Through The Looking Blast: Geopolitics and Visual Culture: Rachel Hughes

Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.
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Through the Looking Blast: Geopolitics and

Visual Culture
Rachel Hughes*
University of Melbourne
Abstract
It is often argued that the most commonly assumed visual mode in geopolitics is
the objective and disembodied gaze of the master geopolitical tactician. This is a
charge that has been levelled at both geopolitical figures such as national leaders,
and at academics who write about historical and present-day geopolitics.
However, recent work has diversified the way in which formal, practical and
popular geopolitical visions may be examined in critical geopolitical studies. Such
work calls for greater attention to be paid to popular visual cultures and to
geopolitical practice as a way of envisioning global space that is embodied and
subjective.
Introduction
At first glance, ‘geopolitics and visual culture’ might seem an odd title.
The two terms – ‘geopolitics’ and ‘visual culture’ – invoke quite different
associations. ‘Geopolitics’ conjures up the sombre arena of international
politics, populated by diplomats and world leaders and taken up with
the conduct of international agreements, sanctions and conflicts. ‘Visual
culture’ suggests all manner of images – personal photographs, maps, art
and advertising – as well as popular media forms like film and television that
we utilise by virtue of a sense of sight. But think for a moment about
how we come to know world events, or of the global and political nature
of the major image producers of our time, and the necessity of thinking
about geopolitics and visual cultures as related fields becomes more evident.
A brief example: as I write this review, my television reports the
resumption of six-party talks on the nuclear capabilities of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea). The report opens
with footage of various state representatives arriving in Beijing. These
figures emerge from diplomatic car convoys, their grave faces lit by the
news cameras. In a brief door-step interview, the US representative says
that he hopes the North Korean representatives have ‘room to move’ on
the issues that have been tabled. The Beijing scenes are followed by
now-familiar footage of a North Korean military parade (presumably in
© 2007 The Author
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Through the looking blast: geopolitics and visual culture 977
Fig. 1. North Korean soldiers march through Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square on the occasion
of the 55th anniversary of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), 9 September
2003. Source: AAP/AP.
Pyongyang, but not specified) involving personnel and large weaponry.

The report concludes with a brief image of President Kim Jong Il,
apparently presiding over the same military spectacle.
The two footage sequences contrast dramatically with one another;
the first providing images of righteous, open and reasonable dialogue
(apparently ‘led’ by the United States and ‘facilitated’ by China), while
the latter images communicate an indulgent if genuinely spectacular
showmanship, even brinkmanship. The contrasting images give a sense of
contrasting politics: (expansive) diplomatic debate versus (isolationist)
cultish dictatorship.
There is no doubt that Pyongyang’s parades are visually astounding
events, designed to showcase to DPRK citizens and other nation-states
the military strength and discipline of that state (Figure 1). There is also
no doubt that footage from inside the DPRK is more difficult to come
by for news media outlets than for other states. But the predilection for
footage of the parades in global news media reports has, I would argue,
much to do with the visual parallels (and, by extension, the geopolitical
parable) it affords. The DPRK footage references the historical films (and
filmic recreations) of the fascist rallies of the Third Reich (Figure 2).
Large, coloured, disciplined formations (the high kick is key here) – great
masses of loyal individuals – march in vast civic spaces. By virtue of this
short-hand visual resemblance, viewers are reminded of North Korea’s
status as a member state of an ‘Axis of Evil’. Kim Jong Il quite literally
appears on the screen as a ‘shadowy’ leader of a defunct ideology
(apparently state-stopping parades and pornographic regard for military
hardware are visual clues for the latter).
© 2007 The Author Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.x
978 Through the looking blast: geopolitics and visual culture
Fig. 2. Rally in Berlin’s Lustgarten on 30 January 1936, organised by the Sturmabteilung, the
paramilitary wing of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party). Source: Deutsches
Historisches Museum, Berlin.
But in a geopolitical climate dominated by the disastrous unravelling

of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, US ‘visibility’ as a superpower that is
simultaneously involved in other ‘operations’ must be seen, at least for the
time being, to be diplomatic and demure. Common to both the Beijing
and the Pyongyang footage are the highly visible icons of nation-states: a
small US flag fluttering a-front the diplomatic car, an enormous North
Korean flag made from hundreds of coloured bodies marching in
machinic unison. What is visible, and thus worthy of political note, rolls
as smoothly across the screen as a tank over parade ground, hour after
hour. As this brief example suggests, ways of seeing (televisual ‘seeing’,
cinematic ‘seeing’) and geographies of international relations are in part
constituted in and through each other.
The term ‘visuality’ is used to denote vision as something that is always
culturally mediated. ‘Visuality’ encompasses things that are visible to us as
well as the visual technologies and viewing positions that enable us to
see things in the ways that we do. It is possible to speak of different
visualities arising from, and helping to produce, different places and times.
Perhaps is also useful to unpack the term ‘geopolitics’ a little. The term
was coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjelln in 1899 to
refer to the harnessing of geographical knowledge to the aims of specific
nation-states (Toal [Ó Tuathail]1 and Agnew 2003, 457). Such ‘classical

