The Racial Visual Imaginary of International Relations

Abstract

Visual politics is a thriving subfield of international relations (IR) that traces its origin to the “visual turn” at the turn of the century. However, visual politics hardly engages with the central visuality of modernity: race. This article argues that visual politics has a longer history than the current disciplinary history suggests, and it deploys a sociographical analysis to explore the central role of the visual politics of racial difference in articulating the racial imaginary that frames IR. The article explores the “shadow archive of global difference,” the mass project of the visual taxonomization of colonial peoples that haunted subsequent projects of visual production by aligning them with an implicit hierarchy, and in turn was central to the articulation of the doctrine of “global difference,” which framed early IR and still influences its racial imaginary. This intervention amounts to a prevision of visual politics and its reorientation around racial visualities to revise its disciplinary imaginary and encourage scholarship that engages with the global prevalence of oppressive visualities.

Sous-champ florissant des relations internationales, les origines de la politique visuelle remontent au « tournant visuel » du début du siècle. Toutefois, la politique visuelle s'intéresse à peine à la visualité centrale de la modernité : la race. Cet article affirme que l'histoire de la politique visuelle remonte davantage que ne le suggère l'histoire actuelle de la discipline. Il déploie une analyse sociographique pour explorer le rôle central de la politique visuelle de différence raciale dans l'articulation de l'imaginaire racial qui cadre les RI. L'article examine « l'archive masquée de la différence mondiale », le projet systématique de taxonomie visuelle des peuples coloniaux qui a hanté les projets ultérieurs de production visuelle en les alignant sur une hiérarchie implicite et qui a ensuite été central dans l'articulation de la doctrine de « différence mondiale », qui cadre le début des RI et influence encore son imaginaire racial. Cette intervention correspond à une prévision s'agissant de la politique visuelle et de sa réorientation vis-à-vis des visualités raciales afin de réviser l'imaginaire de cette discipline et d'encourager les chercheurs à traiter la prévalence mondiale des visualités oppressives.

La política visual es un próspero subcampo dentro de las Relaciones Internacionales, el cual tiene su origen en el «giro visual» que tuvo lugar a principios de siglo. Sin embargo, la política visual pocas veces se compromete con la visualidad central de la modernidad: la raza. Este artículo argumenta que la política visual tiene una historia más larga de lo que sugiere la historia disciplinaria actual y despliega un análisis sociográfico con el fin de analizar el papel central que tiene la política visual de la diferencia racial con relación a la articulación del imaginario racial que enmarca las RRII. El artículo estudia el «archivo en la sombra de la diferencia global», que fue un proyecto a gran escala en materia de la taxonomización visual de los pueblos coloniales que obsesionó a los proyectos posteriores de producción visual al alinearlos con una jerarquía implícita y que, a su vez, fue fundamental para la articulación de la doctrina de la «diferencia global», que enmarcó las primeras RRII y aún influye en su imaginario racial. Esta intervención equivale a una previsión de la política visual y su reorientación en torno a las visualidades raciales con el fin de revisar su imaginario disciplinario y fomentar, así, la existencia de un mundo académico que se comprometa con la prevalencia global de visualidades opresivas.

Introduction

Visual politics is a thriving subfield of international relations (IR), and its origin story is well-known: Ours is “a global culture of images, a society of the spectacle, a world of semblances and simulacra” (Mitchell 2018, 230), and the pictorial/visual/aesthetic “turn” in the social sciences and the humanities is a response to our “hypervisual” world (Mirzoeff 2001, 124). According to Roland Bleiker, IR’s own turn to the visual took place as scholars “increasingly recognized and examined the numerous and complex ways in which the visual, the political, and the international are intertwined” (2023, 18).

However, IR’s engagement with the visual world has been marked by a glaring omission. Recently, I asked how it could be that race, which is the central visuality of modernity, is hardly represented in the scholarship on visual politics (Galai 2023). This question picked up on an earlier observation by Priya Dixit that visual politics has not engaged with “the relationships between those who visualize and those who are visualized” (Dixit 2014, 338). Visual politics deals mostly with “reading” visual artifacts rather than engaging with “visualities,” which are visual discourses, or “techniques of looking” (Andersen, Vuori, and Mutlu 2015), and this orientation precludes a focus on oppressive visualities, such as the enduring and structural aspects of race and racism.

Deborah Poole (1997, 15) explained that vision and race are “autonomous but related features of a broad epistemic field,” and an engagement with racial visualities is as absent from visual politics as an engagement with “racial imaginaries” had been from IR more generally (the term comes from Barder 2021; see also Vitalis 2000; Henderson 2014). This article seeks to reorient visual politics toward these concerns by exploring the oppressive visualities that established the epistemic field on which the early social sciences, including IR, were constructed. Overall, this reorientation amounts to a “prevision,” a Gramscian term that refers to “that which allows the present to be seen differently” (Hart 2024, 150). It installs the missing element from contemporary visual politics (race) as the cornerstone of IR and not as a discrete concern that evaded its gaze. This prevision makes possible a reorientated visual politics that is attuned to the interrogation of oppressive visualities and is aligned to the emerging revisionist history of IR, which recognizes the field’s origins in a global racial imaginary.

The prevision does not amount simply to a “new and improved” origin story, but rather it introduces a missing core concern that persists in the present as active oppressive visualities that are largely ignored by visual politics, where “visual analysis is often flattened to images that inspire criticism” (Galai 2023, 2). To achieve this prevision, I focus on the “shadow archive” (Sekula 1986), an extensive and global project that oriented early photography as “a tool to capture visually and classify human difference” (Benjamin 2019, 68). The shadow archive left its mark on subsequent visual practices and was central to the development of the doctrine of “global difference” that framed the early social sciences in terms of racial difference (Connell 1997; Go 2020). Visual politics then has a longer, darker, and richer tradition than that of a participant in the “visual turn.” Rather, visual politics is a major tributary to early IR, which Henderson (2014, 22) framed as “interracial relations.”

