craig Clunas, “Reading Wen
Zhengming: Metaphor and Chinese Painting,” Word & Image 25:1 (2009):96–102.
10 Hall and Ames, Anticipating the Han, 216.
11 Cordell D. K. Yee, “Chinese Cartography among the Arts: Objectivity, Subjectivity,
Representation,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and
Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), p. 128.
12 Clunas, “Reading Wen Zhengming,” 101, 99.
13 Hall and Ames, Anticipating the Han, 212, 217; Clunas, “Reading Wen Zhengming,” 98.
law, and sovereignty, while “outside” marks danger, violence, and anarchy.16 Politics
emerges in the negotiations that occur each time this unstable social distinction is
asserted, especially when it defines self/Other and friend/enemy relations.
Inside/outside is even more central to Chinese political discourse as nei/wai.17
According to Thomas A. Metzger, dynamic dyads such as nei/wai-inside/outside
are key to social life in China, organizing relations between individuals, families,
and clans, all the way up to relations between different peoples and different states.18
Other dynamic dyads include wen/wu (civil/military) and Hua/yi (Civilization/
barbarism), which likewise directly engage in social-ordering and world-ordering.
Hua/yi functions in familiar ways to construct the barbaric Other so as to exclude
them from the Civilized self.19 In other words, Civilized China only takes shape
when it is distinguished from barbarism through a set of dynamic dyads, with
“China being internal, large, and high and barbarians being external, small and
low.”20 Civilization/barbarism dynamic is not merely useful for understanding pre-
modern China’s relations with its neighbors; China’s top international lawyers con-
tinue to use “barbarian” as a technical term in arguments to discourage neighboring
states from making rival territorial claims.21
This contemporary example shows how contingent relations with difference can
become ossified into fixed binary oppositions of self/Other and friend/enemy. In
Euro-America this works itself out through self-criticism that figures the Western
16 R. B. J. Walker, Inside/ Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge,

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
17 See Lien-sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order,” in The Chinese World
Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, edited by John King Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1968), pp. 20–33; Ge Zhaoguang, Lishi Zhongguo de nei yu wai: Youguan “Zhongguo”
yu “zhoubian” gainian de zai chengqing [Inside and outside in historical China: Re-clarifying the
concepts of “Middle Kingdom” and “periphery”] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017).
18 Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 84.
19 See Yang, “Historical Notes”; Magnus Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of
Imperial China,” Inner Asia 1:2 (1999):139–168. Although there is now debate about whether we
should translate ancient terms such as “Yi” as “foreigner” rather than “barbarian,” this argument misses
the point that in such a hierarchical world order, outsiders are by definition barbarians. See, for ex-
ample, Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
20 Yang, “Historical Notes,” 20; also see Fiskesjö, “On the ‘Raw’ ”; William A. Callahan, Contingent
States: Greater China and Transnational Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
21 Jianming Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands: A Historical Perspective,”
Chinese Journal of International 94 (2002):103, 104, 118; Zhiguo Gao and Bing Bing Jia. “The Nine-
Dash Line in the South China Sea: History, Status, and Implications,” The American Journal of
International Law 107:1 (2013):100.
self as barbaric in relation to a Civilized East.22 Unfortunately, such “Occidentalism”

not only reverses the Civilization/barbarism distinction but also reinforces its bi-
nary opposition logic, thus obstructing more fruitful possibilities. Dynamic dyads
thus are not a dialectic opposition in which visual politics is “moved forward by the
productive and destructive interaction of opposed forces.”23 The point of figuring
sensible politics in terms of dyads is not emancipation or progress, but to loosen
up their dynamic relations in ways that question both self/Other and Other/self
relations and to critique the social orders, the world orders, and the affective com-
munities of sense that they produce and perform.24
Another interesting dynamic dyad is wen/wu, which can work in more nuanced
ways that resist simple reversal and ossification. Wen generally means literary, ci-
vilian, and civilization, while wu generally means physical, military, and martial.25
The two concepts certainly can be understood as opposites, but not necessarily
in the sense of the mutually exclusive binary opposition of an either/or zero-sum
battle between civil and military. Wen/wu does not necessarily contrast the roles
of different autonomous actors, such as the soldier and the civilian. Likewise, wen/
wu does not map easily onto gendered distinctions: feminine-civil and masculine-
martial.26 Rather, the ideal person in pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea harmo-
nized a dynamic balance of civility and martiality, as both a poet and a warrior.
World-ordering, national governance, family relations, and personal self-cultivation
all were guided by this quest to harmonize the complementary opposites of literary
and martial performances.27
Hence, rather than function according to the fixed binary distinctions charac-
teristic of Enlightenment modernity, such dynamic dyads are relational, contex-
tual, contingent, and fluid, often with a productive tension between the ideal and
lived experience.28 What is most interesting about these dyads is their general lack
of stable canonical definition; there is no orthodoxy, and the dynamic dyads’ con-
tingent flexibility demands that we appreciate each dynamic through continual
interpretive practice and affective experience.29 Rather than analyze according to
22 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2010); Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the
Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
23 Mirzoeff, Introduction to Visual Culture, 9.
24 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics,  48–49.
25 Kam Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 10.
26 Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity,  9–11.
27 Louie, Theorizing Chinese Masculinity, 11, 15–17; Oleg Benesch, “National Consciousness
and the Evolution of the Civil/Military Binary in East Asia,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 8:1
(2011):133–137.
28 Metzger, Escape from Predicament, 84; also see David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking
Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
29 See Benesch, “National Consciousness,” 165.
instrumental rationality and causality, these correlative dyads require concrete

and detailed thinking and feeling.30 Dynamic dyads thus are more about making
sense of experience and less about determining stable truth-claims; they help us
to “picture theory”31 by appreciating the workings of the conventions of picture-
taking, film-making, map-making, veil-wearing, wall-building, garden-building,
and Web-surfing.
This book thus argues that to appreciate the workings of ideology and affect, de-
tailed empirical study is necessary and valuable. One way to problematize the search
for universal theory is to examine how sensible politics emerges in specific times
and places. David Campbell, for example, conducts a detailed empirical study to
show how a different kind of picture-taking was required in the mid-2000s to ad-
dress atrocities in Sudan. While standard humanitarian war photography pictures
the conflict through the frame of suffering women and children in refugee camps,
Campbell argues that if the issue is “war crimes,” then picture-taking has to adjust to
provide specific sorts of photographs that can be used as “evidence” in international
tribunals. A “forensic” approach to this particular situation thus required pictures
of “Sudanese helicopter gunships strafing villages, Janjaweed militia dividing goods
they have looted, as well as their human victims and the ordnance that has killed
and injured them.”32 The performativity of picture-taking here is an empirical ques-
tion.33 In this way, methods of visual international politics move from the empirics
of positivism to the symbolic analysis of hermeneutics to recover the empirical
study of material modalities and sensory spaces through the critical aesthetic mode.
East/West as a Conceptual Dyad

Readers may have noticed that this book has yet to discuss or display images of 9/11
or Abu Ghraib. While it is common to see such horrific images on book covers and
discussed in the opening pages of visual international politics texts,34 I have avoided
30 Hall and Ames, Anticipating the Han, 215; Roxanne L. Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in
Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power,” Perspectives on Politics 15:4
(2017):1007–1033.
31 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 355; also see W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal
and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 6.
32 David Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict,” Political Geography
26 (2007):378–379; Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability
(Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2017).
33 See Rune S. Andersen, Juha A. Vuori, and Can E. Mutlu, “Visuality,” in Critical Security
Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis, edited by Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and
Nadine Voelkner (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 107.
34 Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 1; David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro,
“Guest Editor’s Introduction: Securitization, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of
these images because this starting point characteristically puts discussion on a par-
ticular path that conceals as much as it reveals. Namely, it focuses critical attention on
“America/the West,” where image politics is dominated by the “military-industrial-
media-entertainment network” that joins Hollywood, corporate America, and the
Pentagon.35 Eurocentrism increasingly is seen as a problem in IR, and much visual
IR thus addresses this issue through a robust critique of Euro-American images of
the non-Western Other.36
My concern is that Eurocentrism is not simply about content—for example,
analysis of the global power of Hollywood—but also about theory and method. As
Kuan-Hsing Chen argues, the “West as method” dominates discussions of Asia as
well as of Euro-America.37 This problematic emerges when top (Western) theorists
are confronted with their lack of interest in topics outside Euro-America. In her
discussion of the politics of walls, for example, Wendy Brown doesn’t feel the need
to look beyond her European and American examples, but suggests that “someone
should.”38 Thomas Nail is more circumspect about his lack of interest in politics be-
yond Euro-America: while “focusing mainly on the West . . . risks perpetuating a
pernicious Eurocentrism,” he argues that it’s justified because he is deconstructing
(Western) hegemony and empire.39 In his Introduction to Visual Culture, Mirzoeff
answers potential complaints about his textbook’s lack of Asian content in a
different way:
Post-9/11,” Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):131–137; Gabi Schlag and Anna Greis, “Visualizing
Violence: Aesthetics and Ethics in International Politics,” Global Discourse 7:2–3 (2017):193–200;
Roland Bleiker, “Mapping Visual Global Politics,” in Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker
(London: Routledge, 2018), p. 4; Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge,
2009), p. 1; Mirzoeff, Introduction to Visual Culture, book cover; Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes,
and Klaus Dodds, “Introduction,” in Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture, edited by Fraser
MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010), p. 5; Frank Möller,
Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 6.
35 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment
Network (New York: Routledge, 2009); David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial
Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):57–73.
36 Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Fraser MacDonald,
Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds, eds., Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (New York: I.
B. Taurus, 2010); David Shim, Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is Believing (London: Routledge,
2013); Jung-Bong Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism onto Postcolonial Criticism,” Social Identities
9:3 (2003):327; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. xii, xxii–
xxiii; Bleiker, “Mapping Visual Global Politics,” 26.
37 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010), p. 216.
38 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014), p. 78.
39 Nail, Theory of the Border, 223.
I am, for example, very much aware that I do not have a great deal of ex-
pertise in Asian visual culture (and none at all in Asian languages) and it is
not widely represented in this book. That in no way means that I think it is
unimportant: to the contrary, I hope someone writes an account of visual
culture from the Chinese, Indian or Japanese point of view.40
For such critical theorists, the non-West is a curious place for “area studies” (i.e.,
requiring exotic language abilities), which can provide a particularist perspective
but not interesting concepts—let alone general theory.
How can we address this Eurocentrism of theory and method? One response
is to reverse the East/West power dynamic to see China/Asia not just as the site
of alternative experiences, but as the source of a ready-made, comprehensive al-
ternative theory: for example, China’s All-under-Heaven (Tianxia) system as an
alternative to the Westphalian system.41 Such “Asian alternatives” promise to eman-
cipate the world from the “problem” of America/the West.42 The problem with
such empirical reversals is that Eurocentrism is characteristically replaced with
an Asia-centrism that is still, as Chen puts it, “obsessed” with the West.43 For ex-
ample, to invoke an Asian alternative, L. H. M. Ling reduces IR in Euro-America
to “HEW: Hypermasculine-Eurocentric Whiteness.”44 Or more to the point, while
there was a vociferous response in 2016 to one article in Third World Quarterly that
made “the case for colonialism,”45 there has been little or no critical response to a
40 Mirzoeff, Introduction to Visual Culture, xiv; also see Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A
Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. xvi.
41 See, for example, Tingyang Zhao, “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-
Heaven’ (Tian-xia),” Social Identities 12:1 (2006):29–41; David C. Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five
Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Wang Ban, ed., Chinese
Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
42 See, for example, Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a
Sustainable Future (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); L. H. M. Ling, The Dao of
World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations (London: Routledge, 2014);
Pinar Bilgin and L. H. M. Ling, eds., Asia in International Relations: Unlearning Imperial Power Relations
(London: Routledge, 2017); Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western
World and the Birth of a New Global Order, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2012); Yan Xuetong, Ancient
Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Qin Yaqing,
A Relational Theory of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
43 Chen, Asia as Method, 1, 215. Also see Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism”; Arif Dirlik,
The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, 1998).
44 Ling, The Dao of World Politics, 4.
45 Bruce Gilley, “The Case for Colonialism,” Third World Quarterly (September 8, 2017):1–
17; Adam Lusher, “Professor’s ‘Bring Back Colonialism’ Call Sparks Fury and Academic Freedom
Debate,” The Independent (October 12, 2017) http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/amer-
icas/colonialism-academic-article-bruce-gilley-threats-v iolence-published-w ithdrawn-third-world-
quarterly-a7996371.html (accessed December 14, 2017).
tidal wave of texts (both texts from establishment intellectuals in China and critical
IR texts from Euro-America) that promote a Chinese model of “benevolent” im-
perial governance that is suitable for the twenty-first century.46 This follows from
a general trend in critical literature that frames imperialism as a uniquely Western
practice, often focusing only on the modern Anglo-French experience.47 Criticism
of “Western imperialism” here focuses more on “the West” than on “imperialism”
itself, resulting in the popularity of Chinese imperial models of world order that we
see today.
Sensible Politics aims to avoid such East/West and self/Other reversals.48 Like
Nail’s confessions of his own Eurocentric limitations, political theory and IR
theory are full of apologies for not going beyond the Western canon. As Brown
and Mirzoeff suggest, the hope is that “natives” from beyond Euro-America can in-
form the Western academy about possible theoretical contributions from Chinese,
Islamic, Indian, African (and so on) “traditions.”49 But for comparative political
theorists such as Leigh Jenco, this is problematic. In Changing Referents: Learning
Across Space and Time in China and the West, she argues that we need to get beyond
a container-style geopolitical organization of knowledge-production in which the
choice is between the “modern West” and “traditional China.”50 Jenco describes
how in the late nineteenth century critical intellectuals in China dealt with the chal-
lenge of the West/modernity by creatively combining various different strands of
thought: neo-Confucianism, Daoism, Marxism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and
so on. The result of this complex and critical cross-cultural engagement is a new
form of global thought that draws on various distinct traditions but is not reducible
to any one singular tradition. It thus draws on different times and places to critique
the present.
Sensible Politics likewise seeks to learn from Middle Eastern, Chinese, and Asian
concepts, practices, and experiences of visual international politics as a way to
46 See the sources in notes 41 and 42.

47 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, xv–xvi; Choi, “Mapping Japanese Imperialism”; Allen Chun, Forget
Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2017), pp. 16–17; Said, Culture and Imperialism, xii, xxii–x xiii.
48 This is part of a problematization of geopolitical binary oppositions, including North/South.
49 See, for example, Fred Dallmyr and Zhao Tingyang, eds., Contemporary Chinese Political
Thought: Debates and Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012); Peter Katzenstein,
ed., Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010);
Diego von Vacano, “The Scope of Comparative Political Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 18
(2015):465–80.
50 Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Also see Chen, Asia as Method, 253; Clunas, “Reading
Wen Zhengming,” 100; Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits
of Modern Rationalism; A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
resist the hegemonic Eurocentric framing of analysis. However, the goal is not to
replace “Western” concepts with “Chinese” ones, because that risks reproducing
the power of hegemonic domination. Rather than replacing “Eurocentrism” with
“Sinocentrism,” Sensible Politics aims to explore visual international politics through
an assemblage of concepts that are Chinese, Asian, Western, traditional, and con-
temporary. Such a critical juxtaposition can decenter (but not necessarily dis-
card) critical IR discourse that characteristically generalizes from Euro-American
examples. Since my expertise is in Chinese and Asian politics, the analysis often
starts from that point.
In this way, we can take Asian and Middle Eastern concepts, practices, and
experiences seriously by analyzing their dynamics. Since the goal is not to replace
one meta-theory with another, the task is to denature habitual practices, including
those in China, Asia, and the Middle East. If we return to Chapter 1’s discussion
of Hollywood cinema’s “whitewashing” with this denaturing strategy in mind, we
can see how Matt Damon’s role in The Great Wall takes on new significance when
understood in terms of China’s own Civilization/barbarism (Hua/yi) dynamic.
In Zhang Yimou’s film, Europeans are presented as the Other: dirty, conniving,
greedy thieves, whom the Chinese leader calls “barbarians.” As Damon’s character
readily admits: “We really do smell.”51 The European characters are only redeemed
when they accept the Chinese way of loyalty and trust; as Damon asks the Chinese
general, “Xinren [trust], did I say it right?” This drama thus repeats the enduring
Chinese narrative of dirty barbarians who are grateful for being “Civilized” by a be-
nevolent China. Hence, while it’s reasonable for Asian-Americans to complain that
Matt Damon was cast in a Chinese story, we should also recognize how the story
itself reproduces China’s hierarchical Civilization/barbarian dynamic. This example
shows how it is necessary to do more than open up spaces for new conditions of
possibility. The point is to explore these new spaces by doing the detailed empir-
ical research that is necessary to see how alternative social orders and world or-
ders are being visualized in the present, examples being the Islamic State’s utopian
Caliphate, a revived Chinese world order, Russian Eurasianism, and participatory
surveillance on the Web.
Although it is now common to present China’s alternative world order as a
source of “emancipation” from the problems of “Western modernity,” Sensible
Politics does not figure Chinese and Asian concepts, practices, and experiences as an
“alternative” that will solve the problems of contemporary IR. Recent studies have
shown how Qing dynasty China (1644–1911), rather than simply being a victim
of Western imperialism, was itself a colonial empire that worked in ways similar to
other contemporaneous empires.52 As we will see in Chapter 7, map-making was
51 Zhang Yimou, dir., Changcheng [The Great Wall] (Legendary Pictures, 2016).

52 Peter C. Perdue, “China and Other Colonial Empires,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations
16:1–2 (2009):85–103.
an important part of this imperial competition for glory and territory; in the early
modern period France, Russia, and China simultaneously employed cartography
for state-building and empire-building.53 In this coeval clash of empires, imperial
map-making in Qing China (finished in 1712) actually preceded that in Bourbon
France (1744) and tsarist Russia (1745).54
While much critical IR deconstructs how European visual images served as tools
of imperialism, this book aims to move beyond postcolonial IR’s understanding of
China (and the non-West) simply as a victim of imperialism and beyond critical IR’s
fascination with Euro-America, the nation-state, and neoliberal capitalism. Rather,
it considers if and how Chinese and Asian visual images and artifacts were imperial
performances. The purpose of exploring the Chinese and Asian “alternatives,” once
again, is not “emancipation” from Eurocentrism, but to show how Chinese, Korean,
and Russian maps, for example, creatively engage in world-making by visualizing
power and authority in ways that enforce particular world orders.
The East/West dynamic dyad, therefore, does not define a set of problems and
solutions, so much as it examines the productive tensions that emerge in the political
relations of various performances of social-ordering and world-ordering. Attention
to, for example, Chinese concepts, practices, and experiences doesn’t just fill in the
empirical “gap” noted by Mirzoeff in his Introduction to Visual Culture. I hope it also
presents an oblique entry into a nuanced appreciation of sensible politics itself. The
book thus does discuss 9/11, but in Chapter 10 rather than on page one, and rather
than using it to frame issues in Chapter 10’s introduction, New York’s September 11
Museum and Memorial is discussed in the chapter’s conclusion in terms of the ci-
vility/martiality dynamic generated by an analysis of Japanese, Chinese, and French
imperial gardens.
Once again, the aim is not to provide either a general theory or a comprehensive
survey of visual IR. Rather, the goal is to set aside the imperatives of high theory for a
more modest set of concepts, conventions, and practices that some media theorists
call “medium theory.”55 The analysis thus proceeds through the deployment of odd
conceptual frames and strange juxtapositions that hope to provide oblique views
of events, practices, and experiences. Sensible Politics’s more artisanal mode of the-
orizing thinks of concepts in terms of dynamic dyads—visible/visual, center/
53 Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 72; Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 442–461; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Steven Seegel,
Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2012); Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and
the Rest,’” Education About Asia 22:1 (2017):6–10.
54 Branch, Cartographic State, 157–158; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Yee, “Chinese Maps in
Political Culture,” 92.
55 W. J. T. Mitchell, “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium,” Critical
Inquiry 30:2 (2004):324–335; Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, xv.
periphery, concealing/revealing, loosening/tightening—that often grow out of the

practical conventions that guide picture-taking, film-making, map-making, veil-
wearing, wall-building, garden-building, and Web-surfing. The purpose of exploring
both dynamic dyads and conventions is to make sense of the social construction of
the visual and appreciate the visual performance of the social—and of the interna-
tional. In other words, it is necessary not to simply deconstruct how visual artifacts
reflect social, political, and economic power relations; we also need to consider how
they can visually provoke and perform new and different social, political, and eco-
nomic relations that engage in social-ordering and world-ordering practices.
Conclusion
Rather than see visibility and visuality as opposing strategies, Chapter 3 argues that
both are valuable for an analysis of sensible politics. Instead of seeing visibility/vis-
uality as an exclusive binary opposition, it considers them a dynamic dyad that is
relational, contextual, contingent, and fluid. The chapter explores the East/West
dyad to develop this approach in ways that problematize visual IR’s Eurocentrism. It
examines concepts, practices, and experiences from China to argue that an inclusion
of non-Western sources is not just an empirical issue, but one of theory and method.
It uses comparative political theory to decenter (but not necessarily discard) crit-
ical IR discourse that characteristically generalizes from Euro-American examples.
The chapter introduces a set of dynamic dyads—inside/outside, Civilization/
barbarism, civility/martiality—that are developed in later chapters. In this way,
our understanding of social theory and visual international politics benefits from
exploring both the “social construction of the visual” and the “visual performance
of social orders and world orders.”
PA RT   I I
VISUAL IMAGES
Part I, “Visibility/Visuality: A Framework for Analysis,” provided a de-

tailed discussion of how to critically analyze the sensible politics of visual
IR. It presented an analytical framework to both understand the meaning
of visuals and appreciate their affect. In particular, it explained how the vis-
ibility strategy is useful for tracing the “social construction of the visual,”
while the visuality strategy is useful for appreciating the “visual construction
of the social”—and the visual performance of the international. It argued
that we need to think of visibility and visuality not as binary opposites, but
as a dynamic dyad that is relational, contextual, contingent, and fluid. Part
I showed how sensible politics is provoked and performed through the pro-
ductive tension of dynamic dyads such as visibility/visuality, ideology/af-
fect, and images/artifacts.
While Part I examined theoretical debates, Part II, “Visual Images,” more
directly addresses trends in visual IR research through chapters that examine
the aesthetic turn in IR (Chapter 4), visual securitization (Chapter 5), and
ethical witnessing (Chapter 6). Part II uses the framework of visuality/visi-
bility and ideology/affect to analyze how a range of images—photographs,
documentary films, feature films, online videos, and visual art—engage in
visual IR. In Chapters 5 and 6, it introduces the cultural governance/re-
sistance dynamic dyad to probe questions of how to respond to war and
violence.
The goal of Part II is to explore how visual culture studies and visual IR
have used the visibility strategy to deconstruct visual images in order to re-
veal their hidden ideology. It argues that while exploring important issues,
this research agenda is also limited by its hermeneutic mode of analysis and
by its narrow focus on Euro-American images of security, war, and atrocity. It
60 Visual Images
seeks to push beyond this verbally-inflected mode of analysis to see not just
what images mean, but what they can “do” in provoking affective communi-
ties of sense. Part II thus employs comparative analysis and critical aesthetics
to juxtapose concepts, practices, and experiences from different times and
places.
Many of the examples considered in Part II highlight the necessity of
expanding from visual IR to appreciate sensible politics. The audio-visuality
of films and the tactility of art installations both show how visual interna-
tional politics is a multisensory experience. Three-dimensional sculptures
and art installations also provoke questions about visual IR’s focus on images
that lead us to the analysis of the sensible politics of visual artifacts, material
modalities, and sensory spaces explored in Part III.
4
Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking
Introduction
This chapter uses the experience of documentary filmmaking to autoethnographically
explore research methods and ethics for sensible politics and visual IR. It locates
its analysis in the “aesthetic turn” in critical IR, to compare different modes of anal-
ysis: empiricism, hermeneutics, and critical aesthetics. But it also suggests that an ap-
preciation of visual IR needs to look beyond the aesthetic turn’s focus on language and
representation to explore what visual images can “do” that is different from the written
word. Hence, the chapter engages in a “visualizing turn” to examine filmmaking as a
theory-making activity that joins the metatheoretical with the practical in its consider-
ation of the sensible politics of the everyday. The goal is to see what knowledge produc-
tion can “mean” and what it can “do,” especially when it provokes new sites and senses
of international politics, including new and different “affective communities of sense.”
While writing the first draft of this chapter on methods and ethics, I started
working on a documentary film, toilet adventures (2015, 15 min.), which addresses
the politics of shit in China.1 It uses the on-camera testimonials of over a dozen
participants recounting their first impressions of China to explore the very mun-
dane personal experience of going to the bathroom in the People’s Republic of
China (PRC). I thought it would be an entertaining way to chart how people en-
counter the unknown through a bodily function that is both intimate and universal.
In this way, I hoped to creatively address some of the self/Other issues at the cutting
edge of critical IR: the role of person-to-person relations, the importance of the eve-
ryday, and the value of emotions and embodied knowledge.2 Indeed, the founder of
1 The film is posted at William A. Callahan, “Toilet Adventures in China: A Film about Transnational
Encounters,” Australia National University: The China Story (August 25, 2015) https://www.
thechinastory.org/2015/08/toilet-adventures-in-china-making-sense-of-transnational-encounters/
(accessed July 23, 2018). In 2015, toilet adventures was shortlisted for a major award by the UK’s Arts
and Humanities Research Council.
2 Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
62 Visual Images
feminist IR, Cynthia Enloe, explains that to get a critical bottom-up understanding
of international politics, we need to switch from research in the halls of power to
take “notes in a brothel, a kitchen, or a latrine.”3
The goal of the film thus was to provide a nuanced view of encounters with the
unknown—in this case, Chinese public toilets—and show how different people
addressed this alien situation, often with good humor; there was a lot of laughing as
people recounted their uncomfortable experiences. Such laughter highlights what doc-
umentary filmmaking offers that is different from text-based studies, audio-recorded
interviews, and written analysis of existing films—namely, an appreciation of the
power of the nonlinear, nonlinguistic, and nonrepresentational aspects of knowledge,
the laughs, sighs, shrugs, cringes, and tears that are provoked in the on-camera inter-
view process, which then can be edited into an engaging set of images that in turn can
produce laughs, cringes, and tears in the film’s audience. Indeed, audience reactions are
unpredictable; while I see toilet adventures as a serious film about vulnerability, it was
celebrated at a film festival as a comedy.4
In this way, filmmaking provides an exemplary method for showing both the vis-
ibility strategy of what knowledge production can “mean” as a social construction
of the visible and the visuality strategy of what it can “do” as a visual provocation of
the social. Because films can viscerally move us in different ways from verbal texts,
we need to appreciate them not just in terms of their ideological-value, but also in
terms of their affect-work: not just what they mean, but also how they can move us
and connect us, both as individuals and as collectives. This chapter thus builds on
Part I’s exploration of theory and method to probe how filmmaking is not merely a
research “tool” but is also an innovative method that raises important ethical issues.5
Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2013); Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, and
Emma Hutchison, “Visual Cultures of Inhospitality,” Peace Review 26:2 (2014):192–200; Cynthia
Enloe, “The Mundane Matters,” International Political Sociology 4:5 (2011):446–462; Roland Bleiker
and Emma Hutchison, eds., “Forum: Emotions and World Politics,” special issue, International Theory
6:3 (2014):490–594.
3 Enloe, “The Mundane Matters,” 446.
4 Riga Pasaules Film Festival, Riga, Latvia (April 26–28, 2018).
5 See Andy Lawrence, Filmmaking for Fieldwork: An Ethnographer’s Handbook (Manchester,
UK: University of Manchester Press, forthcoming); Elena Barabantseva and Elizabeth Dauphinee,
“Border People: Editor’s Interview with Elena Barabantseva,” Journal of Narrative Politics 4:2 (2018):58–
64; Elena Barabantseva and Andy Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for
Fieldwork,’” Millennium 43:3 (2015):911–930; Sophie Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in
International Relations: Film, Co-Produced Research and Transnational Feminism,” European Journal
of International Relations (2017):1–23; Sophie Harman, “Film as Research Method in African Politics
and International Relations: Reading and Writing HIV/AIDS in Tanzania,” African Affairs 115:461
(2016):733–750; Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual
Materials, 4th ed. (London: Sage, 2016); Luc Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More
Visual Sociology and Anthropology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Roy Germano,
“Analytic Filmmaking: A New Approach to Research and Publication in the Social Sciences,” Perspectives
Method s , Ethic s , and Filmmak ing 63
This innovative method looks to feminist IR theory’s focus on “the personal as the
international” to stretch IR beyond its preoccupation with geopolitics, security, war,
and terrorism.6 To explore international politics in terms of the sensible politics of
self/Other relations in the everyday, it probes the ideology/affect dyad to juxtapose
the methods and ethics of empiricism, hermeneutics, and critical aesthetics.
Certainly this topic risks descending into the cliché of middle-class people
experiencing structural poverty for the first time in the “Third World,” for example,
Montezuma’s revenge or Delhi belly. Such funny stories are political in the sense
that they distinguish insiders from outsiders; there is always “the butt of the joke,” in
this case China, India, or Mexico. The interviews thus tended to reaffirm dominant
ways of formulating problems: the discourses of “Orientalism” and “Science,” with
their attendant and interrelated hierarchical distinctions of East/West and back-
ward/advanced.7 Indeed, in one sense the film is merely one more illustration of
the culture war of China versus the West that raged during the Cold War and con-
tinues in the twenty-first century to turn difference into Otherness for both sides.
It also illustrates China’s current odd position in both being a potential “threat” as
the world’s second largest economy and military, and bearing the enduring “back-
ward” image of the world’s largest developing nation that still faces many “hygienic
modernity” challenges.8
Hence it is not strange that some viewers of early versions of toilet adventures
drew ideological conclusions from it, such as that China is a dirty, backward place
that is essentially different from the modern West. While participants and audiences
were generally very enthusiastic about China and its recent economic success, at the
same time many still felt that the PRC is defined by what one participant called
its “lavatorial aspects”—and this was not meant as a compliment.9 Hence while
making the film, I felt a persistent concern with the ethical problem of “fairness” to
my analytical subject (i.e., China), as well as to individual interview participants: I
on Politics 12:3 (2014):663–676; Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, “Documenting International
Relations: Documentary Film and the Creative Arrangement of Perceptibility,” International Studies
Perspectives 16 (2015):229–245; Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, eds., Documenting World
Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 2015); Wesley Shrum,
Ricardo Duque, and Timothy Brown, “Digital Video as Research Practice: Methodology for the
Millennium,” Journal of Research Practice 1:1 (2005):1–19.
6 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed.
7 See Elena Barabantseva, “In Pursuit of an Alternative Model? The Modernisation Trap in China’s
Official Development Discourse,” East Asia 29 (2012):63–79.
8 Gonçalo Santos, “Technological Choices and Modern Material Civilization: Reflections on
Everyday Toilet Practices in Rural South China,” in Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian
Explorations, edited by Johann Arnason and Chris Hann (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2018), p. 262.
9 Interview, August 8, 2014.
64 Visual Images
had legal permission to use the interviews, but was it fair to present them—and
China at large—in a less than favorable light?
In this sense, the making of toilet adventures provides a good case study of
methods and ethics for research films when the purpose is less to document the
truth and more to engage in analysis. It helps show how filmmaking can provide in-
novative methods for the study of international politics, especially when we think of
foreign policy as a matter of self/Other relations.10 The filmmaking process also can
show how methods and ethics are entangled in interesting and unexpected ways—
for example, how one’s ethical position becomes even more complicated when
conducting a “domestic ethnography” that films friends and family.11
The first section of this chapter provides a critical analysis of IR methods and
of methodologies for visual culture. Following from Part I, it locates the analysis
in the positivist/post-positivist debates that animate critical IR and visual cultural
studies to do two things: (1) appreciate the methodological shifts from empiricism
to hermeneutics to a “critical aesthetic” mode of analysis and (2) argue that anal-
ysis of visual international politics also needs to shift from its focus on ideology to
appreciate affect.12
While in many ways the first section unpacks the impact of the aesthetic turn
in IR on studies of visual international politics,13 the second section explores
what could be called IR’s visual turn. As we saw in Chapter 1, the aesthetic turn
characterizes most critical analysis of visual culture and visual international politics
and is guided by a strong “hermeneutics of suspicion” toward the power of images.
But rather than follow the aesthetic turn’s focus on the power of language and the
politics of representation, this chapter also explores what visual images can “do” that
is different from the written word.
10 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International
Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); William E. Connolly,
Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, expanded ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2002), pp. 36–63.
11 Michael Renov, The Subject of the Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2004), pp. 216–229.
12 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002); Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015); William
F. Schroeder, “On Cowboys and Aliens: Affective History and Queer Becoming in Contemporary
China,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18:4 (2012): 425–452; Rune S. Andersen, Juha A.
Vuori, and Can E. Mutlu, “Visuality,” in Critical Security Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis, edited
by Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner (New York: Routledge, 2014),
pp. 85–117.
13 Roland Bleiker “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium: Journal
of International Studies 30 (2001):509– 533; Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics
Hence the second section engages in a “visual turn”—which is perhaps better

described in the verbal as a “visualizing turn” because it stresses filmmaking as a theory-
making activity that joins the metatheoretical with the practical. As Gilles Deleuze
declares, “[T]‌he great directors of cinema . . . must also be compared with thinkers.”14
The chapter thus explores what documentary filmmaking can “do” by critically
recounting the methods of research film production. Although such autoethnography
can appear self-indulgent to those who desire analysis that is objective and rigorous,
this chapter follows Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker to suggest that we need to em-
ploy a different set of criteria to evaluate autoethnographic discussions of filmmaking.15
Rather than looking for objectivity and generalizability as the guiding criteria, this
method values creativity in the sense of generating new sites and senses of interna-
tional politics:16 the role of person-to-person relations, the importance of the everyday,
and the value of emotions and embodied knowledge. In this way, the toilet adventures
film and this chapter each explore how affect theory’s shift of attention from “facts” to
“feelings” can inform our understanding of international politics. Rather than engage
in a comprehensive survey of visual social science methodology,17 this chapter has the
more modest goal of seeing how researchers can use filmmaking as a method. The aim
is to see what knowledge production can “mean” and what it can “do,” especially when
it provokes new sites and senses of international politics as self/Other relations.
Admittedly, writing about filmmaking is an uneasy strategy that raises many
contradictions—that is, using a linear and representational mode to discuss non-
linear and nonrepresentational methods. It is noteworthy that two leading IR
filmmakers—James Der Derian and Cynthia Weber—both generally avoid aca-
demic discussions of their methods. Weber’s book-length description of how she
came to make the “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens” suite of
films is as much a personal travelogue as it is a critical analysis.18 As in her films, the
book’s images provoke analysis as much as the written text. Der Derian’s essays and
interviews about Human Terrain are fascinating for how they deliberately refuse to
discuss methods; rather than look to the director to define the film’s meaning, the
point is to watch it, then discuss it.19
14 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (London: Bloomsbury, 1986), p. xiii.
15 Morgan Brigg and Roland Bleiker, “Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring
the Self as a Source of Knowledge,” Review of International Studies 36:3 (2010): 779–798; also see
Roland Bleiker, “Visual Autoethnography and International Security: Insights from the Korean DMZ,”
European Journal of International Security (forthcoming 2019).
16 See van Munster and Sylvest, “Documenting International Relations.”
17 See Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science.
18 Cynthia Weber, “I Am an American”: Filming the Fear of Difference (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011).
19 James Der Derian, “Now We Are All Avatars,” Millennium 39:1 (2010):181–186; James Der
Derian, “War Becomes Academic: Human Terrain, Virtuous War and Contemporary Militarism,” in
66 Visual Images
Alongside these two worthy approaches, this chapter follows other research
filmmakers who more deliberately describe and analyze the filmmaking process as
an innovative method for producing knowledge in IR.20 In my case, film produc-
tion and chapter-writing definitely informed each other. But in the end, the film
and the chapter are actually about two different things: the film explores issues of
self and Other on the toilet in China, while the chapter focuses on the theoretical,
methodological, and ethical possibilities provided by filmmaking. For many of the
reasons discussed in this chapter—including that filmmaking offers a different form
of knowledge than that produced by writing texts—this chapter does not seek to re-
produce the film’s content in written form. Neither is toilet adventures a “film adapta-
tion” of the written chapter that is geared to disseminate its research results; rather,
the film and the chapter are both designed to stand alone as original research.21
Hence, it may be helpful to read the chapter alongside watching the film.
The Aesthetic Turn: Visual Culture Methodologies

and IR Methods
Since Roland Bleiker declared the aesthetic turn in IR theory in 2001,22 much has
been written about the need to resist the rational methods and the linear teleolog-
ical narratives that frame our understanding of ourselves and the world. He called
for IR to more directly address the interpretive aspects of politics and suggested that
we look at poetry, art, and film as alternative sources to understand IR.
Although many scholars now employ visual images in their analysis, few directly
discuss research methods for visual international politics.23 Hence it is helpful to
Militarism and International Relations: Political Economy, Security, Theory, edited by Anna Stavrianakis
and Jan Selby (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 59–73.
20 Lawrence, Filmmaking for Fieldwork; Barabantseva and Dauphinee, “Border People: Editor’s
Interview with Elena Barabantseva”; Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities”;
Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in International Relations”; Harman, “Film as Research
Method”; van Munster and Sylvest, “Documenting International Relations”; Germano, “Analytic
Filmmaking”; Shrum, Duque, and Brown, “Digital Video as Research Practice.”
21 Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking,” 667. For using filmmaking as a dissemination strategy, see
Rose, Visual Methodologies, 330–356.
22 Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn.”
23 Andersen, Vuori, and Mutlu, “Visuality”; Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in International
Relations”; Cerwyn Moore and Chris Farrands, “Visual Analysis,” in Critical Approaches to Security: An
Introduction to Theories and Methods, edited by Laura J. Shepherd (London: Routledge, 2013), pp.
221–235; David Shim, Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is Believing (London: Routledge, 2013);
Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad
Cartoon Crisis,” European Journal of International Relations 17:1 (2011):51–74; Roland Bleiker,
“Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics,” Millennium 43:3 (2015):872–890.
examine how scholars use visual images in their analysis more generally: for ex-
ample, David Campbell’s analysis of photography, humanitarianism, and geno-
cide; Cynthia Weber’s books that use films to discuss IR theory and US foreign
policy; James Der Derian’s work on the “military-industrial-media-entertainment
network”; and geographers’ consideration of the visual in “critical geopolitics.”24
Even fewer people actually make films as a method for considering international
politics.25
To explore research methods for visual international politics, then, it is helpful
first to separate analysis into the two cognate fields: visual cultural studies and IR.
Certainly there is much discussion of methodology in the social sciences, as well
as new attention to methods in IR.26 However, there is less discussion of method-
ology in visual cultural studies. Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies: An Introduction
to Research with Visual Materials stands out as an example of a theoretically-
sophisticated, practical handbook of research methods. In line with postpositivist
IR theory, her goal is not to find the singular correct “truth” about visual images,
but to “ground . . . interpretations in careful empirical research of the social
circumstances in which they are embedded.”27 Rose thus develops a “critical visual
methodology” by considering the “cultural significance, social practices, and power
relations” that are embedded in each image, with the aim of challenging mainstream
ways of seeing, understanding, and acting.28 This multifaceted research method is
helpful because it targets both the factual/explanatory and the embodied/affective
24 David Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict,” Political Geography
26:4 (2007):357– 382; Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 2013); Cynthia Weber, Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and
Film (London: Routledge, 2006); James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-
Media-Entertainment Network (New York: Routledge, 2009); Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus
Dodds, eds., Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010).
25 See Cynthia Weber, “‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens” (2007), https://
www.iamanamericanproject.com (accessed August 23, 2019); Weber, “I Am an American”: Filming the
Fear of Difference; James Der Derian, David Udris, and Michael Udris, Human Terrain: War Becomes
Academic (Bullfrog Films, 2011); James Der Derian and Phillip Gara, Project Z: The Final Global
Event (Bullfrog Films, 2015); Elena Barabantseva, “Border People,” Journal of Narrative Politics 4:2
(2018), https://jnp.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/87/88 (accessed August 22,
2019); Elena Barabantseva, British Born Chinese (Manchester, UK: AllRightsReversed, 2015); Sophie
Harman and Leanne Welham, Pili (Kuonekana Films Ltd., 2017).
26 Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine Voelkner, eds., Critical Security
Methods: New Frameworks for Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2014); Alan Bryman, Social
Research Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method;
Laura J. Shepherd, ed., Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods
(London: Routledge, 2013); Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods.”
27 Rose, Visual Methodologies, xxi.
28 Rose, Visual Methodologies, xxii.
68 Visual Images
role of images, which is discussed more later in the chapter. The question here is not
(just) how images look and what ideologies they reveal, but what they can “do” in
the sense of an active notion of what visceral affect they can provoke.29
In its later editions, Visual Methodologies ventures into the social sciences to
see how researchers can answer questions not only by examining images, but also
by making them, for example, by taking photographs and making films.30 Rose
laments that there is little dialogue between these social scientists and visual culture
specialists and commends anthropologists and geographers for experimenting with
making images in order to consider the nonrepresentational and nonlinear aspects
of social life. She explores this in chapters on “making images as research data” and
“using images to disseminate research findings.”31 Interestingly, Rose notes that
many of these photographic projects are deliberately involved in “social reform”
campaigns that explore the experience of “marginalized or disempowered people
and places: children, the homeless.”32
The goal of such “social reform” films is to make invisible people more visible,
according to the “visibility strategy” discussed in Chapter 1. While the aesthetic
turn generally concentrates on criticizing empiricism’s rationalist methodology to
allow space for hermeneutics’s interpretive strategy,33 it is important to note that
both positivist and postpositivist filmmakers are concerned with using research
films to make the invisible more visible. For example, Roy Germano’s documen-
tary film The Other Side of Immigration develops a positivist method to reveal the
true causes of Mexican migration to the United States.34 Germano’s arguments are
interesting because they come from an unexpected quarter. While positivist so-
cial science is hegemonic in North America, research filmmaking is dominated by
postpostivist anthropologists and sociologists. Germano feels compelled to defend
positive social science’s assumptions and approaches against what he sees as a lack
of scientific rigor in documentary filmmaking. He thus offers a systematic “analytic
filmmaking” model that has the capacity to produce knowledge that is more “accu-
rate and complete.”35
Standard documentary filmmakers, Germano explains, see themselves as story-
tellers who follow idiosyncratic characters on a journey. Their method is to edit
films to highlight the stories of such “engaging characters” by building “narrative
tension” in a three-act narrative arc.36 Analytic filmmaking, on the other hand, is
29 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 9–10, 21.

30 Rose, Visual Methodologies,  15–16.
31 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 307–329, 330–356.
32 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 328.
33 See, for example, Bleiker, Aesthetics,  1–47.
34 Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking”; Roy Germano, dir., The Other Side of Immigration (RG
Films, 2010).
35 Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking,” 663.
not character-driven, but theory-driven; it is “guided by rigorous social scientific

standards” to produce “a logical explanatory narrative that sheds light on the causal
processes that underlie some social or political outcome.”37
While anthropologists delight in telling entertaining stories about “eccentrics and
outsiders,” analytical filmmaking is different:
(1) it emphasizes the general over the particular; (2) it engages in original the-
oretical inquiry and nomothetic explanation over descriptive storytelling and
character development; (3) it is categorically nonfictional and privileges ac-
curacy above all else; and (4) it advances positive arguments based on theory
and evidence rather than normative arguments based on opinion, emotion,
and dramatization.38
To accomplish this, Germano develops a model that looks to three core

concepts: video data, theoretical pillars, and strategic reiteration. His discussion of
“video data” sees the camera as a tool that objectively records and stores audio-video
information. Research questions guide the gathering of data from interviews and ob-
servational footage, which is then edited into an engaging social science film according
to the logic of “theoretical pillars” (rather than according to episodes in the journey of
a particular person). To build a causal argument, Germano employs “strategic reitera-
tion,” in which film clips of different people doing or saying similar things are edited
together to present conclusions that are generalizable. Utilizing these three concepts—
video data, theoretical pillars, and strategic reiteration—analytic filmmaking is able
to “systematically unpack causal processes or present new evidence from an original
social scientific study.”39 The resulting documentary films can properly draw universal
conclusions that in turn are more impactful with policymakers.40
Germano’s methodology, and its (mis)characterization of “documentary film,”
generated much critical discussion at a panel hosted by the journal Perspectives on
Politics.41 One of the main critiques was that analytic filmmaking is an exemplary

41 Sunita Parikh, “Analytic Filmmaking and the Persistence of Narrative: A Response to Roy
Germano,” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):677–679; Dvora Yanow, “I Am Not a Camera: On Visual
Politics and Method, A Response to Roy Germano,” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):680–683;
Jeffrey L. Gould, “Analytic Filmmaking as Social Scientific Research: A Response to Roy Germano,”
Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):684–685; Henry Farrell, “The Woodgrain of the Chessboard: A
Response to Roy Germano,” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):686–687; Davide Panagia, “Cinéma
vérité and the Ontology of Cinema: A Response to Roy Germano,” Perspectives on Politics 12:3
(2014):688–690; Roy Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking: A Response to Critics,” Perspectives on Politics
12:3 (2014):691–694.
70 Visual Images
case of what Michael J. Shapiro calls empiricism’s “pre-Kantian slumber,” in which

“experience is engendered by what appears.”42 Here, seeing is believing, and as
with analytic filmmaking, the researcher’s job is to explain the data by “systemat-
ically achieving representations of experience by using reliable (that is repeatable)
techniques of observation” and representation.43 The reality-effect of film is strong
because images are seen as empirically reflecting objective truth.44 Thus in analytical
filmmaking data are gathered and represented to make visible the invisible “causal
processes that underlie some social or political outcome.”45 The purpose is to in-
form public debate and policymaking; in Germano’s case, rather than seeing illegal
immigration as a problem at the US-Mexico border, his film reveals the hidden
political-economic factors that push migration from Mexican villages that are actu-
ally far from the US border.46 The Other Side of the Border thus is an exemplary case
of empiricist research film methodology, especially in its focus on ideology (i.e.,
social science truth) over affect.
Alongside analytic filmmaking, hermeneutic strategies are also used to make re-
search films that can likewise work as social reformist “campaign videos” to make
visible the invisible for popular and policymaking audiences.47 Among critical IR
research films, Sophie Harman and Leanne Welham’s feature film Pili stands out
because it employs transnational feminist theory and creative filmmaking methods
to make “the invisible visible in international relations,” in this case poor Tanzanian
women who live with HIV/AIDS.48 By presenting “a combination of moving images
that allows women to be multidimensional and express themselves in their own lan-
guage and movement,” this project builds on the experiences of Tanzanian women
to challenge the “skinny white men” aesthetic of HIV/AIDS.49
In many ways, Pili is an example of what Germano is trying to counter; as a fea-
ture film, it not only blurs the fact/fiction distinction, but actually celebrates its
dramatic fictional approach to the social journey of an individual as an innovative
way of giving voice to an under-represented group. Rather than posit abstract and
universal research questions, Pili’s filmmaking process is an active construction
of knowledge that defers to the concrete, contextualized experiences of particular
women. The story and the script were developed by working closely with groups of
42 Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method, 1.

43 Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 5.
Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), p. 124.
46 Germano, The Other Side of Immigration; Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking.”
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 350.
48 Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in International Relations”; Harman and Welham, Pili.
49 Harman, “Film as Research Method,” 737; Harman, “Making the Invisible Visible in International
Relations,” 9, 11; Harman and Welham, Pili.
women in rural Tanzania, many of whom then acted in the film.50 While Germano
dismisses such people as “eccentrics and outsiders,” Pili allows them to bear witness
to the complex experience of living with HIV/AIDS. Rather than strive for objec-
tivity or mimesis, Pili’s hermeneutic strategy sees research filmmaking as “a dram-
aturgical affair, with roles and stages, costumes and cueing.”51 Hence as a film and
as a research method, Pili engages in the social construction of the visual; it makes
visible the invisible in a creative way reminiscent of John Grierson’s definition of
documentary film as the “creative treatment of actuality.”52
The result of this hermeneutic project is a co-produced feature film that engages
popular and policymaker audiences in the South and the North. Screenings were
sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in
rural Tanzania and by public health providers in rural England; the shared goal was
to encourage people to overcome the social stigma of admitting being HIV positive
and thus take advantage of available medical treatment.53 Through the film, and its
participatory production process that puts Tanzanian women in the frame, passive
victims are turned into active citizens.
Weber’s suite of “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens” films
similarly uses a hermeneutic strategy to make visible people who are hidden by
America’s patriotic diversity citizenship discourse. These short films engage pop-
ular and policymaking audiences by playing off a popular Ad Council PSA, “I am an
American,” which celebrated the diversity of the United States in the wake of the 9/
11 attacks. The Ad Council’s goal was to promote tolerance of diversity—especially
for Muslim-Americans—and to unify the nation; the PSA ended with America’s
national motto: E Pluribus Unum (“Out of Many, One”). Weber’s film project uses a
similar format but explores a different set of participants to show who is left out of
the frame: “the son of an immigrant without papers, a political refugee from the US,
a person wrongly accused of being a terrorist spy.” In the end, she concludes that
the United States has always been fragmented, and her films each finish with the
reworked motto: Ex Uno, Plures (“From One, Many”).54
In this sense, “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens” is exem-
plary of analysis of self/Other relations in international politics. The various stories
are each tragic in their own way, which is shown not only through the informa-
tion conveyed, but also through the participants’ silences, tone of voice, and facial
expressions. Indeed, a large part of the work of the films is done through visuals and
nonverbal sound, such as establishing shots at gravesites, military memorials, the
US-Canada border, and the US-Mexico border. The films thus work by showing
50
Harman, “Film as Research Method,” 733.
51
Shrum, Duque, and Brown, “Digital Video as Research Practice,” 8–9.
52
John Grierson, “The Documentary Producer,” Cinema Quarterly 2 (1933):8.
53
Sophie Harman, Q&A after screening of Pili (London: LSE, November 29, 2018).
54
Weber, “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens.”
72 Visual Images
how participants are concerned, bewildered, disappointed, and disillusioned that

the United States is not living up to its ideals.
Like many social science research film projects, “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of
Post-9/11 US Citizens” thus seeks to make disempowered subjects more “visible”
so their problems can be addressed through the mobilization of progressive reform
movements.55 This is part of a common polemic in visual international politics that
seeks to criticize the “War on Terror” more generally, thus reproducing mainstream
IR’s focus on sovereign state power in the international system.56 Although Weber
explains that her films aim to “suggest the possibility for new mobilizations of affect,
aesthetics, and politics,”57 when push comes to shove, ideology trumps affect. For
example, when Minuteman founder Chris Simcox used Weber’s film about him to
raise funds for his US Senate campaign, Weber removed the film from the Internet
and forbade Simcox from using it “at any time for any reason in any form whatso-
ever” because this constituted a “flagrant violation” of her politics.58
While the ethically-charged research of these films by Germano, Harman, and
Weber is admirable for provoking political discussion, such a sharp focus on so-
cial and political problems can also limit visual methodology to certain forms of
identity politics and partisan politics. As Shapiro argues, cinema is valuable because
it allows us “to think rather than pursue a particular interest,” as do many social
reform–themed research films.59 This challenge to identity politics enables a meth-
odological shift from the social reform films’ oppositional stance of “disgust” and
“disillusion”—which can actually reaffirm the reigning political system—to think
again in ways that “disrupt” dominant discourses, create “dissensus” and “discord,”
and thus “displace” institutional forms of recognition to open up spaces for new
political thinking.60 While the aesthetic turn generally concentrates on criticizing
empiricism to allow space for interpretation,61 Shapiro questions both empiricism’s
focus on representation and hermeneutics’s focus on disclosure to advocate a post-
empiricist, post-hermeneutic mode of inquiry that poses the question of power by
emphasizing the forces (languages, genres, apparatuses) that are involved in the
production of presence.62
55 Gillian Rose, “On the Relation Between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual
Culture,” The Sociological Review 62:1 (2014):24–46.
56 Weber, Imagining America; Der Derian, “Now We Are All Avatars”; MacDonald, Hughes, and
Dodds, Observant States.
57 Cynthia Weber, ‘ “I Am an American’: Protesting Advertised ‘Americanness,’ ” Citizenship Studies
17:2 (2013):288.
58 Weber, “I Am an American”: Filming the Fear of Difference, 187.
59 Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics, 4.
60 Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics,  4–5.
61 See, for example, Bleiker, Aesthetics, 1–47. Bleiker’s mimetic/aesthetic distinction is much like
Shapiro’s empiricist/hermeneutic distinction.
62 Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 4, 3.
This critical attitude is “aesthetic” in two senses. It shifts from the normal objects
of scrutiny in IR (official documents, elite interviews, survey data, and so on) to
artistic genre (novels, music, films, and so on) in order to challenge the epistemo-
logical certainties of the other modes of inquiry. Rather than offering a traditional
model of explanation or interpretation, artistic genres provide a “heterogeneous as-
semblage” that can arrest common sense.63 Films are valuable not necessarily for
their narrative content, but for their visuality; when we think visually in this way,
we can appreciate how a “film’s landscape and close-up face and body shots carry
the burden of its political thinking.”64 Here the film’s “cuts and juxtapositions throw
the reader back on her-/h imself to provoke critical reflection rather than allow for
mere recognition or understanding.”65 This post-hermeneutic approach to sensible
politics engages in “sense-making” that no longer looks to meaning or reference.66
Sensible politics emerges not through representation, but through juxtaposition,
montage, and mis-en-scène.67 Shapiro thus encourages us to “avoid argument-
marking meta-statements” in order to allow “juxtapositions [to] carry much of the
burden of the analyses.”68 Here we move from an empiricist/hermeneutic process of
making subjects more “visible” to the critical aesthetic mode of exploring the “vis-
uality” of how images (and sounds) themselves can “do” things beyond narrative,
representation, and interpretation.69 This is what is meant by the shift in evaluative
criteria from “generalizability” to “creativity” for research methods.
The critical aesthetic mode of inquiry thus is less interested in representing
facts and making interpretations than it is in seeing how artistic genre can provoke
new affective communities of sense. Here we encounter the second sense of aes-
thetics, which stresses “the pre-linguistic, embodied, or feeling-based aspect of per-
ception.”70 “Affect,” as we saw in Chapter 2, is a broad and contested concept.71 It
generally seeks to shift critical focus from facts to feelings; from stable individual
identity to multiple flows of encounter; from texts to nonlinear, nonlinguistic, and
nonrepresentational genres; and from abstract rational knowledge to embodied
forms of knowledge. Rather than test the truth-value of data, it seeks to appreciate
63 Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods.”

67 Deleuze, Cinema I, 33–34; Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory
Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), p. 67.
69 Rose, “On the Relation,” 36–41.
71 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Schroeder, “On Cowboys and Aliens”; Gregory J. Seigworth
and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–25; Sarah Ahmed, The
Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
74 Visual Images
the “cringe-value” of heterogeneous visceral encounters. The critical aesthetic mode

here is not about what symbols mean, but rather embodies what experiences can
“do” and thus moves from ideology to affect. Affect theory addresses a tension be-
tween emotion and affect, seeing emotion as the internal subjective content of the
individual, while affect emerges as a social experience as bodies connect. Affect thus
is a complex concept that is useful for appreciating how audio-visual images can
move and connect people both individually and collectively.
As we saw in the discussion of visual culture methodology, affect theory looks to
image genres, particularly film and television.72 Indeed, film in particular activates af-
fective communities of sense through “its possibility to connect subjects, filmmaker
and audience through a shared understanding of the emotion, frustrations, confusion,
and struggles of everyday life.”73 William Schroeder offers an exemplary analysis of af-
fect work when he considers the strange and unexpected feelings produced in China
by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005). Many commentators expected Lee’s film to
have limited impact in China even among gay and lesbian audiences due to its unfa-
miliar setting and strange language (i.e., cowboys speaking English). Hence scholars
were surprised when broad audiences in China—both gay and straight—embraced
the film, in what came to be known as “Brokeback Fever.”74
Many viewers identified with a character who had to sacrifice love for duty, which
is a common experience in China for both gay and straight people, who are torn be-
tween the filial duty of heterosexual marriage and reproduction, on the one hand, and
the romantic freedom to pursue their own desire, on the other. The film appealed to a
wide variety of Chinese viewers, therefore, not because it was familiar in content (white
homosexual cowboys), but because of its affective resonance: the shared experience
of sacrifice and forbearance. Schroeder argues that this is not simply a “Chinese” ap-
propriation of a “Western” story; Brokeback Mountain actually was successful because
it resonates through an experience of liminality that connects gay and straight people,
Chinese and Americans, and Brokeback Mountain and the world.75
For some, the very alien-ness of the story and the setting created space for an af-
fective connection at the visceral level: “that excess, which might be best described
as ‘giddiness’ and which I suggest is at its most striking or potentiating when derived
from the disorientation associated with connecting with the strange.”76 Through
this contingent affective experience, the film created space for people to be both
“queer” and “Chinese” in ways that jammed established discourses of identity, lo-
cality, and history.77
72
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 27.
73
Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities,” 929.
74
Chris Berry, “The Chinese Side of the Mountain,” Film Quarterly 60:3 (2007):32–37.
75
Schroeder, “On Cowboys and Aliens,” 432.
76
77
Elena Barabantseva’s British Born Chinese film engages in a similar shift. In early
drafts, the film explored the racial bullying that two pre-teen ethnic Chinese boys
suffered in Northern England. But as the film project’s participatory action research
method developed, the two boys resisted the limitations of such racialized iden-
tity categories to express more complex social experiences of vulnerability that ex-
ceed racial categories.78 Both Brokeback and British Born Chinese thus go beyond
the guiding binaries of identity politics (e.g., East/West, gay/straight) to create new
sites and senses for international encounters. In this way they move from ideology
to affect.
This section has juxtaposed empiricist, hermeneutic, and critical aesthetic meth-
odological strategies to argue that more attention to visual images is helpful for real-
izing some of the goals of the aesthetic turn, in particular, suggesting ways to resist
the rational methods and the linear teleological narratives that frame our under-
standing of ourselves and the world. It also pushes further to argue that employing
a critical aesthetic mode helps to shift analytical attention from issues of identity
and ideology to an appreciation of affective communities of sense that move and
connect people.
The Visualizing Turn: Making Movies,

Making Theory
Theorists of the critical aesthetic mode and of critical visual methodology generally
focus more on “reading” found images than on “making” new images.79 This is an
outgrowth of the suspicion of state and corporate powers’ manipulation of images
as a mode of cultural governance. Deconstructing the visuality of war thus is a major
concern, especially with the growth of state and corporate surveillance activities
since 9/11.80
This section, however, argues that the visualizing turn of research filmmaking
provides a useful method for IR analysis because (1) filmmaking provides a method
for shifting from ideological issues to explore affective experience that is nonlinear,
nonlinguistic, and nonrepresentational; and (2) it is particularly helpful for exam-
ining the sensible politics of self/Other relations, especially the role of person-to-
person relations, the importance of the everyday, and the value of emotions and
embodied knowledge. By exploring these themes, this section more deliberately
78 Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities,” 926–927; Barabantseva, British

Born Chinese.
79 Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method; Rose, Visual Methodologies, 318.
80 MacDonald, Hughes, and Dodds, Observant States; Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics; Der Derian,
Virtual War; David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2018). Also see Chapter 11 of this book.
76 Visual Images
moves away from what films can mean to see what filmmaking can “do” in the sense
of provoking new sites and senses of international politics.
Since issues of self/Other relations in foreign climes are likewise explored
in the cognate field of visual anthropology, it is helpful to consider the three
approaches examined in the first section alongside discussions of ethno-
graphic filmmaking methods.81 But rather than summarize and critique debates
in visual anthropology, this section employs them to frame the examination
of the methods used in making toilet adventures. This section thus engages in
autoethnography to critically describe the issues confronted in the production
of a research film. By dealing with filmmaking at both the metatheoretical level
and the practical level, we can see how film-production can profitably inform
theory-production.82
As Brigg and Bleiker’s discussion of autoethnography shows, such self-
referentiality is still controversial in the social sciences.83 They suggest that while
autoethnographers need not be judged according to the standard social science
criteria of objectivity and generalizability, to avoid accusations of self-indulgence,
they still need to locate their research within a specific knowledge community. If
we locate this chapter’s research in the cognate communities of visual international
politics and visual anthropology, then we can further explore how the visualizing
turn in IR allows researchers to value creativity in the sense of generating new
sites and senses of international politics. The remainder of this section examines
what filmmaking can “do” by discussing (1) how issues of the international pol-
itics of the everyday were confronted in pre-production, (2) how issues of the
IR of person-to-person relations were addressed in production, and (3) how the
sensible politics of emotion and embodied knowledge were negotiated in post-
production editing.
81 Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities”; Lawrence, Filmmaking for Fieldwork;

Sarah Pink, ed., Advances in Visual Methodology (London: Sage, 2012); Paul Henley, “Are You Happy?
Interviews, ‘Conversations’, and ‘Talking Heads’ as Means of Gathering Oral Testimony in Ethnographic
Documentary,” in Film und Interview: Volkskundliche und ethnologische Ansatze zu Methodik un Analyse,
edited by Joachim Wossidlo and Ulrich Roters (Berlin: Waxmann Verlag, 2003), pp. 51–67; Paul
Henley, “On Narratives in Ethnographic Film,” in Reflecting Visual Ethnography: Using the Camera in
Anthropological Research, edited by Metje Postma and Peter Ian Crawford (Hoejbjerg: Intervention
Press 2006), pp. 376–401; Renov, The Subject of the Documentary; Malin Wahlberg, Documentary
Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Marcus Banks,
Visual Methods in Social Research (London: Sage, 2001).
82 See Wahlberg, Documentary Time, x; Deleuze, Cinema I, xiii.
83 Brigg and Bleiker, “Autoethnographic International Relations”; Bleiker, “Visual Autoethnography
and International Security.”
Pre-Production: Selecting Cinematic Topics and Sources

for the International Politics of the Everyday
The toilet adventures project actually started at a personal level. My maternal great
uncle was a businessman in Shanghai from 1924 to 1949,84 and my father was in
Qingdao and Shanghai as a sailor in the US Navy in 1946–1947. I thought it would
be interesting to compare their stories; then like others,85 I became interested more
generally in the experience of non-Chinese who over the past century have chosen
to live in China. Until quite recently, the border between China and the rest of the
world was very high—legally, politically, culturally, and symbolically. People who
crossed—going either direction—entered a strange new world of the unknown.86
Toilet adventures thus is part of a much larger film project, “Digging to China,”
which examines how people construct their self through very personal everyday
encounters when they become the Other while abroad.87
By the time toilet adventures was made in 2015, this project included nearly one
hundred on-camera interviews with participants aged between 2 and 107 years old,
from mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, the United Kingdom,
France, Thailand, India, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, Denmark, Belarus,
Australia, and Mexico. The main interview question was “what was your first im-
pression of China” for non-Chinese participants, and “what was your first impres-
sion of [country X]” for Chinese participants. The logic of this project is that the
personal everyday experiences of non-Chinese in China (and Chinese outside the
PRC) embody “foreign policy” in the sense of encounters with the foreign, the
strange, and the unknown, where the personal is the international.88
The interviews were simple but open-ended and thus provided a mass of mate-
rial to work with. As discussed previously, one way to negotiate complicated mate-
rial is to employ the “classical” narrative mode of a three-act drama that follows the
protagonist on an experiential journey.89 Weber’s “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of
Post-9/11 US Citizens” films, for example, follow characters through the “typical
84 See Bill Callahan, dir., An American in Shanghai (2016, 22 min.), which is posted at William
A. Callahan, “An American in Shanghai: Then and Now,” Australia National University: The China
Story (September 28, 2016) https://www.thechinastory.org/2016/09/an-american-in-shanghai-
then-and-now/ (accessed July 23, 2018).
85 See Kin-ming Liu, ed., My First Trip to China (Hong Kong: Muse, 2012).
86 See Bill Callahan, dir., You Can See CHINA from Here (2018, 14:35 min.) https://vimeo.com/
169046223 (accessed July 26, 2018).
87 See a selection of films at Bill Callahan, “Digging to China,” https://vimeo.com/album/4040464
(accessed July 26, 2018).
88 Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases; Campbell, Writing Security; Jacques Derrida and Anne
Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000).
89 See Toni de Bromhead, Looking Two Ways: Documentary’s Relationship with Cinema and Reality
(Aarhus, Denmark: Intervention Press, 1996), pp. 35–67; Lawrence, Filmmaking for Fieldwork.
78 Visual Images
arc of normal life before 9/11, how 9/11 changed the character’s life for better or
usually worse, [and] how this change was adjusted to or resolved.”90 Der Derian
likewise explains how Human Terrain is a character-driven film because “it makes it
easier for the audience to identify and understand a complex issue.”91
But unlike Germano’s narrow understanding of anthropological filmmaking in
terms of character-led, three-act narrative arcs, there are other ways to organize a
documentary. Since no single character stood out in my project, I thought making
an “episodic film” that explores a theme from multiple perspectives, but without
the backbone of a single character arc,92 would be a more effective way of using film
to explore the sensible politics of the everyday. The toilet adventures theme actually
jumped out in the first interviews of the “Digging to China” project in 2011; Thai
and American women, in particular, went out of their way to recount their “suf-
fering” with toilets in China.93 Following the episodic mode, the film is emplotted
not according to a chronological beginning/middle/end,94 but through a nonlinear
affective movement inspired by the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining,
depression, and acceptance—which are reworked in toilet adventures as shock, fear,
bargaining, struggle, and acceptance.
Toilets provide a good hook because, on the one hand, everyone has to use
them, and on the other, it is still generally taboo to discuss toilet activities.95 Toilet
experiences thus provide what Malin Wahlberg describes as a “frame-breaking” ex-
perience:96 discussing it is defamiliarizing, first for the interview participant, and
then for the audience. Such frame-breaking experiences are not natural, but are
“manufactured” by the filmmaker in order to call social codes into question. For
example, when recalling how a group of Chinese women watched her take a pee
in a public toilet, an American professor declared, “It was as if I wasn’t alone, and
usually going to the bathroom should be a solo activity.”97 Well, maybe not—as
another participant explained, pissing and shitting can also be a collective social
activity that is widely discussed. Hence, rather than simply illustrating quirky eccen-
tricities, frame-breaking shows how odd experiences can reveal norms among film
participants, filmmakers, and the audience.
Toilet experiences thus provide a good topic because they break the frame of
modern/Western/bourgeois propriety, both in terms of explanatory meaning and
90 Weber, “ ‘I Am an American’: Protesting Advertised ‘Americanness’,” 286.

91 Der Derian, “War Becomes Academic,” 60.
92 de Bromhead, Looking Two Ways,  69–79.
93 Interview, January 9, 2011.
94 Henley, “On Narratives in Ethnographic Film.”
95 See Kathinka Frøystad, “Failing the Third Toilet Test: Reflections on Fieldwork, Gender and
Indian Loos,” Ethnography (October 15, 2018):1–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138118804262
(accessed August 23, 2019).
96 Wahlberg, Documentary Time, 44.
97 Interview, July 5, 2014.
in terms of affective experience.98 Indeed, the toilet has provided the hook for crit-
ical discussions of Japanese aesthetics, American consumerism, and Chinese “hy-
gienic modernity.”99 Toilets also can join elite and popular experiences of foreign
relations. On the one hand, the sovereign power of the self/state includes sovereign
control over such mundane bodily functions; a former UK ambassador to China
was “grateful” to recall that in his more than eight years’ service in the PRC, he
“never had to encounter a Chinese toilet in extremis, so to speak.”100 On the other
hand, recall that Enloe challenges researchers to take “notes in a brothel, a kitchen,
or a latrine” in order to get a bottom-up understanding of international politics.101
Toilets thus provide a rich theme for self/Other relations in the sensible politics of
everyday life in ways that highlight the ideology/affect dynamic.
Even so, toilet adventures differs from many IR documentaries because its topic is not
directly “geopolitical.” As we have seen, many critical studies of visual international pol-
itics focus on the interplay of stagecraft and statecraft and concentrate on issues of war,
security, militarization, and terrorism.102 The focus of toilet adventures, however, shifts
to the act of shitting as a more intimate experience in which state-to-state relations are
reconstituted as person-to-person relations. Campaigning for better sanitation around
the globe is a worthy endeavor; the United Nations has designated November 19 as
“World Toilet Day” to highlight this important issue. However, the goal of the film is
more modest: to see IR in terms of how people negotiate the messy relations of self and
Other while they are abroad, and while they are on the toilet. Rather than focus on the
geopolitics of security, it examines how social-ordering and world-ordering processes
provoke the personal as the international in affective communities of sense.
Since filming in toilets would be an ethically-problematic approach that would
raise a host of sticky issues, I decided to make a “memory film”103 that uses on-
camera interviews and archival images as its main sources. The list of participants
for the project started with colleagues, friends, and family and quickly expanded
to friends of friends and acquaintances of acquaintances (i.e., the snowball sam-
pling method). In this sense, on-camera testimonial interviews appeal to standard
methods of qualitative analysis described by Germano: it is a matter of getting a
98 Wahlberg, Documentary Time, 51.

99 Junichiro Tanzaki, In Praise of Shadows (London: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 8–12; Francesca
Bray, “American Modern: The Foundation of Western Civilization” (2000) http://www.anth.ucsb.
edu/faculty/bray/toilet/index.html (accessed January 3, 2015); Santos, “Technological Choices.”
101 Enloe, “The Mundane Matters,” 447.
102 Weber, Imagining America at War; MacDonald, Hughes, and Dodds, Observant States, 10;
Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities,” 914.
103 See Douglas MacDougall, “Films of Memory,” in Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998), pp. 231–244.
80 Visual Images
broad representative sample, then accurately recording and representing their

information.104
But it was actually dissatisfaction with the reliability of elite interviews that ulti-
mately led me to the method of staging formal on-camera interviews. The Chinese
state and its policymaking procedures are highly opaque, and it is difficult to get reli-
able information from using standard interview techniques. Officials and academics
in the PRC generally are suspicious of “foreigners” and wary of providing them
with information on “sensitive” topics such as foreign relations. This is a common
problem with fieldwork, which is exacerbated in the Chinese context, where people
risk being imprisoned for providing information to foreigners.105 For example,
on the PRC’s “National Security Day” in 2018, a propaganda cartoon warned pa-
triotic Chinese to be suspicious of foreign professors, who were characterized as
spies.106 Elite interviews, as I argue at length elsewhere, are a problematic method
for researching international politics in China.107
Visual anthropologists have a different objection to the use of interviews in doc-
umentary filmmaking. Ethnographic filmmaking training often downplays instruc-
tion in interview techniques because, as in ethnography more generally, such films
“should be about showing not telling. That is we should be interested in showing
how our subjects actually lived their lives rather than giving them the opportunity
to tell us how they did so.”108 Formal on-camera interviews thus are viewed with
“suspicion” by many visual anthropologists, largely due to problems of reliability
and accuracy.
The toilet adventures project, however, returns to the elite interview method,
but with a different objective. Rather than using the interview hermeneutically
to extract secret information from participants, the purpose is to appreciate the
contours of participants’ on-camera testimonials as a “performance.” As with the
visualizing turn more generally, here we switch from evaluating interviews in terms
of their “truth-value”—that is, whether or not they provide accurate and complete
information—to appreciate their affect-work: Can they provoke new sites and senses
of international politics? Hence alongside asking the “what happened” questions
104 Ruth Blakely, “Elite Interviews,” in Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and
Methods, edited by Laura J. Shepherd (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 158–168; Germano, “Analytic
Filmmaking.”
105 See Maria Heimer and Stig Thogerson, Doing Fieldwork in China (Copenhagen: NIAS
Press, 2006).
106 “Anquan zai wo xin: 4–15 Guojia anquan ri zhuanti (2): ‘Gongmin fangfan zhengzhi shentou’
xuanchuan manhua” [Security in my heart: April 15 National Security Day special (2): “Prevent po-
litical penetration of citizens” propaganda comics], Sohu (April 13, 2018) http://www.sohu.com/a/
228225702_391364 (accessed July 23, 2018).
107 William A. Callahan, China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future (New York: Oxford University Press,
2013), pp. 4–5.
108 Henley, “Are You Happy?,” 53.
characteristic of standard rationalist methodology, interviews pay particular atten-

tion to the “how did it make you feel” questions to probe the affective dynamics
of embodied knowledge. Paul Henley argues that interviews can do much more
than reveal facts; as a multisensory practice, they can “reveal cultural conventions of
speaking, gesture and storytelling . . . like a theatrical performance.”109
Thinking of on-camera interviews in terms of performativity also highlights
how the categories that we use to understand international politics are not merely
socially-constructed, but come into being through the “visual performance of the
international.” Here we are shifting from requiring objectivity, to value issues of
subjectivity, otherness, and ethics.110 In terms of topics and sources, then, research
filmmaking provides an innovative method for research on nonlinear and nonrepre-
sentational topics, and the sensible politics of bodily performativity in everyday life.
Production: Hospitality-as-Method for Exploring
Person-to-Person IR
Filmmaking is a relational process, in which you don’t just read books, but also in-
teract very directly with various participants in person-to-person relations.111 It thus
provides an interesting method for theoretically-engaged fieldwork that highlights
the relationality of knowledge.112 Filmmaking’s reliance on person-to-person rela-
tions thus raises a particular set of ethical and methodological issues.
To address issues of Otherness in on-camera interviews, it is helpful to employ
an ethic of hospitality-as-method. Although it may seem like a “natural conversation
between two people,”113 an interview is not an encounter between equals. In both
the actual interview and post-production editing, the agenda is set by the researcher,
and there is “no parity of exposition” in the sense of “self-revealing testimony by
the interviewer.”114 One way to critique this unequal situation is to make it more
equal in the sense of negotiating the research agenda with the participant.115 This is
what Harman does through co-production and what Barabantseva and Lawrence
do through participatory action research methods.
Another strategy is to acknowledge the hierarchy and employ an ethic of hos-
pitality. Hospitality, of course, means different things in different contexts and

110 Wahlberg, Documentary Time, xi, xvii.
111 See Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities”; Harman, “Film as Research
Method.”
112 See Brigg and Bleiker, “Autoethnographic International Relations.”
115 Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 122–124; Rose, Visual Methodologies, 332–37.
82 Visual Images
traditions, for example in Greek and Chinese philosophy.116 Immanuel Kant’s essay
“Perpetual Peace” continues to make hospitality an issue for cosmopolitan global
politics, while Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida use the concept to address
local and global encounters with the Other.117
If we can delink hospitality from the Kantian metanarrative of cosmopolitanism
that dominates IR, then a more Hellenistic shared meaning emerges: it is the
person-to-person relation of welcoming the stranger as a guest. In this situation,
the host is in a superior position to provide hospitality to the stranger, either as an
unconditional right or as a conditional duty. The stranger’s main obligation is to be
a proper guest; as Benjamin Franklin quipped, “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after
three days.” Derrida argues that even in conditional hospitality, the stranger still has
some power, in the sense that the host can become hostage to the guest.118 Hence,
“hospitality,” “host,” and “hostage” are in a dynamic, contingent relationship.
Although the topic of toilet adventures is provocatively frame-breaking, the
interviews for the broader “Digging to China” project relied on hospitality in its
various forms. One of the main tasks was to build rapport with participants. For
these interviews, I generally chose participants whom I had known for years—and
sometimes decades. They were colleagues, friends, teachers, students, and family.
Hence, many of the interviews started from a sense of intimacy and trust, which of
course raised a peculiar set of ethical issues. It’s one thing to deal with the macro-
level postcolonial ethical issues provoked by a “white American man” (like me)
filming “China”; it’s something else entirely when you are filming a “domestic eth-
nography” that includes your mother and mother-in-law.119 While such issues of
methods and ethics certainly arise in standard interview-based fieldwork, they take
on an added dimension in filmmaking because people tend to be even more protec-
tive of their visual image than of their spoken and written words. As one participant
put it: “Don’t make me look stupid.”120
The relations of hospitality thus involve what Michael Renov calls “co(i)
mplication” because they are complicated in ways that co-implicate the subject/
object identities of the researcher and the participant.121 On the one hand, the re-
searcher is the host because she or he sets the agenda and makes editing decisions.
But on the other, participants act as the host by welcoming the researcher into their
116 Julian Pitt-Rivers, “The Law of Hospitality,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2:1 (2012
[1977]):501–517; James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney
Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
117 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1969); Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality.
118 Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 109, 123–124; also see Pitt-Rivers, “The Law of
Hospitality.”
119 Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 216–229.
121 Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 218.
homes and offering their testimony. Indeed, one of the problems of testimonials
is that the participant can “hijack” the interview to lead it in a different direction,
which in effect holds the filmmaker hostage.122 This is particularly problematic in
a domestic ethnography, where the filmmaker has to keep “tacking between inside
and outside” in order to maintain both familial harmony and scholarly distance.123
At the same time, it is easy for the researcher to abuse this hospitality. Certain
participants—students and Asian friends in particular—likely feel more obligated to
accept the request for the interview. Furthermore, the clips used for toilet adventures
are actually taken from interviews about something else: people’s experiences on
their first trips abroad. Participants thus may be surprised to see that out of their
hour-long interview, I have chosen the fifteen seconds when they talked about their
most intimate and embarrassing episode.
While researchers are required to gain informed consent from participants
during the interview, this legal requirement is not necessarily sufficient. It is better
to see consent as a “rolling process” rather than a “one-off event.”124 Researchers
thus can be good hosts by taking their participant-guests’ feelings into account in
the finished product—but without becoming hostage to any across-the-board post-
production approval. The method of hospitality thus requires an ethic of care and a
sense of intersubjective reciprocity.125
Although this discussion of hospitality-as-method may appear to be a list of
problems, such co(i)mplicated on-camera interviews can provide rich views of a
participant’s multilayered performance of both rational knowledge and affective ex-
perience. It thus explores the dynamic of person-to-person relations in ways that
generate new sites and senses of international politics.
Post-production: Editing-as-Critique for Affective IR
In one sense, filmmaking is even more linear than essay-writing. The first step in the
online editing process is to copy all of the relevant film clips onto a timeline, which
teleologically proceeds from beginning to end. Editing typically, then, is less the
practice of creating, than it is of cutting and trimming. In a way, it actualizes Michel
Foucault’s dictum: “Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”126

123 Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 218; Der Derian, “Now We Are All Avatars,” 185–186.
124 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 327; Pauwels, Reframing Visual Social Science, 265.
125 Kate Nash, “Documentary- for-
the-
Other: Relationships, Ethics and (Observational)
Documentary,” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 26:3 (2011):224; Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1982); Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 219.
126 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 88.
84 Visual Images
But in another way, film editing is a much more complex way of producing
knowledge than writing essays. The timeline itself is just the spine of the story,
to which numerous layers of visual image and sound can be attached. Wahlberg
employs the analogy of film and music to explain how editors need to skillfully
conduct multiple elements,127 which is much like how a conductor directs the
many instruments of the orchestra. The musical analogy is also useful for under-
standing the temporal dimension of editing, in which the editor plays with the
order, duration, and frequency of film clips to produce visual rhythm.128 Episodic
films such as toilet adventures need to pay particular attention to rhythm, because
their narrative coherence appeals to the repetition of similar experiences rather
than to the progressive journey of a character arc. Here the tremors of affect are
produced through the montage of images and the juxtaposition of interview film
clips.129
In toilet adventures, clips from over a dozen interviews conducted between 2011
and 2014 in China, Thailand, the United States, and the United Kingdom are edited
together to create a rhythmic, crosscut conversation around common themes. At
key points in the film, two separate people talking about a similar experience are ed-
ited together in a parallel montage, whose fast crosscuts build suspense and produce
affect.130 Examining one of the film’s edited-interplays can illustrate this technique.
Two women—Wannapa, a PhD with the Ministry of Public Health in Thailand who
did her fieldwork in rural China, and Miriam, an American historian who studies
the politics of public health in Maoist China—explain their experiences of Chinese
public toilets in the 1990s:
Wannapa: I would like to go to toilet, we have to go to the public toilet. I don’t

know how to do, and I don’t know . . .
Miriam: I went into the bathroom. There were cubicle-like stalls, back to back
to back down the middle. They were all squat toilets—
W: —with very, very low walls, low walls. But no door—
M: —the barriers between these cubicles came about breast high. So you could
stare down the entire row of ladies squatting at the toilets.
W: And then I saw something dirty, smelly—
M: —the stench of the place, as is normal, was outrageous. The cleanliness, we
won’t even speak of that.
W: —so I have to walk and look, look, look and go into the last one, the last one.
M: I squatted to do my business and I had this very peculiar feeling. It was as if
I was not alone.
127
Wahlberg, Documentary Time, 64.
128
Wahlberg, Documentary Time, ix, 66.
129
Deleuze, Cinema I,  33–61.
130
Deleuze, Cinema I,  34–36.
W: I tried to do something, but I could not even sit down, because I saw so
many accumulated faeces, faeces. As well as I saw the maggots, a lot of
maggots. . . .
M: I sort of look up, and I am surrounded. There is an entire group of Chinese
ladies who are peering down to see if my butt is as white as my face is.
W: —so I just walk away, and told my professor that I can’t do it. (Laughter)
I couldn’t do it.
M: —and I eventually get out there as quick as I can, not only because of the
stink but because the observation was intense.
W: (Sigh)
The participants here provide plenty of facts to answer the “where,” “when,” and
“how” questions to make visible the hidden toilet experience in rural China. But
the main point is affect: the cringe-factor that we see on the participants’ faces
when they recall coming face-to-face with a dirty, smelly squat toilet for the first
time; the anxiety about catching infectious disease; the uncomfortable laughs pro-
voked when the private becomes public; and the cathartic relief when the experi-
ence is complete. These two different experiences are edited together in a rhythmic
montage in which “juxtapositions carry much of the burden of the analyses”; the
film thus can “avoid meta-statements” that efface affect in favor of explanation and
interpretation.131 Reading this transcript while watching the film also shows what
documentary filmmaking’s entangled, multilayered visualization of nonlinguistic
and nonrepresentable experiences of Otherness and vulnerability can “do” that
is different from textual analyses of international politics. Wannapa and Miriam
are both internationally-respected experts in the field of public health in China.
However, the key moment for me is not the story or the analysis, but the audio-
visual intensity of Wannapa’s heart-felt sigh. At screenings of toilet adventures,
audiences likewise have affectively responded at key points with uneasy laughs
and sighs.
Like the Chinese reception of Brokeback Mountain, the experience—and
the storytelling—is interesting not in spite of being exotic (and here perhaps
Orientalized), but just because it is exotic. Here Der Derian’s notion of di-
plomacy as interpersonal “estrangement”—rather than state-to-state “engage-
ment”—is actualized, again and again, through affect in various participants’
experiences of Chinese toilets.132 It is a matter in which l’étranger—Derrida’s
discussion of the “foreign” and/as the “strange”133—takes shape when people
choose to be the Other. Affect here is not simply evoking emotion, but
131
Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 31.
132
James Der Derian, On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
133
Derrida and Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, 3ff.
86 Visual Images
appreciating “the unpredictability of the virtual” in a nonlinear “connection be-

tween multiple places and times, [that] challenges ideology’s power to arbitrate
meaning.”134
Alongside this affect-work, the fourth chapter of the film, “struggle,” shifts
back to the explanatory/interpretive mode by putting non-Chinese participants’
toilet adventures in the context of the PRC’s recent history of public health
campaigns, which continue to promote a form of “hygienic modernity” that
values both sanitary progress and political disciplining.135 (Indeed, public toilets
are now part of China’s surveillance state, using facial recognition technology
to fight toilet paper theft.)136 Here the editing method shifts from fast-cut jux-
taposed “conversations” to longer monologue testimonials that provide histor-
ical analyses of ideological campaigns, rather than personal memories of private
encounters. As in many “memory films,” the editing here employs visual archives
that run parallel to the auditory testimony:137 a public health PSA on spitting
and public health campaign posters from the 1950s and 1960s.138 Yet even these
“propaganda posters” provide much more than simply the facts; as a montage
they evoke feeling through images and slogans that connect individual health
to family health, to public health, and finally to the health of socialism and the
health of the Chinese nation (see figure 4.1). The images from visual archives
thus can be understood as a performance that evokes affect rather than simply as
evidence that proves an analytical or an ideological point.
Editing therefore can serve as critique.139 Its techniques, especially fast-cut
juxtapositions and image montages, can be used as part of the visuality strategy to
create a multisensory affective register. Through editing, face-to-face conversations
can be produced that highlight emotional and sensorial knowledge practices.
Editing-as-critique is also helpful for examining the uneasy relation between ide-
ology and affect.
Conclusion
As Kimberly Hutchings noted in her critical summation of Millennium’s 2014 con-
ference on method, methodology, and innovation in IR, producing knowledge is
134 Schroeder, “On Cowboys and Aliens,” 427.