geopolitics’ focussed on the so-called ‘permanent realities’ of the earth –
such as the location of different populations and resources, proximity
between states, the topography and climate of neighbouring or imperial
territories, and so on – for the strategic purposes of states and other
centres of power (Ó Tuathail 1996a, 17). The contemporary project
of ‘critical geopolitics’ has now significantly problematised classical
approaches. Rather than viewing geopolitics as a science of geographical
realities, critical geopolitics examines how it is that international politics
is imagined spatially or geographically, thus uncovering the politics
involved in ‘writing’ the geography of global space (Sharp 2005, 357).
A critical geopolitics approach draws attention to practical and formal
geopolitics of nation-states. ‘Practical geopolitics’ refers to the reasoning,
actions and statements of geopolitical figures and other actors engaged in
foreign policy-making, while ‘formal geopolitics’ refers to the prescrip-
tions for, and theories of, state conduct and relative power made by
intellectuals and institutions dedicated to statecraft (Ó Tuathail 2005a, 68).
Critical geopolitics also explores the ways in which geopolitical claims
and scripts are produced and circulated within popular cultural forms.
Studies of both practical and popular geopolitics have questioned the
role of visual representations and practices, as will be detailed below.
The relationship between geopolitics and visual culture has also been the
subject of a significant body of work by critical scholars located in inter-
national relations, political science, cultural studies, media studies and
critical journalism. Such scholarship examines how the otherwise taken-
for-granted ‘realities’ of geopolitical intervention, cooperation, resistance
and discord are made and known (if unevenly) through visual images and
practices. In this review, I first discuss the emergence of debate about the
role of vision in the conduct (and critique) of geopolitics initiated by
the 1996 publication of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s book Critical Geopolitics: The
Politics of Writing Global Space. I then turn to studies of the intersection
of popular images and geopolitical imperatives, considering represent-
ations found on screen and page. In the penultimate section I discuss
more recent work that attempts to move away from an emphasis on
images themselves and towards accounts of visual practices that license and
also undermine geopolitical power. Some concluding comments are
offered under the title ‘Looking on . . .’.
Panoramic Geopolitics
Explicit attention to the role of vision in geopolitics emerged with the
publication of Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics (1996a).2 Critical Geopolitics
sets out a number of different instances – within British imperial,
American wartime and American post-war periods – in which particular
ways of seeing have enabled particular global actions. Ó Tuathail is
concerned to introduce the notion of ‘ocularcentrism’, referring to the

privileging of vision at the expense of all other sensory modes in Western
modernity. More specifically, Ó Tuathail is concerned with the ways in
which a particular form of ocularcentrism – a ‘perspectivalist’ vision of
space – was essential to the territorial and governmental expansion of
European powers. This visuality began in the sixteenth century when
[S]pace was homogenized . . . and measured from a central point, which was
normally the seat of government or royal authority. This central point con-
stituted the fixed spectatorial position from which panoramic visions of official
state territory were constructed. (Ó Tuathail 1996a, 12)
Ó Tuathail’s opening example is a cartographic rendering of just such
a panoramic vision: a map of Ulster drawn in 1602 as part of the British
subjugation of Irish peoples and lands. By virtue of the ‘vision’ provided
by this map, ‘Ulster was provincialised (made into a province)’ for the
purposes and profit of the colonising power. Resistance to this vision was
swift; the cartographer was killed by some of the inhabitants of the
territory he had depicted. For Ó Tuathail, this violent moment occurs at
a threshold of modernity in which a religious ordering and viewing of
space ‘gave way to an early modern horizontal organization of space
associated with ideas of state sovereignty and the emerging state system’
(Ó Tuathail 1996a, 3) (Figure 3). Indeed, from this early modern era, we
inherit the ‘modern geopolitical imagination’: a vision of world political
space as a unitary whole subsequently divided into territorial units of
sovereign statehood (Agnew 1997). Such a ‘chess-board’ vision of global
space made it possible to authorise and strategise new campaigns of
geopolitical pre-eminence.
Late modernity’s visual technologies and geopolitics must also be
thought through simultaneously. As well as providing a view of space as
a stage for geopolitical action, late modern visual technologies (particu-
larly the camera) were quickly enlisted by state power in the control of
both peoples and territories. John Berger speaks of this when he notes
Within a mere 30 years of its invention as a gadget for an elite, photography
was being used for police filing, war reporting, military reconnaissance, porno-
graphy, encyclopaedic documentation, family albums, postcards, anthropo-
logical records (often, as with the Indians in the United States, accompanied
by genocide), sentimental moralising, inquisitive probing . . . new reporting
and formal portraiture. (Berger 2001, 286)
If the visual technologies of late modernity held out the promise of
witnessing the world, they also gave cause for concern. Photography
guaranteed a (visual) recollection of the past that was far more exacting,
(apparently) objective, transmissible and manipulable than private remem-
brance. Photographic images proved to be troubling things, and photo-
graphy an art that could be propagandist and cannibalistic; the intimate
violence of photography lay in its ability to confer great authority on
Fig. 3. Pacata Hibernia map of Cork, 1585–1600. This map was first published in Pacata
Hibernia (London, 1633) but is thought to date from around 1600. Pacata Hibernia deals with
the Elizabethan wars in Ireland and the panoramic perspectives provided by maps like this one
were significant to the successes of such military campaigns. Source: Cork City Libraries, Cork,
Ireland.
the one moment or scene that has been recorded in the photographic
image, such that that moment or scene comes to violently dominate all
others (McQuire 1998, 8). Photography as the purveyor of authoritative
scenes of the world gave rise to twentieth century photojournalism. While
some photojournalists worked to expose otherwise underexamined places,
conflicts and suffering, much photojournalism suffered the same ‘fixed
spectatorial position’ as earlier visual technologies in its readiness to show
the world back to a select audience within dominant nation-states in
ways that conformed with extant geopolitical scripts.
In the post-modern geopolitical world, new visual orders are at work.

