Peace, Complexity, Visuality

This book argues that we can capitalize on the tolerance of ambiguity-enhancing potentialities inherent in visual images – their non-coherence – and thus increase our capability of tolerating ambiguities. Studying international relations equals studying ambiguity. The international system is complex, and where there is complexity, there is also ambiguity. Crucially, in a world saturated not only with ambiguities but also with visual images, it is mandatory to think ambiguity and visuality together. The authors analyze the constructive and peaceful potentialities of ambiguities through an exploration of journalistic imagery in the context of post-war Bosnia and post-siege Sarajevo. The book is a theoretically sophisticated, yet accessible, and politically relevant exercise in inter-disciplinary thinking, uniquely combining literature on complexity, ambiguity and visuality thus offering important readings for international relations, peace and conflict research, and security studies. Rasmus Bellmer is based in Berlin and currently works for the Berghof Foundation. He holds a master’s degree in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research. From 2020 to 2022, he worked as a project researcher in the research project Peace Videography, funded by Kone Foundation, and was affiliated with the Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland. His research was published in journals such as International Political Sociology, Peacebuilding and Journal of Peace Education. Frank Möller is a peace and conflict researcher residing in Tampere (Finland). He is affiliated with Tampere University as Docent in Peace and Conflict Research. From 2020 to 2022, he was in charge of the project Peace Videography, funded by Kone Foundation, and in 2023, he received a scholarship grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. Möller is the co-editor of Art as a Political Witness (2017) and the author of Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship and the Politics of Violence (2013), Peace Photography (2019) and numerous journal articles and book chapters.