135 Santos, “Technological Choices.”
136 Benjamin Haas, “Wiping Out Crime: Face-scanners Placed in Public Toilet to Tackle Loo Roll
Theft,” The Guardian (March 20, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/20/face-
scanners-public-toilet-tackle-loo-roll-theft-china-beijing (accessed, July 26, 2018).
137 Henley, “On Narratives in Ethnographic Film”; MacDougall, “Films of Memory.”
138 National Institutes of Health, “Chinese Public Health Posters” exhibit (2006) http://www.nlm.
nih.gov/hmd/chineseposters/introduction.html (accessed July 28, 2014).
139 Also see Lawrence, Filmmaking for Fieldwork.
Figure 4.1 “To fully carry out a patriotic public health movement” (1963). Source: National
Institutes of Health, USA140
a messy business. Guided by the conceptual dyads of visibility/visuality and ide-

ology/affect, this chapter argues that documentary filmmaking allows researchers
to “do” a range of things that call into question standard modes of representation.
In particular, it shows how on-camera testimonials, in which people recount their
uncomfortable experiences while in public toilets in China, can provide a different
kind of knowledge: a nonlinear, nonlinguistic, and/or nonrepresentational mode
of knowledge, which manifests itself in the intensities of laughs, cringes, sighs, and
tears rather than in the accuracy of facts or the persuasiveness of interpretations.
This method is employed to explore three sets of issues that animate the sensible
politics of self/Other notions in IR: the role of person-to-person relations, the im-
portance of the everyday, and the value of emotions and embodied knowledge.
These themes are examined through an autoethnographic account of the making
of toilet adventures, which utilized on-camera interviews not just to gather the ide-
ological “facts” of people’s experiences, but also to illustrate the affective politics of
140 “Dali kaizhan aiguo weisheng yundong” [To fully carry out a patriotic public health movement]
(1963), Chinese Public Health Posters exhibit, (National Institutes of Health, 2006) https://www.
nlm.nih.gov/hmd/chineseposters/images/1200/DSC_4052.jpg (accessed on December 20, 2018).
This poster adds another layer of analysis because it has text in both Chinese and Korean languages; it
was produced by and for ethnic Korean Chinese people.
88 Visual Images
the estrangement, the giddiness, and thus the excess evoked by such experiences.
Rather than test the truth-value of data, the film seeks to appreciate the “cringe-
value” of heterogeneous visceral encounters that move and connect people. Indeed,
toilet adventures shows how bowel movements can provoke emotional movement
and even political mobilization.
Research filmmaking thus provides a good method for exploring the intricacies
and intensities of how sensible politics works through self/Other relations, espe-
cially as state-to-state relations interact with people-to-people relations through
experiences of hospitality, estrangement, intimacy, and vulnerability. In this way,
the chapter pushes the empiricist/hermeneutic debate of the aesthetic turn toward
a visualizing turn in IR to show how documentary filmmaking provokes new sites
and senses of international politics. The goal is to demonstrate how documentary
filmmaking provides an exemplary method for showing what knowledge produc-
tion can “do,” rather than what it can mean.
While much critical IR analysis has a hard time gaining traction with mainstream
audiences and policymakers, award-winning films by Der Derian, Harman, and
Weber show that non-specialists have an easier time engaging with a well-crafted
research film. This appeal to creative methods of critique is not limited to documen-
tary filmmaking; similar multisensory methods can be used in research to produce
(rather than just analyze) cartoons, collages, photo essays, performance art, and
other multisensory media.141
One of the main thrusts of the chapter is to shift from framing international
politics in terms of ideology to appreciate its affective register. This is not simply a
theoretical argument, but a political intervention. At the beginning of this chapter,
I suggested that toilet adventures is complicit in the reproduction of the domi-
nant discourses of “Orientalism” and “Science,” with their attendant hierarchical
distinctions of East/West and backward/advanced. In many ways the film plays
into stereotypes of China as an exotic place that, although achieving much progress,
is still “behind” the “advanced” West. But the chapter also aims to take a critical
view of such “ideological” arguments, to suggest that we should examine the affec-
tive work that documentary films can do. Shifting from the ideological polemic of
East/West to the affective register of self/Other relations here can produce a crit-
ical opening.142 As we saw in Schroeder’s discussion of Brokeback Mountain and in
Barabantseva’s British Born Chinese film, the heterogeneous encounters seen in toilet
adventures jam any simple Chinese/non-Chinese binary division to create new sites
141 See Bleiker, “Visual Autoethnography and International Security”; Saara Särmä, “Collaging
Iranian Missiles: Digital Security Spectacles and Visual Online Parodies,” in Visual Security
Studies: Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War, edited by Juha A. Vuori and Rune Saugmann
Andersen (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 114–130.
142 See Allen Chun, Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2017), pp. 16–17.
and senses of international politics. Rather than treating “China/non-China” as a

contradiction in need of resolution, audio-visual media provokes a new set of af-
fective communities of sense. The toilet adventures documentary film project thus
both reinscribes and resists dominant discourses by refiguring them in a strange
place: Chinese toilets.
Throughout the chapter I have employed the rhetoric of “shifts”: from facts to
feelings, from texts to nonrepresentational genres, from ideology to affect, and
from the aesthetic turn to the visualizing turn. But the discussion of film produc-
tion methods underlines claims made in Chapter 3 that, perhaps, it is better to
think in terms of a rhetoric of juxtaposition, mixture, and montage, such as that
exemplified in the Maoist public health posters that mix facts and feelings, written
texts and images, and abstract concepts with embodied forms of knowledge (see
figure 4.1). In this way, to employ Levinas’s critique of rational knowledge, the visu-
alizing turn of documentary filmmaking can provide “a mode of thought better than
knowledge” for understanding international politics.143
Quoted in Renov, The Subject of the Documentary, 148; also see Nash, “Documentary-for-the-Other.”
143
5
Visualizing Security, Order, and War
Because the Islamic State (IS) used media as a key part of its strategy, accounting
for its rise (and fall) is not just a matter for traditional IR. Even after defeat on the
ground in Iraq and Syria, IS continued to produce visual media products to pro-
mote itself as a virtual Caliphate.1 In 2014–2017 IS invested scarce resources in pro-
duction houses and communications platforms to wage war through images: online
videos, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook posts, and glossy online magazines. It thus
used the stagecraft of visuals as statecraft, to literally produce a sovereign state that
is also a utopian state:2 the Caliphate that “is not just a political entity but also a col-
lective religious obligation (wajib kifa’i), a means to salvation.”3
While Chapter 4 examined the critical aesthetic opportunities offered by re-
search filmmaking, this chapter returns to more traditional IR topics to ask: How
is the visible essential not only for thinking about war in the twenty-first century,
but also for waging it? What can visuals tell us about security, social-ordering,
and world-ordering? To consider these issues, Chapter 5 explores the examples of
(1) the North Korea-US national security event provoked by the feature film The
Interview (2014) and (2) the Islamic State’s use of images on social media to hail
people in Europe, North America, and within IS itself.
1 Mia Bloom and Chelsea Daymon, “Assessing the Future Threat: ISIS’s Virtual Caliphate,” Orbis
(Summer 2018):372–388; Charlie Winter and Jade Parker, “Virtual Caliphate Rebooted: The Islamic
State’s Evolving Online Strategy,” Lawfare blog ( January 7, 2018) https://www.lawfareblog.com/
virtual-caliphate-rebooted-islamic-states-evolving-online-strategy (accessed October 24, 2018);
Fawaz A. Gerges, ISIS: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Abel Bari Atwan,
Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (London: Saqi Books, 2015); Aaron Y. Zelin, “Picture Or It Didn’t
Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media Output,” Perspectives on Terrorism 9:4
(2015):89.
2 Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds, “Introduction,” in Observant
States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture, edited by Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds
(New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010), p. 9; Roxanne L. Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS
Executions, Visual Rhetoric and Sovereign Power,” Perspectives on Politics 15:4 (2017):1024.
3 Gerges, ISIS, 28.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
Visuali z ing Secur it y, O rde r, and   War 91
Unlike other areas of IR, which tend to ignore visuals, in critical security studies
there has been much discussion of the role of images.4 Here the international pol-
itics of visual images is seen as an example of “securitization,” and this chapter
compares securitization’s hermeneutic strategy with the broader and more nuanced
considerations provided by the cultural governance/resistance dynamic. Chapter 5
seeks to go beyond framing visuality and violence in terms of a “war of images” to
see how visuals can affectively provoke utopian social order and world order in a
battle of visualities. In this way, it considers how visuality has been key to waging
war; the ideas, concepts, and technologies of visual images and modern warfare
are entangled.5 Chapter 5 thus argues that it is helpful to complement the visibility
strategy’s hermeneutic approach of “reading” visual securitization with the visuality
strategy’s attention to how images can actively provoke affective communities of
sense that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done.
Visual Securitization
The main mode of understanding the overlap of visual culture and international rela-
tions is securitization theory. Securitization theory, also known as the Copenhagen
school, argues that security is “not an objective condition, but is the outcome of a
specific social process.”6 Security issues thus are a social construction, in which the
issue is constituted—“securitized”—as an existential threat that requires emergency
measures beyond normal political procedures and public debate.7 This is an inter-
subjective process, wherein the issue is successfully securitized “only if and when
the audience accepts it as such.”8
4 The critical security studies research on visual IR is substantial; recent exemplary works in-
clude Roland Bleiker, ed., Visual Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018); Juha A. Vuori and
Rune Saugmann Andersen, eds., Visual Security Studies: Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War
5 See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1989); Nicholas
Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2011); Antoine J. Bousquet, The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
6 Michael C. Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics,”
International Studies Quarterly (2003) 47:513. Williams is critically summarizing Barry Buzan, Ole
Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde, Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner,
1998), pp. 21–35; also see Frank Möller, “Photographic Interventions in Post 9/11 Security Policy,”
Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):179–196; Stuart Croft, Securitizing Islam: Identity and the Search
for Security (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag,
“Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan,” European Journal of International
Relations 19:4 (2012):891–913.
7 Buzan et al., Security, 24.
92 Visual Images
Securitization theory looks to speech-act theory to argue that language does

more than describe events; it can actively constitute a new social reality. In How to
Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin examines how judges employ language to pass
judgment, for example, condemning a person to death or marrying a couple.9 Judith
Butler has extended Austin’s analysis to argue that identity is not essential but per-
formative; she looks to drag queens to show how gender is not a scientific category
but a social performance.10
Securitization theory builds on Austin’s and Butler’s arguments to show how se-
curity is a social performance that works through speech-acts; a president declaring
war would be an exemplary case. For a securitization speech-act to be effective, it
needs to satisfy two criteria: (1) it must follow conventional procedures (in this
case the constitutional rules for declaring war), and (2) the securitizing actor must
occupy the proper social or political position of authority (in this case the presi-
dency).11 Hence, here only a country’s political leader can declare war, and only if
that person follows the proper procedure. It is common for securitization theorists
to stress that “securitizing actors” need not be official political leaders, and the
referent object need not be the state, while still acknowledging that “[c]‌ommon
players in this role are political leaders, bureaucracies, governments, lobbyists, and
pressure groups” that seek to speak on behalf of the state.12
International politics is likewise “desecuritized” through authoritative statements,
such as political leaders declaring a truce or signing peace treaties. The goal for crit-
ical analysis is to find ways to problematize securitization activities and encourage
“desecuritization” in the sense of “the shifting of issues out of emergency mode and
into the normal bargaining processes of the political sphere.”13 Desecuritization
thus seeks to persuade security actors and audiences by providing alternatives to
securitization, such as by promoting more nuanced engagements with the Other
through “peace” photographs and films.14 For example, Bill Anders’s iconic Earthrise
photograph (1968, figure 5.1) was used by many groups to envision a world united
9 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962); Buzan et al.,
Security,  26–27.
10 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
2006); Buzan et al., Security, 40; Croft, Securitizing Islam, 84.
11 Buzan et al., Security, 32; Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies,” 525.
12 Buzan et al., Security, 40, 36. For analysis that takes a broader view of security actors and objects,
see Croft, Securitizing Islam, 73–109; Heck and Schlag, “Securitizing Images.”
14 Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 1–2; Frank Möller,
Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013);
Möller, “Photographic Interventions”; Frank Möller, “From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a
Photography of Peace,” Global Society 31: 3 (2017):315–335; Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World
(New York: Pelican Books, 2015), pp. 3–5.
Figure 5.1 Bill Anders, Earthrise (1968). Courtesy NASA
in peace and harmony, rather than one divided by nations or ideologies.15 This ap-
proach accords with the visibility strategy’s social constructivism and is herme-
neutic in the sense that we need to “ ‘read’ the rhetorics of securitizing acts.”16 An
issue thus isn’t successfully securitized until it is read, understood, and supported
by an audience.
Since it relies on “speech-acts” and rhetoric, securitization theory’s focus on
written and verbal texts seems like an odd choice for analysis of visual images. In
2003 Michael C. Williams therefore challenged securitization theory to expand be-
yond its narrow focus on verbal texts and political elites to address “the dynamics
of security in a world where political communication is increasingly bound with
images and in which televisual communication is an essential element of commu-
nicative action.”17
15 Ian Sample, “Earthrise: How the Iconic Image Changed the World,” The Guardian (December
24, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/dec/24/earthrise-how-the-iconic-image-
changed-the-world (accessed January 2, 2019).
16 Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies,” 527; Buzan et al., Security, 26.
17 Williams, “Words, Images, Enemies,” 527.
94 Visual Images
Lene Hansen’s work on “visual securitization” provides a robust response to

Williams’s challenge.18 International relations here needs to address the growing
presence of visual images due to rapid advances in digital technology that allow a
greater range of actors to influence opinion-making and policy-making in interna-
tional politics, especially through the rapid dissemination of visual images as seen in
the global real-time coverage of 9/11.
Exploring how the “Muhammad cartoon crisis” in 2005 provided a securitization
challenge to Danish foreign and domestic policy, Hansen argues that visual images
securitize in different ways from speech-acts. On the one hand, Hansen follows the
verbalist trend in securitization theory to highlight how visual images cannot speak
for themselves and in particular cannot speak foreign policy. Images need people to
interpret them through spoken and written texts in an intertextual process wherein
texts do not stand alone, but are part of a network of inter-reference.19 She argues
this by examining how we need to understand the original twelve “Muhammad
cartoons” in various intertextual contexts: first the context of the original Danish-
language publication in Copenhagen’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper in 2005, and then
how the securitization crisis escaped this context when (often selected) cartoons
were re-published abroad in different intertexts and contexts. Hansen also expands
beyond “intertextuality” to argue that we need to understand images in terms of
“intervisuality,” in which iconic images often point to other iconic images; for ex-
ample, during the Balkans war “photos of emaciated Bosnian prisoners . . . invoked
the icon of the Nazi concentration camp.”20 In this way, images can become securi-
tized through the dynamics of self/Other relations that construct friends and ene-
mies. Hansen thus asks whether the “Muhammad cartoons” demonized, belittled,
or ignored Muslims as a whole—which is a securitizing problematic—or whether
they just targeted violent jihadists, which could be seen as normal politics.21
Hansen’s most interesting analysis examines how images’ immediacy,
circulability, and ambiguity challenge securitization theory’s understanding of in-
ternational politics. Immediacy here refers to time; through twenty-four-hour cable
news programs, the Internet, and social media platforms such as Instagram, images
can appear very quickly. The temporal immediacy is also an emotional immediacy;
18 Lene Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the
Muhammad Cartoon Crisis,” European Journal of International Relations 17:1 (2011):51–74; Lene
Hansen, “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib,”
Review of International Studies 41:2 (2015):263–288; Lene Hansen, “Reading Comics for the Field
of International Relations: Theory, Method and the Bosnian War,” European Journal of International
Relations 23:3 (2016):581–608.
19 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 54. For more analysis of the politics of
the “Muhammad cartoon crisis,” see Jytte Klausen, The Cartoons That Shook the World (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
20 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 55.
21 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 63–64.
iconic images, especially of death and violence, can provoke a more direct and im-
mediate response from the viewer. This immediate response is both rational in the
sense that photographs are seen as reflections of the truth, and emotional because
images of human faces can provoke identification with greater humanity.22
Hansen argues that the decentered and rapid circulation of images through
modern media technologies problematizes “securitization theory’s rather tradi-
tional notion of securitizing actors as political elites,” in which “security is consti-
tuted through an ‘if–then’ sequence where the[ir] constitution of threats legitimizes
the adoption of emergency measures.”23 As we saw in Chapter 2, the “Europe in
2035” maps made a large security splash, even though they were not produced by an
official source as part of official policy. The “Muhammad cartoon crisis” also shows
how the continual circulation of images kept reconstituting the security crisis: first
in 2005, then in 2008, and again in 2015. Hansen acknowledges that texts circulate
and re-circulate like this, but the nonverbal nature of images means that they can
more easily “transcend linguistic boundaries” and thus reach a broader and more
diverse audience both locally and globally.24
This broader distribution of images across linguistic boundaries highlights
Hansen’s third factor, ambiguity; because “different audiences might ‘see’ the same
image, they are unlikely to ‘read’ it in the exact same way.”25 She also sees ambiguity
in the sense that images are often focused on individuals, whereas securitization
engages a collective; this is why it is important for the securitizing actor to have
authority as the representative of a collective political or social group. Hansen thus
argues that there is an “interpretive gap” between the individuals in the image and
the collective. More important, while verbal securitization generally promotes a
specific policy response, visual securitization can raise a set of problems but rarely
provides a policy-relevant answer.26
Although Hansen’s analysis might seem to raise a set of problems, she argues
that this should not disqualify visual securitization. Rather than be a theoretical
problem, these questions can be addressed through analysis of specific empirical
case studies. In other words, the question is not whether visual images are securi-
tized or not, but how they are securitized.27 Hansen’s analysis thus underlines “the
powerful conflict potential of the visual.”28 Rather than a process of securitization/
desecuritization, we have seen a continual re-securitization of the cartoons, Danish
foreign policy, and Muslims in Europe and elsewhere.
22
Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 56.
23
24
25
26
27
28
96 Visual Images
Securitizing The Interview

Hansen’s analysis is interesting and important because it moves from the usual
examples of visual securitization—journalistic photographs of war, violence, and
atrocity—to analyze editorial cartoons, which more than documenting an event
that needs to be witnessed, also critically engage with the political issues that visual
images can performatively provoke. Cartoons are also helpful because they illus-
trate the ambiguity of images, often employing strategies of satire, irony, and poly-
semy that are easily lost in translation.29 Even so, editorial cartoons are intentionally
created to be “serious” political and moral commentary; that’s why they are on the
op-ed page.30
Yet what do we do when the securitizing images are not meant to be serious or
even political? The Interview (2014), a feature film that was described as a “tepid,
uninspired, and often crude comedy,”31 presents an interesting case of how visual
culture can get securitized in unexpected and unintentional ways.32 In terms of
narrative content, The Interview is very political; it tells the story of how the CIA
recruits an elite American journalist to poison North Korean leader Kim Jong-un
during an exclusive interview in Pyongyang. In the end, the assassination attempt
fails. Still, after Kim starts to launch a nuclear attack against the United States, he
is killed in a strange battle against the new alliance of the American journalists and
North Korea’s head of propaganda.
The film highlights real-life geopolitical tensions by putting the interview in the
context of North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal, which includes ballistic missiles
that can reach the United States. Since political assassination is one of North Korea’s
modi operandi—including the assassination of Kim’s half-brother Kim Jong-nam in
Malaysia in 2017—it’s not surprising that Pyongyang took notice.33 When the film’s
trailer came out in June 2014,34 North Korea’s official news agency demanded that
President Barack Obama stop the film because North Korea saw it as an act of ter-
rorism and war. Then North Korea’s UN ambassador sent a letter to the secretary-
general, likewise denouncing the film:
29 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 59–60.

30 See Klaus Dodds, “Steve Bell’s Eye: Cartoons, Geopolitics and the Visualization of the ‘War on
Terror,’” Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):157–177.
31 Steve Erickson, “Voyeurs in the Hermit Kingdom: The Interview and Other Films on North
Korea,” Cineaste 40:2 (2015):37.
32 Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, dir., The Interview (Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2014).
33 The United States also targets some of its enemies’ leaders. See Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty
in Digital Time,” 1020; James P. Farwell, “Jihadi Video in the ‘War of Ideas,’” Survival 52:6 (2010):140.
34 The Interview: Official Trailer no. 2 (2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frsvWVEHowg.
To allow the production and distribution of such a film on the assassination

of an incumbent head of a sovereign state should be regarded as the most
undisguised sponsoring of terrorism as well as an act of war. . . . The United
States authorities should take immediate and appropriate actions to ban
the production and distribution of the aforementioned film; otherwise, it
will be fully responsible for encouraging and sponsoring terrorism.35
In response to North Korea’s threatening complaints, the head of Sony Pictures

Entertainment talked to a North Korea expert at RAND Corporation and to
contacts in the US State Department. The RAND researcher felt that the film could
have a positive regime-change effect in North Korea if DVDs were smuggled in from
South Korea; he thus advised against toning down the film. The State Department
assured Sony executives that North Korea’s bark was worse than its bite and stressed
that “entertainers are free to make movies of their choosing, and we are not involved
in that.” Still, under pressure from Sony executives, the release date of the film was
delayed, and the Kim Jong-un death scene was toned down.36 The news was not all
bad for The Interview; it was rescheduled for release on Christmas Day 2014 as a
holiday blockbuster.
Fast-forward to November 2014; a group called Guardians of Peace hacked Sony
to protest the film’s imminent release. At first this was framed as an economic crime
and a social problem; the attack wiped Sony’s computers, leaked upcoming films,
published embarrassing emails, and threatened people who worked at Sony. There
were serious economic consequences; the value of Sony shares dropped by more
than 10 percent. It then became a violent crime issue when the Guardians of Peace
threatened to attack American cinemas if they screened The Interview:
We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places “The Interview”
be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in
terror should be doomed to. Soon all the world will see what an awful
movie Sony Pictures Entertainment has made. The world will be full of
fear. Remember the 11th of September 2001. We recommend you to keep
35 “North Korea Complains to UN about Film Starring Rogen, Franco,” Reuters ( July 9,
2014) https://UK.Reuters.com/article/UK-NorthKorea-UN-Film/North-Korea-complains-to-UN-
about-film-starring-Rogen-Franco-idukkbn0fe21b20140709 (accessed October 20, 2018).
36 Tatiana Siegel, “Sony Altering Kim Jong Un Assassination Film ‘The Interview,’” The Hollywood
Reporter (August 13, 2014) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sony-altering-kim-jong-
assassination-725092 (accessed August 23, 2018); William Boot, “Sony Emails Say State Department
Blessed Kim Jong-un Assassination in ‘The Interview,’” Daily Beast (December 17, 2014) https://web.
archive.org/web20141217180144/http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/17/exclusive-
sony-emails-allege-u-s-govt-official-ok-d-controversial-ending-to-the-interview.html (accessed
August 23, 2018).
98 Visual Images
yourself distant from the places at that time. (If your house is nearby, you’d
better leave.)37
Sony thus decided to not release the film in December 2014, primarily because
cinema chains refused to screen it.
After the film’s cancellation, the US government got involved. Up to this
point, the North Korean government had securitized the film by criticizing it in
official media and through a letter to the United Nations. After the Guardians of
Peace—a hacker organization that was traced to North Korea—threatened the
American theater-going public, the White House declared it a national security
issue. Obama first scolded Sony for being weak in the face of the challenge, then
declared, “We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start
imposing censorship here in the United States.” The secretary of the Department
of Homeland Security’s statement was even more securitizing: “The cyberattack
against Sony Pictures Entertainment was not just an attack against a company and
its employees. It was also an attack on our freedom of expression and way of life.”38
Washington’s response to this existential crisis was diplomatic through targeted
economic sanctions, and military because it reportedly cut off North Korea from
the Internet for a day. This is noteworthy, because it was the first time the United
States had treated cyberattacks as a security issue rather than as an economic issue
of protecting intellectual property rights.39
The strange story of The Interview is a good example of visual securitization. It
exemplifies the two criteria necessary for securitization: properly credentialed se-
curity actors (a North Korean ambassador and an American president) working
according to established rules and procedures (a letter to the United Nations and
official government statements). The film and the responses of various audiences
also show the self/Other dynamic involved in constructing friends and enemies.
Curiously, this visual securitization was done primarily through verbal and textual
interventions; by the end of December 2014 only the trailer was available for ge-
neral viewing, and none of the security actors had actually seen the film, let alone
a broader audience. This process shows how an issue can move from corporate
37 Quoted in Boot, “Sony Emails.”

38 Quoted in David E. Sanger, Michael S. Schmidt, and Nicole Perlroth, “Obama Vows a Response
to Cyberattack on Sony,” New York Times (December 19, 2014) https://www.nytimes.com/2014/
12/20/world/fbi-accuses-north-korean-government-in-cyberattack-on-sony-pictures.html (accessed
August 22, 2018); also see Josh Eells, “Seth Rogen’s ‘Interview’: Inside the Film North Korea Really
Doesn’t Want You to See,” Rolling Stone (December 17, 2014) http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/
features/seth-rogen-interview-north-korea-controversy-cover-story-20141217 (accessed October
20, 2018).
39 Sanger, Schmidt, and Perlroth, “Obama Vows.”
security to national security; as we’ve seen, the film was securitized by both sides as
North Korea versus America.
But what happened is more complicated than that, and these complications
undermine the logic of securitization theory. First, this event shows how people
from outside the political elite can be sucked into national security politics. The
film was co-written and co-directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who are
not known for serious or artistic filmmaking. Rather, they are famous for making
movies that appeal to the male teenage demographic’s interest in casual sex and
gross bodily functions. Rogen was bewildered at North Korea’s threats, posting on
Twitter: “People don’t usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve
paid 12 bucks for it.” If we see the film as a political satire, the targets are American
journalism and US foreign policy as much as North Korea’s dictator.40 Progressive
elites such as George Clooney tried to organize actors and directors to defend The
Interview as a matter of freedom of expression, but he was unsuccessful, perhaps
because many saw it as a bromance movie rather than as a serious political film
worthy of political activism.41 In other words, Rogen and Goldberg are not worthy
members of the political and cultural elite, whose work requires defending.
Moreover, neither Rogen nor Goldberg is American; they are both proudly
Canadian, and much of the movie was filmed in their hometown of Vancouver.
Although based in Los Angeles, Sony Pictures Entertainment is part of the larger
Japanese multinational corporation Sony, and the Tokyo headquarters weighed in
to tone down the excesses of the film after North Korean complaints in summer
2014. How then can we say that the film is part of securitization if neither the
filmmakers nor the company is clearly “American”? Certainly some would point
to Sony’s discussions with RAND Corporation and the US State Department to
argue that The Interview was part of US foreign policy and propaganda.42 But since
Sony ultimately didn’t follow their advice, to me it suggests that something else was
going on.
If we return to Hansen’s new modalities of visual securitization, we can see how
The Interview confirms that the circulation of images through modern media tech-
nologies challenges securitization theory’s rather traditional notion of securitizing
actors as political elites. As the movie shows, now we have non-elite producers of
40 See Brian McNair, “The Interview: Schnarking, Nob Jokes and the Right to Cause Gross Offence,”
Journalism Practice 9:3 (2015):452–454.
41 David Carr, “How the Sony Hacking Became a Horror Movie,” New York Times (December 22,
2014); an online discussion of The Interview situation among East Asian politics specialists came to a
similar conclusion.
42 For similar arguments about Hollywood-Pentagon collusion, see David Campbell, “Cultural
Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” Review of International Studies
29 (2003):60; James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment
Network (New York: Routledge, 2009).
100 Visual Images
security images, the intentionality and policy-relevance of which is hard to estab-

lish, if it exists at all. Here, comedians become security actors who are on a par with
political leaders. Rather than security being the image’s objective, the goals are aes-
thetic (Is it a funny movie?) and financial (ticket sales). Securitization thus is an un-
intended consequence of the film. Rather than the image representing a securitizing
event, the film itself has become the securitizing event—and it is not entirely clear
who is securitizing whom.
The immediacy argument is also problematic. Although the trailer was available
online, the film itself was not immediately available to watch. The main motivation
for securitization actually was the “invisibility” of the film, rather than its immediate
visibility. After Sony canceled its theater release, people couldn’t see it at all. The
Interview was eventually released for online streaming, and Rogen joked that North
Korea’s complaints were a great marketing campaign; in the end the film made a
small profit. As we saw with the Muhammad cartoon crisis, the securitization of cul-
tural products can spin out of control and last for a long time. The cartoons were first
controversial in 2005, then in 2008, and again in 2015. The Interview film was not
an intentional securitization issue, and as we saw, it took months to get securitized.
The film, however, is a good example of Hansen’s discussion of the political
ambiguities provoked by comedy: audiences can read the same image differently.
In the United States The Interview was a low-brow comedy, while in North Korea it
was seen as an outrageous security threat. The film was offensive because it attacked
the sacred image of the North Korean leader. Pyongyang’s response then attacked
America’s sacred value of free speech. Hence irony, satire, and humor—modes
that are not easily translated—spur the possibility of multiple readings of the film,
much as they did for the Muhammad cartoons. While declarations of war are clear
examples of using language to securitize international relations, images don’t work in
the same way; as Hansen argues, we have to interpret images on a case-by-case basis.
But is this a sufficient response to the problems raised in arguments for visual
securitization? Or are the problems too serious to salvage securitization theory?
Even with recent modifications that look to the impact of non-state actors such as
the mainstream media,43 the theory is very state-centric and elitist, and assumes
an if-then relationship between existential threats and securitization. It works
fine to make sense of international politics seen in terms of elite political actors
representing states. But it doesn’t work so well in the messy world of popular culture
and cyberspace. Hence, while Hansen argues that visual securitization is an empir-
ical issue rather than a theoretical problem, what if the theory is the problem? While
we could keep spinning verbal yarns to make sense of images and foreign policy, it
is helpful to look elsewhere to make sense of the visual international politics of vio-
lence and war. In other words, it is necessary to switch from the visibility strategy’s
43
See Croft, Securitizing Islam, 73–109; Heck and Schlag, “Securitizing Images.”
hermeneutic approach of reading visual securitization to visuality strategy’s atten-

tion to the broader issues of how images can actively provoke affective communities
of sense that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done
Images of War and Peace

While securitization theory sees “security” as an unstable discourse that needs to be
socially constructed, it relies on a certain stability of the state, sovereignty, and the
image. Actors securitize the image on behalf of the state in a recognized process, or
an image is securitized and the state has to respond. But what if we turn the question
around to query the stability of the state, sovereignty, and the image? Here we move
from analyzing the social construction of the visual as a security problem (as Hansen
does for the Muhammad cartoons, and I do for The Interview) to see how an unstable
visuality constructs the state and sovereignty as contingent events. Theoretically, we are
moving from documenting securitization as a foreign policy-making practice to tracing
patterns of sensible politics that work in the different registers of social-ordering and
world-ordering.
On the first page of her path-breaking book On Photography, Susan Sontag similarly
declared that photographs do not simply represent the world, but also change the way
we see it and act in it: “In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge
our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are
a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.”44 More recently, Sontag
argued that the torture activities at Abu Ghraib were “deeply informed by photog-
raphy” in the sense that they were “created precisely to be photographed.”45 The visual
here is not a photographic representation of war, violence, and atrocity that people
need to respond to in a humanitarian or ethical mode.46 As we saw with The Interview,
representation and interpretation aren’t always the best ways to see how images work
and what they do.
Rather than help us make visible official state-centric (upper-case) “Foreign
Policy,” critical attention to images helps us to visualize how the social relations of
everyday life—what David Campbell calls the non-official (lower-case) “foreign

45 Jonathan Finn, “Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice,” in Eyes Everywhere: The
Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, and David Lyon, 67–80
(London: Routledge, 2012), p. 70; Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” New York Times
Magazine (May 4, 2014) https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-
of-others.html (accessed October 20, 2018).
46 For example, see Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).
Also see discussion in Chapter 6.
102 Visual Images
policy” of self/Other relations47 can produce the state, sovereignty, and war. As
argued in Chapter 2, the visuality strategy’s goal is not necessarily to evaluate official
foreign policy or analyze image wars. As Jacques Rancière explains, images “do not
simply supply weapons for battles . . . [Rather, they] help sketch new configurations
of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought and, consequently a
new landscape of the possible.”48
Visual international politics is not simply a current events issue that is the out-
come of advances in digital technology over the past few decades; visuality, war,
and peace have been interwoven for centuries, if not longer. And it’s not simply a
question of visual technology aiding war. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, the history
of warfare is also the history of visuality: “Battlefields were visualized first in the
mind’s eye of the general; then from the air by balloons, aircraft, satellites and now
drones.”49
Before Napoleon, war was a small-scale battle between elites. After Napoleon,
modern war became a new kind of political event that required mass armies and
thus popular support.50 In the 1860s, the American Civil War was the first modern
war, and one of the first wars to be photographed; its industrial warfare used mech-
anized weapons, which caused over half a million casualties. It was total war with
total destruction—General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” scorched-earth campaign
(1864) devastated Georgia between Atlanta and Savannah—and this wholesale
destruction was duly recorded in photographs that intervisually evoke images of
destroyed Syrian cities in the 2010s (see figure 5.2).51
As such Civil War photographs show, modern warfare challenged the pre-
industrial mode of understanding conflict, which was based on historical paintings.
Benjamin West’s iconic painting The Death of General Wolfe (1770, figure 5.3) was
the “summary image” of the French and Indian War (1754–1763).52 The general is
a symbolic hero, who represents the sovereign (but not the nation). An assemblage
of soldiers and civilians, both Europeans and Native Americans, collectively witness
his death to record the heroic tragedy of the British military victory.
But as the Civil War photographs show, the camera changed what counted as
historical record; its images are not as dramatic. This was for technical reasons: in
47 David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 68.
2011), p. 103.
49 Mirzoeff, How to See the World, 15.
50 Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker
Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), p. 75; Virilio, War and Cinema.
51 George N. Barnard, Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866), p. 101. This book can
be viewed at Duke University Library, https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r39p2wj24 (accessed May
29, 2019).
52 Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 74.
Figure 5.2 George N. Barnard, City of Atlanta GA No. 2 (1866). Source: George N. Barnard,

Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866), p. 101.
the nineteenth century, the camera needed long exposure times, so photographers
couldn’t capture images of war at the height of conflict. Hence, as key Civil War
photographs show, images of war became rotting corpses after battle rather than
the general’s heroic action during battle. Many iconic Civil War photos were
staged: photographers moved corpses around to get the desired effect, in a practice
that continues today.53 The iconic photos of World War II victory—the American
flag-raising at Iwo Jima and the Soviet flag-raising in Berlin—were staged after the
fact. They thus provoke the iconoclastic critique of photography and film discussed
in Chapter 1: Do they represent the objective truth? Or does manipulating dead
bodies mean that photographs are dangerous because they provoke emotion in
order to manipulate the public?54
Beyond issues of authenticity, Paul Virilio argues that war is the logistics of per-
ception in general, in which politics is about (visual) targeting.55 It’s not simply a
53
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 73.
54
See Butler, Frames of War; MacDonald, Hughes, and Dodds, Observant States.
55
Virilio, War and Cinema, 4.
104 Visual Images
Figure 5.3 Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe (1770). Courtesy National Gallery
of Canada
question of visual technology aiding war. As Mirzoeff argues, “visuality is not war
by other means: it is war.”56 James Der Derian explains that at both the micro-level
of chemistry and the macro-level of economics, war and cinema are intimately
entangled; the same chemical is used in explosives and celluloid filmstrips, the same
technology for motion picture cameras and for airplane machine guns, and similar
“modes of representation and destruction [are] organized to represent, see, and kill
the enemy while securing and seducing the citizen have converged in dual econo-
mies of sight and might.”57 To frame is to target, and to target is to attack; for the
military, it is an act of war to lock on another country’s ship or plane as a target.58
To chart out the complex relations between visuality and war, particularly when
they assert the stateliness of IS’s new Caliphate, the dynamic of cultural governance
and resistance is useful.59 Rather than taking the “nation” for granted as an actor in
56 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 6.

57 James Der Derian, “After-image,” in Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and
Non-Fiction Film, edited by Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest (London: Routledge, 2015), pp.
226–227.
58 Bousquet, The Eye of War; Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), pp. 1–12.
59 Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject
a rational calculus, Michael J. Shapiro sees the nation as a set of unstable social rela-
tions that take on coherence through cultural governance. This cultural governance
looks to Michel Foucault’s understanding of power as a productive force that is gen-
erated by contingent social relationships, rather than as a set of juridical practices
of sovereignty that restrict action.60 Shapiro argues that while for the early-modern
state sovereignty relied on “military and fiscal initiatives,” by the nineteenth cen-
tury these “coercive and economic aspects of control have been supplemented by
a progressively intense cultural governance . . . aimed at making territorial and na-
tional/cultural boundaries coextensive.”61 But Shapiro does not simply chart out
the productive power of state-led cultural governance; his critical approach also
shows how resistance can emerge through other modalities of expression—films,
journals, diaries, novels, and counter-historical narratives—that “challenge the
state’s coherence-producing writing performances.”62 As we see in the next sec-
tion, alongside its coercive rituals of sovereignty (military campaigns and public
executions), IS uses videos to create a utopian state—the Caliphate—by making
people feel moved by it and connected to it in an affective community of sense.
Visualizing the Islamic State
The Islamic State sees media not simply as an outlet for propaganda, but as a “bat-
tlefield” that is nearly as important as the military battlefield: as the title of an offi-
cial IS handbook puts it, O Media Worker, You Are a Mujahid!63 While Salafi-jihadi
movements have utilized media technologies to creatively distribute their messages
for decades, IS is noteworthy for both the high quality of its visual products and its
effective use of social media technology to disseminate them.64 In addition to its
60 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited

by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp.
87–104.
61 Shapiro, Methods and Nations, 34.
62 Shapiro, Methods and Nations, 49; Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance.”
63 Quoted in Marwan M. Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and
Global Networked Affect,” Media, Culture & Society 39:8 (2017):1197; also see Abu Bakr Naji, The
Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass, translated by
William McCants (Cambridge, MA: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University,
May 23, 2006).
64 Anne Stenersen, “A History of Jihadi Cinematography,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social
Practices of Militant Islamists, edited by Thomas Hegghammer (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2017), pp. 108–127; Attila Kovács, “The ‘New Jihadist’ and the Visual Turn from al-Qa’ida to
ISIL/ISIS/Da’ish,” Bitzpol Affairs 2:3 (2015):47–69; Simone Molin Friis, “‘Behead, Burn, Crucify,
Crush’: Theorizing Islamic State’s Public Displays of Violence,” European Journal of International Relations
24:2 (2018):243–267; Simone Molin Friis, “‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever Seen’: Beheading Videos
and the Visibility of Violence in the War against ISIS,” International Affairs 91:4 (2015):725–746; James
106 Visual Images
main production sites—the al-Hayat Media Center and the al-Furqan Foundation
for Media Production—IS spent scarce resources to develop a decentralized net-
work of thirty-three local media bureaus. According to one source, between January
2014 and August 2016 IS produced more than nine thousand video products.65 Its
media strategy, which worked to both recruit fighters and intimidate enemies, was
quite successful; by 2017, more than thirty thousand people had traveled to join the
Islamic State.66
Moreover, IS media has been a key site for analysis of visual international politics
and securitization, with particular attention to the visuality of its execution videos.
The political violence of beheading was not new, but its global visibility through
IS videos certainly was a new development. While some criticize American and
British leaders for treating IS as a unique case that demanded new and different
policies, US secretary of defense Chuck Hagel’s lament that it presented a threat
“beyond anything we have ever seen” is correct in the sense that previously such
political violence was not seen by such a global audience.67
To understand this new global media strategy, Roxanne L. Euben, Simone
Molin Friis, and Sara Monaci have each analyzed key IS videos in which people are
beheaded or burned alive.68 Rather than look for the political meaning of the videos
as “tactics” in order to craft proper policy responses, Euben argues that we need to
examine how the videos “work” as visual modes of violence that “constitute visceral
power.”69 The task is less hermeneutic (to trace the social construction of the visual)
and more critically aesthetic, to appreciate the creative visual construction of the
P. Farwell, “The Media Strategy of ISIS,” Survival 56:6 (2014):49; Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty
in Digital Time”; Farwell, “Jihadi Video in the ‘War of Ideas’ ”; Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image”; Sara
Monaci, “Explaining the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy: A Transmedia Approach,” International
Journal of Communication 11 (2017):2842–2860; Charlie Winter, Documenting the Virtual “Caliphate”
(London: Quilliam Foundation, 2015); Brendan I. Koerner, “Why ISIS Is Winning the Social Media
War,” Wired (April 2016), https://www.wired.com/2016/03/isis-winning-social-media-war-heres-
beat/ (accessed August 23, 2019); Axel Heck, “Images, Visions and Narrative Identity Formation
of ISIS,” Global Discourse 7:2/3 (2017):244–259 ; Axel Heck, “The Struggle for Legitimacy of the
Islamic State—Facts, Myths, and Narratives,” in Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction edited by
Frank Gadinger (Duisburg: Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, 2016),
pp.  81–88.
65 Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image,” 1199.
66 Monaci, “Explaining the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy,” 2857; Koerner, “Why ISIS Is
Winning.”
67 Friis, “ ‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever Seen,’ ” 736; Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital
Time,” 1009; Brian Mello, “The Islamic State: Violence and Ideology in a Post-Colonial Revolutionary
Regime,” International Political Sociology 12 (2018):139–155.
68 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time”; Friis, “ ‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever
Seen’ ”; Monaci, “Explaining the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy”; Kraidy, “The Projectilic
Image.”
69 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1007.
social and of the international. Indeed, Euben argues that the “videos are verbally
parsimonious, using images, quick cuts, composition, blocking, pacing, resolution,
sound/silence, camera angles, dress, and casting, to ‘speak’ as much as words.”70
These visual artifacts work less through instrumental rationality and more through
affective resonance, in resonance’s literal sense of “evoking a response.”71 As Kraidy
explains, in execution videos, images “do not represent an object, but rather are
part of an operation,” that “connect[s]‌processes, events and bodies.”72 Like Sensible
Politics’s approach, Euben argues that an appreciation of the nonverbal and nonnar-
rative audio-visual politics of these execution videos allows us to “document how
visual images can reshape interpretive frameworks that, in turn, reconstitute the
realm of what is politically thinkable and doable.”73
What is newly “politically thinkable and doable” in these execution videos? It is
the founding of the Islamic State as the Caliphate. In an argument shared with other
analysts, Euben sees execution videos as political rituals meant to constitute the
sovereign power of the Islamic State as the Caliphate.74 Here she follows Foucault’s
analysis of sovereignty as the power over death, in which political legitimacy is pro-
duced through the public spectacle of executing the human body.75 The focus of
such executions, either in eighteenth-century France or the twenty-first-century
Middle East, is not on the executioner or the executed. Rather, it is on the audi-
ence (both local and global) that is hailed by the ritualized spectacle to recognize
and swear allegiance to the ruling state power.76 Kraidy explains that “[t]‌he video
showcases IS as a state,” while Mello declares that “violent execution videos pro-
duce in this public faith in the status and power of the Islamic State.”77 The execution
videos thus are not simply “random brutality,” but are a visual practice that produces
sovereign power through the production and circulation of the videos.78 The videos

71 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1026; also see Monaci, “Explaining the
Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy,” 2854; Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image,” 1198; Farwell, “Jihadi
Video in the ‘War of Ideas,’ ” 127; Koerner, “Why ISIS Is Winning.”
73 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1009; Friis, “ ‘Behead, Burn, Crucify,
Crush,’ ” 245.
74 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1010, 1020; Mello, “The Islamic State,” 143–
145; Monaci, “Explaining the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy,” 2856; Kraidy, “The Projectilic
Image,” 1202.
75 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan
(London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 24; Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1010; Friis,
“ ‘Behead, Burn, Crucify, Crush,’ ” 251; Mello, “The Islamic State,” 143–145.
76 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1021; Mello, “The Islamic State,” 144.
77 Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image,” 1202; Mello, “The Islamic State,” 145; also see Euben, “Spectacles
of Sovereignty in Digital Time”; Friis, “ ‘Behead, Burn, Crucify, Crush,’ ” 258–260; Monaci, “Explaining
the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy,” 2856.
78 Friis, “ ‘Behead, Burn, Crucify, Crush,’ ” 248.
108 Visual Images
don’t just engage in securitizing enemies—or even in provoking the United States
and the United Kingdom to securitize the Islamic State79—but through cultural
governance, they also actively provoke social orders and world orders as affective
communities of sense.
IS Utopian Public Service Announcements

Much of the analysis of the execution videos concerns whether (or not) they
present IS as a dystopia of overwhelming savagery, characterized by beheadings,
slavery, and other examples of extreme violence. Kraidy, for example, argues that
while “Hollywood, for the most part, seeks to impart enjoyment, IS seeks to inflict
pain.”80 Euben explains that the beheading videos work to enact “retaliatory humil-
iation . . . not by way of explicit argument, but through the visual inscription of im-
potence upon male bodies whose public subjugation and abjection is symbolically
converted into that of the American nation.”81 Such conclusions are drawn from
close analysis of IS’s violent films; Friis, for example, spent two years studying 985
IS videos of public violence, including an “in-depth analysis of 185 of the group’s
execution videos.”82
But execution videos are only one genre in IS’s video repertoire. Its media centers
have also produced a host of what could be characterized as PSAs that present IS
as a utopian project, an actually-existing Caliphate. The strategy of previous Islamic
terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, focused on creating chaos, with the Caliphate
as a vague goal for the long-term future. According to James Farwell, such groups
thus presented a “wholesale failure to define an alternative vision of the society they
wish to create.”83 On the other hand, IS’s videos work to create the Caliphate in the
here-and-now, as a utopian project that hails Muslims throughout the world.
According to Charlie Winter’s analysis, most of IS’s media products—
52.7 percent—can be characterized as “utopian,” focusing on issues of govern-
ance, morality, justice, economy, physical infrastructure, and social welfare.84 In
addition to tearing down the ancien regime, videos show how IS also engages in
79 See Friis, “ ‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever Seen,’ ” 736; Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in
Digital Time,” 1009; Mello, “The Islamic State.”
82 Friis, “ ‘Behead, Burn, Crucify, Crush,’ ” 246.
83 Farwell, “Jihadi Video in the ‘War of Ideas,’ ” 148.
84 Winter, Documenting the Virtual “Caliphate”, 30; also see Stenersen, “A History of Jihadi
Cinematography,” 125; Bloom and Daymon, “Assessing the Future Threat,” 378; Jeu Delemarre,
“Dabiq: Framing the Islamic State” (MA thesis, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2017) https://
theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/4718/Delemarre%2C_J.F.M._1.pdf ?sequence=1
(accessed October 13, 2018).
state-building, society-building, and world-building.85 What is most interesting

about the IS media strategy is that it works not just to create a sovereign “state” (as
previously argued), but to create a utopian one that is “Islamic”; one of the main
tasks of IS media products is to “persuade all Muslims [that] battling to restore a
caliphate is a religious duty.”86
While many scholars focus on the savagery of public violence, here I follow those
who look at the sensible politics of everyday life in warzones. In this way, we can see
how the Islamic State engages in “rebel governance” to assert itself as a legitimate
state not only through military conquest, but also through social welfare provision.87
Here it is like other rebel states—for example, Sri Lanka, Columbia, and Sudan—
that gained civilian support through social welfare projects, thus “performing the
state . . . within the routines and patterns of everyday life.”88 In Syria, it has long
been the state’s job to provide social welfare to the population, including free health
care and subsidized oil and food. Indeed, during the Syrian civil war, hospitals and
bakeries have been strategic sites both in the sense that rival regimes (the Assad re-
gime, the Kurdish YPG, the Free Syrian Army, and armed Islamist groups including
IS) have competed for civilian loyalty by devoting scarce resources to hospitals
and bakeries, and in the sense that the Assad regime and IS deliberately destroyed
hospitals and bakeries to undermine their rivals.89 The war thus is not just between
armed groups, but also takes place in everyday life struggles.
The rest of this section examines the visuality of war through PSAs that cele-
brate IS’s rebel governance of a utopian society. In particular, it examines IS videos
about health and food. For these videos, the search for legitimacy switches from
the sovereign’s power over death (which characterizes late-medieval/early modern
European politics), to what Foucault sees as the modern administrative state’s
biopolitical project of nurturing populations. He argues that in the modern era “the
function of pastoral power has spread far beyond the church to inform the state’s
85 Mello, “The Islamic State,” 147; Kraidy, “The Projectilic Image,” 1195; Bloom and Daymon,
“Assessing the Future Threat,” 379; Delemarre, “Dabiq,” 38; Heck, “The Struggle for Legitimacy of the
Islamic State,” 84.
86 Farwell, “The Media Strategy of ISIS,” 49.
87 José Ciro Martínez and Brent Eng, “Stifling Stateness: The Assad Regime’s Campaigns Against
Rebel Governance,” Security Dialogue 49:4 (2018):235–253; José Ciro Martínez and Brent Eng,
“Struggling to Perform the State: The Politics of Bread in the Syrian Civil War,” International Political
Sociology 11 (2017):130–147; Alex Jeffrey, The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in
Dayton Bosnia (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2012); David Brenner, Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology
of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), pp. 13–28.
88 Martínez and Eng, “Struggling to Perform the State,” 131; Martínez and Eng, “Stifling Stateness,”
237, 238.
89 See Martínez and Eng, “Stifling Stateness”; Martínez and Eng, “Struggling to Perform the State.”
110 Visual Images
Figure 5.4 Screenshot of Health Services in The Islamic State (2015).
modes of managing society.”90 Here the theo-political state administers not just the
spiritual needs of its population, but also the population’s everyday material and
cultural needs. These PSAs show the day-to-day rebel governance of society; but as
creative products themselves, they are an important part of cultural governance in
ways that are both very pious and very modern (and very modernistic). They hail
audiences both within the IS and outside it, in a battle of visualities that looks to the
sensible politics of everyday life.
While IS stresses that it is completely different from European secular states, its
video Health Services in the Islamic State (2015) exhibits interesting parallels with
the West.91 Indeed, the Islamic State Health Service logo (ISHS) will be familiar
to people in the United Kingdom; it closely mirrors that of the National Health
Service (NHS) (see figure 5.4). The video starts in the hermeneutic style of a pious
doctor at Al-R aqqah General Hospital explaining how the IS’s Health Service
worked to overcome obstacles to benefit the people, and thus produces the legit-
imacy of the Islamic State. To prove how the ISHS is working at a global level that
90 Michel Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism

and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (New York: The Harvester Press,
1982), p. 214; also see Foucault, “Governmentality.”
91 Health Services in the Islamic State—Wilāyat al-Raqqah (April 24, 2015) https://jihadology.net/
?s=health+service (accessed September 3, 2018). The script of this video was translated from Arabic
by a professional translation company. For discussion of the Islamic State Health Service, see Aymenn
Jawad Al-Tamimi, “The Archivist: Critical Analysis of the Islamic State’s Health Department” (August
27, 2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/08/27/the-archivist-critical-analysis-of-the-islamic-states-
health-department/ (accessed October 19, 2018).
includes specialized care, the video gives the viewer a tour of the hospital, which
is also a medical school. Certainly the hospital is caring for war casualties, but the
head doctor stresses that the intensive care unit also works to heal people with “inju-
ries from car accidents, poison, burns, trauma, brain damage, nerve damage, and
surgical complications.”92 The video thus makes visible the virtuous pastoral work
done by the Islamic State.
Here the verbal information is complemented by visual affect-work: we see in-
jured and sick people being cared for, including heart-wrenching clips of little chil-
dren and old people. Actually, the affect-work precedes the ideological work; the
first minute of the fifteen-minute film is an audio-video collage of film clips from
around the hospital set to the beat of an EKG beep (the graph of which is animated
over the images; see figure 5.4) and the harmony of a pious anashid (an a cappella
religious song).93 It is a music video in a fast-cut MTV style that edits together clips
of ambulances, doctors in scrubs, and premature infants in incubators in ways that
stylistically reference Western medical TV dramas. The video’s introduction ends
with the music fading out, focusing first on an ambulance racing up to the hospital,
and then on paramedics rushing the injured person into the emergency room.
The head doctor’s testimony and the tour of the wards are both done with
high production values; like with the execution videos, the Health Service video
employs multiple cameras, “quick cuts, composition, blocking, pacing, resolution,
sound/silence, camera angles, dress, and casting, to ‘speak’ as much as words.”94 But
here, rather than using violence to medievally-mutilate the human body as a means
of asserting the sovereign power over death, the video uses high-tech life-saving
techniques to heal human bodies in the IS as a biopolitical utopia. While many an-
alyze the ideology of IS videos to probe their effectiveness in recruiting warriors,
this video uses affective work to attract life-giving medical professionals to the IS
utopia. Numerous doctors invite their medical colleagues in the West to join the
multinational ISHS and thus pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. As an Australian
doctor pleads:
[I have] a message that I would want to send out to any brothers or sis-
ters still in living in the West who are considering coming. I swear it was a
92 For a description of how the health service worked in a two-tiered system that favored IS
cadres over the general public, see Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “How the People of Mosul Subverted ISIS
‘Apartheid,’” The Guardian ( January 30, 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jan/30/
mosul-isis-apartheid (accessed October 26, 2018).
93 For more on the politics of singing nasheen, see Nelly Lahoud, “A Capella Songs (Anashid) in
Jihadi Culture,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists, edited by Thomas
Hegghammer, 42–62 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Thomas Hegghammer, “Non-
military Practices in Jihadi Groups,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists,
edited by Thomas Hegghammer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 188–189.
112 Visual Images
decision I was very very happy I made. . . . Everything lived up to my ex-

pectations completely. And we really need your help, any little thing gives
the local people who are truly suffering a lot of benefit. . . . God willing, see
you soon.
The video ends much as it began, with a collage of images from the Al-R aqqah
General Hospital, except this time the images stress not crisis, but happiness and
contentment: the doctors who were interviewed in the video are shown in slow mo-
tion smiling and laughing, crosscut with clips of vulnerable infants who are under
their care, against the catchy soundtrack of an anashid. The IS here is a productively
healthy utopia full of people working together for the good life and succeeding in
pious triumph; the IS flag waves in the video’s upper left corner.95 As an artifact
of creative cultural governance, this video works to exhort various audiences—
primarily from outside IS—to support the Islamic State as a legitimate utopian state.
Videos of the IS’s administration of food are also good examples of rebel gov-
ernance, cultural governance, and biopolitical utopia. Actually, it’s a bit more com-
plicated because the two films—Food Security and Administration of Bakeries and
Ovens—show a tension between securitization and cultural governance.96 Food
Security, not surprisingly, starts with military security issues: a black and white clip
of President Obama announcing airstrikes against IS, then black and white images
of war and destruction from the IS point of view.97 The video is narrated with a dec-
laration of IS’s goal “to protect its soldiers, borders, and to protect the Muslims.”
However, this protection is not only a military project; it is pastoral in the sense
of protecting food security. The video soon switches (as in The Wizard of Oz) from
black and white to color images of a combine harvesting wheat, underlining how
farmers are warriors in the battle to “maintain and expand” IS. The film then engages
in a fascinating PSA tour of the food industry in Ḥalab province. Although not ex-
actly a statement of “Organic IS,”98 it does present a “farm-to-table” process video
of life in the Islamic State. It visually traces how wheat is grown and harvested, then
ground into flour, which is then made into dough that is, in turn, baked to make pita
95 Also see Gerges, ISIS, 228; Bloom and Daymon, “Assessing the Future Threat,” 379.
96 Food Security: Aspects from the Work of the Agriculture Administration in the Province—Wilāyat
Ḥalab (November 10,  2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/11/10/new-video-message-from-the-
islamic-state-food-security-aspects-from-the-work-of-the-agriculture-administration-in-the-province-
wilayat-ḥalab/(accessed October 19, 2018); Administration of Bakeries and Ovens in Wilāyat al-Raqqah
(August 15, 2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/08/15/new-video-message-from-the-islamic-state-
administration-of-the-bakery-and-ovens-in-wilayat-al-raqqah/ (accessed October 19, 2018). The
scripts of these videos were translated from Arabic by a professional translation company.
97 Interestingly, for ideological reasons, the video does not mention how the Assad regime was ac-
tually bombing IS bakeries. See Martínez and Eng, “Struggling to Perform the State,” 138.
98 Thanks to Katharine Millar for the phrase “Organic IS.”
Figure 5.5 Screenshot of Administration of Bakeries and Ovens (2015).
bread. The clips show how this pita bread is stacked, weighed, bagged, and loaded
onto a truck for distribution. As the narrator explains, “[T]‌he Administration of
Mills and Bakeries takes responsibility for delivering bread to the homes of Muslims
in remote villages and far areas.” But actually, the narration is moot, because we see
the trucks going down long, dusty roads to deliver bread to happy and grateful fam-
ilies (which has parallels with the production and distribution of the video itself).
The video presents life in IS as “paradise” in the sense of an Islamic garden (based on
the Garden of Eden) that is well-irrigated and full of flora and fauna, sweet honey,
juicy fruits, and crunchy nuts.99 The off-screen narrator concludes, “The province of
Ḥalab had what other provinces had: food security. And this is due to God’s grace
and his luck, thank you God for what you have graced us with.”
The other food PSA, Administration of Bakeries and Ovens in Wilāyat al-Raqqah,
is even more interesting because the verbal-ideological aspect seems to be an after-
thought. The first two minutes of this five-minute video are a series of audio-video
clips that show the bakery production of pita bread in even more detail than in
Food Security, without any narration at all. It is a well-crafted video that uses all the
techniques discussed previously to produce a PSA/music video that is not only
informative but aesthetically-pleasing (see figure 5.5). This process video style of
visualizing how things are made is an effective (and affective) way of addressing
audiences both inside and outside the Islamic State. This style is also popular in
other countries, where bakery process videos are used to move and connect
99 See Emma Clark, Underneath Which Rivers Flow: The Symbolism of the Islamic Garden
(London: Prince of Wale’s Institute of Architecture, 1996).
114 Visual Images
audiences for projects as diverse as welfare for adults with learning disabilities in
Edinburgh and Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps in Northwest China.100 In
these examples, as well as in IS videos, populations perform bread-making as happy
and healthy participants in a greater (utopian) project.
In Administration of Bakeries and Ovens, the narrator appears on-screen quite
late (and soon disappears behind the b-roll of bakery-process clips). Importantly,
he explains that IS is concerned with not only the quantity of food, but also its
quality: “As for the quality of bread in the bakeries of the Islamic State, praise to
God, where we have standards for the quality of the bread, high-quality standards
for bread.” Like a proper pastoral state, these quality control mechanisms guar-
antee the safety of bread and other necessary foodstuffs. By producing food
through rebel governance, IS produces power through cultural governance. Once
again, these videos show that IS is not simply a sovereign state that gains legiti-
macy through its control over death, but is at the same time a biopolitical state
that nurtures the life of its growing and expanding population. As the health and
food videos show, this biopower is both pious and modern, and it produces IS
as a legitimate utopian state: the twenty-first-century Caliphate. Like the health
video, the food videos are examples of creative cultural governance that works
to exhort specific audiences to support IS’s utopian social-ordering and world-
ordering projects.
These films are disseminated through IS’s global multimedia network, which
includes promotion on top-ten video lists and prominent tie-in articles in its
flagship glossy monthly magazine Dabiq.101 This intervisuality among different
platforms produces a “global networked affect”102 of IS as not simply a sovereign
state that relies on savage violence, but also a biopolitical utopia where people vis-
cerally feel at home. IS videos thus provide a good example of the audio-visual as an
affective mode that “does” things through cultural governance. This utopian social-
ordering and world-ordering project moves and connects people first emotionally
to support IS, then materially when they, like the Australian doctor, migrate to the
Islamic State to live the good life in the Caliphate. These PSAs hailed audiences
both inside IS, to cultivate loyalty and legitimacy among the civilian population,
and outside IS, to attract pious professionals to join the utopian project. Rather
100 The Edinburgh film is Yasmin Fedda, Breadmakers (2007) https://vimeo.com/21718544

(accessed October 22, 2018); the Chinese film is Zhulao fangtan [Building the foundation], Focus
Interview, Chinese Central Television Channel 13 (October 16, 2018) http://tv.cctv.com/v/v1/
VIDEVvr9aq34SsDMrB6IRGnh181016.html (accessed October 22, 2018).
101 For example, see “Report: Health Care in the Khilafah,” Dabiq 9 (May 2, 2015):24–26; “10
Videos Selected from the Wilayat of the IS,” Dabiq 9 (May 2, 2015):33; “10 Videos Selected from the
Wilayat of the IS,” Dabiq 12 (November 18, 2015):63. For IS memes, see https://knowyourmeme.
com/search?q=islamic+state.
than being an issue of security or securitization, IS videos show how cultural gov-
ernance in warzones can provoke new social orders and world orders as affective
Conclusion
This chapter explores the connections among visuality, security, order, and war. It
compares securitization and cultural governance as two approaches to appreciating the
political workings of images. Securitization theory is useful for unpacking how visual
images can shape foreign policy events through their immediacy, circulation, and ambi-
guity. But the chapter uses the security crisis provoked by the feature film The Interview
to question securitization’s focus on the state, official elites, and the close relationship
between existential threats and security problems. It then outlines how cultural govern-
ance can better address the political problems provoked in less official spaces, such as
popular culture and cyberspace, which has implications for the wider issues of social-
ordering and world-ordering. In this way, the chapter shows, on the one hand, the
visibility strategy’s hermeneutic approach to reading visual securitization, and on the
other, the visuality strategy’s attention to the broader issues of how images can actively
provoke affective communities of sense that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen,
said, thought, and done.
To push beyond the visibility strategy’s ideological questions, the chapter examines
the audio-visual affective politics of Islamic State videos. It argues that IS is a strong
example of cultural governance; between 2014 and 2019, the world witnessed the cre-
ation (and then destruction) of a sovereign state. This was not simply a military con-
quest of territory; IS devoted scarce resources to building legitimacy through rebel
governance and media products, including professional-quality videos that were dis-
seminated through a global affect network. In critical security studies, analysts have
shown how the extreme violence of IS videos works to assert sovereignty through
control over death. This chapter argues that we also need to look beyond the shock
of savage violence to see how IS videos work through the pastoral politics of cultural
governance to create a biopolitical utopia. Certainly we can understand IS PSAs in
terms of securitization, such as food security. But I argue that the broader conceptual
framework of cultural governance allows us to better appreciate IS as a utopian pro-
ject of social-ordering and world-ordering that produces new affective communities
of sense.
But what about resistance? Cultural governance theory follows Foucault to
argue that where there is power, there is resistance. Yet as a theo-political totali-
tarian state, within IS there was very little space for cultural resistance. Resistance
forces certainly didn’t have access to the video equipment and expertise necessary
to make counter-PSAs (e.g., Cynthia Weber’s I Am an American videos, discussed
in Chapter 4). Although there was state-led and popular resistance to IS from
116 Visual Images
outside the Caliphate,103 resistance within IS was limited to everyday activities for
survival.104 This shows a conceptual weakness shared by securitization and cultural
governance: both assume that there is political space for cultural activity within or
alongside the polity.105 But this space is not evident in many revolutionary, funda-
mentalist, authoritarian, or totalitarian states, where critics are either dissidents
(who are silenced) or establishment intellectuals (who parrot the party line).
The next chapter develops the resistance factor of the cultural governance/re-
sistance dynamic through an analysis of artistic work done by dissidents fighting
the state and by international refugees who address transnational flows of people.
103 See Koerner, “Why ISIS Is Winning.”

104 See Abdul-Ahad, “How the People of Mosul Subverted ISIS ‘Apartheid.’ ”
105 See Saloni Kapur and Simon Mabon, “The Copenhagen School Goes Global: Securitisation in
the Non-West,” Global Discourse 8:1 (2018):1–4.
6
Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing,

and Resistance
Introduction
As we saw in the introduction’s discussion of Europe’s refugee crisis in summer
2015, the photograph of the dead toddler Alan Kurdi didn’t just illustrate the
dangers facing migrants. It also actively did things, including moving German chan-
cellor Angela Merkel to allow over one million refugees into her country. To many,
this was evidence of the CNN-Effect, in which images drive policy; that is, the spec-
tacle of suffering and vulnerable people, displayed originally on twenty-four-hour
cable news programs and now on popular YouTube and social media sites, is able to
mobilize the viewing public—and ultimately their political leaders—to respond to
injustice.1 This is an example of how photojournalism works as an ethical witness
to move and connect people—here Western citizens, Middle Eastern migrants, and
European political leaders—to excite political action. Conversely, there are many
examples of atrocities that go unanswered on the global stage unless and until they
are illustrated by powerful images: the Rwandan genocide (1994), torture at Abu
Ghraib prison (2004), and over one million Muslims in concentration camps in
Northwest China (2017–present).
How are we to understand the role of images in global politics? What do they
mean, and what can they do? Can visual art serve as a site of resistance to cultural
governance? And are viewers just passive spectators who reproduce hegemonic
power, or can they be emancipated spectators who can ethically witness injustice
in creative ways that provoke new affective communities of sense? The previous
chapter introduced the concept of “cultural governance” to analyze how state and
1 Warren P. Strobel, “The CNN Effect,” American Journalism Review (May 1996) http://ajrarchive.
org/article.asp?id=3572 (accessed December 20, 2018); Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of
News Foreign Policy Intervention (London: Routledge, 2002); Piers Robinson, “Media Empowerment
vs. Strategies of Control: Theorizing News Media and War in the 21st Century,” Zeitschrift fur Politik 4
(2014):461–479.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
118 Visual Images
corporate power productively creates sovereignty, legitimacy, and power by creating

and managing supportive forms of culture and identity. But cultural governance
does not exhaust political possibility, because there are opportunities for resistance
to state and corporate powers’ imaginings of legitimacy. Resistance here does not
necessarily take place in political institutions (e.g., political parties at home and in-
ternational organizations abroad), but also can emerge through other modalities of
expression—films, journals, diaries, novels, and counter-historical narratives—that
“challenge the state’s coherence-producing writing performances.”2 This cultural
governance/resistance dynamic assumes that there are alternative cultural spaces
within or alongside the polity, that is, civil society. But as we saw in Chapter 5,
this space for resistance is not obvious in many revolutionary, fundamentalist, au-
thoritarian, or totalitarian states. Hence, to complement Chapter 5’s examination
of the cultural governance of PSAs from the Islamic State, this chapter considers
how images—especially visual art—can engage in resistance to cultural governance
through an ethical witnessing that resists authoritarian state oppression and trans-
national atrocities.
To trace these issues, the chapter analyzes the work of Ai Weiwei, a world-famous
artist-activist whose work ideologically resists China’s authoritarian party-state in
both the traditional sense of liberal resistance to authoritarian state oppression and
the hermeneutical sense, in which it is necessary to decode his work for its “meaning”
as a social construction of the visual. The chapter then considers how resistance can
take shape through the “visual provocation of the social”—and of the global. Ai’s
documentary film Human Flow (2017) is analyzed to see how it expands from a
critique of China’s domestic oppression to visualize the oppression of refugees on a
global scale in a creative way that can mobilize transnational affective communities
of sense. The chapter thus considers how visual art can serve as an “ethical witness”
to resist reigning political regimes, and how it also can excite affective communities
of sense to creatively resist reigning political aesthetics. Ai Weiwei’s experience also
shows how resistance—even that of a world-famous artist—still relies to a large
extent on what the state will allow; in 2015, Ai was forced into exile, where he no
longer focuses his critique on China.
While the previous chapter explored how war and violence must be appreci-
ated for their aesthetic nature, this chapter flips the aesthetics/politics dynamic to
explore how things that we normally view as aesthetic—here visual art—are also
very political. Actually, both the Islamic State PSA videos and Ai’s Human Flow are
dealing with the same issue: the massive movement of people to and from Syria
and Iraq. While the Islamic State videos considered in Chapter 5 aimed to attract
(New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 49; David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial
Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):57–73.
Visual A r t, Ethical Witne s s ing , and R e s i stanc e 119
Muslim migrants to the utopian Caliphate, Ai’s Human Flow traces the horrors of
people trying to escape from Syria and Iraq. In this way, Ai’s visual art can be seen as
a mode of resistance not just to European (anti-)migration regimes, but also to the
Islamic State’s cultural governance project.
Photojournalism, Witnessing, and Ethics

Discussion of the role of images in “witnessing” links the disciplines of international
relations and media and communications. Debates center around how audiences
react to graphic images of violence, trauma, and pain, either as passive voyeurs or as
active witnesses. After World War I, there was much hope that the shocking images
of military violence provided by the new mass medium of photography would con-
vince the general public to oppose war. While Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas is
famous for raising the issue of gender and IR, here it is also important because it
discusses the politics of images: the power of photographs to raise awareness and
the responsibility of the viewer to respond. As Woolf describes, during the Spanish
Civil War the Republican government sent packets of grisly photos—twice a
week—to sympathetic viewers in Europe and America. These graphic images aimed
to mobilize support for their cause: “photographs of more dead bodies, of more
ruined houses, to call forth an answer, and an answer that will give you, Sir, the very
help that you require.”3 Woolf thus employs a mimetic understanding of knowledge
as the “mirror of nature,” in which photographs reflect the unvarnished truth of the
horrors of war: “Those photographs are not an argument; they are simply a crude
statement of fact addressed to the eye.”4 This is an early version of what we now call
the CNN-Effect: as in the 1930s, in the twenty-first century you need a visual image
to transform local political violence into a global political event.5
However, the Frankfurt school, and later critics such as Susan Sontag, warned
that images can be dangerous. Rather than appreciating how images could sup-
port progressive causes, as in the Spanish Civil War, they look to the contempo-
raneous example of how Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary films—Triumph of the
Will (1935) and Olympia (1938)—mobilized popular support for the Nazi Party.6
Here photographs do not reflect the truth; rather, the films’ aesthetic spectacle
manipulates the masses. Walter Benjamin thus concluded that “[f]‌ascism is the
3 Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), pp. 10, 39. Also see Susan Sontag,
Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2003).
4 Woolf, Three Guineas, 10.
5 Rune Saugmann Andersen, “Videos,” in Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, edited
by Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 260.
6 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975):1–20; Susan
Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977).
120 Visual Images
introduction of aesthetics into political life,” and “[a]ll efforts to render politics aes-
thetic culminate in one thing: war.”7 In the twenty-first century, such photographs
and videos are part of state-led campaigns to justify war to Euro-American audiences
as a humanitarian duty.8
This “hermeneutics of suspicion” recalls arguments about the relationship of
word and image discussed in Chapter 1: while photographs shock us, narratives
make us understand.9 Images emotionally manipulate people into reproducing
hegemonic power as passive voyeurs; hence, following the visibility strategy’s her-
meneutics mode, the critic’s job is to look behind the image and iconoclastically
reveal the institutional power that supports it. The CNN-Effect thus is a ruse; rather
than showing the democratizing power of widely distributed topical images, such
visual campaigns are evidence of the elite manipulation of our emotions.10 While
for Woolf it is the duty of humanity to witness and react to the horrors presented in
photographs, for others photographs and films work as propaganda to manipulate
what the masses think, and how they feel.11
To critique this iconoclastic approach that sees spectators as passive voyeurs,
Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites explain how a more active notion of
witnessing has emerged.12 Rather than appeal to the photograph as a technology
that reflects the truth, however, this approach appeals to photography (warts and
all) as a “vital technology of democratic citizenship” that can serve as “a mode of
experience, a medium for social thought, a public art” that is “a boon for human
understanding and solidarity.”13 Here spectatorship does not look to reflection or
7 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 241.
8 Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Humanity of War: Iconic Photojournalism of the Battlefield, 1914–2012,”
in Visual Security Studies: Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War, edited by Juha A. Vuori and Rune
Saugmann Andersen (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 71–90; Robinson, “Media Empowerment vs.
Strategies of Control”; Piers Robinson, “CNN Effect,” in Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker
(London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 62–67.
9 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 80.
10 Robinson, “Media Empowerment vs. Strategies of Control”; Robinson, “CNN Effect.”
11 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others.
12 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), pp. 1–28. Also see Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated
Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of
Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2004); Susie Linfield, Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political
Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political
Ontology of Photography, translated by Louise Bethlehem (London: Verso, 2012); Lilie Chouliaraki,
The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013);
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016); Frank Möller, Visual
Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
13 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 2, 3.
manipulation, but is a “civic capability” that is learned and critically discussed.14 As

Jacques Rancière argues:
Being a spectator is not some passive condition that we should transform

into activity. It is our normal situation. We also learn and teach, act and
know, as spectators who all the time link what we see to what we have seen
and said, done and dreamed.15
Spectatorship thus is not understood as a reaction to images, as in the CNN-Effect,

but is figured as a social relationship that is an “affective alignment.”16
The “ethical witness” thus shifts from being the victim of elite manipulation to
being an “emancipated spectator,” an “ironic spectator,” and a “participant witness,”
who can actively resist the cultural governance of state and corporate power.17 And
it’s not just the human witness who is active, but also the image itself: as Judith
Butler explains: “The photo is not merely a visual image awaiting interpretation: it
is itself actively interpreting, sometimes forcibly so.”18 While the iconoclastic ap-
proach employs the visibility strategy’s hermeneutics of suspicion to deconstruct
ideological meaning, active witnessing is better explained in terms of the visuality
strategy’s appreciation of how affect-work can provoke communities of sense that
complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done.
The dynamic relation of visibility and visuality, ideology and affect, and active
and passive witnessing is helpfully shown in Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay’s compar-
ison of how two styles of documentary photography—humanitarian and pluralist
photography—represent HIV/AIDS in Africa.19 Humanitarian photography is
done by professional photojournalists who fly in to document the violence of wars
and humanitarian crises for a Euro-American audience. These aren’t realist images
that seek to reflect reality, but activist images that aim to make invisible suffering
more visible, such as Ed Hooper’s iconic photograph of a Ugandan mother and her
baby in the last stages of an AIDS-related illness. Humanitarian photographs hope
to “serve as a catalyst for positive change” by evoking compassion in the viewer.20
Still, such photos are problematic because they tend to universalize and homog-
enize Africans into nameless, passive victims. The activism also risks reproducing
14 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 14.

16 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 15.
17 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator; Möller, Visual Peace.
18 Butler, Frames of War, 71; also see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves
of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
19 Roland Bleiker and Amy Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and
Local Empowerment,” International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007):139–163.
20 Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa,” 141.
122 Visual Images
the hierarchy of postcolonial power relations in a politics of pity wherein helpless

Africans rely on Euro-American saviors. Although humanitarian photography may
successfully raise funds for charity—and even change government policy—such
images often reinforce existing self/Other relations that separate the safe Euro-
American “here” from the dangerous African “there.”
To critique how humanitarian photography generates passive victims and passive
spectators, Bleiker and Kay consider how “pluralist photography” encourages dia-
logue among active subjects and active spectators. Rather than look to iconic photos
taken by outsiders that tend to homogenize Africa, they explore the example of a
photography project in Ethiopia that involved HIV/AIDS-affected children. Here
the children were given cameras and asked to tell their own stories through pictures.
The result was an exhibition of the day-to-day experience of “living with HIV-AIDs,”
rather than dying from it (as seen in humanitarian photographs). Bleiker and Kay
argue that such pluralist photography was empowering for the children and even
moved policy in Ethiopia. As well as treating the photographic subjects as active
agents, the resulting photo exhibit was designed to activate the audience; viewers
were encouraged to add their own letters and pictures to the children’s photos.
Rather than the foreign subject and the local object, the participatory process pro-
duced a “creative and safe space for dialogue” among active self-photographers and
emancipated spectators.21 Witnessing here is not simply the reaction of the Euro-
American spectator to images of disaster in Africa, but creates an interactive social
relation that moves, connects, and changes people in many places.
Bleiker and Kay’s analysis of pluralistic photography exhibits is also inter-
esting because it jams the distinction between photojournalism and visual art.
Indeed, parallel to the discussion of the resistance potential of photojournalism
is a robust debate about the relation of visual art, world politics, and resistance.22
Rather than dealing with issues of authenticity—such as whether or not the image
is manipulated—visual art addresses the entanglement of aesthetics, politics, and
21 Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa,” 157; also see Möller, Visual Peace, 19.
22 Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011);
Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Meg McLagan and
Yates McKee, eds., Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism (New York: Zone
Books, 2012); Christine Sylvester, Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect it
(London: Routledge, 2008); Alex Danchev, “Witnessing,” in Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland
Bleiker (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 332–338; David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, “Guest
Editor’s Introduction: Securitization, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post-9/11,”
Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):131–137; Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, “Introduction: Art, Politics,
Purpose,” Review of International Studies 35:4 (2009):775–779; Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller,
eds., Art as Political Witness (Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich, 2016); Möller, Visual Peace; Jill Bennett,
Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2005); Alex Danchev and R. B. J. Walker, eds., “Art and Politics,” special issue, Alternatives: Global,
Local, Political 31:1 (2006):1–104.
ethics. It considers how works of art that serve as an ethical witness can creatively
challenge prevailing conceptions of social order and world order, and even offer
“innovative solutions.”23
Following from analysis in previous chapters, Chapter 6 uses the visibility/
visuality dynamic to explore the international politics of visual art. The visibility
strategy examines the meaning of art by considering how, as a “social construction
of the visual,” art can resist oppression through witnessing, and the visuality strategy
explores how art can provoke new affective communities through a “visual provoca-
tion of the social”—and of the global.24 The visibility strategy works to make invis-
ible ideology more visible, while the visuality strategy looks to how affect-work can
create new communities of sense and thus new ways of seeing, feeling, and perhaps
doing. As Rancière explains, “[I]‌mages are the object of a twofold question: the
question of their origin (and consequently their truth content) and the question of
their end or purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in.”25 Visual
art as a mode of resistance here works in complementary ways: on the one hand, it
acts ideologically as a witness to atrocities in order to speak truth to power, while on
the other it works affectively to creatively excite new affective communities of sense.
To trace this ideology/affect dynamic, the chapter examines how tragedy and
vulnerability are represented in art that mixes the visual and the visceral. There is
a long tradition of this in European art, perhaps starting with medieval Christian
art, and seen in modern times in Goya’s Disasters of War (1810–1820) and Picasso’s
Guernica (1937).26 Indeed, we should note that visual art can be even more suc-
cessful than photojournalism; a copy of Guernica now hangs in the UN Headquarters
in New York, where it is seen as a general anti-war statement.
However, this chapter strays from the Western canon to see the interaction of
art, politics, and resistance in the visual art of Ai Weiwei. The point is not to pro-
vide a non-Western riposte to art/politics analysis that is dominated by analysis of
art from Europe and America. As we will see, in some ways Ai is the embodiment
of the comparative political theory dynamic discussed in Chapter 3; his creative
combination of modern, traditional, Euro-American, Chinese, and Middle Eastern
concepts, practices, and experiences jams any East-West binary opposition. The
chapter explores the interplay of ideology and affect to see how visual art can serve
as a “witness” to resist reigning political regimes, as well as how it can provoke affec-
tive community that creatively resists reigning political aesthetics.
23 Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 1, 10–13.

26 See Liu Quan, “Nanmin yu yishu” [Refugees and art], Meishu guancha no. 2 (2017):147–150;
Möller, Visual Peace, 9; Danchev, “Witnessing,” 332; Bennett, Empathic Vision, 35.
124 Visual Images
Witnessing as Ideological Resistance
In the past decade, Ai Weiwei has burst out from his limited role of Chinese artist to
become a key artist-activist on the global stage. He first gained international fame
as the artistic consultant for Beijing’s “Bird’s Nest” Olympic stadium; just before
the 2008 Olympics, however, Ai became infamous for denouncing the stadium as
China’s “fake smile” to the world. In October 2010 Ai fascinated the art world with
his Sunflower Seeds exhibit at London’s Tate Modern art gallery; before the exhibit
closed in May 2011, Ai became a global political figure when he was arrested by
the Chinese government on April 3, 2011. Following his release in June 2011 after
eighty-one days of illegal detention, Ai continued to intrigue, outrage, and entertain
audiences in China and around the world. In response to the controversy around
US mass surveillance operations, Ai argued that by invading people’s privacy “the
US is behaving like China.”27 After years of post-detention harassment by China’s
party-state, in 2015 Ai moved into self-imposed exile in Berlin, where he continued
to produce noteworthy art—and activism.
Ai Weiwei is famous for crossing boundaries, especially the boundary between
art and politics. His activities explore the limits of what is acceptable in China in
terms of both political action and aesthetic taste: in 2000 he co-organized an exhibit
in Shanghai called Fuck Off, and more recently his nude photos were denounced
as pornography both by the police and in the court of public opinion.28 He thus is
a polarizing figure among both artistic and nonartistic audiences, who delights in
making people—both friends and enemies—feel uncomfortable. His main friend,
promoter, and defender in the West, Swiss art collector and former ambassador to
China Uli Sigg, warned Ai “to be careful. Don’t let them mix your position as an
artist and a political activist” because “ ‘political art’ is not a good word.”29 After Ai
was illegally detained in April 2011, a critic in one of China’s official newspapers
complained that Ai’s art “confounds the boundary between the artistic and the po-
litical; in fact, he uses it to engage in political activities.”30
Ai’s work as an activist-artist thus is noteworthy not because it is “new.” His cri-
tique of China’s politics and society is actually part of a broad and ongoing debate
about the moral crisis that China faces after four decades of economic reform and
opening up. In other words, China’s New Left, traditionalists, and liberals are all
27 Ai Weiwei, “NSA Surveillance: The US Is Behaving Like China,” The Guardian ( June 11, 2013)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/nsa- surveillance-us-behaving-like-
china (accessed April 11, 2019).
28 See Hua Tianxue, Ai Weiwei, and Feng Boyi, eds., Bu hezuo fangshi-Fuck Off [An uncooperative
approach-Fuck Off] (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2000).
29 Ai Weiwei, interview with the author in Beijing (May 27, 2013).
30 Liu Yiheng, “Ai Weiwei zhen mianmu: Wu wan yishujia—wu du ju quan” [The true face of Ai
Weiwei: Five play artist—five poisons] Wenhui Bao (April 15, 2011).
worried about the “values crisis” presented by what they call China’s new “money-
worship” society.31 Intellectuals from across the political spectrum thus are engaged
in what Chinese call “patriotic worrying” (youhuan yishi); they feel that it is their
job to ponder the fate of the nation and to find the correct formula to solve China’s
problems.32
Ai’s contribution to this debate is straightforward: he feels that the PRC is a
corrupt authoritarian state, and the country can only be saved if the government
respects freedom of expression and the rule of law.33 As he wrote in his blog: “Return
basic rights to the people, endow society with basic dignity, and only then can we
have confidence and take responsibility, and thus face our collective difficulties.
Only rule of law can make the game equal, and only when it is equal can people’s
participation possibly be extraordinary.”34 Ai thus sees China’s dictatorial state as
the problem.35 As he wrote in The Guardian, “[E]‌very day in China, we put the state
on trial.”36 In one tweet he declares, “Every delight we have on Twitter is a death of
dictatorship and totalitarianism,” while in another he states, “Evil exists to test our
courage.”37 Ai thus figures politics as a Manichean struggle of good versus evil, in
which the heroic dissident fights the cruel state.38
Ai thus shares many political values with Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who like-
wise questioned Beijing’s authoritarian rule. In his co-authored “Charter ’08” mani-
festo, Liu argued that the Chinese people need to “embrace universal human values,
join the mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system.”39 Yet
Ai’s style and tactics are quite different. Liu acted like a classic twentieth-century
31 See William A. Callahan, China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013); Liu Mingfu, Zhongguo meng: Hou Meiguo shidai de daguo siwei zhanlue dingwei [The
China dream: The great power thinking and strategic positioning of China in the post-American era],
2nd ed. (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2013); Xu Jilin, Dangdai Zhongguo de qimeng yu
fan-qimeng [Enlightenment and anti-enlightenment in contemporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue
wenxian chubanshe, 2011).
32 Gloria Davies, Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Liu, Zhongguo meng.
33 Ai Weiwei, interview with the author.
34 Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interview, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, edited and trans-
lated by Lee Ambrozy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2011), pp. 181–182.
35 For a different view of Ai’s ideology, see Christian Sorace, “China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei,”
Critical Inquiry 40:2 (2014):396–419.
36 Ai Weiwei, “Every Day in China, We Put the State on Trial,” The Guardian (April 15, 2013)
https:// w ww.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/ 2 013/ a pr/ 1 5/ a i- weiwei- c hina- s tate- o n- t rial
(accessed April 11, 2019).
37 Ai, Ai Weiwei’s Blog, September 3, 2009, and August 3, 2009.
38 See Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture. Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 1.
39 Liu Xiaobo, No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, edited by Perry Link, Tianchi
Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 301.
126 Visual Images
dissident: he drafted manifestos demanding political change, acted in rationally ear-

nest ways—and, in 2017, he tragically died in prison. “Charter ’08,” which landed
Liu in jail for “state subversion,” reads like a five-year plan for rational democratic
reform in China.
Ai, however, takes a twenty-first-century approach to resistance that blurs art,
life, politics, and activism. Rather than writing earnest essays that demand rational
governance, Ai appeals to people’s outrage, mocks the government, and works pri-
marily through the Internet to witness the party-state’s oppression. This often takes
the form of an ideological campaign for government transparency and accounta-
bility that is expressed through his visual art.40 Although he has always been polit-
ical in the sense of demanding freedom of expression, Ai was moved to intervene
more directly in politics by the official corruption exposed by China’s Wenchuan
earthquake in 2008. Like many public intellectuals in the PRC, Ai was critical of
the official response to the earthquake.41 Noticing that public schools often suffered
more damage than surrounding buildings, many people felt that the schools had
collapsed due to substandard construction stemming from official corruption. After
the government refused to investigate, Ai enlisted hundreds of volunteers in what he
called a “Public Citizen Investigation Project” to ethically witness the combination
of state and private corruption that had produced this tragedy.42
Using techniques similar to those of the Forensic Architecture group,43 this cit-
izens’ investigation eventually compiled and published a list of the names of the
5,212 children who were killed in the earthquake. As a project of building civil
society, the process of the investigation itself was important; as Ai explains, “[I]‌t
became a symbol or some kind of testimony to show how an individual can cast
against the whole system.”44 Ai and his team eventually shamed the government
into releasing its own list of 5,335 names. Again blurring the line between art and
politics, Ai turned this tragedy into visual art. The Wall of Names, which lists the
name, gender, age, and school of each of the 5,212 victims in Chinese and English,
was exhibited as artwork.45 Ai’s massive mosaic Remembering (2009), exhibited
at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, lined up nine thousand school bags to spell out one
mother’s reaction to her daughter’s death: “She lived happily on this earth for seven
40 See Giorgio Strafella and Daria Berg, “‘Twitter Bodhisattva’: Ai Weiwei’s Media Politics,” Asian
Studies Review 39:1 (2015):138–157.
41 See Christian Sorace, “China’s Vision for Developing Sichuan’s Post- Earthquake
Countryside: Turning Unruly Peasants into Grateful Urban Citizens,” China Quarterly 218
(2014):404–427.
42 Ai Weiwei, interview with the author.
43 See Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Cambridge,
MA: Zone Books, 2017).
44 Ai, quoted in Tim Marlow, “Ai Weiwei in Conversation,” in Ai Weiwei [Exhibition catalogue],
edited by Tim Marlow and John Tancock, 17–29 (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015), p. 22.
45 See Marlow and Tancock, Ai Weiwei, 136–143.
years.” Ai also straightened out 150 tons of twisted steel rebar that had been sal-
vaged from the Wenchuan ruins, which was exhibited in orderly piles as Straight at
the 2013 Venice Art Biennale.46 Ai thus uses visual art to highlight the party-state’s
lack of accountability, including the literal counting of dead children. To fight the
crookedness of official corruption that had led to the collapsed school buildings, Ai
straightened out the mangled rebar taken from the ruins of those buildings.
Through his nude photography, Ai also promotes witnessing, visibility, and
transparency in a more playful way that blends art, politics, and life. Many Chinese
artists and intellectuals visited Ai during his New York sojourn (1981–1993). At
that time he always carried a camera, and he often persuaded his friends to pose
nude in public with him: Ai and Yan Li are smilingly nude in a now-iconic photo at
the World Trade Center Plaza (1985).47 After his release from detention in 2011, Ai
used nudity to poke fun at China’s political leadership. Grass Mud Horse Covering
the Middle is a photograph of a naked Ai covering his genitals with a stuffed an-
imal, which Ai posted on the Internet. Its title invokes the word-play (e’gao) used to
resist the keyword-based online censorship of China’s Great Firewall; “Grass Mud
Horse Covering the Middle” is a homophone for “Fuck your mother, Communist
party central committee.”48 Ai also returned to his New York habits; in 2011 four
activists wanted a photograph with Ai to commemorate their visit to his studio in
Beijing. Ai suggested that they take off their clothes, and the result is a nude pho-
tograph of him with these four women, One Tiger, Eight Breasts, which was posted
on the Internet. The Chinese police reacted by accusing Ai and his photographer
of spreading pornography online, and then China’s netizens responded in support
of free artistic expression by posting online naked photos of themselves.49 As with
the citizen’s investigation of accountability after the Wenchuan earthquake, here Ai
brought together a diverse group of artists and activists to protest the party-state’s
46 Marlow and Tancock, Ai Weiwei, 128–141.

47 Bei Ling, “Grin and Bare It,” South China Morning Post Magazine (August 28, 2011); also see
Feng Xiaogang, “Queshao ni, Niuyue biande pingyong” [Without you, New York is mediocre], Xingfu
no. 8 (2015):3–5. For the nude photograph with Yan Li at the World Trade Center, see Bei Ling,
“Der nackte Bürger Ai Weiwei,” Frankfurter Allgemeine (May 14, 2011) http://www.faz.net/aktuell/
feuilleton/bilder-und-zeiten-1/die-new-yorker-jahre-der-nackte-buerger-ai-weiwei-1638007.html
(accessed May 19, 2018). Strangely, none of Ai’s nude photos are included in Ai Weiwei, Niuyue 1983–
1993/New York 1983–1993 (Berlin: DISTANZ Verlag, 2011).
48 Leah Goldman, “Check Out Revolutionary Artwork from Ai Weiwei, the Guy Who Has China
Under House Arrest,” Business Insider ( June 23, 2011) http://www.businessinsider.com/ai-weiwei-
art-2011-6?op=1&IR=T (accessed May 19, 2018).
49 Jonathan Watts, “Ai Weiwei Investigated over Nude Art,” The Guardian (November 18, 2011)
https:// w ww.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/ 2 011/ nov/18/ai-weiwei-i nvestigation-nude-art
(accessed May 19, 2018); Tania Branigan, “Ai Weiwei Supporters Strip Off as Artist Faces ‘Porn’
Investigation,” The Guardian (November 21, 2011) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/
21/ai-weiwei-porn-investigation-naked (accessed May 19, 2018).
128 Visual Images
lack of transparency. To protest the opaqueness of the state, Ai witnessed its invisi-
bility through the hypervisibility of nude photography.
Ai Weiwei’s eighty-one-day illegal detention also provoked audio-visual art that
engaged in ethical witnessing. Some of it is playful; Ai’s debut music video Dumbass
is a foul-mouthed mockumentary about his time in detention.50 But other work is
more serious. S.A.C.R.E.D. is a six-part installation of half-scale dioramas in iron
boxes; it uses the themes of Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, and
Doubt to reproduce the scene of Ai’s illegal detention in a cheap hotel room.51 This
artwork exemplifies both the invisibility of being held in secret detention and the
hypervisibility of being under constant surveillance by a team of guards. The themes
of nudity and surveillance are combined in Cleansing, which witnesses how Ai was
forced to take a shower under the watchful gaze of two (fully clothed) guards.52 The
exhibit also addresses issues of witnessing and spectatorship at a structural level;
in the art gallery, people can only see into S.A.C.R.E.D.’s six boxes through small,
awkwardly-placed holes. Hence viewers are turned into voyeurs who are complicit
with China’s surveillance state. S.A.C.R.E.D. thus is interesting not simply as a visual
image that represents politics; this three-dimensional visual artifact is a multisen-
sory space that active spectators can performatively witness through sight, sound,
and touch.
In this way, Ai’s visual art exemplifies how ethical witnessing can work through
the visibility strategy: he works hard to expose the violence and corruption of the
party-state. His goal, like that of Czech dissident and later president Vaclav Havel, is
to “Live in Truth.”53 Because spectators are called upon to decode the clever meaning
of Ai’s artwork, viewers must work as active witnesses to creatively reproduce the
visibility strategy’s hermeneutic urge to speak truth to power. Moreover, Ai’s art
doesn’t just seek to represent other people’s pain and suffering. Since Ai himself is a
target of party-state oppression, his approach recalls “pluralistic photography” be-
cause it involves active participant witnessing to bridge the gap between inside and
outside, subject and object.
Art, Exile, and Global Witnessing

Up until his illegal detention in 2011, Ai’s work focused almost entirely on China
and the oppression of the party-state. His art exhibits generally showed Chinese
50 Tania Branigan, “Dumbass: Ai Weiwei Releases Heavy Metal Music Video,” The Guardian (May
22, 2013) https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/may/22/dumbass-ai-weiwei-music-
video (accessed April 11, 2019).
51 Marlow and Tancock, Ai Weiwei, 210–215.
52 Marlow and Tancock, Ai Weiwei, 215.
53 Vaclav Havel, Living in Truth (New York: Faber & Faber, 1987).
things to the world: a hundred million ceramic sunflower seeds in London or

thousands of children’s backpacks in Munich. While Ai was celebrated in China for
his art and design work in the 2000s,54 after 2009 he more or less disappeared from
the mainland’s Chinese-language media, which was restricted by the censorship re-
gime from even criticizing his work.
At the same time, Ai received support and praise from the artistic and activist
communities outside of China. After his release from detention, Ai was named one
of Foreign Policy’s “100 Top Global Thinkers of 2011” and made the short list for
Time magazine’s “Person of the Year 2011.” GQ profiled him as China’s “photog-
rapher, architect, gambler, orchestrator of installations, organizer of happenings,
troublemaker, mad tweeter.”55 In 2012 Elton John dedicated his concert in Beijing
to Ai, while in 2013 Ai’s detention ordeal was dramatized on the London stage in
“#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei.” The coup de grace was when ArtReview chose
Ai as the “most powerful artist in the world.”56 Still, after his release in 2011, Ai
was worn down by the strain of four years of quasi-house arrest, artistic and po-
litical censorship, and threats against his family. His experience also shows how
resistance—even that of a world-famous artist—still relies to a large extent on what
the state will allow.
This combination of push and pull factors finally motivated Ai to accept
Germany’s offer to set up a studio in Berlin. Once the Chinese government returned
his passport in 2015, Ai moved into self-imposed exile. But this European exile
was not a totally new experience. Actually, Ai has spent most of his life in exile.57
Soon after Ai was born in 1957, his family was sent into internal exile on the harsh
borderlands of the PRC because Ai’s father, the famous communist poet Ai Qing,
had criticized Mao and the Communist Party. The family only returned to Beijing
in 1976 as the Maoist period drew to a close.
After living for five years in Beijing, Ai was frustrated by the restrictions on ar-
tistic expression in China, and in 1981 he went to study in the United States. After
dropping out, Ai bummed around Manhattan as an illegal alien, doing odd jobs and
hanging out with visiting Chinese artists, filmmakers, and poets while shooting
more than ten thousand photographs.58 He returned to Beijing in 1993 to see his
sick father and was based in China until 2015. Hence Ai has only spent seventeen
of his sixty-odd years not in exile. Living in Xinjiang, Beijing, New York, and Berlin
54 See “2006 niandu yishujia” [Artists of the year 2006], Dangdai yishu yu tuozi no. 2 (2007):8.
55 Wyatt Mason, “The Danger Artist,” GQ (December 2011):218.
56 “The Power 100,” ArtReview (October 2011) http://www.artreview100.com/power-100-lists-
from-2002-through-2008/2011/ (accesses July 15, 2013).
57 See Ian Boyden, “Not Yet Not Yet Complete: An Interview with Ai Weiwei, Part 3: Exile and
the Consequences of Hope,” China Heritage Quarterly (October 28, 2018) http://chinaheritage.net/
journal/exile-and-the-consequences-of-hope-ai-weiwei-interview-part-3/ (accessed April 11, 2019).
58 Ai, Niuyue 1983–1993; Bei, “Grin and Bare It”; Feng, “Queshao ni.”
130 Visual Images
thus has informed his comparative artistic approach, which appeals to a combina-
tion of modern, traditional, European, American, and Chinese concepts, practices,
and experiences.
It is not strange, then, that Ai Weiwei made Human Flow (2017), a film about
the current global refugee crisis. This epic film, which British journalist Jon Snow
described as “amazing, agonizing, and very beautiful,”59 addresses the massive chal-
lenge of the world’s sixty-five million refugees. Like Ai’s art-activism in China, the
message of Human Flow is very clear: we need to look beyond national borders and
national interests to appreciate the refugee problem as a global issue of humanity
that demands a global solution.60 Ai’s goal in this film is not simply ideological—to
inform people about the inhumane conditions of refugees—but also affective, to
provoke a transnational community of sense that would creatively do something
to help refugees. As one of Ai’s colleagues explains, the film “reminds us that in this
crisis, we have to look, we have to feel, we have to not accept the status quo and we
have to change it.”61 Ai likewise states that “[t]‌here is no language to describe this
crisis. I am trying to see what is the role of civilization and human nature, how they
treat these refugees, how they spread the most basic values and human dignity.”62
In other words, the CNN-Effect of providing information for rational discussion of
policy options is not enough; Human Flow engages active ethical witnessing beyond
language to creatively move people to act in new affective communities of sense.
To understand the global artistry of Human Flow, it is helpful to see how it
employs the visibility strategy to ideologically speak truth to power and invokes the
visuality strategy to affectively excite new communities of sense. In this way, we con-
sider how the film’s ethical witnessing blurs distinctions between local/national/
global, word/image, individual/collective, rational/aesthetic, ideology/affect, and
visibility/visuality. The visual international politics of the refugee crisis, globaliza-
tion, and national borders has generated rich academic analysis,63 and this section
59 Jon Snow said this as the host of a panel discussion on Ai’s film, which can be seen in the “Extras”
section of the Human Flow DVD.
60 See “Nationality and Borders Are Barriers to Our Intelligence and Imagination” (interview with
Ai Weiwei), New Perspectives Quarterly (Fall 2017):35–39; “7 Questions: Ai Weiwei,” Time (October
23, 2017):112; Human Flow final press notes (2017) https://www.humanflow.com/press-kit/
(accessed May 23, 2018).
61 Diane Weyerman in Human Flow final press notes, 4.
62 “Gen pai zhengzheng yinian, zhe bu jilupian jijiang jiekai Ai Weiwei wei nanmin zuole shenme”
[After filming a full year, this documentary reveals what Ai Weiwei has done for refugees], ArtsBJ ( June
28, 2017) http://www.artsbj.com/show-19-550253-1.html (accessed May 31, 2018).
63 See David Campbell, “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict,” Political
Geography 26 (2007):357–382; Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa”; Roland Bleiker,
David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson, “The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees,”
Australian Journal of Political Science 48:4 (2013):398–416; Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou,
“Hospitability: The Communicative Architecture of Humanitarian Securitization at Europe’s Borders,”
Journal of Communication 67:2 (2017):159–180. Also see Chapter 7 in this book.
utilizes these arguments to consider the limitations of Human Flow. The goal is to
see how effective the film is as a humanitarian consciousness-raising project and as
an activity-provoking, pluralistic performance.
Local/National/Global
Human Flow is interesting because it not only criticizes nationalism and territorial
borders, but also aims to efface such borders in its presentation. Although people
in the film are categorized according to their citizenship for bureaucratic reasons,
Human Flow forces viewers to actively visualize less national and more global iden-
tities, spaces, and experiences. While national police certainly are shown guarding
national borders, most of the film presents the plight of migrants, who are often a
multinational/transnational group of contingent travelers. Likewise, most of the ex-
pert testimony offered in the film is from people who work for the United Nations
and transnational aid groups. Ai’s stated purpose is to efface national boundaries,
and this is done by deliberately problematizing these different geographical scales
through the journey to twenty-three countries and over forty refugee camps: “At
times during the film, the viewer may be disoriented, [and] not know which country
or camp he or she is in. Yet this sensation is integral to the film.”64
Yet the film risks reproducing the hackneyed logic of a package holiday that
overwhelms the audience. One reviewer felt that the film’s “patchwork construc-
tion can make it hard to determine exactly which particular crisis you’re in at any
given moment. The colors of land, skin and sky are often all you have to go on.”65
In other words, it is like a Grand Tour of suffering that merges numerous horrible
experiences in ways that can make spectators passive rather than active.66 Like hu-
manistic photojournalism, it risks reaffirming the hierarchical division of a safe
“here” in Euro-America from a dangerous “there” in refugee camps. Interestingly,
because of its appeal to global humanity, there is not a clear Other or enemy in this
film. It is certainly critical of European (and Western) policing, apathy, and com-
plicity. But since this is the target audience, it is not constructed as the Other to
the refugee self. Indeed, Ai’s country of residence—Germany, which let in over one
million refugees in 2015—comes off as a welcoming place.
64 Andrew Cohen in Human Flow final press notes, 11.

65 Robbie Collin, “Human Flow Review: Ai Weiwei’s Refugee Documentary Weighs on Your Heart
Like a Cannonball” (December 8, 2017) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/human-flow-review-
ai-weiweis-refugee-documentary-weighs-heart/ (accessed May 17, 2018).
66 Debbie Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016);
Rodanthi Tzanelli, “Schematising Hospitality: Ai WeiWei’s Activist Artwork as a Form of Dark Travel,”
Mobilities 13:4 (2018):520–534.
132 Visual Images
Word/Image: Words
Although the film does not have a voice-over to guide the story, it works according to
a particular combination of word and image. In place of an authoritative narrator, it
liberally employs on-screen text to provide statistics, definitions, and explanations.
These provide a rational argument for why refugees matter, the scale of the crisis,
and background information about particular camps and situations. At times this
includes a twenty-four-hour-news-channel-type ticker-tape that scrolls (Western
media) headlines across the lower third of the screen. Texts also include a series of
interviews with refugees and international experts that once again give factual meat
and emotional spice to the film’s episodic narrative. Interestingly, the on-screen text
is more than empirical facts; to add emotional depth to the rational argument, it
also displays poems from local and regional writers.67
Word/Image: Images
While words and verbal testimony are plentiful, most of the film’s political work is
done by images, nonverbal sound, and editing.68 For example, Human Flow starts
off with an image of a boat rocking gently in the deep blue sea. Filmed from a drone
far above and accompanied by evocative music, the scene is more beautiful than ag-
onizing: the bright orange dots (which we later recognize as people in life jackets)
look cute against the aquamarine canvas. It is only when the drone descends that
we see the precarious position of the people in this overloaded boat. A police boat
comes alongside, and the refugees come ashore on Lesbos island in Greece. At this
point Ai Weiwei appears, filming the scene with his smartphone. Next we witness
Ai offering hot tea and a reflector blanket to a tired and wet man who has come from
Iraq (see figure 6.1).
The cinematography of this opening scene is repeated numerous times in the
film to ethically witness a visual mixture of collectives and individuals, who are ge-
neral and specific, abstract and material (see figure 6.2). It is common in documen-
tary films to choose an individual and follow that person on a journey, either to
show the person’s individual idiosyncrasies or to represent the general experience of
a collective.69 Ai, however, explains that he didn’t want to choose between the face-
less mass of the collective and the unique experience of the individual; his purpose
67 For a discussion of the aesthetics and politics of poetry, see Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics.
68 Peter Bradshaw, “Human Flow Review—Ai Weiwei Surveys Shocking Plight of Migrants on
the Move,” The Guardian (December 7, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/07/
human-flow-review-ai-weiwei-migration-documentary (accessed May 17, 2018); Michael J. Shapiro,
Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 31;
Chapter 4 in this book.
UK: University of Manchester Press, forthcoming).
Figure 6.1 Selfie of Ai offering tea and a blanket to a refugee, Human Flow (2017).
Courtesy Human Flow
was to “get more knowledge on a global scale. Not making a film about one family or
one person, but global scale to see the humanity, the human flow.”70
This appeal to the collective has echoes in Ai’s earlier artistic work: 100 million
porcelain Sunflower Seeds (London, 2010–2011), 9,000 backpacks in Remembering
(Munich, 2010); the 5,212 names in the Wall of Names of Wenchuan victims
(London, 2015); and 150 tons of straightened rebar in Straight (Venice, 2013). And
now in Human Flow there were more than 40 forty camps in 23 countries. Many of
the film’s sections begin with a drone’s-eye-view establishing shot that shows wide
landscapes and seascapes. Again, as the drone descends, the view shifts from the ab-
stract to the material, the aesthetic to the social, and the collective to the individual.
One scene starts far above an abstract pattern that evokes Islamic geometric design;
as it descends, a refugee camp of orderly tents in the desert takes shape. Then we see
things moving around like ants, and finally we see them emerge as people, including
young children, who cheer the drone as it hovers just above them. The transition
from collective to individual, however, is incomplete; since the images are captured
from above, we don’t clearly see specific people’s faces.
70
Ai with Snow, Human Flow “Extras” section.
Figure 6.2 Drone’s-eye view of a refugee camp, Human Flow (2017). Courtesy Human Flow
After these establishing shots that highlight the shared experience of global hu-
manity, the film offers a series of images of individuals. As well as witnessing how
people encounter challenging situations, the film also shows them doing things in
everyday life: cooking food, checking and charging mobile phones, and playing.
The film thus employs a “pluralistic” strategy that presents refugees not just in life-
or-death crises, but also as ordinary people who do ordinary things in daily life.
Everyday life also is where Ai again enters Human Flow as a character; we see him
grilling meat, getting a haircut, giving a haircut, and taking selfies with refugees.
While he is buying vegetables, we see how Ai and the vendor are able to viscerally
communicate without verbal language through comical gestures. Here we are shown
that refugees are just like “us” in Euro-America—and could be us. In one scene, Ai
offers to exchange passports and homes with a Syrian man in a camp: “Next time
you are Ai Weiwei. Exchange tent for studio in Berlin. . . . I respect you.”
There are also numerous scenes in which people are filmed doing nothing—
standing against a white backdrop in a tent, or after their interviews. Here they are
filmed in long takes in an artistic video portrait that shows the emotional contours
of individual people. This aesthetic sense is highlighted by the evocative music that
is added in over muted background noise from the camp. These dignified video still-
lifes are complemented by portraits of movement: a small child running frantically
in tight circles in a confined room, and later a horse running in a tight circle in a
small urban space under the guidance of a groom. Such visual rhymes combine the
joy and frustration of going nowhere, fast.71
The images in the word/image dynamic affirm how audio-visual art serves as an
active ethical witness that both provides ideological information and provokes af-
fective communities of sense.
Rational/Aesthetic and Ideology/Affect

In general, the film appeals to the aesthetic and emotional movement of evocative
audio-video images more than to the rational and ideological argument of facts.
Although it tells a chronological story of Syrian, Iraqi, and Afghan refugees making
their way to Europe before the borders closed in 2015–2016, the film lacks a linear
narrative. It is more of an artistic collage and cinematic montage of images of fear,
joy, frustration, and boredom.72 As one critic explains:
71 See Malin Wahlberg, Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. ix, 66.
72 On the political aesthetics of montage and collage, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-
Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Bloomsbury, 1986);
Sylvester, Art/Museums.
136 Visual Images
[W]‌hile most documentaries would opt to zero in on a handful of case

studies, Human Flow makes a virtue of its vastness, and roves freely be-
tween displaced communities—Syrians, Kenyans, Rohingya—in search
of both spiky specificity and common ground. It spends no more than a
minute or two with any one group, and after someone disappears, they
don’t come back.73
This collage is not only of different refugee groups, but also of “text, faces, ideas,
facts, emotions, landscapes and human bonds,”74 which work together to show the
diverse individual and collective elements of the global refugee crisis. Although
some of the scenes seem forced—for example, the odd interchange between the US
border patrol police officer and Ai at the US-Mexico border—in general the film
works to create a broad and deep feeling about the necessity for action. The film
here goes beyond promoting ideology to excite a new global affective community
of sense.
Human Flow thus ethically witnesses the migration crisis through an interesting
mix of the visibility strategy and the visuality strategy. It makes visible the often in-
visible challenges faced by refugees, and it also is a film that aims to “do” something
by provoking new relations in an audio-visual (re)construction of transnational
communities of sense. This activism was seen at both the film’s world premiere at
the Venice International Film Festival (2017) and its British/Irish premiere at 120
cinemas that was followed by a live simulcast interactive panel discussion with Ai
Weiwei. Human Flow is a consciousness-raising and activity-provoking performance
that is like an extended PSA, complete with injunctions to do something: contact
your member of parliament! Donate to charity organizations through this URL
link! At the end of the panel discussion Ai Weiwei bowed to the ecstatic cheers of
the various audiences, perhaps provoking new social-ordering and world-ordering.
At my university, I have screened Human Flow to students in class and to a di-
verse audience at a public event, and it provoked an ecstatic response from both
groups. Indeed, one student told the class that seeing the film in 2017 changed his
life; it showed the power of artistic documentary films and thus inspired him to
study filmmaking as a mode of political activism. This exemplifies Alex Danchev’s
emancipatory view of art/politics: “[C]‌ontrary to popular belief, it is given to art-
ists, not politicians, to create a new world order.”75
73 Collin, “Human Flow Review.”

74 Human Flow final press notes, 14.
75 Alex Danchev, On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2016), p. 91.
Too Far?
For some, however, the film is problematic. Although Ai says that the purpose of the
film is not to follow one family or one person, it actually does follow Ai on his own
personal journey of discovery. Whereas in his earlier work Ai positioned himself as
the rebel of Chinese art,76 now he presents himself as the Chinese savior of humanity.
He gives refugees tea and blankets, he consoles a woman who has had an emotional
break-down during an interview, and he even pretends to be a refugee by offering his
passport—which he quickly takes back.77
Sometimes the film is compelling, but at other times it is like Marie Antoinette’s
performance as a milkmaid at the Versailles dairy. Ai was criticized for an earlier
refugee-themed photograph, in which he appropriated the image of the dead toddler
Alan Kurdi by lying down on the beach in a similar way.78 While it is common to crit-
icize Europeans and Americans for appropriating the experience of people of color,
here we have an example of the Chinese savior mentality, also known as the “Yellow
Man’s Burden.”79 Although the lingering gaze of the camera can “humanize” suffering
people,80 it also risks becoming a “colonial gaze.”81 And as mentioned previously, the
colossal scale of the film risks morphing the experience to one of the Grand Tour of
dark travel.82
76 See William A. Callahan, “Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman,” Journal of Asian Studies
73:04 (2014):899–920.
77 Peter Bradshaw, “Human Flow Review –Ai Weiwei Surveys Shocking Plight of Migrants on
the Move,” The Guardian (December 7, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/07/
human-flow-review-ai-weiwei-migration-documentary (accessed May 17, 2018).
78 “Artist Ai Weiwei Poses as Aylan Kurdi for India Today Magazine,” India Today (February 1,
2016) https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/artist-ai-weiwei-poses-as-aylan-kurdi-for-india-today-
magazine-306593-2016-02-01 (accessed April 11, 2019); Ian Boyden, “Not Yet Not Yet Complete: An
Interview with Ai Weiwei, Part 4, The Conditions of Empathy,” China Heritage Quarterly (October
28, 2018) http://chinaheritage.net/journal/the-conditions-of-empathy-ai-weiwei-interview-part-5/
(accessed April 11, 2019); Mette Mortensen, “Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The
Alan Kurdi Imagery Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo,” Media,
Culture & Society 39:8 (2017):1142–1161.
79 See Pal Nyri, “Yellow Man’s Burden: Chinese Immigrants on a Civilizing Mission,” The China
Journal no. 56 (2006):83–106; Chenchen Zhang, “Racism and the Belt and Road in CCTV’s Spring
Festival Gala,” The Diplomat (February 23, 2018) https://thediplomat.com/2018/02/racism-and-
the-belt-and-road-in-cctvs-spring-festival-gala/ (accessed January 19, 2018).
80 See Zito Madu, “The Unflinching Humanity of Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow,” GQ (March 27, 2018)
https://www.gq.com/story/ai-weiwei-human-flow-radical-empathy (accessed May 17, 2018).
81 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Malek Alloula, The
Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). The colonial gaze is also explored
in Chapter 8.
82 Collin, “Human Flow Review”; Tzanelli, “Schematising Hospitality.”
138 Visual Images
This beautiful and agonizing film risks aestheticizing the suffering: the camera
is fascinated with the bright orange life jackets and the deep blue sea.83 Individual
refugees are largely nameless and voiceless in similar ways to what was critically
discussed previously as the “humanitarian” style of photography.84 Visualizing
refugees as masses of faceless people crammed onto a boat—rather than individ-
uals with faces—is problematic politically and ethically. According to an article
by Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson,
this is a common strategy for dehumanizing refugees, treating them more as a se-
curity threat than as “a humanitarian crisis that involves grievable lives requiring
compassion.”85
Finally, it seems odd that China is invisible in a film about the global refugee
crisis. On the one hand, China is a major source of refugees in the world, and on the
other it is one of the most anti-refugee places in the world; according to an online
poll, 97 percent of the Chinese public opposes receiving any refugees at all.86 Beijing
is commonly criticized both for sending North Koreans back across the border to
face certain punishment and for not allowing dissidents, Uyghurs, and Tibetans
to leave the PRC. Ai actually mentions North Korea in one of the interviews pro-
moting the film, but only to criticize a “Western mentality”: “I’ve seen people who
escape North Korea and cannot accept the Western lifestyle. Don’t take the Western
lifestyle as the natural, absolute condition.”87 Interestingly, this criticism of Western
hypocrisy, which shifts attention away from the sources of the refugee problem
in North Korea and China, chimes with the message promoted by the CCP’s
Propaganda Department. This is not a one-off; in exile, Ai focuses his activism on
global issues, rather than on the Chinese party-state. For example, although he lived
in Xinjiang for over twenty years, Ai has been relatively quiet about the PRC’s mass
“re-education” camps there. Ai’s global resistance activities in exile thus are still
shaped by the party-state back in China. And as mentioned previously, Germany,
Ai’s home at the time of the film project, also comes out looking pretty good.
Human Flow thus shows how Ai Weiwei has followed the lead of China’s state-
owned enterprises to “go global.”88 While many political dissidents become irrele-
vant in exile because they still focus on the authoritarian state back home, Ai has
83 Bradshaw, “Human Flow Review.”

84 Bleiker and Kay, “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa”; Ryan Woods, “Crisis and Confusion: A
Review of Human Flow by Ai Weiwei,” Geopolitics and Security (February 12, 2018) https://
rhulgeopolitics.wordpress.com/2018/02/12/crisis-and-confusion-a-review-of-human-flow-by-ai-
weiwei/(accessed May 30, 2018).
85 Bleiker et al., “The Visual Dehumanisation of Refugees,” 413.
86 See Li Ruohan, “97% of Chinese Would Reject Receiving Refugees: Online Poll,” Global Times
( June 20, 2018) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1107731.shtml (accessed August 27, 2018).
87 “Nationality and Borders,” 39.
88 See David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
successfully recast both his art and his activism to adapt to his latest Euro-American
exile experience. Rather than being simply an individual artist creating individual
works, Ai has expanded to work as a director who orchestrates artistic and cine-
matic works on an epic scale, including both a hundred million items in Sunflower
Seeds and thousands of people in dozens of countries and camps in Human Flow.
The film is interesting because it works hard to provide objective facts for rational
discussion at the same time that it tantalizingly excites affective communities. And
as my students’ experience shows, for some the film moves beyond passive specta-
torship to connect and move people to actually “do” ethical witnessing in new affec-
tive communities of sense.
Conclusion
This chapter has three interrelated objectives: first, to explore how visual art can
act as a site of resistance to cultural governance; second, to consider how this re-
sistance can take the form of ethical witnessing; and third, to see how this anal-
ysis can be enabled by the visibility/visuality and ideology/affect dynamic dyads. It
thus joins debates in critical theory, media and communications, and IR about what
photographs (and other images) mean and what they can do. This also involves
probing what spectatorship means and what it does: Are viewers passive voyeurs
who are manipulated by the image into reproducing hegemonic power? Or can they
be active, emancipated spectators who can ethically witness injustice in creative
ways that provoke new affective communities?
To explore these issues, the chapter considers the work of artist-activist Ai Weiwei.
As a Chinese artist struggling against a communist party-state, Ai might seem like
an idiosyncratic example who does not explain much else. But Ai is an interesting
case for a number of reasons. His living and work experience in China, America,
Europe, and refugee camps enables him to creatively combine modern, traditional,
Euro-American, Chinese, and Middle Eastern concepts, practices, and experiences.
As a long-time exile who has felt the sharp boot of the party-state on his own body,
Ai doesn’t just represent other people’s suffering; his art shows how he can ethically
witness his own oppression as a collective experience. Ai’s concern with transpar-
ency and accountability—as seen in his experiments with nude photography and
the half-scale model of his prison—shows how one can resist an authoritarian state
as an ethical witness. Indeed, the S.A.C.R.E.D. dioramas aren’t just something that
people look at. In the gallery, viewers have to experience them in three dimensions,
as voyeurs looking through small holes that offer only partial views. (Part III will
further explore how visual artifacts work as both two-dimensional representations
and as performances in material modalities and multisensory spaces.) Moreover,
Human Flow is not simply a visual image; it is an audio-visual image that uses sight
and sound to create affective communities of sense.
140 Visual Images
Finally, Human Flow shows how Ai is not simply a “Chinese artist”; this crea-
tive juxtaposition of his personal refugee experience with those of a range of other
refugees works hard both ideologically and affectively to give information about
the horrible situation migrants face, while at the same time provoking new social-
ordering and world-ordering activities. This is a transnational form of audio-visual
resistance that problematizes the cultural governance of a world divided into nation-
states. Still, Ai’s shift from a very visible resistance to the Chinese party-state to a
global activism in which China is much less visible shows how his resistance is still
shaped by the cultural governance of the PRC. Chapter 6 thus highlights the need to
appreciate the dynamic tension that entangles cultural governance and resistance.
PA RT   I I I
VISUAL ARTIFACTS AND

SENSORY SPACES
Part II examined how visual IR and visual culture studies analyze visual in-
ternational politics in terms of aesthetics, securitization, and witnessing. It
argued that this research is limited by its hermeneutic mode of analysis and
by its narrow focus on Euro-American images of security, war, and atrocity.
To critique this tendency, Part II used the visibility/visuality and ideology/
affect dynamics to move beyond assessing what images mean to see what
they can “do” in provoking affective communities of sense. Part II ended
with an analysis of activist films and art installations, which are more than
simply visual images.
Part III builds on this discussion of visual image analysis to make three
critical moves: (1) expand from visual images to appreciate visual artifacts
as material modalities and sensory spaces; (2) examine the interplay among
the verbal, the visual, and the multisensory; and (3) engage in compara-
tive political theory by developing conceptual dyads from different times
and places. These three interventions are useful for a more detailed analysis
and appreciation of visual IR, and they are also useful interventions into the
broader disciplines of social theory and international politics.
By the end of Part II, the analysis of activist films and art installations
showed what is different about visual artifacts and multisensory experiences.
This analysis overlaps with critical IR’s analysis of memorials, monuments,
museums, architecture, and landscapes. Yet while much of this analysis turns
visuals into texts for discursive analysis, Part III works to appreciate maps,
veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace as visual and multisensory artifacts via
the critical aesthetics mode.
142 Visual Artifacts and Sensory Spaces
On the one hand, the definition of “artifact” is simple; as Caitlin Hamilton

explains, etymologically it refers to a thing made (fatto) with skill (arte).1
Artifacts thus aren’t natural objects, but are human-made and thus embody
social relations. On the other hand, artifacts can also range from the small
and self-contained to the very large and complex, from things that you can
hold in your hand, such as a map or a veil, to things that are difficult for
humans to comprehend as a single entity, such as the Great Wall of China
or the Internet.
There is also the issue of agency and intent. The craftsperson who draws
a map, sews a veil, constructs a wall, builds a garden, or uses social media
certainly has intent and thus shapes the meaning of those artifacts. But as
we saw with the “Europe in 2035” maps, artifacts can also provoke new so-
cial orders and world orders far beyond the imagination or intent of any
particular actor. Those maps gained meaning and value not just in their
production, but also through their circulation and exchange in various af-
fective communities of sense. As one of my students reminded me, while
maps are images that you read, they are also artifacts that you touch—and
that can touch you viscerally when they spark the attraction (and revulsion)
of patriotic themes. Here maps, veils, walls, and gardens aren’t simply two-
dimensional representations of things that demand critical interpretation; as
three-dimensional spatiotemporal artifacts, they are the things, events, and
spaces that people can experience and perform as participants, rather than
just as observers. To appreciate a wall or a garden, looking at it is not enough;
you have to performatively “walk it” as an active participant.2 This experi-
ence certainly is visual, but it is also multisensory; you touch and smell maps
and veils, while walls and gardens are sites of sight, sound, touch, smell—
and even taste.
While many people see artifacts as “objects” that take on meaning through
human agency and interpretive understanding, Part III follows Jane Bennett
to consider how material artifacts can have agency—material vitality—to
mean things and do things separate from human understanding. They have
“Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to
1 Caitlin Hamilton, “The Everyday Artefacts of World Politics: Why Graphic Novels, Textiles
and Internet Memes Matter in World Politics” (PhD dissertation, University of New South Wales,
2016), p. 37.
2 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), pp. 91–110.
Visual A r tifac ts and Sens or y  Spac e s 143
produce effects dramatic and subtle.”3 Artifacts thus can do things “in ex-
cess of human meanings, designs, or purposes they express or serve.”4 Much
as W. J. T. Mitchell argues that pictures themselves can have the agency to
desire,5 Part III examines how artifacts can mean and do things as part of a
human-nonhuman assemblage. Such assemblages have their own energy, as
“living, throbbing confederations” of bodies that are moved and connected
in affective communities of sense.6 Walls and gardens therefore aren’t just
individual objects, but are artifactual assemblages that gather together heter-
ogeneous material modalities in sensory spaces.
As artifacts, walls, gardens, and the Internet are a site, an institution, an
enactment, an encounter—and an ideology. While Raymond Williams
discusses politics and culture in terms of “structures of feeling,” artifacts can
be appreciated as “infrastructures of feeling” in which politics is represented,
performed, and experienced in affective communities of sense. For example,
in the Palestinian feature film Omar (2013), the West Bank barrier is not
presented as an insurmountable material and ideological barrier; rather,
the wall is a site, an institution, an enactment, an encounter that Omar
performatively surmounts on his everyday visits to his girlfriend.7 Omar’s
experience thus exemplifies the sensible politics of artifacts, which work
through both multisensory experiences and the pragmatic everydayness of
crossing a border (or wearing a veil, or surfing the Web).
While it might be easy to accept maps and walls as artifacts, what about
cyberspace: Isn’t it a nondimensional virtual space that we (primarily) see
on two-dimensional screens? As Kathleen Brennan explains, the Internet is
an assemblage of artifacts that includes “devices, computers, cell phones, and
tablets; telephone lines, fiber-optic cables, cellular networks, and satellites”;
server farms, power grids, companies, and governments; and the software
that runs these devices, as well as the protocols that connect them.8 In Part
III we see how such artifactual assemblages are moving, shifting, connecting,
3 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press
2010), p. 6.
4 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 20. Also see Mark B. Salter, ed., Making Things International 1: Circuits
and Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
6 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23.
7 Hany Abu-Aasad, dir., Omar (ZBROS, 2013).
8 Kathleen P. J. Brennan, “Memelife,” in Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, edited
by Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 244.
attracting, and repelling as part of social-ordering and world-ordering.

Artifacts thus are both social constructions and provoke social relations.
To summarize, Part III examines visual artifacts and sensory spaces to
trace their ideological meaning and appreciate how they move and connect
bodies and things. It is common for visual analysis to criticize discursive
analysis, and for multisensory analysis to criticize ocular-centrism, as if there
were only one true vector from which to engage in politics. Although Part
III primarily focuses on the visual and the multisensory, it aims to consider
the interplay among the verbal, the visual, and the multisensory. It starts and
ends with artifacts—maps and cyberspace—that complicate the verbal/
visual and image/artifact distinctions, in ways that develop the political anal-
ysis of multisensory space. The point is not to get rid of texts (or images), but
to decenter discursive analysis to see how it works with and against the visual
and other senses. Sensible Politics thus works to appreciate politics in terms of
a complex multisensory ecology.
Part III’s third intervention is to broaden and deepen comparative po-
litical theory strategies through an elaboration of the dynamic dyads
developed in Part II (visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, and cultural gov-
ernance/resistance) and to introduce and develop a new set of dyads that
emerge from a broad range of visual and multisensory experiences: making
maps, wearing a veil, building a wall, enjoying a garden, surfing the Web.
The new dyads include center/periphery for maps (Chapter 7), concealing/
revealing for women’s fashion (Chapter 8), loosening/tightening for walls
(Chapter 9), and civility/martiality for gardens (Chapter 10). Part III’s con-
sideration of women’s fashion and surveillance turns the question of visual
IR around: not just how things look, but how you are seen—and how you
perform—especially in relation to the male gaze, white/colonial gaze, and
surveillant gaze.
Part III, again, deliberately juxtaposes the familiar and the strange, with
chapters switching from hard politics to high aesthetics and back again, as
well as back and forth between iconic sites and everyday experience. Once
more, the chapters in this section stress how Asian and Middle Eastern visual
artifacts provide important concepts, practices, and experiences that aid us
in understanding sensible politics both beyond Eurocentrism and within
Euro-America.
Part III thus engages with visual IR, new materialism, the practice turn,
and other critical movements; but its analysis is not reducible to any one of
them. Some of the concepts employed—for example, the visual artifact—
are unwieldy and open to contestation, but that can be a strength rather than
Visual A r tifac ts and Sens or y  Spac e s 145
a weakness. In a way Part III, and Sensible Politics as a whole, engages with
IR’s abstract arguments (e.g., envisioning world order, mapping the discur-
sive field, unveiling the truth, building conceptual bridges, and tearing down
ideological walls) by materializing these metaphors through an examination
of how such infrastructures of feeling actually work to create (and destroy)
affective communities of sense.
7
Maps, Space, and Power
In IR, maps characteristically are used to clearly and accurately represent the territo-
rial borders between nation-states in the Westphalian international system. Although
this mimetic understanding of maps has been questioned by cartographers for some
time, since the 1980s critical cartography has gone further, arguing that maps are
social constructions that reflect broader political and cultural agendas. Rather than
simply look to mathematical techniques to understand maps, here maps are seen
as texts that need to be deconstructed with the tools of semiotics and/or literary
criticism.1 In other words, critical cartography engages in a robust practice of the
“visibility strategy” that treats maps as “social constructions of the visual.”
But as Sensible Politics’s analysis suggests, cartography is more than a social
construction that draws sovereign borders to mark the inside from the outside.
Following the visuality strategy, cartography can also creatively visualize social
order and world order.2 The “Europe in 2035” maps considered in Chapter 2 graph-
ically show how maps not only mean things, but can do things; although they were
made by a Ukrainian horror novelist, these maps ended up shaping discussions in
Russia and Euro-America of the future size and shape of Eurasia.3 In a similar way,
maps have been a crucial part of how the Islamic State (IS) visualizes the Caliphate
(see Chapter 5). For a broad spectrum of Islamists, the Sykes-Picot map (1916)
is figured as the “problem” because it was drawn by British and French diplomats
1 See J. B. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” Cartographica 26 (1989):1–20; Gearóid Ó Tuathail,

Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 1–20; Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso,
2006), pp. 170–178; Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality,
and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Cordell D. K. Yee, “Chinese
Cartography among the Arts: Objectivity, Subjectivity, Representation,” in The History of Cartography,
Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J.B. Harley
and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 128–169.
2 See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 343ff.
3 See Chapter 2; Frank Jacobs, “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035 If Putin Gets His Wish,”
Foreign Policy ( June 4, 2014) http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/04/what-russia-could-look-like-in-
2035-if-putin-gets-his-wish/ (accessed June 6, 2017).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
to divide up the Ottoman Caliphate.4 Indeed, one of the early IS English-language

videos, There Is No Life without Jihad, shows IS fighters from the United Kingdom
and Australia rejecting the border that divides Iraq and Syria, that is, the Sykes-Picot
line.5 In 2014, just as the IS was declaring itself the Caliphate, new maps circulated
on the Internet that offered IS’s unified transnational Caliphate as the twenty-first-
century solution to the problem of Sykes-Picot division. Such maps consolidate the
Caliphate into a contiguous territory joining the Iberian peninsula and North Africa
in the West with India, Central Asia, and Western China in the East.6 According to
these arguments, the Caliphate is not conquering new territories but is visualizing
the “reconquest” of Islamic “lost territories”; Russian irredentist maps likewise re-
claim the “lost territories” of the Soviet Union.
As with the “Europe in 2035” maps, the origin and source of the IS world
map is unclear. And like with the European maps, this both matters and doesn’t
matter. The visibility strategy tells us to find the original source; before it was
circulated by reputable news organizations, the IS world map came from (now
familiar) right-w ing conspiracy sites. We thus should be wary of this map and
interrogate it as an example of “fake news.” But like the “Europe in 2035” maps,
the IS world map matters because it took on a life of its own, exciting activity
both in support of IS as a righteous Caliphate and against it as an aggressive em-
pire. As Steven Seegel argues for similar mapping struggles in the borderlands of
Central Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cartography
provides a language of both cultural governance and resistance, which are often
entangled.7
To explore this dynamic, Chapter 7 considers how maps “do” things as visual
artifacts, especially when they are empire-maps and world maps that engage in
social-ordering and world-ordering. It proposes the new concept “map-fare” to see
not only how maps are a social construction, but also how maps visually construct
the social. This active map-fare dynamic allows us to examine how as visual artifacts
maps provide an interface between word and image that can creatively perform—
and not merely represent—world orders. Map-fare is particularly important during
times of global transformation; as Jordan Branch argues, the now-familiar concepts
4 Malise Ruthven, “The Map ISIS Hates,” New York Review of Books ( June 25, 2014) http://www.
nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/25/map-isis-hates/ (accessed November 1, 2018).
5 There Is No Life without Jihad, al Hayat Media Center ( June 19, 2014) https://jihadology.net/
2014/06/19/al-ḥayat-media-center-presents-a-new-v ideo-message-from-the-islamic-state-of-iraq-
and-al-sham-there-is-no-life-without-jihad/ (accessed April 18, 2019).
6 See Aaron Y. Zelin, “Colonial Caliphate: The Ambitions of the ‘Islamic State,’ ” Jihadology ( July
8, 2014) https://jihadology.net/2014/07/08/the-clairvoyant-colonial-caliphate-the-ambitions-of-
the-islamic-state/ (accessed August 17, 2018).
7 Steven Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 2. Also see Nancy Lee Peluso, “Whose Woods Are
These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia,” Antipode 27:4 (1995):383–406.
Maps , Space, and   Powe r 149
and practices of the international system of sovereign states were first envisioned
through the mathematical maps that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe.8 And
this is not a unique case. Carl Schmitt famously argued, “Every new age and every
new epoch in the coexistence of peoples, empires, and countries, of rulers and
power formations of every sort, is founded on new spatial divisions, new enclosures,
and new spatial orders of the earth.”9
Chapter 7 thus considers how map-fare works in the twenty-first century’s cur-
rent global transformation, and in particular, how the center/periphery logic of
early-modern Chinese empire-maps is visually shaping Beijing’s current promotion
of a post-Westphalian world order. The chapter argues that center/periphery entails
more than nationalizing imperial space by re-drawing single-line, inside-outside
boundaries; rather, map-fare shows how empires expand and contract in their
visualization of new social orders and world orders. Map-fare thus is about more
than ideas and representations; as with the Russian and IS irredentist examples
mentioned previously, cartography is pushing Beijing to “rejuvenate China” by
recovering “lost territories” like those in the South China Sea. This is one way of
achieving Chinese president Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” of “the great rejuvenation
of the Chinese nation.”10 The chapter thus concludes that we need to understand
maps as active interventions that can shape global politics, because such map-fare
combines word and image, and images and artifacts, to visualize and promote par-
ticular (imperial) world orders.
This chapter makes these broad theoretical arguments through the exami-
nation of a specific case: Chinese maps that contain a U-shaped line that digs
deep into the South China Sea abutting the littoral states of maritime Southeast
Asia (see figure 7.1). The South China Sea is a security flashpoint that brings to-
gether a rising China, a retrenching United States, and Southeast Asian countries
scrambling to deal with this shifting situation. Maps are a key factor in the South
China Sea disputes. They are used in warfare to reclaim maritime space, including
China’s building of new military bases on lost territory that has been “reclaimed”
through the terraforming of land reclamation. Maps are also used in “lawfare”—
the use of law as a weapon in strategic competition11—to (re)claim sovereignty
in international tribunals.12 Indeed, the deliberations of the United Nations Law
8 Jordan Branch, The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty (Cambridge,
9 Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus publicum Europaeum, trans-
lated by G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003 [1950]), p. 79.
10 Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, [Vol. 1] (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014), p. 57.
11 See Charles J. Dunlap Jr., “Lawfare 101: A Primer,” Military Review 97 (2017):8–17.
12 Anne Hsiu-An Hsiao, “China and the South China Sea ‘Lawfare,’” Issues & Studies 52:2 (2016):3;
cf. Gao Zhiguo and Bing Bing Jia, “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea: History, Status, and
Implications,” The American Journal of International Law 107:1 (2013):98–124.
Figure 7.1 Chinese U-shaped line map on PRC passport (2016). Courtesy Anonymous
of the Sea (UNCLOS) Arbitral Tribunal of the Permanent Court of Arbitration

(2016) on the South China Sea could be seen as a battle between maps: China’s
historical U-shaped line map, on the one hand, and the Philippines’s geograph-
ical map of its exclusive economic zone and its geological map of its continental
shelf, on the other. As the tribunal’s award in 2016 showed, the geographical and
geological maps legally trumped the historical map: China’s U-shaped line was
declared incompatible with international law under UNCLOS.13
While legally moot, the U-shaped line map lives on in Chinese institutions—and
in the Chinese imagination. The image of the map of China with the U-shaped line
in figure 7.1 is a picture of a visa page in the PRC’s high-tech e-passport (first issued
in 2012). Strangely, the U-shaped line is very ambiguous, both on the passport map,
where it is a light watermark, and in Beijing’s official policy statements. The PRC has
never clearly defined the exact location coordinates of the line, what it means legally
and politically, or even its proper name; it is also known as the nine-dash line, the
eleven-dash line, and the ten-dash line. Although it appears to clearly mark an inter-
national boundary, Beijing’s U-shaped line is fascinating because it calls into question
both the empiricist function of maps—to accurately represent the earth’s surface—
and hermeneutic understanding of the image: Just what does it mean? Neither
Beijing’s top government officials nor its top international lawyers have clear answers
to questions about the location and the meaning of this cartographic marking.14
This chapter argues that the U-shaped line is ambiguous because it emerges out
of an alternative way of envisioning the world. Rather than being a mathematical
map—such as the Philippines’s geographical and geological maps—the U-shaped
map comes from the more normative and aesthetic map-making practice of early-
modern China. To show this, the chapter examines four empire-maps/world maps,
each of which exemplifies particular cartographic practices and worldviews: (1) All-
under-the-Heavens maps from Qing dynasty China (1644–1911 ce) visualize the
center/periphery logic of the Sinocentric tributary system; (2) Ch’oenhado from
Choson dynasty Korea (1392–1910 ce) exemplify both this center/periphery dy-
namic and resistance within it; (3) Civilization/barbarism maps from the Song dy-
nasty (960–1279 ce) use an analogous cultural logic to reclaim “lost territories”;
and (4) lost territories maps from twentieth-century China combine the center/
periphery and lost territories visualizations to assert the proper size and shape of
modern China.
These particular maps were chosen for this discussion for two reasons. First,
the Chinese government and prominent state-intellectuals tell us to look to such
13 Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA), “Award: PCA Case No 2013-19: In the Matter of the
South China Sea Arbitration between the Republic of the Philippines and the People’s Republic of
China” (The Hague: Permanent Court of Arbitration, July 12, 2016) https://pca-cpa.org/wp-content/
uploads/sites/175/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Award.pdf (accessed July 6, 2017).
14 State Council, “China Adheres to the Position of Settling Through Negotiation the Relevant
Disputes Between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea” (Beijing: State Council
Information Office, July 13, 2016) http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/t1380615.
shtml (accessed July 5, 2017); Gao and Jia, “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea”; Jianming
Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands: A Historical Perspective,” Chinese Journal
of International 94 (2002):94–157.
maps as evidence for Beijing’s expansive claims in the South China Sea.15 While the
“Europe in 2035” maps and the IS world maps come from unofficial sources, the
four maps analyzed in this chapter are either official maps or popular maps from
reputable sources. Second, each of these maps exemplifies a particular historical
worldview and envisions a specific world order. The chapter argues that these maps
intervisually resonate with each other to provoke “affective communities of sense”16
that celebrate imperial expansion, lament lost territories, and fight to recover them.
These four maps thus excite analogous views of the world, and thus worldviews,
that call into question the Westphalian mapping that draws inside/outside bound-
aries. Although the South China Sea is a key security issue, these maps are about
more than sovereignty, security, and where to properly draw boundaries.17 Rather
than see Chinese maps as traditional and European ones as modern,18 the chapter
argues that this set of maps exemplifies and promotes a center/periphery worldview
that developed in parallel to the Westphalian inside/outside world order and is (re)
gaining popularity and power in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 7 thus is not primarily concerned with proving (or disproving) Beijing’s
claims to the South China Sea. Rather than seek to present incontrovertible evidence
to buttress arguments of rational causality that yield generalizable conclusions, the
chapter is interested in looking at correlations among these popular and powerful
maps to see how they provoke concepts and feelings of the Chinese imaginary that,
in turn, produces such U-shaped line maps. This is not a chronological argument
about a developing sensibility; instead, it is more conceptual in the sense of recog-
nizing the shimmers and the resonance, and the intertextuality and the intervisuality,
of these important maps. While other chapters focus on the visual over the textual,
this chapter takes seriously the important dynamic of word and image. Yet rather
than looking to a text to discipline the image, it follows Roland Bleiker’s analysis of
poetry in world politics to appreciate how texts can also be creative and aesthetic,
15 State Council, “China Adheres to the Position,” para 21; Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the
South China Sea Islands,” 126–127; Gao and Jia, “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea.”
16 Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and
the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth
Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick, 31–50 (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 31.
17 Suisheng Zhao, “China and the South China Sea Arbitration: Geopolitics Versus International
Law,” Journal of Contemporary China 27:109 (2018):1–15; Bill Hayton, “The Modern Origins of
China’s South China Sea Claims: Maps, Misunderstanding and the Making of China’s Maritime
Geobody,” Modern China 45:2 (2019):127–170.
18 Branch, The Cartographic State. Branch here over-interprets the sources that argue that European
practices replaced Chinese cartography. Richard J. Smith provides a more nuanced view of the inter-
play of European and Chinese cartography. See Richard J. Smith, Mapping China and Managing the
World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times (New York: Routledge, 2012).
offering meanings and feelings in a different register.19 This chapter analyzes maps
as two-dimensional visual images and also appreciates how they work as three-
dimensional visual artifacts, material modalities, and sensory spaces that have what
Jane Bennett calls “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate,
to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle.”20
Although most of these maps are now available online, previously they were ex-
perienced as material artifacts and sensory spaces. The Qing dynasty map is huge,
taking up eight large scrolls; the Korean wheel map is part of an atlas that people
leafed through; the Song dynasty map is carved on a large stone stele; and China’s
twentieth-century maps were either fold-out maps in books or large maps designed
to be hung on classroom walls. These maps thus were things that people touched
and smelled, as well as saw; the Song dynasty map is actually a rubbing of the stele.
The Qing map was made for decorative display, to viscerally demonstrate the power
of the emperor.21 This overlap of word and image, and of image and artifact, exem-
plifies how cartography is about much more than drawing sovereign borders to
mark the inside from the outside, because it engages in the creative experience of
visualizing social order and world order.22
The twenty-first century is witnessing many challenges to the liberal international
order, and again, as Schmitt writes, each new era requires a new spatial division. It is
common in critical IR to celebrate “alternatives” to the hegemonic liberal order as
emancipatory transformations that are themselves the focus of little critical engage-
ment. For example, it is now popular to present China’s alternative world order as a
source of “emancipation” from the problems of “Western modernity.” All too often,
such critiques figure the problem of “Western imperialism” not in terms of “im-
perialism” itself, but only its Western form.23 Rather than simply being a victim of
Western imperialism, recent studies have shown how Qing dynasty China was itself
a colonial empire that worked in ways similar to other contemporaneous empires.24
This chapter thus does not figure Chinese cartography as an “alternative” that will
19 Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

20 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press
2010), p. 6. Emphasis in original.
21 Craig Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997),
pp.  78–80.
22 See Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands.
23 For example, see Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World
and the Birth of a New Global Order, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2012); Zhao Tingyang, Tianxia de
dangdaixing: Shijie zhixu de shijian yu xiangxiang [Tianxia’s contemporary relevance: Practice and im-
agination for world order] (Beijing: Zhongxin chubanshe, 2016).
24 See Peter C. Perdue, “China and Other Colonial Empires,” Journal of American-East Asian
Relations, 16:1–2 (2009):85– 103; Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and
Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Seegel, Mapping
Europe’s Borderlands.
solve the problems of contemporary IR. Rather, it analyzes how “new and different”
alternatives are often based on re-imaginings of hierarchical imperial orders that
work according to their own often violent center/periphery dynamics. The analysis
presented in this chapter thus is about more than China and the South China Sea.
It hopes to encourage a robust critical engagement with alternative cartographies
and their alternative world orders—as seen in the Islamic State’s invocation of the
Caliphate (Chapter 5) and Russian appeals to “Eurasian” space (Chapter 2)—
especially when these alternative world orders invoke past imperial cartographies.
Map-fare
Much as “lawfare” provides a new optic on the politics of warfare, this chapter
proposes the concept “map-fare” to highlight the visual politics of maps. Here maps
do not merely reflect or represent reality, but can actually “do” things to transform
the world. While J. L. Austin and the securitization theorists discussed in Chapter 5
examine how people “do things with words,”25 here I switch that idea around to con-
sider how maps “do” things to political leaders, public intellectuals, and the general
public. Like Austin’s “performative utterances,” maps not only describe things but
are themselves performances that “do” legal and material things; the Republic of
China’s (ROC) first official map in 1912 was “issued for enforcement.”26 Likewise,
the Sykes-Picot map (1916) was not description; rather, it enacted a new regional
order by dismantling the Ottoman Caliphate in order to expand the French and
British empires.
China’s infamous U-shaped line map certainly is a mathematical representation
of the region that has institutional power; since 1992, all maps of the PRC are le-
gally required to include it.27 Yet the U-shaped line is also an aesthetic creation of
spatial identity that seeks to produce affective communities of sense. The passport
map, for example, doesn’t just excite Chinese pride; it provoked anger in Southeast
Asia, with a Vietnamese official declaring, “I think it’s one very poisonous step
by Beijing among their thousands of malevolent actions. When Chinese people
visit Vietnam we have to accept it and place a stamp on their passports.”28 Many
25 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962); Branch, The
Cartographic State, 36.
26 “Zhonghua minguo ditu,” in Zhonghua mingguo yuannian lishu [Almanac of the first year of the
Republic of China] (Hunan yanshuo zongke yin, 1912).
27 “Law on Territorial Waters, Adjacent Areas,” Beijing: Xinhua, FBIS-China (February 28,
1992):2; translated in British Broadcasting Corporation, Summary of World Broadcasts (November 28,
1992):C1/1-2.
28 Jamil Anderlini and Ben Bland, “China Stamps Passports with Sea Claims,” Financial Times
(November 21, 2012) https://www.ft.com/content/7dc376c6-3306-11e2-aabc-00144feabdc0
(accessed June 6, 2017).
postcolonial (including post-Soviet) nation-states have serious “cartographic anxi-

eties” that move them to legally and martially promote and enforce national maps.29
Here a map is “not merely space or territory.” As Thongchai Winichakul explains, a
map is a living and breathing “geobody” that is “a component of the life of a nation.
It is a source of pride, loyalty, love, . . . hatred, reason, unreason.”30 As we see in this
chapter regarding China’s imperial cartography, maps are living, breathing things
that expand and contract. As mass-produced visual artifacts, maps thus are more
than mathematical representations of “reality.” Here the national/imperial map
becomes a logomap—the national map as an icon that is separate from the con-
text of neighboring territories—that works as a visual icon to mobilize the masses
(and the elite). In this way, maps do not only tell us about the inside-outside geo-
politics of international borders; when they inscribe space as a geobody, maps are
visualizations of “power, duty, and emotion” that can move and connect people in
affective communities of sense.31
These examples remind us that maps are not merely mathematical reflections of
the earth’s surface, but are also ideological and aesthetic. The Chinese character for
map, tu (图, which is also used in Korean and Japanese) speaks to this double-coded
science/art understanding: as a noun, tu means a picture, a diagram, a chart, a table,
and a map, while as a verb it means to anticipate, to hope, to scheme, to plan, to plot
against, and even to covet.32 Cartography according to the nominal-tu engages in
the ideological-work of “visibility”: which territories, countries, states, and peoples
are included on the map, and which are excluded. In the South China Sea disputes,
this would inform where to draw the boundary to divide up maritime territories.
Cartography according to the verbal-tu, however, deals with the affect-work of “visu-
ality”: how to creatively envision different world orders. For the disputes, this would
inform whether people understand the issues in terms of Westphalian-style maps
that mathematically plot single-line, inside-outside boundaries between sovereign
29 See Franck Billé, “On China’s Cartographic Embrace: A View from Its Northern Rim,” Cross-
Currents no. 21 (2017):1–21; Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands.
30 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1994), p. 17; also see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 170–178; Hayton, “The
Modern Origins of China’s South China Sea Claims.”
31 Cordell D. K. Yee, “Reinterpreting Traditional Chinese Geographical Maps,” in The History of
Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by
J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 67.
32 Nathan Sivin and Gari Ledyard, “Introduction to East Asian Cartography,” in The History of
Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by
J.B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 25; Cordell D. K.
Yee, “Chinese Maps in Political Culture,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography
in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 79; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 3; also see Ó
Tuathail, Critical Geopolitics, 2.
nation-states, or in terms of the more expansive—and more ambiguous—notions

of center/periphery territoriality seen in empire-maps/world maps.
Maps thus are not simply auxiliaries that illustrate history and politics, because
they can actively perform world order. As mentioned previously, Branch argues that
mapping is
closely linked to societal norms and ideas: how mapmakers depict the
world shapes map users’ view of the world. . . . [Maps thus] serve to em-
body, shape, and reshape map users’ ideas about the world in which they
live, even to the point of altering goals they are pursuing with the help of
these cartographic tools.33
Through a careful analysis of the shift in map-making concepts and conventions,

Branch shows how the empty homogeneous space depicted on the mathematical
maps that emerged in early-modern Europe shaped leaders’ “fundamental ideas
about political rule.”34 The new maps transformed the concepts and practices of
world order, shifting from the overlapping non-cartographic forms of authority
characteristic of medieval Europe toward a cartographic understanding of world
order as a collection of distinct sovereign states separated by clear line boundaries.
This conceptual transformation was not the plan of the map-makers; rather, it was an
unintended consequence of new techniques of mapping the world. Such mapping
conventions produced what Martin Heidegger critically describes as the “age of the
world picture,” which “does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived
and grasped as a picture.”35 Hence, rather than a singular “world-mirroring,” here
even mathematical cartography’s world-picturing functions as “world-making.”36
Starting in the sixteenth century, Europe used more mathematical maps, both to
conquer the world and to create the world map to carve up the globe into sovereign
territories divided by exclusive line boundaries. Walter D. Mignolo argues that car-
tography here not only shaped the material politics of claiming imperial space and
sovereignty, but also worked to “colonize the imagination” of both the conquered
and the conquerors.37 While much critical cartography deconstructs how European
world maps served as tools of Western imperialism, this chapter moves beyond
critical IR’s understanding of China (and the non-West) simply as a victim of im-
perialism and its fascination with Euro-America, the nation-state, and neoliberal
33 Branch, The Cartographic State, 36.

34 Branch, The Cartographic State, 6.
35 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (London: Garland
Publishing, 1997), p. 130; also see Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xiv.
36 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, xv; John Agnew, Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd ed.
(New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 15–16.
37 Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 218.
capitalism. Indeed, in the early-modern period France, Russia, and China simul-
taneously employed cartography for state-building and empire-building.38 In this
coeval clash of empires, imperial map-making in Qing China (finished in 1712) ac-
tually preceded that in Bourbon France (1744) and tsarist Russia (1745).39 Hence
this chapter considers if and how Chinese cartography was an imperial performance,
and if and how Chinese maps were able to “colonize the imagination” of both the
periphery and the center in East Asia. The purpose of exploring the Chinese “al-
ternative,” once again, is not “emancipation” from Eurocentrism, but to show how
Chinese maps creatively engage in map-fare by visualizing power and authority in
ways that perform and enforce particular world orders—including revived imperial
world orders.
The Cartography of China’s Alternative World Orders

If maps don’t just illustrate geopolitics, but performatively “do” things, what did late
imperial/early-modern Chinese maps “do”? Rather than promote exclusive sover-
eign statehood, maps in East Asia visualized a different form of world order: the
center/periphery logic of Sinocentric tributary system. This is seen in All-under-
the-Heavens maps (Tianxia tu, Ch’eonhado, Tianxia quantu, Tianxia zongtu) that
were popular in East Asia during China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912 ce).
Although the Jesuits helped the Qing court produce the first mathematical-
survey-based, comprehensive map of the empire in the early eighteenth century, this
map and its technique did not exclusively shape either general cartographic trends
or worldviews in China.40 In fact, All-under-the-Heavens maps, which were very
popular from the seventeenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century,
emerged as an alternative view of the world. Figure 7.2 is a hybrid map that provides
accurate readings of China’s East and Southeast coast, but fantastic visions of China’s
periphery.41 While on Westphalian maps Vietnam is a narrow North-South territory,
here it is presented as a narrow East-West strip along China’s southern underbelly.
The Malay peninsula also takes a different shape as a tiny cape labeled Siam (i.e.,
38 Branch, The Cartographic State, 72; Peter Perdue, China Marches West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005), pp. 442–461; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Seegel, Mapping Europe’s
Borderlands; Magnus Fiskesjö, “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest,’”
Education About Asia 22:1 (2017):6–10.
39 Branch, The Cartographic State, 157–158; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Yee, “Chinese
Maps in Political Culture,” 92.
40 See Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Smith, Mapping China; Clunas, Pictures and Visuality in
Early Modern China, 80.
41 “DaQing wannian yitong tianxia quantu” [Perpetual All- under-the-
Heavens Map of the
Unified Great Qing Empire] (1811) (Washington, DC: Library of Congress) https://lccn.loc.gov/
gm71005018 (accessed July 8, 2017).
Figure 7.2 Perpetual All-under-the-Heavens Map of the Unified Great Qing Empire
(1811). Courtesy Library of Congress
Thailand). Cartographic conventions here are not regulated by the scalar plotting
and the clear inside-outside border divisions that are employed to divide empty ho-
mogeneous space into separate sovereign territories. Rather, the map visualizes the
center/periphery logic characteristic of imperial China. Pre-modern empire-maps
actually were world maps, on which it is not clear where China ends and the rest
of the world begins.42 This is because the normative Chinese geography was organ-
ized around the Son of Heaven (i.e., the emperor) at the center, with power (and
Civilization) radiating out toward the periphery of vassals, tributes, and barbarians.43
Perpetual All-under-the-Heavens Map of the Unified Great Qing Empire employs
these cartographic conventions to place the Qing dynasty at the center, surrounded
by vassal states; such maps thus work to assert and affirm China’s tributary system as
a hierarchical network that joined the emperor, overlords, and vassals. Here Korea,
Vietnam, and Siam are represented not merely for geographical reasons, but for po-
litical and historical ones; the textual cartouches describe these countries as vassal
states, listing when and how they came to China to offer tribute. Power here works
centripetally, with barbarians “turning toward civilization” by coming to China to
learn “elegance and etiquette.”44 Such maps promoted an elaborate vocabulary of
“imperial condescension,”45 in which Korea and Vietnam are praised for being loyal
vassals, while Japan is chastised for its past as a “country of dwarf pirates.” Although
mainstream histories of cartography trace the gradual disappearance of text from
mathematical maps,46 Chinese cartography is interesting because it foregrounds
the complementary relationship between word and image.47 As philosopher Wang
Bi (226–249 ce) writes, “Image is what brings out meaning; word is what clarifies
image.”48 Images and words thus are used to promote the tributary system’s hierar-
chical network of overlords and vassals on All-under-the-Heavens maps, where the
“foreign ministry” was the Board of Rites and the Board of Barbarians, and diplo-
macy took the form of the “guest ritual.”49
It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that territory didn’t matter, or that China
was not an expansionist colonial empire. Over the course of the Qing dynasty’s first
century, China’s land territory more than doubled in size. All-under-the-Heavens
42 Smith, Mapping China, 48.

43 See Yee, “Chinese Maps in Political Culture,” 76.
44 Smith, Mapping China, 78, 76.
46 See Branch, The Cartographic State, 55.
47 Yee, “Chinese Cartography among the Arts,” 128.
48 Quoted in Cordell D. K. Yee, “Space and Place: Ways of World- making,” in Space &
Place: Mapmaking East and West, Four Hundred Years of Western and Chinese Cartography, edited by
Cordell D. K. Yee et al. (Exhibition Catalogue for the Library of Congress) (Annapolis, Maryland: St.
John’s College Press, 1996), p. 11.
49 See Dittmar Schorkowitz and Chia Ning, eds., Managing Frontiers in China: The Lifanyuan and the
Libu Reconsidered (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
maps thus visualized the changing size and shape of the Chinese empire. China here
is not fixed or eternal, but is a living, breathing geobody, whose new conquests re-
quired new maps. A common preface to such maps declared: “The land ruled by
the present dynasty is unprecedented in its extent.”50 Indeed, many of the places
marked as “lost territories” on twentieth-century Chinese maps are celebrated as
“gained territories” on All-under-the-Heavens maps.51 In general, even as the East
Asian world order was challenged by European powers in the nineteenth century,
these empire-maps plotted a particular view of the proper Sinocentric world order.
The map in figure 7.2 thus is exemplary because it engages in map-fare. It doesn’t
merely illustrate the ideology of mathematical maps by plotting borders and listing
territories. As map-fare, it visualizes the aesthetic conventions of empire: center/
periphery in its figuration of the Sinocentric tributary system as an affective com-
munity of sense.
This is not simply a historical argument. Over the past two decades, many
Chinese officials and scholars have rediscovered the Sinocentric world order, which
they present as a model for global governance in the twenty-first century. Indeed,
“periphery diplomacy”—which places China at the center—is one of the new
trends in Chinese foreign policy.52 The All-under-the-Heavens system and the trib-
utary system are specifically promoted as peaceful alternatives to the Westphalian
world order not just by scholars, but by Chinese leader Xi Jinping himself.53 For
example, Xi recently discussed the valuable lessons of China’s idealized imperial
history with other national leaders, telling US president Donald Trump that Korea
used to be part of China, and Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte that the South
China Sea has been Chinese “since the Ming dynasty” (1368–1644 ce).54 And most
importantly, the Chinese state and its top international law judges and scholars all
point to All-under-the-Heavens maps examined in this section as evidence for the
PRC’s claim to expansive maritime sovereignty in the South China Sea.55
50 Quoted in Smith, Mapping China, 74.

51 Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Changing Spaces of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Qing China,” in
Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History, edited by Nicola Di
Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), p. 333.
52 See Xi, Governance of China, vol. 1, 315ff.
53 See “Xi Jinping: Tuidong gongjian ‘Yidai yilu’ zoushen zoushi zaofu renmin” [Promoting the
“One Belt and One Road” to together build a deeper and better benefit for the people], Beijing: Xinhua
(August 27, 2018) http://cpc.people.com.cn/n1/2018/0827/c64094-30254137.html (accessed
December 5, 2018); Zhao, Tianxia de dangdaixing.
54 “Official Downplays Report of War Threats from China,” Bangkok Post (May 23, 2017):5.
55 State Council, “China Adheres to the Position,” para 21; Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the
South China Sea Islands,” 126–127; Gao and Jia, “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea.”
Alternative Alternative World Orders in Korean Maps

“Ch’eonhado” is the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters for All-under-
the-Heavens Map. As figure 7.3 shows, it is colloquially called a “wheel map” because
it charts the world according to concentric land and sea rings.56 It offers an even
more graphic visualization of the imperial center/periphery logic of the Sinocentric
world order: the central continent of China and Korea is surrounded by peripheral
Figure 7.3 Ch’eonhado (ca. 19th century). Courtesy © British Library Board, Maps.33.c.13
56 “Ch’onhado” (ca. 19th century) [All-

under-
the-
Heavens Map] (London: British Library,
Maps.33.c.13).
rings of countries and peoples, both exotic and mythological. As on Chinese All-
under-the-Heavens maps, this world map marks neither clear land borders nor ac-
curate island shapes. Places were marked with cartouches, with the territorial size of
the country dependent on its importance to the empire. On the outer land ring, all
the places are fantastical, based on Chinese literary sources, including the Classic of
Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing), an ancient Chinese text in which geography, eth-
nography, and mythology collide.57 The Ch’eonhado’s intertextuality/intervisuality
exemplifies how the texts actually come onto the map to explain the mysteries of
the Sinocentric periphery in terms of a set of fantastic countries: “the country of
the tree people,” “the country of the hairy people,” and “the country of the righteous
and harmonious.”58
This map is not a one-off; dozens of Ch’eonhado were made between the sev-
enteenth and nineteenth centuries. So what did Ch’eonhado “do” for Koreans?
From the fifteenth century, Koreans could produce mathematically accurate maps.
In a way, Ch’eonhado are part of a positivist cartography; typically, they were the
first maps in an atlas, followed by maps of China, Japan, the Ryukyu islands (i.e.,
Okinawa), Korea, and finally Korea’s provinces and towns. But like the All-under-
the-Heavens maps, Ch’eonhado both shape strategic and commercial objectives
and serve to satisfy cultural and emotional desires. This popular cartographic genre
exemplifies the center/periphery logic of the Sinocentric tributary system: China
as the “Central Plain” (Zhongyuan) is the center of both Civilization and territory;
Korea is close by as the number one tributary state; and Japan (which was seen as
Korea’s main military threat) is presented as smaller than Korea, pushed away to
China’s Southeast.59
Ch’eonhado thus provide a strong example of map-fare. This imperial cartography
“colonized the imagination” of both the periphery and the center; these Korean
maps present an even more Sinocentric view of the world—and worldview—than
similar Chinese All-under-the-Heavens  maps.
Ch’eonhado are not simply an example of East Asian curiosities. As Seegel argues
for similar mapping struggles in the borderlands of Central Eastern Europe, cartog-
raphy provides a language of both power and protest, which are often intertwined.60
In other words, Ch’eonhado also were employed by Koreans in map-fare to crea-
tively resist the cultural governance of the Chinese state.
57 See Shan Hai Ching: Legendary Geography and Wonders of Ancient China (Taipei: Committee for
Compilation and Examination of the Series of Chinese Classics, 1985).
58 Quoted in Gari Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” in The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book
II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David
Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 257.
59 Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” 258.
60 Seegel, Mapping Europe’s Borderlands, 2.
Much of Korean history narrates resistance to Chinese expansionism, which

helps explain South Korean anger at Xi Jinping’s declaration in 2017 that Korea
used to be part of China. Although the atlas’s map of China was produced during
the Qing era(1644–1911), Chinese space is visualized on these maps according
to the previous Ming dynasty’s (1368–1644) administrative divisions.61 Using the
logic of Sinocentric Civilization/barbarism relations, Koreans resisted the Qing pri-
marily because they felt that these “barbaric” Manchurians had usurped the throne
from the Ming dynasty, which was properly-Confucian and properly Han-Chinese.
These maps thus were geographical, but also nostalgic and aspirational; they ac-
tively resisted the Qing by plotting the map of China according to the normative
order that used to exist, and which the Koreans hoped would soon be restored.62
While the Perpetual All-under-the-Heavens Map of the Unified Great Qing Empire
(1811) presented the hegemonic view of China’s tributary system, the Ch’eonhado
show how alternative visualizations can arise within this world order; by chan-
ging the “visibility” of the Chinese map to exclude the Qing and include the Ming,
Korean atlases affectively provoked the “visuality” of an alternative affective com-
munity of sense. Unlike the Chinese All-under-the-Heavens maps, Korean atlases
do not show expanding territoriality but resistance to it. Power is generated here in
different, even more visual ways; in this Sinocentric cartography, the periphery has
power to choose its preferred center. Ch’eonhado thus flourished during the Qing
dynasty as a fantastic view of a properly-ordered, alternative world order.
Lost Territories Maps in Twelfth-Century China

The Ch’eonhado’s visualization of the restoration of the proper normative order
is not exceptional; it has interesting resonances with Chinese cartography during
the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279 ce). Among the dozens of empire-maps/
world maps produced in the Song, the most famous is the Map of Civilization and
Barbarians (Huayi tu, 1136 ce).63 As figure 7.4 shows, it gives a broad, idealized vis-
ualization of the Chinese realm. Much like the All-under-the-Heavens/Ch’eonhado
maps that came five centuries later, it employs the cartographic convention of
center/periphery, rather than the clear line boundaries of inside-outside. This map
61 See “Ch’eonhado” (ca. 1800) [All-under-the-Heavens Map] (Washington, DC: Library of

Congress) https://lccn.loc.gov/93684246 (accessed April 19, 2019).
62 Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” 238, 267.
63 “Huayi tu” (1136 ce) [Map of Civilization and barbarism] (Washington, DC: Library of
Congress) https://lccn.loc.gov/2002626771 (accessed July 8, 2017). Although some argue that we
should translate ancient terms such as “Yi” as “foreigner” rather than “barbarian,” this argument misses
the point that in such a hierarchical world order, outsiders are by definition barbarians. See, for ex-
ample, Lydia H. Liu, The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge,
Figure 7.4 Map of Civilization and Barbarians (1136 ce). Courtesy of Library of Congress
provides a total view of the Chinese empire from the Great Wall in the North to
Hainan island in the South. The Western frontier is fascinating because here tex-
tual and pictorial information slowly peters out as the map traces the origins of the
continent’s great rivers. There are numerous textual notes on the map to explain the
geography of China, as well as the particulars of its neighbors. Like the tributary
system’s hierarchical order, this map charts global politics not as “international re-
lations,” but in terms of cultural and moral judgments: Civilization and barbarism.
The center/periphery system in China maps onto the Civilization/barbarism dis-
tinction, which is not merely cultural but also spatial. Many empire-maps/world
maps were not named according to specific dynasties, but with more general names
that highlight China as the center of Civilization; for example, the Central Cultural
Florescence (Zhonghua), the Central Kingdom (Zhongguo), and the Central Plain
(Zhongyuan). Barbarism, on the other hand, was visualized in idealized form ac-
cording to the four cardinal points: Eastern-Yi, Western-Rong, Northern-Di, and
Southern-Man.64
The Map of Civilization and Barbarians is noteworthy because it presents neither
the actual territory of the reigning Song dynasty nor that of its powerful neighbors.
The map was produced during a violent (global) transformation, in which the Song
dynasty lost significant territory. After decades of struggle, in 1141 the Song signed
a peace treaty to formally recognize Jin dynasty control over Northern China—that
is, territory north of the Yangtze and Huai Rivers. None of the many empire maps
of the Southern Song period, however, plotted the territory of both the Song and
Jin dynasties.65 Rather, the Map of Civilization and Barbarians shows the Song ruling
over all of China, and all of the world. That the map in figure 7.4 is carved on a stone
stele underlines its work as a visual artifact, and also its didactic purpose. But rather
than instructing people on the actual borders of the Song empire, the purpose is
to provoke an affective community of sense. As a commentary on a similar map
from the 1190s made clear, such maps “were intended as an illustration for future
Song emperor (Ningzong, r. 1194–1224 ce) of how much land had been lost to the
northern invaders, and as a reminder of the sovereign’s responsibility to reunite the
empire.”66 This was not simply a battle between nation-states over where to properly
draw national boundaries, but an all-out struggle between Civilization and barba-
rism: the Jin dynasty was ruled by Jurchens, whom many Han Chinese dismissed
as barbaric. The rich vocabulary of imperial condescension that we saw in the Qing
dynasty map here is quite crude; those who are not Chinese-Civilized are branded
as “barbarian.”
Like the image/word dynamic of Ch’eonhado and the Classic of Mountains and
Seas, Song dynasty cartography was intertextual as well as intervisual. In the Map of
Civilization and Barbarians the aesthetic of verisimilitude animates both poetry and
map-making,67 as both creative modes long for a truth that is not quite there. Along
with instructing emperors, “the sight of the map of the empire” also “struck grief ”
into many Southern Song intellectuals, who then wrote poems to lament lost ter-
ritories.68 One cartographic-literary activist expressed his outrage in a poem called
“Reflections on the Past”:
This lowly functionary is overcome by solitary anger

By the nightly window frame, tears flowing, I look at the map.69

65 Hilde de Weerdt, “Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth-and Thirteen-
Century Song China,” Imago Mundi 61:2 (2009):164.
67 Yee, “Chinese Cartography among the Arts,” 133.
68 de Weerdt, “Maps and Memory,” 145.
69 Quoted in de Weerdt, “Maps and Memory,” 159.
Another map-fare poet was more programmatic:
I carefully examined a map of the empire,

I’d rather see it once more implemented on the ground.70
Empire-maps were evocative because their idealized normative view of the unified
empire clashed with people’s raw experience of a partitioned kingdom. Map-fare
here involves more than providing rational information, or even a persuasive rhet-
oric. It provokes positive and negative visceral reactions because the map-poetry
dynamic provides a “performative structure of geopolitical practices and their af-
fective foundations.”71 Through this vibrant affective community of sense, the lost
North was experienced as an open wound on the geobody that generated “territo-
rial phantom pain.”72 This map/poetry (image/word) dynamic was a popular mode
of radical political critique that demanded the recovery of lost territories.
Once again, China is a living, breathing geobody that expands and contracts.
While the eighteenth-century All-under-the-Heavens maps charted an expanding
empire’s growing domain of tributary states, here Song dynasty maps of Civilization
and barbarism visualized the opposite situation of a contracting territoriality. After
being beaten by a “barbaric” foe, cartography worked to visualize lost territories
that needed to be restored. Maps here are not meant to reflect reality on the ground,
but to “do” something according to the verbal meaning of tu-map: they show how
emperors and poets “coveted” lost Northern territories and “schemed” to restore
lost glory through recovering them. Like the Republic of China’s first official map
(1912), these twelfth-century empire-maps were “issued for enforcement” to
rejuvenate China.
Lost Territories in the Twentieth Century

Chinese maps of lost territories re-emerged at various points in Chinese history,
most notably in the first half of the twentieth century. Like the Song dynasty,
modern China faced an existential crisis, with fears that imperialist powers from
Europe, the United States, and Japan would soon carve up China “like a melon.”
When the Qing dynasty fell in 1911, it was not at all clear where “China” began
or ended and what territories were “Chinese” and what weren’t. Chinese atlases
from the early twentieth century, for example, characteristically state that the new
republic (founded in 1912) needed national maps to know just what it was ruling.
70 Quoted in de Weerdt, “Maps and Memory,” 159.

