Roland Bleiker
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland, where he coordinates an interdisciplinary research program on Visual Politics. His research explores the political role of aesthetics, visuality and emotions, which he examines across a range of issues, from humanitarianism, security and peacebuilding to protest movements and the conflict in Korea. Recent publications include Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (2005/2008), Aesthetics and World Politics (2009/2012) and, as co-editor with Emma Hutchison, a forum on “Emotions and World Politics” in International Theory (Vol 3/2014). Bleiker’s new book Visual Global Politics has come out with Routledge in 2018.ilemmas in world politics through interdisciplinary and cross-cultural sources.
These interests have translated into several scholarly inquires, including work on protests and social movements. The result was my first book on Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (CUP 2000). Ever since I spent two years - in the mid 1980s - as a Swiss diplomat in the Korean DMZ I have also developed a very passionate relationships with this wonderful but politically troubled part of the world. The result here was my second book: Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005/2008). Conceptually I have for long had a key interest in using alternative sources to rethink key issues in world politics. The issues ranged from authoritarianism, development, poverty, terrorism, trauma, health-crises, peacebuilding and gender/race-discrimination, and the means I used to explore these issues included art, poetry, theatre, literature and music. The result here was my third book on Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012). In the context of these inquiries I developed a keen interest in the ethical and methodological challenges involved, which lead to collaborative work with Morgan Brigg, including a book on Mediating Across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution (University of Hawaii Press, 2011) and a Forum Section of the Review of International Studies (no 3 4, 2010) on the issue of autoethnography.
At the moment my main focus lies on visual global politics. I lead a project on "How Images Shape Responses to Humanitarian Crises." This is a collaborative endeavour with two colleagues, Emma Hutchison and David Campbell. Related to this I am involved several smaller projects, including work on emotions and world politics (with Emma Hutchison), visual apologies (with Erin Wilson) and Indigenous Art and cultural diplomacy (with Sally Butler).
For more details see my UQ website:
http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/617
Address: University of Queensland
School of Political Science and International Studies
Brisbane, Qld 4072
Australia
These interests have translated into several scholarly inquires, including work on protests and social movements. The result was my first book on Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics (CUP 2000). Ever since I spent two years - in the mid 1980s - as a Swiss diplomat in the Korean DMZ I have also developed a very passionate relationships with this wonderful but politically troubled part of the world. The result here was my second book: Divided Korea: Toward a Culture of Reconciliation (University of Minnesota Press, 2005/2008). Conceptually I have for long had a key interest in using alternative sources to rethink key issues in world politics. The issues ranged from authoritarianism, development, poverty, terrorism, trauma, health-crises, peacebuilding and gender/race-discrimination, and the means I used to explore these issues included art, poetry, theatre, literature and music. The result here was my third book on Aesthetics and World Politics (Palgrave, 2009/2012). In the context of these inquiries I developed a keen interest in the ethical and methodological challenges involved, which lead to collaborative work with Morgan Brigg, including a book on Mediating Across Difference: Oceanic and Asian Approaches to Conflict Resolution (University of Hawaii Press, 2011) and a Forum Section of the Review of International Studies (no 3 4, 2010) on the issue of autoethnography.
At the moment my main focus lies on visual global politics. I lead a project on "How Images Shape Responses to Humanitarian Crises." This is a collaborative endeavour with two colleagues, Emma Hutchison and David Campbell. Related to this I am involved several smaller projects, including work on emotions and world politics (with Emma Hutchison), visual apologies (with Erin Wilson) and Indigenous Art and cultural diplomacy (with Sally Butler).
For more details see my UQ website:
http://researchers.uq.edu.au/researcher/617
Address: University of Queensland
School of Political Science and International Studies
Brisbane, Qld 4072
Australia
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Books by Roland Bleiker
This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world.
This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.
Divided Korea challenges the prevailing logic of confrontation and deterrence, embarking on a fundamental reassessment of both the roots of the conflict and the means to achieve a more stable political environment and, ultimately, peace. In order to realize a lasting solution, Bleiker concludes, the two Koreas and the international community must first show a willingness to accept difference and contemplate forgiveness as part of a broader reconciliation process."
To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict."
