In 2015, Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir took a photo of a Syrian toddler’s dead body on the Turkish coast. This photo has a significant impact on the global policy agenda related to opening borders to refugees. Around sixty years ago, Vietnam war photographs can move intellectuals on college and peace activists in American and European countries to organize Anti-war marches and other protests. A year ago, the video of George Floyd being killed by a Minneapolis police officer filmed by Darnella Frazier, triggered global rage against racism and police brutality. All of these examples show that images can convey a powerful message to the public, even capable of demanding global ethical and political responsibility.
How these images can affect people’s ethical and political choices? What is the relationship between visuality, emotions, and politics? Is it true that political choices are affected by emotions rather than by rational consideration? Researchers on visuality and international politics examine not only the meaning of these images but also who constructed them, what they get, when, and how.
William A. Callahan in his book Sensible Politics: Visualizing International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2020), found that visuals do not only illustrate international events as visual texts, but they actively take part to create nonverbal international politics performances. Visual strategy reveals not only the social construction of the visible but also the visual construction of society.
Post-war political thought tends to emphasize the rational rather than the emotions choice theory as results from their trauma of the abuse of emotions in totalitarian propaganda. Christine Unrau explains that they would like to reestablish rational rules for interactions between political leaders and citizens. They are suspicious of anything related to emotional manipulation and propaganda, so the appraisal of the positive role of emotions in political life moves very slowly.
Vicky Karaiskou in his essay “Visuality and Emotional Governance in the Public Sphere” confirms that implicit memory and “picture-superiority effect” are the key elements in the shaping of perceptions, dispositions, and behavior in social groups. “Implicit memory is the memory created unintentionally and without conscious recollection of the event”. Implicit memory is directly influenced by visual stimuli and can trigger emotions. The picture-superiority effect emphasizes that the nature of memory is visual and emotional. Both of these elements affirm that visuals create faster and more efficient reactions than verbal modes. They also can evoke affective reactions more directly and faster than words.
As our world today cannot avoid the visual and emotional turn in political life, research on visuals, emotions, and politics is pivotal to understand the role of images to urge global ethics. This study is also important to increase our capability to deploy visual representation for the sake of greater humanity.