In the next section, I will briefly retrace the course of visual politics as we commonly understand it. Then, I will introduce the idea of a sociographical analysis, and in the third part, I will deploy it to understand the epistemic and political restrictions and affordances of the subdiscipline from a wider context. Fourth, I will explore an alternative sociography that focuses on IR and global difference. Fifth, I will introduce a prevision of visual politics within that sociography via the “shadow archive of global difference.”

Mapping Visual Politics into IR

It is commonly accepted that visual politics emerged from the “visual” or “aesthetic” turn (Bleiker 2018, 2023). Helen Berents and Constance Duncombe (2020, 567) explained that “contributors to the burgeoning field of visual politics examine the affective power of images, how images become securitized and their role in framing politics.” From the earliest contributions, the emerging field focused on visual artifacts, largely following a framework that Roland Bleiker (2001, 525) termed “aesthetic encounters with the political,” or reflections on the refractions of the political in visual artifacts, as gleaned by the researcher. That is, visual politics started as a concern with “images that inspire criticism” (Galai 2023, 2). Scholars reflected on their aesthetic encounters in connection with wider visual discourses, often exploring (but seldom referencing or engaging with) what Stuart Hall (2013) termed “regimes of representation.”

Through this articulation, visual politics certainly brushed with aspects of race and racism. For example, Campbell’s (2007) discussion of the visual trope of “Africanism” in photojournalism published in The Guardian and The Observer conceptualizes a regime of representation that is locked into a colonial gaze, and the analysis comes close to confronting deeply seeded racialized visualities. Conversely, Bleiker et al.’s (2013) study of the visual representation and visual dehumanization of refugees positioned the “aesthetic encounter” at the descriptive end, developing a scheme of representation based on a quantitative analysis of Australian newspaper front pages.

Elspeth Van Veeren’s (2011) elaborated the idea of the “aesthetic encounter” framework by discussing the curation of images of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay distributed to the media in relation to Butler’s “domain of representability” and underlying “domain of unrepresentability,” pointing to the power of the visual to conceal or distract. More recently, Freistein, Gadinger and Unrau (2022) deployed the full bandwidth of international political sociology to their encounters. They tied together discrete instances, transnational regimes of representation, and their relations to emotion in an impressive survey of far-right visual communication in Europe, but one that reflects a norm within political science to eschew an analysis of the racialized implications of far-right politics in favor of the framework of “populism,” with race in effect “invisibilized” (Mondon 2023, 890).

For the most part, visual politics argues that visual artifacts hold (representational) political power. However, it has less to say about how vision itself is structured in oppressive ways. For example, Lene Hansen (2011) explores how representational power can engorge into a form of visual securitization. Her influential study focused on the Muhammad cartoons published in Denmark in 2005 and introduced a creative methodological toolkit that enriched the field with terms like “intervisuality,” which have been taken on board by others. However, Hansen admitted that there is more to explore in the realm of “identities, policies, and ‘civilizational fault-lines’” (Hansen 2011, 70).

Another group of scholars aligned their reflections on the aesthetic encounter with theories rather than representations. For example, Cynthia Weber’s (1998) analysis of a portrait of RuPaul allowed her to demonstrate the role of performativity. Michael Shapiro (2008) wrote about “violent cartography” as it is refracted in a photograph of a US Army soldier in Afghanistan by embedded AP photographer Tomas Munita, while the late Alex Danchev (2009) analyzed an iconic image from Vietnam by Don McCullin through Levinas’ theorization of the face. Hansen (2011, 52) explained that “International Relations scholars have continued the tradition of looking to the Humanities for intellectual inspirations,” and overall, the methods of visual politics have often been imported from other fields to understand visual artifacts in terms of their political power.

Overall, Andersen, Vuori, and Mutlu (2015, 85–6) rightly note that the field of visual politics is oriented toward analyses that focus on visual artifacts and that the field has hardly engaged with “visualities,” which are the discursive frameworks in which sight is articulated, or “the way in which vision is constructed in various ways” (Rose 2016, 2). Stuart Hall (2007, 9), whose omission from the canon of visual politics is glaring, wrote that an explication of meanings from visual artifacts is an incomplete analysis. This is because an image is often “caught up in a network of chains of signification which ‘overprint’ it, its inscription into the currency of other discourses, which bring out different meanings” and that “its meaning can only be completed by the ways we interrogate it.” Elsewhere, he warned of valorizing aesthetic encounters, writing that:

The exercise in interpretation…calls for considerable caution, historical judgement—in essence, a politics of reading. The evidence which the photographic text may be assumed to represent is already overendowed, overdetermined by other, further, often contradictory meanings, which arise within the intertextuality of all photographic representation as a social practice (Hall 2023 [1984], 79).

Hall, true to his project of conjunctural thinking, as well as his deep belief in the importance of visual artifacts as powerful communal patrimony,¹ recognized the danger of detaching visual artifacts from their contexts and applying “the riot of deconstruction” (Hall 2023 [1984]), a practice that would be familiar to attendees of visual politics conferences who listened to speakers play “free association” with images of violence. The ready readability of images does not excuse us from exploring their construction, their provenance, and their varied technological and political implications. Specifically, those ocular practices that make up visualities, and that are largely unexplored by visual politics, manifest in powerful and oppressive political discourses; chief among them is the modern conception of race, with vision and race being “autonomous but related features of a broad epistemic field in which knowledge was organized around principles of typification, comparability, and equivalency” (Poole 1997, 15). While there exists some engagement with visualities in visual politics, it is rarely with oppressive visualities.

Grayson and Mawdsley (2019, 433) have written the most extensive theoretical engagement with visuality, and they draw on Nick Mirzoeff’s framework that conceptualizes oppressive forms of visuality complexes, starting with the slave plantation. They also engage with Allen Feldman’s (2005) rearticulation of scopic regimes in terms of sectarian violence and targeting. Moreover, Grayson and Mawdsley address specifically the scopic regimes of modernity and colonial violence, but the different strands are not entwined, and neither Mirzoeff’s nor Feldman’s focus on oppression travels to their theorization, which relies on Martin Jay’s. More recently, Achilleos-Sarll, Sachseder, and Stachowitsch (2023) explored visuality in border security in Europe and specifically its oppressive racialized and gendered aspects, as well as their implication in security practices and technologies. However, this promising framework and the useful recontextualization of “intervisuality” were operationalized as a set of “aesthetic encounters” with the illustrations in eleven FRONTEX annual risk analysis reports, rather than the elaborate and extensive systems of surveillance. The analysis provides valuable insights into organization’s visual imagery, but less into the operational visual field in which violent encounters take place.

