War art and the formation of community

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between war art and community formation. Building on scholarship around trauma, visuality and community formation, we are concerned with how the subject position of the war artist, and their traumatic encounter with war, might disrupt understandings of community that underpin liberal war making. Focusing on Mark Neville’s Battle Against Stigma, we show that making visible the embedded constraint and complicity and the traumatic experiences of the war artist can constitute a form of imminent critique; both rendering intelligible and destabilising the martial gaze and liberal military meaning making. This offers contributions to IR by interrogating the processes through which war visuals both make and unmake communities in relation to war trauma.