Ó Tuathail proposes that there are two main ways in which the visuality
of geopolitics is significantly changed under post-modernity. The first
of these concerns the representation of space and territory. In the con-
temporary period, cartographic visualisations like maps have been super-
seded by telemetrical visualisations (telemetry being the capturing and
recording of data from a significant distance), most notably through
geographical information system (GIS) technologies. The second transfor-
mation pertains to the way that the drama of geopolitics is imagined.
While geopolitics was once imagined as a ‘theatre’ – involving the com-
ponents of stage, setting, actors and viewing perspectives (the audience
views the drama from a distance, likely from on-high) – this has been
replaced with the drama of simulations that are ‘post-perspectivist’ (Ó
Tuathail 1998, 28). A simulation is a modelling of the real, one that
nominally assists in training or understanding, a construction of a ‘like
world’ based on detailed knowledge of situations, relations and objects.
Leaving the question of simulation aside, it is true that contemporary
visual renderings of global political events often offer a ‘participant’s-eye
view’: a view that serves to collapse the distance between the viewer and
things seen. Neil Smith observes in relation to the Gulf War of 1990–
1991 that GIS technologies have altered the way in which modern warfare
is fought and ‘the way it is consumed by a global public transformed
into video voyeurs’ (Smith 1991, 257). Representationally, GIS returns us
to absolute (not relational) space, and promises an orgiastic fusion of
geographical knowledge and territorial control. Smith refers to this
situation as the reinstatement of ‘a mordant Newtonianism of space’ (Smith
1991, 263). In terms of the drama of geopolitics, it is possible to argue
that GIS enables the disappearance of war. The ‘perverse extravanganza’
(Smith 1991, 257) of clean-screen GIS representations of war permits
audiences to deny the violence that is unfolding (Smith 1991, 268).
Finally, charges of panoptic gazing have been brought against the
same authors who have been concerned to critique the masterful gaze of
formal geopolitical figures. Ó Tuathail’s book was the subject of an
author-meets-critics panel at the 1997 Association of American Geogra-
phers conference. The comments of panel respondents, and Ó Tuathail’s
(2000) reply, were subsequently gathered together in a Review Sympo-
sium in the journal Political Geography (pp. 345–346). While praising Ó
Tuathail’s analysis, panellists drew attention to a contradiction that lay,
as they saw it, at the heart of the book’s claims. Several argued that the
text itself presented a masterful view-from-above in order to critique just
these same tendencies in geopolitical (and particular geopoliticians’)
scriptings of the world. Joanne Sharp suggested there was no sense of the
author as an embodied critic, ‘only a relentless unveiling and revealing
of all geopolitical texts that he encounters’, adding that ‘simply to
describe a foreign policy is to engage in geopolitics and so normalise
particular world views’ (Sharp 2000b, 362). Neil Smith expressed dis-
comfort with what he saw as the ‘ahistorical aura’ of the charge of
ocularcentrism in Critical Geopolitics; if all hegemonic geopolitical gazes
and practices are resolutely perspectivalist, then ‘what might take the
place of this “visionism”?’ (Smith 2000, 368; see also Heffernan 2000).
On this issue, a third commentator suggested that the key task is not to
find an outside to or replacement for vision but to
[R]e-vision vision as an enabling power/knowledge medium that critics cannot
not have . . . In this way it can become understood as an embodied medium
of knowledge production which precisely because of its critical but partial
perspective calls out for a new kind of self-situating responsibility. (Sparke
2000, 375)
For Matthew Sparke and Sharp, the philosopher of science Donna
Haraway provides some direction on why vision cannot be dismissed and
must be engaged politically. Haraway has argued that, far from being
irredeemably panoptic, ‘vision can be good for avoiding binary opposi-
tions.’ ‘I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision,’ she
writes, ‘and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify
a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from
nowhere’ (Haraway 1991, 188). In responding to his critics, Ó Tuathail
affirmed that his project was not simply to show that geopolitics has a
visuality but to contend that one might ‘(ab)use geopolitics by turning
geopolitical vision against itself in order “to reveal the unseen of seeing” ’
(Ó Tuathail 2000, 72; see also Ó Tuathail 1996b). This is a model of
vigilance against any simple acceptance of the visual representations and
envisioning practices of key actors, institutions, political movements and
ourselves as critical geopoliticians. But the question of whether the
project of ‘turning geopolitical vision against itself ’ is possible, or even
meaningful, remains open.
Imaging Popular Geopolitics