A few works do engage directly with oppressive visualities. Priya Dixit (2014), through an approach of “decolonizing visuality,” draws in part on Mirzoeff, while Lauren Wilcox (2017) draws on Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge and specifically the “god-trick,” which she explains “is not only visual, but more broadly epistemological” (Lauren Wilcox 2017, 13). However, for the most part, visual politics scholars are devoted to “aesthetic encounters,” which is certainly a productive approach, but insufficient if we take seriously the harm visualities inflict when they are enfolded into visual technologies (Galai 2023). In contrast, these “missing” visualities do feature very prominently in the work of scholars working on race and racism who relate it back to political practices that are at the core of global politics. George Yancy explained that this is because “theorizing the specular/ocular dimensions of colonialist power and knowledge is a significant point of entry into the racist colonialist Weltanschauung” (2016, 86).

I argue that the prevailing practice in visual politics of framing analysis as an “aesthetic encounter” partly explains the absence of an engagement with race and racism in visual politics that is much more common in adjacent fields. Moreover, this blindness is influenced by IR’s existing “norm against noticing” race and racism (Vitalis 2000, 333). In the rest of this article, I explore the conditions that led to this orientation by employing a sociographical analysis of visual politics. I will later and suggest a “prevision” that reorientates visual politics toward the study of oppressive visualities.

The Sociography

The study of social scientific practice as political practice was termed by Uri Ram (1995) a “sociography.” He used this approach to frame his interrogation of the role of the Parsonian sociological theory of structural functionalism within Israeli sociology that formed a unique double function: It was both a hegemonic academic theory that served as a legitimizing narrative, imparting scientific prestige on disciplinary narrations of past oppressive state actions, as well as serving as a framing device for new political projects.

As I perceive it, a sociography explores disciplinary knowledge as a conjuncture of interdisciplinary and extradisciplinary discourses that track its development and steer its application. The sociography I deploy here is composed of three intertwining strands, and it builds on the work of Raluca Soreanu (2010). First, it explores disciplinary infrastructures. It asks, “what are the terms under which new approaches are accepted into disciplines or rejected from them?” This strand refers to “onboarding mechanisms” for new perspectives to emerge or be imported. Second, it explores “disciplinary imaginaries” (Soreanu 2010) that align a disciplinary horizon to their “origin myths” and asks, “what research questions could be asked?” Soreanu (2010, 380) defined the disciplinary imaginary as a “repertoire of possible forms of disciplinary life available to intellectuals in a certain field and framework for training and practice,” which aligns with Jennifer Platt’s argument that disciplinary stories of becoming and contemporary protocols of practice are connected through a “collective disciplinary memory” (1996, 240). Third, it explores the implication of these disciplinary politics with wider political projects and ideologies.²

Soreanu was writing against the background of the erasure and dismissal of feminist IR scholarship in the early 2000s. What was at stake at the time was a disciplinary failure of the imagination that limited the disciplinary imaginary. IR’s “origin myth” was (and to a degree still is) a “myth of rescue” (Soreanu 2010, 386) from “utopians” or “idealists” in the period between the First and Second World Wars, who purportedly ignored the harsh realities of global politics, which necessitated cold calculations of power. This basic story was complemented by additional elements that were added through supposed discipline-wide “great debates.” Within this disciplinary imaginary, feminist approaches were dismissed as marginal and incompatible.

Robert Keohane (1989, 250) famously opined that “many feminist theorists of international relations may follow the currently fashionable path of fragmenting epistemology, denying the possibility of social science,” pointing to a disciplinary infrastructure that amounted to a “paradigm mentality” (Walker 2010). Gatekeeper Keohane deployed Imre Lakatos’ concept of a research program (Keohane 1989, 249) to delineate a disciplinary imaginary that precludes feminist theory (or some caricature of it). The larger political context, epitomized in Keohane’s conceited approach was deftly described by Cynthia Weber (1994) through Amelia Jones’ concept of “male paranoia,” or “the fearful response of patriarchy to the loss of boundaries” (Jones in Weber 1994, 337).

Leon Wieseltier (1994) commented that “it’s not exactly news that people put things in the past and say they found it there”, and the “origin myth” of IR that feminists and others have challenged was recently shown to be much younger than introductory courses claim, with one estimate tracing it to the 1970s (Leira and de Carvalho 2018). It was retrofitted to align with Thomas Kuhn’s work on research paradigms in the 1960s. As Steve Fuller explained, Kuhn’s model of science was a “free-floating narrative—a ‘myth’ properly speaking—that could be used by any discipline in need of boosting its status” (1992, 269). And so, Kuhn’s paradigm framework, and for others Lakatos’ “research program,” provided a structure to (social) scientific practice. They were used to legitimize an origin story that had established the prevailing theories of the day at the apex of a historic process of development, treating them as a “paradigm,” as “normal science,” or as a “Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (MSRP),” serving “as a means of defending or de-legitimizing scholarly contributions” (Elman and Elman 2002, 231).

Therefore, the origin myth has a double function. First, it imparts legitimacy on hegemonic approaches by alluding to a logic of evolution from the declared origin, with previous erroneous and outdated paradigms (or research programs) failing to survive the challenge of the more rigorous theoretical newcomers that better reflect the political world. Second, it reifies a disciplinary infrastructure that imposes a set of theoretical commitments on newcomers.

This use of the philosophy of knowledge to police knowledge clashes with the original intention of the authors of these frameworks, Kuhn and Lakatos, to limit these approaches to the natural sciences (Walker 2010). Yet, IR practitioners used the scientific cachet of these frameworks to dismiss alternative approaches. And so, for example, Keohane accused “reflectivist” (and, as we saw, “feminist”) approaches of lacking a “research program” like that of the then-predominant Waltzian neorealism (Keohane 1988; Keohane 1989, 250).

