International Relations in the Age of the Image

Images pervade contemporary politics. Across the globe, people receive more and more of their information and impressions about politics through media outlets saturated with images, while political leaders show increasing skill in melding popular culture and political power. Understanding the aesthetic dimensions of world politics is thus of paramount importance. This article seeks to deepen our understanding of the historical and political relationship between images and international theory. Contrary to the predominant view, it argues that, far from being absent from international relations (IR), aesthetics concerns were at the heart of the intellectual politics in which the postwar study of international relations developed. The article shows that suspicion toward aesthetics in IR is not simply the result of ignorance about emotions or images in politics, nor of methodological myopia. Instead its roots are political and lie in the powerful political constellation of Cold War liberalism, social science, and the foreign policy strategies and political struggles of the Cold War. This history has largely disappeared from the self-understanding of the field, but its recovery is essential in appreciating the place of aesthetics in international relations theory and addressing the challenges posed by aesthetics in contemporary world politics.