The Visual Culture of Security Communities

Möller, Frank

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-03222-7_10

Frank Möller³

Part of the book series: Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ((RCS))

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Abstract

Security communities are conditioned by expectations of dependable peaceful adjustment between and among groups of people. Neither the original writings on security communities nor social constructivist adaptations had anything to say about the ways in which, and the extent to which, visual culture can contribute to security community building. This chapter fills this gap by focusing mainly on two aspects: first, the potentialities of visual culture as to representing the commonalities of being human (MacDougall) thus contributing to mutual responsiveness; and, secondly, photography’s capability of strengthening ‘the pathetic understanding of an other’ (Thompson), with ‘pathetic’ referencing experience passively received such as looking at a photograph, thus thwarting the transformation of difference into Otherness.

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Notes

1.
I presented an earlier draft of this chapter titled ‘Zones of Transition: The Visual Culture of Security Communities’ at the 2017 ISA Convention, Baltimore, February 22–25, 2017. I am grateful to the participants in the panel Security Governance: Conceptual and Institutional Responses, sponsored by Comparative Interdisciplinary Studies, for helpful comments.
2.
Karl W. Deutsch , Political Community at the International Level: Problems of Definition and Measurement (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954) and Karl W. Deutsch, Sidney A. Burrell, Robert A. Kann, Maurice Lee, Jr., Martin Lichterman, Raymond E. Lindgren, Francis L. Loewenheim, and Richard W. Van Wagenen, Political Community and the North Atlantic Area: International Organization in the Light of Historical Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
3.
Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York: The Free Press, 1956).
4.
Frank Möller, Thinking Peaceful Change: Baltic Security Policies and Security Community Building (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007).
5.
Ibid.
6.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 126.
7.
Ibid., p. 125.
8.
Jim George and David Campbell , ‘Patters of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference: Critical Social Theory and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34 (1990), No. 3, pp. 269–293.
9.
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
10.
David Chandler, Peacebuilding: The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1997–2007 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
11.
Frank Möller, ‘Capitalizing on Difference: A Security Community or/as a Western Project’, Security Dialogue, Vol. 34 (2003), No. 3, p. 318.
12.
Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett (eds.), Security Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
13.
See Möller, Thinking Peaceful Change, Chapter 4.
14.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 32.
15.
See Möller, Thinking Peaceful Change, pp. 45–46.
16.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 36.
17.
Even if security concerns have completely disappeared from social relations among and between groups of people at a given point in time, they may re-appear at a later stage. Security community is a concept. As such, what I wrote in Chapter 2 about concepts in terms of people doing and undoing them is applicable to security communities as well.
18.
In addition to the Adler /Barnett volume referenced above, Peter J. Katzenstein (ed.), The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) is an important early example of writings on collective identify formation.
19.
The non-use of physical force is binding only within security communities ; it does not regulate the politics of the members of security communities towards non-members. Thus, security communities can be called introverted forms of social organisation (in contrast to extroverted ones which would also pay attention to social relations towards non-members).
20.
Deutsch, Political Community, p. 41.
21.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 5.
22.
Ibid., pp. 6 and 36, respectively.
23.
Ibid., p. 33.
24.
Ibid., p. 5.
25.
Deutsch, Political Community, pp. 35 and 41, respectively.
26.
Alexander Wendt , Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1999), p. 300.
27.
Nick Couldry, Inside Culture: Re-imagining the Method of Cultural Studies (London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage, 2000), p. 4. Of course, this is not the only way culture can be thought of. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1976), pp. 87–93 and Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
28.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 163.
29.
Ibid., pp. 66–67. ‘Pluralistic security communities’ refers to forms of social organisation where the individual units maintain their formal independence; if the units merge to form a new, larger integrated unit, they become ‘amalgamated security communities’.
30.
Ibid., p. 126.
31.
Ibid.
32.
See Ole Wæver, ‘Insecurity, Security, and Asecurity in the West European Non-War Community ’, in Security Communities, pp. 69–118.
33.
Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett , ‘A Framework for the Study of Security Communities’, in Security Communities, pp. 37–48. They acknowledge , however, that their model presents only one particular conceptualisation among many possible others.
34.
Ibid., p. 31.
35.
Ibid., p. 58.
36.
David Rieff , In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 50.
37.
This is what I meant above when I differentiated from one another introverted and extroverted security communities , the latter characterised by regard for non-members.
38.
Adler and Barnett , ‘Framework’, p. 39.
39.
Couldry, Inside Culture, pp. 21–22. This, according to Couldry, is the ‘intellectual and political commitment’ of cultural studies.
40.
James Der Derian, ‘The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard’, in R. Lipschutz (ed.), On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 27.
41.
Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York and London: Routledge, 2004).
42.
Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict , p. 8.
43.
Ibid., p. 80.
44.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 126.
45.
Ibid., p. 3.
46.
Roger Mac Ginty , No War, No Peace: The Rejuvenation of Stalled Peace Processes and Peace Accords (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006), p. 24, and Nicholas Mirzoeff , Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), p. 25.
47.
Roland Barthes . Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. R. Howard (London: Vintage, 2000), p. 96 (italics in original).
48.
David Campbell , Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Revised ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1998), p. 70 (all quotations).
49.
Barthes , Camera Lucida, p. 96.
50.
John Roberts , Photography and Its Violations (New York: Columba University Press, 2014), p. 103.
51.
Jerry L. Thompson , Why Photography Matters (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2013), p. 78 (italics in original).
52.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Vol. II, p. 1527.
53.
Thompson, Why Photography Matters, p. 14 (italics in original).
54.
Ibid.
55.
Couldry, Inside Culture, p. 120.
56.
David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema , edited and with an Introduction by Lucien Taylor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 246.
57.
Ibid.
58.
Ibid., pp. 246–247.
59.
Ibid., p. 246.
60.
Jae Emerling , Photography: History and Theory (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 119.
61.
Jason Burke , ‘Al-Qaida Is Now an Idea, Not an Organisation’, The Guardian , August 5, 2005, at https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/aug/05/world.july7 (accessed June 8, 2018).
62.
MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema , p. 246.
63.
Frank Möller, ‘Public Frames: Security, Persuasion, and the Visual Construction of the International’, in Claudia Alvares (ed.), Representing Culture: Essays on Identity, Visuality and Technology (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), p. 109.
64.
Ibid. See also Errol Morris , Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) (New York: Penguin Books, 2011) for the importance of pre-existing beliefs to acts of image interpretation.
65.
MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema , p. 68.
66.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, pp. 70–116.
67.
Michael Sheringham , Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 22.
68.
Ibid., pp. 22–23.
69.
Ibid., p. 23.
70.
Deutsch et al., Political Community, p. 35.
71.
Ibid.
72.
Emerling, Photography: History and Theory, p. 165.

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Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Frank Möller

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Möller, F. (2019). The Visual Culture of Security Communities. In: Peace Photography. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03222-7_10

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03222-7_10
Published: 18 December 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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