Such gatekeeping on spurious grounds of a supposed “incommensurability” is no longer practiced so openly. Over the past two decades, IR has become the site of successful transdisciplinary migrations and homegrown innovations. Most notably, the disciplinary infrastructure has extended beyond its “paradigm mentality” and allowed for “turns” as a mechanism of disciplinary onboarding, with visual politics being inducted via the aforementioned “visual turn.” However, the revised disciplinary infrastructure still supports a distinct (sub)disciplinary imaginary, which tracks visual politics along the wider disciplinary “norm against noticing” race and racism (Vitalis 2000, 333).

A Sociography of the Visual Turn

On the face of it, the terms in which visual politics entered IR are different from early feminist approaches. Following the “constructivist turn,” and according to David McCourt (2016), its subsequent “fractalization,” an age of additional disciplinary diversification began, in which new perspectives joined as “turns.” However, as two recent papers on IR “turns” and their disciplinary infrastructure demonstrate, the paradigm mentality is still alive.

Baele and Bettiza (2021) argued that “turns” in IR are now an entry point into the discipline, but they only apply to “critical” perspectives as an alternative onboarding mechanism. They argue that “there are (many) more turns than canonical theories, and the practice one might well be the only turn truly seeking to graft with them” (Baele and Bettiza 2021, 320). In other words, the ideal way for a new subdiscipline to develop is by “grafting” to a paradigmatic “canonical” approach. “Grafting” is a Lakatosian term whereby “some scientists would stretch anomalous findings to fit the dominant research program” (Walker 2010, 437), and adhering to the “grafting” framework would protect IR “as a cumulative endeavour with a shared or coherent sense of identity and a record of scientific progress” (Baele and Bettiza 2021, 320).

In so arguing, Baele and Bettiza deploy the “paradigm mentality” fully and reiterate the evolutionary narrative of IR. On the one hand, they accept that “turns” are, in Kuhnian terms, “commensurable” with disciplinary development. This could easily be evidenced by the flourishing subfields these turns brought about, including visual politics. On the other hand, they are dismissive of this practice and its practitioners, framing the act of announcing a turn as “the rhetorical display of a radical critical stance” (Baele and Bettiza 2021, 328) and reserving particularly dismissive language for anything in the vicinity of the label “queer” (Baele and Bettiza 2021, 327, note 90). Of course, framing anything “radical critical” as a performance and belittling queer approaches are familiar reactionary tropes.

Heiskanen and Beaumont (2023) are less dismissive of turns and turners, but they similarly suggest that there are too many of them and that they are too readily declared. They argue that the proliferation of “turns” and subfields, of which they counted more than sixty, amount to “turn-talk” as an alternative organizing metaphor to the “paradigms” that framed “rationalist” approaches (Heiskanen and Beaumont 2023, 6). So, while what they term “positivist” IR had developed through paradigmatic “great debates,” alternative “reflectivist” IR, which they argue is now a “new mainstream,” developed through “turns” as “postpositivist” IR (Heiskanen and Beaumont 2023, 17). Additionally, they argue that turns were often imported from other disciplines, an observation that links with the work of Jennifer Platt, who wrote about disciplinary development in sociology. Platt similarly explained that the transdisciplinary “borrowing” that make up turns are themselves a direct consequence of the very same paradigmatic thinking, but differently constellated, whereby a paradigm can be argued to be changing on a larger scale, across disciplines, requiring engagement with external literatures (1996, 243).

These recent papers on IR “turns” demonstrate differently a continuing adherence to the paradigm mentality in IR. Heiskanen and Beaumont align “turns” to “paradigms,” revising disciplinary infrastructures and questioning the sustainability of disciplinary expansion, while Baele and Bettiza simply dismiss turns on Kuhnian grounds of incommensurability. Perhaps these mappings are best understood as a riff on Groucho’s famous line: This is my paradigm. If you do not like it, I have others. But besides reminding us of the persistence of gatekeeping and the paradigm mentality, these accounts articulate well the persistence of established disciplinary infrastructures and disciplinary imaginaries in IR. In the case of visual politics, the imaginary cascaded to the subfield and manifested in its concern with ontologically widening IR to include visual artifacts. This ontological extension could be reframed as IR gaining a visual literacy and transposing the empirical and theoretical concerns of IR onto visual artifacts explored through “aesthetic encounters.”

Of course, there is nothing preventing visual politics scholars from exploring the visual politics of race and racism in depth through an engagement with the operation of oppressive visualities, and as I demonstrated above, a few scholars do. But this engagement rarely includes an interrogation of oppressive visualities. Moreover, the methods of visual politics, centered on the “aesthetic encounter,” seem to replicate IR’s preference for theoretical abstraction over historicization that has prevented IR from engaging with race meaningfully, as Krishna (2001, 401) elaborated:

IR discourse’s valorization, indeed fetishization, of abstraction is premised on a desire to escape history, to efface the violence, genocide, and theft that marked the encounter between the rest and the West in the post-Columbian era.

Overall, what is missing is the orientation alluded to by Alexander Weheliye (in Yancy 2008, 9):

The hegemony of vision in Western modernity, its ocularcentric discourse, has been subjected to much scrutiny, and Afro-diasporic thinkers, in particular, have stressed the centrality of the scopic in constructions of race and racism.

I suspect that the lack of engagement with oppressive visualities is in part a consequence of the “disciplinary imaginary” inherent in IR and inherited by the “visual turn.” However, it is also a consequence of the function of the very same epistemic “visual politics” that Weheliye wrote against and its foundational role in the articulation of IR itself, as well as a lack of engagement with Afro-diasporic thinkers. I argue that exploring this (visual) genealogy of IR would uncover a “better” origin story that reconnects visual politics to IR through precisely those channels of engagement that are currently missing.

