Emergent images :|frames of counterinsurgent warfare

Abstract

This thesis addresses contemporary transformations in political violence, image making, and digital culture by focusing on the frames and visibilities of counterinsurgent warfare. The empirical basis of this work is an archive of images comprising photographs and videos that circulated on the internet during various recent counterinsurgency operations. Discussion of these images is complemented with observations made during cyberethnographic fieldwork conducted while assembling the archive. Following a reflection on the problems of an archive framed through a human rights perspective that searches for facts and evidence regarding violations, this thesis approaches the images in the archive with a focus on the relationship between image-making and political violence. Placed in the context of counterinsurgent governmentality, the images in the archive are taken as exemplary of counterinsurgency as a war waged in the visual field. An analysis of the different frames and visibilities of the counterinsurgency operations is followed by reflections on their implications for a witnessing of the war. Particular attention is paid to images shared via social media by the state's forces, which are discussed as acts of violent display with a special meaning-making force that (re)inscribe gendered, racialized and sexualized forms of sovereignty and identity.