71 Gearóid Ó Tuathail in Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Monika K. Baar, and Steven Seegel, “Mapping Europe’s
Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire,” Nationalities Papers 42:3 (2014):551.
72 Billé, “On China’s Cartographic Embrace,” 5.
There was considerable debate about how to even ask this question, because of the
tension between the broad Sinocentric notion of territorial domain seen in All-
under-the-Heavens maps and the mathematical notion of homogeneous space that
asserted exclusive single-line, inside-outside boundaries between nation-states.73
The Republic of China’s first official map (Zhonghua minguo ditu, 1912) exempli-
fies the tension between the two cartographic visualizations: as the republic’s first
constitution declared, “the sovereign territory of the Republic of China continues
to be the same as the domain of the former Empire.”74 This simply begs the question
of defining the domain of the Qing dynasty—which as we have seen relies on a dif-
ferent way of visualizing the world. The ROC map also continues the imperial trend
of marking territories according to China’s tributary system with historical notes
about the evolving relationship. However, rather than celebrating the glories of an
expanding empire, it laments the loss of tributary states to other powers, noting
how, for example, Korea and Taiwan used to be “on our country’s map” and now
are Japan’s territories.75 From 1912 to the 1940s, dozens of maps and atlases were
published that graphically inscribed China’s “lost territories” (sangshi lingtu, sangdi).
Map of China’s Lost Sovereign Land and Maritime Territories (1927; figure 7.5) is
typical of maps published at this time.76 It is a fold-out map in the appendix of Xie
Bin’s popular History of China’s Lost Territories. On the one hand, the map deals with
“visibility” issues: it marks China’s “lost territories” that were stolen by European
and Japanese imperial regimes. This is done through color-coding: “totally” lost ter-
ritories are colored in green, while territories that are now “shared” with another
power are marked in orange, with the year of each territory’s loss marked in bright
red textual notes. The map includes inset charts that list the name of each lost sov-
ereign land territory and of each lost sovereign maritime territory. The lost sover-
eign land territory chart lists thirty-four places in terms of three categories: fifteen
“homeland territories” (benguo), including Sakhalin Island and Taiwan; fifteen trib-
utary states (fanshu), including Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the Sulu Islands
(now in the Philippines); and four “territorial concession territories” (zujiedi),
73 See Thongchai, Siam Mapped; William A. Callahan, Contingent States: Greater China and
Transnational Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 57ff.; William A.
Callahan, China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 91–125.
74 “Constitutional Compact of the Chung Hua Min Kuo,” Peking Daily News (May 1, 1914); also see
Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 in this book.
75 “Zhonghua minguo ditu,” no page.
76 Xie Bin, “Zhongguo sangshi lingtu linghai tu” [Map of China’s lost sovereign land and maritime
territories], in Zhongguo sangdishi [History of China’s lost territories] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju,
1927). Also see a different style of lost territories map in the 1925 edition of the same book: Xie
Bin, “Zhongguo sangshi lingtu linghai tu,” in Zhongguo sangdishi [History of China’s lost territories]
(Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1925). This edition was reissued in 2014 with a poor reproduction of the
map: Xie Bin, Zhongguo sangdishi [History of China’s lost territories] (Shanghai: Sanlian shujian, 2014
[1925]).
Figure 7.5 Map of China’s Lost Sovereign Land and Maritime Territories (1927).
Source: Xie Bin, Zhongguo sangdishi
including Hong Kong’s New Territories.77 The lost territories map thus engages in
the issues of “visibility” by marking territories that need to be recovered from im-
perial powers. As we see later in the chapter, the maps employ the cartography of
Chinese colonial imperialism to accomplish this recovery. Although one might be
sympathetic to China’s recovery of lost territories such as Taiwan or Hong Kong,
what about the other places listed on this map, which were decolonized to become
now-familiar independent sovereign nation-states in Central Asia, South Asia,
Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia? Here the problem of “Western imperialism”
is not “imperialism” itself, but only its Western form; as this map suggests, the pre-
ferred solution is a reconstituted Chinese empire.
77 A concession is a territory within a country that is administered by an entity other than the state
that holds sovereignty over it.
Lost territories maps also address “visuality” issues. Although they appear to be
modern mathematical maps with scalar plotting and clear inside-outside bound-
aries, they also promote the Sinocentric center/periphery logic of China’s imperial
tributary system. Like Ch’eonhado, the lost territories map in figure 7.5 employs
two sets of rings to reclaim vast territories. What these places have in common is a
history of presenting tribute to the Chinese court. Hence, although it is not explic-
itly declared, such maps of lost territories are organized according to the center/
periphery, Civilization/barbarian cartography of China’s expansive imperial do-
main seen on early-modern and pre-modern maps. Similar claims to lost land and
maritime territories are made in maps of China’s national humiliation (Zhongguo
guochi tu, Zhonghua guochi tu), dozens of which were published between the 1910s
and 1940s.78 Indeed, one of the most popular maps, the Map of China’s National
Humiliation, more or less copies the “lost territories” map, which is not surprising as
it was published in the same year by the same publisher.79 Lost territories maps thus
were not exceptional, but were part of mainstream debates about the ideal norma-
tive size and shape of Republican China. These maps were often produced to hang
on classroom walls to instruct students; they were artifacts that you could touch,
and that would touch you.
As in the Song dynasty, the purpose of such maps is the “righteous restoration” of
lost territories. The textual prefaces attached in the margins of many of these maps,
for example, explain that their purpose is to “mark the glorious borders of the reign
of the Qianlong emperor [1735–1796], and the timing and extent of territories that
were later lost.”80 The didactic message of the cartography of expansive rings of lost
territories is clear: since China has “lost more than half its territory,” it is neces-
sary to “compile a geographical record of the rise and fall of our country in order
to craft a government policy to save it.”81 By the middle of the twentieth century,
the image of China at the center of the imperial rings of lost territories had become
a logomap—an image separated from its context—that sparked calls for a restora-
tion of lost glory through the recovery of lost territories.82 The wounded geobody
thus moved and connected people in affective communities of sense that demanded
action.
78 See Callahan, China, 98–111.

79 “Zhongguo guochi ditu” [Map of China’s national humiliation] (Shanghai: Zhonghua
shuju, 1927).
80 “Zhonghua guochi jianming yutu” [Concise map of Chinese national humiliation]
(Nanjing: Jiangsu Military Surveying Department, 1928).
81 Jia Yijun, Zhongguo guochi dilixue [Geography of China’s national humiliation] (Beiping: Wenhua
xueshe yinxing, 1930), p. 1.
82 For example, see Yu Guozhen, Jin bainian waijiao shibai shi [History of the past century’s diplo-
matic defeats] (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1929), cover.
This genre of lost territories maps engages in map-fare in two ways. First, there
is a resonance between twentieth-century maps of lost territories and eighteenth-
century maps that celebrate imperial China’s military conquests and tributary
system. While the tributary states and barbarians are marked as “loyal vassals” and
“gained territories” on eighteenth-century All-under-the-Heavens maps, in the twen-
tieth century they are marked as “lost territories.” These lost territories maps thus
graphically transformed the blurred boundaries and overlapping authority of the
All-under-the-Heavens system into a campaign to embrace a diverse set of lost ter-
ritories as the “homeland territories” of the modern Chinese nation-state. Second,
as in the Song dynasty, these maps worked in an intertextual/intervisual dynamic
wherein cartographically-themed poetry, songs, art, and theater performances af-
fectively provoked Chinese citizens to reclaim lost glory through reclaiming lost
territories.83
Chinese Cartography and the South China Sea

As China’s economic, political, and military power has grown, there have been
calls in the PRC for Beijing to use its new influence to recover lost territories. At
the turn of the twenty-first century, the return of Hong Kong (1997) and Macau
(1999) to Chinese sovereignty was seen in the PRC as the return of lost territories
and was celebrated in a special atlas, Maps of Modern China’s Century of National
Humiliation, as well as through hundreds of specially-commissioned cartographic
poems.84 The return of these territories to Chinese sovereignty thus was much more
than a diplomatic or ideological victory. It also was affect-work that re-membered
the geobody that had been dismembered, moving and connecting people in the
PRC to celebrate the territories’ “return to the warm embrace of the fatherland.”85
According to an influential Chinese scholar-official, the lesson of this returned ter-
ritory/restored glory dynamic is irredentist; while “welcoming the return of Hong
Kong and Macau to the fatherland, we also look forward to perfect resolution of
other historical legacies.”86
Alongside this celebration, however, another group of less official activists in
China lament how territories continue to be lost under the PRC. While some point to
83 See Zhichi, ed., Guochi [National humiliation] (Shanghai: Zhichishe, 1915); Wu Gongxiong, ed.,
Huitu guochi yanyi [Drawings of the romance of national humiliation] (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1922).
84 Jindai Zhongguo bainian guochi ditu [Maps of the modern China’s century of national humilia-
tion] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1997/2005); Feng Yitong, “Bu qude huhao, chonggao de shixin”
[Unyielding call, noble poetic heart], Nanjing shifan zhuankexiao xuebao 16:1 (2000):1–4; Callahan,
China, 91–125.
85 See Billé, “On China’s Cartographic Embrace,” 15.
86 Lu Yiran, “Jindai Zhongguo sangshi lingtu zhihuigu” [A review of modern China’s lost territo-
ries], 21 shiji, no. 1 (1997):63.
this peaceful resolution of land border disputes as evidence of China’s non-coercive

use of diplomacy,87 others calculate that 4.31 million square kilometers of sovereign
national territory has been lost under the CCP’s leadership of China.88 The current
map and list of territories lost since the PRC was founded in 1949 includes mari-
time territories in the South China Sea lost to the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia,
Indonesia, and Brunei.
Hence, in China the South China Sea disputes are seen by both officials and
activists as “lost territories” that need to be recovered, and the U-shaped line is the
“scheme” to bring them back onto China’s map. But the situation is more complex
than that, and Chapter 7’s final section explains how the U-shaped line and China’s
claims in the South China Sea are issues of both visibility (i.e., where to correctly
draw the line boundary to reclaim maritime sovereignty) and visuality (i.e., what
cartographic conventions to use in creating, promoting, and recovering maritime
space). This section thus goes back to the four exemplary empire-maps/world maps
previously considered to trace how the Spratly Islands and the U-shaped line came
onto China’s national map. While it weighs evidence of Beijing’s claims, the purpose
of the discussion here is more to probe the aesthetic resonances that link these his-
torical maps with the U-shaped line, in ways that have mobilized affective commu-
nities of sense to claim the South China Sea as a lost territory.
Visibility
As mentioned previously, the Chinese government instructs viewers to examine All-
under-the-Heavens maps for conclusive evidence of Chinese sovereignty over the
South China Sea and the Spratly Islands.89 As the Map of Civilization and Barbarism
shows, Chinese maps typically see Hainan Island (which is just off the continental
coast) as the southern extreme of China. Hence it is noteworthy that maritime
features beyond Hainan are marked on the southern margin of the Perpetual All-
under-the-Heavens Map of the Unified Great Qing Empire (1811): “reefs of 10,000 li”
and “embankment for 10,000 li.”90 Yet such maps are unable to serve as reliable ev-
idence to support China’s sovereign claim, for two reasons. First, although “reefs of
10,000 li” is supposed to represent the Paracel Islands, and “embankment for 10,000
li” the Spratlys, on other similar maps they are called the opposite, or “reefs of 1000
li” and “embankment for 1000 li.” Hence none of these names—reefs for 10,000
87 See M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial
Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
88 See, for example, “1949 to Now, China Has Lost over 4 Million Square Kilometers of Sovereign
Territory?” (April 12, 2015) http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-3017-881866.html (accessed July
5, 2017).
89 State Council, “China Adheres to the Position.”
90 A li is equal to one-third of a mile.
li, reefs for 1000 li, embankment for 10,000 li, embankment for 1000 li—has any
stable reference. Second, even if the toponyms were stable, it is difficult to deter-
mine where China ends and the rest of the world begins on such maps. To address
such interpretive problems, one key commentator explains that “these ancient maps
lack precision due to limitations on map drawing techniques.”91
But when we look at a recently discovered, more “mathematically accurate” mar-
itime map from the Ming dynasty (ca. 1609), a different set of problems arises.92
While the All-under-the-Heavens maps are designed to perform dynastic magnif-
icence and the Sinocentric world order, this Chinese map—named “Mr. Selden’s
Map” after the person who donated it to Oxford University—was a route-map
designed to facilitate the maritime trade that joined China with East and Southeast
Asia. Like many maps of the period, it actually is an assemblage, in the sense that it
combines a set of individually drawn maps of China, the South China Sea, Japan,
and Taiwan into a more comprehensive map. Unfortunately the relevant placement
of the various continental and island features is not quite right. But when aligning
the Selden map with GIS coordinates of key features, Timothy Brook and his team
were able to reconstruct the map to be remarkably accurate in terms of the scale and
position of the features. To get this more accurate rendering, they disassembled and
reassembled the map’s various component maps, and the result shows that a large
part of the South China Sea is missing from the reconstituted map.93
Brook suggests that this large swathe of the South China Sea is missing because
the shallow waters of the reef-dotted sea were seen by mariners as a “navigational
hazard” and thus a risk for shipwreck and piracy, to be avoided. As one historical
source warns, the South China Sea reefs are as “tortuous as a long snake lying in
the sea. . . . One would be safe to avoid it, and dangerous to come across it.”94 It
is likely that if the area was occupied at all, residents were sea nomads and fisher
folk from local Malay seafaring groups.95 Brook thus concludes that although some
might think that Selden’s map provides evidence for China’s “claim to sovereignty
over any rock in this sea, [d]‌eclaring sovereignty wasn’t what sailors or mapmakers
were doing in this part of Asia in the seventeenth century. These were islands that
nobody wanted.”96
In a way, this Ming dynasty map plots the opposite of the U-shaped line: rather
than include the South China Sea on the map to mark maritime sovereign claims,
91 Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands,” 128.

92 Timothy Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart, and the South China Sea
(London: Profile Books, 2015).
93 Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China, 166–167, plate 26.
94 Quoted in Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands,” 116–117.
95 Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2014), pp. 1–28.
96 Brook, Mr. Selden’s Map of China, 167.
large parts of the sea are deliberately excluded from Selden’s map because the sea’s
reefs presented a set of problems for maritime commerce. While Xi explained to
Duterte that the South China Sea has been Chinese since the Ming dynasty,97 this
Ming dynasty map actually does not include much of the South China Sea itself.
Neither the U-shaped line nor the Spratly Islands are marked on the Korean
Ch’eonhado or the Song dynasty Map of Civilization and Barbarism. As we have seen,
the peripheries of such maps characteristically envisioned fantastic places and exotic
humanoid creatures. However, the South China Sea and something similar to the U-
shaped line do appear on lost territories maps from the early twentieth century. The
Map of China’s Lost Sovereign Land and Maritime Territories (1927) is interesting for
two reasons: (1) for the first time, its title stresses maritime territories alongside land
territories, and (2) it includes an inset chart that lists lost sovereign maritime territories.
Notably, the chart laments the total loss of the Sea of Okhotsk, the Sea of Japan, and the
Bay of Bengal and worries about China’s partial sovereignty over the Bohai Gulf, the
Yellow Sea, the East [China] Sea, and “China’s South Sea”—that is, the South China
Sea. On such maps, China’s southern extreme is extended from Hainan Island to the
Paracel Islands, which are marked on lost territories maps as the “Xisha” islands. The
Spratly Islands are not marked at all on lost territories maps. Indeed, the outer ring on
lost territories maps does not mirror the U-shaped line; it does not include all of the
South China Sea, and actually veers West to exclude the Spratlys area (discussed fur-
ther later in the chapter).
Hence, the exemplary maps examined in this chapter show that the U-shaped line
and the Spratly Islands were not issues for China until the twentieth century. While
the Chinese government asserts that the disputed territories have been China’s “since
ancient times,” the sudden appearance of the South China Sea as a territorial issue is
confirmed by a close analysis of the historical and diplomatic texts of the twentieth
century.98
Visuality
While twentieth-century controversies over the South China Sea do not present
clear evidence of Chinese sovereignty, they do show how PRC elites were devel-
oping a “maritime consciousness,” as opposed to China’s traditional continental con-
sciousness. It is common to understand China’s new interest in the seas as a modern
phenomenon, tied to its emergence as a nation-state in the early twentieth century
97 “Official Downplays Report of War Threats from China,” 5.

98 Hayton, “The Modern Origins of China’s South China Sea Claims”; Chris P. C. Chung,
“Drawing the U-Shaped Line: China’s Claim in the South China Sea, 1946–1974,” Modern China 42:1
(2016):38–72.
and as a rejuvenated great power in the twenty-first century.99 But as the four ex-
emplary empire/world maps show, that interest also grew out of early-modern and
pre-modern practices of cartography in China. The U-shaped line resonates with
the Sinocentric rings of the lost territories maps. Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s
some of the same people were involved in charting lost territories and the creating
the U-shaped line.100 Moreover, the expansive rings of the lost territories maps vis-
ually resonate with the center/periphery cartography that characterizes All-under-
the-Heavens maps and Ch’eonhado.
To understand the cartography of lost territories, then, one needs to appreciate
how Ch’eonhado provoke power, duty, and emotion through the cartography of
concentric rings. On the exemplary lost territories map (1927; figure 7.5), the outer
ring is marked as the “boundary of maritime territory during the Qianlong era.”
This outer line is interesting for what it includes and what it excludes. It includes
the Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan, but it excludes Japan and, as noted previously, it
does not trace the area in the South China Sea now defined by the U-shaped line.
Rather, south of Taiwan the ring veers west before hooking around to include the
Sulu Islands, northern Borneo, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, and the Andaman
Islands before going back onshore to claim Burma. This is certainly an odd col-
lection of maritime territories. To understand how this outer ring functions more
according to a center/periphery dynamic than an inside-outside distinction, the
All-under-the-Heavens maps are helpful. What these places have in common is a
history of presenting tribute to the Chinese court. Recall that China’s All-under-
the-Heavens maps visualized the tributary system, in which authority and power
grew out of people-to-people relations as much as through territorial claims.
Indeed, recent arguments for Chinese sovereignty look to historical texts to chart
how people from the South China Sea presented tribute to China; however, it is
hard to map such scattered textual references to any particular place.101 Features in
the South China Sea thus are not marked on Chinese maps, because no loyal vassals
from there came to Beijing to present tribute to the emperor. As with the geobody,
the focus was on moving people rather than stable territory. Either no one lived
on these reefs, or they were home to people who actively resisted centralized im-
perial authority. Much like James C. Scott’s argument for mountains in The Art of
Not Being Governed, such maritime navigational hazards attracted outlaws—pirates,
99 See Hayton, “The Modern Origins of China’s South China Sea Claims”; Chung, “Drawing the
U-Shaped  Line.”
100 Bai Meichu, Zuixin Zhonghua minguo gaizao quantu [The atlas of the Republic of China, with
the latest corrections] (Beiping: Jianshe tushuguan, 1930); Zheng Ziyue, Nanhai zhudao dili zhilu
[Geography of the South Sea Islands] (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1947); Hayton, “The Modern
Origins of China’s South China Sea Claims, 158–163; Chung, “Drawing the U-Shaped Line,” 50.
101 See Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands”; Gao and Jia, “The Nine-Dash
Line in the South China Sea.”
sea nomads, transient fisher folk—who thrived outside the tributary system.102 Yet
since they were not tributes, they were not on the map. If they are not included on
the map as loyal vassals, then even according to Beijing’s own imperial visualization,
it is difficult for China to make a sovereign claim.
Finally, it is important to note how current explanations of Chinese sover-
eignty employ a harsh vocabulary of “imperial condescension,” like that seen in
the Song dynasty. Although Southeast Asian seafarers have plied the South China
Sea for millennia, their experience is largely excluded from Chinese explanations.
When their experience is included, it is according to the hierarchical logic of
the tributary system and Civilization/barbarian relations. Vietnamese claims to
the South China Sea are dismissed as illegitimate because “Vietnam remained a
tributary to China until 1884” and thus according to Beijing could not make its
own sovereign territorial claims.103 According to this logic, which comes from
All-under-the-Heavens maps, none of China’s neighbors would be able to make
any sovereign territorial claims to their own homeland territory, let alone to
maritime space.
The explanations also employ the logic of the Map of Civilization and Barbarism;
strangely for a twenty-first-century legal text, Chinese arguments actually de-
scribe the ancestors of rival claimants as “barbarians.”104 In this way, the current
legal arguments visualize the South China Sea disputes in terms of the carto-
graphic conventions of All-under-the-Heavens Maps and Maps of Civilization
and Barbarism. This visualization clearly includes China as the sovereign center
of Civilization, while erasing the activities of people on China’s periphery. The pe-
riphery here is like that on Ch’eonhado, a fantastic place of odd humanoid creatures
who although entertaining, lack political agency.
What started out as a vision of a fantastic space on the outer margins of the
Chinese imagination is now seen as sovereign territory that demands to be
recovered and defended; a recent billboard in Beijing pictures an uninhabit-
able reef in the South China Sea with the caption “Chinese sovereign territory,
even an inch will not be ceded!!!”105 In other words, map-fare traces how coun-
tries (e.g., China, Russia, and IS) can recover lost glory through recovering lost
territories.
102 James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009); Hayton, The South China Sea.
103 Gao and Jia, “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea,” 113.
104 Shen, “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands,” 103, 104, 118; Gao and Jia, “The
Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea,” 100.
105 See the image in Andrew Chubb, “Did China Just Clarify the Nine-Dash Line?” East Asia Forum
( July 14, 2016), http://www.eastasiaforum.org (accessed June 6, 2017).
Conclusion
In a broad sense, the U-shaped line exemplifies the warfare and lawfare issues of
one of history’s greatest “sea grabs.”106 Beijing’s approach to the South China Sea is
worrying the PRC’s neighbors to the north: in Mongolia and the Russian Far East,
there are concerns that China will use the logic of lost territories to demand a re-
vision of previously-settled borders. While the “rigidity” of nation-state maps is
generally challenged in critical cartography, here the ambiguity of imperial cartog-
raphy provokes the concern in Asia that a “spatially liquid” China will “seep into its
neighbors.”107 The “living, throbbing” geobody thus can be threatening.108
But as the chapter’s critical examination of Chinese cartography shows, the U-
shaped line is better appreciated as “map-fare”: it visually performs a creative world-
ordering transformation that provokes particular affective communities of sense.
Beijing’s reaction to the UNCLOS award in 2016 demonstrates how it feels that
multilateral international law is not the appropriate means for addressing questions
of the PRC’s territoriality. Although the South China Sea is a key security flash-
point, the issue is about more than where to properly draw boundaries. As the maps
considered in this chapter show, the region is envisioned according to the social-
ordering and world-ordering of the Chinese geobody.
This is part of a broader trend in which the All-under-the-Heavens system is pro-
moted as an alternative to what is seen as the “failed system” of American hegemony.
Through a set of creative practices—ranging from making maps, to writing poetry,
to terraforming brand new islands—this map-fare covets, plans, and schemes to put
the South China Sea and the Spratly Islands onto China’s map, and thus into China’s
geobody.
Maps thus are more than texts that represent the natural and the social worlds.
In addition to deconstructing how maps are a social construction of the visual, it is
necessary to appreciate how maps are a visual construction of the social—and of the
imperial. As this chapter shows, we need to appreciate maps as active interventions
that can shape global politics, because such “map-fare” combines word and image,
and image and artifact, to visualize particular (imperial) world orders that pro-
voke particular affective communities of sense. In this case, the center/periphery
and geobody logic of empire-maps set the conventions both for understanding the
modern territoriality of the PRC and for restoring China’s proper normative size
and shape. Hence cartography is about much more than drawing sovereign borders
106 Howard W. French, Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for
Global Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), pp. 54–55.
107 Billé, “On China’s Cartographic Embrace,” 4.
108 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23.
to mark the inside from the outside, because it creatively engages in visualizing so-
cial order and world order.
While critical IR scholars might welcome this challenge to the Westphalian inter-
national system, we should recognize how Beijing looks to an idealized notion of its
own (often violent) imperial center/periphery system to make these claims. Once
again, the problem of “Western imperialism” is not “imperialism” itself, but only
its Western form. Since Eurocentrism here is replaced by Sinocentrism, Chinese
cartography does not present an “emancipation” from unequal and unjust power
relations. Rather, its alternative world order presents a rival hierarchical system that
has its own set of codes and conventions, inclusions and exclusions, and problems
and solutions.
China is not alone in challenging the inside- outside cartography of the
Westphalian international system with an expansive map-fare of center/periphery
that generates world orders. While neoliberal capitalism sought to deterritorialize
space away from sovereign states, the twenty-first century is witnessing a resurgence
of transnational imperial cartographies that work to visualize and recover lost terri-
tories, for example, the IS Caliphate and Russia’s “Eurasianism.” This chapter looks
beyond critical IR’s fascination with Euro-America, the nation-state, and neoliberal
capitalism to provide a model for analyzing how revived cartographic conventions
are visually transforming the normative model of world order, often toward coer-
cively hierarchal models.
8
The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender,

and Faith
Introduction
NiqaBitch Shakes Paris is a short video that follows two young women walking
around Paris dressed in niqab, which conceals their faces and upper bodies,
along with hot pants and high heels that reveal their bare legs (see figure 8.1).1
The video shows how this perambulatory performance shook Paris; it literally
stopped traffic, turning people’s gazes. NiqaBitch—which combines niqab, the
French term for a full-face veil, with the American slang “bitch”—excited confu-
sion, as well as appreciation; the video shows how the women get “thumbs up”
support from many on the street and even a request for a fun photo from the
policewoman at France’s Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. In ad-
dition to providing information about the French veil ban that came into force
six months later in 2011, NiqaBitch Shakes Paris provokes a visceral reaction
from people on the street, as well as from the police who guard France’s national
identity.
This outrageous video shows how the visual can performatively provoke the
entangled issues of gender, race, and faith. Clothes here are more than functional
garments; they are multisensory artifacts that have cultural, religious, and political
significance. As Frantz Fanon writes in “Algeria Unveiled”:
The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress
and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of
a society’s uniqueness, that is to say the one that is the most immediately
perceptible . . . through written accounts and photographic records or
NiqaBitch Shakes Paris (2010) http://vimeo.com/15747849 (accessed February 23, 2018).

1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
The Sar tor ial Eng ineer ing o f R ace , G e nd e r, and   Fai th 179
Figure 8.1 NiqaBitch Shakes Paris (2010). Courtesy NiqaBitch
motion pictures. In the Arab world, for example, the veil worn by women
is at once noticed.2
In NiqaBitch Shakes Paris, the contradiction between veiling the face and upper
body, on the one hand, and wearing hot pants and high heels, on the other, graph-
ically displays female bodies as an exemplary site of the negotiation of visibility/
invisibility. It also suggests the open-ended nature of this concealing/revealing dy-
namic. Although it is common to either “whole-heartedly support” or “resolutely
denounce” the practice of veiling, the video does not provide a clear political state-
ment. It seems to criticize the French state’s criminalization of the veil, but it also
suggests that taking the veil is not the answer, either.3 This strategy of moral ambi-
guity is also manifest in a film by my students, Awrah: Uncovering the Covered (2017),
in which a young woman in London concludes from her own experience: “I’d say
that my relationship with my hijab has been quite turbulent.”4
As Fanon and NiqaBitch both attest, sartorial practices are political performances,
and this chapter explores their visual politics by juxtaposing two modes of visibility/
invisibility: taking the veil and participating in beauty pageants. The international
2 Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 35.
Also see Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, “The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze: Turning the Inside Out,”
Signs 40:1 (2014):177–180.
3 NiqaBitch, “Hot Pants and Niqabs: NiqaBitch Stroll through Paris,” Monthly Review (October 13,
2010) http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/niqabitch131010.html (accessed February 23, 2018).
4 Su’ad in Abi Steadman, Hayley Rabet, and Lamisa Khan, dir., Awrah: Uncovering the Covered
(2017) https://vimeo.com/channels/ir318/208667693 (accessed February 23, 2018).
politics of veiling is manifest; it is not much of an exaggeration to state that the veil is
“the most politicized piece of fabric in the world.”5 Beauty pageants are also sites of
international politics, in the sense that sending a national beauty queen to the Miss
Universe pageant confirms a state’s sovereignty in international society in ways that
are analogous to sending an ambassador to the United Nations. Indeed, in 2003 the
People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) first national beauty queen was recognized by
the US government as “Miss China, going to Miss Universe Contest” on her visa to
attend the pageant in Puerto Rico.6
As previous chapters have shown, Sensible Politics is interested in the interplay of
politics and aesthetics. Since it is not controversial to see veils and beauty pageants
as aesthetic practices of women’s fashion, the goal in this chapter is to consider how
veiling and beauty pageantry are important as experiences of the political and social
negotiation of concealing and revealing. In this way, veiling and beauty pageantry
are also key sites of visibility and visuality—that is, as social constructions of the
visible and visual constructions of the social. Although common sense might tell us
that veiling is about concealing and beauty pageantry is about revealing, both strat-
egies make women hypervisible: paradoxically, up-veiling’s invisibility tactic often
also makes the female body hypervisible in public.
The chapter thus uses the conceptual dynamic of concealing/revealing to ana-
lyze how various groups—women and men, Muslims and non-Muslims, states and
corporations—expend considerable resources negotiating, performing, legislating,
policing, and resisting such sartorial engineering practices.7 It first decodes how these
sartorial practices take on meaning in a set of social and political contexts: namely,
as the choice of many women as individuals and through the discursive structures
of the male gaze and the colonial gaze that can govern these choices. Along with
beauty pageantry, taking the veil exemplifies Judith Butler’s argument that “woman”
is not a natural category, but rather a social experience that emerges from the per-
formance of dressing up and acting like a woman.8 While much of the debate is
located in Europe and the Middle East and is framed by the East/West distinction,
the chapter juxtaposes these sites with China, a non-Western country that uses the
sartorial engineering projects of both de-veiling and beauty pageantry to creatively
police its own Muslim minority groups. The discussion thus shows how structures
and agents are mutually constituted through cultural governance and resistance.
5 James Leibold and Timothy Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang: The Political and Societal
Struggle to Define Uyghur Female Adornment,” China Journal no. 76 (2016):78.
6 Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Here She Comes! (Will China Ever Be the Same?),” New York Times ( July
16, 2002); also see William A. Callahan, Cultural Governance in Pacific Asia (New York: Routledge,
2006), pp. 1–4.
7 Timothy Grose coined the phrase “sartorial engineering.”
8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Finally, the chapter considers how up-veiling and beauty pageantry not only create
ideological meaning, but also can excite affective communities of sense. Analyses of
the veil characteristically turn this material object into a symbolic discourse and then
use hermeneutic methods—for example, interpreting the Qur’an and/or French
law9—to uncover its hidden ideology and thus reveal its true meaning. Alongside this
hermeneutic analysis that seeks to define and deconstruct the veil, Chapter 8 explores
what happens when we take seriously the materiality of veils as multisensory artifacts
that are seen and touched. The goal is to appreciate veils and beauty pageants as visual
artifacts and sensory spaces in which sensible politics is represented, performed, and
experienced through more embodied, affective, and everyday encounters on the local,
national, and world stages. “Sensible” here not only means “what can be sensed,” but
also “what makes sense” in the pragmatic politics of everyday life.10 As we will see,
women learn how to move and feel differently when they up-veil, de-veil, re-veil, and
participate in beauty pageants. The chapter thus employs the visuality strategy to ex-
amine how these sartorial performances visually construct the social and the interna-
tional: you don’t just take the veil, the veil also takes you, in a politics that is creative as
well as disciplinary. To put it another way, if “hijab” means partition and up-veiling is
a performance at the intersection of invisibility and hypervisibility, then such sartorial
practices exemplify Jacques Rancière’s “(re)partition of the sensible.”11
While it is common to draw conclusions that either support or denounce veiling
and beauty pageantry, this chapter is more interested in appreciating how such
material sartorial performances push us to think visually and feel visually in unex-
pected ways. Chapter 8 thus analyzes veiling and beauty pageantry to explore two
areas: (1) the visual international politics of race, gender, and faith; and (2) visual
artifacts and bodily experiences as sites of ideology and affect. Certainly we should
be careful in our analysis.12 In addition to provoking controversy, veils and beauty
pageants themselves present an uneasy juxtaposition; they are not opposites, and
9 See Mona Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015), pp. 36–38; Christian Joppke, Veil: Mirror of Identity
(Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009); Nick Hopkins and Ronni Michelle Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and
the Performance of Identity,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43 (2013):438; Leibold and Grose,
“Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 78; Louise Bourgeois in Steadman et al., Awrah.
10 Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 3.
Also see Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, eds., Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental
Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012).
11 Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 36; Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution
of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing
Group, 2004).
12 For a discussion of how my positionality as a “white male American” might impact the analysis,
see the preface. In this chapter I aim to problematize the male gaze and the white/colonial gaze by
taking seriously the concepts, practices, and experiences offered by feminist theory and Middle Eastern
and Asian studies.
there is considerable diversity and slippage within both practices.13 But this jux-
taposition provides an interesting entry into broader debates within global visual
politics. The chapter’s conclusion considers the wider theoretical and international
politics of sartorial engineering to ask whether veiling, as a performance of both
invisibility and hypervisuality, marks the limits of visual international politics. In
other words, this chapter hopes to shake up visual international politics, much as
NiqaBitch shakes up Paris.
Up-veiling and Beauty Pageantry

as Individual Choices
As noted, it is not an exaggeration to say that taking the veil constitutes one of the
most provocative political and cultural statements in the world today. Reactions
are strong, both in defense of veiling and attacking it, and these reactions are
expressed in personal space, community space, national space, and global space.
Taking the veil is not only a religious practice; it is also a social practice of spe-
cific women at specific times and places. Veiling is also a concept in the sense that
post-Enlightenment political thought focuses on issues of invisibility and visibility,
concealing and revealing, dark iron curtains and bright transparency, and veiling
and unveiling. As we saw in Chapter 6, artist-activist Ai Weiwei protests the lack of
official transparency in China through the body politics of getting naked by himself
and with friends. Veiling offers a different strategy. As the French guerrilla artist
Princess Hijab explains:
What’s interesting about the niqab is that it isolates the person wearing it,
while at the same time here in the Western world—especially in France—
it puts you in the spotlight. That’s the contradiction, by wishing to disap-
pear from the public sphere, you’re far more visible. You take possession
of the public space. It’s an empowering piece of clothing, but it can also be
frightening.14
In the post-ideological era, such empowering/frightening visual performances

can produce essentialized self/Other relations, which in turn can excite the dy-
namics of identity/ difference: gender, race, and religion. A woman recently
described how when she wears hijab on the streets of London, people assume that
13 This chapter employs a broad sense of “veil” and “veiling” to “indicate an Islamic system of mod-
esty in dress” (Gökariksel and Secor, “The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze,” 178).
14 Princess Hijab in Princess Hijab’s “Veiling Art”, Al Jazeera English ( July 6, 2010) http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=h0GLv-HzJFc (accessed February 23, 2018).
Figure 8.2 A “white British Muslim convert”. Courtesy Amena Amer
she is “Arab,” while she describes herself as a “white British Muslim convert.”15 As
she explains, “People outside the Muslim community have a hard time believing I’m
white. It’s like I can’t be white and Muslim. If I didn’t wear the hijab they wouldn’t
have a problem accepting I’m white” (see figure 8.2). Veiling here is a visual per-
formance that marks communities of race and religion in the sensible politics of
everyday sartorial practice; it is a choice, an assertion of a woman’s “cultural sover-
eignty” at the personal level.
In the short video Awrah: Uncovering the Covered, young Muslim women in
London also describe up-veiling in terms of personal choice: “I started wearing
hijab in secondary school. It was completely my choice. Most people think girls get
forced into it, but for me my family were quite open. I decided to wear it. For me it’s
a quite personal decision.”16 Likewise, another woman uses “choice” to explain why
she no longer takes the veil: “So I started wearing it from age 5. When you’re that
young you sort of do as your parents say. So I never had a choice, I never wanted
to wear it. In the same way, I didn’t want ‘not’ to wear it. I stopped wearing it when
I was 19. I think the reason is I sort of fell out of love with the idea that a woman
needed to wear a hijab to be modest.”17
15 Amena Amer, “A White British Muslim” (London: LSE Research Festival Exhibition, 2015)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/63004/ (accessed February 23, 2018).
16 Nadine Othman in Steadman et al., Awrah.
17 Su’ad Abdi in Steadman et al., Awrah; also see Mina Hoti in Steadman et al., Awrah.
The choice to take the veil in the twenty-first century does not necessarily mean
an assertion of tradition over modernity. Rather, it is often an expression of “global
Islamic haute couture,” which is part of a larger global “movement to construct al-
ternative, sometimes specifically Islamic and transnational, versions of moder-
nity.”18 The rise of “modest fashion,” in which beautiful clothes do not reveal much
skin, is an important part of this trend because it both questions the hegemonic
European view of beauty and provides an alternative; London Fashion Week is now
complemented by London Modest Fashion Week. The choice to take the veil and
to conceal the body thus can be an aesthetic expression of individuality that is cele-
brated (and commodified) by the global modest fashion industry.19
With modest fashion, the aesthetics of concealing/revealing seen in up-veiling
overlaps with that of beauty pageants. While the popularity of beauty pageants is
waning in Euro-America, they are still quite popular in Asia.20 Certainly socialist
countries such as Vietnam and China generally shared the Euro-American femi-
nist view of beauty pageants as spectacles of bourgeois decadence and Western cor-
ruption. But by 2003 both Vietnam and China had held their first national beauty
contests.21 Initially, Chinese officials were suspicious even of this inaugural pageant.
But after the first Miss China’s success in the Miss Universe 2002 pageant—she
came in third—many Chinese people caught the beauty pageant bug, and contests
started to proliferate throughout the country.22 After the Miss China pageant re-
ceived the official blessing in 2003, the new enthusiasm did not stop with national
pageantry; the Chinese state aggressively (and successfully) lobbied to host the
Miss World pageant in December 2003. For the first time an international beauty
pageant was broadcast nationwide on China’s state-controlled television. The con-
test was so successful (Miss China again came in third) that the Miss World pageant
has returned to China on a regular basis.
18 Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 101; also see Banu Gökariksel and Anna Secor,
“Between Fashion and Testtür: Marketing and Consuming Women’s Islamic Dress,” Journal of Middle
East Women’s Studies 6:3 (2010):119.
19 See Reina Lewis, Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015); Reina Lewis, ed., Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (London: I. B. Taurus,
2013); Jennifer Heath, “Introduction,” in The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, edited
by Jennifer Heath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 11; Nafisa Bakkar in Steadman
et al., Awrah.
20 Laura Mulvey, “The Spectacle of the Vulnerable: Miss World, 1970,” in Visual and Other Pleasures,
2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 3–5; Deborah L. Madsen, “Performing Community
through the Feminine Body: The Beauty Pageant in Transnational Contexts” (presented at University
of Zurich, October 2005) http://sigmao2.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/lecture-presented-at-university-
of_08.html (accessed February 3, 2018).
21 “Beauty Pageants Gaining Popularity in China,” China Daily (August 16, 2003); Rosenthal,
“Here She Comes!”; Seth Myans, “Vietnam: Beauty in the Eye of the Government,” New York Times
(March 28, 2002); Callahan, Cultural Governance in Pacific Asia,  1–4.
22 “Miss China Beauty Pageant Opens,” China Daily ( January 21, 2005).
As with up-veiling, participating in a beauty contest is seen as a matter of personal

choice. Some Chinese women see the pageants as a new measure of their skills: “I
believe that while I win in university entrance examinations, I can also win in beauty
contests,” reasoned an elite student at Beijing University.23 Similarly, in Thailand, Lily
Chaweewan Chongsakjarenkul explains, “I believe I was crowned Miss Thailand China
Cosmos [2013] because of my wisdom.”24 Taking the veil and participating in beauty
pageants thus are not seen by participants as traditional or backward activities; rather,
highly educated young women choose such activities as part of being modern.25
In the 1990s beauty queens even became part of the “women’s rights” move-
ment in Thailand; public discussion of equal rights was provoked by a high-profile
divorce case involving a former Miss Thailand/Miss Universe.26 The general uproar
at the unfair treatment of a woman who had represented Thailand generated a po-
litical debate that eventually led to an amendment in Thailand’s 1997 Constitution
that guaranteed equal rights for women and men. Thus, it is not surprising that in
2016 Lily declared: “I am a beauty queen, and I’m a feminist. I’m for human rights,
and women’s rights. . . . I support children’s and women’s rights, to help them to be
independent, and not dependent on men, like it was a hundred years ago.”
Likewise, when scholars and public intellectuals analyze why women take the
veil (or not), the consensus is that it is a matter of individual choice, a matter of
personal sovereignty that is inviolable.27 Lila Abu-Lughod thus argues that Euro-
Americans should stop “obsessing” about the veil, because Muslim women do not
need saving. Moreover, she argues that Western analysts should stop using general
categories such as “Muslim women” altogether, because they characteristically are
23 “Beauty Pageants Gaining Popularity in China.”

24 Author’s interview with Lily Chaweewan Chongsakjarenkul in Bangkok, Thailand (December
2016); also see NJ Survey, “Do You Agree with Beauty Pageants?,” The Nation Junior (Bangkok) 2:42
(May 1–15, 1994):22; Kawalpreet Kaur, “It Takes Brains to Be Beautiful,” The Nation Junior (Bangkok)
2:26 (September 1–15, 1993):26.
25 Lewis, Muslim Fashion, 12ff.; Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 17–18, 39–40; Wolfgang Wagner, Ragini Sen, Risa
Permandadeli, and Caroline S. Howarth, “The Veil and Muslim Women’s Identity: Cultural Pressures
and Resistance to Stereotyping,” Culture & Psychology 18:4 (2012):536.
26 Opas Boonlom, “High-stakes Divorce Case Sparks Women’s Rights Debate,” The Nation
(Bangkok) (February 15, 1995):A8.
27 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?; Martha C. Nussbaum, The New Religious
Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012); Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
(New York: Free Press, 2006); Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Refusing the Veil (London: Biteback Publishing,
2014). Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens; Heath, The Veil; Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the Veil
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Wagner et al., “The Veil and Muslim Women’s
Identity”; Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of Identity,” 438.
recruited to justify the West’s imperialist actions.28 A contemporary example of this

is Laura Bush’s speech in November 2001 that invoked saving women as justifica-
tion for the US invasion of Afghanistan: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight
for the rights and dignity of women.”29 Postcolonial feminists, however, turn the
question around to ask why white men (and women) continually feel the need to
save brown women from brown men.30
Governance by the Male Gaze and the Colonial Gaze

Against the robust defense of personal agency just discussed, post-Marxist critical
analysis looks to how these individual choices are shaped by the social and polit-
ical structures of patriarchy. In a general sense this is part of structural governance
of both the state and transnational capital. In a more specific sense it looks to how
women’s visibility is determined by the “male gaze,” whereby “men act and women
appear.”31 The woman is the “bearer, not maker, of meaning”; hence we do not have
“images of women, but images as women,” with women concealing and revealing
their bodies for the pleasure of men.32 In 1970 the London Women’s Liberation
Workshop’s intervention in the Miss World contest was a graphic illustration of
both the workings of the male gaze and resistance to it.33 Outside the Royal Albert
Hall, the venue of the Miss World contest, hundreds of activists demonstrated
against beauty pageants, which were criticized as “cattle markets.” Protestors coun-
tered the male gaze’s objectification of women by chanting “We’re not beautiful,
we’re not ugly, we’re angry!” Inside the hall, they disrupted the televised proceed-
ings with a cascade of leaflets, smoke bombs, stink bombs, and flour bombs. The
28 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?; see also Heath, The Veil; Wagner et al., “The Veil
and Muslim Women’s Identity,” 523.
29 Laura Bush, “The Weekly Address Delivered by the First Lady” (November 17, 2011) http://
www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24992 (accessed February 23, 2018).
30 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 33. This idea originally comes from Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A
Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 53.
31 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed.
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 14–27; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin
Books, 1972), p. 47.
32 Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 15; Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 35;
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984), p. 149.
33 Mulvey, “The Spectacle of the Vulnerable.” In 1968 Women’s Liberation protested against the
Miss America Pageant using similar methods and language; see Maxine Leeds Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty
Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3–5.
pageant’s male judges and journalists were pelted with tomatoes, lettuce, and other
rotten vegetables.34 Activists thus engaged in a war of images on international televi-
sion, fighting one spectacle—women parading in swimsuits—with another: “This
was our moment to tell the whole world about feminism.”35 The protest’s spectacle
was designed to literally reclaim the gaze for women by disrupting the television
broadcast.
In a similar way, the “white gaze,” works to make non-Europeans visible in spe-
cific hierarchal ways: “For not only must the black man be black; he must be black
in relation to the white man.” Fanon tells the story of how when he was on a train in
France, a white child cried out: “Look, a Negro! . . . Mama, see the Negro! I’m fright-
ened!”36 Fanon’s reaction to “being dissected under white eyes” was to be “fixed” in
“shame and self-contempt,” as if photographed by the white gaze.37 National beauty
pageants can similarly provoke controversy when an “visible minority” is chosen
to represent the nation; racist reactions were provoked in 2017 when an ethnically
Filipino woman was crowned Miss Belgium, in 2005 when the first Muslim woman
was crowned Miss England, in 1996 when a black woman was selected to be Miss
Italy, and so on.38 These are not just individual cases, but show the workings of what
W. E. B. Du Bois called “The Color Line” in (inter)national identity construction
projects.39 The white gaze thus is related to the “colonial gaze,” in which the Occident
figures the Orient as part of imperial self/Other relations: the West is strong, mascu-
line, rational, and scientific only when contrasted against the East as weak, feminine,
mysterious, and exotic.40
The entangled tension of gender and race in beauty pageants becomes clearer
when we see how they have been instrumental in nation-building and state-
34 Sally Alexander, “Miss World: My Protest at 1970 Beauty Pageant,” BBC World Service: Witness
(March 5, 2014) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/magazine-26437815/miss-world-my-protest-at-
1970-beauty-pageant (accessed February 23, 2018); Jo Robinson, “Miss World Protest,” British Library
(no date) http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/clips/bodies-minds-and-spirits/body-
experience/143246.html (accessed February 23, 2018); also see Beatrix Campbell, “Another World,”
The Guardian (November 19, 2010) https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/19/
feminists-disrupted-miss-world-tv (accessed February 23, 2018).
35 Robinson, “Miss World Protest.”
36 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), pp. 82–83, 84; also see
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
37 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 87; emphasis in original.
38 “Newly-crowned Miss Belgium Faces Racist Abuse Online,” The Straits Times ( January 20,
2018) http://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/newly-crowned-miss-belgium-faces-racist-abuse-
online (accessed February 23, 2018); “First Muslim Miss England Crowned,” BBC News (September
4, 2005) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4212412.stm (accessed February 23, 2018); Celestine
Bohlen, “Que Pasa, Miss Italy?,” New York Times (September 15, 1996).
39 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1903), p. 19.
40 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2004).
b uilding.41 As I explain in detail elsewhere,42 in the 1930s the Miss Siam contest—
Thailand was called Siam until 1939—was an important part of nation-building
and state-building. After the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, the new
civilian and military elite cultivated political legitimacy for the new constitutional
monarchy through a constitution festival, which included the first Miss Siam pag-
eant on Constitution Day in 1934. As Supatra Kopkijsuksakul explains, Miss Siam
served as a “media of entertainment to attract the attention of people to come to
the Constitutional Festival” because the contest itself “promoted democracy by
selecting a beauty to grace the constitution.”43 The pageant was organized by a newly
created section of the Interior Ministry called the “Office of the Miss Siam Pageant,”
which made searching for beautiful women an official duty of (male) government
officials. The responsibilities of Miss Siam included not only the expected charity
work and entertainment activities, but also attending parliamentary functions and
promoting state policy.44 Hence the pageant was a site of nation-building and state-
building in which the hereditary king was replaced by a beauty queen who was
chosen by the people and worked for the nation.
The Interior Ministry’s Office of the Miss Siam Pageant also highlighted the in-
ternational importance of the beauty queen: “Miss Siam is the representative of Thai
women to show the world that Siam has Miss Siam who is as beautiful as the beauty
queens of other countries.”45 In 1965 Miss Thailand won the Miss Universe pageant,
and the director of the Tourist Authority of Thailand directly linked beauty pageant
success with Bangkok’s foreign policy goal of securing further security guarantees
from the United States in the context of the Vietnam War.46 The Miss Siam pageant
thus used the visual spectacle of beautiful women to craft the new Thai nation and
the modern Thai state for both domestic and foreign policy. It also shows how the
male gaze of the Thai administrative state was able to mobilize women and men as
active national citizens (as opposed to loyal royal subjects).
Beauty pageants in Jamaica show an even more complex entanglement of the
male gaze and the colonial gaze. As Rochelle Rowe explains, Jamaican elites in
government and the media very deliberately employed beauty pageants to build a
proper postcolonial identity.47 The Miss Jamaica contest was first held in 1929. But
41 See Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 5; Lewis, Muslim Fashion, 5.

42 See William A. Callahan, “Beauty Queens, National Identity and Transnational Politics,” in
Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia,  43–70.
43 Supatra Kopkijsuksakul, “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai (b.e. 2477–2530)” [Miss Thailand con-
test: 1934–1987] (master’s thesis, Thammasat University, Bangkok, 1988), p. 49. Many thanks to
Sumalee Bumroongsook for alerting me to Supatra’s thesis and translating key passages.
44 Supatra, “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai,” 118.
45 Quoted in Supatra, “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai,” 59.
46 Supatra, “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai,” 158.
47 Rochelle Rowe, “‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl’: The ‘Ten Types—One People’ Beauty Contest,
Racialized Femininities, and Jamaican Nationalism,” Radical History Review 103 (2009):36–58.
Figure 8.3 “Ten Types—One People” pageant winners (1955). Source: Peter Abrahams,

Jamaica: An Island Mosaic (London: The Stationery Office, 1957). Courtesy The Stationery Office
this beauty queen did not represent Jamaica very well; the pageant was a private
affair run by the island’s upper-class, white, British planters and merchants, who
typically chose their daughters to be the beauty queen.48 In 1955 a rival beauty pag-
eant emerged as part of the “Jamaica 300” festival that commemorated the island’s
three centuries as a British colony. Rather than directly compete with Miss Jamaica
by crowning a rival beauty queen, the contest offered a new postcolonial way to
visualize Jamaica. The “Ten Types—One People” pageant was designed to find and
display beauties according to ten racial and ethnic categories, such as “Miss Apple
Blossom” for women of European parentage, “Miss Allspice” for women of part
Indian parentage, and “Miss Ebony” for women of black complexion (see figure
8.3).49 Interestingly, while most beauty pageants choose a single person to represent
the nation—such as Miss Jamaica—this contest simultaneously crowned ten beauty
queens, and Miss Ebony was equal to Miss Apple Blossom. The pageant was seen as
progressive because it not only encouraged black and colored women to participate,
48
Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 40.
49
Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 44.
it also created space for them to win. Young women in Jamaica thus “embraced the
beauty contest format as a new means of challenging racial discrimination.”50
This model of mixed-race national identity was not just for beauty pageants; the
“Ten Types” pageant directly influenced the idea of a “racially harmonious” Jamaica,
as seen in the slogan for the country’s independence in 1962: “Out of Many, One
People.”51 The duties of Jamaica’s beauty queens were not confined to domestic
nation-building. Soon after independence in 1962, the Miss Jamaica Nation pag-
eant was created to celebrate black beauty queens. Its winner went to Africa as an
“unofficial cultural ambassador” to share experiences with other new countries that
were emerging from the British empire.52
As in Thailand, Jamaican pageants were organized by men; the new middle-class
colored and black elite likewise “scour[ed] the countryside for Jamaica’s hidden
beauties.”53 The male gaze also reproduced the white/colonial gaze, as the Ten
Types winners all “conform to a recognizable Western ideal. The selected beauty
queens were all, unsurprisingly, slim and petite in frame”54 (see figure 8.3). The crit-
icism that the global beauty pageant industry reproduces European ideals of beauty
rings true in Thailand as well. In 1984 the organizer of the Miss Thailand pageant
noted that “[w]‌e must admit that the world is shrinking, and these changes affect
Miss Thailand too. She cannot be sweetly beautiful as she used to be. She must be
good in her figure, her personality and her language.”55 In the 1990s Euro-American
beauty standards were promoted by the pageant’s corporate sponsors: Colgate
Palmolive, Catalina swimsuits, and Revlon makeup.56 One reaction to such a for-
eign imposition is resistance to the West and its colonial gaze, as we saw with the
global movement for modest fashion.57 But in Thailand pageant organizers decided
to adapt to the new international standard in order to better compete on the world
stage. For example, while Miss Thailand 1994 looked great in the context of her Thai
50 Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 48. This is also the logic behind the Miss Black America
Beauty pageant, which was launched in the United States in 1968 by the NAACP (Craig, Ain’t I a
Beauty Queen?,  3–6).
51 Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 53, 44, 36–37; also see M. Cynthia Oliver, Queen
of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean ( Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009).
52 Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 49; also see Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?,  45–64.
53 Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 43.
54 Rowe, “ ‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl,’ ” 44; also see Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 5, 16.
55 See Supatra, “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai,” 246.
56 Chin Ampornratana, Secretary to the Managing Director of BBTv Color Channel 7, interview
with the author in Bangkok (October 27, 1994).
57 For example, see Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 5–6, 24–26; Madsen, “Performing Community
through the Feminine Body”; M. G. G. Pillai, “West’s Idea of Beauty Ignores Rest of the World,”
Bangkok Post (February 22, 1995):5.
rivals, Thai commentators concluded that she did poorly on the global stage at the
Miss Universe pageant because she was too short.
Patterns of the male gaze and the colonial gaze emerge in different ways with the
veil in revolutionary Algeria. Fanon’s arguments in “Algeria Unveiled” show how the
veil was seen as a strategic weapon in the resistance against the French colonial state.
The veil here is not a constant of either tradition or modernity, because the “attitude to-
ward the veil underwent modifications during the revolution.”58 Fanon first narrates the
“traditional” role of the veil in traditional Algeria, as a sartorial practice that protected
women in their preferred home life. The French colonial state, he explains, pictured
Algerian women as “humiliated, sequestered, [and] cloistered” and worked to de-veil
them in the name of emancipation. France’s real objective, according to Fanon, was to
“convert the woman, [by] winning her over to foreign values,” which would “destroy
[the] structure of Algerian society [and its] capacity for resistance.”59
Initially, France’s de-veiling strategy produced resistance because it “strength-
ened traditional patterns of behavior” among Algerian women.60 But as the revo-
lution progressed, the issues shifted from the grand ideologies of identity politics
to the sensible politics and pragmatic tactics of revolutionary action. Indeed, the
veil evolved from being the sign of traditional modesty to be deployed as revolu-
tionary armament. According to Fanon, originally women were excluded from the
liberation struggle.61 Hence he praises them for sacrificing their modesty for the
revolution by going outside the home and outside the Casbah to carry messages and
guns under the cover of their veils. Fanon then praises women for sacrificing their
modesty even more when they are required to change into “Western” clothes—
short skirts, sleeveless dresses—so as to move more freely in the European part
of Algiers. Interestingly, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) visualizes
Fanon’s arguments by showing how veiled women could pass through checkpoints
more easily; after that strategy was discovered, Algerian women de-veiled to deliver
bombs to the European city.62
The film visualizes this transformation from modest to “European” by showing
three women de-veiling, cutting their hair, applying make-up, dressing in short skirts,
and as Pontecorvo explains, “generally assuming the look of the French women.”63
58 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 47.

59 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 39, 37.
60 Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 49.
61 This point is contested; Minne argues that women were involved in resistance from the very be-
ginning. See Daniele Djamila Amarane Minne, “Women at War,” Interventions 9:3 (2007):340–349.
62 Gillo Pontecorvo, dir., The Battle of Algiers (Casbah Film, 1966). For a discussion of the rela-
tion between Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” and Pontecorvo’s film, see Lindsey Moore, “The Veil of
Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers,” Kunapipi
25:2 (2003):56–73.
63 Gillo Pontecorvos, dir., Return to Algiers (1992) https://youtu.be/tQvOeJ11iRA (accessed
February 23, 2018); also see Minne, “Women at War.”
Figure 8.4 De-veiled woman in The Battle of Algiers (1966).
The scene’s strong audio drumbeat highlights that these women aren’t dolling up for
a date, but are arming to do battle. Figure 8.4 shows how this new sartorial perfor-
mance enables a new body politics: the young woman in a sleeveless dress distracts
French soldiers by flirting with them. As Fanon explains, “Carrying revolvers,
grenades, hundreds of false identity cards or bombs, the unveiled Algerian woman
moves like a fish in Western waters. The soldiers, the French patrols, smile at her as
she passes, complements on her looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects
that her suitcases contain the automatic pistol which will presently mow down four
or five members of one of the patrols.”64 Then once this de-veiling strategy had run
its course—that is, when French troops started to target immodest “Westernized”
Algerian women—partisans re-veiled to conceal messages and arms under the folds
of their revolutionary garments. As Fanon concludes, “[T]‌he veil was resumed, but
stripped once and for all of its exclusively traditional dimension.”65
Both Fanon and the film employ the visibility strategy, wherein the veil is a tactical
tool that is deployed and withdrawn. As Fanon explains, “Removed and reassumed
again and again, the veil has been manipulated, transformed into a technique of
camouflage, into a means of struggle.”66 This is an exemplary case of the female body
as the site of the dynamic politics of revealing and concealing. Yet although the anti-
colonial arguments are strong, Fanon and the film both employ a paternalistic view
of women. By manipulating both the male gaze and the colonial gaze for what is
64
Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 58.
65
66
seen as the greater good of national liberation, un/veiling in revolutionary Algeria

certainly was deployed for political resistance. But it also was a mode of what could
be called a postcolonial male gaze. Hence veiling and beauty pageantry are used in
similar ways by the new middle-class elite in Thailand, Jamaica, and Algeria to mo-
bilize women in nation-building projects run by men, primarily for men. In other
words, women’s liberation was secondary to national liberation.67 Malek Alloula’s
The Colonial Harem raises similar issues; the postcolonial critique of the postcards’
combination of the colonial gaze and the male gaze is sharp. But reproducing images
of naked Algerian women also provoked feminist criticism because it uncritically
recycled the male gaze: men are still using images of women for their projects.68
State-led Cultural Governance and Resistance

As the previous section showed, sartorial politics is not merely a personal choice,
but can be conditioned by the patriarchal politics of the male gaze and the imperial
politics of the colonial gaze. The sartorial performances of veiling and beauty pag-
eantry mobilize women to participate in nation-building, state-building, and even
corporate brand-building. The locus of these activities has been moving from state
policy to transnational corporate marketing strategies as part of a neoliberal trend
since the 1970s.69 Yet we also need to appreciate how state-led cultural govern-
ance has been reasserting itself—often simultaneously with corporate-led cultural
governance—both in prescribing dress codes in some Middle Eastern countries
and in proscribing them in some European countries. This section fleshes out how
the choices women make in concealing and revealing their bodies are shaped by
the state’s radical intervention in the sensible politics of the everyday, which in turn
excites collective and individual performances of resistance to state and corporate
power. Here we turn from analysis informed by choice and structured by gazes to
examine how structures and agents are mutually constituted through cultural gov-
ernance and resistance.70
Saudi Arabia and Iran do not agree about much, but both have official dress
codes for women and morality police to enforce them. According to Iran’s Islamic
establishment, the “hijab is protection from sin” for both women and men, and
67 Moore, “The Veil of Nationalism”; Minne, “Women at War”; also see Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty
Queen?, 14.
68 For example, see Mieke Bal, “The Politics of Citation,” Diacritics 21:1 (1991):25–45.
69 See Callahan, “Beauty Queens, National Identity and Transnational Politics.”
70 For a discussion of cultural governance, see Michael J. Shapiro, Methods and Nations: Cultural
Governance and the Indigenous Subject (New York: Routledge, 2004); David Campbell, “Cultural
Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” Review of International
Studies 29 (2003):57–73; Callahan, Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia.
the morality police see themselves as a “kind of hijab for the society of the Islamic
Republic.”71 Rather than being an obstacle to public life, here the veil provides
women with “security” to enable them to enter the public sphere, especially when
society is seen as a space haunted by dangerous moral temptations.72 Indeed, for
many veils provide the security of a “mobile home,” and to de-veil is to publicly
reveal oneself as “naked.”73 The cultural logic also appeals to global self/Other re-
lations: “pious Iran” versus “the Great Satan” of America. Sometimes it is directly
invoked in international politics; in 2015 Iran’s reformist president Hassan Rouhani
was criticized for the loosening of morality rules as a way to attack his government’s
nuclear agreement with the Group of Six world powers.74 Yet even within Iran, such
fundamentalism lends itself to ridicule; as one young woman criticized the morality
police: “[W]‌hat right do you have to say whether my hijab is proper or improper?
Can you show me the hijab-o-meter they issued you when you took this job?”75
In Headscarves and Hymens, Mona Eltahawy recounts her personal experience
of up-veiling and de-veiling in the wider context of everyday life in Egypt, London,
and Saudi Arabia.76 Many women celebrate the veil in terms of emancipation and se-
curity and criticize white Western feminists for exacerbating Islamophobia through
their misunderstanding of the practice.77 Thus when Eltahawy asks, “Why do you
hate us?,” one expects a similar East versus West argument. Eltahawy, however,
reframes the issue to Arab men hating Arab women. For her, the veil is a concrete
expression of patriarchal power relations, in which women are seen as the “walking
embodiment of sin,” and “clerics [are] obsessed with female orifices.”78 In this legal-
istic practice of the male gaze, morality police are not promoting piety, but rather
cynically using their power to commit sexual harassment. At Islam’s holiest site in
Saudi Arabia, the veil didn’t protect Eltahawy; rather, it actually enabled the police
71 Marketa Hulpachova, “Hijab: A Woman’s Rite of Passage in Iran,” The Guardian (December
19, 2013) https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2013/dec/19/iran-hijab-islamic-veil
(accessed February 23, 2018); “Rouhani Clashes with Iranian Clergy over Women Arrested for ‘Bad
Hijab,’ ” The Guardian (May 27, 2015) https://www.theguardian.com/world/iran-blog/2015/may/
27/iran-hijab-rouhani-versus-senior-clergy-enforcement (accessed February 23, 2018); also see
Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 49.
72 See Heath, The Veil; Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 34–35; Wagner et al., “The Veil and
Muslim Women’s Identity,” 531; Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of
Identity,” 444.
73 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 36; Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 46; Heath,
“Introduction,” 2, 14; Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 42, 43, 45.
74 “Rouhani Clashes with Iranian Clergy.”
75 Cited in “Rouhani Clashes with Iranian Clergy.”
76 Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens.
77 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?; Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Heath, “Introduction,”
1–2; Wagner et al., “The Veil and Muslim Women’s Identity”; Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab,
Visibility and the Performance of Identity.”
78 Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 10.
officer to grope her anonymously.79 Likewise, the Islamic Republic’s “cultural revo-
lution,” described in Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persopolis, shows how sartorial
politics can be very personal and very threatening; debate among Iranian women
was not between East and West, but between “the veil” and “freedom.”80
Veiling is also politically charged in France. Curiously, much as in Iran and Saudi
Arabia, the French state appeals to legally-defined dress codes to control veiling.
In 2004 it banned girls from wearing headscarves in public schools, then in 2011
banned public burqa-wearing. Veil politics invaded the beaches in summer 2016
with the ban on burkinis—a modest-style swimsuit—in many French coastal re-
sort towns.81 Supporters of the veil bans argued that the veil is problematic not just
as a practice, but conceptually as well; it poses a challenge both to the liberal ide-
ological order of French secularism (laïcité, laicity) and to the liberal world order
in the global war on terror. As in the feminist protest against Miss World in 1970,
this concern was expressed in terms of “women’s rights” and figured veils as a sign
of female submission to the patriarchal culture of Islam. While many girls and
women in France argued that they had freely chosen veiling, the counter-argument
was that one cannot have free choice in such a male-dominated culture and society.
Muslim girls, according to this logic, needed to be saved from their families and
their community.
Here French feminists’ resistance to what they see as the “male gaze” of Islamic
patriarchy meets the resistance of some Muslim women to what they see as the “co-
lonial gaze” of white French women.82 This is not the first time that there has been
a tension between anti-sexism and anti-racism movements. Intersectional politics
also erupted at the Miss World pageant in 1970. The London Women’s Liberation
Workshop mocked the winner, Jennifer Hosten, for her “conventionality,” yet
Hosten explained that the contest gave her “opportunities to travel, study and work
that, as a black woman from Grenada, she might otherwise not have had.”83 The ten-
sion had been even more manifest in 1968, when (predominantly white) feminists
protested in Atlantic City against the Miss America pageant to fight sexism, while
just down the boardwalk the NAACP launched the first Miss Black America pag-
eant to fight racism.84
79 Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens,  50–51.

80 Marjane Satrapi, “The Veil,” in Persopolis (London: Vintage, 2008).
81 See Angelique Chrisafis, “French Mayors Refuse to Lift Burkini Ban Despite Court Ruling,” The
Guardian (August 28, 2016) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/28/french-mayors-
burkini-ban-court-ruling (accessed February 23, 2018).
82 See Johanna Gullberg, “The Republic of Difference: Feminism and Anti-racism in the Parisian
Banlieues” (PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 2016).
83 Mulvey, “The Spectacle of the Vulnerable,” 3; Robinson, “Miss World Protest.”
84 Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?,  3–22.
Back in France, debates about the veil ban often invoke a “clash of civilizations”
logic that sees Islamic values and Western values as incompatible.85 While it is pop-
ular to criticize Samuel P. Huntington’s monolithic view of culture, a leading Muslim
cleric actually agrees that Islam and laicity are incommensurable.86 French president
Jacques Chirac thus saw the headscarf as a “kind of aggression,” and a state com-
mission concluded that veils were part of Islam’s “permanent guerrilla war against
laicity.”87 This concern was not just domestic, but is part of a global visual economy
of veiling: some feared that “the experience of Iran was about to be imported into
France.”88 Indeed, this French concern over a cultural and political invasion of
Islamism was the topic of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission (2015).89 Veil
bans thus were criticized by many for exemplifying a deeper Islamophobic racism.90
Globally, many Muslims saw France’s veil bans as an attack on Islam as a whole.
Indeed, the crusade against the veil has Orientalist overtones. As we have seen, con-
quering the East by de-veiling Muslim women is a recurring Western male fantasy
from the colonial period, which continues in the present. While the Muslim clerics
may see unveiled women as “naked,” this unveiling/naked dynamic is also found
in paintings by Manet, Renoir, Matisse, and Picasso.91 In the realm of popular cul-
ture, colonial Algeria produced a whole genre of postcards for French soldiers that
showed unveiled women as naked.92 More recently, the veil—and unveiling—has
been a popular topic for cartoons in Playboy magazine.93
As in Iran and Saudi Arabia, where morality police see the absence of veils as
a threat to moral order and social order, in France veiling has become a matter of
cultural sovereignty, cultural governance, and resistance to it. Iranians resist by chal-
lenging the veil, and in France women resist by veiling. But the veil has also become
a site of art, fashion, and satirical intervention in France. Princess Hijab uses graffiti
art “to spark debates about fundamentalism and feminism” by drawing veils with
a black marker pen on fashion posters in the Paris Metro (see figure 8.5).94 As she
85 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
86 Joppke, Veil, 31, 112–123.
87 Cited in Joppke, Veil, 4, 47.
88 Scott, The Politics of the Veil, 176.
89 Michel Houellebecq, Submission (London: William Heinemann, 2015).
90 Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Heath, The Veil.
91 Heath, “Introduction,” 14.
92 Alloula, The Colonial Harem; also see Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 45.
93 Faegheh Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture (Miami: University Press of
Florida, 2001), pp. 39–61; also see Heath, “Introduction,” 11.
94 Angelique Chrisafis, “Princess Hijab: Underground Resistance,” The Guardian (November 11,
2010) http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2010/nov/10/princess-hijab-graffiti-
france-metro (accessed February 23, 2018); Annelies Moors, “NiqaBitch and Princess Hijab: Niqab
Activism, Satire and Street Art,” Feminist Review 98 (2011):128–135; Princess Hijab’s “Veiling Art”.
Figure 8.5 Visual cultural resistance by Princess Hijab. Source: Anonymous artist, The

Guardian
explains, “When I see an interesting billboard or model that I find unusually ar-
resting, I feel the impulse to hijabize, . . . to draw a black veil on the model.”95 This
“hijabization” of public images not only questions the role of the state in everyday
sartorial practices, but also targets the “visual terrorism” of the advertising industry
for promoting a consumerist view of life and politics.96
As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, two young women who call them-
selves NiqaBitch protested against France’s veil bans through a video of themselves
walking around Paris dressed in niqab that concealed their faces and upper bodies,
along with hot pants and high heels that revealed their bare legs. The video shows
how they get “thumbs up” support from many on the street as they walk around
central Paris, pausing at many government buildings. The audio-visual experience
95
Princess Hijab in Princess Hijab’s “Veiling Art”.
96
Cited in Moors, “NiqaBitch and Princess Hijab,” 134.
underlines both the fun and the protest: the video is edited to the rhythm of the
Beastie Boys anthem that declares, “If you don’t like it, then hey fuck you!”97
Interestingly, their reception at France’s Ministry of Immigration and National
Identity is mixed: the policeman guarding this site tells them to move along, while
the policewoman engages them in a conversation that highlights the sensible poli-
tics of the everyday:
Policewoman: I love your outfit, is it to do with the new law?

NiqaBitch: Yes, we want to de-dramatize the situation.
Policewoman: It’s brilliant. Can I take a photo?
Here timing was crucial; when the law went into effect six months later, the same
policewoman would be obliged to fine them for the same veiling activity.
Princess Hijab’s guerrilla art and NiqaBitch’s performance art are both fasci-
nating sites of resistance that mix the sacred and the secular to question how sen-
sible politics works in France. Power here is expressed by state control over visual
practice, specifically legally prescribing a sartorial performance. Likewise, we have
two examples of young women visually expressing their protest against state con-
trol over their everyday lives. They show how veils work as material artifacts to
performatively provoke affective communities of sense: “Operating within a visual
field that requires little linguistic competence and using Internet infrastructures to
circulate their work, they are able to reach a global public.”98 Both cultural govern-
ance and resistance thus are more than local, as they are part of a global political-
economy of visual images and multisensory artifacts.
The debate over veiling/unveiling in Europe and the Middle East can be sum-
marized as debates between women and men and between East and West. Many
supporters of veiling see it as a practice that positively distinguishes Eastern/
Islamic/Arabic communities from Western ones. Many critics of veiling call for the
liberation of all women from patriarchy. This figuration makes a certain amount of
sense when the debate is located in Europe and the Middle East. But what happens
when we relocate it to China, a non-Western country whose Northwest frontier is
home to the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group? How does it complicate the notions
of Islamic modernity as an alternative to the West, as well as struggles within
liberalism?
In many ways the situation in Northwest China offers the familiar cultural gov-
ernance/cultural resistance dynamic that we saw in France. Veils were not a major
issue until the 2000s, when Uyghur women started re-veiling as part of the global
97 NiqaBitch, NiqaBitch Shakes Paris; Nesrine Malik, “NiqaBitch Unveil Themselves in Paris,” The
Guardian (October 7, 2010); NiqaBitch, “Hot Pants and Niqabs.”
98 Moors, “NiqaBitch and Princess Hijab,” 128–129.
Islamic revival that includes the global Islamic modest fashion trend.99 Beijing be-
came particularly concerned about this visual artifact after 2009, as riots erupted
in Xinjiang between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. “Islam” in Xinjiang thus was in-
creasingly understood as a foreign threat to China’s national security and cultural
sovereignty, while the veil was seen as a visual provocation of what Beijing calls the
“Three Evil Forces” of separatism, extremism, and terrorism.100
As in Iran and France, visual performances and sensible politics are seen as a le-
gitimate site for state intervention. Sartorial engineering as a mode of cultural gov-
ernance is not new in China. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), people
were obliged to wear the military-inspired Mao suit. In 2001 the “Han clothing
movement” emerged as a grassroots nativist movement to resist what is seen as the
Manchu “bastardization” of Chinese civilization.101 While sartorial engineering in
Xinjiang is a local issue, it is also located in the global visual politics of national se-
curity. The concern is foreign terrorism, and the goal is social stability along China’s
long Central Asian frontier. Since 2011 the veiling practices of Uyghur women have
been a topic of intense study by Han men and women in the party-state.102 The con-
cern is that vulnerable women are being “brainwashed” into wearing the veil by for-
eign fundamentalists and their local supporters. De-veiling thus is presented as an
issue of women’s liberation, which has the added benefit of fighting the “Three Evil
Forces.”103
In addition to proscribing veils, in 2011 the Xinjiang government launched a
five-year, $8 million Beauty Engineering Project to prescribe the proper attire for
the veil-free “new style woman”: a multicolored ätläs-fabric dress, a doppa hat, and
braided hair (see figure 8.6).104 As an official newspaper explains:
99 Lewis, Muslim Fashion.

100 See Zunyou Zhou, “Chinese Strategy for De-R adicalization,” Terrorism and Political Violence
( June 9, 2017):1– 23, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1330199; Leibold and Grose,
“Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 80; Maya Wang, “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of
Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2018).
101 See Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism and Tradition in China Today (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).
102 See Jin Wei, “Burqas, Hijabs and Beards in the Governance of Xinjiang,” University of Nottingham,
China Policy Institute Blog (April 29, 2015) http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/
2015/04/29/regulating-burqas-hijabs-and-beards-to-push-or-pull/ (accessed December 11, 2017);
James Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement,” Journal of
Contemporary China (May 31, 2019):1–15, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2019.1621529.
103 Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 89.
104 See Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional Government, “Liangli gongcheng: Zuo liangli
nuxing, zhanda mei Xinjiang” [Beauty Engineering Project: Make beautiful women, display a beau-
tiful Xinjiang], http://www.ts.cn/special/2011_Beautiful/node_93130.htm (accessed December 11,
2017); Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 89ff.
Figure 8.6 Official mural for the Beauty Engineering Project, Kashgar. Source: BBC, “The
Colourful Propaganda of Xinjiang” ( January 12, 2015) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-
30722268 (accessed December 11, 2017).
Veils and long robes block a women’s splendor and beauty. . . . Women rep-
resent the love and beauty of the world and they should personify beauty
and serve as emissaries of love. Wrapping oneself up is not only not beau-
tifying, it can also destroy one’s body and mind. One’s heart and soul can
wither due to long periods in the dark.105
While fashion is a site of cultural resistance in France, it is a site of cultural gov-

ernance in Xinjiang, where the official Xinjiang Women’s Federation organizes
fashion shows that encourage women to “expose their pretty face and allow their
beautiful hair to flow free.”106 The People’s Daily also celebrates such sartorial engi-
neering: “The audience enjoyed a visual feast with charming models wearing dresses
that are both ethnic and fashionable.”107 The goal is to “make beautiful women, to
105 Quoted in Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 89–90.

106 “Xinjiang Promotes Beauty Project in Communities,” http://womenofchina/html1/projects/
project/15/2485-1.htm; “ ‘Beauty Project’ Garment Design Competition Held in Xinjiang,” People’s
Daily (November 5, 2015) http://en.people.cn/n/2015/1105/c98649-8971893.html (accessed
December 11, 2017); United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central
Committee, “Xinjiang nuxing ‘liangli gongcheng’ wu zhounian chengguo zhan zai Kashen juban” [An
exhibition for the five-year anniversary of the Xinjiang Women’s “Beauty Engineering Project” held
in Kashgar], Tianshan wang ( June 27, 2016) http://www.zytzb.gov.cn/tzb2010/S1824/201606/
016b28c620d94cd8bb3a9bca81bca197.shtml (accessed December 11, 2017); Jin, “Burqas, Hijabs
and Beards”; Leibold and Grose “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 89–90.
107 “ ‘Beauty Project’ Garment Design Competition.”
display a beautiful Xinjiang.”108 The Beauty Engineering Project reaped benefits

at the national level in 2013, when Mikray, a non-veiled Uyghur woman, won the
Miss China beauty pageant and went on to be a top model for Beauty Engineering
Project–style attire.109 This sartorial engineering also gained international exposure
in 2012 in the China-Eurasia Expo’s fashion show, which is now held every other
year in Xinjiang’s capital city, Urumqi.
Certainly in China there is a wide range of resistance to both up-veiling and de-
veiling. As James Leibold and Timothy Grose show, some Uyghur agree that veils are
an improper import from the Arab world, and some women complain that they have
been pressured by their husbands to veil. However, rather than see it as foreign and
backward, many Uyghur women celebrate veiling as an important activity in global
Islam’s modern cosmopolitan modest fashion.110 The Chinese case also shows the
problems of cultural sovereignty in both domestic and international politics. Beijing
responds to threats to cultural sovereignty not just by controlling national identity
by prescribing what (not) to wear to be “Chinese,” but by controlling ethnic/reli-
gious identity by positively defining the proper ethnic dress for Uyghur women.
Here material visual culture (i.e., the veil) is not simply a problem; as the Beauty
Engineering Project shows, an alternative material visual culture is the solution. In a
fascinating twist, the Beauty Engineering Project brings together the two modes of
concealing and revealing juxtaposed in this chapter—veils and beauty pageants—in
ways that resonate with NiqaBitch, Princess Hijab, and modest fashion.
Beijing’s strategy thus is interesting because it combines the Iranian proscription
of female fashion with the French prescription of female fashion: the visual culture
of the veil is presented as the problem, and the visual culture of an alternative “au-
thentic” sartorial form is presented as the solution. Rather than relying on just legal
measures to ban veils, as in France, Beijing looks to its own kind of morality police.
In the early 2010s tens of thousands of party cadres were sent around Xinjiang to
urge women to discard the “regressive fad” of veiling. This campaign was positive in
the sense that women who de-veiled were rewarded with cash prizes. It was negative
in the sense that the party cadres created intelligence files to monitor uncooperative
108 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Regional Government, “Beauty Engineering Project.”