As I have noted, a number of critical scholars of geopolitics have turned
to popular culture texts as a means to understanding geopolitics. Such
work considers geopolitics to be a social and cultural process by which
leaders and ordinary citizens make sense of the world (Toal [Ó Tuathail]
and Agnew 2003, 457). Periodicals such as Reader’s Digest and Time,
photojournalism, political cartoons and patriotic ‘blockbuster’ films
have tracked and contributed to international affairs from Cold War
geopolitical antagonisms to the rise of ‘New World Order’ geopolitical
visions (Dodds 1998, 2003, 2005; Ó Tuathail 2005b; Sharp 1998, 2000a;
Sidaway 1998). Two forms of popular visual representations and their
effects have been considered below in more detail: the lens imagery of
television, photography and film, and the drawn imagery of cartoons.
SCENES AND SCREENS
Televised events are arguably the dominant popular geopolitical visual

form of our time. In 1994, President Clinton gave a CNN-televised
question-and-answer session on global affairs. This event was ‘watched
by an audience of millions in more than two hundred countries and
territories’ and enlisted ‘160 international journalists from eighty
countries and additional journalists in four remote television locations
(Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Johannesburg and Seoul)’ (Ó Tuathail 1996a, 187).
Ó Tuathail writes that, at the time, the event ‘was indicative of the new
conditions of space and time shaping the conduct of US foreign policy,
conditions where particular events in remote corners of the world are
experienced immediately and instantaneously across the globe in real
time.’3 But the level of orchestration of this geopolitical event – the way
in which it self-consciously ushers the geopolitician into ‘screen’
spaces, like a spotlight upturned on a tightrope walker – seems oddly
old-fashioned in the context of post-2001 global media order. As many
have noted, the events of 11 September 2001 – and the subsequent
invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the United States and its allies –
have greatly altered the relationships between geopolitical practices and
figures, global media networks and various political collectives (see Dalby
2004; Gregory 2004b; Kirsch 2003; Ó Tuathail 2003). For one thing,
global media networks have been radically (re)enlisted in the promul-
gation of reactionary geopolitical visions.
In both old and new ways, the camera is again at war. Photographs
and photo-opportunities have proved indivisible from recent perform-
ances of US foreign policy. From Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
powerpoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council of
intelligence images as ‘proof ’ of Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass
Destruction (thus legitimising a new foreign policy of ‘pre-emption’),
to President George W. Bush’s 2003 ‘Top Gun’ appearance aboard an
American missile carrier off the San Diego coast to announce ‘Mission
Accomplished’ in Iraq, seeing into (other states) and being seen (to be
victorious) have been strategies heavily utilised in recent waging of war.
Of course, the spatial and imaginative circumscription of those who
produce images of war has a significant history. David Campbell reminds
us that
[A]t no stage in the post–World War II period has the US or UK military
operated without detailed media management procedures designed to
influence the information (specifically the pictorial) outcomes. (Campbell
2003, 102)
Beyond the everyday nature of televised war, geopolitical violence also
works through iconic (visual) forms. The idea that iconic images can
work to normalise and neutralise geopolitical violence is by no means
new; it is a claim that is still debated in both academic and popular

responses to Holocaust and other ‘atrocity’ photographs (see Campbell
2002a,b; Hughes 2003). As far as the current conflict in Iraq is
concerned, the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs are a key case in
point. Despite provoking wide outrage and condemnation, these
photographs – generally encountered via televisual medias – have not
prevented the absolution of individuals and institutions responsible for the
abuse (Gregory 2004a, 318). Derek Gregory is careful to note the dangers
of reducing those already objectified in the photographs to ‘objects of
Theory’. However, the ‘theatricalised “scene-setting” that involved
practices known to be illegal’ (Gregory 2004a, 322) is only part of the
politics of this case. The photographs are not simply ‘scenes recorded’, but
images constructed precisely for further visual use: enabling the enhance-
ment, broadcasting, sharing and memorialisation of the abuse. Questions
of how pornographic visual cultures were being referenced in these
images, or of how digital cameras and websites capable of hosting personal
photographs and videos are increasingly utilised by military personnel
should be raised in accounts of how these events came to pass. Visual
(geopolitical) cultures do not simply record war crimes, they also structure
such crimes as visual experiences and utilise the authority ceded to images
to further additional political ends.
It is precisely because vision is not innocent, and because images
command particular authority, that questions of ethics and truth become
superheated in the exertions of news media. David Campbell (2003)
reveals a central contradiction of the envisioning of war when he jux-
taposes two (visual) media events that occurred simultaneously in 2003.
In the first case, The Los Angeles Times published an image of a British
soldier in Basra that had been doctored by the photographer (two similar
images had been combined to improve the composition of the published
image). The controversy that subsequently arose in regard to the fabri-
cation of this image damaged the paper’s reputation and caused the
photojournalist responsible to be sacked (Campbell 2003, 103). In the
second case, the US military’s own video footage of their ‘rescue’ of a
young American soldier, Private Jessica Ryan, was fed to journalists
covering the Iraq War from the Coalition Media Center at the US Central
Command headquarters in Qatar. Widely circulated images from the
footage – depicting an injured Lynch prone on a stretcher and draped in
a US flag – were part of
[A]n account that was staged, insofar as the particular narrative that was
attached to and derived from the military footage of her release was con-
structed by the Pentagon’s media operation to convey a heroic and redemptive
meaning. (Campbell 2003, 104–105)
As Campbell argues in regard to these two visual incidents, the manipul-
ation of news images after the ‘shutter’ of the camera has ‘frozen reality’
is considered highly unethical, but the fabrication of war-related events in