An Alternative Sociography: IR and “Global Difference”

Sociographical analyses of IR have transformed how we understand the discipline. Scholars have “excavated” its early years to find radically different origin stories to the retrofitted “myth of rescue.” I intend to extend this existing sociography with an additional “excavation” concerning the central role of visual production in establishing the doctrine according to which the early social sciences, including IR, were articulated. In other words, I will offer an alternative “foundational myth” for visual politics to replace the “turn” myth, in which “visual politics” was an active ingredient of IR from the start.

Gurminder Bhambra (2014, 478) wrote about sociology in terms of “prevision”:

Contesting canonical histories of the discipline requires not only highlighting the alternative traditions that were also present at the time in question, but also… using the intellectual resources of these alternative histories to think differently about sociology today.

The argument I am making here is that an extensive global visual project of capturing visual difference was a project of visual politics that constructed a racial imagination (Morris-Reich 2016), which subsequently fed a global racial imaginary (Barder 2021). Such a reorientation of the field, by which a visual politics of difference established the epistemic foundations of IR, would center the concern that is missing from it: structural racism and oppression and their long-standing implication in visualities.

In the words of poet Gil Scott Heron, I suggest this origin story is “ought to be where we’re coming from,” serving as a “prevision,” which Gilian Hart (2024) explains is a type of conjunctural analysis that interweaves theoretical contingencies. This formulation echoes Cornel West’s definition of a genealogy as “a history that highlights the contingent origins and often ignoble outcomes of critical responses to a question” (West 1990, 94–5) and amounts to “that which allows the present to be seen differently” (Hart 2024, 150).

This alternative disciplinary imaginary begins with visualization as racialization, and it takes seriously the challenges of IR’s “norm against noticing” race and racism (Vitalis 2000, 333), opening a broader bandwidth of engagement with historic and current oppressive practices. In this section, I will introduce the project of revisionist IR as a sociographical analysis, and in the next section, I will relate it to the doctrine of global difference: an overarching racialized scheme that framed the budding social sciences. Third, I will introduce the (visual) shadow archive (Sekula 1986) as a major tributary to global difference.

Jeanne Morefield (2020, 131–2) wrote that the field of IR has “an uncomfortable disconnect between the conceptual apparatus by which the contemporary discipline understands the world and the historical origins of the discipline in the world.” This is evident, for example, in the absence of women from the disciplinary canon, which implies that “women in the past never engaged intellectually with world politics until the 1980s and the re-emergence of feminist IR” (Owens et al. 2022, 2). It is also evident in the omission of any serious discussion of race and racism in the discipline, and Errol Henderson (2024, 417) recently argued that the aforementioned “norm against noticing” is in effect a much broader “strategic ignorance.”

Recent revisionist disciplinary histories exposed IR’s deep implication with an oppressive and racist doctrine that Raewyn Connell (1997) referred to as “Global difference,” which speculated on the “difference between the civilization of the metropole and an Other whose main feature was its primitiveness” (Connell 1997, 1516–7). These commonsensical Durkheimian prenotions (Emirbayer and Desmond 2012, 575) took the form of “just so stories” that enmesh visual impressions with wild speculation (Gould 1978, 530) and framed as some form of “evolutionary sociology,” which legitimized and promoted racial and colonial political orders (Connell 1997, 1545). And so, by clinging to its recently established disciplinary imaginary, IR ignores its own foundation as a science of managing racial difference (Vitalis 2015), and in this context, we should keep in mind Howard Winant’s observation about the social sciences (2015, 2177):

[T]he deep implication of the disciplines in the organization of racial oppression… All the fundamental assumptions and all the methodologies of all the social sciences had their origins, and still operate today, in the effort to manage “race relations”.

In early IR, studies would speculate on the social evolutionary processes by which the differences were established and on means of managing “primitive” populations. This methodology, which is now largely considered pseudo-scientific, was at the time standard practice that echoed popular justifications for colonialism (Connell 1997, 1530). Much like the later disciplinary infrastructures presented above exhibited a “paradigm mentality,” these justifications also “claimed the status of science” (Connell 1997, 1531).³

Elias and Feagin (2016), as well as Henderson (2014), trace the belief in such “racial realism” to Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Hume and their canonization into modern social science, as well as early (proto)sociologists like Comte and De Tocqueville, who promoted a framework of a global racial hierarchy. By the mid-nineteenth century Herbert Spencer coined the term “survival of the fittest” to denote the “natural” state of competition amongst races, a framework that Benjamin Kidd expanded to a rationalization for Western imperialism (Henderson 2014), while early American sociologists like George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes produced theories on the “natural” consequence that was the system of slavery in the American South (Elias and Feagin 2016).

In a recent work, Duncan Bell (2022, 26) wrote of an additional tributary in the utopian designs of a global racial order being developed as “an insidious feature of the Western political imaginary” that had a familiar script in which:

The “advanced” parts of the world solve the problem of war through socioeconomic coordination and building international institutions, while the “backward” zones were developed and incorporated in a new civilizing mission (Bell 2022, 24).

As Bell demonstrates, the wider political project of managing human difference readily translated into IR, which, as Henderson (2014, 22) noted, “were more accurately 'interracial relations' at the time”, and as Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam (2014, 2) explain, “though questions of race and racism have been often side-lined to the margins of contemporary IR, such issues were in fact integral to the birth of the discipline.” Early IR aligned itself to the genealogy of “modern knowledge” (Seth 2013), whereby “Europe thought of itself as the mirror of the future of all the other societies and cultures” (Quijano 2007, 176).

Establishing this origin is not difficult. Following Vitalis (2015), even a cursory look at the output of the Journal of Race Development, the progenitor of “Foreign Affairs” and the first IR journal, which is freely available online through JSTOR, will verify that global difference was the field’s guiding principle. Furthermore, the absence of this history from the disciplinary canon and imaginary demonstrates the “norm against noticing” (Vitalis 2000, 333) of the history and the (after)life of white supremacy in IR. More importantly, this “strategic ignorance” (Henderson 2024, 417) enables its continued reemergence.

