Visions of Peace in International Relations

Abstract

AbstractIn this article, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography into IR's emerging agenda on peace. Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large scale violence and interstate war. In contrast, we provide an alternative approach which aims to broaden our understanding of (the study of) peace in IR. First, we explore a positive conception of peace at the individual and everyday level of analysis. Second, we advocate methodological pluralism by examining different analytical sites of peace photography. Third, we concentrate on the potentialities of peace photography in Colombia and Brazil—notorious spaces of everyday violence. We argue that the analytical perspectives developed in this paper have also relevance beyond our examples: If peace photography can be found here, than it can also be found elsewhere. Put differently, everyday visions of peace constitute particular instances of the international.