front of cameras is accepted as a patriotic norm that is beyond contestation
and beneath public notice.
While still photography and photojournalism have long been popular
geopolitical sources, and televised footage has been central to the
conduct of war particularly since the Vietnam/America War conflict,
documentary and feature films have also been significant sources in the
writing of global space. Marcus Power and Andrew Crampton observe
that the film, amid the geopolitical struggles and ideological shifts of
the post–World War II period, helped the United States reinvent itself as
a benevolent defender of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ worldwide (Power
and Crampton 2005, 195). During the Cold War period,
Hollywood’s cinematic geographies . . . became a crucial ideological battle-
ground . . . Thus cinema was not some sort of crude and unwieldy foreign
policy tool but rather an important site of contestation around geopolitical
meanings and scriptings. (Power and Crampton 2005, 195)
Opportunities to capitalise on popular perceptions of the Soviet ‘Evil
Empire’ were, moreover, rarely passed up by Hollywood. As Klaus Dodds
has noted, the early James Bond film series – funded by both Hollywood
and British film industries – self-consciously mimicked and exaggerated
the diplomatic and intelligence intercourse of the post-war world, helping
define the Cold War zeitgeist (Dodds 2005, 271, 278). At a time of
declining British influence in a post-colonial world, the figure of James
Bond emerges to cement ‘a sense of imperial continuity’ as well as to
(re)introduce ‘various racial geographies of danger’ in its portrayal of
Anglo-American ‘friends and adversaries’ (Dodds 2005, 271–282).
Drawing significant popular audiences, these films reflected and
anticipated Cold War political allegiances and dangers. They also
spoke of the changing domestic and international profile of Britain
(Dodds 2005, 284). In the films,
[F]antasy was anchored to political detail and geographical background,
which added an air of realism to Bond’s missions and encounters . . . [and the
inclusion of ] places such as Turkey and the Caribbean played a significant
role in conveying Cold War intrigue and providing a stage for the evolving
Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ personified by Bond and [Felix] Leitner.
(Dodds 2005, 285)
Recent American films – as representations that have been cut adrift from
the co-constitutive dualisms of the Cold War – necessarily renegotiate
masculine identity, particularly patriotism (Sharp 1998, 153). Joanne
Sharp links the literal film script (film narrativisation) with the metaphoric
operation of such scripts as ‘a set of directions for the performance of
global politics’ (Sharp 1998, 159). The rewriting of American (geopo-
litical) masculinity in the ‘reel geographies’ of the new world order
occurs both through the exclusion of women characters from heroic
scripts in such films, and the structuring of narratives around heroic

individuals’ attempts to beat a feminised bureaucratic state structure
(Sharp 1998, 159–160). Ó Tuathail has also examined the project of the
‘remasculinisation’ of American geopolitical culture, albeit in post–9/11
American geopolitical culture, pointing to the ways in which the 2001
blockbuster Behind Enemy Lines is ‘yet another parable about the liberation
of a war-fighting masculinity from the constraints of multilateralism and
diplomacy in order to get the job done’ (Ó Tuathail 2005b, 361). Accord-
ing to Ó Tuathail, this particular film – one of few American financed
productions dealing with the Bosnian conflict – articulates an ‘everyman’
frustration with the confusion of the post–Cold War era, delivering to its
audience a Manichean world of clarity and moral certainty in which
the US military is the instrument of moral righteousness and interna-
tional justice (Ó Tuathail 2005b, 370). But as Gregory notes in the
context of the ‘War on Terror’: ‘Manichean geography is not only black
and white; it requires a vast grey area within which America’s enemies
can be represented and reduced to something less than fully human’
(Gregory 2004a, 320). The ‘greyscale’ of bloodless images of war is one
such ‘grey area’ (see also Campbell 2003; Graham 2005; Gregory 2004b;
Griffin 2004).
GEOPOLITICS DRAWN IN
But what of other-shaded interventions? The subtle tonalities of