Vitalis (2015) found that the infant field was predominantly made up of discussions about race and was marked by a strong strand of white supremacy and, importantly, by responses from (mostly) Black American thinkers who rejected this way of thinking and offered powerful alternative formulations. However, both sides of this forgotten “great debate” were expunged from disciplinary histories. Nevertheless, this early tradition left a long-lasting mark. Henderson (2014) explains that “racism informs IR theory mainly through its influence on the empirical, ethical, and epistemological assumptions that undergird its paradigms” (Henderson 2014, 27). To understand the afterlife of this troubling and once dominant approach, it is important to briefly “zoom in” and get a sense of what this early brand of IR was like. The intellectual sources of “global difference” may be diverse, but the reliance of the “method” of evolutionary sociology on visual cues indicates a strong implication with visual projects. I explore this implication historically in the next section, but readers could already glean it from the accounts below.

At the time, the idea of race was constituted through an established “vocabulary of difference” (Gilman 1991, 18), which to varying degrees is still echoed in the present. I will start with a sample of a more popular project than IR. The “Peoples of All Nations” series published by J.A. Hammerton in the 1920s was a widely distributed seven-volume racial atlas, which was also available as a sixpence periodical with color plates. The book series featured over 5,000 images and essays about different racial and ethnic groups. The volume I consulted (Thomas 1922, 5327–72) was found in my local pub in southwest London, next to memoirs of Churchill and Lloyd-George, an authentic “vintage” atmospheric artifact that was probably meant to lend the place a sense of nostalgia. The last volume featured a forty-five-page long “Dictionary of Races” composed by anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas, who was a major contributor to the visual project I will discuss below.

The letter “A” alone had sixty-one entries, from “Ababua” to “Aztec,” and descriptions link visual characteristics to moral qualities. One group is “distrustful and churlish,” another is “frank, courteous and, when kindly treated, trustful,” and a third is made up of “small and dirty people, timid, treacherous, ugly, sullen, and of unprepossessing manners.” With one group, the noted anthropologist tells us that “A new-born child is a dirty yellow,” and all continents contain populations that are described as cannibals. Of course, racialized ways of thinking (and of looking) were the episteme of the day. These were ridiculous, dehumanizing, and dangerous reflections that legitimized the colonial world and that were always visually grounded.⁴

It is precisely such essentializing and demeaning characterizations that we find in early IR. In the very first issue of the Journal of Race Development, G. Stanley Hall (1910, 5) assures us that “The best primitive races have acute senses,” and John P. Jones (1910, 89) tells us that “India has always been a land of poverty,” while in later issues, Charles R. Watson perfectly captures Kalpana Ram’s definition of the colonial gaze as “an unequally constituted right to scrutinize, to represent what is gazed at, and, if judged necessary, to intervene and alter the object of the gaze” (Ram 2018, 1), when he argues that “it is easy to overturn a government; it is more difficult to transform society” (Watson 1911, 432).

The journal’s articles are full of evolutionary just-so stories. For example, E.W. McDowell (1911, 83) spent a page contemplating the visual similarities between Kurds and Scots, concluding that “There is undoubtedly a strong family likeness between the Scotchman of a few centuries back and the Kurd of today,” while Charles W. Furlong (1911, 24) professes that “Arab character in a marked degree seems to be the child of its environment and has inherited many of the characteristics of the great solitudes among which it has dwelt for thousands of years” before continuing to unleash a series of racist speculations that are as ridiculous as they are “balanced”: “On the one hand the Arab is hospitable and open-handed; on the other hand treacherous, grasping and cruel; seemingly mild and lazy, yet he is capable of performing extraordinary feats of labor” (Furlong 1911).

Early IR, like the rest of the social sciences, shared a disciplinary imaginary that was a “racial imaginary” (Barder 2021). IR was part of the interdisciplinary infrastructure of “global difference” that framed the social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century (Connell 1997; Go 2017), and the sociographic work by Henderson (2014), Vitalis (2015), Barder (2021, 2024), and others has demonstrated the enduring presence of this early strand.

Overall, at least three aspects of the “racial imaginary” are retained in IR’s disciplinary canon today: First, “a binary of universalism versus particularism” (Go 2020), whereby the experiences of the Anglo-European in-group are universal, and the experiences of other groups are particular. In IR, this view was explicitly articulated by Waltz’s gripe within one of the most cited works in the field that is core to the “paradigm mentality” (Walker 2010) that “It would be as ridiculous to construct a theory of international politics based on Malaysia and Costa Rica as it would be to construct an economic theory of oligopolistic competition based on the minor firms in a sector of an economy” (Waltz 1979). A perspective that is echoed in the work on “turns” mentioned above that dismisses alternative perspectives.

Second, the establishment of essentialized racial traits as a foundation for social theorizing, mostly in the form of evolutionary sociological speculation (Connell 1997). While one would expect this pernicious aspect to have evaporated, racial essentialization is perhaps best represented by the 48,932 citations (according to Google Scholar in early 2025) and curricular endurance of Samuel Huntington’s openly Islamophobic screed of essential global difference.⁵

Third, “paradigmatic” IR is composed of theories with racist origins. As Henderson notes, Aaron Sampson (2002) demonstrated that the concept of anarchy at the core of mainstream theories is derived from white-supremacist thinking and an entrenched color line (more specifically, from S.F. Nadel), in which the state of nature only applies to non-Europeans. Conversely, it is specifically the central role of “anarchy” in IR thinking that allows the phenomenon of race war to recede into the national space and evade the grasp of the discipline (Barder 2021).

Of course, these traits do not frame all current IR scholarship, and scholars do challenge disciplinary infrastructures. However, the deep grooves left by the tradition of “global difference” still track much current practice. As Barder demonstrated, it shapes a disciplinary imaginary that in various ways precludes an engagement with practices of oppression that the project of global difference, once core to IR, sought to establish and support. While this is perhaps changing, as is evidenced by the growth of the revisionist school cited here, there is still a long way to go, as was made clear, for example, by the furor sparked by the suggestion that the theory of securitization has roots in racist thinking (Howell and Richter-Montpetit 2023).

