Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 26, Issue 4, May 2007, Pages 357-382
Political Geography

Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.11.005Get rights and content

Abstract

In the many considerations of visual culture in geography, there are few works concerned with the visual culture of contemporary geopolitics. In seeking to rectify this lacuna, this paper outlines elements of a research project to consider the way visuality is a pivotal assemblage in the production of contemporary geopolitics. Signalling the need for a conceptual exploration of the importance of vision and visuality to all forms of knowledge (rather than just those associated with or manifested in specific visual artefacts like pictures), the paper argues that understanding the significance of visuality for geopolitics involves recasting visual culture as visual economy. This enables the constitutive relations of geopolitics and visuality to shift from the social construction of the visual field to the visual performance of the social field. This argument is illustrated through an examination of some of the documentary photography and photojournalism covering the most recent outbreak of war in Darfur, Sudan, beginning in the summer of 2003. Exploring the tension in these pictures between the established disaster iconography of ‘Africa’ and the desire to image genocidal violence and war crimes, considering in particular the way photography captures identity, the argument concludes with reflections on the way the visual performance of the social field that is Darfur structures our encounters with others.

Introduction

Everyday life in world politics is replete with images and policy makers are attuned to their power. Speaking at the World Press Photo 50th anniversary in 2005, the UN Secretary General's special representative for Sudan linked the world's lack of concern about Darfur with an absence of photographic witnesses and called on photojournalists to produce more pictures as part of the struggle for attention and action in Darfur (Pronk, 12 January 2006). Jan Pronk's call echoed the conclusion of Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, that a journalistic line to Western audiences was worth a battalion on the ground (Power, 2002: 355). Yet the study of world politics has not properly grasped the significance of visual culture, where it refers to the practices and representations

“which circulate in the field of vision establishing visibilities (and policing invisibilities), stereotypes, power relations, the ability to know and to verify…” (Rogoff, 2000: 20).

To be sure, Geography has been called a visual discipline, and research on cartography, landscape, and geographic information systems is prominent (Rose, 2003). Equally, within Politics and International Relations the place of media imagery in global politics has been analysed. However, in neither Geography nor Politics/International Relations are there many studies concerned with the visual culture of contemporary geopolitics (cf. Campbell and Shapiro, in press, Luke and O Tuathail, 1997, McDonald et al., in press, Mirzeoff, 2005, Power and Crampton, 2005), and little research that takes documentary photography and photojournalism to be important technologies in the visual production of contemporary geopolitics (cf. Ryan, 1997 on 19th century photography and empire).

Visual imagery is of particular importance for geopolitics because it is one of the principal ways in which news from distant places is brought home, constructing the notion of ‘home’ in this process. Ever since early explorers made a habit of taking cameras on their travels, photographs have provided much basic information about the people and places encountered on those journeys. Much like cartography, these images contributed to the development of an “imagined geography” in which the dichotomies of West/East, civilized/barbaric, North/South and developed/underdeveloped have been prominent (Gregory, 1995, Said, 1979). Since the advent of technology for moving images (i.e. film, television, video and, most recently, digital technologies), much ‘foreign’ news has centred on disaster, with stories about disease, famine, war and death prominent contrasts to the relative stability of the ‘domestic’ realm they are directed at (Moeller, 1999).

The aim of this paper is to offer an initial statement of a research project that is very much in progress. This project will explore the way visuality, in the form of photography as a technology of visualization (Maynard, 1997), is pivotal to the production of contemporary geopolitics. This requires an understanding of photography generally, but the project will focus on the photographic genres which document and report on global events.

The first section sets out some of the conceptual questions surrounding visuality that a project of this kind must engage. Four research questions animate this overall project: first, how can visuality be theorized as a specific form of knowledge? Second, what are the implications of a philosophical account of visuality for our understanding of photography generally? Third, how can documentary photography and photojournalism be understood as a technology of visuality that establishes the conditions of possibility for geopolitics? Fourth, how has documentary photography and photojournalism as a geopolitical technology of visuality problematized Sudan – in particular (as explored in this paper), the current conflict in Darfur – and affected ethical and political responsibility?

Exploring photography's role in the historical production of Sudan will locate these conceptual questions in a specific geopolitical location. As Africa's largest country, the site of its longest running conflict and a place subject to a range of interventions from the 19th century colonial period under the British to 21st century concern about war crimes in Darfur, Sudan offers a rich case for examining the historical construction of ‘Africa’ in the European imagination. Drawing on prior linguistic articulations of the continent as a site of cultural, moral and spatial difference, the contemporary visual performance of ‘Africa’ through reportage from sites like Sudan more often than not reduces the plurality and hybridity of the continent and its people to a single entity marked by an iconography of despair, disaster and disease. This enactment renders those places as objects of colonialism, imperialism, military intervention and humanitarianism.

A full account of the photographic production of Sudan is obviously beyond the scope of a paper such as this. Nonetheless, as a means of partly substantiating some of the conceptual propositions, this paper will provide an analysis of how photojournalism – in the form of news photographs used by The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK from 2003 to 2005 – has pictorially performed the conflict in Darfur. After the conceptual overview and brief methodological discussion of this photographic analysis in Conceptual issues, Darfur – the political context of conflict examines the political context of the conflict in Darfur, drawing attention to the way coverage of the conflict was linked to particular events and understandings. The paper then offers a quantitative and qualitative discussion of the news photographs that were used in the two-year period under consideration, comparing them to other sets of images. This analysis suggests photojournalism has helped captured the violence of Darfur within two competing narratives. This visual enactment of Darfur does not simply reflect geopolitics; it is itself geopolitical, both manifesting and enabling power relations that distance difference, leaving us with the challenge of how our mediated encounters with others can be better handled.

Section snippets

Conceptual issues

This project is inspired by W. J. T. Mitchell's (2002: 175) admonition that in many analyses of visual culture there is too often

“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 imagines that the destruction or exposure of false images amounts to a political victory.”

Avoiding a reductive iconoclasm requires a comprehensive philosophical investigation of visuality with respect to

Darfur – the political context of conflict

By the middle of 2005, some 3.2 million people – 50% of Darfur's population – required humanitarian assistance to sustain their livelihood. With 12,500 aid workers from 81 NGOS and 13 UN agencies in the region, the international community had put in place a substantial support operation (World Health Organization, 2005: 9). Their task was to cope with the consequences of a 2-year old conflict that had displaced more than 2 million civilians and killed at least 200,000 and perhaps 300,000 people

Conclusion

Knowledge involves abstraction, interpretation and representation. Historically, western models of knowledge have privileged a particular understanding of vision as their governing model. Paradoxically, while the inevitability of representation means aestheticization is unavoidable, the naturalistic understanding of vision claims that objectivity is achieved by a correspondence between an image and its external referent such that the issue of aesthetics can be avoided. In many respects, the

Acknowledgements

This paper arises from the Political Geography plenary lecture at the Royal Geographical Society – Institute of British Geographers annual conference, London, August 31, 2006, the first part of which was based on a presentation to Durham Geography's Social/Spatial Theory workshop on ‘Vision and Visuality’, February 8, 2006. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of Political Geography for the opportunity to present and publish this work, and to Caitlin Patrick for research assistance. I am

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