political comment are also the purview of visual artists who prefer to
draw rather than ‘shoot’ their worldview. Cartoonists draw new rela-
tions between ourselves as geopolitical subjects and various situations.
Cartoonists grant us visual parody and satire in ways that are impos-
sible for photography. Dodds (1998) has considered ‘the selection,
siting and arrangement of visual themes’ in the work of British cartoonist
Steve Bell. Bell’s cartoons accompanied reports in the newspaper The
Guardian of events in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Bell
drew the Bosnia of external states’ imaginings – to show how geo-
political self-interest and ignorance were creating a wasteland where
lives were at stake and crimes being committed with impunity. Some
of his more provocative drawings were those that depicted Britain and
Bosnia as neighbouring geographical and social spaces. Such cartoons
comprise, ‘a powerful iconographic critique of ethnic cleansing,
Western inaction and the lack of recognition of the social proximity
of Bosnia’ (Dodds 1998, 175). Steve Bell, among many other political
cartoonists, remains an articulate commentator on current world
events and, more reflexively, on visual media’s own role in these
events (see www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/archive/stevebell/).
Heroes drawn to bolster hegemonic geopolitical identities are also
present in our domiciles. Jason Dittmer reads the constitution of
American geopolitical identity of the post-war and more recent periods

through the immensely popular ‘Captain America’ comic books. Dittmer
argues that the post–9/11 Captain presents an ambiguity around geopo-
litical supremacy in staging a ‘divergence between American ideals and
American practice’ (Dittmer 2005, 641–642). However, as an embodi-
ment of an idealised America who fights anonymous and placeless terrorist
Others, the successful adventures of the Captain reiterate ‘the dominance
of statebased power over nonstate actors by delegitimising those who are
voiceless in the territorially based state system’ (Dittmer 2005, 642). One
of the most intriguing elements of Dittmer’s analysis is the observation
that this ‘super-soldier serum’-induced superhero informs ‘the meaning
of an idealized America’ in part by ‘rescaling’ the territorial symbols of
such an America to the individual reader (Dittmer 2005, 641). As such
the reader (usually a child or young adult) might ‘fantasize about being
Captain America, connecting themselves to the nation in their imagina-
tions’ (Dittmer 2005, 627), their (imaginative) embodiment performing
(Captain) America’s supremacy. What then of emotional, habitual and
virtual geopolitics? Recent work considers how geopolitics might be
thought about as a visual practice involving emotion, habit and virtuality,
and not simply as a projection-room of popular, if contested, images.
The Observant Practice of Geopolitics

Acts of enframing, supervising, surveying, hiding, reporting and demar-
cating are everyday practices routed through ‘the visual’ that are used to
produce and bolster geopolitical power. These visual and more-than-
visual activities are part of ‘the constant hum of practices and their attendant
territorialisations within which geopower ferments and sometimes boils
over’ (Thrift 2000, 385). Even the most banal talk that couches discussion
of geopolitical ‘realities’ in the public domain – statements like ‘so you
see’ and ‘it must be seen that’ – lend legitimacy to the idea that, for a
chosen few, the world is transparent and awaits their moral action. Such
phrases rely on the subtle coercion of the visual – in what ‘we see there’
– when situations are far from transparent or inevitable.4
Fraser MacDonald (2006) points to the limits of thinking about the
‘ocularcentrism’ of geopolitics, whereby the significance of vision is
reduced to the philosophical model of Cartesian perspectivalism. Looking,
he argues, is not just a metaphor for geopolitical power; the practice of
looking (gazing, glancing, peaking, gawking, looking away) can itself be
an expression of geopolitical power. Drawing on Berger’s Ways of Seeing
(1972), he argues that something as simple as looking at an object is to
situate oneself in relation to it. He asks that we take seriously ‘the active
character of observant practice’ as a ‘looking-and-listening’, a watching
that is ‘situated, embodied and connective with other sensory registers’.
MacDonald regards Britain and America’s first nuclear missile through the
story of a young space-enthusiast’s transgression of a missile test fire in

