This article introduces international icons to the field of International Relations. International icons are freestanding images that are widely circulated, recognised, and emotionally responded to. International icons come in the form of foreign policy icons familiar to a specific domestic audience, regional icons, and global icons. Icons do not speak foreign policy in and of themselves rather their meaning is constituted in discourse. Images rise to the status of international icons in part through images that appropriate the icon itself, either in full or through inserting parts of the icon into new images. Appropriations might be used and read as critical interventions into foreign policy debates, but such readings should themselves be subjected to analysis. A three-tier analytical and methodological framework for studying international icons is presented and applied in a case study of the hooded prisoner widely claimed to be emblematic of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

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How images make world politics: International icons and the case of Abu Ghraib

The last fewyears have seen aremarkable visualturn in criminology and thisarticleexplores some of the implications of this renewed interest in the power of images. It begins by setting out influential sociological understandings of aesthetics, before turning to the distinctive ethical questions posed by visual representations of harm, suffering and violence that feature so prominently in these multimediated times. These arguments are then developed in relation to the documentary photography tradition, as it explicitly confronts the relationships between aesthetics, ethics and justice, in ways that a visually attuned criminology has much to learn from, not least since contemporary practitioners have become increasingly aware that they have certain social responsibilities towards the subjects they photograph, while remaining committed to anthropological exploration, moral commitment and political reform.

/pdf/just-images-aesthetics-ethics-and-visual-criminology-1wvhy2qagl.pdf

Just Images Aesthetics, Ethics and Visual Criminology

Drawing on a close analysis of how the Abu Ghraib photographs originally were perceived and framed in the American news media, public debate, and in various cultural contexts, this article addresse...

The Abu Ghraib torture photographs News frames, visual culture, and the power of images

The digital recording of torture at Abu Ghraib has left pictures which are likely to be the defining images of the war in Iraq. This paper is an attempt to understand the images and why so many critics sought to locate the origins of the cruelty in US popular culture. Internet pornography, reality television and campus humiliation rituals are among the sources said to have inspired the brutality. While such explanations are more than plausible, they ignore the much longer history of violent representation that figures in the European classical art tradition, which all too frequently has justified imperial ambition, colonial conquest, and belief in racial superiority, while eroticizing bodies in pain. In the rush to situate the images well within the terms of a lowly popular culture a fuller understanding of their visual power is lost, as is their place in the cultural politics of torture more generally. The paper begins by outlining influential understandings of photography and atrocity images, before considering the differing explanations of the abuse. In taking a cue from recent scholarship in 'trauma studies', the argument is that human suffering should not be reduced to a set of aesthetic concerns, but is fundamentally bound up with the politics of testimony and memory -- issues that have been pursued in some of the images produced after Abu Ghraib and which are discussed in the final section of the paper.

Images of torture: Culture, politics and power

............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................... iv Table of

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The Political Economy of Accounting and the 2003 Iraq War

In the topical commentary on the moral disgrace of Abu Ghraib, several commentators have noted a resemblance between the torture photos from Iraq and American lynching photos. These similarities have remained largely unexplored, however, including perhaps the most significant effects of the two sets of photos, which is that both came to function as sites of resistance against the very acts they represent. Between deeds that are very different in nature and motivation, and which took place at very different times and places, what might we learn from the similarities? What indeed constitutes these similarities? In this essay, I examine the usefulness of parallels between the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib and lynching photographs from the early decades of the twentieth century, and explore the political responses to the Abu Ghraib photos both through their public distribution and in contemporary artworks and civic displays.

https://www.sjsu.edu/people/ruma.chopra/courses/H170_MW9am_S12/s1/Abu_Ghraib.pdf

Dora Apel

Papers

Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib

Irrepressible@@@Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing