Why do soldiers swap illicit pictures? How a visual discourse analysis illuminates military band of brother culture

Abstract

Military service members have been taking and circulating illicit images for decades, and soldier-produced illicit images are a regular and coherent category of international images. Focusing on two case studies – Abu Ghraib images and images of hazing – the argument put forward in this article is that soldier-generated illicit images are not simply photographic evidence, or accidental by-products, of exceptional military activities; rather, these images – and the practices associated with these images – are central to, and reinforce aspects of, military band of brother culture. Soldier-produced illicit images establish a visual vernacular that normalizes particular practices within military communities. Moreover, the practices of producing, circulating and consuming these images convey explicit messages to service members about acceptable behaviour and norms around loyalty and secrecy. A method of visual discourse analysis is developed and employed to examine the acts captured in soldier-generated illicit images as well as the practices linked to the production, circulation and consumption of images. Building on existing work on military culture and images and international relations, this article makes a unique contribution by systematically analysing soldier-produced illicit images in order to gain insights about internal military culture and group dynamics.

Resilience as a ‘concept at work’ in the war in Ukraine: Exploring its international and domestic significance

“…According to her, DA is a way of implementing reflexivity, and she directly encourages researchers 'to conceive themselves as social agents engaged in the world via their discursive activity' . 59 MacKenzie, for her part, adopts a visual approach to DA, exploring soldier-produced illicit images as 'a visual vernacular' 60 that can provide important insights into internal military culture. Some of the studies of resilience that use DA similarly reflect a diversity of approaches.…”

How to analyze visual propaganda in the Middle East: An analysis of imagery in the “Saudi Strike Force Movie”

“…To trace this process of othering and connect security studies to CDA, MacKenzie's (2020) paper was instrumental in demonstrating the idea that “a visual discourse analysis can and should consider patterns across groups of images, as well as the patterns of practice linked to categories of images” (p. 342). This idea is highly influential and will be explored throughout this paper as a key methodological insight, in alignment with J. Wang's (2014) approach to visual analysis.…”

“…Across media studies (Ericson et al, 1987; Golding & Middleton, 1982; Mowlana et al, 1992), social sciences (Ball & Smith, 1992), security studies (Amoore, 2007; MacKenzie, 2020), and CDA (Hansen, 2011; Schlag, 2016), attempts have been made to analyze the visual. Nevertheless, none have provided a methodological framework that is sophisticated enough to analyze the specificity of the visual in the Middle East.…”

Iconic war images and the myth of the ‘good American Soldier’

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