Scotland’s Outer Hebrides in 1959. For MacDonald, the ‘strategic vision’
of post-war Britain, the ‘monumental visibility’ of nuclear weapons as
deterrents to war, and teenager Duncan Lunan’s experience of watching
the firing of the Corporal missile must all be considered part of a larger
visuality of post-war geopolitics.
If we are to take seriously the notion of a more-than-visual geopolitics,
analysis of a greater variety of subjects, events, sites and forms of geopo-
litical agency appears imminent (see MacDonald et al. forthcoming).5
Sean Carter and Derek McCormack have already argued for an analysis
of film that understands it to be more than a way of scripting and seeing
the world. They suggest that while scripting and seeing involves represen-
tation, films and film images also work beyond representational logics as
ways of feeling. The key term used in their article is ‘affect’, being that
which is ‘by no means reducible to personal emotion, but designates
something both more and less’ and, after Brian Massumi, can be thought
of as a ‘register of sensible intensity’ emerging from relations between
things (Carter and McCormack 2006, 234). The authors’ particular
interest is in cinematic and geopolitical ‘intervention’: the case of US
‘intervention’ in Somalia in 1993, and the cinematic ‘intervention’ of the
2002 blockbuster Black Hawk Down (a film that references the 1993 events
in Somalia) in the wider social field. They argue that cinematic interven-
tion amplifies and modulates the affect of geopolitical intervention, and
vice versa (Carter and McCormack 2006, 230). Films as ‘moving pictures’
take up their double meaning in such accounts, while the notion of
affective amplification may be extended to other geopolitical events and
forms of visual culture.
Digital games, arguably the pop culture form most closely associated
with ‘real’ war and surveillance technologies, also make new geopolitical
practices possible. In the most immediate sense, current war-themed
games assist in constructing particular places and types of spaces (cities,
desert landscapes) ‘as little more than receiving points for US military
ordnance’ (Gregory in Graham 2005, 6). Stephen Graham’s observation
regarding the US military’s purpose-built ‘Islamic’ cities is also true of
much urban space seen in war games:
[T]his shadow urban system works like some bastard child of Disney. It
simulates, of course, not the complex cultural, social or physical realities of
Middle Eastern urbanism, but the imaginative geographies of the military
and theme-park designers who are brought in to design and construct it.
(Graham 2005, 6)
But it is the looking of (as well as the look of) such digital games that
builds and expresses geopolitical power. This is the looking of the tactical,
‘first-person shooter’ ‘citizen-soldier’ (Stahl 2006) and, later and less
playfully, of the foot soldiers of Bush, Blair and Howard on duty in
Fig. 4. Screenshot from the digital game America’s Army.
Afghanistan and Iraq (see Power 2007, 271).6 The incessant opening of
space-upon-space (generic Islamic city upon generic Islamic city, desert
battleground upon desert battleground) afforded by game-play views
produces not so much a condition or affect of geopolitical ‘vertigo’
(Ó Tuathail 1996a) as one of ‘horizontigo’7: a sort of unbounded, self-
generating field that both stimulates and exhausts geopolitical action
(see Figure 4). Such games may also promote a view of the world in
which the true role of the state is to conduct secret missions out of sight
and out of mind (Stahl 2006, 119, my emphasis). Digital games allow
players to occupy positions in which – in terms of the militarisation of
domestic space and in terms of popular ‘secret mission’ narratives – they
manfully perform the state’s ‘out of sight’ work.
Games ‘refigure the experience of history by way of an anticipatory
impulse’, providing a way of ‘inhabiting history as “game time” ’ (Crogan
in Stahl 2006, 119). The idea that ‘gametime collapses the temporal space
between real-world events and the ability to “play” them’ (Stahl 2006,
119) brings us closer to an awareness of games as cultural forms that
measure out the interactive nature of contemporary geopolitics. The CNN
‘I-Report’ and BBC World ‘your pictures’ services – whereby viewers may
submit their own ‘eyewitness’ images – are further examples of an inter-
active visual geopolitics. Accessible from global media outlet websites,
these services allow individuals to upload images from personal commu-
nication devices for potential use in news reports. The CNN ‘Breaking
News I-Report’ site reads: ‘What’s happening where you are? Is news
happening in front of your eyes? Pull out your camera and I-Report it
for CNN.’ 8 Viewers become more than news consumers: they are also
news makers, news players, so-called ‘citizen journalists’. This is a minor
example of a larger cultural transformation from ‘the sedative of the
spectacle [to] the stimulant of game time’ (Stahl 2006, 120).
Digital games return us to a consideration not only of what images or
visions show of the world, but also to what images or visions do in the
world. War-related digital games do not simply represent ‘disdain for
diplomacy and preference for force’ (Stahl 2006, 118), they provide for
the embodied repetition (and perhaps amplification) of such feelings. We
might usefully think about how ‘game space’ – a space of simulation that
allows ‘interactivity’ with particular types of events and places – is changing
the ways that geopolitics is practiced and understood. In his recent reading
of America’s Army – the hugely successful multiplayer game developed by the
US military as a ‘recruitment and outreach tool’ – Marcus Power argues
for attention to games ‘as affective assemblages through which geopolitical
sensibilities emerge’ (Power 2007, 284). Games provide ‘a space of cyber-
deterrence’ in which it is possible to ‘play through the anxieties that attend
uncertain times and new configurations of power’ (Power 2007, 271).
It is constant affective stimulation, which may temporarily become
qualified as emotions such as anger, sympathy, horror and (unspeakable)
enjoyment, that suffuses the state of (geopolitical) exception as the norm.
Put another way, where once international accord was threatened by a
passing crisis or conflict, it now seems that crisis is only ever briefly
threatened by the end of such stimulation, ‘game over’. Tracking US
military expansionism and its implications for capital from the nineteenth
century to the present, the Retort collective recently identified this
situation as one of ‘permanent war’:
The repeated use of military force, to whatever immediate end, serves . . . to
normalize itself, and to keep the machine running. (Boal et al. 2005, 82, emphasis
in original)
The imperial machine spoken of in this quotation is in no small part a
vision machine but, I would argue, a largely unspectacular one. In their
own words:
Frequent war is a way of rendering visible . . . the threat against the nation
which, because of its falsity, cannot otherwise be shown. (Boal et al. 2005, 102)
Looking on . . .
Critical scholars of geopolitics have long drawn attention to geopolitical
‘visions’, ‘images’, international political ‘scenes’ and ‘imaginative geogra-
phies’ to show how these representations and constructions are integral
to the functioning of geopolitical orders. While not all such studies have
been explicitly framed as enquiries into situated visualities, others have
worked with the understanding that vision ‘as a representational practice
which affirms certain worlds and not others . . . is something which social
and political critics cannot not want’ (Ó Tuathail 2000, 391). Diverse
forms of visual culture and an array of visual practices – always entwined
with other cultures and processes – are enlisted in the development,
deployment and resistance of geo-power. These variously scaled geopo-
litical cultures produce and disseminate ways of seeing the world: such
vision is never spent, it is continually re-elected and adapted to new
geopolitical circumstances. Recognition of different types of agents,
embodied ‘visions’ and affects so far left out of the frame of critical
geopolitics analyses might go some way towards redressing this imbalance.
By recognising that vision works within a larger perceptual field – and as
such remains worthy of our critical consideration – we may attend to
other geopolitical visions that matter, critically, to many.
Short Biography
Dr. Rachel Hughes is a lecturer in Geography at the University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Fraser MacDonald, Don Mitchell and Joanne Sharp
for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this review. All
mistakes and omissions remain my responsibility alone.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Rachel Hughes, School of Social and Environmental Inquiry,
221 Bouverie St., University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia. E-mail:
hughesr@unimelb.edu.au.
1
On the anti-imperialist gesture of publishing under his Gaelic name ‘Ó Tuathail’ over the
anglicised version ‘Toal’, see Ó Tuathail (2000, 388–389).
2
Studies of specific global visualisations were nascent in political geography before this time.
Denis Cosgrove’s study of the iconographic and geopolitical significance of photographs of
planet Earth from space is one example of such work (Cosgrove 1994).
3
For a discussion of a similar event held in Ohio in 1998 and the potential for the ‘scripted media
stage’ to become ‘a more fully public space and a protest platform’, see D’Arcus (2006, 167–170).
4
For a geographer’s perspective on questions of vision and ontology, see Kearnes (2000).
5
In the context of landscape, John Wylie has subjected what he calls ‘Cartesian spectatorial
epistemologies’ to rigorous critique. Wylie problematises the distinction between ‘vision and
[the] visible, seeing and thing seen’ (Wylie 2002, 454) and, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and Gilles Deleuze, produces an account of gazing on landscape ‘as an eventful actualisation
and distribution of selves and landscape’ (Wylie 2006).
6
The politics and effects of such viewing are by no means fixed or predetermined. While it
could be argued that game-play vision elides material and social complexity and rewards rapid
and pre-emptive (see-it-shoot-it) violence, the messy realities of soldiers’ service captured on
personal imaging devices (perhaps with game-play vision in mind) might also be understood in
terms of the ‘antigeopolitical eye’. Ó Tuathail identifies the ‘antigeopolitical eye’ as belonging
to ‘dissident diplomats and courageous reporters’ whose ‘ground-level travelling eye’ allowed

