Lost in the aftermath

Abstract

What happens when violence disappears? What is left in the backwash of crisis? Who attends to the emotional, material and ideational detritus of closing borders? Like many, we are working in the aftermath of the recent and deadly intensification of EU migration. We contest the widespread account that the ‘crisis’ is now over – that policymakers have effectively ‘solved’ the problem of migration by gathering undocumented subjects into infrastructures of containment. We focus instead on the painful traces of EU migration that continue to be produced by global structures of citizen/alien, legal/illegal, friend/enemy. We do not produce a comprehensive diagnosis, normative argument or critical framework. Instead, we rest awhile in the aftermath of the crisis – specifically on the Greek island of Kos – to think about questions of abandonment, erasure and displacement. This is a visual essay representing a conversation between two researchers as they interact with the aftermath of the refugee crisis on Kos. Reflecting on select images from September 2016, we present a dialogue that directly speaks to a core theme each image raises. In doing so, we question some of the basic assumptions about how to do critical analysis on migration, security and borders, and therefore seek to disrupt dominant modes of academic writing as well as the practice of research itself.

Taking the trouble: science, technology and security studies

“…The growing interest of STS in IR is also due to the fact that it speaks to adjacent trends. These trends include an emphasis on the socio-political significance of the seemingly mundane (Guillaume and Huysmans 2018;Lisle and Johnson 2019), the conditions of possibility for politics and contestation (Mandelmaum, Friis Kristensen, and Athanassiou 2016;Monsees 2019), and the need for creative methods and deeper methodological reflection (Aradau et al 2015;Naumes 2015). Recent conceptual exchange with IR also places an emphasis on those entanglements (Bellanova and Fuster 2013;Voelkner 2011) and processes (Jackson and Nexon 1999;Passoth and Rowland 2010) that create both the 'state' and the 'international', which make them look like frictionless wholes.…”

Façade

“…These inquiries into institutional architecture sit well with broader initiatives bringing together art and international law, seeking to explore art as method of enquiry, or the role of art itself in understanding international justice (Bleiker, 2019; Lisle and Johnson, 2019). 7 An added dimension here is to look for the questions that arise in the encounter between international institution and audience.…”

“…The building shows traces of its rapid abandonment as well as hints of its new purpose. In one way, it is what Lisle and Johnson call an ‘aftermath environment’ in which ‘the material security measures seem to declare that the space is, instead, in the aftermath, its closure aiming to obscure and prevent even the memory of what happened here’ and ‘the clearest traces of those who passed through are contained in, and produced by, material objects and infrastructures’ (Lisle and Johnson, 2019: 20; Saugmann, 2019). At the same time, the building is full of promises as rumours of its new destiny as The Hague’s biggest art studio, gallery or even a hotel buzz around.…”

“… 7. Such as Art and International Justice Initiative https://artij.org/en/mission.html, and the book project ‘The Aesthetics and Counter-Aesthetics of International Law’ by Rob Knox and Christine Schwöbel-Patel. Similar projects are undertaken in the field of international relations and security studies, for example ‘Colours of Security’ initiated by Juha Vuori or experimentation with photography as a research method, see Bleiker (2019) and Lisle and Johnson (2019). …”

The security captor, captured. Digital cameras, visual politics and material semiotics

“…The notable exception to this de-privileging of cameras and production agency is in Kennedy's (2009) work on soldier photography, where we see how digital cameras transform the warzone as soldiers capture routine and exceptional moments, including moments of violence, as mundane part of everyday practices, and share these moments with people who are not in the battlefield. While an increasing amount of works consider the digital mediation of images (Crone 2014;Leander 2017;Malmvig 2020), the tendency to bracket or overlook camera agency has proved surprisingly stubborn even as international relations researchers have themselves begun using cameras to do research, producing and altering images (Weber 2011;Saugmann Andersen 2012; Der Derian, Udris, and Udris 2010; Möller 2013; Särmä 2018; Lisle and Johnson 2018).…”