Moreover, even a short browse through textbooks and reading lists, which in the United Kingdom are often made open-source by the Talis-Aspire software, reveals that the conversations in IPS do not reflect the state of the disciplinary exemplars. A common formula for teaching IR centers on the positivist theories and ends with postpositivist ones (to use Heiskanen and Beaumont’s terms), displaying the same logic that centers scholarship not “from Malaysia and Costa Rica” as the core concern of the discipline and that students of Stuart Hall would instantly recognize as a case of “primary definition”, and that Henderson (2024, 442) argued reflects the “banality of white supremacy.”

Vitalis ended his book by reflecting on the current state of IR in the United States, writing that for the most part, “international relations today remains a white, mainly male rampart that exhibits routine anxieties about the various threats beyond the walls” (2015, 180). I suggest that in the case of visual politics, it would be fruitful to join the existing revisionist sociographic project and to work to provincialize IR, which means recognizing that “all social knowledge is provincial” (Go 2020, 93). Specifically, this would mean approaching IR through the visual foundations on which it was articulated, which were apparent even in the short review above and that reflect the “shadow archive” that I introduce below.

Enter the Visual: The Shadow Archive of Global Difference

The visual primacy within projects of biological determinism is widely accepted (Sekula 1986; Poole 1997; Browne 2015; Morris-Reich 2016; Poskett 2019), and in this section, I will demonstrate that the visual politics of difference are a central component of the doctrine of global difference discussed above. It is the hinge that links visual politics to global difference is modern visual technologies that Ruha Benjamin asserted were developed “as a tool to capture visually and classify human difference” (2019, 68). The visual project of recording global difference coincided with the development of photography and its related epistemic claims to new kinds of “mechanical objectivity” (Daston and Galison 2009). It offered powerful new “visual truths” (Galai 2023), and the subsequent global visual project of racial typification and classification was a prevalent pursuit from the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century until the dying days of eugenics in the 1940s.

Anne Maxwell (2008, 12) explained that “the earliest racial type photographs were taken by anthropologists hoping to prove the mental and physical inferiority of peoples who have been colonized by Europeans.” The goal was to have human physique “classified, quantified, and placed appropriately in the evolutionary framework” (Edwards 1990, 240).⁶ This project of visually measuring and mapping the racial world was established as a sort of foreign policy goal for the imperial powers of the day. The earliest manifestation was when Thomas Henry Huxley, the then president of the Ethnological Society of London, requested the Colonial Office in 1869 “to produce a photographic record of the races of the British Empire” (Edwards 2001, 131). He received hundreds of images and quickly despaired of the project due to its magnitude and the difficulty of using photographs to conduct measurements (Maxwell 2008, 33).

The project continued in the subsequent work of anthropometric photographers such as Paul Foelsche, Carl and Frederick Dammann, Rudolf Martin, Bernhard Hagen, William Elliott Marshal, Fritz and Paul Sarasin, Maurice Vidal Portman, Francis Galton, and others. In fact, the “dictionary of races” introduced above was written by anthropologist and photographer Northcote W. Thomas, who employed an elaboration of Huxley and Lamprey’s photographic method to create an extensive library of anthropometric images in colonial Nigeria and Sierra Leone in the early twentieth century.⁷

The scientific project of typifying anthropometric images in a global pursuit of racial measurement was extended and popularized through an additional type of images: the cartes de visite (Poole 1997). This new photographic format, which was patented in 1854, allowed for small 6 × 10 photographs to be mass produced at much greater ease than before. The topics of these images were often “exotic” colonial people, who were framed as “types,” further popularizing the anthropological discourse and finding new audiences, as well as being collected for the actual anthropometric project (Edwards 2001, 138). As a result of this technological, scientific, and aesthetic entanglement, the impact of the anthropometric project had a far wider reach. “Type” images also circulated in additional forms like scientific atlases, which began to embrace the epistemological authority of photographic indexicality (Daston and Galison 2009), as well as more popular publications that fed a fascination with imperial adventure (Hall 2021, 188). These images were being distributed through a global “visual economy” to the degree that “type photographs were one of the most popular and widely disseminated visual genres in the European world” (Poole 2004, 42). Furthermore, they were marked by a high degree of “visual slippage, in terms of function, between scientific and aesthetic photographic discourses” (Edwards 2001, 143), widening the appeal of this racialized gaze and the implicit scientific and white supremacist knowledge claims of visually grounded “just so” stories/theories. Importantly, this new visual economy of race was erected alongside colonial expos, human zoos, and national quests for grandeur in new colonial projects.

The far-reaching effect of these practices aligns it with Allan Sekula’s (1986) theory of the “shadow archive.” Sekula surveyed the mechanics of early photography’s attempt to measure human difference. He focused on the works of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Cesare Lombroso, who promoted different but related ways of typifying human difference. Sekula concluded that the effect of these early and extensive projects of the visual taxonomization of human groups and the reinvention of the human body as an archive was so profound that they left their marks on all subsequent projects of visualization. They functioned as a “shadow archive,” whereby any new photograph will echo the taxonomical assumptions of this grand project. Therefore, “the archives of race scientists and criminologists consolidated the dominant ideology that people could be read and categorized visually, that exterior signs could reveal interior essences” (Smith and Sliwinski 2017, 16).

Joseph Pugliese similarly interprets the shadow archive as “the historical reservoir of images that functions to construct the enabling conditions for the emergence and cultural intelligibility of any image” (2007, 250), and this formulation has lent itself to colonial and racist discourses. This potentiality is evident if we consider the presence of the shadow/ghost images of Francis Galton’s eugenic imaginary—the Jew and the African—and his focus on biological determinism and so-called “national stocks” (Sekula 1986).⁸ Furthermore, the “shadow archive” as a repository of vectors of racial difference is an established trope. Leigh Raiford (2012) wrote of “the larger shadow archive articulating racial, gender, as well as class hierarchies on the social terrain of this period,” while artist and curator Coco Fusco (2007, 57) elaborated on Sekula’s conceptualization in her artwork, while in her doctoral thesis, she reflected on this engagement and explained that the colonial archive is:

A subset of the photographic “shadow archive,” in the sense of a repertoire of images that in their totality make intelligible the articulations of racial and ethnic difference that identify the colonised subject as “other.”

Importantly, the racial “shadow archive” was not only a theoretical construct. It was the stated goal of the eugenic movement to construct an actual “shadow archive,” with Francis Galton advocating for the creation of national visual anthropometric archives to control marriage and sexual reproduction (Maxwell 2008, 94). In other words, eugenicists sought to preserve the racial purity of the nation through the visual archive, or to filter supposed “interior essences” through an iconography of “exterior signs.” While this project never materialized in such a crude form, it is important to note the extent to which race science, surveillance practices, and visual practices were and still are intertwined (Browne 2015; Benjamin 2019).

The shadow archive, which played a central part in the cultural and institutional life of the colonial metropoles, had a significant part in supporting what Alexander Barder termed a “global racial imaginary” that forms the basic meter of global politics. Barder links Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s focus on “mechanisms and practices. . . responsible for the production of racial domination” (Bonilla-Silva 2016, 75), which makes racism a material consideration, to the idea of a social imaginary. The resultant global racial imaginary:

Integrates the material and ideological foundations—the very “mechanisms and practices” Bonilla-Silva refers to—and reflects specifically the placement of different groups within a hierarchical order (Barder 2021, 13).

As I have demonstrated, this racial imaginary was visual, and it was supported by two related traits, identified by Morris-Reich (2016), which explain the pedagogic role of the racialized visual field in establishing “everyday nonspecialist empiricism with increasingly authoritative attempts to medicalize the study of the mind” (Sekula 1986, 11), which manifested in the “slew of racial theories, grounded in a confused admixture of philological speculation, evolutionary argumentation, and folk assumptions about hierarchy and difference” (Bell 2022, 9).

The first is a “practical epistemology.” According to this mode of an aesthetic encounter, the didactic aspect of visually plotting difference is secondary to the osmotic tendency of the visual “type” image to suggest itself to viewers. Encountering variations of the shadow archive of global difference meant learning by immersion “from practice to theory” (Morris-Reich 2016, 4) and the calibration of visual registers of difference. It is a pernicious pedagogy that was aided by the established legacy of a long project of immense popularity set around phrenology (Poskett 2019), which Edwards (2001, 43) characterized as established “visual dialects.”

Second, the “racial imagination,” which breaks free from any presumed “mechanical objectivity” associated with photographic indexicality and “enables movement from the actual to the ideal and vice versa” (Morris-Reich 2016, 24). The racial imagination “can complete a photograph by the addition of what is absent from it or add nonreality to the photographed object” (Morris-Reich 2016, 27), perhaps drawing on established iconographies of difference and supplanting the belief in the empiricism of the camera and its ability “to capture. . . both the visible and invisible features of race” (Morris-Reich 2016, 21).

The revolving door between vision and epistemology, or between seeing and knowing, explains how this material yet vague project of reifying difference through phenotypical measurement resulted in a racial visuality and imaginary. The “shadow archive” is the enduring remnant of a global project of human typification that, to a large degree, framed the doctrine of global difference. Overall, the “shadow archive” plays a major part in the constitutive role of race and racism in social and political life, including in the study of global politics.

But importantly, the harmful, contingent, and unstable nature of any racist scheme bears repeating. George Mosse explained that racism is “a scavenger ideology, which annexed the virtues, morals, and respectability of the age to its stereotypes and attributed them to the inherent qualities of a superior race” (Mosse 1985, 234). As anyone who has been in any way involved with efforts to integrate racial literacy into an institutional setting knows, it is not enough to declare a non-allegiance to these ideologies, to insist to place them in the past and move forward, or to dismiss them as marginal. Oftentimes, this amounts to a “strategic ignorance.” An effort must be made to understand the ways in which different forms of racism work and the ways in which they retain their power or enmesh with other discourses in muted ways that allow them to get by. Relatedly, while the political context for disciplinary knowledge is often elusive, in this case, the final piece of the sociographic puzzle is the most directly readable part: the enduring global project of white supremacy, in which service the shadow archive of global difference was articulated.

Conclusion

The visual implication of race and racism in social, political, and disciplinary structures of knowledge is too central a concern to ignore, making the current focus of visual politics on “images that inspire criticism” (Galai 2023) an unsustainable pursuit. By recognizing the central role of oppressive visualities and their enfoldment within disciplinary thought in IR and in the social sciences more broadly, the visual politics of global difference is remade into a “prevision” that reorientates visual politics toward the enduring power of the shadow archive of global difference and the sustained relevance of vocabularies of human difference in global politics.

This leaves us with a troubling question: If visuals, visualities, and their discursive power are such a central concern of global politics, is not a distinct subfield devoted just to the visual realm redundant? Should not visual politics be an aspect of the analysis of global politics more generally? In other words, should not IR simply gain a political visual literacy, take on board visuals and visualities, and “graft” visual politics into the larger field on more honorific terms than those suggested by the critiques cited above?

My response is—no. Visual politics as a distinct subfield is a much-needed space that affords us the opportunity to cultivate an important sensibility for our times by interrogating oppressive visualities and their manifestation in global politics, moving across disciplinary boundaries but retaining a focus on their manifestation as political power. This is because we may well declare that we are done with visual politics, but visual politics is not done with us.

The oppressive visualities in our world range from regimes of representation and iconographies of difference to practices of surveillance, biometric recognition, actuarial and weaponized modes of vision, and new technologies of visualization and visual processing. However, our current conjuncture is marked most powerfully by those visualities of targeting, surveillance, and representation that enable, support, screen off, and normalize genocidal violence, such as that enacted in Gaza. These are visualities that fall squarely within the remit of visual politics, which should extend beyond commenting on representations and serve as a critical space in which we strive to fully understand visualities, their historical, technological and political trajectories, the imaginaries they support and their overall part in our genocidal conjuncture.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Olivette Otele, Laura Sjoberg, Suki Finn and Mori Ram for reading and commenting on this article and the students of my visual politics course for helping me to think through it.

Footnotes

References