Bosnia to remain ‘morally visible’ in an otherwise evacuated political space (Ó Tuathail 1996a,
220–221, see also Ó Tuathail 1996b).
7
I am indebted to writer Corinne Berry for the concept of ‘horizontigo’.
8
The fine-print terms for ‘I-Report’ read in part: ‘By submitting your material [ . . . ] you hereby
grant to CNN and its affiliates a nonexclusive, perpetual, worldwide license to edit, telecast,
rerun, reproduce, use, syndicate, license, print, sublicense, distribute and otherwise exhibit the
materials you submit, or any portion thereof, as incorporated in any of their programming or
the promotion thereof, in any manner and in any medium or forum, whether now known or
hereafter devised, without payment to you or any third party.’ The use of the term ‘edit’ but
not ‘change’ or ‘manipulate’ concurs with Campbell’s (2003) observation regarding the sanctity
of the digital image that has no ‘material’ referent (not, at least, in the traditional sense of the
photographic ‘negative’).
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Through The Looking Blast: Geopolitics and Visual Culture: Rachel Hughes

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Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.

Through the Looking Blast: Geopolitics and

Pyongyang, but not specified) involving personnel and large weaponry.

But in a geopolitical climate dominated by the disastrous unravelling

nation-states (Toal [Ó Tuathail]1 and Agnew 2003, 457). Such ‘classical

concerned to introduce the notion of ‘ocularcentrism’, referring to the

In the post-modern geopolitical world, new visual orders are at work.

Imaging Popular Geopolitics

SCENES AND SCREENS

Televised events are arguably the dominant popular geopolitical visual

new; it is a claim that is still debated in both academic and popular

is considered highly unethical, but the fabrication of war-related events in

scripts in such films, and the structuring of narratives around heroic

But what of other-shaded interventions? The subtle tonalities of

American geopolitical identity of the post-war and more recent periods

The Observant Practice of Geopolitics

story of a young space-enthusiast’s transgression of a missile test fire in

Fig. 4. Screenshot from the digital game America’s Army.

© 2007 The Author Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.x

© 2007 The Author Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.x

© 2007 The Author Geography Compass 1/5 (2007): 976–994, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00052.x

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