109 Huang Lina, “Nu daxuesheng mire ayi: He shijian saipao de jianzhi mote” [Female college stu-
dent Mikray: Part-time model who races against time], Tianshan wang (March 7, 2015) http://news.
hexun.com/2015-03-07/173835037.html (accessed December 11, 2017); Kubanjan Samat, dir.,
Bainian qian Zhongguo Xinjiang 13 ge diqu fushi [Clothing in 13 regions of Xinjiang, China from one
hundred years ago] (September 3, 2017) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVJCKrg6JG8&featu
re=youtu.be (accessed December 11, 2017); “Gaoqing: Motezhe Xinjiang nuxing ‘liangli gongcheng’
fuzhuang douyan” [HD: Models of Xinjiang women’s Beauty Engineering Project], Zhongguo xinwen
wang (November 6, 2015) http://leaders.people.com.cn/n/2015/1106/c58278-27785534.html
(accessed December 11, 2017).
110 Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 98–100.
women. Likewise, citizens who reported veiled women to the authorities were
rewarded, and stores that sold cloth suitable for making veils were penalized.111
While the Beauty Engineering Project generally focused on persuasion, in
2015 the banning of public veil-wearing in Urumqi signified the shift to a much
more coercive strategy.112 The party-state’s tactics also include the “Marrying-up
and Becoming Kin” campaign, which mobilizes Han Chinese cadres to go and
live with Uyghur families in order to promote “inter-ethnic mingling” and “ethnic
harmony.”113 Through such intense everyday surveillance, Uyghur women are dis-
ciplined to de-veil and wear approved clothing. After Xi Jinping intensified the
crackdown in 2017—declaring that China needs to build a “Great Wall of Iron” in
Xinjiang114—the situation became a humanitarian disaster. More than one million
people, or over 11 percent of Xinjiang’s adult Muslim population, have been incar-
cerated in “re-education camps” for things such as having a long beard or wearing
a veil.115 Although these anti-veiling/pro-new-ethnic-clothing campaigns aim to
win the hearts and minds of Muslim women, one consequence is the fraying of
Xinjiang’s social fabric. As James Leibold explains, such surveillance and control
creates mistrust beyond target groups, causing “husbands to mistrust their wives;
sisters their brothers; Uyghurs other Uyghurs; and Party officials one another.”116
This assault on Muslims in China continues, and Chapter 11 examines its surveil-
lance politics.
Like other countries, the Chinese party-state seeks to nail down the meaning of
the veil through official definition and moral policing, and as in other countries, the
more it seeks to enforce a stable meaning, the more up-veiling/de-veiling resistance
it creates. Once again, culture, visuality, and global politics bleed into each other.
But the Chinese experience complicates the East/West framing of the debate in un-
expected ways, making us think again about the proper role of visual images and
multisensory artifacts in state/society relations. Finally, this experience shows how
China is not able to escape the political problems that we usually trace to “the West.”
111 Jin, “Burqas, Hijabs and Beards”; Leibold and Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang,” 95.
112 “The City of Urumqi Prohibition on Wearing Items That Mask the Face or Robe the Body,” trans-
lated by Timothy Grose and James Leibold (February 4, 2015) http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-
opinion/features/city-urumqi-prohibition-wearing-items-mask-face-or-robe-body (accessed April
19, 2019).
113 Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 11; Darren Byler and Timothy Grose, “China’s Surveillance
Laboratory,” Dissent (October 31, 2018) https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/chinas-
surveillance-laboratory (accessed March 87, 2019).
114 “China’s Xi Calls for ‘Great Wall of Iron’ to Safeguard Restive Xinjiang,” Reuters (March 10,
2017) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-security-xinjiang-idUSKBN16H04J (accessed
April 19, 2–19).
115 Adrian Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political
Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang,” Central Asian Survey 38:1 (2019):122.
116 Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 14.
Beijing’s focus on “beauty” as the measure of female value underlines how this na-
tional security project is ordered by the “male gaze.” It is also culturally governed
by China’s own “colonial gaze,” which promotes Han Chinese beauty standards in
Xinjiang. Indeed, there is a long history of Chinese men fantasizing about “con-
quering” Uyghur women as part of imperial governance, and Uyghur women are
now being encouraged to build inter-ethnic harmony by marrying Han men.117
Conclusion: Visibility and Visuality in Veiling

and Beauty Pageantry
This chapter explores the complex body politics of race, gender, and faith through
the unlikely juxtaposition of veiling and beauty pageantry. It employs the concep-
tual dynamic of concealing/revealing to analyze how various groups—women and
men, states and corporations—expend considerable resources negotiating, per-
forming, legislating, policing, and resisting such sartorial practices. Using examples
from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, Chapter 8 first decodes how they take on
meaning as an individual choice, then how the discursive structures of the male gaze
and the colonial gaze can structure these choices. It then examines state projects
of sartorial engineering to consider how structures and agents are mutually consti-
tuted through cultural governance and resistance.
As we have seen, it is hard to nail down the meaning of the veil; it means dif-
ferent things to different people, in different times and places. Many analysts thus
conclude that we should not be “obsessed” with veiling because it distracts us from
the real issues of the day: the physical violence and poverty suffered by women,118
racism in the West,119 and the political contradictions that define the liberal polity.120
Such analysis replays many of the ideological arguments of the twentieth century,
in which visual images were seen by many critical scholars as a distraction from the
true nature of class, race, and humanity in the ideologies of communism, fascism,
and liberal democracy. Rather than seek to clarify the essence of these grand ideo-
logical narratives, we need to appreciate that the provocation of veiling and beauty
pageants shows how politics can move us in visceral ways in affective communities
of sense.
117 See James A. Millward, “A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong’s Court: The Meaning of the Fragrant
Concubine,” Journal of Asian Studies 53:2 (1994):427–458; Darren Byler, “Uyghur Love in a Time of
Interethnic Marriage,” SupChina (August 7, 2019) https://supchina.com/2019/08/07/uyghur-love-
in-a-time-of-interethnic-marriage/ (accessed August 23, 2019).
118 Heath, “Introduction,” 14.
119 Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?; Scott, The Politics of the Veil; Heath, The Veil;
Lewis, Muslim Fashion.
120 Joppke, Veil.
Awrah, the video about young London women’s experience of up-veiling and de-
veiling, is interesting because it is more than the text. While these women discuss
the very serious topics of faith, belonging, and politics, the video shows them not as
ideologues, but as people who have fun in the sensible politics of everyday life. The
protest at the 1970 Miss World pageant shows activists’ visceral revulsion to this sexist
spectacle in ways that complement the meaning of their powerful slogan: “We’re
not beautiful, we’re not ugly, we’re angry!” NiqaBitch’s mixed experience at France’s
Ministry of Immigration and National Identity seems to exemplify Rancière’s political
aesthetics. The policeman literally “polices” the hegemonic partition of the sensible by
telling the women to move along, nothing to see here. The policewoman, on the other
hand, repartitions the sensible to highlight the levity and the gravity of their visual per-
formance: “I love your outfit, is it to do with the new law? . . . Can I take a photo?”
The analysis of taking the veil and competing in beauty pageants suggests that
these activities make participants move and feel differently. On the one hand, veiling
and beauty pageantry provoke nonverbal reactions that make people see women
differently. As a young woman in London recounts: “The first thing that you see
when you look at me is my headscarf. So automatically you know that I’m Muslim.
Even before I even say anything to you.”121 In a similar way, Lily declares, “I’m not
a typical beauty queen-type. I believe I was crowned Miss Thailand China Cosmos
[2013] because of my wisdom.”122
But rather than focus on the viewer’s experience and thus limit our analysis to
visibility/invisibility as a problem to be overcome, it is also important to highlight
women’s multisensory bodily experiences, especially when veiling and beauty pag-
eantry make them move and feel differently. As Fanon and The Battle of Algiers show,
up-veiling, de-veiling, and re-veiling make women move and feel in new ways, for a
new body politics. In “Algeria Unveiled,” Fanon discusses women and the veil not
just in terms of tactics (as considered earlier in the chapter), but in terms of bodily
transformation. Behind the veil, he notes, women are at home physically, socially,
and bodily: “The veil covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it. . . . The veil
protects, reassures, isolates.”123 To leave the home unveiled, young women needed
to “overcome inner resistances” because of the hostile reaction from men who saw
unveiled women as “naked.”124 The Battle of Algiers visualizes this uneasy conver-
sion from modest to activist by showing how thoughtful women are when they de-
veil, cut their hair, apply make-up, and change into short skirts. Importantly, there
is no dialogue in this scene; the characters thus do not tell us how they feel, instead
showing us what they can do.125
121
Nafisa Bakkar in Steadman et al., Awrah; also see Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens, 35.
122
Interview with Lily Chaweewan Chongsakjarenkul.
123
124
Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 52–53.
125
Minne, “Women at War,” 347.
This transformation is not just of the body, but of bodily movements, such as
learning a new way to walk: “Having been accustomed to confinement, her body
did not have the normal mobility before a limitless horizon of avenues, of unfolded
sidewalks, of houses, of people dodged or bumped into.”126 To overcome this, the
new revolutionary woman “quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new
means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-
woman-outside.”127 The successful transformation is astounding for Fanon: “The
shoulders of the unveiled woman are thrust back with easy freedom. She walks with
a graceful, measured stride, neither too fast nor too slow. Her legs are bare, not con-
fined by the veil, given back to themselves, and her hips are free.”128 As we saw with
the woman flirting at the checkpoint, the confident body politics of the newly de-
veiled women is clear in The Battle of Algiers (see figure 8.4). Fanon concludes that
through this experience, the Algerian woman “relearns her body, re-establishes it
in a totally revolutionary fashion. This new dialectic of the body and of the world
is primary in the case of one revolutionary woman.”129 The point here is not that
women are “emancipated” when they de-veil. Rather, these experiences show how
women can be empowered through both up-veiling and de-veiling performances,
because “the necessities of combat give rise in Algerian society to new attitudes, to
new modes of action, to new ways.”130
Certainly we should be careful about drawing strong conclusions from Fanon’s
“Algeria Unveiled”; it is a polemical work about women written by a man for a lib-
eration struggle that was dominated by men.131 A recent survey of young women’s
experiences of taking the veil in Britain thus is helpful for exploring how you don’t
just take the veil; the veil takes you, too, in a social performance of sensible poli-
tics.132 On the one hand, the survey confirms the experience of the “white British
Muslim convert” seen at the beginning of the chapter: women up-veil to have their
faith recognized on the street by other Muslims in a shared affective community of
sense.133 And as in revolutionary Algeria, the veil is used by women “to manage the
degree to which men (Muslim and non-Muslim) oriented to them in terms of their
physical attractiveness.”134 More important, many young Muslim women reported
how taking the veil changed their behavior; because you are seen as an “ambassador
of Islam, . . . you have to watch your own etiquette.”135 Numerous people reported
126
127
128
129
130
Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” 64; also see Moore, “The Veil of Nationalism,” 60.
131
For a critical view see Minne, “Women at War”; Moore, “The Veil of Nationalism.”
132
Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of Identity.”
133
Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of Identity,” 441.
134
135
that visibility as a Muslim woman helped them to avoid the temptations of boys and
liquor at university:
It’s weird how [up-veiling] changes your whole you know thinking and
stuff. It’s quite good. And it’s good in the way that you, before doing some-
thing, when you’ve got a hijab on you actually think twice you know
whereas if I didn’t wear hijab I would just do whatever.136
The veil thus works to encourage self-monitoring and self-discipline.137 While this
survey concludes that veils are an identity performance for British Muslims, we can
also highlight the productive body politics provoked by veils. More than changing
thinking, veils are also shaping and changing bodily performances in ways similar to
those described by Fanon and seen in The Battle of Algiers.
This productive sensible politics of body performance likewise emerges in
beauty pageantry. On the one hand, when conducting interviews I found that
beauty queens do not like to be filmed without the armor of their gown, sash, and
crown. On the other hand, as part of the pageantry process contestants learn how
to move and act differently. Lily described her four weeks’ training for the Miss
Thailand Chinese Cosmos pageant as “boot camp,” which was highlighted as a seg-
ment of the contest’s television broadcast.138 In my own filmed interview with Lily,
she shares this bodily knowledge by teaching her friends how to properly smile,
walk, and pose.
The feature film Miss Congeniality (2000) and the experience of Areeya Chumsai
(Miss Thailand 1994) both confirm the parallel body politics of beauty pageants and
military training. In Miss Congeniality the main character, Gracie, is forced to trans-
form herself from a highly-trained FBI agent into a highly-trained beauty queen.
The film shows how she painfully (and comically) learns how to wear a tight dress,
walk in high heels, and lose weight for the pageant. In the end, Gracie successfully
learns how to walk and act like a “lady,” who admires the “discipline” of her fellow
contestants.139 Areeya pursued the opposite trajectory: after training to transform
herself from a journalist into a beauty queen in 1994, in 1998 she took a job teaching
at Thailand’s military academy that required her to go to an actual boot camp. Like
Gracie learning to wear a tight dress, Areeya explains how she “felt powerful and
136 Hopkins and Greenwood, “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of Identity,” 444–445.
137 Also see Gökarıksel and Secor, “The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze,” 188–190.
138 See Miss Thailand Chinese Cosmos 2013, Part 2/ 7, Bangkok: Channel 7 TV ( July 18,
2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XotXQt1ALcY (accessed February 23, 2018).
139 Donald Petrie, dir., Miss Congeniality (Castle Rock, 2000); Madsen, “Performing Community
through the Feminine Body,” 3–5.
proud” learning how to properly wear the army uniform. Likewise, she describes the
muscle-memory that recruits have to develop to be able to properly salute superior
officers.140 In conversation with her boot camp comrades, Areeya also describes the
bodily training in terms of wearing shoes:
“What’s the difference between the Army and the pageant, [Areeya]?”
“The difference between high heels and combat boots,” I said.
“What’s the similarity then?”
“Both give you sore feet.”141
As these embodied performances show, it is difficult to reduce analysis of

veiling and beauty pageantry to an accurate representation of visibility/invisi-
bility. The negotiations of concealing and revealing seen in such visual artifacts
and bodily experiences—in public pageantry and public veiling, as in public
diplomacy—produce an excess of meaning beyond what can be expressed in
words and encapsulated in ideology. Here we go beyond hermeneutics to ap-
preciate veils as material artifacts and pageants as affective experiences, both of
which “do” politics through more embodied, affective, and everyday encounters
on the local, national, and world stages. Hence, rather than reveal the truth-value
of de/veiling and beauty pageantry, we can appreciate the affect-work, the uneasy
excitement, and the heterogeneous encounters provoked in such affective com-
munities of sense.
Even so, veils are a challenge not only to the liberal polity, but also to larger eth-
ical debates. Consider how, on the one hand, Jacques Derrida encourages us to pro-
vide unconditional hospitality that welcomes the “Other” into our homes, without
either judging them or seeking to convert them to the self.142 On the other hand,
Emmanuel Levinas stresses how we must not simply tolerate difference but actively
engage it through person-to-person, face-to-face, eye-to-eye encounters.143 Roland
Bleiker, David Campbell, and Emma Hutchison likewise conclude that to have an
ethical relation with refugees as people, we need to see their faces, up close and in
person.144
140 Areeya Chumsai, Muat Pop [Lt. Pop] (English title: Boot Camp) (Bangkok: Future Publishing,
1998), pp. 25–26.
141 Areeya, Muat Pop, 113.
142 Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, translated by Rachel Bowlby
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
143 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
144 Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, and Emma Hutchison, “Visual Cultures of Inhospitality,” Peace
Review 26:2 (2014):192–200.
But what of the veil: Does it deny this ethical encounter in the public square?
Are veiled women actually judging non-veiled women as impious?145 Or does it
mean that we need to think about the limits that the visual poses on global politics?
This tension between moral certainty (i.e., the piety of the religious, secular, Left, or
Right) and moral ambiguity is examined in more detail in Chapter 9’s discussion of
the sensible politics of walls.
145 Eltahawy, Headscarves and Hymens; Gökarıksel and Secor, “The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze”;
Heath, The Veil; Lewis, Modest Fashion.
9
Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and

the Sublime
It’s going to be a big, fat, beautiful wall!
—Donald J. Trump1
A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be,
and not building bridges, is not Christian.
—Pope Francis2
As Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign graphically showed, walls are a hot
topic; he promised to build a serious wall along the US-Mexico border—and to
get Mexico to pay for it. On his visit to Mexico in 2016, Pope Francis responded
to Trump’s wall call by declaring that building walls is morally repugnant, while
building bridges is the “Christian” way.
Like the pope, many critical intellectuals argue that such walls are not just a
political problem, but a moral problem. Wendy Brown’s Walled States, Waning
Sovereignty, for example, examines the theoretical politics of wall-building in the
United States and Israel and concludes that these walls are both ineffective and im-
moral; they don’t really keep foreigners out, and they actually produce a xenophobic
identity within America and Israel.3 With few exceptions,4 such criticism reflects the
1 Michael Finnegan, “It’s Going To Be a Big, Fat, Beautiful Wall!,” Los Angeles Times ( June 3,
2016) http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-california-campaign-20160602-snap-story.
html (accessed December 22, 2017).
2 Jim Yardley, “Pope Francis Suggests Donald Trump Is ‘Not Christian,’ ” New York Times (February
18, 2016) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/world/americas/pope-francis-donald-trump-
christian.html (accessed December 22, 2017).
3 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014).
4 See, for example, Timothy W. Luke, “Design as Defense: Broken Barriers and the Security
Spectacle at the US-Mexico Border,” in Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of Alterity,
Community and Securitizing Space, edited by Max O. Stephenson and Laura Zanotti (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 115–131; John Williams, “Territorial Borders, International Ethics and
Geography: Do Good Fences Still Make Good Neighbours?,” Geopolitics 8:2 (2003):25–46.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
tone of discussions of border walls not just in the academy,5 but also among public
intellectuals in newspapers, magazines, radio/TV, and popular nonfiction.6
Indeed, the radical critique of walls as ineffective barriers that exclude vulnerable
people on morally repugnant grounds is compelling. But rather than be satisfied with
this moral critique, Chapter 9 seeks not only to problematize the “political piety” of
moral judgments of walls as “good,” but also to interrogate the political piety of denoun-
cing them as “evil.”7 As George W. Bush’s post–September 11, 2001 “axis of evil” for-
eign policy narrative showed, such moralizing “rhetoric is an ‘analytical cul-de-sac’ that
prevents rather than encourages understanding.”8 It tends to close down discussion and
thus reproduce the politics of domination.
This chapter, however, seeks to understand walls in a different register as visual
artifacts and sensory spaces that embody political negotiations and experiences.
While morality is singular and cannot be negotiated—walls are either “good” or
“evil”—once we recognize walls as sites of negotiation, then we likewise recognize
that they can be renegotiated, which is a productive understanding of politics it-
self. Indeed, here we switch from partisan campaigning to figure politics in terms
of cultivating a “critical attitude” of self-reflection that goes beyond “merely serving
particular social segments or disempowered groups.” Rather than stake out political
positions, the goal here is to “displace institutionalized forms of recognition with
thinking. To think (rather than to seek to explain) in this sense is to invent and apply
conceptual frames and create juxtapositions that disrupt and/or render historically
contingent accepted knowledge practices.” Discussion thus can explore “a challenge
to identity politics in general, . . . even those on which some social movements are
5 See, for example, Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso,
2007); Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Yara Sharif,
Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict
(London: Routledge, 2017); Max O. Stephenson and Laura Zanotti, eds., Building Walls and Dissolving
Borders: The Challenges of Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014);
Elisabeth Vallet, ed., Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014);
Mohammad A. Chaichian, Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration, and Colonial Domination
(Leiden: Brill, 2014); Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States,
India and Israel (London: Zed Books, 2012).
6 See, for example, Tom Vanderbilt, “The Walls in Our Heads,” New York Times (November 4, 2016)
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/sunday/the-walls-in-our-heads.html (accessed April
27, 2019); James West, “Donald Trump Loves the Great Wall of China: Too Bad It Was a Complete
Disaster,” Mother Jones (March 3, 2016) http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/great-wall-
china-donald-trump (accessed April 27, 2019); Marcello Di Cintio, Walls: Travels along the Barricades
(London: Union Books, 2013).
7 For a discussion of political piety, see Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing
Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1988), p. 130.
8 Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 72.
Wal l s a s B ar r iers , Gateways , and the S ublime 211
predicated.”9 The aim is to see how the walls are not simply physical barriers that
exclude disadvantaged groups, but also “work” to produce political meaning and
political affect—and not necessarily the meanings and feelings that we’ve come to
expect.
Walls are key sites of visibility and visuality, where the visibility/visuality dy-
namic builds on W. J. T. Mitchell’s argument that we need to do more than trace
the “social construction of the visual,” because we also need to pay attention to the
“visual construction of the social”—and of the international.10 In other words, it is
necessary to not simply deconstruct how walls reflect social, political, and economic
power relations; we also need to consider how they can visually produce new and
different social orders and world orders. This chapter thus develops Sensible Politics’s
argument that visuals need to be appreciated not just in terms of their ideological-
value, but also in terms of their affect-work: not just what they mean, but also how
they can move us and connect us, as individuals and collectives in “affective com-
munities of sense.”11
To do this, Chapter 9 juxtaposes the American and Israeli walls with the Great
Wall of China, the massive physical infrastructure that is celebrated in the PRC as
the positive symbol of the Chinese nation.12 Mao Zedong told his compatriots: “You
aren’t really a hero [haoHan] until you’ve climbed the Great Wall.” China’s national
anthem sings: “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!/With our flesh and blood, let us
build our new Great Wall!” In 1984 Deng Xiaoping declared “Love our China, re-
store our Great Wall.”13 As we will see, the Great Wall is promoted as a symbol of
the PRC’s morally superior “defensive” foreign policy and as evidence that China
has never invaded any other country.14 The Great Wall thus is more than China’s
9 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans- Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 8, xv, 8.
Chicago Press, 2005), p. 343ff.
11 See Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after
Trauma (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Brian Massumi, Parables for the
Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Jacques Rancière,
“Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics
and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth
McCormick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 31.
12 See, for example, Huang Hua, “Renovating the Great Wall,” China Today 43:8 (August
1994):12–13.
13 Quoted in Carlos Rojas, The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), pp. 135, 131, 143.
14 Liu Dexi, “Zhongguo de fazhan yu waijiao zhengce de zouxiang” [Trends in China’s develop-
ment and foreign policy], Guoji zhengzhi yanjiu (2015) http://study.ccln.gov.cn/fenke/zhengzhixue/
zzzgwj/163609.shtml (accessed April 27, 2019); Arthur Waldron, “Scholarship and Patriotic
Education: The Great Wall Conference, 1994,” China Quarterly no. 143 (1995):843–850.
national heritage; it is “global cultural heritage” that exemplifies a morally good for-
eign policy of peace.15
The Great Wall juxtaposition thus can help us to challenge received wisdom—
both conservative and critical—about border walls. Rather than reflections of clear
territorial or social boundaries, the walls here are multiple and contingent artifacts
that function more as complex sites of flow than as absolute barriers. Franz Kafka’s
short story “The Great Wall of China” discusses the Wall’s piecemeal, jigsaw-like
construction process as a critique of singular coherent narratives; wall-building here
creates more gaps than barriers.16 “The Great Wall of China” story thus shows how
walls can take on meaning through creative destruction—discontinuous construc-
tion, destruction, and reconstruction—that animates more fluid inside/outside
dynamics.17
The Great Wall presents an interesting spatial (i.e. non-Western) juxtaposi-
tion; it also shows how walls vary in meaning temporally. A century ago the Great
Wall was understood in China as a monument to the wastefulness of tyrannical
emperors and/or as a useless ruin that didn’t border anything.18 In the twenty-first
century it is taken for granted that the Great Wall is morally good as a symbol of
peace that benefits humanity.19 This wall’s unstable historical meaning can provoke
odd questions: In a hundred years, will Trump’s Great Wall likewise be celebrated
around the world as the symbol of a defensive foreign policy that is morally exem-
plary? This outrageous idea recalls the shock Michel Foucault experienced when
he encountered the strange categories of a Chinese encyclopedia (as imagined by
Borges): “the stark impossibility of thinking that.”20
Certainly these walls are different: the US-Mexico barrier marks an actual inter-
state border, while the Great Wall of China is an archeological ruin and historical
curiosity that doesn’t mark sovereign space. Yet when figured as an infrastructure
of feeling, the Great Wall can tell us much about human relations. It also can tell us
15 Cheng Dalin, “The Great Tourist Icon,” in The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts and
Geremie R. Barmé (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006), p. 26.
16 Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories (London: Vintage, 2005), pp. 235–249.
17 Also see Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, xv, 8.
18 See Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge
University Press, 1990), p. 155; Rojas, The Great Wall, 5; Claire Roberts, “China’s Most Famous Ruin,”
in The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé (Sydney: Powerhouse
Publishing, 2006), p. 16; Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000
(New York: Grove Press, 2006).
19 At this point, analyses of the Great Wall often note the West’s influence in the rebirth of the Great
Wall as a positive symbol in the twentieth century (see Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 203ff.; Rojas,
The Great Wall; Roberts and Barmé, The Great Wall of China; Lovell, The Great Wall). I do not recount
this argument for two reasons: (1) I am interested in Chinese understandings of the Great Wall, and
(2) this Western-centric approach tends to devalue Chinese agency in understanding the Great Wall.
20 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. xv (emphasis in original).
about how people relate to the material culture of massive projects as visual artifacts
and sensory spaces that provoke affective responses—even exciting the sublime.
Indeed, the Great Wall keeps appearing at China’s borders as a sign of sovereign
power. The sign shown in figure 9.1 is noteworthy because its stylized Great Wall
Figure 9.1 Immigration counter at Haikou International Airport, China (2016). Courtesy

William A. Callahan
marks the border in Hainan Island, historically China’s Southern extreme, which is
thousands of miles away from the Great Wall itself.
The first part of the chapter thus uses the counter-example of the Great Wall of
China to deconstruct the ideology of post–Cold War walls like the US-Mexico bar-
rier. It probes this juxtaposition to show how (1) walls actually can be instruments
of security policy that is rationally sound, and (2) wall-building in both China and
the United States emerges from prior moral judgments that continue to produce the
moral problems of exclusion. While critical IR generally understands walls in terms
of the tension between absolute barriers at sovereign borders and neoliberalism’s
unrestrained flows of goods and capital, Chapter 9 employs the new conceptual
framework of “gaps” to explore how walls work as gateways that are neither com-
pletely closed nor completely open.
Critical borders studies scholars have profitably explored how borders are not
static and can take on meaning through movement and flows: borders here are
no longer just at the edge of the nation-state, but are complex sites of flows, often
throughout society.21 Interestingly, however, this research agenda has not been ap-
plied to analyze border walls, which characteristically are figured as static barriers
that ineffectively impede flows from without, while creating xenophobic homelands
within.22 In other words, in critical border studies walls generally are presented as a
“problem” that needs to be “solved.” This chapter, however, employs the “gaps” con-
cept to explore how walls themselves can be productive sites of movement, flows,
and exchange that complicate problem/solution figurations.
While the first section employs the “critical juxtaposition” of the Great Wall of
China and the “conceptual frame” of gaps to rethink border politics, the next sec-
tion explores another conceptual frame to understand walls in a different register;
specifically, it switches from a hermeneutic approach to a critical aesthetic mode
that values detailed empirical study and creative visual analysis of sensible politics.
The goal is to appreciate the visuality and materiality of walls as nonnarrative sites
of visceral provocation, moving from ideology to affect.23 Explorations of visuality
thus often shift attention away from the state and official foreign policy-making
to see how foreign affairs emerge through local, transnational, and unofficial self/
21 The literature on critical borders studies is substantial. For exemplary texts see David Newman,
“On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 18:1 (2003):13–25;
Reece Jones, Corey Johnson, Wendy Brown, Gabriel Popescu, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Alison Mountz,
and Emily Gilbert, “Interventions on the State of Sovereignty at the Border,” Political Geography 59
(2017):1–10; Corey Johnson, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter,
and Chris Rumford, “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies,” Political Geography
30 (2011):61–69; Louise Amoore and Alexandra Hall, “Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and
Resistance,” Cultural Geographies 17:3 (2010):299–319.
22 See, for example, Jones, Border Walls.
23 For a detailed discussion of ideology and affect, see Chapters 1, 2, and 4.
Other relations: the sensible politics of everyday encounters with walls as barriers

and gateways.
To explore this critical aesthetic strategy, the chapter discusses short films
about border walls and gateways, specifically Cynthia Weber’s pair of We Are Not
Immigrants films from the US-Mexico border and a Tecate beer advertisement that
aired in September 2016 during the US presidential campaign.24 Here walls aren’t
necessarily either the problem or the solution; rather, the goal is to encourage a
greater appreciation of their political complexity and moral ambiguity as gateways
that govern flows of goods, capital, ideas, and people.25 By problematizing polit-
ical piety (both conservative and critical), the chapter hopes to understand walls
as visual and multisensory experiences that work in a different register as active
embodiments of political debate—and of political resistance. The chapter thus fur-
ther develops the idea of visual artifacts as multisensory spaces and infrastructures
of feeling that move and connect people in affective communities of sense.
The Great Wall, of course, is not the only example that one could use to inter-
rogate current criticism of post–Cold War walls.26 This chapter examines Chinese
examples because that is my particular area of expertise. But as the comparative
analysis of walls will show, this research deploys unexpected juxtapositions and new
conceptual frames to call into question any Orientalist regionalization of interna-
tional studies. Indeed, the hope is that this chapter will generate further studies of
the sensible politics of walls that will explore examples from other times and places.
Deconstructing the Wall
Walls are interesting because they are physical and symbolic sites of inclusion and
exclusion that mark the inside from the outside. As discussed in earlier chapters,
inside/outside is the guiding distinction for IR: it marks the division between do-
mestic politics and international politics that is not only territorial but also social.
“Inside” denotes safety, law, and sovereignty, while “outside” marks danger, vio-
lence, and anarchy.27 This order-inside/wilderness-outside view of social life can be
seen in an eighteenth-century silk painting of the Great Wall (see figure 9.2).28
24 Cynthia Weber, dir., We Are Not Immigrants (18 minutes), screened at the Visual International
Politics workshop at LSE ( June 13, 2016); Tecate Beer Wall Advertisement, YouTube (September
2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXYM_zBVF7Q (accessed August 23, 2019).
25 See Michael J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 68.
26 See, for example, Chaichian, Empires and Walls.
27 R. B. J. Walker, Inside/ Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Also see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 211–231.
28 Also see Roberts and Barmé, The Great Wall of China, 184.
Figure 9.2 Inside and outside the Gate of Mountains and Seas (1760). Courtesy Collection
of National Palace Museum
The inside/outside distinction also emerged in 1961 when East Germany

constructed the Berlin Wall, which it saw as an “anti-fascist wall,” to distinguish
what it saw as its morally superior socialist “experiment” from West Berlin’s mor-
ally corrupt capitalist “tumor.”29 This territorial division soon came to symbolize
for both sides the global Cold War ideological division between the East and the
West. Likewise, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was seen as a sign that
the Cold War was over. This led to declarations of the end of history, the end of
ideology, and a brave new borderless world. In the neoliberal era of globalization,
nations are not divided by walls, but joined by unrestrained transnational flows of
goods and capital.
Why, then, do countries keep building walls? Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in
1989, dozens of new walls have been built, not just in the United States and Israel,
but also both inside the European Union and at its edges, as well as in the Middle
East, Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. The end of the Cold War thus did not re-
sult in the final victory of neoliberalism and the “End of History”; rather, exclusive
nationalism erupted first in many post-communist states, and now in the Brexit-
Trump era in liberal democratic states as well. Walls thus work as barriers to sepa-
rate people, in what some see as a “disease” and others as “apartheid.”30
As Brown and others argue, these new walls speak to a number of contradictions.
First, walls don’t work very well as a security strategy; the technologies of artillery
and airpower have made walls obsolete as a military strategy. In World War II, the
Germans just went around the Maginot Line to invade France, and then the Allies
29 Greg Eghigian, “Homo Munitus: The East Germans Observed,” in Socialist Modern: East German
Everyday Culture and Politics, edited by Katherine Pence and Paul Betts (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2007), p. 49.
30 Di Cintio, Walls, 11; Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, 15, 26, 63, 130; Weizman, Hollow Land, 10.
breached the Nazi’s Atlantik Wall, designed to seal off the continent. The US and
Israeli walls do not really “work” either; they are functionally ineffective as barriers
and are very expensive.31
Rather than seeing walls as something that states have built since ancient times,
Brown argues that new walls in the twenty-first century are a new general phe-
nomenon that lays bare the unique contradictions of our era.32 While rationally we
should see walls as a waste of time and money, Trump’s populist election campaign
showed that they are very popular with the general public. For Brown, walls thus
exemplify a crisis of sovereignty peculiar to the neoliberal era, in which sovereignty
has become unhinged from the state and has been relocated to transnational capital
and transnational religious activity.33
Many would counter that the new walls exemplify the global politics of the
post-9/11 era: a re-securitization of the state and a rapid expansion of sovereign
state power, not just in the United States, but globally.34 While Euro-America is
addressing the problems of neoliberalism, China, for example, is pursuing a combi-
nation of two illiberal ideologies—socialism and Confucianism—in what some call
the neo-socialist ideology, which cultivates expanded state power both at home and
abroad.35 This post–Cold War expansion of sovereign state power includes building
the “Great Firewall of China” to control cyberspace, as well as a new wall along the
PRC’s external border with North Korea designed to keep out refugees.36
But Brown is not persuaded by this argument: we are in what she calls the
“post-Westphalian” era, in which transnational capitalism uses the state to gen-
erate profits, while transnational religious groups are the main threat to state secu-
rity. New walls thus exemplify the post-Westphalian shift in IR from state-to-state
conflict to transnational flows of goods, capital, ideas, and people. People here are
not acting as agents of the nation-state, but as individuals and groups who cross
borders as migrants, refugees, and terrorists: Mexican border-crossers are not pur-
suing Mexican state policy, and BP (formerly British Petroleum) doesn’t act in the
interests of Great Britain when it spills/drills for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.
Brown argues that the new walls are not really meant to be material barriers,
but are symbolic and ideological performances designed to deal with popular anxi-
eties about the loss of sovereign power. It’s a complicated argument, but in general,
Brown sees walls as sites of “pure interdiction” that contradict liberalism’s commit-
ment to openness.37 They are a site of “hypocrisy” where liberal states break the law
31 See Brown, Walled States, 32; Weizman, Hollow Land, 161; Jones, Border Walls; Nail, Theory of the
Border.
32 Brown, Walled States,  7–8.
33 Brown, Walled States, 21ff.
34 See, for example, Jones, Border Walls.
35 See Frank Pieke, Knowing China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
36 See Chapter 11.
37 Brown, Walled States, 25; also see Jones, Border Walls, 181.
to enforce the law; to stop illegal immigrants, states build walls that actually require
them to break other laws.38 Hence walls exemplify the crisis of the liberal values of
“universal inclusion, equality, liberty, and the rule of law.”39
This is a technical, economic, and political issue, but for Brown and many others
wall-building ultimately is a moral issue: the wall is a blank screen upon which people
project their anxieties over the erosion of state sovereignty.40 Walls thus aren’t a ma-
terial expression of sovereign power, but rather an ideological sign of the loss of
power and a loss of sovereignty. Instead of asserting strength, walls are a symptom of
vulnerability and anxiety. They don’t really keep foreigners out and actually produce
a racist and xenophobic homeland within. Recall how Trump declared the neces-
sity of walls when he announced his presidential candidacy: “When Mexico sends
its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of
problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs.
They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”41
Walls thus are less physical constructions than they are symbolic social borders
that need to be deconstructed according to the visibility strategy for the proper
understanding of their hidden ideology. Brown here employs a robust example
of hermeneutic analysis to reframe walls from concrete material infrastructure
to be symbolic sites of the “bordering process.” The goal for hermeneutics is to
trace patterns of signification and thus show “how the text can be understood in
terms of the hidden content it discloses.”42 For visual international politics, the
visibility strategy’s hermeneutic mode is useful for revealing who is left out of po-
litical debates: who is visible inside the frame, and who is invisible outside; who
is included inside the wall, and who is excluded outside the wall. Walls here are
like visual images and artifacts more generally, which take on meaning through
“social construction.” Indeed, one of the hermeneutic mode’s key contributions is
highlighting—often visually—the plight of vulnerable people on the Other side of
the wall. As in much of critical IR, the target of criticism is the sovereign state, and
walls are prime examples of its exclusionary security practices. The political sub-
ject is not the citizen but the migrant, and walls are illusions that hide dominant
ideology.43
38 Brown, Walled States, 39–40, 101.

39 Brown, Walled States, 72.
40 Brown, Walled States, 73; Weizman, Hollow Land; Vallet, Borders, Fences and Walls; Stephenson
and Zanotti, Building Walls and Dissolving Borders.
41 Fred Imbert, “Donald Trump: Mexico Going to Pay for Wall,” CNBC (October 28, 2015) http://
www.cnbc.com/2015/10/28/donald-trump-mexico-going-to-pay-for-wall.html (accessed December
22, 2017).
42 Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method,  29–30.
43 See Nail, Theory of the Border, 13ff.
Figure 9.3 Ana Teresa Fernández, Borrada (2010). Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris
The goal here is emancipation: to demolish the ideological, social, and phys-
ical walls that separate humans from each other. Indeed, one of the strategies for
resisting the US-Mexico barrier is to artistically tear down the wall; for example,
Mexican-American artist Ana Teresa Fernández “erases the border” by painting the
wall with the landscape that it blocks (see figure 9.3).44 Walls, as an overwhelmingly
visual policing of social distinctions, both exemplify social exclusion and distract us
from the truth of power as domination.
To draw such conclusions, Brown looks to a few Western examples to make a
general argument about sovereignty and its demise.45 She is clear about not being
concerned with the specifics of particular walls—indeed, her passing reference to
the Great Wall of China locates it in the wrong region: South Asia rather than East
Asia.46 While Brown doesn’t see the need to look beyond her Western liberal dem-
ocratic examples, she suggests that “someone should.”47
44 Ana Teresa Fernández, “Borrando La Frontera— Erasing the Border” (2010) http://
anateresafernandez.com/borrando-la-barda-tijuana-mexico/ (accessed April 27, 2019). Sharif also ar-
tistically resists the West Bank barrier by using collages to “break all boundaries” (Sharif, Architecture of
Resistance, 8).
Accepting Brown’s invitation, this chapter looks to Chinese experiences as

examples of a different relation to walls as markers of community and security.
While walls are an insult to liberal society, they are very popular in China:
“Wall” is what makes China, wall makes the city of Beijing, the Imperial
City, the Forbidden City, and all subsidiary units down to country town,
village, and private home. Give any Chinese some loose bricks and he will
build a wall, a gate, and hire a gatekeeper to prevent an outsider from en-
tering. . . . The Great Wall is the symbol of China par excellence.48
Indeed, as the classical Chinese philosopher Xunzi explains: “Wherein lies that
which makes humanity human? I say it lies in humanity’s possession of boundaries.”49
The Great Wall thus is not simply a site of military architecture; it is a site of iden-
tity politics that informs the definition of Chinese foreign policy as “defensive.”50
The main security problem for pre-modern China was from the Central Eurasian
steppe, and guarding the border along the Great Wall was a common solution.
China’s military intellectuals still argue that “without the Great Wall, China could
never have survived as a unified state (Rome, it was pointed out, perished at the
hands of barbarians).”51 The Great Wall, in this popular narrative, is exemplary be-
cause it shows how China did not expand, but merely sought to defend itself from
foreign armies that attacked from the North. Responding in 2016 to the US Defense
Secretary’s description of Beijing’s actions in the South China Sea as “building a
Great Wall of self-isolation,” the spokesman for China’s Ministry of National
Defense explained, “[A]‌s those who study Chinese history know, the Great Wall
itself is a defensive strategy. It was built to keep out the cruel oppression of invaders,
not friendly envoys or free trade.”52 The Great Wall thus is taken as concrete evi-
dence that China has never invaded any other country—and never will.53 It also
exemplifies the PRC’s long-standing ideological position of non-interference in the
domestic politics of other countries.
As well as a sign of defense, the Great Wall is also a symbol of diplomacy. In
1974 the PRC gave the United Nations a massive thirty-six-by-sixteen-foot silk tap-
estry of the Great Wall, which now hangs in the UN headquarters in New York.
48 Jeffrey F. Meyer, The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City (Columbia: University of

South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 4.
49 Quoted in Rojas, The Great Wall, xvii.
50 See Liu, “Zhongguo de fazhan.”
51 Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 847.
52 “Mei wumie wojian[:]‌‘ziwo guali de changcheng’[;] Guofangbu: Zhongguo pengyou bian
tianxia” [US slander: We have built “a Great Wall of self-isolation”; Ministry of National Defence: We
have friends all over the world], Cankao xiaoxi wang ( July 1, 2016) http://www.cankaoxiaoxi.com/
china/20160701/1214020.shtml (accessed December 22, 2017).
53 See Liu, “Zhongguo de fazhan”; Huang, “Renovating the Great Wall.”
Figure 9.4 Chinese ambassador presents Great Wall tapestry to Foreign Ministry of

Pakistan (2014). Source: Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan
Great Wall tapestries also hang in the reception rooms of China’s embassies abroad,
as well as in the entrance hall of the foreign ministry of one of Beijing’s key allies,
Pakistan (see figure 9.4).54 Visiting world leaders regularly make a pilgrimage to the
wall; in 1972 Richard Nixon declared, “This is a great wall and it had to be built by
a great people,” while in 2009 Barak Obama mused that it is “magical.”55 The Great
Wall thus is “not just China’s national treasure, but shared or global cultural her-
itage.”56 Rather than being a moral problem, the Great Wall is offered as a moral
solution, again and again, not just for China, but for the world.
China here is neither exotic nor unique. The Great Wall actualizes the standard
textbook concept of sovereignty, in which one of the sovereign state’s necessary
54 “Sun Weidong dashi xiang Bajisitan waijiaobu zengsong ‘Wanli Changcheng’ guatan”
[Ambassador Sun Weidong presents “Great Wall” tapestry to the Foreign Ministry of Pakistan],
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (February 7,
2014) http://pk.chineseembassy.org/chn/zbgx/t1126157.htm (accessed April 27, 2019). Also see
Zhou Rong, “Ba-Zhong youyi rutong wanli changcheng” [The friendship between Pakistan and China
is like the Great Wall], Guangming ribao (February 8, 2014) http://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2014-
02/08/nw.D110000gmrb_20140208_3-08.htm (accessed April 27, 2019).
55 See Rojas, The Great Wall, 1.
56 Cheng, “The Great Tourist Icon,” 26.
tasks is to guard its territorial borders—otherwise it is not sovereign.57 When asked

about Trump’s wall plans in 2017, Mexico’s economy minister stated that “[t]‌he US
is a sovereign nation and if the US decides to build a wall on the southern border,
it’s their sovereign decision. We may like it or not . . . [but] we have to respect the
sovereign act of a nation.”58
The judgment of inefficiency—for example, that people can always climb
over or tunnel under walls—also misunderstands the logic of walls as a security
strategy: they are not meant to provide a hermetic seal, but to be part of a multidi-
mensional strategy that includes patrols, drones, remote sensors, and other forms of
surveillance.59 The goal is not complete security, but “good enough” security.60 As
the architect of the US wall built after 2006, Homeland Security Secretary Michael
Chertoff, explains, “a fence is part of a whole strategy. A fence by itself is not going to
work, but in conjunction with other tools, it can help.”61 While it is common to de-
construct the “rationality” of realist foreign policy claims, this suggests that it is also
necessary to deconstruct critics’ claims of the wall’s “irrationality.” In other words,
if it is broadly rational to safeguard one’s national borders, why is the US-Mexico
barrier so controversial?
Brown cannot appreciate the rationality of walls because she is employing a sin-
gular, absolute, and complete version of sovereignty that is taken from a survey of
classical and contemporary political theory.62 In IR theory, however, there are more
nuanced notions of borders and sovereignty. While the argument about the post-
Westphalian erosion of sovereignty assumes that sovereignty was ever solid, R. B.
J. Walker argues that sovereignty has never been stable and has always been prob-
lematic.63 The problems of sovereignty thus are not simply post-Westphalian, but
pre-Westphalian, and Westphalian too. Westaphalian sovereignty thus is an ideal
that is never realized—but this is not necessarily seen as a failure of the system as a
whole. Rather than speak of containment and impermeable barriers, it is common
57 See, for example, Robert Jackson and Georg Sorenson, Introduction to International Relations, 6th
ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 4; John Baylis, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, eds.,
The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), pp. 23–24.
58 Dana Afina, “Mexico Economy Minister Talks NAFTA, Border Wall in Detroit Visit,” Mlive
News (March 4, 2017) http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/03/mexico_eco-
nomic_official_detro.html (accessed April 27, 2019); also see Irasema Coronado, “Towards the Wall
between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora,” in Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity?, edited
by Elisabeth Vallet (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 261–262.
59 See Weizman, Hollow Land; Sharif, Architecture of Resistance.
60 Luke, “Design as Defense,” 120.
61 Quoted in Ronald Rael, “Border Wall as Architecture,” in Borders, Fences and Walls: State of
Insecurity?, edited by Elisabeth Vallet (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), p. 278.
62 Brown, Walled States, 22ff.
63 Walker, Inside/Outside, 179.
for critical IR theorists to recognize sovereignty as partial, overlapping, graduated,

and even an experience of “organized hypocrisy.”64 Even so, it still is the job of the
state to defend its borders—otherwise it is not sovereign. Thus the Great Wall of
China can help us to rethink the politics and the morality of the US wall to reframe
it as a defensive act.65
If we step away from a condemnation of walls as immoral sites of separation, then
we can examine not just what they mean, but what they can “do.” Rather than simply
condemning exclusion, the Chinese practice of walling encourages us to look more
closely at how the inside/outside distinction works as a “bordering process”:66
Traditionally [the Great Wall] marks off the “sacred land” (shenzhou) from
the rest of the world. Walls are important to the Chinese because, over and
above practical considerations (preventing thievery, resisting attack, and the
like), the wall is the line clearly drawn between what is significant and what is
insignificant, what is powerful and what is not powerful, who is kin and who
is stranger, what is sacred and not sacred.67
Understanding inside/outside as a complex and contingent relation is popular

in critical IR literature,68 and it is even more central to Chinese political discourse
as nei/wai.69 As discussed in previous chapters, conceptual dyads such as nei/wai-
inside/outside are key to social life in China, organizing relations among individ-
uals, families, and clans, and all the way up to relations between different peoples
and different states. Rather than function according to the fixed binary distinctions
characteristic of Enlightenment modernity, such dyads are relational, contex-
tual, contingent, and fluid, with a productive tension between the ideal and lived
64 See, for example, Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); William A. Callahan, Contingent States: Greater
China and Transnational Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Aihwa Ong,
“Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia,” Theory, Culture, and Society (2000) 17(4):55–75; Stephen
D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
65 See Williams, “Territorial Borders.”
66 See Newman, “On Borders and Power”; Nail, Theory of the Border.
67 Meyer, The Dragons of Tiananmen, 4.
68 See Walker, Inside/Outside; R. B. J. Walker, Out of Line: Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the
Limits of Modern Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016).
69 See Lien-sheng Yang, “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order,” in The Chinese World
Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations edited by John King Fairbank, 20–33 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Ge Zhaoguang, Lishi Zhongguo de nei yu wai: Youguan
“Zhongguo” yu “zhoubian” gainian de zai chengqing [Inside and outside in historical China: Re-clarifying
the concepts of “Middle Kingdom” and “periphery”] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017).
experience.70 Indeed, while much critical analysis of walls focuses on etymological

definitions and canonic texts,71 what is most interesting about these Chinese dyads
is the general lack of stable canonic definition; there is no orthodoxy, and the dyads’
contingent flexibility demands that we make sense of each dynamic through con-
tinual interpretive practice.72
Civilization/barbarism (Hua/yi) and loosening/tightening (fang/shou) are two
other conceptual dyads that are key to understanding how walls work. Loosening/
tightening is a contemporary Chinese concept used to describe the nonlinear and
non-progressive exercise of power seen in the PRC.73 Although fang/shou generally
describes a cycle of loosening and tightening of state control over society, often it
was not so much a chronological shift from loose to tight, and then back to loose
again, as doing both simultaneously. As Deng Xiaoping declared, successful govern-
ance requires “grasping with both hands” (liangshou zhua), with one hand grasping
Beijing’s economic policy of “reform and opening,” and the other grasping political
stability.74
Such dynamic dyads resonate with Foucault’s concept of “governmentality” be-
cause they shift us away from a blunt understanding of politics as the juridical power
to say “no,” toward a more nuanced sense of power as productively generated by
social relationships.75 The issue thus is “no longer that of fixing and demarcating the
territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the
good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement.”76 Governmentality
and loosening/tightening thus help us to shift from seeing walls as sovereign
barriers that separate and exclude the outside from the inside to appreciating how
walls also can function as productive sites that regulate flows according to degrees
of loosening/tightening. The governmentality of flows, which functions according
70 Thomas A. Metzger, Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 84; also see David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames,
Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).
71 Brown, Walled States; Nail, Theory of the Border.
72 See Oleg Benesch, “National Consciousness and the Evolution of the Civil/Military Binary in
East Asia,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 8:1 (2011):165.
73 See Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 5ff.
74 See Yang Fengcheng, ““Liangshou zhua” de yuanqi, neihan yu yanbian” [The origin, meaning and
evolution of “grasp with both hands”] Guangming ribao (February 23, 2011) http://news.ifeng.com/
history/shixueyuan/detail_2011_05/23/6567879_0.shtml (accessed December 22, 2017).
75 See Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed-
ited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp.
87–104.
76 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 65.
to a loosening/tightening dynamic, thus is quite different from neoliberalism’s un-

restrained flows of capital and goods.
As in earlier chapters, here we resist the geopolitical container-style organiza-
tion of knowledge-production, in which the choice is between the “modern West”
and “traditional China.”77 Rather than replacing “Eurocentric” concepts with
“Sinocentric” ones, the chapter explores the political dynamics of walls through an
assemblage of concepts that are Chinese, Euro-American, traditional, and contem-
porary. The goal here is to use Chinese concepts, examples, and experiences as a
critical juxtaposition that problematizes the moralized discourse of walls as good or
evil and opens up space for a more nuanced appreciation of what walls can “do” as
visual images and artifacts.
The Great Wall of China, therefore, is not simply a defensive act. Like many walls,
it was built to mark a moral distinction. It wasn’t built to defend an interstate border;
rather, it was employed to operationalize another dynamic dyad, the Civilization/
barbarism distinction (Hua/yi), that governed pre-modern China’s political, moral,
and literary discourse.78 Rather than just being exemplary post-Westphalian phe-
nomena, walls here are also pre-Westphalian events. To put it another way, we need
to recognize how post–Cold War IR theory was not simply dominated by globalists.
It also witnessed the backlash of essentialized identity politics, exemplified by
Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis. Clash of civilizations is not
simply a post–Cold War phenomenon; in many ways, it reproduces a pre-modern
notion of international politics that continues to be very popular in China and other
non-Western countries.79 However, rather than following Huntington to distinguish
between different civilizations, Chinese texts characteristically distinguish between
Civilization and barbarism. Indeed, the word for Civilization (Hua) is the same as
the word for “Chinese.” Civilized China only takes shape when it is distinguished
from barbarism, with “China being internal, large, and high and barbarians being
external, small and low.”80 This is not simply an ancient understanding; prominent
Chinese scholars still argue that border walls, including the Great Wall, are “an indi-
cator of settled social development, generally termed ‘civilization’.”81
77 See Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
78 See Yang, “Historical Notes”; Joseph MacKay, “The Nomadic Other: Ontological Security and
the Inner Asian Steppe in Historical East Asian International Politics,” Review of International Studies
42 (2016):471–491.
79 See, for example, Wang Jisi, “Huntingdun tiaoqi de lunzhan jiang chaoyue shikong” [The debate
provoked by Huntington transcends time and space], Shijie zhishi no. 3 (2009) https://user.guancha.
cn/main/content?id=66738 (accessed August 23, 2019).
80 Yang, “Historical Notes,” 20.
81 See Bruce Gordon Doar, “Delimited Boundaries and Great Wall Studies,” in The Great Wall of
China, edited by Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006),
pp. 122, 123ff.
The Great Wall was an important part of policing this hierarchical and moral-
ized social distinction. It was built to guard China from nomadic pastoralists of the
Central Eurasian steppe. Although nomads regularly banded together into large
armies, they generally did not present a state-to-state challenge to China, so much
as the ecological conflict between settled farmers who formed states and mobile
pastoralists who occasionally banded into confederations.82 Wall-building then
emerged from a Civilization/barbarism distinction that violently creates, targets,
and attacks the nomadic pastoralists as an invading barbaric horde. These polit-
ical and moral distinctions could be harsh; the orthography of classical Chinese
categorizes many nomads as “animals” rather than as fellow humans. Although the
Chinese language changed to include them as humans in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, the sub-human barbarian image remains prominent: Zhang Yimou’s feature
film The Great Wall (2016) sees the threat on the other side of the wall as green-
blooded, man-eating monsters.83
Thus China’s hierarchical, exclusive, and morally superior understanding of
walls is familiar. The Great Wall of China is a pre-Westphalian example of a strategy
designed to address the security challenge of mobile non-state peoples, rather
than interstate territorial conflict. As Ai Weiwei’s film Human Flow (2017) shows,
twenty-first-century walls likewise are designed to manage the post-Westphalian
transnational challenge of flowing people rather than to mark fixed territory.
Like Central Eurasian nomadic pastoralists, people at the US border—migrants,
refugees, smugglers, and terrorists—are largely unorganized, and do not act on be-
half of a state. Hence the Great Wall’s Civilization/barbarism distinction resonates
with Trump’s racialist description of Mexicans as barbaric criminals rather than
as vulnerable migrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists.”
While the Great Wall of China’s defensive foreign policy goal can be rationally
exemplary, when probed more deeply its moral problems emerge. The division be-
tween Civilized people and barbarians often became a racially-exclusive policing of
the distinction between Han and non-Han social groups. Indeed, even Mao’s famous
quotation about Chinese going to the Great Wall reflects this: haoHan means “hero”
and “good fellow,” but it also means “good Chinese”—and “good Han.” Strangely,
the wall that provokes moral outrage in the United States and Israel becomes the
key to China’s exceptionalist moral superiority.
Hence this juxtaposition of walls can help us to understand US and Chinese for-
eign policy in new ways. On the one hand, the Chinese experience allows us to see
walls as instruments of a security policy that is rationally sound: it is the sovereign
82 See Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society,
1940). For a more complex view see MacKay, “The Nomadic Other.”
83 Zhang Yimou, dir., Changcheng [The Great Wall] (Legendary Pictures, 2016).
state’s job to guard its borders, otherwise it is not sovereign. But because the
Chinese discourse of Civilization/barbarism is broadly analogous to the racialist
distinctions that support the US wall, the Great Wall of China has moral problems
as well. It is common to figure non-Western experience as either completely the
same or completely different—that is, as derivative sites of “modernization” or as
exotic alternatives. But this comparative political theory-style of analysis shows how
the juxtaposition of walls from different times and places can yield fruitful—and
unexpected—insights.
From Singular Barrier to Contingent Gateway

Critiques of the US-Mexico barrier and Israel’s West Bank barrier often rely on a sin-
gular notion of walls, in both time and space. Walls have been here since the begin-
ning of time as expressions of Western civilization and/or Judeo-Christian theology
that mark out sacred from secular space.84 Here sovereignty is absolute, and borders
are unproblematic, single-line boundaries. The US-Mexico barrier is figured as a
singular, coherent, linear, and unitary wall that sits exactly on the border, ranging
from the Pacific Ocean in San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.
Curiously, this unitary wall-scape is shared by supporters and critics alike.
Supporters seek to build such an international hermetic seal, yet because the wall
does not measure up to this unitary absolute singularity, critics declare it techni-
cally, economically, politically, and morally “ineffective.” Thus gaps are a problem
for both groups. They need to be sealed for supporters, while for critics they are
evidence of the deadly consequences of the wall’s failure: gaps in the wall redirect
people from urban crossings toward the high desert plateau, which generates greater
costs in terms of higher fees paid to human traffickers, as well as a higher death rate
among migrants.85 According to this argument, it’s all or nothing: walls are located
along 100 percent of the border and work 100 percent of the time—or they are
useless.86
The Great Wall of China generates similar discussions of unity and multiplicity,
continuity and gaps. The textbook description of the Great Wall portrays it as a sign
of the nation’s power, unity, and longevity.87 The Great Wall was built by China’s
first unified dynasty, and the Wall as a whole is presented as unified and continuous
in space and time: it is thousands of miles long and thousands of years old, the lar-
gest and longest structure built by human beings, and the only man-made structure
visible from outerspace. As mentioned previously, the Great Wall exemplifies the
84
See Brown, Walled States; Nail, Theory of the Border.
85
Brown, Walled States, 38; Nail, Theory of the Border, 21, 172–176, 189.
86
Brown, Walled States, 24; Vallet, Borders, Fences and Walls.
87
See Rojas, The Great Wall,  2–3.
timeless history of a defensive foreign policy: despite substantial historical experi-

ence to the contrary, we are constantly told that China has never invaded any other
country—and never will.
Upon closer examination, it turns out that none of these statements is true. The
current wall was built by the Ming dynasty five centuries ago and was rebuilt by the
PRC starting in 1952.88 It is neither continuous nor visible from outerspace. There
are dozens of sections of the wall that do not line up into a single-line barrier (like
with from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas). Until recently, we didn’t even know
the wall’s basic statistics; China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping com-
pleted the first archeological survey of the Great Wall in 2012, concluding that it
is a massive 21,196.18 kilometers in length.89 But this survey raises more questions
than answers because measuring the Great Wall is more than an empirical question;
it is an epistemological problem in the sense that any definition of the Great Wall
is unstable.90 There is no single continuous Great Wall; rather, there are dozens of
discontinuous and overlapping walls, built at different times, by different peoples,
for different purposes. Scholars deal with this epistemological instability in various
ways: some use different terms to refer to the wall in different eras, while others
simply pluralize the term: the Great Walls of China.91
Likewise, the Great Wall’s morality is neither singular nor unitary. Until the
twentieth century, it was seen in folk culture as an immoral artifact of the brutal
tyranny of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce). One of China’s
most popular folk tales, the story of Lady Meng Jiang, describes the wall as a site of
cruelty and suffering because it is built on the bones of conscripted laborers.92 The
Great Wall here is immoral not because it excluded vulnerable Others, but because
it brutalized Chinese subjects.
Instead of seeking a more precise measurement of the Great Wall and thus
asserting its unity and coherence in time and space, Carlos Rojas argues that we
should celebrate its gaps, and use them to engage in a critical view of identity, ter-
ritoriality and politics.93 Historically speaking, walls were not clear markers of
Civilization/barbarism. Han Chinese built walls against each other in the Warring
States period (475–221 bce), and non-Han built their own walls to guard against
Han in various periods.94 Rather than reflections of clear territorial or social
88 Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 217.

89 Xinhua, “China’s Great Wall Is 21,196 km Long: Survey” ( June 5, 2012) http://news.xinhuanet.
com/english/china/2012-06/05/c_131632790.htm (accessed April 27, 2019).
90 Rojas, The Great Wall, 17.
91 See Rojas, The Great Wall, xiv; Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé, “Introduction,” in The
Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing,
2006), p. 11; Waldron, The Great Wall of China.
92 Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 201–203.
93 Rojas, The Great Wall, 13ff.
94 Rojas, The Great Wall,  68–69.
boundaries, the walls here are multiple and contingent artifacts. As previously
suggested, Kafka’s short story “The Great Wall of China” appreciates the creative
power of disjuncture by showing how wall-building creates more gaps than barriers.
Walls thus take on meaning through creative destruction: discontinuous construc-
tion, destruction, and reconstruction that animates more fluid loosening/tight-
ening, inside/outside, and Civilization/barbarism dynamics. The Great Wall of
China thus can be experienced as an indeterminate challenge to the unitary and
essentialized master narratives of identity, culture, and territory—and hence a chal-
lenge to abstract binary notions of sovereignty, borders, and walls.
Therefore, rather than understand walls as barriers that separate countries, ter-
ritories, and populations, it is helpful to understand them as gateways that can join
them.95 Indeed, a popular Chinese idiom for inside or outside the Wall is actually in-
side or outside the gate or pass: guannei, guanwai. Alongside its work as military ar-
chitecture, the Great Wall was a site of meeting and exchange. At the wall, China and
its Northern neighbors fostered peaceful relations through trade, in which nomadic
pastoralists exchanged horses for Chinese grain, metalwork, and handicrafts.96 As a
former Chinese foreign minister explains:
the Great Wall of China, while safeguarding the Chinese people, also
served as a meeting point for economic and cultural exchange between
China and the countries on the other side [that] . . . increased its friendly
relations with other nations.97
The silk painting of the Great Wall in figure 9.2 thus helps us to question
assumptions we have about walls as immoral barriers. It was made by a Korean artist
and presented by the Korean ambassador to the Qing emperor as a tributary gift.
This image is painted from two perspectives: inside and outside the gate. But rather
than painting the “outside” of wall in protest—as often happens at the US-Mexico
barrier and Israel’s West Bank barrier—this pair of paintings is a vassal state’s cele-
bration of the sovereign power and cultural magnificence of the Chinese emperor
as the Son of Heaven. In 2014 Beijing reasserted such wall-themed friendship diplo-
macy by giving its key ally, Pakistan, a silk painting of the Great Wall that hangs in
the foyer of Pakistan’s foreign ministry (see figure 9.4).
Certainly gateways can include harsh checkpoints that actualize (im)moral
judgments of self and Other: Checkpoint Charlie, the Palestinian checkpoints,
and the US-Mexico border. However, instead of understanding walls simply as
blunt instruments of sovereign juridical power, it is helpful to think of power as
95 See Newman, “On Borders and Power”; Williams, “Territorial Borders”; Nail, Theory of the
Border.
96 See MacKay, “The Nomadic Other.”
97 Huang, “Renovating the Great Wall,” 12–13.
productively generated by social relationships. In this way, “Israeli checkpoints, or

the ‘Separation Wall’ [i.e. the West Bank Barrier], are no longer perceived as spaces of
division and fragmentation, but can also be recaptured as ‘bridges’ that connect in-
visible networks, space of livelihood, or collective spaces to dream.”98 Hence, rather
than be examples of barriers to neoliberalism’s unrestrained flows of goods and
capital, here walls can also provoke the new political dynamic of governmentality,
where power is produced through the loosening/tightening of flows of goods, cap-
ital, ideas, and people.
Indeed, the first major wall-building project on the US-Mexico border was not
called “Operation Barrier” but “Operation Gatekeeper” (1994). Although it is
common to declare that the US wall is evidence of a progressive militarization of the
border, Luke argues that when compared with other countries, the United States is
actually an “underwalled state.”99 Actually, the wall itself tightens and loosens ac-
cording to political season. The wall mandated by the Secure Fence Act (2006) was
never completed; the Obama administration suspended construction in 2010 when
the project ran out of funds.100
Of course the border is tightening now with Trump’s call to build a big, beautiful
wall. But even here the moral arguments falter: when the Trump administration put
out a call for bids to “design and build several prototype wall structures,” 10 percent
of the responding contractors were Hispanic. According to The Guardian, after some
soul-searching many Mexican-American contractors put moral issues aside and
treated the wall as a business opportunity: “My goal is to build a wall so I can make
enough money so we can turn this thing around and tear down the wall again.”101
Instead of being the site of “pure interdiction,” here walls as gateways are contact
zones, sites of markets and exchange where entry and exit are managed through the
loosening/tightening dynamic. In the Palestinian feature film Omar (2013), for ex-
ample, Omar’s love-life is regulated according to the loosening/tightening dynamic
of the West Bank barrier that he has to climb over to visit his girlfriend.102 While
Omar certainly engages in armed resistance to Israeli occupation, the wall here is
treated not as an absolute barrier but as one of the many features that he has to
creatively negotiate to get from here to there in the sensible politics of everyday
life. While contemporary critics see walls as a moral problem of clear divisions,
where all selves are xenophobic in their division from the Other, attention to this
98 Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, 8.

101 Julia Carrie Wong, “One in 10 Firms Bidding for Trump’s Mexico Wall Project Are Hispanic-
Owned,” The Guardian (March 11, 2017) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/
11/mexico-border-wall-hispanic-owned-construction-companies?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
(accessed December 22, 2017).
102 Hany Abu-Aasad, dir., Omar (ZBROS, 2013).
loosening/tightening dynamic shows how the power, unity, and even morality
of the wall is produced at its gaps. Rather than being evidence of “hypocrisy,”103
the wall’s contradictions are fruitful as ambiguous and multiple experiences of
governmentality. The wall is not a simple moral outrage; rather, it is a new economic
and political opportunity that has been provoked by a recalibrated governmentality
of flows.
From Textualizing the Wall to Visualizing the Wall

In China, wall-building characteristically arose from a hermeneutic approach to inter-
national politics. Pre-modern China is famous for its meritocratic civil service, which
valued ethical and literary knowledge over hereditary lineage. But this otherwise ad-
mirable policy employed textual modes of knowledge production over other ways of
experiencing the world, which in turn produced particular political problems. Scholar-
officials often discussed the Great Wall through texts and images that invoked the mor-
alized Civilization/barbarism distinction described above. As we saw in Chapter 7,
the oldest extant map of China, the Map of Civilization and Barbarians (Huayi tu;
1136 ce), famously includes the Great Wall as the proper unitary boundary between
Civilized China and the barbaric North (see figure 7.4). The problem with this very
detailed map—and with much pre-modern Great Wall discourse—is that it is based
on textual references, rather than on fieldwork-based ethnographic or geographic
surveys.104 Indeed, empirical research at the Great Wall was impossible at that time be-
cause Northern China was governed by the semi-nomadic Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–
1234 ce). The hermeneutic mode, which relied on moralized distinctions between
Civilization and barbarism, thus tragically narrowed the options for Chinese foreign
policy to the containment or the extermination of nomads as “barbarians.”105
The Chinese problem of textualizing the wall can help us to understand the
weaknesses of current critiques of twenty-first-century walls. Brown’s main argu-
ment is not based on experience, interviews, or fieldwork; rather, as a political the-
orist she examines classical and contemporary texts for a conceptual discussion of
walls and sovereignty. Yet this detailed theoretical analysis also shows the weakness
of abstract discussion: while thick descriptions of specific events show the mess-
iness of walls, hermeneutics reproduces the problems of binary oppositions that
add up to singular unity: self/Other, inside/outside, and so on. As previously men-
tioned, Brown posits the US wall as a single continuous structure that goes from be-
ginning to end, and then criticizes it for not living up to this ideological standard.106
103
Brown, Walled States, 101.
104
Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 24, 32.
105
Waldron, The Great Wall of China, 37; also see Rojas, The Great Wall, 73.
106
Brown, Walled States, 30.
To explain the illusory power of walls, Brown recalls the story of the Wizard of
Oz,107 who appeared to be an awesome sovereign until Toto tore away the curtain
to reveal an anxious and vulnerable man. This illustrates the workings of herme-
neutic interpretation, which aims to trace patterns of signification and thus reveal
hidden ideology. The lesson here is that walls themselves are secondary, “a deriva-
tive phenomenon” that is the product of deeply embedded social contradictions.108
The focus on reading walls as “texts” reflects critical theory’s suspicion of images
and other visual artifacts.109 It is the job of critical scholars, according to the herme-
neutic mode of analysis, to deconstruct how state and corporate power use images
to manipulate the general public.110 Brown’s text is exemplary in its negative view
of visuality; walls are criticized as “stages,” “spectacles,” and “screens” that powerful
people use to “theatricalize and spectacularize” sovereignty in a “ritualistic perfor-
mance” that disguises hegemonic power and hides true ideological intentions.111
Walls thus are less physical constructions than symbolic borders that are socially
constructed and thus need to be deconstructed for proper understanding.
Certainly we can gain much by treating walls as “texts” to see how they function
as narratives of national identity and resistance to it. But rather than just understand
them as representations of narratives of sovereignty, identity, and security, a “crit-
ical aesthetic” mode of analysis helps us to see walls as a collection of nonnarrative
and nondiscursive sites constructed to provoke emotions—pride, awe, disgust, out-
rage, and sadness—that are themselves political performances. Thus, if the chapter’s
first shift of conceptual frame is from figuring walls as absolute barriers to see them
as gateways of governmentality, then the second shift is from hermeneutic textual
analysis to a critical aesthetic mode that values detailed empirical study and creative
analysis of walls as visual artifacts and sensory spaces.
When we speak of “aesthetics” in global politics, we are not discussing a theory of
beauty but are more concerned with styles of ordering that raise ethical questions.112
The shift from exclusive binary oppositions to relational dyads seen in this book is
one example of a critical aesthetic approach to probing the global politics of walls.
While critics commonly figure walls as screens that hide true meaning and hege-
monic ideology, this critical aesthetic strategy treats visuality as an opportunity, in
which screens and other visual sites are valued for their potential to excite affective

108 Nail, Theory of the Border, 21; also see Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, 192.
109 See Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 342.
110 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 32–33; Brown, Walled States, 74–75; Stephenson and Zanotti,
Building Walls and Dissolving Borders.
111 See, for example, Brown, Walled States, 26, 39, 70, 73, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 130.
Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004); Bleiker, Aesthetics and World
Politics; Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method.
communities of sense. In such a critical aesthetic mode, we move from seeing walls as
material and/or symbolic barriers between pre-existing spaces to figure them as not
simply partitions of space (e.g., territorial borders), but multisensory experiences of
sight, sound, touch, and smell that (re)partition the see-able, the say-able and the
think-able.113 Resistance is not necessarily found in the emancipation of a wall-free,
borderless world—for example, the liberal victory of demolishing the Berlin Wall.
Rather, resistance works in a different register that emerges through more nuanced
repartitions the sensible that create new political dynamics, as well as new political
problems. Politics here emerges less in the formal arenas of the struggle for state
power than in the broader sense of provoking affective communities of sense that
complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done.
While Raymond Williams discusses politics in terms of “structures of feeling,”
here we can appreciate walls as “infrastructures of feeling.” The critical aesthetic
strategy thus is helpful for understanding the Great Wall as a nonnarrative and non-
discursive artifact and experience. For many it is an “[a]‌we-inspiring fragment of
something much larger, more complex and contradictory”; the Great Wall is often
described as a magnificent dragon gracefully flowing through the steep hills and
deep valleys of Northern China.114 According to Brown’s understanding, however,
twenty-first-century walls are awesome only in a negative way: the US wall is a
“behemoth,” while the Israeli wall “snakes” rather than dances through the hills.115
These contemporary walls thus are examples of the hegemonic militarized power of
“shock and awe.”116
The Great Wall, on the other hand, can excite the sublime. Immanuel Kant uses
a beautiful/sublime distinction to explore judgment, where the beautiful refers to
“the form of an object, which consists in having boundaries.” The object is beautiful
here because it is harmonious and thus is pleasurable within accepted measures of
judgment. The sublime, however, appeals to the “momentary arrest of our inter-
pretive faculties” that excites a shock that can be both horrible and pleasurable.117
While the beautiful inspires “restful contemplation,” the sublime excites movement,
a vibration “quickly alternating attraction towards, and repulsion from, the same
Object.”118 The sublime thus can emerge through a relational mode of creative/

114 Roberts, “China’s Most Famous Ruin,” 25; see interviews in Bill Callahan, dir., Great
Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience (Wildwood Films, 2019), screened at LSE Festival, London
(March 2, 2019) https://vimeo.com/billcallahan/great-walls (accessed August 23, 2019).
117 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 2000), p. 102. Also see Michael J. Shapiro, The Political Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2018); Michael J. Shapiro, “The Sublime Today: Re-partitioning the Global Sensible,” Millennium
34:3 (2006):657–681; Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics,  67–83.
118 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 120.
destruction. A violent thunderstorm is an experience of the mathematical sublime;

it is so “absolutely large” that it causes us to turn inward, encouraging critical re-
flection.119 In the dynamic sublime, we “recognize the fearfulness of nature without
fearing it” and so elevate our imagination beyond the boundaries of common
sense.120 The Great Wall does not have the destructive power of a violent storm, but
it does work on a massive scale. Even in its fragmented state, the wall’s spatial and
temporal expanse cannot be comprehended as an individual experience. As Rojas
explains, the “great” in the Great Wall is the sublime: first as the symbol of territo-
rial, ethnic, and historical boundaries, and then as the experience of boundlessness;
it is thousands of miles long and thousands of years old.121
To understand how walls can be sublime, it is helpful to change our perspective
from analyzing the wall in terms of its verticality—that is, the hermeneutic pro-
ject of giving voice to vulnerable others on the Other side of the wall—to horizon-
tally look along the wall itself.122 Here we not only can see the clear inside-outside
boundary between Civilization and barbarism, but also can experience the sublime
boundlessness of the wall dancing its way through the hills like a mystical dragon.
Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s Project to Extend the Great Wall (1993; see figure
9.5) was an explosive public art event that celebrates the mystical nature of the
wall.123 While Fernández paints a peaceful landscape on the US-Mexico barrier to
“erase the border” (see figure 9.3), Cai’s pyrotechnic art lights up the night sky to
violently extend the western terminus of the Great Wall by ten kilometers. Cai’s art
thus speaks to the violent creative/destruction and the awe-inspiring boundary/
boundlessness of the sublime wall.
The sublime thus does not provide emancipation from the “moral problem” of
walls; rather, it allows us to appreciate their affect-work as material performances
and multisensory spaces that can excite politics in a different register. Much like
Kant’s understanding of the sublime as “ever being alternatively attracting and
repelling,”124 China’s most famous modern writer, Lu Xun, concludes: “The Great
Wall of China: a wonder and a curse.”125

120 Kant, The Critique of Judgment, 118; Shapiro, “The Sublime Today,” 664.
121 Rojas, The Great Wall, 14.
122 For a similar approach to borders, see Rumford, Cosmopolitan Borders,  39–54.
123 See Takehisa Araki, dir., Cai Guo-Qiang: Project to Add 10,000m to the Great Wall of China—
Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (Cai Studio, 1993); Rojas, The Great Wall, 20–22. A clip of this film
can be seen at the end of Callahan, Great Walls.
125 Quoted in Geremie R. Barmé, “Prince Gong’s Folly,” in The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire
Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006), p. 248.
Figure 9.5 Cai Guo-Qiang, Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000
Meters: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (1993). Courtesy Cai Studio
Visibility and Visuality at the US-Mexico Barrier

This section re-visions walls in ways that appreciate the productive tension between
hermeneutics and critical aesthetics, narrative and nonnarrative, ideology and af-
fect, and the quotidian everyday and the boundless sublime, ultimately under-
standing sensible politics in terms of visibility and visuality.
Weber’s pair of We Are Not Immigrants (2016) films about the US-Mexico
border exemplify such productive tensions. One film is narrative and the other is
nonnarrative. Both address questions of visibility and visuality: the visibility of
who is (not) allowed to cross the border, and the visuality of the anger, frustra-
tion, fear, (and occasional joy) of the sensible politics of everyday border-crossing
experiences.126 In many ways, Weber’s films illustrate critical theorists’ hermeneutic
analysis: they show the progressive militarization of the US-Mexico border and the
moral problems this barrier creates for disempowered people who need to cross the
wall. It is an ethnographic approach in the traditional sense; the first film explores
the experience of people from the Pascua Yaqui Nation, a Native American tribe
whose community has been divided by the border’s arbitrary barrier. One of the
indigenous community’s leaders, José Matus, makes a verbal critique—“ We are not
Also see Sharif, Architecture of Resistance; Abu-Aasad,  Omar.

126
Figure 9.6 Negotiating a border wall. Courtesy Cynthia Weber
immigrants!”—and narrates the injustice produced by the wall that separates him
from his cousins on the Other side of the border.127
But the film also offers a visual critique, showing Matus not just at the boundary
of the United States and Mexico, but at the wall between his sovereign indigenous
nation and the sovereign nation-state of the United States. Rather than being an
imposing wall that is an outrage to liberalism, this wall is 2.5 meters high and has
an open and unguarded gate. Matus shows its fluidity by stepping inside and out-
side the border of his indigenous community, in an expression of his own sover-
eignty (see figure 9.6). As with the Great Wall of China, it is the gaps that produce
meaning—and a meaning that is not singular but ambiguous. As for many indige-
nous groups, here claiming and performing sovereignty is the goal rather than the
problem.
The second film in the We Are Not Immigrants pair is nonnarrative and nonlinear.
It is designed for display in an art gallery and employs three side-by-side screens
that flash in and out; sometimes three images are screened in parallel, but at other
times only one or two are shown. It works according to an aesthetic of loosening/
tightening: the three 4:3 aspect ratio spaces enact the openness of a broad land-
scape that typifies the high desert, but the flashing black spaces also point to tight-
ening. The film has an affective rhythm, but no linear narrative; it is designed to
be screened in a loop, so there is no beginning or end. Scenes from the first film of
the frightening experience of crossing the border are reproduced here: we see big,
127 Also see Cynthia Weber, “I Am an American”: Filming the Fear of Difference (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 78–84.
armed, border patrol officers “policing” the border by demanding documents, again
and again, with a coercively official politeness.
But there are new clips as well, which provoke affect in different ways. Indeed,
both films highlight how the wall is not the site of “pure interdiction,” but a gateway
of governed flows that is a site of exchange, play, and enjoyment. One sequence shows
a party at the border, complete with a Tecate beer tent and children playing volley-
ball over the wall, while a border patrol SUV drives by on the American side. The ex-
perience thus can be sublime: the horrible police state alongside a pleasurable fiesta
where the wall is as much a gateway as a barrier. While Brown is very serious about
the ideology of the wall, here We Are Not Immigrants allows a more ambiguous and
creatively sublime appreciation of what the wall can do. Indeed, it shows how walls not
only separate people but can bring them together as “a catalyst to promote cross-border
cooperation.”128
With the nastiness of Trump’s wall-policy in mind, this argument is difficult to sus-
tain. Walls are still an expression of post-sovereign and post-Westphalian power that
is a moral outrage. Still, Trump’s wall-building campaign has provoked interesting
reactions. Alongside Pope Francis’s serious moral chastising of Trump, a Mexican beer
commercial offers a creative critique that is both sharp and playful. It starts with the
familiar bird’s-eye view of the US-Mexico barrier as an ominous monument to racist
separation; snaking through the extreme frontier of the Tecate desert, it is sublimely
terrible.129 The narrator declares in a menacing tone, “It’s time for a wall, a tremen-
dous wall, the best wall!,” with the film showing four Mexicans and four Californians
confronting each other at the wall. The ad then dramatically shifts perspective in terms
of both tone and scale. The wall, it turns out, is only two feet high. The narrator declares
with glee: “The Tecate Beer Wall. A wall that brings us together. This wall might be
small, but it’s going to be YUGE!” The Mexican and Californian men go from mutual
enmity to mutual amity, with hugs, handshakes, and fist-bumps. The awesome wall is
brought down to earth and re-visioned on a more human scale, as a long thin table that
facilitates beer drinking. More important, the Mexicans share their Tecate beer, and the
Californians jump over the wall in celebration to join the party on the Other side. As in
Weber’s second We Are Not Immigrants film, the party at the border involves drinking
Tecate beer in a playful, affective community of sense.
Certainly we can see this as another example of the post-Westphalian/post-
sovereign era: the transnational corporation Heineken, which owns Tecate beer,
employed the global PR firm Saatchi and Saatchi to set the political agenda in terms
of buying more beer.130 In a confirmation of the commercial nature of the video,
128 Coronado, “Towards the Wall,” 265.

129 See Tecate Beer Wall Advertisement. Also see “Mexican Beer Brand Mocks Trump’s Wall in
Brilliant Ad,” The Huffington Post (September 28, 2016) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/
tecate-ad-beer-wall-trump_us_57ec5fb3e4b024a52d2cd2b3 (accessed December 22, 2017).
130 See “Mexican Beer Brand.”
Heineken USA refused to give me permission to use the Tecate ad in my Great

Walls film because, they explained, they need to maintain absolute control over
their brand.
But I think that this playful, thirty-second ad is fruitfully pregnant with reversals
and contradictions. And it is even political in the sense of partisan campaigning;
it premiered in September 2016 during the first presidential debate on Fox News,
Univision, and Telemundo. More important, it shows “play” in the sense of both
ludic action and flexible plasticity; the wall brings together as well as separates.131
It creatively combines visibility and visuality in a multidimensional sensory expe-
rience that needs to be not only unpacked for political meaning, but also appreci-
ated for political affect. Rather than political piety, here we have moral ambiguity at
the wall.
Conclusion
It is common to criticize post–Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico barrier
and Israel’s West Bank barrier, as ineffective and immoral. Chapter 9, however,
problematizes such arguments by using the unlikely juxtaposition of the Great
Wall of China and the conceptual dynamics of gaps and loosening/tightening to
explore (1) how walls can be a rational security policy, (2) how they are not simply
barriers but can be complex gateways for flows, and (3) how walls are not simply
texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of nonnarrative and nonlinear affec-
tive experience that can even excite the sublime.
While many critical theorists understand twenty-first-century walls in terms of
the tension between “pure interdiction” at sovereign borders and neoliberalism’s
unrestrained flows of goods and capital, this chapter refigures walls as gateways
that are neither completely closed nor completely open and thus function through
a loosening/tightening governmentality of flows. Rather than merely being an
issue of security and foreign policy, walls thus can provoke new dynamics of social-
ordering and world-ordering. By putting moral questions to the side for a moment,
the chapter aims to understand walls in a different register as sublime experiences
of horror and wonder. Walls here are more than visual images whose ideology
demands deconstruction; they are also visual artifacts, multisensory spaces, and
infrastructures of feeling that move and connect people in unexpected affective
See Sharif, Architecture of Resistance, xv, 13.