This volume addresses the issues that are at stake in this dual process of political closure, and therefore rethinks how states can respond to terrorist threats. The contributors range from leading conceptual theorists to policy-oriented analysts, from senior academics to junior researchers. The book explores how terrorism has had a profound impact on how security is being understood and implemented, and uses a range of hitherto neglected sources of insight, such as those between political, economic, legal and ethical factors, to examine the nature and meaning of security in a rapidly changing world.
Journal Special Issues by Roland Bleiker
Journal Articles by Roland Bleiker
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0236.xml
This book offers the first comprehensive engagement with visual global politics. Written by leading experts in numerous scholarly disciplines and presented in accessible and engaging language, Visual Global Politics is a one-stop source for students, scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the crucial and persistent role of images in today’s world.
This book offers a passionate but systematically sustained defence of an aesthetic engagement with world politics. It argues that aesthetic sources can offer alternative insight: a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from applying the analytical skills that are central the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of creativity and sensibility about the political. We then might be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives or people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events. Drawing on detailed case studies that range from Stalinist Russia to Cold War Germany and contemporary Korea, the author compellingly demonstrates how the poetic imagination can help us understand – and perhaps even shape - some of the most difficult political challenges.
Divided Korea challenges the prevailing logic of confrontation and deterrence, embarking on a fundamental reassessment of both the roots of the conflict and the means to achieve a more stable political environment and, ultimately, peace. In order to realize a lasting solution, Bleiker concludes, the two Koreas and the international community must first show a willingness to accept difference and contemplate forgiveness as part of a broader reconciliation process."
To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalizing world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the editors present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict."
This volume addresses the issues that are at stake in this dual process of political closure, and therefore rethinks how states can respond to terrorist threats. The contributors range from leading conceptual theorists to policy-oriented analysts, from senior academics to junior researchers. The book explores how terrorism has had a profound impact on how security is being understood and implemented, and uses a range of hitherto neglected sources of insight, such as those between political, economic, legal and ethical factors, to examine the nature and meaning of security in a rapidly changing world.
http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199743292/obo-9780199743292-0236.xml
Alex Danchev is dead.
I offer an appreciation of Alex as a person and as an international relations academic. He was one of the most generous, genuine and creative scholars I have ever met – a true role model.
boats. We argue that this visual framing, and in particular the relative absence of images that depict individual asylum seekers with recognisable facial features, associates refugees not with a humanitarian challenge, but with threats to sovereignty and security. These dehumanising visual patterns reinforce a politics of fear that explains why refugees are publicly framed as people whose plight, dire as it is, nevertheless does not generate a compassionate political response.
the social sciences. Such inquiries can assess emotions up to a certain point, as illustrated by empirical studies on psychology and foreign policy and constructivist engagements with identity and community. But conventional social science methods cannot understand all aspects of phenomena as ephemeral as those of emotions. Doing so would involve conceptualising the influence of emotions even when and where it is not immediately apparent. The ensuing challenges are daunting, but at least some of them could be met by supplementing social scientific methods with modes of inquiry emanating from the humanities. By drawing on feminist and other interpretive approaches we advance three propositions that would facilitate such cross-disciplinary inquiries. (1) The need to accept that research can be insightful and valid even if it engages unobservable phenomena, and even if the results of such inquiries can neither be measured nor validated empirically; (2) The importance of examining processes of representation, such as visual depictions of emotions and the manner in which they shape political perceptions and dynamics; (3) A willingness to consider alternative forms of insight, most notably those stemming from aesthetics sources, which, we argue, are particularly suited to capturing emotions. Taken together, these propositions highlight the need for a sustained global communication across different fields of knowledge. Introduction
Published in the Journal of Narrative Politics, Vol 2, No 1, Sept 2015.
http://journalofnarrativepolitics.com/volume-2-number-1-september-2015/
MUNDO, IMAGEM, MUNDO – O ser humano cria imagens e as utiliza como meio para construir, entender e propagar ideias. Elas influenciam nas percepções e produções de realidades, gerando múltiplos entendimentos sobre as concepções possíveis de mundo. O processo de compreensão e construção de realidades está em constante movimento e transformação. Nos diversos contextos culturais estas visões coexistem, se sobrepõe, se intercruzam e se contestam. Estas constantes trocas entre o mundo, a imagem e o mundo geram um intenso fluxo que impacta as relações humanas. A imagem se torna então uma ferramenta de poder, pois ela tanto organiza como desestabiliza realidades.
Os artistas publicados nesta edição são: Akintunde Akinleye, Alban Lécuyer, Amy Elkins, Andrea Grüntzner, Arnau Blanch Vilageliu, Beto Shwafaty, Boris Eldagsen, Camila Maissune de Sousa, Cássio Campos Vasconcellos, Chang Kyun Kim, Claude Rouyer, Cristina Nuñez, Cynthia Greig, Daesung Lee, Ellen Jacob, Gili Lavy, Hrvoje Slovenc, Hua Weicheng, Ivar Veermäe, Joanna Bonder, Katerina Mistal, Katherine Longly, Léo Delafontaine, Luisa Puterman, Marcela Magno, Michael Lundgren, Michel Le Belhomme, Nicola Lo Calzo, Paul Thulin, Ricardo Alves Jr., Ricardo Burgarelli, Ricardo Muñoz Izquierdo, Simon Menner, The Cool Couple e Ulf Lundin.
Os autores dos textos convidados são:
André Azevedo da Fonseca /// A imagem nas mitologias políticas: heróis sagrados e vilões demoníacos na disputa pelo seu coração
Heloisa Murgel Starling /// Nada a dizer, só a mostrar: imagens, política e escrita da história
Marie José Mondzain ///A imagem zonarde ou a liberdade clandestina
Antonio Bispo dos Santos /// A influência das imagens na trajetória das comunidades tradicionais
Philipp Jeandrée /// “Desnaturalizando o visual”: o filme de ensaio como pensamento político em imagens
Roland Bleiker /// A política das imagens em relações internacionais
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The publication “World, Image, World – Notebooks of critical reflections on photography” is part of the research carried out for the production of the FIF BH 2015 and 2017. The book is divided into two notebooks: a textbook and a photobook. The articles were produced by thinkers and researchers from different areas of knowledge and life experience bringing a broad reflection on the image in the contemporary context. The photobook (…) and brings images of the works of 35 artists selected for the second edition of the festival. In 2015, the festival set out to raise questions and reflect on imagery production, its influences on the construction of different worldviews and how they impact human relations, through the concept: World, Image, World.
WORLD, IMAGE, WORLD – Human beings create images and use them as a means to build, understand, and spread ideas. Images influence the way we grasp and produce realities, generating manifold understandings about the world’s possible conceptions. The process of understanding and building realities is constantly moving and changing. In the varied cultural contexts, these views co-exist, overlap, crisscross and challenge each other. These ongoing exchanges between the world, the image, and the world bring about an intense flow, affecting human relations. The image then becomes a tool of power, since it both organizes and destabilizes realities. To actualize processes of critical thinking on the production of images and their influence in the world – this is what we want with FIF 2015.
The artists published in this edition are: Akintunde Akinleye, Alban Lécuyer, Amy Elkins, Andrea Grüntzner, Arnau Blanch Vilageliu, Beto Shwafaty, Boris Eldagsen, Camila Maissune de Sousa, Cássio Campos Vasconcellos, Chang Kyun Kim, Claude Rouyer, Cristina Nuñez, Cynthia Greig, Daesung Lee, Ellen Jacob, Gili Lavy, Hrvoje Slovenc, Hua Weicheng, Ivar Veermäe, Joanna Bonder, Katerina Mistal, Katherine Longly, Léo Delafontaine, Luisa Puterman, Marcela Magno, Michael Lundgren, Michel Le Belhomme, Nicola Lo Calzo, Paul Thulin, Ricardo Alves Jr., Ricardo Burgarelli, Ricardo Muñoz Izquierdo, Simon Menner, The Cool Couple e Ulf Lundin.
The guest authors are:
André Azevedo da Fonseca ///The image in political mythologies: sacred heroes and demonic villains in dispute over your heart
Heloisa Murgel Starling /// I needn’t say anything. Merely show: images, politics and the writing of history
Marie José Mondzain /// The zonard image or the clandestine freedom
Antonio Bispo dos Santos /// The influence of images on the path of tradicional communities
Philipp Jeandrée ///“Denaturalising the visual”:The essay film as political thinking in images
Roland Bleiker /// The Politics of Images in International Relations