Tidy, J. (2017) Visual regimes and the politics of war experience: Rewriting war ‘from above’ in WikiLeaks’ ‘Collateral Murder’. Review of International Studies, 43 (1). pp. 95-111. ISSN 0260-2105
Abstract
War experiences are a material of political currency, invoked, appropriated, and ‘written’ in particular configurations to sustain, complicate, and contest narratives about war. This occurs through and within the same relations of power that are intrinsic to the conduct of war as war-experiencing subjects comprise a political vocabulary of selves and others that populate and operate within war’s wider social (re)production. To track these power relations and consider implications for how dominant accounts of war can be complicated and contested, the article is grounded in an analysis of the visual regimes at work in footage, photographs, and testimony relating to the shooting of a group of people by an American Apache helicopter in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. The event was publicised on a dedicated website and dubbed ‘Collateral Murder’ by WikiLeaks in 2010. Analysis of the website reveals how visual modes and the experiences of war subjects accompany each other, revealing war in contrasting locations of sight and violence: the ‘view from above’, the ‘view from below’, and the view of the ‘on-the-ground’ soldier eyewitness. Taken together these discursively produce ‘Collateral Murder’ and contest the dominance of war known through the experience of those who wage it ‘from above’.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Cambridge University Press. This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Review of International Studies. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). |
Keywords: | Collateral; Murder; War; Experience; WikiLeaks; Visuality; Scopic; Regimes; Visual; Regimes |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Politics and International Relations (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 08 Sep 2016 14:00 |
Last Modified: | 05 May 2020 07:42 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Cambridge University Press |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1017/S0260210516000164 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:104404 |