131
10
Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace
Introduction
Chapter 10 continues the exploration of how visual artifacts can be sensory spaces
and infrastructures of feeling that provoke unexpected affective communities of
sense. It examines gardens as social constructions of social-ordering and world-
ordering that both shape and participate in international politics. As multisen-
sory artifacts, gardens are a site where both political elites and ordinary people
perform the sensible politics of everyday life. In particular, Chapter 10 questions
understandings of international politics that employ the peace-war binary, to argue
that the “civility/martiality” dynamic dyad is more helpful for understanding such
social-ordering and world-ordering performances. It juxtaposes historical gardens
from Japan, China, and France to flesh out the dynamics of “civility/martiality.”
The chapter looks to my experience in garden-building to examine how aesthetic
conventions and practical techniques excite ideology and affect in two national war
memorial sites: the Nanjing Massacre Memorial in China and the Yasukuni Shrine
in Japan. The chapter’s conclusion shows how we can use this analytical framework
to better understand (and feel) the sensible politics of other key national memorial
spaces, such as the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York.
As with picture-taking, film-making, map-making, veil-wearing, and wall-building,
here garden-building is theory-building: by producing new sites and sensibilities, it
creatively shapes our understanding of international politics.
To explore these arguments, it is helpful to examine a twenty-first-century dip-
lomatic controversy. On December 26, 2013, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe
visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo to commemorate his country’s war dead. A few
days later Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom denounced
Abe’s visit in London’s Daily Telegraph:
In the Harry Potter story, the dark wizard Voldemort dies hard because the
seven horcruxes, which contain parts of his soul, have been destroyed. If
militarism is like the haunting Voldemort of Japan, the Yasukuni Shrine in
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
Tokyo is a kind of horcrux, representing the darkest parts of that nation’s

soul. Last week, in flagrant disregard of the feelings of his Asian neighbors,
Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, paid homage at the Yasukuni
Shrine.1
Liu here is voicing a reasonable concern that Abe is remilitarizing Japan; indeed, the
Yasukuni Shrine is a controversial site because it enshrines the souls of thousands
of war criminals. China and South Korea are particularly critical when Japan’s
leaders visit the shrine because they are still mourning the atrocities committed by
imperial Japan.
Discussions of the Yasukuni Shrine thus characteristically frame it as an issue
of “Japanese nationalism,” “East Asian international relations (IR),” and/or the
problems of “history and memory.”2 Ambassador Liu’s intervention is interesting
because it points in new directions. Certainly his invocation of Harry Potter follows
the trend in IR that values popular culture as an innovative approach to interna-
tional politics.3 Importantly for this chapter, Liu’s criticism of Abe’s visit to the
Yasukuni Shine also highlights gardens as sites of international politics; the Shrine
is not simply a memorial, it is also a garden park.4 While “peace gardens” as a site for
relaxation are now common in everyday urban life,5 how can we understand the in-
ternational politics of gardens that actively celebrate war? This chapter thus follows
the Chinese ambassador’s lead to explore how gardens can be “unexpected places”
for the sensible politics of diplomacy, peace, and war in a general sense,6 and how
the Yasukuni Shrine in particular demands to be interpreted as a peace/war garden.
Although gardens are a popular location for diplomatic performances—such
as the Treaty of Versailles—analysis of the international politics of gardens itself
1 Liu Xiaoming, “China and Britain Won the War Together,” Daily Telegraph ( January 1, 2014)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10546442/Liu-Xiaoming-China-and-Britain-won-the-war-
together.html (accessed June 3, 2017).
2 See Jeff Kingston, “Awkward Talisman: War Memory, Reconciliation and Yasukuni,” East Asia
24 (2007):295–318; Akiko Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
3 See Iver Neumann and Daniel H. Nexon, eds., Harry Potter and International Relations
(London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
4 See Mashima Mitsuhide, Yasukuni no Shiki [Four seasons at the Yasukuni Shrine] (Tokyo: Kindai
Publishing Company Mashima, 2008).
5 See Alex McClimens, Stuart Doel, Rachel Ibbotson, Nick Partridge, Elaine Muscroft, and Lesley
Lockwood, “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel? Public Space and Personal Wellbeing in City
Centre Sheffield,” Journal of Urban Design 17:1 (2012):117–133.
6 See Christine Sylvester, Art/ Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It
(London: Routledge, 2008); Debbie Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and
Tourism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Xavier Guillaume, Rune S. Andersen,
and Juha A. Vuori, “Paint It Black: Colours and the Social Meaning of the Battlefield,” European Journal
of International Relations 22:1 (2015):49–71.
Gard ens in D ipl omac y, War, and   Peac e 241
is under-researched in IR. Serious research is generally located in the humanities

and professional schools of art history, social history, and landscape architecture.7
Among social scientists, geographers and sociologists have devoted the most at-
tention to the topic, using gardens to interrogate relations of space, nature, culture,
and power.8 This chapter builds on these interdisciplinary trends to examine how
gardens—like battlefields9—are contingent social constructions that shape and
participate in international politics. Gardens here are a site, an institution, an en-
actment, an encounter—and an ideology. In addition to analyzing gardens as ideo-
logical sites of symbolic power, the chapter also appreciates them as concrete visual
artifacts, sensory spaces, and infrastructures of feeling in which diplomacy, war, and
peace are represented, performed, and experienced through more embodied, affec-
tive, and everyday encounters.10 The aim of the chapter, then, is to highlight how
peace-war becomes intelligible and thus is enacted or appropriated, in part through
garden performances that employ the visibility strategy (the social construction of
the visual) and/or the visuality strategy (the visual construction of the social).
To develop a framework for exploring the sensible politics of gardens, the
chapter first locates its analysis in the following interrelated theoretical contexts—
Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible,” Michel Foucault’s “heterotopia,”
7 See Wang Yi, Zhongguo yuanlin wenhua shi [The cultural history of Chinese gardens]
(Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2014); Geremie R. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness: A
Life in Ruins,” East Asian History 11 (1996):111–158; Geremie R. Barmé, “Beijing, a Garden of
Violence,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9:4 (2008):612–639; Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden
Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Martin Jay, “No State of
Grace: Violence in the Garden,” in Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, edited by Harris Dianne Suzette
and D. Fairchild Ruggles (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh, 2011), pp. 45–60; Wybe Kuitert,
Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002); Wybe
Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650–1950 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2017); Wybe Kuitert, “Borrowing Scenery and the Landscape That Lends—The Final Chapter of
Yuanye,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 10:2 (2015):32–43; Ron Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
8 See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Hong-key Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different
Gardens: The French and the Japanese Cases,” GeoJournal 33:4 (1994):471–477; Chandra Mukerji,
Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1997); Chandra Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles,” Public Culture
24:3 (2012):509–534; Timothy W. Luke, “The Missouri Botanical Garden: Reworking Biopower as
Florapower,” Organization and Environment 13:3 (2000):305–321; Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale,
“Utopiary: Utopias, Gardens and Organizations,” The Sociological Review 50:1 (2002):106–127;
McClimens et al., “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel?”
9 See Guillaume, Andersen, and Vuori, “Paint It Black,” 2.
10 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
2006); Cynthia Enloe, “The Mundane Matters,” International Political Sociology 5:4 (2011):447–450;
Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone, 22.
and the hybrid concept “civility/martiality”—to understand gardens as a dy-

namic performance of “cultural governance/resistance.” It then examines the
(in)visibility of gardens as sites of international politics, using examples from
China and Japan to show that gardens already are diplomatic spaces. Next, the
chapter looks to Versailles and China’s Garden of Perfect Brilliance to consider
the political visuality of gardens. It examines how gardens, rather than being
simply another place for standard state-centric diplomacy, can serve as spaces
for the creative, sensible politics of social-ordering and world-ordering, as well
as sites of resistance. In this sense, gardens are not simply visible as political sites;
they enact an international politics of visuality because the gardens themselves
“do” things through cultural governance performances that are often nonnarra-
tive and nondiscursive.11 The next section employs my garden-building expe-
rience to examine how aesthetic conventions and practical techniques actively
create affective communities of sense in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo and the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial in China. The conclusion argues that we can use
this analytical framework to better understand (and feel) the multisensory pol-
itics of other key national memorial spaces, such as the National September 11
Museum and Memorial in New York.
Certainly it is common to think of gardens as sites of unchanging, essential na-
tional identity: “The” Chinese Garden or “The” Japanese Garden. Critical analysis
then would treat gardens as “texts” to see how they function as narratives of na-
tional identity and resistance to it. But this can be problematic because gardens
themselves are alive, always growing and changing. These visual artifacts are also
sensory spaces and infrastructures of feeling that are built, destroyed, and rebuilt, as
well as real property that is bought, sold, occupied, and confiscated.12 Furthermore,
as sensory spaces, gardens allow us not only to observe IR, but also to participate in
sensible politics.
Hence, rather than just understand gardens in terms of a unified narrative of cul-
ture, nature, and order, a critical aesthetic approach to international politics helps
us to see these gardens as an assemblage of nonnarrative and nondiscursive scenes
constructed to provoke emotions—pride, awe, disgust, outrage, loss, and sadness—
that are themselves political performances. Here garden-building can be theory-
building; by producing new affective communities of sense, it creatively shapes our
understanding of international politics.
11 See Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans- Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(New York: Routledge, 2013); Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes; Li Xiaodong and Felicia Lim,
“Poetics of Gardening: A Holistic Approach Towards Chinese Landscape Cultivation Based on the
Case Study of Yuan Ye,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 24:3 (2004):229–249.
12 Clunas, Fruitful Sites; Tobie Meyer-Fong, “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese
Garden,” Cross-Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 13 (2014):75–98.
Aesthetics, Politics, and Gardening

This discussion of the sensible politics of gardens is again located in the “aesthetic
turn” of international studies.13 It argues that the issues of diplomacy, war, and peace
can be profitably explored through an assemblage of conceptual dynamics: utopia/
dystopia/heterotopia, (re)distribution of the sensible, cultural governance/resist-
ance, and civil/military.
It is common to see gardens as a utopian space: a peaceful place, a blissful island
of apolitical serenity, in which people engage in contemplation, play, and sensuous
enjoyment. In both Persian and Greek, “paradise” comes from the word for a walled
garden.14 As we saw in Chapter 5, the Islamic State’s Food Security video used garden
images to evoke the new Caliphate as a utopian paradise.15 Interestingly, in his discus-
sion of utopia and heterotopia, Michel Foucault points directly to gardens. Utopian
spaces, according to Foucault, are “fundamentally unreal spaces . . . sites with no real
place.”16 Heterotopia, however, can be radical because it is “capable of juxtaposing in
a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.”17
Heterotopia is a hybrid place where multiple spaces are simultaneously represented,
contested, and inverted. Foucault’s examples of heterotopia are colonies, brothels,
prisons, cemeteries, ships—and gardens. Here, heterotopia is involved in projects of
social-ordering and world-ordering; Foucault is particularly fascinated by the garden
as heterotopia because it “is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality
of the world. . . . [It is] a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia.”18
Botanical gardens, for example, are a heterotopic mix of incompatible plants that
juxtapose incommensurable ecosystems: alpine plants in lowland London and de-
sert plants in rain-forest Singapore.19 Heterotopia, then, is an interesting concept
because it disrupts any search for singular meaning. Rather than engage in critique
that appeals to simple reversals, such as utopia and dystopia, examining gardens as
heterotopic experiences can jam such binary oppositions. This approach is useful
because it encourages us to understand space aesthetically in terms of multiple,
overlapping, and contingent dynamics, such as utopia/dystopia/heterotopia.
13 See Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Roland
Bleiker, “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics,” Millennium 43:3 (2015):872–890; Shapiro,
Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method.
14 Burrell and Dale, “Utopiary”; McClimens et al., “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel?,”
124–125; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou, xi, 6.
15 Food Security: Aspects from the Work of the Agriculture Administration in the Province—Wilāyat
Ḥalab (November 10, 2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/11/10/new-video-message-from-the-
islamic-state-food-security-aspects-from-the-work-of-the-agriculture-administration-in-the-province-
wilayat-ḥalab/(accessed October 19, 2018).
16 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (1986):24.
17 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.
19 See Luke, “The Missouri Botanical Garden.”
When we speak of “aesthetics” in international politics, we are not discussing a theory

of beauty but are more concerned with styles of ordering that raise ethical questions.20
Rancière argues that we need to understand aesthetics as a specific “distribution of
the sensible”: “the delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of
speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics
as a form of experience.”21 Politics, then, is found not just in the struggle for institu-
tional power, but also in the configuration of space and sensibility that provokes social-
ordering and world-ordering, especially in affective communities of sense. Politics thus
takes shape either in “policing” the hegemonic distribution of the sensible or in chal-
lenging it through dissensus, a redistribution of the sensible that “disrupt[s]‌the rela-
tionship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable.”22 Politico-aesthetics here
is very active, a heterotopic performance that takes in all senses of material experience.23
As heavily-designed spaces that forge particular relations between the see-
able, hear-able, smell-able, taste-able, and touch-able,24 gardens are exemplary
distributions of the sensible. Still, the politics of material modalities and visual
artifacts is often overlooked, even in critical IR, because of their indirect impact on
international politics; this chapter, however, argues that gardens can shape interna-
tional politics in a broader way by provoking affective communities of sense that
complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said, thought, and done.25
To chart out the ethical workings of such sensible politics, the dynamic of cul-
tural governance and resistance is useful.26 Cultural governance looks to Foucault’s
20 David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1987); Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004); Jacques
Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009); Bleiker,
Aesthetics and World Politics; Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method.
21 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. There are two equally valid ways to translate Rancière’s
phrase: “partition of the sensible” and “distribution of the sensible.” In previous chapters on veils and
walls, “partition of the sensible” was useful because it highlights the work of barriers. Here, “distribu-
tion of the sensible” is a better translation because it addresses the politics of multidimensional sensory
spaces.
23 Butler, Gender Trouble; Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 40–41; Lisle, Holidays in the Danger
Zone, 21.
24 Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art; Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and
Landscapes, 314.
25 Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of
Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon,
Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick, 31–50 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 31;
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics.
understanding of power as a productive force that is generated by contingent social

relationships, rather than as a set of juridical practices of sovereignty that restrict ac-
tion.27 Hence, instead of taking the “nation” for granted as an actor in a rational cal-
culus, Michael J. Shapiro sees the nation as a set of unstable social relations that take
on coherence through cultural governance rather than just through “military and
fiscal initiatives.”28 Shapiro explains that alongside hegemonic cultural governance,
resistance can emerge through other modalities of expression: films, journals, dia-
ries, novels, counter-historical narratives—and gardens.29 Cultural governance here
is analogous to Rancière’s policing of the distribution of the sensible, and resistance
emerges through dissensus, a redistribution of the sensible.30
Finally, this section considers how the peace-war distinction is informed by the
civil-military distinction. As Ambassador Liu’s newspaper article shows, the PRC
regularly presents itself as a “peaceful civilization”—especially in relation to what
it sees as the “remilitarization” of Japan. Tokyo likewise proudly points to postwar
Japan’s “Peace Constitution” and worries about China’s growing military capability.
But “militarism” refers to more than the accumulation of military hardware; as
Martin Shaw explains, it is better understood as “the penetration of social relations
in general by military relations.”31 Indeed, while the common liberal narrative of so-
cial progress sees society civilizing the military, often the interaction results in the
militarization of society.32
I would like to expand this consideration of civil-military relations to see how
civil and military can work together aesthetically in the distribution of the sensible
in war/peace gardens. IR theory’s standard view of “civil” and “military” sees them
as separate and distinct camps “pitched in opposition to each other” in a struggle for
power.33 To see how civil and military work aesthetically in war/peace gardens, it is
helpful to examine how the civil-military distinction takes shape in another political
27 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by

Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104 (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
30 See Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method, xv, 30–31.
31 Martin Shaw, “Twenty-First Century Militarism: A Historical-Sociological Framework,” in
Militarism and International Relations: Political Economy, Security, Theory, edited by Anna Stavrianakis
and Jan Selby (New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 20; also see Christopher R. Hughes, “Militarism and
the China Model: The Case of National Defense Education,” Journal of Contemporary China 26:103
(2017):54–67.
32 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 466; Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on
Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1986), p. 62.
33 Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 80–86; Peter D. Feaver, “The Right to Be Right: Civil-
Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision,” International Security 35:4 (2011):90.
space: imperial China’s wen/wu dynamic. Wen generally means “literary,” “civilian,”

and “civilization,” while wu generally means “physical,” “military,” and “martial.”34
The two concepts certainly can be understood as opposites, but not necessarily in
the sense of the mutually exclusive binary opposition of “either civil or military.”
Wen/wu does not necessarily contrast the roles of different autonomous actors,
such as the soldier and the civilian.35 Likewise, wen/wu does not map easily onto
gendered distinctions: feminine-civil and masculine-martial.36 Rather, the ideal
person in pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea harmonized a dynamic balance of
civility and martiality, as both a poet and a warrior. World-ordering, national gov-
ernance, family relations, and personal self-cultivation were all guided by this quest
to harmonize the complementary opposites of literary and martial performances.37
As Kam Louie explains, this civil/military dynamic is going global through East
Asian popular culture.38
The main point here is not the (neo)Orientalist one that East Asia provides an
“exotic” alternative, fundamentally different from “Western civilization.” Following
from earlier chapters, here we resist any geopolitical container-style organization of
knowledge-production in which the choice is between the “modern West” and “tra-
ditional China.”39 Rather than replacing “Eurocentric” concepts and experiences
with “Sinocentric” ones, this chapter explores how discussions of civil/military re-
lations in different social and historical spaces can generate theoretical consensus
and dissensus.
Here the argument is that civil/military is much more than a categorical distinc-
tion or a struggle between the autonomous camps of civilians and soldiers. It builds
on critical IR’s critique of the binary oppositions that characterize Enlightenment
thought and disciplinary IR40 to see civility/martiality as a contingent conceptual
dynamic. This dynamic governs the performances of social-ordering and world-
ordering in ways that can provide a more nuanced understanding of questions of
diplomacy, war, and peace. The point is not simply to sort national identities as
“peaceful” or “militarist,” but to see how each new event (national day parade, treaty
34 Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 10.
35 Huntington, The Soldier and the State; Feaver, “The Right to Be Right.”
36 Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity,  9–11.
37 Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity, 11, 15–17; Oleg Benesch, “National Consciousness and
the Evolution of the Civil/Military Binary in East Asia,” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 8:1
(2011):133–137.
38 Kam Louie, Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World (London: Routledge, 2015), p. 121.
39 See Leigh Jenco, Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Diego von Vacano, “The Scope of Comparative Political
Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 18 (2015):465–80.
40 See R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method.
signing, military battle—and garden experience) needs to be evaluated in terms of

how it performs the civility/martiality dynamic. Indeed, what is most interesting
about this dynamic is its lack of a stable canonic definition; there is no orthodoxy,
and its contingent flexibility demands that we make sense of civil/military relations
through continual interpretive practice.41
As this section has argued, these conceptual dynamics share a common aesthetic
approach that helps us to highlight how international politics takes shape through so-
cial relations, sensibility, experience, and performativity. These contingent dynamics
resonate with each other in complex ways as an assemblage that offers no stable ac-
count of causality. For the sake of this chapter’s analysis of the international politics of
gardens, they constitute a framework for examining how gardens can act as exemplary
sites where the civility/martiality dynamic takes shape as a heterotopic experience of
particular (re)distributions of the sensible. Such (re)distributions of the sensible, in
turn, generate cultural governance and resistance that are not simply visual experiences,
but are visual/multisensory performances.
Before employing these complementary theoretical dynamics to examine how gar-
dens create affective communities of sense, it is necessary to explore the ideological
politics of the visibility/invisibility of gardens in IR.
Gardens as Political and Diplomatic Spaces

The Yasukuni Shrine and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial are not isolated examples of
gardens as sites of international politics. Since the turn of the twentieth century, gardens
have been an important part of public diplomacy for both China and Japan. Their goal
was ideological: to use gardens as a mode of cultural governance to present their coun-
tries to the West as “civilized” and “peaceful” nations worthy of international respect—
and thus not as targets of military intervention.42 One of the first Japanese gardens built
abroad was commissioned by Tokyo as Japan’s official national pavilion at the Chicago
World’s Fair in 1893. This Japanese stroll garden was a state-directed social construc-
tion of the visual, and it was very popular, successfully presenting Japan as an exotic,
civilized country that was not a threat. In 1910 the British and Japanese governments
organized the Japan-British Exhibition in London to celebrate the two countries’ new
military alliance; it also was designed to convince the British public that Japan was not
a backward country. In addition to showing Japan’s modern manufactures, the exhibit
displayed a traditional Japanese garden, The Garden of Peace.43
41 See Benesch, “National Consciousness and the Evolution of the Civil/Military Binary in East
Asia,” 165; Louie, Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World.
42 See Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 144–148.
43 Kotaro Mochizuki, Japan To-day: A Souvenir of the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition Held in London,
1910 (Tokyo: Liberal News Agency, 1910).
After World War II, one of the ways that the United States and Japan pursued
reconciliation was through gardens. The Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C.,
includes the Ippakutei tea house garden, which is open to the public each spring.
Ippakutei, which means “Century Tea House,” was built in 1960 to commemorate
a century of US-Japan relations. Many cities in the United States have a Japanese
garden park, often cooperatively built though sister-city diplomacy.44 Indeed,
the Japanese pavilion in Chicago was rebuilt in the 1960s with donations from
the Japanese city of Osaka and is now called the Osaka Garden. Likewise, the
Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon (dedicated in 1963, opened in 1967) was
part of a prominent move toward reconciliation through cultural exchange at the
local level.45 As Portland’s mayor explained in 1962: “This Garden will provide
the citizens of Portland with an area of great beauty and serenity and at the same
time represent a warm, understandable link to Japan.”46
Chinese gardens are also popular around the world and are likewise part of dip-
lomatic reconciliation.47 After the United States and China normalized diplomatic
relations in 1979, the first cultural exchange project was to build a Chinese garden
for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.48 This garden-building was part
of Beijing’s general re-engagement with the world that had started in 1978 with
Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening policy. By 1998 more than thirty-five Chinese
gardens had been built in fourteen countries.49 As its plan to build a $100 million
Chinese garden in Washington’s US National Arboretum shows, Beijing continues
to see gardens as a suitable investment for influence abroad.50 Japan and China have
thus recruited gardens into their public diplomacy strategies as examples of state-
led cultural governance. As in many hegemonic distributions of the sensible, gar-
dens employ seemingly apolitical activities for very ideological aims. The success of
44 Bruce Taylor Hamilton, Human Nature: The Japanese Garden of Portland, Oregon (Portland:
Japanese Garden Society of Oregon, 1996), pp. 89–90.
45 Hamilton, Human Nature, 1, 89–93.
46 Quoted in Hamilton, Human Nature, 91.
47 See Stephen McDowall, “Cultivating Orientalism,” International Institute for Asian Studies
Newsletter 73 (2016):12 http://iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/cultivating-orientalism (accessed June
3, 2017).
48 Alfreda Murck and Wen Fong, “A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 38:3 (1980–1981):61.
49 Joseph Cho Wang, The Chinese Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 61;
McDowall, “Cultivating Orientalism.”
50 Adrian Higgins, “China Wants a Bold Presence in Washington—So It’s Building a $100 million
Garden,” Washington Post (April 27, 2017) https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/china-
wants-a-bold-presence-in-washington--so-its-building-a-100-million-garden/2017/04/27/a334ef18-
2b61-11e7-be51-b3fc6ff7faee_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-cards_hp-card-lifestyle%3Ahomepage%2Fca
rd&utm_term=.0026e5aa6e80 (accessed June 3, 2017).
this strategy can be seen at the UNESCO world headquarters in Paris, where global
humanity’s Garden of Peace is a Japanese garden.51
Strangely, both China’s and Japan’s public diplomacy strategies involve an odd
recycling of Orientalist discourse that is now deployed by Asian states rather than
by the Euro-American metropole.52 But such diplomatic gardens are not merely
directed at foreign audiences; as we see in the next section, as state-sponsored social
constructions of the visible, gardens are a site of cultural governance (and resist-
ance) for both domestic and foreign policy performances.
Gardens as Sites of Social-Ordering and

World-Ordering
Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) was known to have an overwhelming passion for two
things: building and war. The result of both passions is the world’s most famous
imperial garden at the Palace of Versailles. With its geometrical design, Versailles is
the best example of French formal gardens embodying the Enlightenment ideology
of order, rationality, and logic. As Chandra Mukerji explains, Versailles was not
simply a pleasure garden, but rather a site of cultural governance.53 French formal
gardens functioned as “social laboratories,” where economic power was translated
into political power.54 The garden at Versailles was thus France-writ-small, a vir-
tual world in which the French monarch’s control over the garden embodied the
French state’s control over nature—and its control over society.55 The geometric
patterns at Versailles were not simply aesthetically pleasing but served to integrate
diverse elements—in the garden and in French society—to reflect the hierarchies
of the new centralized state.56 As such, it is an example of Rancière’s politico-
aesthetics: Versailles’s new relation of the visible, the say-able, and the think-able
asserted a redistribution of the sensible in an affective community of sense suitable
for imperial France.
51 UNESCO, “Garden of Peace” (n.d.) http://webarchive.unesco.org/20151215223006// (accessed

June 3, 2017).
52 See Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes; Clunas, Fruitful Sites; McDowall, “Cultivating
Orientalism.”
53 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions; Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy.”
54 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 32.
55 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions; Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy”; David L. Hall and Roger
T. Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed
Landscapes 18:3 (1998):81; Greg M. Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: Intercultural Interactions
between Chinese and European Palace Cultures,” Art History 32:1 (2009):119.
56 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 9; Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles”; Yoon, “Two Different
Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens.”
Here, Louis XIV was engaging in what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “gardening
impulse,” which is not just about gardens, but entails broader notions of govern-
ance. While in pre-modern Europe the ruling class functioned as “game-keepers” to
keep peasants off their estates, by the early modern period the ruling class worked
as “gardeners” to regulate the environment and society.57 Bauman thus argues that
the gardening impulse works to violently set “apart useful elements destined to live
and thrive, from harmful and morbid ones, which ought to be exterminated.”58 This
scientific view of social ordering informs the modern administrative state, which
Bauman calls the “gardening state,” in applying the violent logic of the gardening
impulse to sort humanity into useful elements to be nurtured and harmful ones to
be exterminated.59
The violence of the gardening state was not merely metaphorical. The baroque
landscape of Versailles was constructed by military engineers to reflect the Sun
King’s martial values; the garden’s battlement-style walls supported the king’s hierar-
chal view of society.60 Louis XIV thus integrated civility and martiality in a redistri-
bution of the sensible that built France as a modern administrative “gardening state.”
The cultural governance of Versailles also worked through garden itineraries
written by Louis XIV himself; nobles, the bourgeoisie, and even peasants were
invited to perform the garden by walking it in particular ways. Importantly, these
tours instructed people to look at a series of views “developed as systems for
showing the park, not explaining it.”61 The promenades thus were a nonnarrative
and nondiscursive performance designed to surprise and delight—that is, a visu-
ality of the sensible politics affect rather than the visibility of the discursive politics
of ideology.62 These garden visits were also a diplomatic activity: the state organized
tours to impress distinguished foreigners. The goal was to display the French state’s
cultural and technical power, as well as its geographical and civilizational reach.
Indeed, many modernizing monarchs around the world emulated Louis XIV’s
model of cultural governance by building their own Versailles-like gardens, such
as Peter the Great’s Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg and the Bang Pa-In Palace in
Thailand.63 As a project of the gardening state’s social-ordering and world-ordering,
57 Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, 52.

58 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 70 (emphasis in original).
59 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 13. Also see Luke, “The Missouri Botanical Garden”;
Barmé, “Beijing, a Garden of Violence”; Jay, “No State of Grace.”
60 Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions, 15, 39ff.; Jay, “No State of Grace,” 50.
62 Mukerji, “Space and Political Pedagogy”; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 91–110.
63 Paul Keenan, “The Summer Gardens in the Social Life of St Petersburg, 1725–1761,” Slavonic
and East European Review 88:1/2 (2010):153; Bang Pa-In Palace (Bangkok: Royal Household
Bureau, 2003).
Versailles actively integrated civility and martiality to produce “France” for natives
and foreigners alike.64
Like Louis XIV, China’s Qianlong emperor (r. 1735–1796) had a passion for
battles and gardens.65 He is well known for doubling the territorial expanse of the
empire and for expanding the size of the Beijing’s Summer Palace—the Garden of
Perfect Brilliance (Yuanming yuan)—and these two activities are related.66 The
Qianlong emperor certainly enjoyed the Garden of Perfect Brilliance as a pleasure
garden, a place to rest and recuperate after his long military campaigns and elab-
orate imperial tours.67 While it is common to see gardens as a refuge from the
demands of political life,68 the Garden of Perfect Brilliance was a site of imperial
administration and governance, that, like Versailles, was a diplomatic space. While
Louis XIV engaged in Westphalian interstate diplomacy at Versailles, the Garden
of Perfect Brilliance embodied the hierarchical diplomacy of tributary relations
in the Chinese world order: vassal states came to the garden to present tribute to
the Son of Heaven (i.e., the emperor).69 Indeed, this tribute from China’s Asian
neighbors often included garden-building materials such as exotic plants, orna-
mental stones, and strange beasts.70 European diplomats also met the emperor in
the garden; when British envoy Lord Macartney went to China in 1793, he first
visited the Throne Room of the Garden of Perfect Brilliance to offer gifts to the
court.71
The Garden of Perfect Brilliance was not simply one coherent utopian garden; it
is better understood as a heterotopic redistribution of the sensible that integrated
a “massive complex of gardens, villas, government buildings, landscapes and vistas,
[that] drew on many elements of fantasy, of garden and scenic design, of cultural
myth and imaginative practice.”72 This heterotopic assemblage combined civility

65 Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Frances
Lincoln, 2003), p. 92; Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles,” 118.
66 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness”; Anne-Marie Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of
Post-Mao Beijing (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 46–47.
67 Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles.”
68 See McClimens et al., “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel?”
69 The tributary system was a hierarchical network of overlords and vassals centered on the Chinese
emperor in Beijing. It was a strong example of political aesthetics in the sense that the “foreign min-
istry” was the Board of Rites and the Board of Barbarians, and diplomacy took the form of the “guest
ritual.” See Dittmar Schorkowitz and Chia Ning, eds., Managing Frontiers in China: The Lifanyuan and
the Libu Reconsidered (Leiden: Brill, 2017). Also see Chapter 7 of this book.
70 Keswick, The Chinese Garden, 45, 169; Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles,” 116.
71 See Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles.”
72 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 113.
and martiality in interesting ways: the Qianlong emperor brought back gardening

ideas from both his military campaigns and his imperial tours.73
The Garden of Perfect Brilliance thus functions both as a condensed version
of the best gardens of the empire and as the Sinocentric world order’s particular
distribution of the sensible. The Qianlong emperor’s main imperial residence in
the Garden of Perfect Brilliance was the Garden of the Nine Realms, Clear and
Calm,74 which according to garden historian Wang Yi was the exemplary impe-
rial garden.75 In this “peace garden” (i.e., “Clear and Calm”), the emperor could
survey the world in microcosm, with the mythological integration of the “nine
realms” alluding to the legendary unification of China—and the unification of the
world.76 As with Foucault’s garden heterotopia, the Garden of the Nine Realms “is
the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. . . . [It is] a
sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia.”77 And as at Versailles, military engineers
constructed the imperial garden as a redistribution of the sensible that reproduced
the expanding territoriality of the Qing dynasty, as well as the enduring hierarchy of
the Sinocentric world order.78
The Qianlong emperor’s gardening practice was much like that in Bauman’s gar-
dening state, which views “the society it rules as an object of designing, cultivating
and weed-poisoning.”79 As the Qianlong emperor put it: “When I find pleasure in
orchids, I love righteousness; when I see pines and bamboo, I think of virtue; when
I stand beside limpid brooks, I value honesty; when I see weeds, I despise dishon-
esty.”80 The Qianlong emperor thus showed his control over nature and society
through garden-building, much as Louis XIV did at Versailles.81
Interestingly, Mao Zedong used a similar “gardening state” logic in the mid-
twentieth century. In 1956 Mao encouraged intellectuals to criticize the new so-
cialist government when he called on them to “[l]‌et one hundred schools of
thought contend, and one hundred flowers bloom.” Ai Qing, the famous commu-
nist poet and father of Ai Weiwei, responded with a prose poem, “The Gardener’s
Dream.” In this dream, hundreds of different kinds of flowers criticize the gardener
for only cultivating roses. Upon awakening, the gardener realizes that “his world
is too narrow. With no point of comparison, many ideas will become confused.”
73 Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing, 49–50; Meyer-Fong, “Civil War,
Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden,” 89.
74 Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles,” 126.
75 Wang, Zhongguo yuanlin wenhua shi, 158.
76 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 117; Broudehoux, The Making and Selling of Post-
Mao Beijing, 53; Wang, Zhongguo yuanlin wenhua shi, 158–162.
78 Wang, Zhongguo yuanlin wenhua shi, 269–308. Also see Chapter 7.
79 Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 13.
80 Quoted in Keswick, The Chinese Garden, 191.
81 Thomas, “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles.”
He thus concludes that to have a “kingdom of many fragrances” he needs to “let all

flowers bloom in their own time.”82
Although “The Gardener’s Dream” is a characteristic act of resistance to state-led
cultural governance, China’s head gardener Mao was not amused. In 1957 Ai and
his family (including newborn Ai Weiwei) were sent into internal exile as part of
the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and they would only be allowed to return to Beijing
in 1976. This crack-down also used gardening metaphors in ways that reproduced
Bauman’s gardening impulse: Mao told Communist cadres to distinguish between
“fragrant flowers” and “poisonous weeds” in order to “weed out the old so that the
new may flourish.”83 Again, this was not just a metaphor; as Ai Qing’s experience
shows, there were serious consequences that continue to shape the work of artist-
activist Ai Weiwei.84
The gardening state is at work again in China with the current crackdown in
Xinjiang on Uyghurs and other Muslim groups, which has interned over one million
people in “re-education camps.” This mass campaign treats Islam as a “disease,”85 and
the extrajudicial incarceration of over 11 percent of Xinjiang’s adult population was
justified by a Chinese official in terms of the gardening impulse: “You can’t uproot
all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one—you need to spray
chemicals to kill them all. Reeducating these people is like spraying chemicals on
the crops. That is why it is a general reeducation, not limited to a few people.”86
Back in the early modern period, at about the same time that grand imperial
gardens were being built in China and France, expansive stroll gardens emerged
in Japan. After unifying war-torn Japan at the beginning of the Edo period (1603–
1868), one of the ways that the Shogun military leader safeguarded the new order
was to require nobles to maintain two residences, one in their home province and
another in the imperial capital (where their families were being held “hostage”). Yet
the shogunate did more than use centralized military control to create social order.
It employed cultural governance as the “sponsor of the imperial imagination”; elite
competition for status and privilege worked largely through nonviolent means, in-
cluding the construction by nobles of elaborate gardens in both the provinces and
82 Ai Qing, “The Gardener’s Dream,” in Ai Qing: Shi Xuan/Selected Poems, edited by Eugene Chen
Eoyang, 208–210 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982), pp. 209, 210.
83 Quoted in Barmé, “Beijing, a Garden of Violence,” 621.
84 See Chapter 6.
85 Maya Wang, “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s
Muslims (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2018).
86 “Chinese Authorities Jail Four Wealthiest Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s Kashgar in New Purge,” Radio
Free Asia ( January 5, 2018) https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/wealthiest-01052018144327.
html (accessed April 20, 2019). Also see Edward Schwarck, “The Failure of China’s Security Policy in
Xinjiang,” Royal United Services Institute, Newsbrief ( January 11, 2019) https://rusi.org/sites/de-
fault/files/20190111_newsbrief_vol39_no1_schwarck_web.pdf (accessed April 20, 2019).
the capital.87 By the early nineteenth century, there were more than one thousand
stroll gardens in the capital alone.88
Edo stroll gardens worked much like the Garden of Perfect Brilliance: they
were built to embody ideal social worlds, but in a heterotopic way that typically
mixed references to Chinese and Japanese classical texts and popular vistas. Like
the Qianlong emperor’s heterotopic garden, they functioned as “theme parks” that
offered a sequence of fantastic scenes rather than a singular master narrative.89 Edo
stroll gardens thus combined previous Japanese garden styles on their expansive
landscaped grounds, including tea house gardens and temple gardens. The devel-
opment of Japanese garden styles over the past fifteen hundred years was quite
complex;90 at the risk of over-generalization, one can say that temple and tea house
gardens were developed during periods of military rule for leaders who sought to
cultivate a civility/martiality dynamic as a means of cultural governance.91
Because Japan had little international contact in the Edo period, the focus of cul-
tural governance in the garden was less on diplomacy and more on constructing and
maintaining social order, on the one hand, and fantastic world orders, on the other.
The large gardens were vibrant social sites for entertaining the shogun, the emperor,
and other elites in affective communities of sense;92 much like in France and China,
people performed the gardens by walking around a central pond on a path that re-
vealed (and concealed) a series of carefully cultivated views. Many of these Edo
stroll gardens did not survive into Japan’s modern period (1868–present). Those
that did survive were often transformed into public parks; Korakuen in Okayama
prefecture is an interesting example because it balances the civility of a stroll garden
with the martiality of a castle, which rises above the garden as a “borrowed view.”93
As a gardening convention, the borrowed view plays with the inside/outside dis-
tinction to include the outside landscape (e.g., a view of Mt. Fuji) in the viewer’s
vista in ways that transgress the boundaries of the walled garden.
Back in China, in addition to working as sites of entertainment and diplomacy,
gardens were also the site of war. Indeed, the Garden of Perfect Brilliance was it-
self a battlefield during the Second Opium War (1856–1860): British and French
troops looted the palace of its treasures, and then burnt it down. The Second Opium
War is important because it still plays a central role in China’s national identity
87 Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art, 165.

88 Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 7.
89 Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 16; Marc P. Keane, Japanese Garden Design
(Tokyo: Tuttle, 1996), pp. xi, 39.
90 See Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art; Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and
Landscapes; Keane, Japanese Garden Design.
91 See Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art, 151–157.
92 Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 7.
93 Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes,  6–7.
narrative as a brutal clash of civilizations or, more to the point, as a prime example
of how Chinese civilization—the imperial garden—was destroyed by European
“barbarians.”94
But as Geremie R. Barmé explains, the situation was more complicated than that.
The war had been raging on and off since 1856.95 In 1860 the British and French
sent an official delegation to Beijing hoping to negotiate permanent diplomatic rec-
ognition from China. “After numerous prevarications, bluffs and acts of deception”
by the Qing court, the latter imprisoned the thirty-nine members of the delega-
tion in the Garden of Perfect Brilliance. They were held hostage and “subsequently
tortured. Of their number eighteen died and, when their bodies were eventually
returned to the Allied forces in October 1860, even the liberal use of lime in their
coffins could not conceal the fact that they had suffered horribly before expiring.”96
British and French forces discussed various ways to respond to this outrage. One
option was to burn down the capital city, as new dynasties typically did in China.97
Another strategy for the British and French was to attack the imperial garden rather
than the city; the looting and torching of the Garden of Perfect Brilliance was
designed to inflict pain on the Manchu imperial court rather than on the general
Chinese public. In a way this can be seen as a properly Chinese reaction; Chinese
armies often destroyed Chinese gardens as part of war campaigns. During the con-
temporaneous Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), gardens were targeted for looting
and burning by both sides in this civil war, and less than 10 percent of the fabulous
gardens of central China survived this conflict.98
Rather than simply framing the destruction of the Garden of Perfect Brilliance as
a military action, we thus can see the attack on the garden as a redistribution of the
sensible that resisted China’s cultural governance. It was seen not as an act of venge-
ance, but as an act of “justice” that would punish what the Europeans saw as China’s
corrupt and barbaric regime.99 Instead of pure martial barbarism, the Franco-British
strategy is a curious combination of civility and martiality. On the one hand, the
garden was built to embody the Sinocentric hierarchy’s particular distribution of the
sensible. If we take seriously political aesthetics in France, then we should in China,
too: much like the cultural governance of promenades at Versailles, diplomats in
Beijing were obliged to recognize China’s hierarchical worldview as they performed
94 Haiyan Lee, “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan: Or, How to Enjoy a National Wound,” Modern China
35:2 (2009):155–190.
95 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness.”
96 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 131.
97 See Pierre Ryckmans, “The Chinese Attitude towards the Past,” China Heritage Quarterly 14
(2008) http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=014_chineseattitude.
inc&issue=014 (accessed June 3, 2017).
98 Meyer-Fong, “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden,” 79.
99 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness,” 132–133; Keswick, The Chinese Garden, 57; Thomas,
“Yuanming Yuan/Versailles,” 27.
the imperial garden on official visits. On the other hand, the looting and burning of
the garden was a political performance, a violent redistribution of the sensible that
was figured as an act of resistance to the Sinocentric world order’s affective commu-
nity of sense. It was a key event in the redistribution of the sensible that asserted an
alternative “standard of civilization”: the Westphalian system of the liberal world
order.100
Indeed, the Garden of Perfect Brilliance continues to function as a powerful site
of cultural governance; this major educational tourist destination works to exemplify
both China’s sophisticated civilization and the barbarism of Western imperialism.101
But that does not exhaust its impact in terms of either ideology or affect: in the twenty-
first century, Beijing’s Old Summer Palace has been rebuilt as a historical theme park
at which people create their own meanings through the active interpretive practice of
walking the grounds in unpredictable ways.102 The Garden of Perfect Brilliance is thus
a heterotopic distribution of the sensible and a visual/multisensory construction of the
international that continues to combine civility and martiality in entangled ways; it is
both a palace and prison, a site of diplomacy and torture, peace and war, civilization and
barbarism, cultural governance—and resistance.
France and China have recruited gardens into public diplomacy as an expression
of cultural governance for the performance of both domestic and foreign policy.
Likewise, dissensus in gardens is neither new nor rare. During China’s Yuan and
Ming dynasties (1271–1644 ce), for example, gardens actually flourished as a
mode of resistance. Scholar-officials turned to garden-building after they resigned
in protest at what they saw as “immoral government,” or after they were fired. While
imperial gardens such as the Garden of Perfect Brilliance engaged in cultural gov-
ernance, private literati gardens offered a redistribution of the sensible as alternative
affective communities of sense, in which marginalized scholar-officials could con-
trol things in their own utopia.103 This was not simply a private protest against offi-
cial oppression; China’s literati gardens characteristically were open to visits from
elites on tour and to peasants during festivals. The best example is the aptly-named
100 See Gerritt Gong, The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984); Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the
Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013).
101 See Lee, “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan.”
102 Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness”; Lee, “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan”; Rancière,
The Emancipated Spectator; William A. Callahan, China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
103 Murck and Fong, “A Chinese Garden Court,” 1–9; Clunas, Fruitful Sites, 51–52; Keswick, The
Chinese Garden, 121, 117, 123; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou, 12–13; Wang, Zhongguo yuanlin
wenhua shi.
Artless Administrator’s Garden, which is the largest and one of the most popular in
Suzhou, a key site of traditional gardens in China.104
Gardens of Peace, War, and Civility/Martiality

The previous section’s discussion of examples from France, China, and Japan
demonstrates how gardens are part of a long and complex international historical
sociology of social-ordering and world-ordering. Its focus on the historicity and
sociality of gardens as spatiotemporal sites of diplomacy, war, and peace can help
us to analyze the sensible politics of our two controversial examples: the Yasukuni
Shrine and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. While they are typically understood
as modern war memorial sites, this section shows how both the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial and the Yasukuni Shrine were actually designed as gardens and are often
experienced as gardens.105 While earlier sections have used international historical
sociology to show how gardens, as social constructions of the visual, are sites of ide-
ology, this section follows my own Japanese garden design experience106 to explore
how the aesthetic conventions and practical techniques of garden-building can ex-
cite affect. The argument is that this set of practices engages in a visual/multisen-
sory construction of the social that can provoke cultural governance and resistance.
The aim is not only to see how the memorials convey facts and figures, but also to
show how they use garden-building conventions to produce political meaning and
political affect—and not necessarily the ideologies and feelings that we’ve come to
expect. While the hermeneutic search for meaning highlights the visibility of gar-
dens, an appreciation of gardens as performances evokes their visuality as affective
Therefore, to understand these memorials as distributions of the sensible that cre-
atively combine civility and martiality, it is helpful to survey the aesthetic regime, that
is, the aesthetic conventions and practical techniques, of Chinese and Japanese garden-
building.107 As the Chinese gardening manual Yuan Ye (1631 ce) tells us, “There are no
104 Clunas, Fruitful Sites,, 22–59; Keswick, The Chinese Garden; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou,
33–42; Meyer-Fong, “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden,” 80–81, 84.
105 See Qi Kang, QinHua Rijun Nanjing datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan [The Monument Hall to
compatriots murdered in the Japanese military invasion of China] (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue kexue
jishu chubanshe, 1999); Mitsuhide, Yasukuni no Shiki; Precinct Map (Tokyo: Yasukuni Shrine, no date)
http://www.yasukuni.or.jp/english/precinct/index.html (accessed June 3, 2017); Meyer-Fong, “Civil
War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden,” 86–87.
106 In autumn 2010, I attended the two-week intensive seminar “The Japanese Garden” at the
Research Center for Japanese Garden Art and Historical Heritage, Kyoto University of Art &
Design, https://www.kyoto-art.ac.jp/en/academics/research/japanese-garden-art/ (accessed April
20, 2019).
107 See Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens”; Sakuteiki: Visions of the
Japanese Garden; A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic, translated by Jiro Takei and Marc
fixed rules in garden creation; it all depends on what the landscape lends.”108 As with
“civility/martiality,” there is no orthodoxy in garden-building; one of the first things
that garden designers learn is that there is no recipe or checklist for building the correct
“Chinese garden.”109 Rather, a garden is judged by how it combines five elements—
rocks, water, architecture, plants, and poetry—according to the aesthetic conventions
of irregularity, asymmetry, variety, and rusticity.110 Unlike French formal gardeners
who remake the environment, Chinese garden designers often defer to the site to take
advantage of the environment’s natural contours and borrowed views. Certainly they
still shape the site; according to Yuan Ye, gardening is the process of “digging ponds
and piling rocks for mountains.”111 This underlines the need to construct an aesthetic
balance between rocks and water, which is seen as a symbolic balance between magical
mountains and sacred lakes. This aesthetic balance is not simply of natural elements,
because gardens also often integrate aspects of high culture. Chinese gardens character-
istically contain poetic inscriptions and architectural follies.112
Rather than having the precise geometry of French formal gardens, Chinese and
Japanese gardens thrive on the aesthetic experience of irregularity. A common fea-
ture is the zig-zag bridge, which questions the rational desire to go from here to
there. Often bridges join not just different material places, but different ideological
and affective spaces, leading us from one world to another.113 Walls are another im-
portant feature, but rather than perform as absolute barriers, they work like veils to
both conceal and reveal.114 As master gardener Shen Fu (1763–1808 ce) explains,
Chinese garden-building employs the heterotopic art of deception: “showing the
large in the small and the small in the large, providing for the real in the unreal world
and for the unreal in the real.”115 Unlike with visual images, in which authenticity
is a major issue, when we treat gardens as visual artifacts and multisensory spaces,
then manipulation is actually valued as a way of making the strange familiar and
the familiar strange. Like the civility/martiality dynamic, garden-building is a con-
tingent social/visual construction, a heavily-designed distribution of the see-able,
P. Keane (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2001); Ji Cheng, Yuan Ye Tushuo ( Jinan: Shandong huabao
chubanshe, 2004); Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art; Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and
Landscapes; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou; Li and Lim, “Poetics of Gardening.”
108 Kuitert, “Borrowing Scenery and the Landscape That Lends,” 35; Ji, Yuan Ye, 257.
109 See Kuitert, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art; Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and
Landscapes.
110 Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens”; Hall and Ames, “The
Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens”; Keswick, The Chinese Garden; Ji, Yuan Ye.
111 Ji, Yuan Ye, 56.
112 Ji, Yuan Ye, 76–103; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou,  21–29.
113 See Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens.”
114 Hall and Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” 175–178; Keswick, The Chinese
Garden, 138, 146–148; Ji, Yuan Ye, 179–193. Also see Chapters 8 and 9.
115 Quoted in Wang, The Chinese Garden, 34.
hear-able, smell-able, and touch-able, and thus of the say-able, the think-able, and
the do-able.
Japanese gardens grew out of Chinese gardens, which were introduced from
Korea in the sixth century ce.116 While Chinese gardens employ five elements,
Japanese gardens generally look to three elements: water, stones, and plants.117 But
once again, the dynamic of the garden lies in the way it is designed, rather than in its
design elements. Japan’s medieval gardening classic text, the Sakuteiki, opens with
the declaration that gardening is “the art of setting stones.”118 It values the harmonic
interplay between two-dimensional planes (ponds, raked sand, walls, and fences)
and three-dimensional volumes (especially rocks and clipped plants).119 There is al-
ways a tension between awe at nature’s wildness and the need for human control,120
which is very similar to the civility-martiality dynamic. Gardens in both China and
Japan thus don’t focus on flowers and plants; they are more conceptual, as an inter-
play of style and content that excites affective experiences in a (re)distribution of
the sensible. As visual constructions of the social (and of the international), Chinese
and Japanese gardens are a site of the visuality strategy: in this case, the multisen-
sory construction of social order and world order as affective communities of sense.
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial is the most popular museum in China. It
commemorates the victims of atrocities committed by the imperial Japanese army
when it invaded the Chinese capital in 1937.121 The Massacre Memorial is thus the
closest thing China has to an official war memorial; indeed, in 2014 Chinese pres-
ident Xi Jinping went there to declare China’s first “National Memorial Day.”122 It
receives over five million visitors per year, primarily students on school trips but
also an increasing number of domestic tourists. Over the May Day holiday in 2011,
for example, it was packed with families, as well as a few young dating couples.
116 Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens,” 447; Keane, Japanese Garden
Design, 10.
117 Yoon, “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens”; Keane, Japanese Garden
Design, 38.
118 Sakuteiki, 151.
119 Keane, Japanese Garden Design, 16–18, 137; Hall and Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of
Chinese Gardens,” 180–181.
120 See Luke, “The Missouri Botanical Garden”; Sakuteiki, 151, 191–192; Burrell and Dale,
“Utopiary.”
121 The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders (no date) http://
www.nj1937.org/en/index.htm (accessed January 8, 2017); Kirk Denton, Exhibiting the Past: Historical
Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014),
pp. 133–152.
122 Xinhua New Agency, “President Xi Attends China’s First State Memorial Ceremony for Nanjing
Massacre Victims” (December 13, 2014) http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-12/13/c_
133851995.htm (accessed June 3, 2017).
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall is an award-winning series of structures. The

Memorial Hall’s main exhibit is in a “tomb-like” underground history museum that
commemorates the victims of wartime atrocities by graphically telling the horrific story
of rape, murder, looting, and destruction. While the museum works to nail down the
meaning of the memorial as singular and dystopic—militarist Japan attacking civilized
China—the overall style of the memorial space is more of a heterotopic distribution
of the sensible. It was designed by top architect Qi Kang, who felt his mission was to
express the “social and national feelings” of the Nanjing Massacre by “embodying the
historical disaster in the entire design of the environment.”123 To do this, Qi mixed the
design styles of socialist realism, classical Chinese gardens, and Japanese public archi-
tecture.124 His task was to generate an affective atmosphere using landscape gardening
techniques “to give visitors a true representation of what happened in history. In a word,
buildings, grounds, walls, trees, slopes and sculptures were essential elements not to be
neglected.”125 The memorial has been built in four phases to commemorate the fortieth
and seventieth anniversaries of the end of World War II and the sixtieth and seventieth
anniversaries of the Nanjing Massacre. It thus is a heterotopic assemblage that contains
many different gardens, and this chapter focuses on two of them.
The Disaster in Jinling [Nanjing] public sculpture opened in 1997 as part of phase
two (see figure 10.1); since its organizing themes are “pain” and “hatred,” it focuses
sharply on what is seen as China’s unfinished historical business with Japan.126 This
monumental sculpture shows a scene of violence and tragedy, in which Chinese
people suffered during Japan’s invasion of Nanjing, which resulted in a huge death
toll and the destruction of one-third of the city’s buildings. The site includes a mas-
sive decapitated man’s screaming head, the frantically outstretched arm of a buried-
alive victim, and a city wall that has been mutilated by artillery fire. Qi’s aim here is
for the memorial sculpture to be “resonant with the wails and shrieks of the dead.”127
But on second glance, the Disaster in Jinling also employs many classical Chinese
garden-building conventions (see figure 10.2). As Qi explains, “In design, Chinese
gardens came to mind, which is a sort of concentration of nature, with mountains
and pavilions put in a limited ensemble.”128 When the memorial is viewed from this
oblique angle, different meanings emerge.129 It has the familiar mix of water, rocks,
123 Qi, QinHua Rijun, 12.

124 Qi, QinHua Rijun, 16, 124–125.
129 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 111ff; Geoffrey Whitehall and Eric Ishiwata, “The
International Aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja and the Yushukan Museum,” in The New Violent
Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, edited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J.
Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 234–247.
Figure 10.1 Disaster in Jinling, Nanjing Massacre Memorial (2017). Courtesy Wikimedia
Figure 10.2 Disaster in Jinling, close up (1999). Source: Qi, QinHua Rijun Nanjing datusha yunan
tongbao jinianguan
Figure 10.3 Peace Tower (2009). Courtesy Wikimedia
and architecture, and there is a harmonic dynamic between the water-like gravel in
the front and the mountain-like wall in the rear. The sculptures of a dismembered
head and a clawing arm resemble a Chinese garden’s ornamental stones. The bullet-
ridden city wall, inscribed with the official number of victims—300,000 dead—
is much like a garden’s symbolic mountain range inscribed with classical poetry.
Finally, the curved bridge takes visitors over a river of gravel to a different affective
space that has vibrant pine trees that evoke virtue and eternal life.130 Hence, Disaster
in Jinling is not simply a memorial; it is a Chinese garden that visually excites feelings
of anger, loss, and remembrance in a particular affective community of sense.131
The second example is Peace Square, which opened in 2007 to mark the seven-
tieth anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre. It has a long reflecting pool at the center
on an East-West axis, a landscaped garden to the south, and a bas-relief wall to the
north. The focus of Peace Square is on Peace Tower at the West end of the reflecting
pool; the tower integrates three “peace symbols” into one sculpture: a woman who
both carries a child and releases a dove (see figure 10.3). Rather than a Chinese
garden, Peace Square is a more generic, modern garden-park. Still, it uses some
Chinese aesthetic conventions to conceal and reveal the view;132 to enter the garden,
130 See Keswick, The Chinese Garden, 191; Henderson, The Gardens of Suzhou.
131 See Meyer-Fong, “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden,” 86–87; Emma
Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 128.
132 Keswick, The Chinese Garden, 28, 37.
Figure 10.4 Peace through strength (2013). Courtesy Wikimedia
you have to first pass through a very dark commemoration hall before coming out
into the bright light that reveals the beautiful scene of the reflecting pool with the
Peace Tower at the end. Once again, the garden bridge leads you from the dark hor-
rors of war to the bright sunshine of peace.
But what kind of “peace” is presented in this garden?133 China’s military victory
over Japan is displayed by the bugling soldier, whose boot stands on a Japanese
helmet and sword (see figure 10.4). As the sculpture shows, this garden embodies
a particular civility/martiality dynamic: peace through strength. Behind the bugler
is a large bas-relief Wall of Victory that records how the Communist Party heroically
led the Chinese people to employ military force to triumph over Japan. Peace here is
seen as the result not of mutual understanding, but of military strength.
133 For a discussion of what counts as a “peace image,” see Frank Möller, Visual Peace: Images,
Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
While Qi Kang’s goal is to foster peace and promote reconciliation through

garden-style landscape architecture, the memorial’s particular distribution of the
sensible works to produce feelings of fear, outrage, and hate. Peace here is experi-
enced not in terms of nonviolence or reconciliation, but in terms of a celebration
of overwhelming military force and invocations of raw emotion. This peace-war
dynamic was underlined in 2002 when a plan to rename the massacre memorial
the “Nanjing International Peace Center” generated outrage among the Chinese
public. After it was found that 80 percent of Nanjing residents opposed the plan, it
was dropped.134 In 2015 the memorial opened an annex dedicated to a new exhibit,
Three Victories: The Victory of the Anti-Fascist War in the China Theater and Judging the
Historical Truth of Japan’s War Crimes.135 Hence, in China the cultural governance
of anti-Japanese historiography and militarized peace is hegemonic, allowing only
limited space for resistance.136
Even so, there are opportunities for people to performatively experience the
garden in ways that resist state-led cultural governance. For example, teenagers on
a date are likely to be engaging in their own redistribution of the sensible. Back at
Peace Square, during my visit in 2011 resistance emerged through an unintentional
use of a Chinese garden-building convention. Behind the Peace Tower is an im-
pious “borrowed view”: the sacred (socialist) patriotism of the site is violated by
the (capitalist) profanity of the billboard for Jinsheng International Property (see
figure 10.3).
Yasukuni Shrine
Like most national war memorials, the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo
commemorates the sacrifice of people who died for their country.137 The souls
of fallen soldiers are enshrined at this Shinto temple, which is sponsored by the
Japanese emperor (see figure 10.5). It is also a controversial place, because in 1978
the souls of fourteen “Class A” war criminals and 5,700 “Class B and C” war criminals
were secretly enshrined there.138 Hence, as the Chinese ambassador’s intervention
described previously shows, there was outrage when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
visited the Yasukuni Shrine in 2013.
134 Huang Ying, “80% Nanjing Citizens Strongly Opposed to Rename ‘Nanjing Massacre Memorial
Hall,’” People’s Daily (March 26, 2002) http://en.people.cn/200203/25/eng20020325_92780.shtml
(accessed January 21, 2019).
135 The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre.
136 See William A. Callahan, “Identity and Security in China: The Negative Soft Power of the China
Dream,” Politics 35:3–4 (2015):216–229.
137 See Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003), pp. 57–110.
138 Kingston, “Awkward Talisman”; Takenaka, Yasukuni Shrine.
Figure 10.5 Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo (2004). Courtesy Wikimedia
To many in East Asia, the Yasukuni Shrine is not a utopian site for national
heroes but a dystopian site that celebrates wartime atrocities. Abe’s visit thus pro-
voked a general concern about the return of Japanese militarism and was seen as
part of his reinterpretation of Japan’s Peace Constitution to expand the role of
the military.139 The Yusukan Museum, which is on the grounds of the shrine and
guides mainstream understandings of this memorial, shows that there is cause for
concern. The museum’s tour of Japanese history, with its scenes of war, death, and
martial commemoration, glorifies Japan as both a heroic warrior nation and an un-
repentant victim.140 The Yusukan Museum thus embodies a distribution of the sen-
sible that serves to police the meaning of the Yasukuni Shrine and of the Japanese
nation according to a stable linear narrative of patriotic coherence and unity.141
But there is more to the Yasukuni Shrine than the Yusukan Museum; in many
ways, the shrine is an Edo stroll garden that juxtaposes different elements and
139 Marie Thorsten, “Soft-Hard Power Convergence and Democracy in Abe’s Japan,” in Power in
Contemporary Japan, edited by Gill Steel (London: Palgrave, 2016), pp. 239–262.
140 See Record in Pictures of Yushukan (Tokyo: Kindai Publishing Co., 2009).
141 See Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics; Whitehall and Ishiwata, “The International
Aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja.”
styles.142 To enter, you can pass through Japan’s largest shrine gate and promenade
up the central path through landscaped gardens complete with statuary, stone
lanterns, religious out-buildings, and market stalls. After passing through another
gate, you enter the “Inner Garden,” a temple garden that is dominated by Yasukuni’s
Main Shrine and also contains other temple and tea house gardens: behind the
shrine is the Sacred Pond Garden, which includes three tea house gardens.143
When recognized as a heterotopic garden park that combines civility and
martiality, the Yasukuni Shrine complex can accommodate meanings and feelings
that resist the militarism of the Yushukan Museum. To put it another way, there is
more than one way to experience the shrine. Most people outside Tokyo only see
the shrine when it is a site of key national events, especially the militarist and paci-
fist demonstrations sparked by the visits of leading politicians on important event
days. But for people who live and work in the neighborhood, the shrine has dif-
ferent meanings that are not exhausted by the war-peace binary opposition. While
it is a sacred imperial shrine, it is also a space of rambling everydayness. People
crisscross it as part of their everyday activities, creating different meanings as they
walk.144 Much like Louis XIV’s Versailles, the shrine is a space of visual/multisen-
sory performances of cultural governance that excite particular affective communi-
ties of sense. But unlike Versailles, it is also a site of resistance to both militarism and
its opposite, pacifism. It is a sacred space and a hypernationalist site, but it is also
a short cut, a place for a smoke or to eat lunch on a sunny day (see figure 10.6).145
Unlike the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, which is mostly contained behind high
walls, the Yasukuni Shrine, like many urban peace gardens, is a crossroads for pedes-
trian traffic at the heart of the city.146
Walking in Tokyo, Yasukuni Shrine is a fascinating YouTube video that records the
experience of simply walking through the shrine and thus performing this Japanese
stroll garden via an impious itinerary.147 The video was a response to a film made
of the hypernationalist crowds that gathered in 2006 to cheer on Prime Minister
Junichiro Koizumi’s controversial visit to the Yasukuni Shrine on August 15, the
day that Japan marks the end of World War II. The YouTube video aims to show
how the Yasukuni Shrine has meanings beyond hypernationalism and militarism.
Importantly, it does this without any narration, letting the images and sounds of
partisan contestation and everyday life do the political work.
142 See Mitsuhide, Yasukuni no Shiki; Kuitert, Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1–44, 247–307.
143 See Precinct Map.
144 See de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91–110; Enloe, “The Mundane Matters.”
145 Whitehall and Ishiwata, “The International Aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja.”
146 See McClimens et al., “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel?,” 122; Keenan, “The
Summer Gardens in the Social Life of St Petersburg,” 154.
147 Egawauemon, Walking in Tokyo, Yasukuni Shrine, YouTube (August 18, 2008) http://www.you-
tube.com/watch?v=Ew9AllEWehM (accessed June 3, 2017).
Figure 10.6 Yasukuni Shrine, Sacred Pond Garden (2016). Source: Koinsky, Flickr
The video starts off outside the shrine grounds in the midst of a political dem-
onstration complete with banners, activists with loudspeakers, and helicopters
circulating overhead. It offers the perspective of an ordinary visitor, walking in
the front gate and up the main pedestrianized avenue of the Yasukuni Shrine, per-
forming it as an Edo stroll garden. It is fascinating to see—and hear—the multi-
sensory experience evolve from partisan politics to the politics of everyday life.
The people walking the site shift from activists outside the gate to a human as-
semblage on the shrine grounds: salarymen (white-collar workers), students, fam-
ilies, tourists, and shoppers all out for a stroll. The sound of the loudspeakers and
helicopters is gradually overwhelmed by the screech of crickets, the murmur of
private conversation, and music from the temple. Surely some people are going
to the Yusukan Museum, but that is not the focus of this film. Others pause to
experience the sacred space, while yet another set of people traverse the site as a
crossroads between here and there. In this way, meaning is actively constructed in
perambulative performances worthy of de Certeau’s practice of everyday life and
Rancière’s emancipated spectator.148
This nonnarrative film thus encourages us to change the question from “what”
is the meaning of the Yasukuni Shrine to “when” and “where” are the meaning of
the shrine? If we find the film’s perambulative performance meaningful, then we
can appreciate the Yasukuni Shrine as an Edo stroll garden that creatively resists
the state-led cultural governance that frames politics in terms of war versus peace.
Rather than allow the Yusukan Museum to determine the ideology of the experi-
ence, we can look to the Sacred Pond Garden at the back of the shrine to reframe
our understanding of it as a site of life, reflection, and other possibilities (see figure
10.6). Still, one of my visual IR students was outraged at this analysis, which he
criticized as normalizing Japanese militarism. He stated that instead of walking
the shrine in impious ways, “as a Korean, it’s my duty to burn down the Yasukuni
Shrine.”
Yet to redistribute the sensible and thereby resist cultural governance, I argue
that it is not necessary to burn down China’s imperial garden, as the Anglo-French
forces did in 1860, or to torch the Yasukuni Shrine now. People can resist state-
led cultural governance simply by experiencing the garden as a heterotopia that
redistributes the sensible dynamic of civility and martiality in performances that
not only counter militarism, but also resist the war-peace framing of international
politics. In this way, the garden experience moves from ideology to affect, and from
questions of visibility to performative experiences of visuality that excite affective
148 de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 91–114; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Enloe,
“The Mundane Matters.”
Conclusion
This chapter explores the contingent social and visual workings of key gardens to
make two main arguments. First is the visibility/invisibility argument: gardens are
“unexpected spaces” for the international politics of social-ordering and world-
ordering, which in turn impact issues of diplomacy, war, and peace. Second is the
visuality argument: to understand the sensible politics of gardens, it is necessary to
take an aesthetic approach to IR that appreciates visual artifacts as heterotopic (re)
distributions of the sensible that can embody new visual/multisensory performances
of cultural governance and resistance. Specifically, the chapter questions how we
categorize the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and the Yasukuni Shrine as “peace gar-
dens” or “war gardens” to explore how they function as distributions of the sensible
that embody particular civility/martiality dynamics. As we have seen, such (re)
distributions of the sensible, in turn, can generate cultural governance and resist-
ance. Gardens here are infrastructures of feeling that provoke unexpected affective
Rather than performing a simple reversal to see the Nanjing Massacre Memorial
as a war garden and the Yasukuni Shrine as a peace garden, this analysis aims to
shake loose such binary distinctions and iconic images to better appreciate the cre-
ative play in the civility/martiality dynamic.149 Such oblique interventions under-
line how war memorials, gardens, and other unexpected spaces of IR are not stable
containers of ideology, but instead need to be actively (re)interpreted as multisen-
sory performances of cultural governance and resistance. As noted, what is most
interesting about the civility/martiality dynamic is its lack of a stable canonic defini-
tion; there is no orthodoxy. Likewise, for garden-building in China and Japan, there
is no canonic recipe for building the correct garden; rather, garden design gener-
ally defers to the site and to other specific factors. The contingent flexibility of the
civility/martiality dynamic and garden-building strategies thus demands that we
make sense of the sensible politics of gardens through continual interpretive prac-
tice and performative experience.
This chapter addresses East Asian international politics because that is my par-
ticular area of interest and expertise. But as the example of Versailles shows, this
research deploys unexpected juxtapositions and new concepts to call into question
any (neo)Orientalist regionalization of international studies. Indeed, the hope is
that this research will generate further studies of the international politics of gardens
that will explore examples from other times and places. For example, what sense can
we make of the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York, which
embodies a particular civility/martiality dynamic in its heterotopic distribution of
the sensible? On the one hand, the official museum seems to follow the distribution
See Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator,  48–49.

149
of the sensible seen at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. Both provoke raw emotions
through their intimate connection to death: the Massacre Memorial is built on the
site of a mass grave, and thousands of people died a violent death at Ground Zero.
Both underground museums seek to stabilize the meaning of the tragedy (and the
identity of the nation) by assigning the roles of villains and victims in a tragically
heroic narrative.150
On the other hand, rather than being walled-off like the Nanjing Massacre
Memorial, the above-ground 9/11 memorial is open, like the Yasukuni Shrine. As
a key hub in New York’s mass transportation system, it is even more of a crossroads
that people traverse going from here to there in everyday life, as well as on partic-
ular pilgrimages. Michael Arad’s Reflecting Absence memorial is radically open: twin
voids that controversially reproduce the gaping wound in the cityscape as a pair of
black holes. Like the Japanese stroll garden, this water garden is open to multiple
interpretations as a site of life, death, and rebirth.151
As this exploratory discussion suggests, the 9/11 memorial is ripe for further
analysis; it can be profitably analyzed as a garden heterotopia that redistributes the
sensible dynamic of civility and martiality in performances of cultural governance
and resistance. It highlights how, as infrastructures of feeling, memorials and gar-
dens are not just visual experiences but are entangled performances that provoke
affective communities of sense. As visual artifacts, material modalities, and sen-
sory spaces, gardens allow us to not only observe IR, but also participate in inter-
national politics. Like picture-taking, film-making, map-making, veil-wearing, and
wall-building, here garden-building is theory-building: by producing new sites and
sensibilities, it creatively shapes our understanding of IR.
150 See Allison Blais and Lynn Rasic, A Place of Remembrance, Updated Edition: Official Book of the
National September 11 Memorial (New York: National Geographic, 2015).
151 See G. Roger Denson, “Michael Arad’s 9/11 Memorial ‘Reflecting Absence’: More Than a
Metaphor or a Monument,” Huffington Post (September 9, 2011) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
g-roger-denson/michael-arads-911-memoria_b_955454.html (accessed June 3, 2107); Blais and
Rasic, A Place of Remembrance; Marita Sturken, “The Objects That Lived: The 9/11 Museum and
Material Transformation,” Memory Studies 9:1 (2016):13–26; Michael J. Shapiro, The Political Sublime
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), pp. 166–167.
11
Visibility, Visuality, and Mass

(Self)Surveillance
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the fu-
ture, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among
us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. . . . We are creating a world
where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how
singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
—John Perry Barlow
“A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996)1
Devotedly keeping watch over heaven and earth every day,

Taking up our mission as the sun rises in the East,
Innovating every day, embracing the clear and bright,
Like warm sunshine moving in our hearts,
Unified with the strength of all living things,
Devoted to turning the global village into the most beautiful scenery.
Internet superpower! The Internet is where glorious dreams are.
Internet superpower! From the distant cosmos to our longed-for home.
Internet superpower! Tell the world that the China Dream is lifting up
the great China.
Internet superpower! Each of us represents our country to the world.
—“Cyberspace Spirit”
Anthem of the Cyberspace Administration of China (2015)2
As the first quotation declares, the Internet, as a free-wheeling, transnational civil

society, promised to emancipate us from authoritarian states and conservative
1 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (February 8,

1996) https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence (accessed June 2, 2018), quoted in Alexander
Klimburg, The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace (New York: Penguin Press, 2017), p. 14.
2 “Cyberspace Spirit,” Cyberspace Administration of China, YouTube (February 2015) https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QlNjvWlWZk (accessed June 3, 2018).
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
societies. In 2000 US president Bill Clinton echoed this view when he mocked
China’s effort to control the Internet: “Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail
Jell-O to the wall.” As debates over the Arab Spring of 2011 show, Internet platforms
such as Facebook and Twitter can play an important part in mobilization and social
change in authoritarian states. This certainly has been seen in Beijing as a pertinent
example of the Internet’s potential threat to regime stability in the PRC.3
More recently, however, surveillance scandals about the Internet have burst into
the news on a regular basis. In 2013 there was global outrage after Edward Snowden
revealed the massive size and scope of PRISM (Personal Record Information System
Methodology), the global data mining project run by the US National Security
Agency (NSA) and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (US, UK, Canada, Australia,
New Zealand).4 In 2017–2018, again, there was concern about how Cambridge
Analytica had worked with social media platforms to influence the 2015 Brexit ref-
erendum in the United Kingdom and the 2016 Trump election in the United States.
As these examples show, surveillance is not just an issue for authoritarian states.
It is also a problem in liberal democracies and emerges in the overlapping private/
public sphere of local, national, and transnational spaces, with battles over transpar-
ency, regulation, and sovereignty on the global stage. Surveillance thus is an issue
of visibility: it characteristically becomes visible when it generates moral panic.
Otherwise, to be effective surveillance itself is largely invisible, whether it is parents
monitoring their children’s social media activity, Facebook tracking your “likes,” or
a state spying on foreign rivals—and its own citizens.
Cybersecurity for individuals, companies, and nation-states is certainly a serious
issue. But rather than just raising questions of security, surveillance also provokes
questions of order. Chapter 11 thus turns the question of visibility around—not just
what we see, but how we are seen in various gazes and how we perform in various
spaces—to explore how surveillance engages in social-ordering and world-ordering
in the twenty-first century. Following previous chapters, the chapter examines sur-
veillance in terms of the ideological-work of what it means and the affect-work of
what it does—and even what it desires.5
Surveillance thus is another profitable site for analysis using the visibility/vis-
uality dynamic, in which the visibility strategy works to make more visible the
3 Shaun Breslin, “China and the Arab Awakening,” ISPI Analysis 140 (2012):1–8.
4 See Zygmunt Bauman, Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, and
R. B. J. Walker, “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance,” International Political Sociology
8 (2014):121–144.
5 Didier Bigo, “Security, Surveillance, and Democracy,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance
Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2014),
p. 282; Jonathan Finn, “Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice,” in Eyes Everywhere: The
Global Growth of Camera Surveillance, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, and David Lyon
(London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 67–80; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves
of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Vis ib ilit y, Visualit y, and Ma s s (S el f ) S ur ve il lanc e 273
invisible ideological distinctions of security/freedom, public/private, and dem-

ocratic/authoritarian, while the visuality strategy looks at how affect-work can
create a new way of seeing, feeling, and perhaps doing in communities of sense. It
is important to make visible the largely invisible artifacts of surveillance—Internet
infrastructure, hidden cameras, and algorithms—and it is also important to ap-
preciate the visuality of how people now “see surveillantly” in sensory spaces as a
“social practice [that] requires a self-reflexive look at our own willingness and de-
sire to watch, record and display our lives and the lives of others.”6 As Kathleen P. J.
Brennan explains, the Internet is a “visual realm” wherein images emotionally con-
nect people first, who then search for information.7
Admittedly, analysis of the visual international politics of surveillance is an
odd way to conclude Part III, “Visual Artifacts.” Cyberspace doesn’t really fit into
the distinction between two-dimensional visual images and three-dimensional
visual artifacts. But this chapter looks at surveillance in terms of the interplay of
three-dimensional surveillance infrastructure and online images and experiences.
Together they produce a multisensory social space for ideological work and affec-
tive performances. As with walls and gardens, here a visual artifact is more than a
“thing”: it is a social space that is human-designed and performative. The Internet
thus is an infrastructure of feeling that provokes a range of affective communities
of sense.
This chapter develops the visibility/ visuality and ideology/ affect concep-
tual dynamics through the juxtaposition of surveillance concepts, practices, and
experiences in Europe, the United States, and China. These examples are at times
unwieldy, showing how surveillance doesn’t readily fit into established categories;
because of the dearth of analysis on surveillance in China, there is more discus-
sion of that country.8 The chapter argues that while it’s common to look at airports
to see the future of security and surveillance practices,9 we actually need to look
to China—and specifically at the Social Credit System and the cyber-police state
in Xinjiang—to appreciate how surveillance practice works through an entangled
ecology of surveillance, sousveillance, and co-veillance, which I call “inter-veillance.”
6 Finn, “Seeing Surveillantly,” 79; David Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018), pp. 113ff.
7 Kathleen P. J. Brennan, “Memelife,” in Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, edited
by Mark B. Salter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 244, 252.
8 For a discussion of the problem of the lack of surveillance studies beyond Euro-America, see
James Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement,” Journal of
Contemporary China (May 31, 2019):2, https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2019.1621529 (accessed
August 23, 2019).
9 See Mark B. Salter, Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Lyon,
The Culture of Surveillance, 61–71; Debbie Lisle, Holidays in the Danger Zone (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016).
This is not just a matter of domestic politics in China, because the PRC is ex-
porting its hardware and software of surveillance and control through its massive
infrastructure development projects, which in turn increasingly impact govern-
ance norms on the Internet.10 But the sensible politics of surveillance is not simply
an ideological battle between (Western) freedom and (Chinese) order; similar
technologies are exciting similar performances in affective communities of sense
around the world, especially on social media. The chapter thus compares how sur-
veillance provokes censorship, self-discipline, and creative social-ordering in China,
the United States, and Europe. While the epigraphs at the beginning of the chapter
suggest that critical politics requires either resisting state control or asserting state
control, Chapter 11 considers how both democratic and authoritarian countries see
surveillance in terms of social and moral order. The conclusion is that surveillance
provokes political and moral questions rather than technical or cultural issues, and
that it is important to move beyond questions of cybersecurity to appreciate sur-
veillance as a social-ordering and world-ordering process that excites affective com-
munities of sense.
Surveillance Studies and Visual International Politics

Surveillance studies emerged in the 1960s as the sociological study of domestic po-
licing issues. Scholarly interest in international surveillance was later provoked by
the US government’s high-tech response to terrorism after 9/11, and especially after
the global scale of data mining by the NSA and Five Eyes was revealed in 2013.
While it is common to focus on the United States—many publications frame their
analysis in terms of post-9/11 and post-Snowden11—we should remember that
the United Kingdom and China compete for recognition as the world’s most sur-
veilled societies. Britain’s CCTV monitoring system, which was pioneered in the
City of London’s “Ring of Steel” project, was developed after the Irish Republican
Army started targeting England in the 1980s; the Great Firewall of China was set
up to block democracy soon after China hooked up to the Internet in 1994.12 Since
10 See Office of the Leading Group for the Belt and Road Initiative, Building the Belt and
Road: Concept, Practice and China’s Contribution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, May 2017), pp.
27–28; James Griffiths, The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of
the Internet (London: Zed, 2019).
11 See Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance; Bauman et al., “After Snowden”; Louise Amoore, “Vigilant
Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror,” Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):215–232;
Rex Troumbley, “Colonization.com: Empire Building for a New Digital Age,” East-West Affairs 1:4
(2013):93–107.
12 Eric Lipton, “To Fight Terror, New York Tries London’s ‘Ring of Steel,’” New York Times ( July
24, 2005), p. C3; Geremie R. Barmé and Sang Ye, “The Great Firewall of China,” Wired ( June 1, 1997)
https://www.wired.com/1997/06/china-3/ (accessed June 23, 2018); State Council Information
these projects preceded 2001, they are best not understood as a “reaction” to US
threats; indeed, after 9/11 the United States actively tried to learn from London’s
surveillance experience.13 While surveillance studies characteristically focus on
Europe and North America, we also need to appreciate China as an influential
source of concepts, policies, and experiences for the visual international politics of
surveillance.
Pundits often assume that all surveillance is bad, yet the discipline of surveillance
studies actually highlights its Janus-faced character, analyzing the “negative” state/
corporate invasions of privacy as well as the potentially positive activity of “good
gazing” for the care of the other.14 The two epigraphs sketch not only the parameters
of debates about cyberspace, but also their normative moral arguments. On the one
hand, we have the cyber-utopian demand for a free and democratic space beyond
nations on the global Internet superhighway, and on the other, we have the cyber-
dystopia of authoritarian state power that demands cyber-sovereignty and cyber-
surveillance on distinct national intranets. Of course these views can be seen from
an alternative perspective: the Chinese party-state sees democracy and civil society
as existential threats, and a “clean and righteous” national Internet is not only an
instrumental political tactic for regime security but also a normative moral goal.15
Although China’s surveillance project seems to be an issue of human rights in
Chinese society, like the rest of the Chinese political-economy, it is actually “going
global.”16 This was made clear to me in 2012 when I was living in Singapore: upon
returning from a visit to the PRC, my mobile phone’s Chinese SIM card automat-
ically sent me a text message from the Chinese foreign ministry instructing me to
obey the local laws and act in a “civilized” manner. People who use Chinese apps
abroad now take the PRC’s surveillance, filtering, and censorship regime with them
to other countries.17 China’s surveillance dynamic thus spreads around the world
Office, “The Internet in China” ( June 8, 2010) http://www.gov.cn/english/2010-06/08/content_

1622956.htm (accessed May 30, 2018).
13 Lipton, “To Fight Terror,” C3.
14 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 17, 194–196; Gary T. Marx, Windows on the Soul: Surveillance
and Society in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. xv; David
Lyon, Kevin D. Haggerty, and Kirstie Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” in Routledge Handbook of
Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge,
2014), p. 3.
15 “China’s Xi Says Ideology Work ‘Absolutely Correct’ Amid Trade Row Criticism,” Reuters
(August 22, 2018) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-idUSKCN1L71CG (accessed
March 7, 2019).
16 See David Shambaugh, China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
17 See Lotus Ruan, Jeffrey Knockel, Jason Q. Ng, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata, “One App, Two
Systems: How WeChat Uses One Censorship Policy in China, and Another Internationally,” The
Citizen Lab (November 30, 2016) https://citizenlab.ca/2016/11/wechat-china-censorship-one-app-
two-systems/ (accessed May 10, 2018).
through both individual smartphones and state-led Internet infrastructure invest-

ment projects such as Beijing’s Cyber Silk Road initiative (discussed more later
in the chapter).18 Indeed, its aggressive research and development strategy, cou-
pled with its weak commitment to privacy and the rule of law, has made China the
“global leader in surveillance technologies and practices.”19 This is not just an issue
of hardware and software; alongside Russia, China is presenting itself to the world
as the future of the Internet’s global norms and governance.20
Most analyses look to technology and security to consider how surveillance
practices generate meaning and sort people. This chapter also appreciates surveillance
as an affective social performance of social-ordering and world-ordering, in what David
Lyon calls the interactive “culture of surveillance.”21 While framing the issues in terms
of culture rather than technology allows for a more aesthetic appreciation of the politics
of surveillance, “culture” itself raises a different set of issues. It is popular to understand
Chinese actions in terms of an East/West conceptual scheme, wherein negotiable po-
litical issues are quickly converted into fixed identity positions. Indeed, it is common
to argue that Chinese civilization frames the issues in terms of order/chaos rather than
in terms of public/private and security/freedom; as the former head of the PRC’s
Cyberspace Administration of China explained, “[T]‌he more we pursue freedom, the
more we require order.”22
To avoid (self)Orientalism’s problems of essentialized identity, this chapter
develops Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s models of social-ordering: so-
ciety of sovereignty, society of discipline, and the networked society of control.23
It juxtaposes these three social models to examine how each enacts what Jacques
18 See Office of the Leading Group, Building the Belt and Road, 27–28; Griffiths, The Great Firewall
of China.
20 Office of the Leading Group, Building the Belt and Road, 27–28; Adam Segal, “When China
Rules the Web: Technology in Service of the State,” Foreign Affairs (August 13, 2018) https://www.
foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-08-13/when-china-rules-web (accessed March 15, 2019).
21 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance.
22 Lu Wei, “Speech at the 13th China Online Media Forum” (October 30, 2013), translation avail-
able at http://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/siio-director-outlines-eight-
objectives-for-online-media/ (accessed June 3, 2018).
23 Galloway explains that Deleuze’s control society is analogous to Manuel Castell’s network so-
ciety; thus I combine the concepts as “networked society of control.” Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the
Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992):3–7; for application of this idea to the Internet, see Alexander
Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006),
p. 24; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 7–9. For an application of this to surveillance studies, see
Greg Elmer, “Panopticon—Discipline—Control,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited
by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 21–29.
Rancière calls a distinct “repartition of the sensible”:24 wall-building in sovereignty

society, the Panopticon in disciplinary society, and interactive performances of
multidirectional “inter-veillance” in networked control society. While it is common
to see these as distinct historical epochs—with the state-led surveillance of the
Panopticon and Big Brother being replaced by a neoliberal performance of “sur-
veillance capitalism”25—this chapter follows Foucault in appreciating how “new
techniques do not replace, erase, or exclude those that currently exist, but rather
penetrate, permeate, infiltrate, and dovetail into them.”26 As we will see, China’s
Social Credit System is working to integrate the societies of sovereignty, disci-
pline, and networked control by interactively scoring individuals through a big
data sharing system that takes advantage of government tracking, e-commerce ac-
tivity, and social media performances to watch, filter, censor, reward, punish—and
amuse—everyone all the time.
Binary Surveillance in the Society of Sovereignty

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault discusses the disciplinary society by contrasting
it with the society of sovereignty. France’s seventeenth-century reaction to leprosy
exemplifies the surveillance strategy of the sovereignty society, because it asserted
a strict binary division. Once the very visible signs of leprosy—the corrosion of
the body—were seen, lepers were made invisible by quarantining them outside
the body politic. These “rituals of exclusion” produced a pure society by isolating
impurities in separate institutions. At this time, those with other visible signs of
difference such as insanity were likewise exiled to institutions that were outside the
purview of the pure society.27
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, surveillance similarly targeted
outsiders who were seen as a threat to the health of society—criminals, political
activists, and spies—and was regulated through the legal framework of target first,
track later. The opening credits of season one of The Wire illustrate the limited,
Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), p. 63. For more discussion of
“(re)partition of the sensible,” see Chapters 2, 9, and 10.
25 Lyon, Culture of Surveillance, 145; Marx, Windows on the Soul.
26 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–6, trans-
lated by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alssandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), pp.
241–242.
27 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 198, 195–200; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An
Introduction, translated by R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), pp.135–136; also see Gilles
Deleuze, Foucault, translated by Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988),
pp.  25–44.
juridical, and deliberate nature of surveillance, showing images of the warrant nec-
essary for wiretapping the phones of specific criminal suspects, individual police
eavesdropping on phone conversations, individual police photographers, a heli-
copter overseeing the neighborhood, and the grainy images of an early generation
of CCTV cameras. The program also shows resistance to such targeted surveillance;
as in the Intifada’s low-tech response to Israel’s high-tech occupation, in The Wire a
young man throws a stone to crack the lens of a CCTV camera.28 The sovereignty
society maintained social order through a binary division that protected the inside
of a healthy polity through the surveillance and control of a select group of people
who were quarantined as a threat to social purity.
China also has a history of maintaining the sovereignty society through a binary
form of targeted surveillance, although in the PRC it was not so legalistic. Criminals
and dissidents were individually surveilled through filtering their mail and tapping
their telephones, as well as through visual surveillance; their information was com-
piled in personal files (dang’an) that recorded their political activities and infractions.
The Great Firewall of China employs information and communications technology
(ICT) in a more modern example of the surveillance prerogatives of the society of sov-
ereignty.29 Indeed, since 2010 the party-state has justified its cybersecurity actions in
terms of defending China’s “Internet sovereignty” in order to “create a healthy and har-
monious Internet environment.”30
The Great Firewall is a complex set of procedures and technologies that accom-
plish a broad range of tasks; this section discusses its quarantining functions. The
first email sent from China, on September 14, 1987, proudly proclaimed: “Across
28 The Wire (2002) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1ABR4UpDSU (accessed June

10, 2018).
29 For discussion of China’s censorship and Internet policies, see Margaret E. Roberts,
Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2018); Griffiths, The Great Firewall of China; Xiao Qiang, “The Road to Digital
Unfreedom: President Xi’s Surveillance State,” Journal of Democracy 30:1 (2019):53–67; Lotus Ruan,
When Winner Takes It All: Big Data in China and the Battle for Privacy, Australian Strategic Policy
Institute, Report No. 5/2018 (May 2018); Samantha Hoffman, Social Credit: Technology-enhanced
Authoritarian Control with Global Consequences, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Report No. 6/
2018 ( June 2018); Florian Schneider, China’s Digital Nationalism (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2018); Jacques deLisle, Avery Goldstein, and Guobin Yang, eds., The Internet, Social Media,
and a Changing China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Amy Chang, Warring
State: China’s Cybersecurity Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, December
14, 2014); “The Great Firewall: The Art of Concealment,” The Economist (April 6, 2013) https://
www.economist.com/special-report/2013/04/06/the-art-of-concealment (accessed June 26, 2018);
Guobin Yang, ed., China’s Contested Internet (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2015); Rebecca MacKinnon,
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 2012).
30 State Council, “The Internet in China”; Min Jiang, “Authoritarian Informationalism: China’s
Approach to Internet Sovereignty,” SAIS Review 30:2 (2010):71–89.
the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world.”31 But after China joined
the Internet in 1994, the party-state began building what became known as the
Great Firewall of China to restrict users’ access to ideas and information from out-
side the PRC. It employs software first developed by Western companies such as
Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems to filter the Internet in a similar way to how
parents can regulate their children’s Web-surfing and corporations manage the on-
line activity of their staff.32 It uses the logic of defending the youth and fighting por-
nography to likewise restrict access to “politically exciting ideas.”33
In 2010 the PRC’s “Internet in China” white paper took a broad view of for-
bidden topics of discussion:
No organization or individual may produce, duplicate, announce or dis-

seminate information having the following contents: being against the
cardinal principles set forth in the Constitution; endangering state secu-
rity, divulging state secrets, subverting state power and jeopardizing na-
tional unification; damaging state honor and interests; instigating ethnic
hatred or discrimination and jeopardizing ethnic unity; jeopardizing state
religious policy, propagating heretical or superstitious ideas; spreading
rumors, disrupting social order and stability; disseminating obscenity,
pornography, gambling, violence, brutality and terror or abetting crime;
humiliating or slandering others, trespassing on the lawful rights and
interests of others; and other contents forbidden by laws and administra-
tive regulations.34
The list’s first restricted topic shows that these problems are political rather than
legal or social: the Chinese constitution’s “cardinal principles” require that the
PRC be a socialist country led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It thus
is a matter of regime security to guard the CCP’s legitimacy by blocking access to
“foreign” content that the party-state deems “harmful.”35 The Great Firewall is the
world’s most advanced national firewall, policing the Internet’s sensible gateways
into China since 1996. Much like France’s late-medieval leprosy strategy, it is the
party-state’s job to regulate cyberspace in order to protect Chinese citizens from im-
pure and harmful thoughts, including “heresy, pornography, violence, and terror.”36
31 “How Does China Censor the Internet?,” The Economist (April 22, 2013) https://www.econo-
mist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/04/21/how-does-china-censor-the-internet (accessed June
4, 2018).
32 Barmé and Sang, “The Great Firewall of China”; Troumbley, “Colonization.com.”
33 See Richard Curt Kraus, The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), p. 93; State Council, “The Internet in China.”
34 State Council, “The Internet in China.”
35 Barmé and Sang, “The Great Firewall of China”; Roberts, Censored.
36 State Council, “The Internet in China.”
The Great Firewall of China thus blacklists unacceptable sites associated with the
Dalai Lama, the Tiananmen massacre, Taiwanese independence, Falun Gong, and
other hot button issues. It likewise blocks many foreign media outlets such as the
New York Times. There also is a sophisticated filtering mechanism that bans keywords in
browser searches and increasingly in email and social media messages.37 This is done by
hand and by automation; the Chinese government distributes a list of forbidden “sensi-
tive words” (minggan ci) to Chinese Internet firms, and the Cyberspace Administration
of China employs more than sixty thousand personnel to directly police the Web.38
(The number of official censors is an estimate; it keeps growing.) Often the result of a
“sensitive word” search is invisible, producing an error message stating that the desired
web page is not available. Likewise, the sender is not alerted when an out-going mes-
sage is deleted. As virtual China has become more visual through online photos and
videos, the Great Firewall has adapted to filter and censor visual images as well as text.39
The scale is staggering: between 1 and 10 percent of all social media posts are removed
by censors.40
Yet where there is power there is resistance. Like the Great Wall of China, the
Great Firewall of China is a blunt instrument for producing sovereignty by ex-
cluding foreign influence. Internet-savvy people in China use VPNs to “jump the
Great Firewall” and get access to the global Internet. Activists can resist the cen-
sorship system that targets “sensitive words” by engaging in e-gao wordplay. Artist-
activist Ai Weiwei and his friends jam the filters by using homophones for Chinese
words, as well as words in English. When the #MeToo (#我也是/#WoYeShi) social
media movement was blocked in China, it then proliferated as “Rice Bunny-Mi tu”
because those characters sound like “Me Too” in English. But in this cat-and-mouse
game, the censors always seem to win; “Rice Bunny” was quickly banned.41 Since
37 See Qiang, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom”; Juha Antero Vuori and Lauri Paltemaa, “The
Lexicon of Fear: Chinese Internet Control Practice in Sina Weibo Microblog Censorship,” Surveillance
and Society 13:3/4 (2015):400–421; Schneider, China’s Digital Nationalism.
38 See “Collecting Sensitive Words: The Grass-Mud Horse List,” China Digital Times, https://
chinadigitaltimes.net/2013/06/grass-mud-horse-list/ (accessed June 26, 2018); Roberts, Censored,
104, 150– 189; Nathan Vanderklippe, “Unpublished Chinese Censorship Document Reveals
Sweeping Effort to Eradicate Online Political Content,” Globe and Mail ( June 3, 2018) https://www.
theglobeandmail.com/world/article-unpublished-chinese-censorship-document-reveals-sweeping-
effort-to/ (accessed June 4, 2018); Klimburg, The Darkening Web, 271.
39 See Jeffrey Knockel, Lotus Ruan, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Ron Deibert, “(Can’t) Picture
This: An Analysis of Image Filtering on WeChat Moments,” The Citizen Lab (August 14, 2018) https://
citizenlab.ca/ 2 018/ 0 8/ c ant- p icture- t his- an- analysis- o f- i mage- f iltering- o n- wechat- m oments/
(accessed September 15, 2018); Vanderklippe, “Unpublished Chinese Censorship Document.”
40 Roberts, Censored, 151.
41 Yang, China’s Contested Internet; Roberts, Censored, 162– 163; Rogier Creemers, “Cyber
China: Upgrading Propaganda, Public Opinion Work and Social Management for the Twenty-First
Century,” Journal of Contemporary China 26:103 (2017):86; Lily Kuo, “From ‘Rice Bunny’ to ‘Back Up
the Car’: China’s Year of Censorship,” The Guardian (December 31, 2018) https://www.theguardian.
2017 Beijing has been cracking down on VPNs as well, throttling their connections
to make them so slow as to be unworkable.42 One netizen wrote a science-fiction
story to parody how banning “sensitive words” is shrinking the Chinese language
in Orwellian ways. In the story, the new technology of “GFW Turbo” (i.e., Great
Firewall Turbo) becomes self-aware and runs out of control, banning almost the en-
tire Chinese language. By 2025 only one phrase is left: “sensitive word.”43
By employing a “friction” strategy that imposes costs, in terms of money and/or
time, on people who want to jump the wall, the Great Firewall has been quite effec-
tive at nudging Chinese users to Internet sites more amenable to the regime.44 As
Margaret E. Roberts concludes, “Small costs of access, not draconian punishments
or sophisticated manipulation, can have huge effects on the behaviour of a ma-
jority.” This strategy also drives a wedge between ordinary people who stay within
the Great Firewall and elite dissidents who jump it.45 While the Great Wall of China
acted as a barrier between Civilization and barbarism, the Great Firewall likewise
acts as a barrier, quarantining the harmful outside from the purely harmonious in-
side. Indeed, in reaction to political violence in 2009 between Uyghurs and Han in
the Northwest region of Xinjiang, Beijing cut off the region from the Internet and
international phone calls for over a year. Starting in 2014, Beijing again restricted
much of Xinjiang from international communication that uses the Internet and
telephones. While David Lyon and Gary T. Marx tell us that it is unhelpful to think
of surveillance in terms of 1984,46 Beijing’s assertion of Internet sovereignty and the
sci-fi story both suggest that the Great Firewall really does work like Orwell’s Big
Brother.
The Great Firewall of China is the largest and most sophisticated digital boundary
in the world.47 As the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China explained in
2015, it functions according to the sovereign logic of border walls:
We live in a common online space. This online space is made up of the

internets of various countries, and each country has its own independent
and autonomous interest in internet sovereignty, internet security and
com/world/2018/dec/31/from-rice-bunny-to-back-up-the-car-chinas-year-of-censorship (accessed
March 7, 2019).
42 Qiang, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom,” 56.
43 “GFW de lishi he weilai” [The history and future of the GFW], Zhongguo jiwenwang (May 15,
2013) https://www.bannedbook.org/bnews/fanqiang/20130515/129086.html (accessed June 26,
2018); also see “The Great Firewall,” Economist.
44 Roberts, Censored, 150–189.
45 Roberts, Censored, 13, 8.
46 Lyon, Culture of Surveillance, 1; Marx, Windows on the Soul, xv.
47 Michael Anti, Behind the Great Firewall of China, Ted Talk ( July 2012) https://www.ted.com/
speakers/michael_anti (accessed June 4, 2018).
internet development. Only through my own proper management of my

own internet, [and] your proper management of your own internet . . . can
the online space be truly safe, more orderly and more beautiful.48
China’s Internet sovereignty argument thus is not just for domestic consumption; it
is seen as Beijing’s contribution to the global governance of the Internet. At China’s
World Internet Conference 2015, Xi Jinping told the global audience:
The principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the Charter of the United

Nations is one of the basic norms in contemporary international relations.
It covers all aspects of state-to-state relations, and therefore should also
apply to cyberspace. We should respect the right of individual countries
to independently choose their own path of cyber development and model
of cyber regulation, and internet public policies and participate in interna-
tional cyberspace governance on an equal footing.49
Thus, according to Alexander Klimburg, there are “two large internets in the
world: the US- oriented global patchwork of around forty- two- thousand-
odd
interconnecting internets with the largely free flow of information over their
networks and services, and the Chinese internet.”50
Actually, after Snowden’s revelations about global data harvesting by the NSA/
Five Eyes, China’s idea of Internet sovereignty has become more popular. Brazilian
president Dilma Rousseff, for example, used her annual speech at the UN General
Assembly in 2013 to criticize the US spying as a “breach of international law” that
violated not just the human rights of Brazilian people, but also the national sover-
eignty of the Brazilian state.51 In response, Brazil started to build its own national
Internet capability, separate from the US networks in terms of both hardware and
software.52 The PRC is a big part of the nationalization of the Internet around the
world through Xi’s signature project, the Belt and Road Initiative:53
48 Quoted in David Bandurski, “Lu Wei on the ‘Dream of the Web,’ ” China Media Project (February
17, 2015) http://chinamediaproject.org/2015/02/17/lu-wei-on-the-dream-of-the-web/ (accessed
June 10, 2018).
49 Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, Vol. II (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017), pp.
582–583.
50 Klimburg, The Darkening Web, 256.
51 Julian Borger, “Brazilian President: US Surveillance a ‘Breach of International Law,’” The Guardian
(September 24, 2013) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/24/brazil-president-un-
speech-nsa-surveillance (accessed June 4, 2018).
52 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 129–130; Rachel Brown, “Beijing’s Silk Road Goes Digital,”
Council for Foreign Relations ( June 6, 2017) https://www.cfr.org/blog/beijings-silk-road-goes-
digital (accessed March 15, 2019).
53 For the Belt and Road Initiative, see William A. Callahan, “China’s ‘Asia Dream’: BRI and the
New Regional Order,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 1:3 (2016):226–243.
We must, with the construction of “One Belt One Road” as juncture,

strengthen cooperation with countries along the line and especially de-
veloping countries, in areas such as basic network infrastructure construc-
tion, the digital economy, cybersecurity, etc., and build a Digital Silk Road
for the 21st Century.54
Zambia is one of the countries where the PRC is constructing this Digital Silk Road
by funding, building, and sometimes managing fiber-optic cables, surveillance sys-
tems, and telecommunications networks. Beijing thus isn’t exporting just hardware
and software, but also the surveillance norms and practices of the sovereignty so-
ciety; civil society groups in Zambia have complained about increased surveillance
and censorship.55 In this way, the Internet is shifting from being a transnational in-
formation superhighway to becoming a collection of national intranets that need to
be guarded by the assertion of national Internet sovereignty.
These examples show how the society of sovereignty works according to the
state’s power to define and exclude the inside from outside and to make the visible
invisible. This is an ideological practice that surveils threats deemed to be “foreign”
and acts by restricting the flow of “harmful” information, often through censorship
and filtering. The video of China’s “Cyberspace Spirit” anthem shows how the song
is scored to the rhythm of a military march, which is performed by a well-disciplined
chorus. This and other evidence shows that Beijing envisions surveillance as a mode
of “inspection and control” that works according to a Cold War understanding of
local, national, and global politics.56 The Great Firewall, like the Great Wall of China
and France’s anti-leprosy strategy, serves as both a barrier against the impure and
a gateway to regulate the flow of the healthy; Lu Wei, the first head of the Cyber
Administration of China, was known as the “gatekeeper of the Chinese Internet.”57
As the examples from Brazil and Zambia show, this is not just an issue of censor-
ship in China; Beijing is globalizing the Great Firewall through its Cyber Silk Road
infrastructure project, which promotes the global governance norm of Internet
sovereignty.
54 “Xi Jinping’s Speech at the National Cybersecurity and Informatization Work Conference”; also
see Office of the Leading Group, Building the Belt and Road,  27–28.
55 Sheridan Prasso, “China’s Digital Silk Road Is Looking More Like an Iron Curtain,” Bloomberg
( January 10, 2019) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-01-10/china-s-digital-silk-
road-is-looking-more-like-an-iron-curtain (accessed January 20, 2019); Joe Parkinson, Nicholas Bariyo
and Josh Chin, “Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political Opponents,”
(August 14, 2019) https://www.wsj.com/articles/huawei-technicians-helped-african-governments-
spy-on-political-opponents-11565793017 (accessed August 23, 2019).
56 Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 3–4.
Panoptic Surveillance in the Society of Discipline

While the French state dealt with leprosy through the ritual of excluding visible dif-
ference, Paris’s response to the plague involved an alternative strategy that worked to
make difference more visible in a particular repartition of the sensible. Rather than
exiling the afflicted, the state fixed everyone in place through a strict partitioning
of space that can still be seen in Paris’s arrondissement districts. The purpose was
not to enforce a strict inside/outside distinction, as with leprosy, but to regulate
the whole society though mass surveillance. This social ordering strategy employs a
system of permanent registration and reporting, in which the omniscient and om-
nipresent power effects a “penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of
everyday life.”58 Rather than a massive binary division of people, it called for “mul-
tiple separations” to individualize and discipline the population. The disorder of
the plague thus was met by a new state-led surveillance society in which power laid
“down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death.”59 While the
anti-leprosy strategy led to the pure sovereign community, the anti-plague strategy
produced the disciplinary society.
The Panopticon is the exemplary case of the society of discipline. Jeremy
Bentham’s model prison, in which the central tower is surrounded by individual
cells, produces and enforces power relations according to who is watching whom.
The overseer in the central tower can see the inmates in their peripheral cells but
cannot be seen by them. According to Foucault, the Panopticon does not have to use
coercive power to regulate the inmates; rather, this invisible surveillance produces
docile bodies that self-regulate and self-discipline. Disciplinary society is the model
for most modern institutions—factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals—which
are highly regulated through a non-coercive habitus.
Power here penetrates into each individual’s everyday life in a productive way
that goes beyond the society of sovereignty’s ability to say “no” (i.e., don’t look
there, don’t do that) to create a productive power that tells people where to look
and how to act: “Panopticism is the discipline mechanism: a functional mechanism
that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more ef-
fective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.”60 It is not simply a power
relation of watcher over watched in a unidirectional surveillant gaze; the overseer
in the Panopticon is also the object of surveillance in a “landscape that could at any
time impart in an individual a likelihood of surveillance.”61 The logic goes beyond
Bentham’s project “to see without being seen . . . to impose a particular conduct on a
58
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198.
59
60
61
Elmer, “Panopticon—Discipline—Control,”  24.
particular human multiplicity.”62 Visibility does not set people free, but rather “is a
trap.”63 It is not a politics of watching (as in sovereignty society), so much as one of
being watched, that productively generates identities, institutions, and behaviors.64
The Panopticon thus offers “not the relations of sovereignty but the relations of dis-
cipline”65 in a society of surveillance.
The society of discipline helps make sense of how ICTs can surveil everyone all
the time in twenty-first-century democratic societies. In the sovereignty society, se-
curity and police apparatuses worked through “index cards and filing cabinets” to
monitor a select, targeted number of criminals, dissidents, and spies who moved
in “close-knit and geographically localized communities.” Now with computerized
record-keeping, individual data are digitized and accumulated in databases that are
“mobile, searchable and sharable.”66 In this way, the state can surveil the daily ac-
tivities of a large number of people; whereas the sovereignty society targets first,
and then tracks, the disciplinary society tracks everyone first, and only later targets
individuals.67 Like Foucault’s Panopticon of multiple separations, these data-driven
surveillance activities engage in “social sorting” to categorize “people into groups,
so that the persons themselves can be treated differently, depending on the group.”68
This is the Orwellian/1984/Big Brother version of the surveillance society.
The Panopticon also helps explain the NSA’s mass surveillance projects. The state
mines data from telephone companies, Internet service providers, browsers, search
engines, and social media platforms in order to sort out who might be a terrorist
threat. It also harvests data by intercepting telephone and online traffic by tapping
the Internet’s physical infrastructure of cables and switches that serve as gateways to
vast regions; cables to Latin America pass through the United States, and Western
Europe’s cables go through the United Kingdom.69 More than spying on content,
the goal is to visualize large populations in a disciplinary society by mapping social
relations. Through cooperation with the expanded Five Eyes network, the NSA was
able to achieve a global program of data mining. Although it is illegal for Five Eyes
Plus states to spy on their own citizens, the project’s data sharing logic was able to
circumvent such restrictions: state 1 would spy on state 2’s citizens, and vice versa,
and then they would share data. But this was not an equal relationship; the NSA’s ca-
pacity is probably ten times that of any of its partners.70 The NSA’s goal, again, is not
62 Deleuze, Foucault, 34 (emphasis in original).

63 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
64 Elmer, “Panopticon—Discipline—Control,”  27.
65 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 208.
66 Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball, “Introducing Surveillance Studies,” 4; Lyon, The Culture of
Surveillance, 5.
67 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 165.
68 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 13.
69 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 122.
70 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 124–126.
to censor—as in the sovereignty society’s regime of inspection and control—but to

data mine and data profile in the society of discipline. Still, this activity has led to a
significant “chilling” of civil society activity on telephones and on the Web, resulting
in self-discipline through self-censorship.71
China has cultivated a disciplinary society of surveillance since late imperial
times, and in the first four decades of the PRC, surveillance worked through the
“work unit” (danwei) system.72 Work units employed military-style organization to
unify the Panopticon institutions of factory, school, hospital, and residence with a
top-down control of the biopolitics of labor, marriage, and reproduction. Up through
the 1980s these institutions produced docile bodies that were self-disciplined by
continual surveillance that guided not only your profession, but where you work,
where you live, whom you can marry, and if and when you can have a child (and
until 2015, what punishment you’d suffer for having more than one child).
The Chinese intranet works in similar ways to produce what Foucault called
docile bodies through a lighter and less coercive touch, with the goal of “creat[ing] a
predictable political environment.”73 It is “domesticated” in the sense of being both
localized and tamed. The Chinese government has worked with private Chinese
companies not only to block harmful content through the sovereignty society’s
Great Firewall, but also to clone popular Internet platforms to create Chinese
equivalents. As Chinese activist Michael Anti explains,
You have Google, we have Baidu. You have Twitter, we have Weibo. You
have Facebook, we have Renren. You have YouTube, we have Youku and
Tudou. The Chinese government blocked every single international Web
2.0 service, and we Chinese copycat every one.74
As figure 11.1 shows, the invisible workings of the Chinese intranet become visible
at transnational nodes such as hotel rooms in Beijing, where staff have to explain to
non-Chinese visitors how the Great Firewall works—that is, what is allowed and
what is not. As Roberts explains, these clone sites can easily nudge Chinese users
away from foreign platforms that Beijing finds problematic: “If the functionality of
a foreign website can be easily substituted by an unblocked Chinese site, users may
be unlikely to spend the time and resources to [jump the Great Firewall to] evade
censorship.”75
71 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 59, 65–68; Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 142.
72 See Michael R. Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to “the People”
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
73 Creemers, “Cyber China,” 97.
74 Anti, “Behind the Great Firewall of China.”
Figure 11.1 “Some tips for internet” at a Chinese hotel (2018). Courtesy Mark C. Elliott
Within China, the Great Firewall employs domestic filtering and surveillance
to move from the society of sovereignty to the society of discipline. The police
use a system of grid-based urban management that includes surveillance through
networks of CCTV cameras, mobile devices, number plate recognition, and facial
recognition.76 As Rogier Creemers explains, “[S]‌urveillance and monitoring moved

from dang’an [files] and neighborhood informers to cameras, big data algorithms
and cloud storage.”77 This combination of police state and surveillance state is at its
most extreme in Xinjiang, where through both human-driven and machine-driven
systems, surveillance is becoming individualized as with the Panopticon: Uyghurs
and other Muslim groups are required to load their smartphones with surveillance
apps and tag their vehicles with GPS and RFID devices, as well as to submit to
scans for facial recognition, voice recognition, walking gait recognition, and other
forms of biometric data (fingerprints, iris scans, DNA gathering, etc.).78 One of the
Xinjiang surveillance state’s innovations is to use the big data provided by the mass
facial recognition scans to hone the software to better differentiate between ethnic
Han Chinese and “ethnic minority” groups such as Uyghurs, Kazahks, and so on.79
At the same time, the human-driven systems are becoming more intrusive; since
2016 a government program called “Marrying-up and Becoming Kin” has mobi-
lized Han Chinese cadres to go and live with Uyghur families to promote “inter-
ethnic mingling” and “ethnic harmony”—through intense day-to-day surveillance
that both disciplines everyday life and produces electronic records for data sharing
and analysis.80
This vast experiment, which is starting to expand to the rest of the PRC, aims
not merely to record data for past offenses, but to predict future offenses by sorting
people into three categories: “trustworthy,” “average,” and “untrustworthy.”81 Based
on some of these surveillance data, over 11 percent of the adult Muslim population
of Xinjiang has been incarcerated in “transformation-through-education” camps
since 2017, and the number keeps growing.82 Needless to say, the surveillance so-
ciety is producing altered behavior among targeted populations both in China and
abroad. Since one of the “risk factors” is making overseas calls, Uyghurs who live
abroad report that their relatives in Xinjiang have told them to stop calling and
76 Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 5; Rogier Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System: An

Evolving Practice of Control,” SSRN (May 9, 2018) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.
cfm?abstract_id=3175792 (accessed June 11, 2018).
78 See Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 5–8; Darren Byler, “Ghost World,” Logic no. 7 (2019)
https://logicmag.io/07-ghost-world/ (accessed April 20, 2019); Maya Wang, “Eradicating Ideological
Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s Muslims (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 2018).
79 John Honovich, “Hikvision’s Minority Analytics,” IPVM (May 8, 2018) https://ipvm.com/
reports/hikvision-minority (accessed September 15, 2018).
80 Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 11; Byler, “Ghost World.”
81 Wang, “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”, 12; Leibold, “Surveillance in Xinjiang,” 2, 11; Byler,
“Ghost World.”
82 Adrian Zenz, “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political
Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang,” Central Asian Survey 38:1 (2019):122.
messaging.83 This “penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of eve-
ryday life” is an example of the “multiple separations” described by Foucault that fix
in place each individual in a surveillance society.84
Back in the rest of China, Internet platforms actively filter and censor be-
cause they are legally required to by the party-state; indeed, the dominance of the
main players—Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent—is incumbent on “cooperation with the
Chinese government’s information management goals.” In 2009, for example, Baidu
received a “Chinese Internet Self-Discipline Award” for fostering “healthy, harmo-
nious Internet development.”85 Because they can be heavily fined or shut down
for non-cooperation, China’s private tech companies are uncritical handmaidens
of the party-state’s information surveillance and social control policy. More to the
point, private companies participate because they can gain “influence and profits” in
China’s growing “security-surveillance complex.”86
In addition to censoring searches and posts, the state and private Internet service
providers employ a total of around two million people to troll critical netizens.87 This
“Fifty-Cent Party”—named after the fee that participants receive for each post—is
the largest security organization in the world. Fifty-Centers don’t just attack critics
of the government; they also spread “positive news” about the CCP’s achievements
and negative views of foreigners’ failures.88 In an interview with a member of the
Fifty-Cent Party, artist-activist Ai Weiwei probed the mechanics of “guiding public
opinion.” The technique is more than regulating ideological views; it also engages in
affect-work by employing the positive governance of “tone of speech, identity and
stance of speech” in order to “guide netizens obliquely and let them change their
focus without realising it.”89 The scale of public opinion guidance is massive; “about
10 to 20% out of the tens of thousands of comments posted on a forum” are posted
by Fifty-Centers.90 Rather than just being a freelance activity, one of China’s new
and growing industries involves “censorship factories,” in which people go to the
83 Wang, “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”. China’s high-tech crackdown in Xinjiang is a fast-

developing situation; to keep track of this humanitarian crisis, see Uyghur Human Rights Project,
“China’s ‘Re- education’/Concentration camps in Xinjiang,” https://uhrp.org/featured-articles/
chinas-re-education-concentration-camps-xinjiang (accessed September 15, 2018).
84 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 198, 197.
85 Sarah Logan, “The Geopolitics of Tech: Baidu’s Vietnam,” Internet Policy Observatory ( June 15,
2015) http://globalnetpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Logan-geopolitics-of-tech-Final-
6.8.pdf (accessed June 30, 2018):6; MacKinnon, Consent of the Networked, 105.
87 This was the estimate in 2013. See Elizabeth C. Economy, The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the
New Chinese State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 82.
88 Ai Weiwei, “Meet the 50-Cent Party,” New Statesman (October 19–25, 2012):42–45; Roberts,
Censored, 4–10, 209–210; Creemers, “Cyber China,” 98.
89 Ai, “Meet the 50-Cent Party,” 43.
90 Ai, “Meet the 50-Cent Party,” 45.
office to review and censor Web-posts (both texts and images) on behalf of China’s
ICT companies.91
In recent years Xi Jinping has been promoting the “China model for a better so-
cial governance system,”92 which goes beyond the binary censorship of the society
of sovereignty. China was helping Brazil, for example, not only to assert Internet
sovereignty by building a new South-South infrastructure network to bypass the
hardware of US-based cables, but also to clone popular social media platforms to
bypass US-based software.93 Through its Digital Silk Road project, the PRC is ex-
porting its disciplinary society to other countries—for example, Educador, Iraq,
Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe—through “safe city”/
“smart city” infrastructure projects that use the PRC’s sophisticated surveillance
systems to socially order the populations.94 Chinese companies are using data
gathered from countries such as Zimbabwe to further develop facial recognition
software beyond the “racial mix” found in China.95
These activities all show how the surveillance society in China works to watch,
filter, censor, sort, and guide Internet users. As with Foucault’s Panopticon, the key
is to use a porous style of censorship that is a low-cost, non-coercive, and largely in-
visible way of “manipulating citizen’s incentives so that they choose, rather than are
forced, to engage in the desired behaviour.”96 It works in ways that are now familiar
91 Li Yuan, “Learning China’s Forbidden History, So They Can Censor It,” New York Times ( January
2, 2019) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/business/china-internet-censor.html (accessed
January 20, 2019).
92 Qiang, “The Road to Digital Unfreedom,” 62; Martin Hala and Jichang Lulu, “The CCP’s Model
of Social Control Goes Global,” The Asia Dialogue (December 20, 2018) http://theasiadialogue.com/
2018/12/20/the-ccps-model-of-social-control-goes-global/ (accessed March 7, 2019).
93 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 129–130; see also “Huawei Marine Targets New Submarine
Cable for South Africa,” Business Tech ( January 2, 2018) https://businesstech.co.za/news/telecom-
munications/217541/huawei-marine-targets-new-submarine-cable-for-south-africa/ (accessed June
30, 2018).
94 See Paul Mozur, Jonah M. Kessel, and Melissa Chan, “Made in China, Exported to the World: The
Surveillance State,” New York Times (April 24, 2019) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/tech-
nology/ecuador-surveillance-cameras-police-government.html (accessed April 27, 2019); Brown,
“Beijing’s Silk Road Goes Digital”; Byler, “Ghost World”; “Video Surveillance as the Foundation of
‘Safe City’ in Kenya,” Huawei (n.d.) https://www.huawei.com/en/industry-insights/technology/
digital-transformation/video/video-surveillance-as-the-foundation-of-Safe-City-in-Kenya; (accessed
March 15, 2019); Parkinson et al., “Huawei Technicians Helped African Governments Spy on Political
Opponents”; Prasso, “China’s Digital Silk Road Is Looking More Like an Iron Curtain”; Adrian
Shahbaz, Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism, Freedom House (October
2018) https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final%20Booklet_11_1_2018.
pdf (accessed March 15, 2019).
95 Amy Hawkins, “Beijing’s Big Brother Tech Needs African Faces,” Foreign Policy ( July 24, 2018)
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/24/beijings-big-brother-tech-needs-african-faces/ (accessed
September 15, 2018).
after the revelations about how Cambridge Analytica was able to guide the votes of
people in the United States and the United Kingdom, except that it operates on a
much grander scale with a clearer message that comes from the party-state. Recent
UK and EU legislation shows how stricter regulatory regimes for “freedom of infor-
mation,” “data protection,” and privacy can be key modes of resistance to the state-
led surveillance activities of the society of sovereignty.97 China, on the other hand,
uses law and regulation to enforce its disciplinary society. Yet it is more than that,
because the party-state sees socially managing the Internet as its moral duty. The
PRC’s disciplinary surveillance society thus combines attack and misdirection, and
censorship and propaganda, to produce a docile, self-regulating body politic.
Performative Inter-veillance in the Networked

Society of Control
Surveillance in both the sovereignty society and the disciplinary society is prima-
rily a state-led, top-down activity that either restricts visibility through censorship
or guides it through discipline, including self-discipline and self-censorship. The
issues are government transparency and individual privacy, and they are sites of
the production and reproduction of ideology. Interestingly, neither mode of under-
standing mass surveillance was able to make sense of the general lack of outrage at
Snowden’s revelations about democratic governments’ massive data mining of their
own citizens.98
Perhaps this is because the surveyor-surveilled relationship has changed. The
main data gatherer is no longer the state, but various private companies: telephone
companies, ISPs, Facebook, Google, and so on. Here, the geometric dynamics of
surveillance have changed from top-down state surveillance to corporate-led mul-
tidimensional and multidirectional surveillance, sousveillance, and co-veillance,
which can be summarized as “inter-veillance.” Like intertextuality and intervisuality,
inter-veillance understands the production of meaning and value as an entangled
experience of circulation. This approach also shifts from understanding the Internet
as a set of visual artifacts that are controlled by state and corporate power to seeing
it as a sensory space that people performatively experience in affective communities
of sense. Especially on social media, people are watching each other and performing
97 See Robert Hazell, Ben Worthy, and Mark Glover, The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act
on Central Government in the UK: Does FOI Work? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Rocco
Bellanova, “Digital, Politics, and Algorithms: Governing Digital Data through the Lens of Data
Protection,” European Journal of Social Theory 20:3 (2017):329–347; Russell Brandom, “Everything
You Need to Know about GDPR,” The Verge (May 25, 2018) https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/
28/17172548/gdpr-compliance-requirements-privacy-notice (accessed January 3, 2019).
98 Bauman et al., “After Snowden”; Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 59.
for each other; as the protagonist in the dystopian novel The Circle exclaims, “I want
to be seen. I want proof that I existed.”99 Such individual social media performances
are for security, but also are for convenience, profit, and amusement. Rather than
the surveillance society, here we have “social surveillance.”100 Instead of being sorted
by the state according to their ideological principles, people are viscerally moved
and connected in their interaction with a range of affective communities of sense.
To make sense of social media’s visibility/visuality dynamic, it is helpful to look
beyond the disciplinary surveillance society to explore how the networked control
society works through individual and collective performances that not only pro-
mote ideology but also excite affect. Here, “[t]‌he story of surveillance . . . [is] less
one of technology, government, law or rights, than one of cultural practice.”101 The
cultural performative mode of surveillance is not just what social media means or
even “does.” Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 7, where Chinese maps excited irreden-
tist territorial desires, the questions change to what social media wants and what
it desires. Facebook desires more “likes” and “shares” in order to move and con-
nect more virtual bodies in an ever-expanding network. As Nicholas Mirzoeff
argues, “[I]f what a picture wants above all is to be seen, what the digitized image
wants is to be circulated.”102 Rather than the centrally-organized Panoption, one of
Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook cover photos speaks to the multicentered logic of the
networked society of control; it is a map of the world in which individual people are
linked together in a rhizomatic network.103 In this “surveillant assemblage,”104 visual
social media such as Instagram work much like Brian Massumi’s description of af-
fect as an “intensive force” that emerges through the resonance of connecting virtual
bodies at “the intersection of matter, movement, aesthetics, and sensation.”105
Rather than hiding from surveillance by finding an unobserved corner or
asserting the legalistic right of data protection, many people now perform “onlife”
99 Dave Eggers, The Circle (New York: Penguin, 2014), p. 485; for a discussion of this novel in terms
of surveillance, see Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 149–172.
100 Alice Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
101 John McGrath, “Performing Surveillance,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited
by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 83; Lyon, The
Culture of Surveillance.
102 Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2011), p. 290.
103 Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook cover photo (September 24, 2013) https://www.facebook.com/
photo.php?fbid=10101026493146301&set=a.941146602501&type=1&theater (accessed March 15,
2019); Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 125.
104 Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson, “The Surveillant Assemblage,” British Journal of
Sociology 51:4 (2000):605–622.
105 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2002), p. 28.
(i.e., with the entanglement of online and offline activities) for security, conven-
ience, profit, and amusement.106 Performative surveillance thus is user-generated
surveillance that is “not just a subject for commentary, but a practice through which
subjects reimagine themselves.”107 This is what Jonathan Finn means by “seeing
surveillantly” when surveillance is more than a state-driven or corporate-driven
Panopticon; it entails “a way of seeing, understanding and engaging with the world
around us” that is an interactive, lateral inter-veillance not of passive voyeurs, but of
active agents performing in affective communities of sense.108
In practical terms, we have shifted from the disciplinary society’s “Big Brother”
to the networked society of control’s “big data,” wherein information is monetized
and weaponized:
[T]‌he kinds of data now circulating in greater volume, velocity, and

variety—to use the words often applied to Big Data—than ever are of
tremendous interest to a growing range of actors; not just government
departments, security agencies and police, but also internet companies,
healthcare providers, traffic engineers, city planners, and many more.109
The issues shift from the wall-themed discussions of censorship, freedom of infor-
mation, and data protection (either bring down the wall for transparency or erect
a wall for privacy, including the right to be forgotten) to questions of trust and
morality.
Although many European scholars compare the strong data protection regime in
the EU with the NSA’s invasion of the privacy of global citizens, it is better to com-
pare the EU with the PRC. Both systems are technologically advanced and address
the more cultural issues of trust and morality. In Europe, trust in government—
and trust in the United States—was shaken by the NSA’s data mining from private
companies (telephone companies, ISPs, browsers, search engines, and Web 2.0
platforms such as Facebook). The response was to build trust by legislating a series
of government regulations to limit what governments and companies can do with
an individual person’s data. The moral arguments considered the issues of trans-
parency, accountability, and freedom in a democratic society.110 The result is the
EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which restricts what governments and
106 Luciano Floridi, ed., The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era
(New York: Springer, 2015).
107 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 5; John McGrath, “Performing Surveillance,” 84.
108 Finn, “Seeing Surveillantly,” 67, 76.
109 Lyon, The Culture of Surveillance, 3, 4.
110 Bauman et al., “After Snowden,” 129–130; Klimburg, Darkening Web, 80; Floridi, The Onlife
Manifesto.
Internet companies can surveil, what data they can collect, how long they can hold
the data, and how they can share the data.111
In China, the issues of trust and morality produced a different response from the
government. As in many rapidly developing societies, economic change has produced
social dislocation in China. Until recently the PRC had a cash economy in which
people and companies were largely invisible to the financial system. One of the results
of this is a poorly regulated society in which governmental and commercial scandals
are common: poisoned medicines, food, and water; dangerous merchandise; iden-
tity theft; official corruption; and so on.112 These scandals became public through the
Internet, especially through the social media of Web 2.0. Chinese netizens also suffered
from fraud and blackmail online, making data security a major issue. Indeed, the party-
state justified its “real-name registration” policy for mobile phones and Internet identity
not through an appeal to national security or ideology, but in order to fight the online
fraud that was plaguing ordinary Chinese netizens.113
While Europe and the United States address such issues through democratic
methods of the free press, representative government, and the regulation of the state
and industry, the PRC takes the authoritarian option of using technology to solve
political problems. As one commentator asked, “[W]‌ho needs democracy when
you have data?”114 The Chinese government thus decided to build trust through
generating greater transparency and accountability in local government, commerce
(especially e-commerce), and society—but not through greater transparency and
accountability of the central government and the CCP, and certainly not through
independent watchdogs in civil society. Beijing decided to “solve” this problem in
a way that promoted its more general social governance goals of building innova-
tive ICT capacity through the Internet Plus project, which, as Chinese premier Li
Keqiang explains, aims to “integrate mobile Internet, big data, cloud computing
and the Internet of things.”115 Rather than regulating state and corporate power
through data protection, Beijing’s solution is to have an even more intense program
111 Bellanova, “Digital, Politics, and Algorithms”; Brandom, “Everything You Need to Know
about GDPR.”
112 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System,” 11–12.
113 See David Bandurski, “Cashing in on Dystopia: Through a Simple Mobile Transaction, You, Too,
Can Be Big Brother,” SupChina ( January 3, 2017) http://supchina.com/2017/01/03/cashing-in-on-
dystopia/; Creemers, “Cyber China,” 98.
114 Christina Larson, “Who Needs Democracy When You Have Data?,” MIT Technology Review
(August 20, 2018). https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-
you-have-data/ (accessed August 28, 2018).
115 Li Keqiang, “Report on the Work of the Government (2015),” State Council Information
Office (March 5, 2015) “http://english.gov.cn/archive/publications/2015/03/05/content_
281475066179954.htm (accessed March 15, 2019).
of surveillance of everyone’s everyday life, all the time. The goal is to make the pop-
ulation legible and visible in the logic of governmentality.116
There has been some discussion of China’s Social Credit System and whether or
not it constitutes an Orwellian/Panopticon invasion of privacy.117 It builds on earlier
innovations in Chinese Internet governance, for example, the enforcement of “real-
name registration” of all users of mobile telephones, email, and social media. In this
way, the activities of individuals and companies are knowable and trackable because
they are associated with specific individuals who are the responsible parties; this ap-
proach thus “sits at the heart of the effort to connect the vast amount of potentially
useful information gathered through individuals’ interactions with technology.”118
The PRC is now building a national program to track, reward, and punish
people for their activities, starting with digitizing and sharing information on fi-
nancial creditworthiness and juridical decisions and expanding to a broader no-
tion of credit that includes economic, social, political—and moral—sincerity and
trustworthiness.119 A detailed “Planning Outline” was published in 2014, with the
goal of having a nationwide system in place by the end of 2020.120 As Creemers
describes, the Social Credit System is part of China’s “informatization of govern-
ance” and involves a three-step process: (1) ensure that individuals are identifiable
through ID cards and biometric data so “information about them can be collected,
stored, processed, shared, and used”; (2) create databases and platforms to share
information; and (3) establish procedures for processing, analyzing, and using the
stored information “to generate actionable insights.”121 The Social Credit System
thus is an infrastructural and normative project to identify and sort the Chinese
population in terms of the political categories of credit and trust. But it is more than
a top-down government program; “the ‘social’ dimension of SCS [Social Credit
System] also entails that members of society create the incentives for each other
116 Creemers, “Cyber China”; Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System.”

117 See “Big Data, Meet Big Brother: China Invents the Digital Totalitarian State,” Economist
(December 17, 2016) http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21711902-worrying-implications-
its-social-credit-project-china-invents-digital-totalitarian?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/china_invents_the_dig-
ital_totalitarian_state (accessed June 28, 2018); Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System; Hoffman,
Social Credit; Sarah Cook, “ ‘Social Credit’ Scoring: How China’s Communist Party Is Incentivising
Repression,” Hong Kong Free Press (February 27, 2019) https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/02/27/
social-credit-scoring-chinas-communist-party-incentivising-repression/ (accessed March 7, 2019).
119 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System,” 1.
120 State Council, “Guowuyuan: Guanyu yifa shehui xinyong tixi jianshe kuanhua gangyao (2014–
2020)” [State Council: Planning outline for the construction of a Social Credit System (2014–
2020)], translated on China Copyright and Media ( June 14, 2014) https://chinacopyrightandmedia.
wordpress.com/2014/06/14/planning-outline-for-the-construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-
2020/(accessed June 11, 2018).
to act in the desired manner, without direct intervention of State actors.”122 It is an

affective inter-veillance performance on social media, much like that seen in Euro-
America—although it goes beyond the symbolic identity experiences to include
very material rewards and punishments.123
People already face harsh penalties for “spreading rumors, disrupting social
order and stability” online; since 2013, if unacceptable speech is retweeted five
hundred times or viewed five thousand times, the user can face up to three years
in jail. Now the new Social Credit System uses digitized information on financial
creditworthiness and juridical decisions to blacklist certain people from certain
activities: purchasing air and high-speed train tickets, enrolling their children in
private schools, staying in some hotels, and purchasing tickets for entertainment
events. The reasoning is instrumental, but also moral—people who owe money for
legal judgments should not be allowed to consume luxury items—and by the end of
2018 over twenty-three million air and train ticket purchases had been blocked.124
It is also political: according to the “Planning Outline,” the goal is to “strengthen
sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, social sincerity, and judicial
credibility construction,” while at the same time to “punish insincerity.”125 This is
part of the party-state’s more general goal of raising the “quality” (suzhi) of the pop-
ulation by constructing a “sincerity culture.” This massive social engineering project
combines China’s Confucian-Leninist paternalism with the CCP’s “deeply posi-
tivist and mechanical view of the world.”126
At the time of writing (August 2019), there is not yet a national system that
combines the data from financial, legal, commercial, social, and political activities;
although it may be delayed, the goal is to have the system in place by the end of
2020. There have been protests in China against various pilot schemes that meas-
ured and scored individual conduct because they were seen as too invasive.127 But
there are also pilot schemes that have been successful in the eyes of both the cen-
tral government and local citizens. Simina Mistreanu’s in-depth report on a popular

123 Cook, “ ‘Social Credit’ Scoring”; Gladys Pak Lei Chong, “Cashless China: Securitization
of Everyday Life through Alipay’s Social Credit System— Sesame Credit,” Chinese Journal of
Communication (March 12, 2019):1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1583261
124 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System,” 15; Lily Kuo, “China Bans 23m from Buying Travel
Tickets as Part of ‘Social Credit’ System,” The Guardian (March 1, 2019) https://www.theguardian.
com/world/2019/mar/01/china-bans-23m-discredited-citizens-from-buying-travel-tickets-social-
credit-system (accessed March 7, 2019).
125 State Council, “Planning Outline.”
127 Creemers, “China’s Social Credit System,” 10; also see Liu Zhun, “China’s Social Credit System
Won’t Be Orwellian,” Global Times (November 1, 2016) http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/
1015248.shtml (accessed June 28, 2018).
social credit system run in the town of Rongcheng shows how a national system
could work. Each resident gets a one-thousand-point score, which is adjusted ac-
cording to that person’s sincerity conduct:
Get a traffic ticket; you lose five points. Earn a city-level award, such as for
committing a heroic act, doing exemplary business, or helping your family
in unusual tough circumstances, and your score gets boosted by 30 points.
For a department-level award, you earn five points. You can also earn credit
by donating to charity or volunteering in the city’s program.128
The goal, as in the national scheme, is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere
under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”129
Again, this is not simply top-down, state-led surveillance; it works because local
people buy into the inter-veillance practice of watching and being watched.130 It is
a gamification of social-ordering, in which people get prizes for participating, in-
cluding prizes for informing on others.131
In the private sector there are parallel developments that are even more par-
ticipatory and better exploit big data dynamics. For example, Chinese tech-giant
Alibaba’s “Sesame Credit” tracks people’s conduct in terms of credit history, beha-
vior trends, ability to honor agreements, verifiable personal information, and social
relationships.132 It is an opt-in loyalty scheme that calculates a score of between 350
and 950 points to determine a range of rewards and punishments, including a re-
duction or waiver of fees for products and services such as mobile phones, hotels,
and bicycle rentals. In this way it is like a credit card loyalty scheme in the United
States. But it is also expanding to facilitate other services, including visa applications
and even dating sites; some people list their Sesame Credit score online to attract
interest from prospective mates. In a press conference, Sesame Credit’s technology
director said that people buying diapers would be “seen as more trustworthy than
someone playing video games for ten hours per day.”133 Hence, Sesame Credit
penalizes users for what it sees as bad social conduct, including a frequent change
of address. Like Rongcheng’s official pilot scheme, it monetizes trustworthiness,
because charitable donations raise your score.134 It is more than a loyalty scheme
128 Simina Mistreanu, “Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory,” Foreign Policy (April 3,
2018) http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-social-credit-laboratory/ (accessed
June 11, 2018).
129 State Council, “Planning Outline.”
130 See Genia Kostka, “China’s Social Credit Systems and Public Opinion: Explaining High Levels of
Approval,” New Media and Society 21:7 (2019):1565–1593; Chong “Cashless China.”
131 Cook, “ ‘Social Credit’ Scoring.”
132 See Chong “Cashless China.”
because it uses an algorithm to predict each individual’s future trustworthy conduct.

And it is more than the private sector because China’s big tech companies work
closely with the party-state.135 It is likely that Sesame Credit will be a model for
China’s nationwide social credit system, because only an organization as large and
sophisticated as Alibaba would be able to create and run such a system.
At present, the party-state’s project is primarily a binary system of blacklisting,
rather than a fully integrated system that would use algorithms to sort people, assign
numerical scores, and predict future behavior.136 But as the State Council’s “Planning
Outline” declares, Beijing’s goal is to share data among government bureaucracies,
ISPs, browsers, and e-commerce sites to give a full-spectrum view of the sincerity of
China’s citizenry. As we have seen, a parallel program in Xinjiang shows the party-state’s
goal for the total surveillance/inter-veillance of online and offline activity that sorts and
predicts economic, social, cultural, and political activity.
Creemers has doubts about whether Beijing has the capacity to overcome the var-
ious technical and social obstacles facing a fully-integrated Social Credit System.137 On
the other hand, Richard P. Suttmeier argues that Chinese labs, including those involved
in developing the PRC’s “surveillance state,” are successfully “inventing the future.”138
As the Great Firewall shows, with enough investment and effort, you can even nail Jell-
O to the wall.
China’s Social Credit Scheme is also being applied to non-Chinese companies,
and in very political ways. In 2018 China accused United Airlines, Qantas, and
other international airlines of “serious dishonesty” for listing Taiwan, Hong Kong,
and Macau on their websites as destinations distinct from China. It demanded that
all airlines state that these were Chinese territories or risk the penalties associated
with blacklisting under the Social Credit System.139 Although the White House
described this situation as “Orwellian,” the airlines ultimately complied. Beijing is
also exporting its Social Credit System to other countries such as Venezuela, where
a single smart card—the “fatherland card”—collects and shares data on medical his-
tory, social media activity, political party membership, and whether the person has
voted.140
135 See Manya Koetse, “Baihang and the Eight Personal Credit Programmes: A Credit Leap
Forward,” What’s On Weibo ( June 10, 2018) https://www.whatsonweibo.com/baihang-and-the-
eight-personal-credit-programmes-a-credit-leap-forward/ (accessed September 15, 2018).
138 Richard P. Suttmeier, “Inventing the Future in Chinese Labs: How Does China Do Science
Today,” Asia Dialogue (September 24, 2018) http://theasiadialogue.com/2018/09/24/inventing-
the-future-in-chinese-labs-how-does-china-do-science-today/ (accessed November 8, 2018).
139 Hoffman, Social Credit, 5.
140 ABC News (Australia), “Chinese Telecom Giant ZTE ‘Helped Venezuela Develop
Social Credit System’ ” (November 16, 2018) https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-16/
These examples from inside and outside the PRC show how China is engaging
in a complex ecology of inter-veillance, including top-down state surveillance,
bottom-up sousveillance, and co-veillance of people watching each other. China
thus shows how the three models of surveillance in society—sovereignty, disci-
pline, and networked performance—can coexist in a surveillance assemblage under
the watch of the party-state. While it is common to declare that the Panopticon era
of surveillance is over, the Chinese experience shows how Big Brother can still exist
in tension with the Great Firewall and performative inter-veillance in a complex
surveillance ecology. Social media and social credit schemes are not successful just
because they are imposed in a top-down way by states and/or corporations; people
actively buy into such platforms because these affective communities of sense pro-
vide security, convenience, profit, and amusement. This infrastructure of feeling
thus works in the macro-register of geopolitics and social control, as well as in the
micro-register of the onlife sensible politics of the everyday.
Conclusion
It would be easy to draw the ideological conclusion that China’s surveillance state
threatens the freedom not just of Chinese citizens, but also of people in liberal dem-
ocratic societies. There is plenty of evidence that the party-state is building a sur-
veillance state in the PRC, as well as a growing corpus of evidence that Beijing is
exporting its surveillance infrastructure, concepts, and norms to both authoritarian
and democratic countries.
But the chapter also shows that we need to think beyond the framing of issues
in terms of the ideological battles of freedom and order, West and East. To do
this, the analysis looks to the conceptual dynamics of visibility/visuality and ide-
ology/affect to reconsider the sensible politics of surveillance in terms of Foucault’s
and Deleuze’s models of social ordering: wall-building in sovereignty society, the
Panopticon in disciplinary society, and interactive performances of multidirectional
“inter-veillance” in networked control society. Rather than simply being a descrip-
tion of historical evolution, Chapter 11’s examples from China, the United States,
and Europe show how all three social models can overlap and co-exist in the present.
The Great Firewall of China exemplifies how the PRC continues to successfully en-
force sovereignty society’s borders by employing the visibility/invisibility strategy
of policing what can and cannot be seen. Disciplinary society and the networked
society of control both appeal more to the affect-work of visuality. Rather than
simply being top-down, state-centric expressions of restrictive power, surveillance
society’s logic of self-discipline and networked society’s practice of self-realization
chinese-tech-giant-zte-helps-venezuela-develop-fatherland-card/10503736 (accessed March 7,

2019); Mozur et al., “Made in China, Exported to the World”; Griffiths, The Great Firewall of China.
both demand active participation in everyone’s everyday onlife performances. Here

the Internet is an infrastructure of feeling that provokes a range of affective commu-
nities of sense.
Importantly, the chapter shows how activities in (authoritarian) China and the
(democratic) West differ more in degree than in kind. Similar technologies and
concepts are provoking similar performances around the world. Indeed, there is ev-
idence of a growing demand for individual privacy in China, as well as a growing
call for regulation in Euro-America. Certainly the epigraphs in this chapter look to
the state as the main factor: either the Silicon Valley libertarian model of resisting
state control or the China Model of asserting state control. This chapter, however,
looks at different models of Internet governance to highlight how the EU’s data pro-
tection regime stresses the value of individual and social privacy as a moral good,
while the PRC’s cybersecurity laws and Social Credit System project see social leg-
ibility and stability as the moral goal. Again, Beijing’s logic is “Who needs democ-
racy when you can have big data?”
The threat to democracy from surveillance is very real, but it cannot be reduced
to geopolitics and security: that either the United States or China is the main threat
to freedom. The conclusion is that surveillance is a political rather than technical or
cultural issue, and that it is important to move beyond questions of cybersecurity to
appreciate it as a social-ordering and world-ordering process. The visual politics of
surveillance thus is not just about how you are captured by the surveillant gaze. It is
also about visualizing what kind of world you want to live in, as well as what kind of
world you don’t want to see and feel.
PA RT   I V
CONCLUSION
Conclusion
Sensible Politics
Beginnings
Sensible Politics is the product of a number of distinct beginnings: a Filmmaking for
Fieldwork class in Manchester in 2011; a Japanese Garden Design class in Kyoto
in 2010; and even my PhD dissertation in Hawaii, which looked at the body pol-
itics of laughter (as opposed to the psychological/ideational politics of humor) in
1992. The shared motivation for these various activities was to think about politics
in terms of ideas and experiences, and meaning and doing. This book’s version of
the project considers how visual international politics takes shape according to the
dynamic dyad of visibility (which looks to ideas, images, representations, and ide-
ology) and visuality (which appreciates experiences, artifacts, performances, and
affect).
My interest in sensible politics and visual IR was provoked by numerous
experiences of exhilaration and frustration. What is it about Japanese gardens
that makes them excite indescribable feelings? What is missing from visual IR re-
search that concentrates on deconstructing Western images of the Other? At first,
I addressed this exhilaration/frustration experience as an issue of content and thus
embarked on a study of gardens and toilets, for example, as sites of international
politics that were not necessarily involved in some East-West or Left-Right con-
flict. But soon I realized that the issue was more than one of content, because it
provokes questions of theory, method, and ethics. At the risk of exhibiting the ir-
rational exuberance of the newly-converted, taking the Filmmaking for Fieldwork
course changed my life—or at least it jammed the way I think about meaning, value,
and politics.
Like many who study visual IR, I am well-trained in hermeneutics, deconstruc-
tion, and the politics of representation. For many years I followed what I call the
“visibility strategy,” using semiotics and narrative theory to turn political events,
artifacts, and processes into texts, which I then analyzed to reveal their hidden
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190071738.001.0001
304 Conclusion
ideology. This approach is employed in Sensible Politics to make visible new sites
of IR that add a critical sense to international studies: for example, Chinese toilets;
utopian PSAs from the Islamic State (IS); the counter-PSAs of Cynthia Weber’s I
Am an American videos; historical and futuristic empire-maps from Russia, IS, and
China; veils and beauty pageants in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia; and gardens
in France, China, and Japan.
Many of the chapters speak to each other, and often in unexpected ways. The
visuality of borders and the logic of inside/outside distinctions is explored not only
through an analysis of the geopolitics of border walls (Chapter 9), but also through
an examination of how walling-strategies erupt in less obvious places, for example,
how the Great Firewall of China polices cyberspace (Chapter 11), how veil-wearing
is seen as a protective/restrictive social barrier (Chapter 8), and even how garden-
building generally starts with the construction of a border wall, which is then
transgressed through “borrowed views” that look over that barrier (Chapter 10).
Once again, the task of the critic is to examine the social construction of the image
and employ the hermeneutic mode of analysis to disclose its hidden ideological
meaning. The visibility strategy thus follows the “aesthetic turn” in IR to argue that
the practice of representation is the site of politics.1
Here the researcher must cultivate a critical attitude, and more important, a self-
critical attitude. Questions of identity are paramount: gender, race, ethnicity, ability,
class, age, sexuality, and so on. Since I am an American white male who studies
Asian theory and politics, self-critique meant targeting “The West” for criticism and
either promoting the “non-West” as an ethically-superior “alternative” or leaving
open the “conditions of possibility” to create space for non-hegemonic voices to
develop their own critique.2 This informed the book’s attention to how scopic
regimes—the male gaze, the colonial/white gaze, the surveillant gaze—can guide
visual IR in elite politics and popular culture. Sensible Politics thus uses historically-
and socially- informed analysis of non- Western experiences to problematize
Eurocentrism in IR in both spatial and temporal terms. As Alex Danchev put it, the
1 See Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 30: (2001):510; Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices
in Biography, Photography and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
2 A good example of this strategy is the World Orders Models Project, which supported both the
academic journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political and Walker’s Inside/Outside book project. See R.
B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. xi; Ranji Kothari, “Editorial Statement,” Alternatives 1:1 (1975):1–5;
Ranji Kothari, “Towards a Just World,” Alternatives 5 (1979–1980):1–42; “Alternatives: A Journal for
World Policy Published,” World Policy (no date) https://worldpolicy.org/timeline/1975-alternatives-
a-journal-for-world-policy-published/ (accessed January 4, 2019). Also see William E. Connolly,
Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, expanded ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2002 [1991]); William A. Callahan, Contingent States: Great China and Transnational
Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Conclu s ion 305
point is not just to “think otherwise,” but to cultivate a critical aesthetic attitude that
is “other-wise.”3
After engaging for many years in such a hermeneutic analysis of the politics of
film, popular culture, and gardens, I thought that learning how films are made and
how gardens are built would enhance my research into their hidden ideologies and
alternative possibilities. What I found in the Filmmaking for Fieldwork and the
Japanese Garden Design courses was actually quite different from what I expected.
Filmmaking and garden-building push you to think, feel, and act in a different reg-
ister and in a more creative than deconstructive mode. As Roland Barthes quipped,
such a critique “paints more than it digs.”4 Hence, while film criticism employs
the visibility strategy to reveal the “social construction of the visual,” filmmaking
employs the visuality strategy to creatively engage in the “visual construction of the
social”—and the international. In other words, I learned that it is not only necessary
to deconstruct how films and gardens reflect social, political, and economic power
relations; we also need to consider how making films and building gardens visually
constructs new and different social, political, and economic orders.
Because visuals can viscerally move us in different ways than written texts,
these practical courses pushed me to appreciate visuals not just in terms of their
ideological-value, but also their affect-work: not just what they mean, but also
how they make us feel, especially when they move us and connect us in nonverbal,
nonlinear, and nonnarrative ways. As we’ve seen, the visuality strategy works to
highlight the broader issues of how visual images and artifacts can actively excite
affective communities of sense that complicate what can (and cannot) be seen, said,
thought, and done.5 Here Sensible Politics presses beyond the visibility strategy’s
goal of making visible the invisible ideologies, in order to explore new sensibilities
through what Emmanuel Levinas saw as “a mode of thought better than [rational]
knowledge.”6
In learning the aesthetic conventions and practical techniques of film-making
and garden-building, I thus learned a different approach to theory and method. To
appreciate how the visual/multisensory can provoke new social orders and world
orders, this book argues that it is necessary to complement hermeneutics with a crit-
ical aesthetic mode of inquiry that (1) involves a switch from the search for meaning
3 Alex Danchev, On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011), p. 4.
4 Roland Barthes, “Inaugural Lecture: College de France,” in A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan
Sontag (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 475.
5 Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions after Trauma
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art
and the Politics of Aesthetics,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by
Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 31.
6 Emmanuel Levinas, quoted in Michael Renov, The Subject of the Documentary
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 148.
306 Conclusion
to an appreciation of what visuals can “do” and (2) a switch from privileging the
word over the image to appreciate the more uncertain relation of word and image,
(3) which enables a shift from the search for ideology to an appreciation of how the
visual/multisensory works to move and connect people in affective communities
of sense; (4) it thus refocuses the critical gaze from the reformist politics of em-
powerment to see critique in terms of the social-ordering and world-ordering work
involved in actively creating “redistributions of the sensible.”7
The Filmmaking for Fieldwork course’s intensive training in camera-work, light
and sound design, and film editing was pivotal because it forced me to think visu-
ally rather than in terms of written texts. I’m still learning how to use a montage of
evocative images and sounds—rather than a logical chain of statements—to create
a critical understanding of international politics. Each year I reproduce this learning
experience when we teach students how to make films in a final year undergrad-
uate course, Visual International Politics.8 This course is practical, and students
learn by doing; they get the camera kit on day-one, and ten weeks later they deliver
a ten-minute video documentary. To cultivate “active looking” skills—and thus
wean students from using words to make meaning—the first assignment is to make
a two-minute “silent movie” in which meaning and value emerge from a series of
images, rather than from a verbal argument. Interviewing is part of the training, but
it comes much later, because in visual ethnography the goal is to see how people live,
rather than ask them to explain it. Even so, video interviews are fascinating because
they require active listening; people tell you things that they would never say in a
normal conversation. As my students’ Awrah: Uncovering the Covered film and my
toilet adventures film both show, people share their intimate experiences on-camera,
usually without provocation (Chapters 4 and 8).9
At the end of the Visual International Politics class, we throw a party and have a
mini-film festival to watch each other’s films. This experience is also different from
seminars in which students present their topics and defend their analyses. Rather
than have the students introduce their films, the class watches them, and only then
discusses them. The point is not necessarily to make arguments that rationally prove
or rhetorically persuade, but to see how viewers respond to the film experience. As
my filmmaking teacher, Andy Lawrence, instructs, rather than react to critique (to
show that you’re right, and they’re wrong), it’s best to actively watch and listen to
audience feedback to see what is working in the film and what isn’t. Filmmaking
7 See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by
Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004).
8 This course is co-taught will Darren Moon.
9 Abi Steadman, Hayley Rabet, and Lamisa Khan, dir., Awrah: Uncovering the Covered (2017)
https://vimeo.com/channels/ir318/208667693 (accessed February 23, 2018); Bill Callahan, dir.,
toilet adventures (August 25, 2015) https://www.thechinastory.org/2015/08/toilet-adventures-in-
china-making-sense-of-transnational-encounters/ (accessed July 23, 2018).
Conclu s ion 307
thus can foster intimate moving and connecting to promote an ethical community
of sense among the subjects, filmmakers, and the audience.10
Learning and re-learning how to make films thus has changed the way I think
about visuals and politics. Rather than simply treating images as illustrations of a
logical argument, thinking visually and feeling visually helped me to appreciate new
sensibilities of IR. It also opens up the range of visuals to include three-dimensional
visual artifacts—maps, veils, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—that can act as mate-
rial modalities, sensory spaces, and infrastructures of feeling. Here material objects
have “thing-power”;11 they can do things, and make things, as well as mean things.
As heavily-designed spaces that forge particular relations between the see-able,
hear-able, smell-able, taste-able, and touch-able, walls and gardens are exemplary
distributions of the sensible (Chapters 10 and 11). Of course, most people still
experience visual artifacts in terms of the visual images of photographs and film.
But it works the other way around, too. Visual images can take on material form
as artifacts and practical experiences; an important part of “going to the movies” is
the collective social experience, and photographic prints are material objects that
people produce, exchange, and accumulate in everyday experience. Visual images
and artifacts are sites of both ideology and sensibilities of affect.
While finishing this book, the strange tension between ideology and affect
erupted once more while I was making Great Walls: Journeys from Ideology to
Experience (2019), a short film that runs parallel to Chapter 9’s consideration of
the US-Mexico barrier, the Berlin Wall, and the Great Wall of China.12 Although
the film’s narrative was initially organized according to Chapter 9’s analytical out-
line, the available film clips—both my own ethnographic clips of experiences at
the three sites and archive clips of political leaders at these walls—led the project
in different directions. First there was the issue of whom to include and whom to
exclude. The PRC started rebuilding the Great Wall in 1952 as a tourist site that
was designed not just for patriotic Chinese, but also for visiting foreign leaders.
Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was the first foreign leader to visit the
Great Wall, during his official trip to China in 1954. But after much archive work
with Chinese and Indian sources, I have yet to find any picture of Nehru’s visit to
the wall. Images of British politicians and royals at the various walls are also hard
to locate, as well as being very expensive to use. On the other hand, the US presi-
dential library system makes it easy—and cheap—to get high quality photographs
10 Elena Barabantseva and Andy Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for
Fieldwork,’” Millennium 43:3 (2015):929.
11 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
12 See Bill Callahan, dir., Great Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience (Wildwood Films, 2019),
screened at LSE Festival, London (March 2, 2019) https://vimeo.com/billcallahan/great-walls
308 Conclusion
and film clips of official visits to walls in Berlin and China, as well as to the US-
Mexico border. The wall-themed presidential films are certainly very ideological.
John F. Kennedy surveys the Berlin Wall and declares US support for Berliners on
both sides (1963). Richard Nixon declares that the Great Wall of China “is a great
wall and it had to be built by a great people” (1972). Ronald Reagan condemns
the Berlin Wall as the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain that ideologi-
cally divides Europe, famously demanding, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
(1987). Donald J. Trump looks to the Great Wall of China as a model for what
he calls the Great Wall of Trump: “2000 years ago, China built the Great Wall of
China. And this is a serious wall. . . . They built a wall, think of this: 13,000 miles
long, and this is a serious wall” (2016).
Recalling the words of such important wall-themed events clearly highlights ide-
ology. But to appreciate them as affective performances, it’s necessary to juxtapose
the films to see (and hear) the experiences. It’s common to mock Nixon for the silli-
ness of saying that it’s really a “great wall.” But the film shows the excitement of both
Americans and Chinese at this momentous event, when an anti-communist presi-
dent goes to “Red China” to offer friendship and support. While Nixon is known
in the United States as a failed politician who was driven from office, in China he is
admired and respected for reaching out across the ideological divide to engage with
the PRC. The film clips show Nixon’s Chinese hosts smiling and enjoying them-
selves. Nixon actually concludes that he hopes that neither physical walls nor walls
of ideology will divide the peoples of the world. This pivotal event now inspires
both high civilization and popular culture; John Adams wrote the Nixon in China
opera (1987), and Spock says “only Nixon could go to China” as “an old Vulcan pro-
verb” in Star Trek VI (1991).
One of the strangest things about making the Great Walls film was stumbling
upon a pair of long-forgotten official films that record First Lady Pat Nixon dedi-
cating International Friendship Park at the San Diego/Tijuana border—which now
is where the thirty-foot-high US-Mexico barrier spills into the Pacific Ocean. In
1972 President Nixon went to China to admire the Great Wall (with Mrs. Nixon
by his side), while in 1971 she was at the US-Mexico border speaking fondly of her
Mexican neighbors and hoping that the five-foot-tall border fence wouldn’t be there
much longer (see figure C.1). Again, the words alone don’t allow us to appreciate
the affective experience. At the ceremony, an army general, who is relinquishing
possession of his ocean-side military test range so it can become a state park, is very
stiff and formal. Mrs. Nixon, on the other hand, comes across as fun and sincere,
playfully joking with friends on both sides of the border. The strangeness of right-
wing politicians criticizing walls in China and at the US-Mexico border is compel-
ling. But the main point, once again, is that visual artifacts are sites of multisensory,
performative experience in which the personal, the political, and the international
collide. The filmmaking experience also shows the “visual/multisensory construc-
tion of the international” because I had to edit together clips from two separate
Conclu s ion 309
Figure C.1 Patricia Nixon at the US-Mexico border (1971). Courtesy Richard M. Nixon
Presidential Library and Museum
films: one of Pat Nixon giving the speech, and the other of her meeting people and
working the crowds.
The strange collision of Richard Nixon’s and Pat Nixon’s wall adventures becomes
even stranger when juxtaposed with the film of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s art
project to Extend the Great Wall by 10 Kilometers (1993). This pyrotechnic spectacle
plays with the dynamic dyad of creative/destruction by building a wall through
explosives (see Chapter 9). At first the film seems to display a typical New Year’s
Eve fireworks show. But as the monochromatic pyrotechnic display dances over
hills and echoes through valleys, it turns into a bombing campaign—complete with
mushroom clouds—which is greeted by the excited, confused, and haunting cheers
of the local Chinese who have gathered to watch the spectacle.13 Once again, the vis-
uality strategy encourages us to see walls not simply as sites of ideology that divide
people, but also as spaces where affective experience can move and connect people
in strange ways—even exciting the sublime. Here wall-building and filmmaking
visually construct new and different social orders and world orders as affective
13 Takehisa Araki, dir., Cai Guo-Qiang: Project to Add 10,000 m to the Great Wall of China—Project
for Extraterrestrials No. 10 (Cai Studio, 1993). A clip of this film can be seen at the end of Callahan,
Great Walls.
310 Conclusion
communities of sense. Jacques Rancière thus concludes that politics emerges not
through representation, but through mis-en-scène.14
This demonstrates the contribution of Sensible Politics: its visibility/visuality
analytic framework enables visual IR research that is attentive to both ideological
meaning and affective experience. It pushes us to think of politics in a different
register that is more attentive to the visceral politics of everyday bodily practices,
wherein both elites and non-elites creatively participate in affective communities of
sense. Sensible Politics is about multisensory politics; but it also looks beyond icons
and ideology to “what makes sense” in the pragmatic politics of everyday life.
From Self/Other and Inside/Outside

to Social-Ordering and World-Ordering
If pressed to make a general conclusion, I think that the book’s analysis of visual
images and multisensory artifacts shows that it is helpful to figure international
politics in terms of social-ordering and world-ordering performances, rather than
in terms of self/Other and inside/outside relations. In 1991 William E. Connolly
insightfully argued that we need to appreciate global politics in terms of identity\
difference, and in 1993 R. B. J. Walker famously wrote that we need to understand
IR in terms of inside/outside.15 Rather than be limited by a Cold War–style set of
East-West and Left-Right options, Connolly figured politics and critique in terms of
fostering new “conditions of possibility.” While Connolly’s and Walker’s shared goal
was to problematize how we socially draw and enforce such self-Other and inside-
outside binary distinctions, much critical IR research focuses on the distinctions
themselves, often in ways that have the unintended consequence of essentializing
identities rather than loosening the binaries.16 If constructivism’s logic is that na-
tional identity determines national interest, which in turn produces foreign policy,
then its goal is to explain how Americans are like “this,” while Chinese are like
“that.”17 Visual securitization and ontological security likewise are concerned with
2009), p. 67.
15 Connolly, Identity\Difference, 36–63; Walker, Inside/Outside.
16 In later editions and books, Connolly and Walker both recognize this problem. See Connolly,
Identity\Difference, xiii–x xxi; R. B. J. Walker, Out of Line: Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the
Limits of Modern Politics (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–30.
17 See, for example, Peter Katzenstein, ed., Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist
Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010); David C. Kang, East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries
of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Wang Ban, ed., Chinese Visions of
World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Martin
Jacques, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order,
2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2012).
Conclu s ion 311
critically identifying discursive boundaries to reveal the mainstream identities that

they assert. While this search for hegemons and alternatives can be interesting and
important, it risks ossifying identity categories—with critique often invoking a
simple reversal to show the civilized West as barbaric, for example.18 Critical IR’s
“border walls are evil” discourse, as discussed in Chapter 9, is a case in point.
The sense in much of critical IR is that drawing boundaries is an ethical and po-
litical problem, and it is the job of analysts to deconstruct inside/outside and self/
Other distinctions as representational problems.19 For example, the solution to the
social construction of security—that is, securitization—is desecuritization. My
sense of politics, on the other hand, follows that of the classical Chinese philosopher
Xunzi: “Wherein lies that which makes humanity human? I say it lies in humanity’s
possession of boundaries.”20 Rather than pursuing an emancipatory project to erase
all boundaries—Reagan telling Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall or the pope
telling Trump to build bridges rather than walls—Sensible Politics examines how
visuals can actively create social order and world order in ways that creatively play
with inside/outside and self/Other distinctions. In other words, we move seeing IR
in terms of security (and desecuritization) to ordering (and re-ordering), as seen in
Rancière’s (re)distribution of the sensible.
Rather than focusing critique on the existing liberal world order, and leaving
“alternatives” open for others to create, Sensible Politics has examined an actual set of
post-Western alternatives that are creatively and actively promoted by scholars and
policymakers. A detailed study of “non-Western” examples is important because it
enriches our understanding of visual international politics. But there is more; visual
images and multisensory artifacts from the Middle East, Asia, and China are not
simply important, but are different in the sense of pushing critique into a new reg-
ister. Using the Great Wall of China to critically engage with Trump’s wall can help us
to shift from a Berlin Wall–inspired understanding of barriers as ideologically evil,
to appreciate walls as sites of performative experience that is morally ambiguous—
or even morally good (as in China). We often hear about the increasing militari-
zation of civilian society; but Sensible Politics looks to East Asian gardens to show
how civil/military relations are better appreciated through the shifting civility/
martiality dynamic. Because Islamic veils problematize liberal and post-Marxist
visions of society as open and transparent, they raise a different set of conceptual
issues, suggesting the limits not just of visibility, but also of an ethics that demands
18 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2010); Erik Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the
Emperor of China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
19 Walker, Out of Line, 2; Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone
Books, 2014).
20 Quoted in Carlos Rojas, The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), p. xvii.
312 Conclusion
face-to-face relations. While we could see these visual experiences as yet another
drawing of inside/outside boundaries of identity/difference, I hope the book has
shown the value of treating them as affective assemblages that performatively pro-
duce social orders and world orders as affective communities of sense.
The point is not to switch from West to East or to replace Eurocentrism with
Sinocentrism, but to loosen up such distinctions to explore sensible politics
through an assemblage of concepts that are Chinese, Asian, Islamic, Western, tra-
ditional, and contemporary. The book thus uses non-Western concepts, practices,
and experiences as a critical juxtaposition to problematize critical IR discourse
that characteristically generalizes from Euro-American examples. Once the West is
decentered from its hegemonic position in critique, then Euro-American examples
can be (re)considered. The purpose of theory thus is not to locate the East/West or
friend/enemy boundary, but to loosen up the categories that we use to understand
politics and IR.21 In this way, we can shake loose the hold of iconic images and en-
gage in comparative political theory that problematizes simple reversals and moral
equivalences.
Here Sensible Politics follows Michel Foucault’s consideration of heterotopia,
which shies away from a search for singular utopian alternatives, to appreciate
the messiness of already-existing alternative social formations: colonies, brothels,
prisons, cemeteries, ships, and gardens.22 Foucault is not promoting such places as
normatively good alternatives—not even gardens. Rather, heterotopia is interesting
because it allows us to appreciate how each alternative social order has its own set of
distinctions, hierarchies, violences, and dreams. Once again, rather than hoping that
the non-West will provide answers to the problems of Western modernity, Sensible
Politics has examined in detail the distinctions, hierarchies, violences, and dreams
of how such alternatives are visualized in terms of photos, films, maps, veils, walls,
gardens, and cyberspace. It’s one thing to open the critical door to new conditions
of possibility; it’s another to walk through the door to do the detailed empirical
research that is necessary to see how alternative social orders and world orders are
being visualized in the present: the IS’s utopian Caliphate, a revived Chinese world
order, Russian Eurasianism, inter-veillance on the Web, and so on.
While there was much hope that the non-West could better address modernity’s
concern with equality and inclusion, I have instead found different dynamics of hi-
erarchy and exclusion. It’s important to criticize Euro-American societies for being
hypocritical in their pursuit of equality. But the book has shown that it’s also neces-
sary to appreciate how powerful voices in China (and elsewhere) now present “hi-
erarchy” as the answer, the preferred regulatory ideal, that will solve the “problem”
21 For example, see Allen Chun, Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017); Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism
and Tradition in China Today (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).
22 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (1986):22–27.
Conclu s ion 313
of equality.23 In addition to being “Other-wise,” it is important to continue critique,

and in an ethical manner that avoids simple reversals and moral equivalences.
Theory and Dynamic Dyads

The experience of film school and garden design class also shaped Sensible Politics’s
conceptual arguments to highlight how theory can be found in odd places and
practices, including picture-taking, film-making, map-making, veil-wearing, wall-
building, garden-building, and Web-surfing. Rather than engage in high theory
to make causal explanations or deconstruct truth-claims, each of the chapters of
Sensible Politics works to analyze, explain, and experience visual/multisensory IR
by inventing and applying new concepts and creating unexpected juxtapositions.24
Some of the book’s odd juxtapositions have already been mentioned in this con-
clusion: the sartorial engineering of veils and beauty pageants; French, Chinese,
and Japanese gardens; and Syrian migrants both in the IS utopian PSAs and in Ai
Weiwei’s tragic Human Flows film. Conceptually, the book looks to the “medium
theory” of dynamic dyads—visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, center/periphery,
concealing/revealing, loosening/tightening, civility/martiality. This more artisanal
mode of theorizing emerges from the practical conventions that guide, for example,
the inside/outside framing of picture-taking and film-making (Chapter 4) and the
center/periphery relation seen on the All-under-Heavens maps of the Chinese world
order (Chapter 7). Rather than function according to the fixed binary distinctions
characteristic of Enlightenment modernity, Sensible Politics has shown how such dy-
namic dyads are relational, contextual, contingent, and fluid; their productive ten-
sion generates important social-ordering and world-ordering performances. What
is most interesting about these dyads is their general lack of stable canonical defini-
tion; there is no orthodoxy, and the dynamic dyads’ contingent flexibility demands
that we appreciate each event through continual interpretive practice and affective
experience. Likewise, there is no recipe for building a Japanese or Chinese garden.
Hence, as I was learning new filmmaking techniques, I also had to unlearn some
familiar analytic modes. While hermeneutics works to problematize conventions
and criticize habitus in order to speak truth to power, filmmaking and garden-
building actually work by recognizing and respecting aesthetic conventions and
practical techniques, while playing with them to make something new and inter-
esting. According to Paul Henley, there are “10 Commandments” for observational
23 See, for example, Yan Xuetong, Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Qin Yaqing, A Relational Theory of World Politics (Cambridge,
24 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans- Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
(New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 8, xv.
314 Conclusion
filmmaking, including “don’t use a tripod” and “don’t do formal interviews.” The
tenth commandment, however, is to ignore the first nine commandments when
that’s helpful, so long as you ignore them knowingly and in pursuit of making a better
film.25 Rather than emancipation from ideologies and resistance to conventions,
here we play with conventions to create new infrastructures of feeling and affective
communities of sense. Creative play here thus entails both ludic action and flexible
plasticity.
But attention to the visuality strategy and affective-work is not sufficient, ei-
ther. As each chapter shows, the book’s purpose is not to switch from one approach
to another—from visibility to visuality, from ideology to affect, from images to
artifacts—but to appreciate how sensible politics can come alive in different ways
through the productive tension of visibility/visuality, ideology/affect, and images/
artifacts. The Visual International Politics class likewise works to combine the vis-
ibility strategy and the visuality strategy. Students learn “visual literacy” by culti-
vating a hermeneutics of suspicion toward images that are produced by state and
corporate power. While filmmaking involves the visual construction of the social,
in class students use texts to “read” images in order to reveal the social construc-
tion of the visual. And this informs students’ filmmaking practice; many student
films address ideological issues of identity: what it means to be British Asian, how a
woman can get elected to Parliament, what it’s like to take the veil in London, whom
Chinese new year represents, the purpose of International Women’s Day, what a
beard means for Muslims and non-Muslims, and so on.26 These films are insightfully
ideological in their search for meaning and are also affective in their attention to the
visceral sensible politics of everyday experience.
While it is common to respond to the challenges of the “post-truth” era by
deconstructing “fake news,” the Visual International Politics class shows the value
of political critique that creatively produces multisensory artifacts that can move
and connect people to form new affective communities of sense, and perhaps dif-
ferent social and world orders. It’s not enough to engage in resistance that speaks
truth to power by fact-checking the lies (of Brexit, Trump, the Islamic State, and
the Chinese Communist Party). Because such resistance is parasitic on the order
that it critiques, it thus risks reproducing dominance. The point is not to simply
resist domination, but to create a new way of living: “As the saying goes, ‘What you
resist persists.’ Another world is possible, but we can’t achieve it through resistance
alone.”27 Critique in these student films playfully and creatively engages with finding

UK: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
26 See “IR318: Visual International Politics,” https://vimeo.com/channels/ir318 (accessed January
20, 2019).
27 Michelle Alexander, “We Are Not the Resistance,” New York Times (September 21, 2018)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/sunday/resistance-kavanaugh-trump-protest.html
(accessed January 8, 2019).
Conclu s ion 315
a way to wear a veil, run an election campaign, and wear a beard, but in a way that is
different from (but not the opposite of) what is expected by those who police the
hegemonic distribution of the sensible.
Such student films also show how we need to expand from the focus on the
visual to appreciate multisensory IR and verbal/sensory international politics. In
the past few years, numerous critical studies have problematized the visual turn in
IR in order to highlight the work of other senses. Franck Billé, for example, looks
to the haptic politics of the skin to draw attention to the multilayered complexity of
both territorial borders and conceptual distinctions.28 Walker listens to musical har-
mony to appreciate IR in terms of the scalar politics of verticality.29 Michelle Weitzel
explores the politics of how non-musical sound is used as a weapon by the state, and
also as a means of challenging such domination.30
The lesson I learn from these interventions is not that we need to fight the new
hegemony of visual IR (which many argue), but that it’s necessary to appreciate
theory and politics as multisensory experiences. To put this another way, the focus
on the visual is only a problem (i.e., ocular-centrism) if it marginalizes other ways
of feeling; for example, if it silences other voices. The analytical framework devel-
oped in Sensible Politics—the visibility strategy’s analysis of the social construction
of the visible and the visuality strategy’s appreciation of the visual performance of
the international—can also be employed to understand and appreciate the inter-
national politics of other senses, for example, the social construction of the audible
and the sonic construction of the international. The purpose of visual IR, therefore,
is not to create a new hegemonic approach, but as we saw in the book’s considera-
tion of walls and gardens (Chapters 9 and 10), to appreciate politics in terms of a
complex multisensory ecology.
The focus on visual politics is also heuristic. As we have seen, making “silent
films” allows students to escape from the prison-house of language to see other
ways of making meaning and value. This attention to how images can create affective
atmospheres in a different register, however, does not entail discarding words alto-
gether; films, remember, usually include verbal sounds. Rather, the point is to de-
throne language from its hegemonic position in critique and thus enable filmmakers
to use words as one of many instruments in the orchestra of multisensory political
critique and social-ordering. In this way, the verbal is critically decentered and re-
valued in order to, once again, probe “the relationship between the visible, the say-
able, and the thinkable.”31 Even so, you can still turn anything into a text, a narrative,
28 Franck Billé, “Skinworlds: Borders, Haptics, Topologies,” Environment and Planning D: Society

and Space 36:1 (2018):60–77
29 Walker, Out of Line,  27–30.
30 Michelle Weitzel, “Audializing Migrant Bodies: Sound and Security at the Border,” Security
Dialogue 49:6 (2018):421–437.
316 Conclusion
and understand most IR issues in terms of securitization. But Sensible Politics shows
how resisting this urge, to focus on critique as the creative multisensory process of
making social orders and world orders as affective communities of sense, can be
both interesting and productive.
The institutional challenge for sensory politics is like that for critical IR in ge-
neral: to gain legitimacy in the academy and in policymaking debates. As discip-
lines, political science and IR increasingly welcome analysis of visual images and
artifacts. The real challenge is to make the multisensory media of films, photo-
essays, sound-scapes, and other nonverbal materials count as legitimate academic
activities for recruitment, tenure, and promotion. While critical IR has a hard time
gaining traction with mainstream audiences and policymakers, award-winning films
by IR scholars show that the general public has an easier time engaging with com-
plex issues through a well-crafted research film.32
Sensible Politics thus makes important contributions to the new sub-field of
visual IR. Many visual IR articles and books conclude by noting what the visual
can add to our understanding of international politics, giving us, for example, a
better way of understanding security, violence, and peace. Sensible Politics does this
by highlighting how visual images and multisensory artifacts open up new sites for
our appreciation of IR, for example, gardens as sites of diplomacy, war, and peace.
Ultimately, however, it is a mistake to see visual IR as a subdiscipline that adds some-
thing to already-existing IR debates on war, terrorism, and diplomacy. Rather than
“add visuals and stir,” the point of Sensible Politics is to provide an oblique entry into
social theory and international studies that takes advantage of the fascinating work
being done in the broader human sciences, as well as in the professional practices of
filmmaking and landscape architecture. In addition to offering new sites of IR, the
book has explored a range of visceral sensibilities for a nuanced appreciation of mul-
tisensory politics that works to understand and feel theory and politics in different
registers. As noted in the introduction, the objective of Sensible Politics isn’t just to
convince people cognitively, but also to move and connect us affectively. In other
words, its goal is to make us not only think visually, but also feel visually—and cre-
atively act visually for a multisensory appreciation of politics.
32 See, for example, Roy Germano, dir., The Other Side of Immigration (RG Films, 2010); Sophie
Harman and Leanne Welham, Pili (Kuonekana Films Ltd., 2017).
SELECTED BIBLIO GR APH Y
Abu-Aasad, Hany, dir. Omar (ZBROS, 2013).

