Epistemic Authority, Lies, and Video: the Constitution of Knowledge and (in)Security in the Video/Security Nexus

Abstract

This article analyses how videos of violent protests become politically powerfularguments able to intervene in debates about security. It does so by looking at a series of videos taken by police authorities and protesters during street battles in Copenhagen in August 2009, when protesters opposed the forced eviction of a group of Iraqi asylum seekers from the Brorson Church. It zooms in on how politically acceptable knowledge about the event is constituted in dialogue between the videos and the surrounding mediascape. The study thus aims to shed light on the question of how videos of violent politics are present in politics, arguing that this happens only through being remediated as politics – and that the underlying epistemic regime governing how political knowledge is arrived at plays a key function in transforming videos from individual representations topolitically relevant knowledge. In analysing how both police and protesters enactstrategies that condition the possibility for images to figure in and impact post-conflict debate, the article explores how both governance and resistance is currently constituted by means of images. It ultimately considers what this means in terms of the conditions of possibility of video-mediated resistance.