Diplomacy, War, and the Ordinary

Abstract

The photo archives from the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War are filled with photographs of military attacks, massacres, mass protests, and the guerrilla struggle of the Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army). Set against the backdrop of the Indo-Pakistani war and the Cold War, the images owe their political significance to the historical frames that articulate them. The photographs of diplomacy during the war, however, complicate Liberation’s discursive arcs. They appear to be unbiased records of official proceedings, but their semiotic details both support and contradict statist frames of history. In contrast to the shocking images of war, the photographs of diplomatic conferences, the signing of treaties or conversations between heads of state, they depict the ordinary, everyday settings in which the discourses of war operate. Therefore, these images underscore the brutal irony of wartime diplomacy and situate the processes of narrating political change. This article counterintuitively reads photographs of diplomacy in the context of the 1971 War of Liberation to examine their particular place in the archives and explore the scenes as sites of critical intervention and reinterpretation of history.