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2013).
Agnew, John. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Ahmed, Sarah. The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
Ai Qing. “The Gardener’s Dream.” In Ai Qing: Shi Xuan/Selected Poems, edited by Eugene Chen
Eoyang, 208–210 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982).
Ai Weiwei. Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interview, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009, edited and translated
by Lee Ambrozy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
Ai Weiwei. Niuyue 1983–1993/New York 1983–1993 (Berlin: DISTANZ Verlag, 2011).
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
(New York: Free Press, 2006).
Alibhai-Brown, Yasmin. Refusing the Veil (London: Biteback Publishing, 2014).
Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Al-
Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad. “The Archivist: Critical Analysis of the Islamic State’s Health
Department” (August 27, 2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/08/27/the-archivist-critical-
analysis-of-the-islamic-states-health-department/.
Amer, Amena. “A White British Muslim” (London: LSE Research Festival Exhibition, 2015) http://
eprints.lse.ac.uk/63004/.
Amoore, Louise. “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror.” Security Dialogue
38:2 (2007):215–232.
Amoore, Louise, and Alexandra Hall. “Border Theatre: On the Arts of Security and Resistance.”
Cultural Geographies 17:3 (2010):299–319.
Andersen, Rune S., Juha A. Vuori, and Can E. Mutlu. “Visuality.” In Critical Security Methods: New
Frameworks for Analysis, edited by Claudia Aradau, Jef Huysmans, Andrew Neal, and Nadine
Voelkner, 85–117 (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Andersen, Rune Saugmann. “Videos.” In Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, edited
by Mark B. Salter, 255–264 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
ed. (New York: Verso, 2006).
Araki, Takehisa, dir., Cai Guo-Qiang: Project to Add 10,000m to the Great Wall of China—Project for
Extraterrestrials No. 10 (Cai Studio, 1993).
Areeya Chumsai. Muat Pop [Lt. Pop] (English title: Boot Camp) (Bangkok: Future Publishing, 1998).
Atwan, Abel Bari. Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (London: Saqi Books, 2015).
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962).
317
318 Selected Bibliography
Azoulay, Ariella. Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, translated by Louise

Bethlehem (London: Verso, 2012).
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
Bai Meichu. Zuixin Zhonghua minguo gaizao quantu [The atlas of the Republic of China, with the
latest corrections] (Beiping: Jianshe tushuguan, 1930).
Bal, Mieke. “The Politics of Citation.” Diacritics 21:1 (1991):25–45.
Bandurski, David. “Lu Wei on the ‘Dream of the Web.’” China Media Project (February 17, 2015)
http://chinamediaproject.org/2015/02/17/lu-wei-on-the-dream-of-the-web/.
Bang Pa-In Palace (Bangkok: Royal Household Bureau, 2003).
Banks, Marcus. Visual Methods in Social Research (London: Sage, 2001).
Barabantseva, Elena. “Border People.” Journal of Narrative Politics 4:2 (2018), https://jnp.journals.
yorku.ca/index.php/default/article/view/87/88.
Barabantseva, Elena. British Born Chinese (Manchester, UK: AllRightsReversed, 2015).
Barabantseva, Elena. “In Pursuit of an Alternative Model? The Modernisation Trap in China’s
Official Development Discourse.” East Asia 29 (2012):63–79.
Barabantseva, Elena, and Elizabeth Dauphinee. “Border People: Editor’s Interview with Elena
Barabantseva.” Journal of Narrative Politics 4:2 (2018):58–64.
Barabantseva, Elena, and Andy Lawrence. “Encountering Vulnerabilities through ‘Filmmaking for
Fieldwork.’” Millennium 43:3 (2015):911–930.
Barlow, John Perry. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (February 8, 1996) https://
www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence.
Barmé, Geremie R. “Beijing, a Garden of Violence.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 9:4 (2008):612–639.
Barmé, Geremie R. “The Garden of Perfect Brightness: A Life in Ruins.” East Asian History 11
(1996):111–158.
Barmé, Geremie R. “Prince Gong’s Folly.” In The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts and
Geremie R. Barmé, 240–248 (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006).
Barmé, Geremie R., and Sang Ye. “The Great Firewall of China.” Wired ( June 1, 1997). https://
www.wired.com/1997/06/china-3/.
Barnard, George N. Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (1866).
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
Barthes, Roland. Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
Barthes, Roland. “Inaugural Lecture: College de France.” In A Barthes Reader, edited by Susan
Sontag, 457–478 (London: Vintage, 2000).
Barthes, Roland. Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972).
Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1988).
Baum, Richard. Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
Bauman, Zygmunt, Didier Bigo, Paulo Esteves, Elspeth Guild, Vivienne Jabri, David Lyon, and R.
B. J. Walker. “After Snowden: Rethinking the Impact of Surveillance.” International Political
Sociology 8 (2014):121–144.
Baylis, John, Steve Smith, and Patricia Owens, eds. The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction
to International Relations, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Bellanova, Rocco. “Digital, Politics, and Algorithms: Governing Digital Data through the Lens of
Data Protection.” European Journal of Social Theory 20:3 (2017):329–347.
Benesch, Oleg. “National Consciousness and the Evolution of the Civil/Military Binary in East
Asia.” Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies 8:1 (2011):133–137.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays
and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 217–251 (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
Sel ec ted Bibliog raphy 319
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972).
Berry, Chris. “The Chinese Side of the Mountain.” Film Quarterly 60:3 (2007):32–37.
Bigo, Didier. “Security, Surveillance, and Democracy.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance
Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, 277– 284
Bilgin, Pinar, and L. H. M. Ling, eds. Asia in International Relations: Unlearning Imperial Power
Relations (London: Routledge, 2017).
Billé, Franck. “On China’s Cartographic Embrace: A View from Its Northern Rim.” Cross-Currents
no. 21 (2017):1–21.
Billé, Franck. “Skinworlds: Borders, Haptics, Topologies.” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 36:1 (2018):60–77.
Blais, Allison, and Lynn Rasic. A Place of Remembrance, Updated Edition: Official Book of the National
September 11 Memorial (New York: National Geographic, 2015).
Blakely, Ruth. “Elite Interviews.” In Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and
Methods, edited by Laura J. Shepherd, 158–168 (London: Routledge, 2013).
Bleiker, Roland. “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory.” Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 30 (2001):509–533.
Bleiker, Roland. Aesthetics and World Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Bleiker, Roland. “Visual Autoethnography and International Security: Insights from the Korean
DMZ” European Journal of International Security (forthcoming 2019).
Bleiker, Roland. “Mapping Visual Global Politics.” In Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker,
1–29 (London: Routledge, 2018).
Bleiker, Roland. “Pluralist Methods for Visual Global Politics.” Millennium 43:3 (2015):872–890.
Bleiker, Roland, ed. Visual Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell, and Emma Hutchison. “Visual Cultures of Inhospitality.” Peace
Review 26:2 (2014):192–200.
Bleiker, Roland, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson. “The Visual
Dehumanisation of Refugees.” Australian Journal of Political Science 48:4 (2013):398–416.
Bleiker, Roland, and Emma Hutchison, eds. “Forum: Emotions and World Politics,” special issue,
International Theory 6:3 (2014):490–594.
Bleiker, Roland, and Amy Kay. “Representing HIV/AIDS in Africa: Pluralist Photography and
Local Empowerment.” International Studies Quarterly 51 (2007):139–163.
Bloom, Mia, and Chelsea Daymon. “Assessing the Future Threat: ISIS’s Virtual Caliphate.” Orbis
(Summer 2018):372–388.
Bousquet, Antoine J. The Eye of War: Military Perception from the Telescope to the Drone (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Branch, Jordan. The Cartographic State: Maps, Territory, and the Origins of Sovereignty
Bray, Francesca. “American Modern: The Foundation of Western Civilization” (2000) http://www.
anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/bray/toilet/index.html.
Brennan, Kathleen P. J. “Memelife.” In Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion, edited by
Mark B. Salter, 243–254 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Brenner, David. Rebel Politics: A Political Sociology of Armed Struggle in Myanmar’s Borderlands
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
Breslin, Shaun. “China and the Arab Awakening.” ISPI Analysis 140 (2012):1–8.
Brigg, Morgan, and Roland Bleiker. “Autoethnographic International Relations: Exploring the Self
as a Source of Knowledge.” Review of International Studies 36:3 (2010): 779–798.
Brook, Timothy. Mr. Selden’s Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart, and the South China Sea
(London: Profile Books, 2015).
Broudehoux, Anne-Marie. The Making and Selling of Post-Mao Beijing (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2014).
Bryman, Alan. Social Research Methods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Burrell, Gibson, and Karen Dale. “Utopiary: Utopias, Gardens and Organizations.” The Sociological
Review 50:1 (2002):106–127.
Bush, Laura. “The Weekly Address Delivered by the First Lady” (November 17, 2011) http://www.
presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=24992.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2016).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Buzan, Barry, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde. Security: A New Framework for Analysis (Boulder,
CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998).
Byler, Darren. “Ghost World.” Logic no. 7 (2019) https://logicmag.io/07-ghost-world/.
Byler, Darren, and Timothy Grose. “China’s Surveillance Laboratory.” Dissent (October 31, 2018)
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/chinas-surveillance-laboratory.
Callahan, Bill, dir. An American in Shanghai (2016, 22 min.) https://www.thechinastory.org/2016/
09/an-american-in-shanghai-then-and-now/.
Callahan, Bill. “Digging to China.” https://vimeo.com/album/4040464.Callahan, Bill, dir. Great
Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience (28 minutes). Screened at LSE Festival, London
(March 2, 2019).
Callahan, Bill, dir. toilet adventures (August 25, 2015) https://www.thechinastory.org/2015/08/
toilet-adventures-in-china-making-sense-of-transnational-encounters/.
Callahan, Bill, dir. You Can See CHINA from Here. (2018, 14:35 min.) https://vimeo.com/
169046223.
Callahan, Bill, dir. Great Walls: Journeys from Ideology to Experience. (Wildwood Films, 2019) https://
vimeo.com/billcallahan/great-walls.
Callahan, William A. China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Callahan, William A. China Dreams: 20 Visions of the Future (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Callahan, William A. “China’s ‘Asia Dream’: BRI and the New Regional Order.” Asian Journal of
Comparative Politics 1:3 (2016):226–243.
Callahan, William A. “Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman.” Journal of Asian Studies 73:04
(2014):899–920.
Callahan, William A. Contingent States: Greater China and Transnational Relations
Callahan, William A. Cultural Governance in Pacific Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006).
Callahan, William A. “Identity and Security in China: The Negative Soft Power of the China Dream.”
Politics 35:3–4 (2015):216–229.
Campbell, David. “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of
War.” Review of International Studies 29 (2003):57–73.
Campbell, David. “Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict.” Political Geography 26
(2007):357–382.
Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, rev. ed.
Campbell, David, and Michael J. Shapiro. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Securitization, Militarization
and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post-9/11.” Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):131–137.
Carrico, Kevin. The Great Han: Race, Nationalism and Tradition in China Today (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2017).
Chaichian, Mohammad A. Empires and Walls: Globalization, Migration, and Colonial Domination
(Leiden: Brill, 2014).
Chang, Amy. Warring State: China’s Cybersecurity Strategy (Washington, DC: Center for a New
American Security, December 14, 2014).
Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
Cheng Dalin. “The Great Tourist Icon.” In The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts and
Geremie R. Barmé, 26–32 (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006).
Ch’eonhado [All-under-the-Heavens Map] (ca. 1800). (Washington, DC: Library of Congress)
https://lccn.loc.gov/93684246.
Choi, Jung-Bong. “Mapping Japanese Imperialism onto Postcolonial Criticism.” Social Identities 9:3
(2003):325–339.
Chong, Gladys Pak Lei. “Cashless China: Securitization of Everyday Life through Alipay’s Social
Credit System—Sesame Credit.” Chinese Journal of Communication (March 12, 2019):1–18,
https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2019.1583261.
Ch’onhado [All- under- the-
Heavens Map] (ca. 19th century). (London: British Library,
Maps.33.c.13).
Chouliaraki, Lilie. “The Humanity of War: Iconic Photojournalism of the Battlefield, 1914–2012.”
In Visual Security Studies: Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War, edited by Juha A. Vuori
and Rune Saugmann Andersen, 71–90 (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-humanitarianism (Oxford: Polity
Press, 2013).
Chouliaraki, Lilie, and Myria Georgiou. “Hospitability: The Communicative Architecture
of Humanitarian Securitization at Europe’s Borders.” Journal of Communication 67:2
(2017):159–180.
Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2012).
Chun, Allen. Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2017).
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
Chung, Chris P. C. “Drawing the U-Shaped Line: China’s Claim in the South China Sea, 1946–
1974.” Modern China 42:1 (2016):38–72.
“City of Urumqi Prohibition on Wearing Items That Mask the Face or Robe the Body.” Translated by
Timothy Grose and James Leibold (February 4, 2015) http://www.chinafile.com/reporting-
opinion/features/city-urumqi-prohibition-wearing-items-mask-face-or-robe-body.
Clark, Emma. Underneath Which Rivers Flow: The Symbolism of the Islamic Garden (London: Prince
of Wale’s Institute of Architecture, 1996).
Clunas, Craig. Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1996).
Clunas, Craig. Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).
Clunas, Craig. “Reading Wen Zhengming: Metaphor and Chinese Painting.” Word & Image 25:1
(2009):96–102.
Connolly, William E. Identity\Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, expanded ed.
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
Coronado, Irasema. “Towards the Wall between Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora.” In Borders,
Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity?, edited by Elisabeth Vallet, 247–266 (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014).
Craig, Maxine Leeds. Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Creemers, Rogier. “China’s Social Credit System: An Evolving Practice of Control.” SSRN (May 9,
2018) https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3175792.
Creemers, Rogier. “Cyber China: Upgrading Propaganda, Public Opinion Work and Social
Management for the Twenty- First Century.” Journal of Contemporary China 26:103
(2017):85–100.
Croft, Stuart. Securitizing Islam: Identity and the Search for Security (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Curtis, Adam, dir. Bitter Lake (London: BBC, 2015).
Curtis, Adam, dir. The Power of Nightmares (London: BBC, 2004).
Dali kaizhan aiguo weisheng yundong [To fully carry out a patriotic public health movement] (1963).
Chinese Public Health Posters exhibit (National Institutes of Health, 2006) https://www.
nlm.nih.gov/hmd/chineseposters/images/1200/DSC_4052.jpg.
Dallmyr, Fred, and Zhao Tingyang, eds. Contemporary Chinese Political Thought: Debates and
Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012).
Danchev, Alex. On Art and War and Terror (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011).
Danchev, Alex. On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
Danchev, Alex. “Witnessing.” In Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker, 332– 338
(London: Routledge, 2018).
Danchev, Alex, and Debbie Lisle. “Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose.” Review of International
Studies 35:4 (2009):775–779.
Danchev, Alex, and R. B. J. Walker, eds. “Art and Politics,” special issue, Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political 31:1 (2006):1–104.
DaQing wannian yitong tianxia quantu [Perpetual All-under-the-Heavens map of the Unified
Great Qing Empire] (1811). (Washington, DC: Library of Congress) https://lccn.loc.gov/
gm71005018.
Davies, Gloria. Worrying about China: The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry (Cambridge,
de Bromhead, Toni. Looking Two Ways: Documentary’s Relationship with Cinema and Reality (Aarhus,
Denmark: Intervention Press, 1996).
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
de Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984).
de Weerdt, Hilde. “Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth-and Thirteen-Century
Song China.” Imago Mundi 61:2 (2009):145–167.
Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Delemarre, Jeu. “Dabiq: Framing the Islamic State.” MA thesis, Radboud University
Nijmegen, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Habberjam (London: Bloomsbury, 1986).
Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault, translated by Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1988).
Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992):3–7.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(London: Athlone Press, 1996).
Delisle, Guy. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea (New York: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
deLisle, Jacques, Avery Goldstein, and Guobin Yang, eds. The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing
China (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Denton, Kirk. Exhibiting the Past: Historical Memory and the Politics of Museums in Postsocialist China
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014).
Der Derian, James. “After- image.” In Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to
IR and Non- Fiction Film, edited by Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest, 223– 231
Der Derian, James. “Now We Are All Avatars.” Millennium 39:1 (2010):181–186.
Der Derian, James. On Diplomacy: A Genealogy of Western Estrangement (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).
Der Derian, James. Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network
Der Derian, James. “War Becomes Academic: Human Terrain, Virtuous War and Contemporary
Militarism.” In Militarism and International Relations: Political Economy, Security, Theory, edited
by Anna Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, 59–73 (London: Routledge, 2013).
Der Derian, James, and Phillip Gara. Project Z: The Final Global Event (Bullfrog Films, 2015).
Der Derian, James, David Udris, and Michael Udris. Human Terrain: War Becomes Academic
(Bullfrog Films, 2011).
Derrida, Jacques, and Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality, translated by Rachel Bowlby (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Di Cintio, Marcello. Walls: Travels along the Barricades (London: Union Books, 2013).
Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder,
CO: Westview Press, 1998).
Doar, Bruce Gordon. “Delimited Boundaries and Great Wall Studies.” In The Great Wall of
China, edited by Claire Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé, 119–127 (Sydney: Powerhouse
Publishing, 2006).
Dodds, Klaus. “Steve Bell’s Eye: Cartoons, Geopolitics and the Visualization of the ‘War on Terror.’”
Security Dialogue 38:2 (2007):157–177.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk (New York: New American Library, 1903).
Duara, Prasenjit. The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
Dugin, Alexander. Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo- Eurasianism (London: Arktos
Media, 2014).
Dunlap, Charles J., Jr. “Lawfare 101: A Primer.” Military Review 97 (2017):8–17.
Dutton, Michael R. Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to “the People”
Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
Economy, Elizabeth C. The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State (New York: Oxford
Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
Egawauemon. Walking in Tokyo, Yasukuni Shrine. YouTube (August 18, 2008) http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=Ew9AllEWehM.
Eggers, Dave. The Circle (New York: Penguin, 2014).
Eghigian, Greg. “Homo Munitus: The East Germans Observed.” In Socialist Modern: East German
Everyday Culture and Politics, edited by Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, 37–70 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
Elmer, Greg. “Panopticon—Discipline—Control.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, ed-
ited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, 21–29 (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Eltahawy, Mona. Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2015).
Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, 2nd ed.
Enloe, Cynthia. “The Mundane Matters.” International Political Sociology 4:5 (2011):446–462.
Erickson, Steve. “Voyeurs in the Hermit Kingdom: The Interview and Other Films on North Korea.”
Cineaste 40:2 (2015):37–41.
Euben, Roxanne L. Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism;
A Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Euben, Roxanne L. “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time: ISIS Executions, Visual Rhetoric and
Sovereign Power.” Perspectives on Politics 15:4 (2017):1007–1033.
Evans, Jessica, and Stuart Hall, eds. Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999).
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
Farrell, Henry. “The Woodgrain of the Chessboard: A Response to Roy Germano.” Perspectives on
Politics 12:3 (2014):686–687.
Farwell, James P. “Jihadi Video in the ‘War of Ideas.’” Survival 52:6 (2010):127–150.
Farwell, James P. “The Media Strategy of ISIS.” Survival 56:6 (2014):49–55.
Feaver, Peter D. “The Right to Be Right: Civil-Military Relations and the Iraq Surge Decision.”
International Security 35:4 (2011):87–125.
Feng Xiaogang. “Queshao ni, Niuyue biande pingyong” [Without you, New York is mediocre],
Xingfu no. 8 (2015):3–5.
Feng Yitong. “Bu qude huhao, chonggao de shixin” [Unyielding call, noble poetic heart], Nanjing
shifan zhuankexiao xuebao 16:1 (2000):1–4.
Fernández, Ana Teresa. “Borrando La Frontera– Erasing the Border” (2010) http://
anateresafernandez.com/borrando-la-barda-tijuana-mexico/.
Finn, Jonathan. “Seeing Surveillantly: Surveillance as Social Practice.” In Eyes Everywhere: The Global
Growth of Camera Surveillance, edited by Aaron Doyle, Randy Lippert, and David Lyon, 67–
80 (London: Routledge, 2012).
Fiskesjö, Magnus. “The Legacy of the Chinese Empires: Beyond ‘the West and the Rest.’” Education
About Asia 22:1 (2017):6–10.
Fiskesjö, Magnus. “On the ‘Raw’ and the ‘Cooked’ Barbarians of Imperial China.” Inner Asia 1:2
(1999):139–168.
Floridi, Luciano, ed. The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era
(New York: Springer, 2015).
Food Security: Aspects from the Work of the Agriculture Administration in the Province—Wilāyat Ḥalab
(November 10, 2015) https://jihadology.net/2015/11/10/new-video-message-from-the-
islamic-state-food-security-aspects-from-the-work-of-the-agriculture-administration-in-the-
province-wilayat-ḥalab/.
Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988).
Foucault, Michel. “Afterword: The Subject and Power.” In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (New York: The Harvester
Press, 1982).
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Pantheon, 1977).
Foucault, Michel. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed-
ited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104 (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991).
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by R. Hurley
(New York: Pantheon, 1978).
Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow, 76–100 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16:1 (1986):22–27.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970).
Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978
Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–6, translated
by David Macey, edited by Mauro Bertani and Alssandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003).
Foucault, Michel. This Is Not a Pipe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
Fravel, M. Taylor. Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial
Disputes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
French, Howard W. Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global
Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017).
Friis, Simone Molin. “‘Behead, Burn, Crucify, Crush’: Theorizing Islamic State’s Public Displays of
Violence.” European Journal of International Relations 24:2 (2018):243–267.
Friis, Simone Molin. “‘Beyond Anything We Have Ever Seen’: Beheading Videos and the Visibility
of Violence in the War against ISIS.” International Affairs 91:4 (2015):725–746.
Frøystad, Kathinka. “Failing the Third Toilet Test: Reflections on fieldwork, Gender and Indian
Loos.” Ethnography (October 15, 2018):1–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138118804262.
Galloway, Alexander. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2006).
Gao Zhiguo, and Bing Bing Jia. “The Nine-Dash Line in the South China Sea: History, Status, and
Implications.” The American Journal of International Law 107:1 (2013):98–124.
Ge Zhaoguang. Lishi Zhongguo de nei yu wai: Youguan “Zhongguo” yu “zhoubian” gainian de zai
chengqing [Inside and outside in historical China: Re-clarifying the concepts of “Middle
Kingdom” and “periphery”] (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017).
Gerges, Fawaz A. ISIS: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Germano, Roy. “Analytic Filmmaking: A New Approach to Research and Publication in the Social
Sciences.” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):663–676.
Germano, Roy. “Analytic Filmmaking: A Response to Critics.” Perspectives on Politics 12:3
(2014):691–694.
Germano, Roy, dir. The Other Side of Immigration (RG Films, 2010).
“GFW de lishi he weilai” [The history and future of the GFW]. Zhongguo jiwenwang (May 15,
2013) https://www.bannedbook.org/bnews/fanqiang/20130515/129086.html.
Gilley, Bruce. “The Case for Colonialism.” Third World Quarterly (September 8, 2017):1–17.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge,
Gliddens, Sarah. Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq (New York: Drawn &
Quarterly, 2016).
Gökariksel, Banu, and Anna Secor. “Between Fashion and Testtür: Marketing and Consuming
Women’s Islamic Dress.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6:3 (2010):118–148.
Gökariksel, Banu, and Anna Secor. “The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze: Turning the Inside Out.” Signs
40:1 (2014):178–200.
Gong, Gerritt. The Standard of “Civilization” in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984).
Gould, Jeffrey L. “Analytic Filmmaking as Social Scientific Research: A Response to Roy Germano.”
Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):684–685.
Grierson, John. “The Documentary Producer.” Cinema Quarterly 2 (1933):7–9.
Griffiths, James. The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the
Internet (London: Zed, 2019).
Grovogui, Siba N’Zatioula. Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996).
Guillaume, Xavier, Rune S. Andersen, and Juha A. Vuori. “Paint It Black: Colours and the Social
Meaning of the Battlefield.” European Journal of International Relations 22:1 (2015):49–71.
Gullberg, Johanna. “The Republic of Difference: Feminism and Anti-racism in the Parisian
Banlieues.” PhD dissertation, Stockholm University, 2016.
Habermas, Jürgen. Time of Transitions, translated and edited by Max Pensky (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2006).
Haggerty Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.” British Journal of Sociology
51:4 (2000):605–622.
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Anticipating the Han: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese
and Western Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens.” Studies in the
History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 18:3 (1998):175–186.
Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. Thinking Through Confucius (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1987).
Hall, Stuart, ed. Representations: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

(London: Sage, 1997).
Hamilton, Bruce Taylor. Human Nature: The Japanese Garden of Portland, Oregon (Portland: Japanese
Garden Society of Oregon, 1996).
Hamilton, Caitlin. “The Everyday Artefacts of World Politics: Why Graphic Novels, Textiles
and Internet Memes Matter in World Politics.” PhD dissertation, University of New South
Wales, 2016.
Hansen, Lene. “How Images Make World Politics: International Icons and the Case of Abu Ghraib.”
Review of International Studies 41:2 (2015):263–288.
Hansen, Lene. “Reading Comics for the Field of International Relations: Theory, Method and the
Bosnian War.” European Journal of International Relations 23:3 (2016):581–608.
Hansen, Lene. “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies: Visual Securitization and the Muhammad
Cartoon Crisis.” European Journal of International Relations 17:1 (2011):51–74.
Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture,
and Liberal Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Harley, J. B. “Deconstructing the Map.” Cartographica 26 (1989):1–20.
Harman, Sophie. “Film as Research Method in African Politics and International Relations: Reading
and Writing HIV/AIDS in Tanzania.” African Affairs 115:461 (2016):733–750.
Harman, Sophie. “Making the Invisible Visible in International Relations: Film, Co-Produced
Research and Transnational Feminism.” European Journal of International Relations
(2017):1–23.
Harman, Sophie, and Leanne Welham. Pili (Kuonekana Films Ltd., 2017).
Havel, Vaclav. Living in Truth (New York: Faber & Faber, 1987).
Hayton, Bill. “The Modern Origins of China’s South China Sea Claims: Maps, Misunderstanding
and the Making of China’s Maritime Geobody.” Modern China 45:2 (2019):127–170.
Hayton, Bill. The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2014).
Hazell, Robert, Ben Worthy, and Mark Glover. The Impact of the Freedom of Information Act on
Central Government in the UK: Does FOI Work? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Health Services in the Islamic State—Wilāyat al-Raqqah (April 24, 2015) https://jihadology.net/
?s=health+service.
Heath, Jennifer, ed. The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2008).
Heck, Axel. “Images, Visions and Narrative Identity Formation of ISIS.” Global Discourse 7:2/3
(2017):244–259.
Heck, Axel. “The Struggle for Legitimacy of the Islamic State—Facts, Myths, and Narratives.” In
Political Storytelling: From Fact to Fiction, edited by Frank Gadinger, 81–88 (Duisburg: Käte
Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research, 2016).
Heck, Axel, and Gabi Schlag. “Securitizing Images: The Female Body and the War in Afghanistan.”
European Journal of International Relations 19:4 (2012):891–913.
Hegghammer, Thomas, ed. Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamists
Hegghammer, Thomas. “Non-military Practices in Jihadi Groups.” In Jihadi Culture: The Art
and Social Practices of Militant Islamists, edited by Thomas Hegghammer, 171– 201
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (London: Garland
Heimer, Maria, and Stig Thogerson. Doing Fieldwork in China (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2006).
Henderson, Ron. The Gardens of Suzhou (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
Henley, Paul. “Are You Happy? Interviews, ‘Conversations’, and ‘Talking Heads’ as Means
of Gathering Oral Testimony in Ethnographic Documentary.” In Film und Interview.
Volkskundliche und ethnologische Ansatze zu Methodik un Analyse, edited by Joachim Wossidlo
and Ulrich Roters, 51–67 (Berlin: Waxmann Verlag, 2003).
Henley, Paul. “On Narratives in Ethnographic Film.” In Reflecting Visual Ethnography: Using the
Camera in Anthropological Research, edited by Metje Postma and Peter Ian Crawford, 376–401
(Hoejbjerg: Intervention Press 2006).
Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
Hevia, James. Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994).
Hoffman, Samantha. Social Credit: Technology- enhanced Authoritarian Control with Global
Consequences, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Report No. 6/2018 ( June 2018).
Hopkins, Nick, and Ronni Michelle Greenwood. “Hijab, Visibility and the Performance of Identity.”
European Journal of Social Psychology 43 (2013):438–447.
Hostetler, Laura. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China
Houellebecq, Michel. Submission (London: William Heinemann, 2015).
Hsiao, Anne Hsiu-An. “China and the South China Sea ‘Lawfare.’” Issues & Studies 52:2 (2016):1–42.
Hua Tianxue, Ai Weiwei, and Feng Boyi, eds. Bu hezuo fangshi-Fuck Off [An uncooperative approach-
Fuck Off] (Shanghai: Eastlink Gallery, 2000).
Huang Hua. “Renovating the Great Wall.” China Today 43:8 (August 1994):12–13.
Huayi tu (1136) [Map of Civilization and barbarism (1136)] (Washington DC: Library of
Congress) https://lccn.loc.gov/2002626771.
Hughes, Christopher R. “Militarism and the China Model: The Case of National Defense
Education.” Journal of Contemporary China 26:103 (2017):54–67.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1996).
Huntington, Samuel P. The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
Hutchison, Emma. Affective Communities in World Politics: Collective Emotions After Trauma
Jackson, Robert, and Georg Sorenson. Introduction to International Relations, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford
Jacobs, Frank. “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035 If Putin Gets His Wish.” Foreign Policy ( June
4, 2014) http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/04/what-russia-could-look-like-in-2035-if-
putin-gets-his-wish/.
Jacques, Martin. When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New
Global Order, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin, 2012).
Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth- Century French Thought
Jay, Martin. “No State of Grace: Violence in the Garden.” In Sites Unseen: Landscape and Vision, ed-
ited by Harris Dianne Suzette and D. Fairchild Ruggles, 45–60 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of
Pittsburgh, 2011).
Jeffrey, Alex. The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
(London: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
Jenco, Leigh. Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Ji Cheng. Yuan Ye tushuo ( Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2004).
Jia Yijun. Zhongguo guochi dilixue [Geography of China’s national humiliation] (Beiping: Wenhua
xueshe yinxing, 1930).
Jia Zhangke. Smog Journeys. Beijing: Greenpeace ( January 21, 2015) https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=zf F7ZmKMUX0.
Jiang, Min. “Authoritarian Informationalism: China’s Approach to Internet Sovereignty.” SAIS
Review 30:2 (2010):71–89.
Jin Wei. “Burqas, Hijabs and Beards in the Governance of Xinjiang.” University of Nottingham: China
Policy Institute Blog (April 29, 2015) http://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/chinapolicyinstitute/
2015/04/29/regulating-burqas-hijabs-and-beards-to-push-or-pull/.
Jindai Zhongguo bainian guochi ditu [Maps of the modern China’s century of national humiliation]
(Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1997/2005).
Johnson, Corey, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Amoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter, and Chris
Rumford. “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies.” Political Geography
30 (2011):61–69.
Jones, Reece. Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel
(London: Zed Books, 2012).
Jones, Reece, Corey Johnson, Wendy Brown, Gabriel Popescu, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Alison
Mountz, and Emily Gilbert. “Interventions on the State of Sovereignty at the Border.” Political
Geography 59 (2017):1–10.
Joppke, Christian. Veil: Mirror of Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009).
Kafka, Franz. The Complete Short Stories (London: Vintage, 2005).
Kang, David C. East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (New York: Columbia
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment, translated by J. H. Bernard (Amherst, NY: Prometheus
Books, 2000).
Kapur, Saloni, and Simon Mabon. “The Copenhagen School Goes Global: Securitisation in the
Non-West.” Global Discourse 8:1 (2018):1–4.
Katzenstein, Peter, ed. Civilizations in World Politics: Plural and Pluralist Perspectives
Keane, Marc P. Japanese Garden Design (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1996).
Keenan, Paul. “The Summer Gardens in the Social Life of St Petersburg, 1725–1761.” Slavonic and
East European Review 88:1/2 (2010):134–155.
Keswick, Maggie. The Chinese Garden: History, Art, and Architecture, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Frances
Lincoln, 2003).
Kingston, Jeff. “Awkward Talisman: War Memory, Reconciliation and Yasukuni.” East Asia 24
(2007):295–318.
Klausen, Jytte. The Cartoons That Shook the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Klimburg, Alexander. The Darkening Web: The War for Cyberspace (New York: Penguin Press, 2017).
Knockel, Jeffrey, Lotus Ruan, Masashi Crete-Nishihata, and Ron Deibert. (Can’t) Picture This: An
Analysis of Image Filtering on WeChat Moments. The Citizen Lab (August 14, 2018) https://
citizenlab.ca/ 2 018/ 0 8/ c ant- p icture- t his- a n- a nalysis- o f- i mage- f iltering- o n- w echat-
moments/.
Kostka, Genia. “China’s Social Credit Systems and Public Opinion: Explaining High Levels of
Approval.” New Media and Society 21:7 (2019):1565–1593.
Kothari, Ranji. “Editorial Statement.” Alternatives 1:1 (1975):1–5.
Kothari, Ranji. “Towards a Just World.” Alternatives 5 (1979–1980):1–42.
Kovács, Attila. “The ‘New Jihadist’ and the Visual Turn from al-Qa’ida to ISIL/ISIS/Da’ish.”
Bitzpol Affairs 2:3 (2015):47–69.
Kraidy, Marwan M. “The Projectilic Image: Islamic State’s Digital Visual Warfare and Global
Networked Affect.” Media, Culture & Society 39:8 (2017): 1194–1209.
Krasner, Stephen D. Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
Kraus, Richard Curt. The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
Kuitert, Wybe. “Borrowing Scenery and the Landscape That Lends—The Final Chapter of Yuanye.”
Journal of Landscape Architecture 10:2 (2015):32–43.
Kuitert, Wybe. Japanese Gardens and Landscapes, 1650– 1950 (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
Kuitert, Wybe. Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2002).
Lahoud, Nelly. “A Capella Songs (Anashid) in Jihadi Culture.” In Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social
Practices of Militant Islamists, edited by Thomas Hegghammer, 42–62 (New York: Cambridge
Lattimore, Owen. Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York: American Geographical Society, 1940).
“Law on Territorial Waters, Adjacent Areas.” Beijing: Xinhua, FBIS-China (February 28, 1992):2;
translated in British Broadcasting Corporation, Summary of World Broadcasts (November
28, 1992):C1/1-2.
Lawrence, Andy. Filmmaking for Fieldwork: An Ethnographer’s Handbook (Manchester,
UK: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).
Ledyard, Gari. “Cartography in Korea.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in
the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward,
235–344 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Lee, Haiyan. “The Ruins of Yuanmingyuan: Or, How to Enjoy a National Wound.” Modern China
35:2 (2009):155–190.
Leibold, James. “Surveillance in Xinjiang: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement.”
Journal of Contemporary China (May 31, 2019):1– 15, https://doi.org/10.1080/
10670564.2019.1621529.
Leibold, James, and Timothy Grose, “Islamic Veiling in Xinjiang: The Political and Societal Struggle
to Define Uyghur Female Adornment.” China Journal no. 76 (2016):78–102.
Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
Levinson, Barry, dir. Wag the Dog (New Line Cinema, 1997).
Lewis, Reina, ed. Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith (London: I. B. Taurus, 2013).
Lewis, Reina. Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015).
Li Keqiang. “Report on the Work of the Government (2015).” State Council Information Office
(March 5, 2015) http://english.gov.cn/archive/publications/2015/03/05/content_
281475066179954.htm.
Li Xiaodong and Felicia Lim. “Poetics of Gardening: A Holistic Approach Towards Chinese
Landscape Cultivation Based on the Case Study of Yuan Ye.” Studies in the History of Gardens
and Designed Landscapes 24:3 (2004):229–249.
Lindroos, Kia, and Frank Möller, eds. Art as Political Witness (Leverkusen: Barbara Budrich, 2016).
Linfield, Susie. Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2010).
Ling, L. H. M. The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian, Worldist International Relations
Lisle, Debbie. Holidays in the Danger Zone: Entanglements of War and Tourism (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Lisle, Debbie. “Learning How to See.” In Routledge Handbook of International Political Sociology, ed-
ited by Xavier Guillaume and Pinar Bilgin, 299–308 (London: Routledge, 2016).
Liu Dexi. “Zhongguo de fazhan yu waijiao zhengce de zouxiang” [Trends in China’s develop-
ment and foreign policy], Guoji zhengzhi yanjiu (2015), http://study.ccln.gov.cn/fenke/
zhengzhixue/zzzgwj/163609.shtml.
Liu, Kin-ming, ed. My First Trip to China (Hong Kong: Muse, 2012).
Liu, Lydia H. The Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge,
Liu Mingfu. Zhongguo meng: Hou Meiguo shidai de daguo siwei zhanlue dingwei [The China
dream: The great power thinking and strategic positioning of China in the post-American era],
2nd ed. (Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chuban gongsi, 2013).
Liu Quan. “Nanmin yu yishu” [Refugees and art]. Meishu guancha no. 2 (2017):147–150.
Liu Xiaobo. No Enemies, No Hatred: Selected Essays and Poems, edited by Perry Link, Tianchi Martin-
Liao, and Liu Xia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Liu Xiaoming. “China and Britain Won the War Together.” Daily Telegraph ( January 1, 2014)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/10546442/Liu-Xiaoming-China-and-Britain-won-
the-war-together.html.
Louie, Kam. Chinese Masculinities in a Globalizing World (London: Routledge, 2015).
Louie, Kam. Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Lovell, Julia. The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000 BC—AD 2000 (New York: Grove
Press, 2006).
Lu Yiran. “Jindai Zhongguo sangshi lingtu zhihuigu” [A review of modern China’s lost territories],
21 shiji no. 1 (1997):60–63.
Luke, Timothy W. “Design as Defense: Broken Barriers and the Security Spectacle at the US-Mexico
Border.” In Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of Alterity, Community and
Securitizing Space, edited by Max O. Stephenson and Laura Zanotti, 115–131 (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2014).
Luke, Timothy W. “The Missouri Botanical Garden: Reworking Biopower as Florapower.”
Organization and Environment 13:3 (2000):305–321.
Lyon, David. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2018).
Lyon, David, Kevin D. Haggerty, and Kirstie Ball. “Introducing Surveillance Studies.” In Routledge
Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon,
1–11 (New York: Routledge, 2014).
Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure, translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lyndon
MacDonald, Fraser, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds. “Introduction.” In Observant
States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture, edited by Fraser MacDonald, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus
Dodds (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010).
MacDonald, Fraser, Rachel Hughes, and Klaus Dodds, eds. Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual
Culture (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2010).
MacDougall, Douglas. Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
MacKay, Joseph. “The Nomadic Other: Ontological Security and the Inner Asian Steppe in Historical
East Asian International Politics.” Review of International Studies 42 (2016):471–491.
MacKinnon, Rebecca. Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
(New York: Basic Books, 2012).
Madsen, Deborah L. “Performing Community through the Feminine Body: The Beauty Pageant in
Transnational Contexts.” Presented at University of Zurich, October 2005.
Marlow, Tim, and John Tancock, eds. Ai Weiwei (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2015).
Martínez, José Ciro, and Brent Eng. “Stifling Stateness: The Assad Regime’s Campaigns Against
Rebel Governance.” Security Dialogue 49:4 (2018):235–253.
Martínez, José Ciro, and Brent Eng. “Struggling to Perform the State: The Politics of Bread in the
Syrian Civil War.” International Political Sociology 11 (2017):130–147.
Marwick, Alice. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
Marx, Gary T. Windows on the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology
Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2002).
Massumi, Brian. Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015).

McClimens, Alex, Stuart Doel, Rachel Ibbotson, Nick Partridge, Elaine Muscroft, and Lesley
Lockwood. “How Do the ‘Peace Gardens’ Make You Feel? Public Space and Personal
Wellbeing in City Centre Sheffield.” Journal of Urban Design 17:1 (2012):117–133.
McDowall, Stephen. “Cultivating Orientalism.” International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter 73
(2016):12.
McGrath, John. “Performing Surveillance.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by
Kirstie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, 83–90 (New York: Routledge, 2014).
McLagan, Meg, and Yates McKee, eds. Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental
Activism (New York: Zone Books, 2012).
McNair, Brian. “The Interview: Schnarking, Nob Jokes and the Right to Cause Gross Offence.”
Journalism Practice 9:3 (2015):452–454.
Mello, Brian. “The Islamic State: Violence and Ideology in a Post-Colonial Revolutionary Regime.”
International Political Sociology 12 (2018):139–155.
Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. (no date) http://www.
nj1937.org/en/index.htm.
Metzger, Thomas A. Escape from Predicament: Neo-Confucianism and China’s Evolving Political
Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
Meyer, Jeffrey F. The Dragons of Tiananmen: Beijing as a Sacred City (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1991).
Meyer-Fong, Tobie. “Civil War, Revolutionary Heritage, and the Chinese Garden.” Cross-
Currents: East Asia History and Culture Review 13 (2014):75–98.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
Millward, James A. “A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong’s Court: The Meaning of the Fragrant
Concubine.” Journal of Asian Studies 53:2 (1994):427–458.
Minne, Daniele Djamila Amarane. “Women at War.” Interventions 9:3 (2007):340–349.
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. How to See the World (New York: Pelican Books, 2015).
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009).
Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011).
Mistreanu, Simina. “Life Inside China’s Social Credit Laboratory.” Foreign Policy (April 3, 2018),
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/04/03/life-inside-chinas-social-credit-laboratory/.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Mitchell, W. J. T. “Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium.” Critical Inquiry
30:2 (2004):324–335.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of
Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Mitsuhide, Mashima. Yasukuni no Shiki [Four seasons at the Yasukuni shrine] (Tokyo: Kindai
Publishing Company Mashima, 2008).
Mochizuki, Kotaro. Japan To-day: A Souvenir of the Anglo-Japanese Exhibition Held in London, 1910
(Tokyo: Liberal News Agency, 1910).
Möller, Frank. “From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace.” Global Society
31: 3 (2017):315–335.
Möller, Frank. “Photographic Interventions in Post 9/11 Security Policy.” Security Dialogue 38:2
(2007):179–196.
Möller, Frank. Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2013).
Monaci, Sara. “Explaining the Islamic State’s Online Media Strategy: A Transmedia Approach.”
International Journal of Communication 11 (2017):2842–2860.
Moore, Cerwyn, and Chris Farrands. “Visual Analysis.” In Critical Approaches to Security: An
Introduction to Theories and Methods, edited by Laura J. Shepherd, 221– 235
Moore, Lindsey. “The Veil of Nationalism: Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and Gillo Pontecorvo’s
The Battle of Algiers.” Kunapipi 25:2 (2003):56–73.
Moors, Annelies. “NiqaBitch and Princess Hijab: Niqab Activism, Satire and Street Art.” Feminist
Review 98 (2011):128–135.
Mortensen, Mette. “Constructing, Confirming, and Contesting Icons: The Alan Kurdi Imagery
Appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo.” Media, Culture &
Society 39:8 (2017):1142–1161.
Mukerji, Chandra. “Space and Political Pedagogy at the Gardens of Versailles.” Public Culture 24:3
(2012):509–534.
Mukerji, Chandra. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Murck, Alfreda, and Wen Fong. “A Chinese Garden Court: The Astor Court at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 38:3 (1980–1981):2–64.
Nail, Thomas. Theory of the Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Naji, Abu Bakr. The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will
Pass, translated by William McCants (Cambridge, MA: John M. Olin Institute for Strategic
Studies at Harvard University, May 23, 2006).
Nash, Kate. “Documentary- for-
the-
Other: Relationships, Ethics and (Observational)
Documentary.” Journal of Mass Media Ethics 26:3 (2011): 224–39.
National Institutes of Health. Chinese Public Health Posters exhibit (2006) http://www.nlm.nih.
gov/hmd/chineseposters/introduction.html.
Neumann, Iver, and Daniel H. Nexon, eds. Harry Potter and International Relations (London: Rowman
& Littlefield, 2006).
Newman, David. “On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework.” Journal of Borderlands Studies
18:1 (2003):13–25.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, [1887] 2001).
NiqaBitch. “Hot Pants and Niqabs: NiqaBitch Stroll through Paris.” Monthly Review (October 13,
2010) http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/niqabitch131010.html.
Nussbaum, Martha C. The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Nyri, Pal. “Yellow Man’s Burden: Chinese Immigrants on a Civilizing Mission.” The China Journal
no. 56 (2006):83–106.
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid. Critical Geopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Ó Tuathail, Gearóid, Monika K. Baar, and Steven Seegel. “Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian
Cartography in the Age of Empire.” Nationalities Papers 42:3 (2014): 548–557.
O’Grady, Lorraine. “Art Is . . .” (1983/2009) http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/.
Office of the Leading Group for the Belt and Road Initiative. Building the Belt and Road: Concept,
Practice and China’s Contribution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, May 2017).
Oliver, M. Cynthia. Queen of the Virgins: Pageantry and Black Womanhood in the Caribbean
( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009).
Ong, Aihwa. “Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia.” Theory, Culture, and Society 17:4
(2000):55–75.
Onuf, Nicholas. World of Our Making (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989).
Ott, Brian L. “Affect.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 1–26 (Oxford: Oxford
Panagia, Davide. “Cinéma vérité and the Ontology of Cinema: A Response to Roy Germano.”
Panagia, Davide. The Political Life of Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).
Parikh, Sunita. “Analytic Filmmaking and the Persistence of Narrative: A Response to Roy
Germano.” Perspectives on Politics 12:3 (2014):677–679.
Pauwels, Luc. Reframing Visual Social Science: Towards a More Visual Sociology and Anthropology
Peluso, Nancy Lee. “Whose Woods Are These? Counter-Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan,
Indonesia.” Antipode 27:4 (1995):383–406.
Perdue, Peter C. “China and Other Colonial Empires.” Journal of American-East Asian Relations
16:1–2 (2009):85–103.
Perdue, Peter. China Marches West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA). “Award: PCA Case No 2013–19: In the Matter of the South
China Sea Arbitration between the Republic of the Philippines and the People’s Republic of
China” (The Hague: Permanent Court of Arbitration, July 12, 2016) https://pca-cpa.org/
wp-content/uploads/sites/175/2016/07/PH-CN-20160712-Award.pdf.
Petrie, Donald, dir. Miss Congeniality (Castle Rock, 2000).
Pieke, Frank. Knowing China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Pink, Sarah, ed. Advances in Visual Methodology (London: Sage, 2012).
Pitt-Rivers, Julian. “The Law of Hospitality.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2:1 (2012
[1977]):501–517.
Pontecorvo, Gillo, dir. The Battle of Algiers (Casbah Film, 1966).
Qi Kang. QinHua Rijun Nanjing datusha yunan tongbao jinianguan [The Monument Hall to
compatriots murdered in the Japanese military invasion of China] (Shenyang: Liaoning daxue
kexue jishu chubanshe, 1999).
Qin Yaqing. A Relational Theory of World Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 2018).
Rael, Ronald. “Border Wall as Architecture.” In Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity?, edited
by Elisabeth Vallet, 267–278 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
Rancière, Jacques. “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics.” In Communities of
Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered
Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick, 31–50 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009).
Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009).
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel
Rockhill (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004).
Record in Pictures of Yushukan (Tokyo: Kindai Publishing Co., 2009).
Renov, Michael. The Subject of the Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Ringmar, Erik. Liberal Barbarism: The European Destruction of the Palace of the Emperor of China
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Roberts, Claire. “China’s Most Famous Ruin.” In The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire Roberts
and Geremie R. Barmé, 16–25 (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006).
Roberts, Claire, and Geremie R. Barmé, eds. The Great Wall of China (Sydney: Powerhouse
Roberts, Claire, and Geremie R. Barmé. “Introduction.” In The Great Wall of China, edited by Claire
Roberts and Geremie R. Barmé, 10–13 (Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing, 2006).
Roberts, Margaret E. Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
Robinson, Piers. “CNN Effect.” In Visual Global Politics, edited by Roland Bleiker, 62–67 (London:
Routledge, 2018).
Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News Foreign Policy Intervention (London:
Routledge, 2002).
Robinson, Piers. “Media Empowerment vs. Strategies of Control: Theorizing News Media and War
in the 21st Century.” Zeitschrift fur Politik 4 (2014):461–479.
Rogen, Seth, and Evan Goldberg, dir. The Interview (Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2014).
Rojas, Carlos. The Great Wall: A Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1981).
Rose, Gillian. “On the Relation between ‘Visual Research Methods’ and Contemporary Visual
Culture.” The Sociological Review 62:1 (2014):24–46.
Rose, Gillian. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials, 4th ed.
(London: Sage, 2016).
Rowe, Rochelle. “‘Glorifying the Jamaican Girl’: The ‘Ten Types—One People’ Beauty Contest,
Racialized Femininities, and Jamaican Nationalism.” Radical History Review 103 (2009):36–58.
Ruan, Lotus. When Winner Takes It All: Big Data in China and the Battle for Privacy. Australian
Strategic Policy Institute, Report No. 5/2018 (May 2018).
Ruan, Lotus, Jeffrey Knockel, Jason Q. Ng, and Masashi Crete-Nishihata, “One App, Two
Systems: How WeChat Uses One Censorship Policy in China, and Another Internationally.”
The Citizen Lab (November 30, 2016) https://citizenlab.ca/2016/11/wechat-china-
censorship-one-app-two-systems/.
Ryckmans, Pierre. “The Chinese Attitude towards the Past.” China Heritage Quarterly 14 (2008)
http://w ww.chinaheritagequarterly.org/articles.php?searchterm=014_chineseattitude.
inc&issue=014.
Sacco, Joe. Palestine (New York: Jonathan Cape, 2003).
Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 2004).
Sakuteiki: Visions of the Japanese Garden: A Modern Translation of Japan’s Gardening Classic. Translated
by Jiro Takei and Marc P. Keane (Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2001).
Salter, Mark B. “Introduction: Circuits and Motion.” In Making Things International 1: Circuits and
Motion, edited by Mark B. Salter, vii–x xii (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Salter, Mark B., ed. Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion (Minneapolis: University of
Salter, Mark B. Politics at the Airport (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Santos, Gonçalo. “Technological Choices and Modern Material Civilization: Reflections on Everyday
Toilet Practices in Rural South China.” In Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian
Explorations, edited by Johann Arnason and Chris Hann, 259–280 (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2018).
Särmä, Saara. “Collaging Iranian Missiles: Digital Security Spectacles and Visual Online Parodies.”
In Visual Security Studies: Sights and Spectacles of Insecurity and War, edited by Juha A. Vuori
and Rune Saugmann Andersen, 114–130 (London: Routledge, 2018).
Satrapi, Marjane. Persopolis (London: Vintage, 2008).
Schlag, Gabi, and Anna Greis. “Visualizing Violence: Aesthetics and Ethics in International Politics.”
Global Discourse 7:2-3 (2017):193–200.
Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus publicum Europaeum, trans-
lated by G. L. Ulmen, (New York: Telos, 2003 [1950]).
Schneider, Florian. China’s Digital Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Schorkowitz, Dittmar, and Chia Ning, eds. Managing Frontiers in China: The Lifanyuan and the Libu
Reconsidered (Leiden: Brill, 2017).
Schroeder, William F. “On Cowboys and Aliens: Affective History and Queer Becoming in
Contemporary China.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18:4 (2012): 425–452.
Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Seegel, Steven. Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire
Segal, Adam. “When China Rules the Web: Technology in Service of the State.” Foreign
Affairs (August 13, 2018) https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-08-13/
when-china-rules-web.
Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader,
edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 1–25 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010).
Shahbaz, Adrian. Freedom on the Net 2018: The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism Freedom House
(October 2018) https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/FOTN_2018_Final%20
Booklet_11_1_2018.pdf.
Shambaugh, David. China Goes Global: The Partial Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Shan Hai Ching: Legendary Geography and Wonders of Ancient China (Taipei: Committee for
Compilation and Examination of the Series of Chinese Classics, 1985).
Shapiro, Michael J. Cinematic Geopolitics (London: Routledge, 2009).
Shapiro, Michael J. For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family
Shapiro, Michael J. Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject
Shapiro, Michael J. The Political Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Shapiro, Michael J. The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography and
Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Shapiro, Michael J. Studies in Trans- Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn
Shapiro, Michael J. “The Sublime Today: Re-partitioning the Global Sensible.” Millennium 34:3
(2006):657–681.
Sharif, Yara. Architecture of Resistance: Cultivating Moments of Possibility within the Palestinian/Israeli
Conflict (London: Routledge, 2017).
Shaw, Martin. “Twenty- First Century Militarism: A Historical- Sociological Framework.” In
Militarism and International Relations: Political Economy, Security, Theory, edited by Anna
Stavrianakis and Jan Selby, 19–32 (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Shen, Jianming. “China’s Sovereignty over the South China Sea Islands: A Historical Perspective.”
Chinese Journal of International 94 (2002): 94–157.
Shepherd, Laura J., ed. Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods
Shim, David. Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing Is Believing (London: Routledge, 2013).
Shirazi, Faegheh. The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in Modern Culture (Miami: University Press of
Florida, 2001).
Shrum, Wesley, Ricardo Duque, and Timothy Brown. “Digital Video as Research
Practice: Methodology for the Millennium.” Journal of Research Practice 1:1 (2005):1–19.
Sivin, Nathan, and Gari Ledyard. “Introduction to East Asian Cartography.” In The History of
Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies,
edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 23–31 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
Smith, Richard J. Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in
Late Imperial Times (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” New York Review of Books (February 6, 1975):1–20.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977).
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Penguin, 2003).
Sontag, Susan. “Regarding the Torture of Others.” New York Times Magazine (May 4, 2014).
Sorace, Christian. “China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei.” Critical Inquiry 40:2 (2014):396–419.
Sorace, Christian. “China’s Vision for Developing Sichuan’s Post-Earthquake Countryside: Turning

Unruly Peasants into Grateful Urban Citizens.” China Quarterly 218 (2014):404–427.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial
Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 53–63 (London: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1994).
State Council. “China Adheres to the Position of Settling Through Negotiation the Relevant
Disputes Between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea” (Beijing: State Council
Information Office, July 13, 2016).
State Council. “Guowuyuan: Guanyu yifa shehui xinyong tixi jianshe kuanhua gangyao (2014–
2020)” [State Council: Planning outline for the construction of a social credit system
(2014- 2020)]. Translated on China Copyright and Media ( June 14, 2014) https://
chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/ 2 014/ 0 6/ 1 4/ p lanning- o utline- f or- t he-
construction-of-a-social-credit-system-2014-2020/.
State Council Information Office. “The Internet in China” ( June 8, 2010) http://www.gov.cn/eng-
lish/2010-06/08/content_1622956.htm.
Steadman, Abi, Hayley Rabet, and Lamisa Khan, dir. Awrah: Uncovering the Covered (2017) https://
vimeo.com/channels/ir318/208667693.
Stenersen, Anne. “A History of Jihadi Cinematography.” In Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices
of Militant Islamists, edited by Thomas Hegghammer, 108–127 (New York: Cambridge
Stephenson, Max O., and Laura Zanotti, eds. Building Walls and Dissolving Borders: The Challenges of
Alterity, Community and Securitizing Space (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
Strafella, Giorgio, and Daria Berg. “‘Twitter Bodhisattva’: Ai Weiwei’s Media Politics.” Asian Studies
Review 39:1 (2015):138–57.
Strobel, Warren P. “The CNN Effect.” American Journalism Review (May 1996) http://ajrarchive.
org/article.asp?id=3572.
Sturken, Marita. “The Objects That Lived: The 9/11 Museum and Material Transformation.”
Memory Studies 9:1 (2016):13–26.
Supatra Kopkijsuksakul. “Kan Prakuat Nangsao Thai (B.E. 2477– 2530)” [Miss Thailand
Contest: 1934–1987], Master’s thesis, Bangkok: Thammasat University, 1988.
Suttmeier, Richard P. “Inventing the Future in Chinese Labs: How Does China Do Science Today.”
Asia Dialogue (September 24, 2018) http://theasiadialogue.com/2018/09/24/inventing-
the-future-in-chinese-labs-how-does-china-do-science-today/.
Sylvester, Christine. Art/ Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It
Tanzaki, Junichiro. In Praise of Shadows (London: Vintage Books, 2001).
Takenaka, Akiko. Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and Japan’s Unending Postwar
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
Tazzioli, Martina, and William Waters. “The Sight of Migration: Governmentality, Visibility, and
Europe’s Contested Borders.” Global Society 30:3 (2016):445–464.
Tecate Beer Wall Advertisement. YouTube (September 2016) https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=nXYM_zBVF7Q.
There Is No Life without Jihad. al Hayat Media Center ( June 19, 2014) https://jihadology.net/2014/
06/19/al-ḥayat-media-center-presents-a-new-video-message-from-the-islamic-state-of-iraq-
and-al-sham-there-is-no-life-without-jihad/.
Thomas, Greg M. “Yuanming Yuan/Versailles: Intercultural Interactions between Chinese and
European Palace Cultures.” Art History 32:1 (2009):115–143.
Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1994).
Thorsten, Marie. “Soft-Hard Power Convergence and Democracy in Abe’s Japan.” In Power in
Contemporary Japan, edited by Gill Steel, 239–262 (London: Palgrave, 2016).
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (Chicago: University of

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker
Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).
Troumbley, Rex. “Colonization.com: Empire Building for a New Digital Age.” East-West Affairs 1:4
(2013):93–107.
Tsygankov, Andrei P., and Pavel A. Tsygankov. “National Ideology and IR Theory: Three Incarnations
of the ‘Russian Idea.’” European Journal of International Relations 16:4 (2010):663–686.
Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “Schematising Hospitality: Ai WeiWei’s Activist Artwork as a Form of Dark
Travel.” Mobilities 13:4 (2018):520–534.
UNESCO. “Garden of Peace” (n.d.) http://webarchive.unesco.org/20151215223006//.
Vallet, Elisabeth, ed. Borders, Fences and Walls: State of Insecurity? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014).
van Munster, Rens, and Casper Sylvest. “Documenting International Relations: Documentary
Film and the Creative Arrangement of Perceptibility.” International Studies Perspectives 16
(2015):229–245.
van Munster, Rens, and Casper Sylvest, eds. Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR
and Non-Fiction Film (London: Routledge, 2015).
Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents
Series, 1986).
Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (New York: Verso, 1989).
von Vacano, Diego. “The Scope of Comparative Political Theory.” Annual Review of Political Science
18 (2015):465–80.
Vuori, Juha A., and Rune Saugmann Andersen, eds. Visual Security Studies: Sights and Spectacles of
Insecurity and War (New York: Routledge, 2018).
Vuori, Juha Antero, and Lauri Paltemaa. “The Lexicon of Fear: Chinese Internet Control Practice in
Sina Weibo Microblog Censorship.” Surveillance and Society 13:3/4 (2015):400–421.
Wagner, Wolfgang, Ragini Sen, Risa Permandadeli, and Caroline S. Howarth. “The Veil and Muslim
Women’s Identity: Cultural Pressures and Resistance to Stereotyping.” Culture & Psychology
18:4 (2012):521–541.
Wahlberg, Malin. Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Minneapolis: University of
Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Waldron, Arthur. “Scholarship and Patriotic Education: The Great Wall Conference, 1994.” China
Quarterly no. 143 (1995):843–850.
Waley-Cohen, Joanna. “Changing Spaces of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Qing China.” In Political
Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History, edited by Nicola Di
Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt, 324–349 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).
Walker, R. B. J. Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Walker, R. B. J. Out of Line: Essays on the Politics of Boundaries and the Limits of Modern Politics
Wang Ban, ed. Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture, and World Politics (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
Wang Jisi. “Huntingdun tiaoqi de lunzhan jiang chaoyue shikong” [The debate provoked by
Huntington transcends time and space]. Shijie zhishi no. 3 (2009). https://user.guancha.cn/
main/content?id=66738.
Wang, Joseph Cho. The Chinese Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Wang, Maya. “Eradicating Ideological Viruses”: China’s Campaign of Repression Against Xinjiang’s
Muslims (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2018).
Wang Yi. Zhongguo yuanlin wenhua shi [The cultural history of Chinese gardens] (Shanghai: Renmin
chubanshe, 2014).
Weber, Cynthia. “I Am an American”: Filming the Fear of Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2011).
Weber, Cynthia, dir. “ ‘I Am an American’: Portraits of Post-9/11 US Citizens” (2007) https://
www.iamanamericanproject.com.
Weber, Cynthia. ‘ “I Am an American’: Protesting Advertised ‘Americanness.’” Citizenship Studies
17:2 (2013):278–292.
Weber, Cynthia. Imagining America at War: Morality, Politics and Film (London: Routledge, 2006).
Weber, Cynthia. International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Weber, Cynthia. We Are Not Immigrants (18 minutes). Screened at the Visual International Politics
workshop at LSE ( June 13, 2016).
Weitzel, Michelle. “Audializing Migrant Bodies: Sound and Security at the Border.” Security Dialogue
49:6 (2018):421–437.
Weizman, Eyal. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Cambridge, MA: Zone
Books, 2017).
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).
Whitehall, Geoffrey, and Eric Ishiwata. “The International Aesthetic of the Yasukuni Jinja and the
Yushukan Museum.” In The New Violent Cartography: Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn, ed-
ited by Sam Okoth Opondo and Michael J. Shapiro, 234–247 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Williams, John. “Territorial Borders, International Ethics and Geography: Do Good Fences Still
Make Good Neighbours?.” Geopolitics 8:2 (2003):25–46.
Williams, Michael C. “Words, Images, Enemies: Securitization and International Politics.”
International Studies Quarterly 47 (2003):511–531.
Winter, Charlie. Documenting the Virtual “Caliphate” (London: Quilliam Foundation, 2015).
Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938).
Wu Gongxiong, ed. Huitu guochi yanyi [Drawings of the romance of national humiliation]
(Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1922).
Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2014).
Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Vol. II (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2017).
Xiao Qiang. “The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President XI’s Surveillance State.” Journal of
Democracy 30:1 (2019):53–67.
Xie Bin. “Zhongguo sangshi lingtu linghai tu” [Map of China’s lost sovereign land and maritime ter-
ritories]. In Zhongguo sangdishi [History of China’s lost territories] (Shanghai: Zhonghua
shuju, 1927).
Xie Bin. Zhongguo sangdishi [History of China’s lost territories] (Shanghai: Sanlian shujian, 2014
[1925]).
Xu Jilin. Dangdai Zhongguo de qimeng yu fan-qimeng [Enlightenment and anti-enlightenment in con-
temporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2011).
Yan Xuetong. Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2011).
Yang, Guobin, ed. China’s Contested Internet (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2015).
Yang, Lien- sheng. “Historical Notes on the Chinese World Order.” In The Chinese World
Order: Traditional China’s Foreign Relations, edited by John King Fairbank, 20–33 (Cambridge,
Yanow, Dvora. “I Am Not a Camera: On Visual Politics and Method: A Response to Roy Germano.”
Yee, Cordell D. K. “Chinese Cartography among the Arts: Objectivity, Subjectivity, Representation.”
In The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast
Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 128–169 (Chicago: University of
Yee, Cordell D. K. “Chinese Maps in Political Culture.” In The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book
II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and
David Woodward, 71–95 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Yee, Cordell D. K. “Concluding Remarks: Foundations for a Future History of Chinese Mapping.”
In The History of Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast
Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 228–230 (Chicago: University of
Yee, Cordell D. K. “Reinterpreting Traditional Chinese Geographical Maps.” In The History of
Cartography, Vol. II, Book II, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies,
edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 35–70 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
Yee, Cordell D. K. “Space and Place: Ways of World-Making.” In Space & Place: Mapmaking East
and West, Four Hundred Years of Western and Chinese Cartography (Exhibition Catalogue for
the Library of Congress), edited by Cordell D. K. Yee et al., 7–65 (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s
College Press, 1996).
Yoon, Hong-key. “Two Different Geomentalities, Two Different Gardens: The French and the
Japanese Cases.” GeoJournal 33:4 (1994):471–477.
Yu Guozhen. Jin bainian waijiao shibai shi [History of the past century’s diplomatic defeats]
(Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1929).
Zelin, Aaron Y. “Colonial Caliphate: The Ambitions of the ‘Islamic State.’” Jihadology ( July 8, 2014)
https://jihadology.net/2014/07/08/the-clairvoyant-colonial-caliphate-the-ambitions-of-
the-islamic-state/.
Zelin, Aaron Y. “Picture Or It Didn’t Happen: A Snapshot of the Islamic State’s Official Media
Output.” Perspectives on Terrorism 9:4 (2015):85–97.
Zenz, Adrian. “‘Thoroughly Reforming Them Towards a Healthy Heart Attitude’: China’s Political
Re-education Campaign in Xinjiang.” Central Asian Survey 38:1 (2019):102–128.
Zhang Yimou, dir. Changcheng [The Great Wall] (Legendary Pictures, 2016).
Zhao, Suisheng. “China and the South China Sea Arbitration: Geopolitics Versus International
Law.” Journal of Contemporary China 27:109 (2018):1–15.
Zhao, Tingyang. “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia).” Social
Identities 12:1 (2006):29–41.
Zhao Tingyang. Tianxia de dangdaixing: Shijie zhixu de shijian yu xiangxiang [Tianxia’s contemporary
relevance: Practice and imagination for world order] (Beijing: Zhongxin chubanshe, 2016).
Zheng Ziyue. Nanhai zhudao dili zhilu [Geography of the South Sea Islands] (Shanghai: Shangwu
yinshuguan, 1947).
Zhichi, ed. Guochi [National humiliation] (Shanghai: Zhichishe, 1915).
Zhongguo guochi ditu [Map of China’s national humiliation]. (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1927).
Zhonghua guochi jianming yutu [Concise map of Chinese national humiliation]. (Nanjing: Jiangsu
Military Surveying Department, 1928).
“Zhonghua minguo ditu.” In Zhonghua mingguo yuannian lishu [Almanac of the first year of the
Republic of China] (Hunan yanshuo zongke yin, 1912).
Zhou, Zunyou. “Chinese Strategy for De-R adicalization.” Terrorism and Political Violence ( June 9,
2017):1–23, https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2017.1330199.
INDEX
Figures are indicated by f following the page number

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only
one of those pages.
aesthetics Ai Weiwei
aesthetic turn in IR, 1, 8–9, 37, 61, 64, 66, 68, 72, activism, 118–19, 123, 124–30, 133f, 137–40,
88, 243, 304 182, 226, 252–53, 280–81, 289–90
Chinese aesthetics, 48–49 art, 123, 128–29, 138–39, 140
conventions, 160, 239, 241–42, 257–59, 262–63, Human Flow, 118–19, 130–36, 133f, 134f,
305–6,  313–14 138–39, 140, 226, 313
critical aesthetics, 20, 36–44, 45, 46, 47–48, 51, autoethnography, 61, 65, 76, 77–88
64, 73–75, 90, 106–7, 214–15, 232–33,
235, 242, 304–6 Barabantseva, Elena, 75, 81, 88–89
political aesthetics, 7, 29, 37, 72, 118–20, Barthes, Roland, 28–29, 38, 44, 47, 305
122–23, 138, 144, 160, 180, 204, 244, 249, Bauman, Zygmunt, 250, 252, 253
255–56,  304–5 beauty pageantry, 179–82, 203–4, 206–7,
theory, 37, 135, 154–56, 165, 184, 232–33, 303–4,  313
243–44, 269, 276, 292 China, 184–85, 199–201, 200f,  202–3
affect Jamaica, 188–91, 189f
affective communities of sense, 2, 6–7, 16–17, nation-building, 187–88, 192–93,  200f
35, 36, 40–41, 44, 45, 47, 49–50, 61, 73–74, Thailand, 185, 187–88, 190–91, 204, 206–7
75, 79, 88–89, 91, 114–15, 117–18, 121, United Kingdom, 184, 186–87
123, 130–31, 136, 138–39, 141, 144–45, United States, 186n33, 190n50, 206–7
152–53, 154–56, 176–77, 198, 203, 207, Vietnam, 184
232–33, 238, 239, 244, 254, 259, 268, 270, Bennett, Jane, 41–42, 142–43, 152–53
272–73, 291–92, 299–300, 305–6, 309–10, Bleiker, Roland, 65, 66, 76, 121, 122–23, 138, 152–53
313–15,  316 Brown, Wendy, 52, 54, 209–10, 216–20, 222–23,
affect-work, 1–2, 3, 41–43, 50–51, 62–63, 78–79, 231–32, 233, 237
80–81, 83–86, 88–89, 91, 107–8, 111–15, Butler, Judith, 41–42, 92, 121, 180
121, 130, 140, 155–56, 163, 170, 207,
210–11, 212–14, 234, 236–38, 250–51, Cai Guo-Qiang, 234, 235f,  309–10
256, 257, 259, 260, 268, 272–73, 276, China
289–90, 292, 295–96, 299–300, 305, aesthetics,  48–49
307–10, 311–12,  315–16 beauty pageants, 184–85, 199–201, 200f,  202–3
affect theory, 2, 3, 5, 36, 38, 39–42, 44, 45, 47, gardens, 247, 248–49, 251–53, 254–57
65, 66–67, 72, 73–75, 78, 123, 181–82, Great Firewall, 127–28, 217, 274–75, 278–82,
303, 305–6, 307, 313–14, 316 283, 286–88, 287f, 299–300, 304
341
342 Index
China (cont.) ideology/affect, 2, 17, 20, 36, 45, 51, 63, 79, 121,
Great Wall, 23–24, 55, 142, 163–65, 164f, 123, 135–36, 181–82, 235–38, 273, 292,
211–15, 213f, 216f, 219, 220–23, 221f, 305–6, 307, 308–10, 313, 314
225–29, 231, 233–34, 235f, 236, 238, inside/outside, 1, 2, 10, 12–13, 17, 22, 25, 45,
280–81, 283, 307–10,  311–12 48–49, 57, 82–83, 114, 128, 147–48, 149,
maps, 150f, 157, 158f, 163, 164f, 166, 168f 151–52, 153, 154–56, 159, 163–65, 167,
Nanjing Massacre Memorial, 259–64, 261f, 262f, 169, 174–75, 177, 212, 215–16, 216f, 218,
263f,  269–70 223–24, 228–29, 231, 234, 254, 277–78,
South China Sea, 44, 149–56, 150f, 160, 170–76 283, 284, 304, 310–13
surveillance, 273–74, 278–83, 286–91, loosening/tightening, 5, 56–57, 224–25,
287f,  294–99 228–31, 236–37, 238, 313
veils, 198–203, 200f meaning/doing, 7, 16–17, 19–20, 36, 41–42,
Civilization/barbarism. See dynamic dyads 43, 45, 46–48, 61, 62–63, 65, 73–74, 76,
CNN-Effect, 30–31, 117, 119, 120, 121, 130 88, 106–8, 117–18, 123, 139, 147–48, 166,
comparative political theory, 4, 54–57, 106–15, 223, 272, 303, 305–6, 307
123, 129–30, 215, 223–34, 312 meaning/feeling, 2, 40, 45, 47, 121, 152–53,
Connolly, William, 310–11 155–56, 181, 204, 207, 210–11, 238, 257,
creative politics, 2, 6, 19–20, 24, 25, 32–34, 40, 266–68, 272, 291–92, 310, 314
56, 61–62, 65, 70–71, 73, 75, 76, 86, 88, self/Other, 1, 2, 12–13, 22, 26–27, 48–50, 54,
104–5, 106–7, 108–10, 117–18, 122–23, 55, 61–63, 64, 65, 66, 71–72, 75–76, 78–79,
130, 139, 147–48, 153, 154–57, 176–77, 86–89, 94, 98–99, 101–2, 121–22, 131,
181, 212, 214–15, 228–29, 237, 241–42, 182–83, 187, 193–94, 214–15, 229–31,
257–58, 268, 270, 272–73, 305–6, 311–12, 310–13
313–15,  316 theory, 5, 17, 50–51, 56–57, 144, 223–25,
critical aesthetics. See aesthetics 232–33, 303, 309–10, 313
cultural governance, 75, 110–11, 112, 114–16, 140, verbal/visual, 6, 20–21, 27–29, 36, 37–38, 44,
186–87, 193–203,  247–56 46–48, 93, 98–99, 106–7, 111, 120, 132,
144, 148–49, 152–53, 159, 161–62, 165–66,
Danchev, Alex, 136, 304–5 176–77, 207, 305–6, 308–9,  315–16
Deleuze, Gilles, 65, 276–77, 299–300 visibility/invisibility, 22, 23–24, 100, 128, 179–80,
Derrida, Jacques, 81–82, 85–86, 207 181–82, 204, 247, 269, 299–300
distribution of the sensible, 6, 36, 37, 42–43, visibility/visuality, 2, 7, 19–20, 46–47, 57,
244–46, 244n21, 247, 249, 257, 259, 264, 86–88, 121, 123, 130–31, 139, 203–7, 211,
269–70, 305–6, 307, 311 235–38, 240–41, 272–73, 292, 299–300,
dynamic dyads 303, 310, 314
center/periphery, 5, 56–57, 149, 151–52,
153–54, 156–60, 158f, 161–65, 161f, Enloe, Cynthia, 3, 61–62, 78–79
168f, 169, 173–75, 176–77, 313 Euben, Roxanne L., 106–8
civility/martiality, 8, 10, 50, 239, 245–47, everyday life, politics of, 1, 3, 4–5, 6–7, 17, 37, 38,
250–52, 254, 255–56, 257–59, 263, 40–41, 42–43, 45, 62–63, 65, 75–76, 77–81,
266, 268, 269–70, 311–12, 313 86–88, 101–2, 109–10, 135, 143, 181,
Civilization/barbarism, 49–50, 55, 151, 157–59, 182–83, 194–95, 196–98, 202, 207, 230–31,
163–66, 164f, 169, 171–72, 173, 175, 199, 235–37, 240–41, 266–68, 270, 284–85,
224, 225–27, 228–29, 231, 234, 256, 260, 287–89, 294–95, 299–300, 307, 310, 314
281,  310–11
concealing/revealing, 5, 22, 30, 51–52, 56–57, feeling visually, 2, 11, 32, 45, 181–82, 260–62,
178, 179, 180, 182, 184, 186–87, 192–93, 307, 316
196–98, 201, 203, 207, 254, 262–63, 313 feminist theory, 4–5, 26–27, 61–63, 70–71, 185–87,
creative/destruction, 115, 144–45, 212, 228–29, 193, 194–95,  196–97
233–34, 235f,  309–10 Fernández, Ana Teresa, 219f, 219, 234
cultural governance/resistance, 75, 91, 104–5, filmmaking, 6, 39, 56–57, 61, 68–72, 75, 77, 81, 83,
115–16, 117–18, 148, 180, 241–42, 243, 88, 179, 303, 305–10, 313–14
244–45, 247, 257, 264, 269, 270 Foucault, Michel, 44, 47, 83, 104–5, 107–8, 109–10,
East/West, 3–5, 26–27, 44, 48, 49–50, 51, 57, 115–16, 212, 224–25, 241–42, 243, 244–45,
63–64, 74, 75, 88–89, 123, 153–54, 156–57, 252, 276–77, 284, 285, 288–89, 290–91,
177, 180, 187, 194–95, 198, 202–3, 212, 299–300,  312
216, 219, 225, 226–27, 246, 274, 276, 299– framing, 1, 21–25, 23f, 26–27, 31, 32, 43, 45, 71,
300, 303, 304–5, 310–13 78–79, 82, 103–4, 218, 313
Ind e x 343
France infrastructures of feeling, 11, 41–42, 42n48, 45,

cartography, 55–56,  156–57 143, 215, 233, 238, 239, 240–41, 242, 269,
gardens, 249–51,  303–4 270, 307, 314
veils, 178–80,  195–98 inside/outside. See dynamic dyads
intertextuality, 37–38, 94, 152–53, 161–62,
gardens 165, 170
China, 247, 248–49, 251–53, 254–57 intervisuality, 37–38, 44, 94, 102, 114–15, 151–53,
civility/martiality (see dynamic dyads) 161–62, 165, 170
conventions, 247–56,  257–59 inter-veillance, 273, 276–77, 291–300, 312
France,  249–51 intimate geopolitics, 1, 4–5, 79
Garden of Perfect Brilliance, 251–52, 254–57, 268 Islamic State
gardening state, 250–51, 252–53 execution videos, 16, 90, 105–8
heterotopia, 243, 252, 268, 270, 312 maps, 147–48, 153–54, 177
Japan, 247–48, 249, 253–54 rebel governance, 109–15
Nanjing Massacre Memorial (see China) utopian PSAs, 108–15, 110f, 113f, 118–19, 243,
resistance, 256–57, 264, 268 303–4,  314–15
September 11 memorial, 269–70
Yasukuni Shrine, 239–40, 264–68, 265f, Jenco, Leigh, 54
267f,  269–70
gaze Lawrence, Andy, 75, 81, 306–7
colonial, 4–5, 26–27, 137, 144, 180, 186–93, Lyon, David, 276, 281
195, 202–3,  304–5
male, 4–5, 26–27, 144, 180, 186–93, 194–95, maps
202–3,  304–5 Chinese, 150f, 157, 158f, 163, 164f, 166, 168f
postcolonial male, 192–93 critical cartography, 21–22, 41–42, 44, 47, 56,
surveillant, 128, 144, 272, 284–85, 300, 304–5 147–54, 157–59,  313
white, 4–5, 26–27, 144, 186–93, 304–5 empire-maps, 55–56, 148–49, 156–57,  163
governmentality, 224–25, 229–31, 232, 238, 294–95 “Europe in 2035,” 32–35, 33f, 36, 95,
Great Firewall of China. See China 142,  147–48
Great Wall of China. See China Korean, 160, 161, 161f
Great Walls. See walls Islamic State, 147–48
lost territories, 147–48, 163, 164f, 166, 168f
Hansen, Lene, 29–30, 37–38, 94–95, 96, 99–101 South China Sea, 44, 150f, 170, 171, 173
hermeneutics, 20, 27, 32, 34–35, 37, 38–39, 40–41, map-fare, 148–49, 154, 159–60, 162, 166, 170,
45, 46, 47–48, 51, 62–63, 64, 68, 70–72, 75, 175,  176–77
80–81, 88, 91–101, 110–11, 115, 118, 120, Massumi, Brian, 39–40, 292
121, 128, 151, 181, 207, 218, 231, 232, 234, medium theory, 5, 7, 50–51, 54–57, 313
235–36, 257, 303–4, 305–6,  313–14 methods
heterotopia, 243, 252, 268, 270, 312 critical aesthetics, 36, 73–75, 232–33, 304–6
hospitality, 81, 88, 207 empiricist, 28–29, 30–31, 37, 43, 66, 68, 70, 72,
Human Flow. See Ai Weiwei 75, 88, 151
Hutchison, Emma, 40–41, 138, 207 hermeneutics, 27–31, 34–35, 38–39, 70–72,
hypervisuality, 11, 127–28, 180–82, 186, 192f, 91–101, 231, 235–36, 303–4, 305–6,
193, 204 313–14
visual, 66–68, 91, 94–96, 99–102
iconoclasm, 30–31, 35–36, 102–3,  120–21 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 28, 52, 54, 56, 102, 103–4, 292
ideology, 2, 5, 17, 19–20, 22, 29–31, 32–34, 36, Mitchell, W. J. T., 6, 19–20, 30–31, 36, 40–41, 44,
39–40, 51, 59–60, 64, 69–70, 72, 75, 111, 46–47, 142–43,  211
123, 143, 181–82, 214, 218, 232, 235, 239, moral ambiguity, 38, 96, 179, 208, 215, 236, 237,
240–41, 249, 256, 268, 269, 291, 303–4, 238,  311–12
305–6,  307–8 multisensory politics, 2, 6–7, 41–42, 45, 86, 144,
imperialism 215, 234, 242, 268, 273, 305–6, 310,
Chinese, 44, 54, 55–56, 149, 152–54, 155–57, 314–15,  316
161, 165–66, 167–70, 176, 202–3, 245–46,
249, 286, 303–4 Nanjing Massacre Memorial. See China
Western, 21–22, 26–27, 52, 54, 55–56, 153– NiqaBitch Shakes Paris. See veils
54, 156–57, 166–68, 185–86, 187, 190, nonlinear, 2, 5, 11, 35, 39–40, 62, 68, 73–74, 75–76,
249,  303–4 78, 81, 85–88, 224, 236–37, 238, 305
344 Index
nonnarrative, 2–3, 5, 35, 106–7, 214–15, 232, 233, self/Other relations. See dynamic dyads
236–37, 238, 241–42, 250–51, 268, 305 sensory spaces, 3, 6–7, 39–40, 42–43, 45, 51, 139,
nonverbal, 2, 5, 6, 40, 71–72, 95, 106–7, 132, 142–44, 153, 181, 210–11, 212–14, 215,
305, 316 232, 234, 238, 240–41, 242, 258–59, 272–
North Korea, 90, 138, 217 73, 291–92, 307, 315
The Interview,  96–100 September 11
visual securitization, 98–101 attacks, 51–52, 56, 71, 77–78, 97–98, 210–11
memorial, 56, 241–42, 269–70
ocular-centrism, 6–7, 27, 31, 45, 144, 315 Shapiro, Michael J., 5, 20, 37, 39, 47, 69–70, 72, 73,
104–5,  245
partition of the sensible, 181, 204, 232–33, 244n21, Social Credit System. See surveillance
276–77,  284 social-ordering, 2, 4–5, 32, 35–36, 37, 39–40, 44,
performative politics, 1–3, 5, 6–7, 26–27, 32, 35– 45, 49, 50, 56–57, 79, 90, 101, 108, 115,
37, 42–43, 44, 45, 51, 56–57, 80–81, 86, 92, 136, 148–49, 176, 238, 241–42, 243–44,
96, 109, 128, 136, 142–43, 148–49, 154, 246–47, 249, 259, 264, 272, 274, 276–77,
156, 157, 172, 176, 178, 181–83, 193, 198, 284, 297, 299–300, 305–6, 310, 313
205–7, 217–18, 232, 234, 236, 241–42, Sontag, Susan, 25–26, 101, 119–20
246–47, 250–51, 254, 255–57, 264, 266– South China Sea, 44, 149–56, 150f, 160, 170–76
68, 269–70, 273, 276–77, 291–300, 303, surveillance
308–9, 310–12,  315 China, 273–74, 278–83, 286–91, 287f,  294–99
poetry, 27–28, 48, 50, 66, 132, 152–53, 165–66, disciplinary society, 284, 287f, 299–300
170, 176, 245–46, 252–53, 257–58 Europe, 290–91,  293–95
populism, 2, 15–16, 34–35, 148, 217, 314–15 inter-veillance, 291, 299–300
positionality, 4–5, 82, 181n, 304–5 networked society of control, 291, 299–300
postcolonial, 56, 82, 121–22, 154–55, 185–86, Social Credit System, 273, 295–98
188–90,  192–93 sovereignty society, 277, 299–300
Princess Hijab. See veils theory, 274
PSAs (Public Service Announcements) United States, 272, 285–86, 293–95, 299–300
China, 86 Xinjiang,  287–89
Human Flow (see Ai Weiwei)
I Am an American (see Weber) thinking visually, 2, 11, 31, 32, 45, 73–74, 181–82,
Islamic State, 108–15, 110f, 113f, 117–19, 243, 307, 316
303–4, 313,  314–15 toilet adventures, 61–62, 63–64, 66, 77, 82–83,
Smog Journeys, 40, 41f 84–89,  306
tu, 47, 155–56
Qianlong emperor, 169, 174–75, 251–52, 254
veils, 22, 26–27, 30, 180, 185–86, 207, 258–59,
Rancière, Jacques 303–4, 311–12, 313, 314
communities of sense, 40–41 affective, 203
distribution of the sensible, 6, 37, 47, 102, 123, Algeria, 178–80, 191–93, 192f,  204–6
241–42, 244, 244n, 245, 249, 309–10, 311 Awrah: Uncovering the Covered, 179, 183,
emancipated spectator, 39, 40–41, 121, 268 204, 306
partition of the sensible, 181, 204, 244n, 276–77 China, 198–203, 200f
representation, 1, 3, 20–22, 24, 25, 28–30, 42–43, France, 178–80,  195–98
44, 48, 64, 69–70, 72, 73–74, 80, 86–88, Iran,  193–94
101, 103–4, 107–8, 121, 128, 139, 143, NiqaBitch Shakes Paris, 178–80, 179f,  196–98
303–4, 309–10,  311 Princess Hijab, 182, 196–97, 197f, 198
gardens, 241–42, 243 Saudi Arabia, 194–95
maps, 147, 148–49, 154–55 United Kingdom, 179, 182–84, 183f, 204,
veils, 181, 207 205–6,  306
walls, 232 verbal/visual. See dynamic dyads
resistance, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 139, 140, 162, visceral politics, 1–2, 5, 7–8, 16, 35, 38, 39–40, 44,
256–57, 264, 268 45, 62–63, 67–68, 73–74, 86–88, 106–7,
114–15, 123, 135, 142, 153, 166, 178, 203,
securitization, 91–93, 93f, 101, 115–16, 154, 217 204, 214–15, 291–92, 305, 310, 314, 316
visual securitization, 91, 96, 101, 106, 112, 114– visibility/invisibility. See dynamic dyads
16, 310–11,  315–16 visibility/visuality. See dynamic dyads
Ind e x 345
visibility strategy posters, 86, 87f, 89

art, 120, 121, 123, 128, 130–31, 136 walls, 218, 225, 229, 232
filmmaking,  62–63 of women, 22–23, 23f, 26–27, 180, 186–87,
gardens, 241–42, 247 188–91, 189f, 192f, 192–93, 197f, 197–98,
maps, 147, 148 200f, 203
security, 91, 93, 100–1, 115 ethnography, 65, 76, 80, 83, 306
surveillance,  272–73 methods, 66–68, 91, 94–96, 99–102
theory, 1, 2, 6–7, 21, 31, 32, 45, 61, 68, 303–4, securitization, 91, 96, 101, 106, 112, 114–16,
305, 314, 315 310–11,  315–16
walls, 218, 235–36 visual turn, 61, 64–65, 75–86, 88, 315
visuality strategy
art, 123, 130–31, 136 Walker, R. B. J., 48–49, 222–23, 310–11, 315
filmmaking, 62–63, 86, 309–10 walls
gardens, 241–42, 247, 259 barriers, 30, 210, 214–15, 216–18, 222–23, 227,
maps, 147–48, 181 228–29, 230–31, 238, 258–59, 281, 283,
security, 91, 102, 106–8, 109 304,  311–12
surveillance,  272–73 Berlin Wall, 3, 42–43, 216, 232–33,
veils,  192–93 307–8,  311–12
theory, 1–3, 6–8, 9–10, 32–34, 35–36, 37–38, gateways, 214, 215, 227–31, 237, 238, 279,
43, 45, 59, 305, 314, 315 283,  285–86
walls,  236–37 Great Wall of China (see China)
visual Great Walls, 237–38,  307–10
artifacts, 1–2, 3, 5, 17–18, 19–20, 32–34, 40, loosening/tightening (see dynamic dyads)
41–43, 45, 141–45, 303, 305, 307, 308–9, Project to Extend the Great Wall of China, 234,
310–11, 314–15,  316 235f,  309–10
art, 128, 139 sublime, 212–14, 233–34, 235f, 235, 237,
gardens, 239, 241–42, 258–59, 270 238,  309–10
maps, 148–49, 152–53, 154–55, 165, Tecate Beer Wall Advertisement,  237–38
169,  176–77 US-Mexico barrier, 30, 212–14, 219, 219f, 227,
surveillance, 272–73,  291–92 229–30, 234, 235–38, 307–9, 309f
veils, 178, 181–82, 198, 207 We Are Not Immigrants (see Weber)
walls, 210–11, 212–14, 218, 228–29, 238 West Bank barrier, 30, 143, 227, 229–31, 238
images, 1–2, 3, 5, 15, 16–17, 19–24, 25, 26–31, Weber, Cynthia
32, 35–36, 37–39, 40, 42–43, 45, 46, 47, 48, I Am an American, 71–72, 77–78,  303–4
59–60, 64, 91, 93, 115, 117–18, 139, 152– visual methods, 65, 66–67, 71–72,
53, 303, 304, 305–6, 307, 314, 315–16 77–78,  235–37
art, 22–23, 23f, 102–3, 104f, 122–23, 126–27, We Are Not Immigrants, 215, 235–37
128, 139, 229 witnessing, 28–29, 41–42, 70–71, 102, 117–18,
cartoons, 15, 16, 29–30, 80, 88, 94–95, 96, 139, 268
100, 196 affective,  128–39
film and video, 61, 62, 70, 74, 75, 84, 90, 96, ideological, 124
106–7, 111, 112, 130–39, 266–68 theory, 119
iconic, 1–2, 3, 28, 38, 42–43, 92–93, 94–95, world-ordering, 2, 4–5, 32, 35–36, 37, 39–40, 44,
102–3, 121, 127–28, 155–56, 269, 310, 312 45, 49, 50, 56–57, 79, 90, 101, 108, 115,
Internet, 272–73, 280, 292 136, 148–49, 176, 238, 241–42, 243–44,
maps, 149, 151, 153, 159, 169 246–47, 249, 259, 264, 272, 274, 276, 300,
methods, 66–68, 91, 94–96, 99–102 305–6, 310, 313
photographs, 1, 102–3, 103f, 117, 119–23,
127–28, 133f, 134f Yasukuni Shrine. See gardens

William A. Callahan - Sensible Politics - Visualizing International Relations-Oxford University Press (2020)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

William A. Callahan - Sensible Politics - Visualizing International Relations-Oxford University Press (2020)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

William A. Callahan - Sensible Politics - Visualizing International Relations-Oxford University Press (2020)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sensible Politics

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

Introduction: Visualizing International Relations 1

PART I VISIBILIT Y/​V ISUALIT Y: A FR AMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

1. Visibility: The Social Construction of the Visual 19

2. Visuality: The Visual Performance of the International 32

3. Dynamic Dyads: Visibility/​Visuality and East/​West 46

4. Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking 61

5. Visualizing Security, Order, and War 90

6. Visual Art, Ethical Witnessing, and Resistance 117

PART III VISUAL ARTIFACTS AND SENSORY SPACES

7. Maps, Space, and Power 147

8. The Sartorial Engineering of Race, Gender, and Faith 178

9. Walls as Barriers, Gateways, and the Sublime 209

10. Gardens in Diplomacy, War, and Peace 239

11. Visibility, Visuality, and Mass (Self)Surveillance 271

Conclusion: Sensible Politics 303

Selected Bibliography 317

1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/​2009) 23

9.4 Chinese ambassador presents Great Wall tapestry to Foreign Ministry of

(and then teaching) these aesthetic conventions and practical techniques—​which

understanding of social theory and international politics by (1) expanding from the

“The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method,”

I thank the publishers for their permission to use this material.

create international politics as nonverbal and nonnarrative experiences and

of the non-​Western Other. My concern is that Eurocentrism is not simply about

than binary oppositions), reflexivity, social-​ordering and world-​ordering, and cul-

2 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-​

Structure and Content of the Book

The chapter develops these theoretical discussions through an autoethnographic

outdated. In addition to the quantitative speed of technological change,

2 Nicolas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (New York: Pelican Books, 2015), p. 6.

well as the conventions and creative practices of picture-​taking, film-​making,

Eco’s understanding of semiotics as “the discipline studying everything which can

3 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 7.

world as a whole was a “defining element” of European modernity, and mapping

Figure 1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/​2009). Courtesy

antique-​style gold frame on a float in Harlem’s African-​American Day Parade.23

23 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . .” (1983/​2009) http://​lorraineogrady.com/​art/​art-​is/​ (accessed

Hermeneutics: The Method for Visibility

photographic statements on the basis of their tendency to either repro-

To understand the power of visual images, then, we need to discover the

69 See Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance.”

3 Jacobs, “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035.”

Critical Aesthetics: Methods for Visuality

22 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 99.

29 Shapiro, Trans-​Disciplinary Method, 23.

Figure 2.2 Jia Zhangke, Smog Journeys (2015). Courtesy Greenpeace East Asia

42 Butler, Frames of War.

46 MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 15.

50 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 3.

56 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25.

4 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 21.

16 R. B. J. Walker, Inside/​ Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge,

self as barbaric in relation to a Civilized East.22 Unfortunately, such “Occidentalism”

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

PART I VISIBILIT Y/V ISUALIT Y: A FR AMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS

3. Dynamic Dyads: Visibility/Visuality and East/West 46

5. Visualizing Security, Order, and War 90

PART III VISUAL ARTIFACTS AND SENSORY SPACES

1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009) 23

(and then teaching) these aesthetic conventions and practical techniques—which

of the non-Western Other. My concern is that Eurocentrism is not simply about

than binary oppositions), reflexivity, social-ordering and world-ordering, and cul-

2 Michael J. Shapiro, Studies in Trans-

2 Nicolas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (New York: Pelican Books, 2015), p. 6.

well as the conventions and creative practices of picture-taking, film-making,

3 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 7.

Figure 1.1 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . . (Girlfriends Times Two)” (1983/2009). Courtesy

antique-style gold frame on a float in Harlem’s African-American Day Parade.23

23 Lorraine O’Grady, “Art Is . . .” (1983/2009) http://lorraineogrady.com/art/art-is/ (accessed

3 Jacobs, “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035.”

22 Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 99.

29 Shapiro, Trans-Disciplinary Method, 23.

Figure 2.2 Jia Zhangke, Smog Journeys (2015). Courtesy Greenpeace East Asia

42 Butler, Frames of War.

46 MacDonald et al., “Introduction,” 15.

50 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 3.

56 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 25.

4 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 21.

16 R. B. J. Walker, Inside/ Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge,

East/West as a Conceptual Dyad

46 See the sources in notes 41 and 42.

51 Zhang Yimou, dir., Changcheng [The Great Wall] (Legendary Pictures, 2016).

periphery, concealing/revealing, loosening/tightening—that often grow out of the

Part I, “Visibility/Visuality: A Framework for Analysis,” provided a de-

Hence the second section engages in a “visual turn”—which is perhaps better

29 Rose, Visual Methodologies, 9–10, 21.

not character-driven, but theory-driven; it is “guided by rigorous social scientific

37 Germano, “Analytic Filmmaking,” 666.

case of what Michael J. Shapiro calls empiricism’s “pre-Kantian slumber,” in which

42 Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method, 1.

the “cringe-value” of heterogeneous visceral encounters. The critical aesthetic mode

78 Barabantseva and Lawrence, “Encountering Vulnerabilities,” 926–927; Barabantseva, British

Pre-Production: Selecting Cinematic Topics and Sources

90 Weber, “ ‘I Am an American’: Protesting Advertised ‘Americanness’,” 286.

98 Wahlberg, Documentary Time, 51.

109 Henley, “Are You Happy?,” 57.

122 Henley, “Are You Happy?,” 57.

134 Schroeder, “On Cowboys and Aliens,” 427.

a messy business. Guided by the conceptual dyads of visibility/visuality and ide-

and senses of international politics. Rather than treating “China/non-China” as a

Securitization theory looks to speech-act theory to argue that language does

Figure 5.1 Bill Anders, Earthrise (1968). Courtesy NASA

29 Hansen, “Theorizing the Image for Security Studies,” 59–60.

security images, the intentionality and policy-relevance of which is hard to estab-

44 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Penguin, 1977), p. 3.

56 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 6.

70 Euben, “Spectacles of Sovereignty in Digital Time,” 1018.

state-building, society-building, and world-building.85 What is most interesting

Figure 5.4 Screenshot of Health Services in The Islamic State (2015).

Figure 5.5 Screenshot of Administration of Bakeries and Ovens (2015).

100 The Edinburgh film is Yasmin Fedda, Breadmakers (2007) https://vimeo.com/21718544

Spectatorship thus is not understood as a reaction to images, as in the CNN-Effect,

14 Hariman and Lucaites, The Public Image, 14.

23 Bleiker, Aesthetics and World Politics, 1, 10–13.

46 Marlow and Tancock, Ai Weiwei, 128–141.