Resisting securitized and militarized understandings of protection: aesthetics as counterpower

Abstract

Tracing the development of modern understandings of the ‘politics of protection,’ this paper examines the paradoxical reality of the use of violence by states to build peace, protect civilians and provide humanitarian assistance. It presents the mechanisms through which a dominant liberal-realist ideology based on securitized and militarized options have come to dominate global understandings of how to protect civilian populations at risk and thus shaped public and political imagination over what is possible and moral in the realm of protection. However, the imaginative dominance of these ideologically based modes of protection can and are being challenged through processes of ‘aesthetic imaginative acts.’ These acts are a form of counterpower that create fissures in the liberal-realist narrative and in turn enable populations to reconfigure political imagination to include alternative, empathetic responses to humanitarian crises. Analysis of one modality of ‘aesthetic imaginative acts’ in one case, namely musical recordings by Canadian artists in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, will be analyzed in relation to how they challenge the dominant liberal-realist imagination and facilitate a broader, nonviolent or empathetic imagination regarding protection.