Chromatology of Security: Introducing Colours To Visual Security Studies

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research-article2015
SDI0010.1177/0967010615585106Security DialogueAndersen et al.: Chromatology of security
Article
Security Dialogue
2015, Vol. 46(5) 440–457
Chromatology of security: © The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0967010615585106
security studies sdi.sagepub.com
Rune S Andersen
Independent scholar, Denmark
Juha A Vuori
University of Helsinki, Finland
Xavier Guillaume
University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
The agenda of this article is to highlight how security becomes intelligible, is enacted, contested and
(re)appropriated in part through colour use. Even though colours are a natural phenomenon, their
meanings are societal products, and part of our constructed visibilities. These can be investigated through
chromatology, the study of colour in relation to people. We illustrate this by applying multimodal social
semiotics to view highly securitized sites, those of concentration and enemy-combatant camps. We show
that the colour uses instituted to classify and govern prisoners not only structure the inmates socially, but
also become vehicles for resisting the security discourses associated with them. The aim of the article is to
highlight how security and international relations are intersemiotic relations, and to open up the study of
security to an expanded range of semiotic modalities and methods of inquiry.
Keywords
Colours, critical security studies, (in)security, visual security, visual semiotics
Introduction
The aim of this article is to put forth a programmatic call and a methodological statement for the
chromatological investigation of security.1 Chromatology, the study of colours in relation to peo-
ple, can comprise multiple theoretical and methodological research programmes, and can add to
Corresponding author:
Xavier Guillaume, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH89LD, United Kingdom.
Email: xavier.guillaume@ed.ac.uk
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Andersen, Vuori and Guillaume 441
the emergent engagement with visualities in the field of security studies (see Andersen et al., 2015).
The present article concentrates on one specific methodological approach that allows for the inves-
tigation of how colours are used in, and become a part of, the enactment of security. We believe that
such an emphasis can further our understanding of security as a system of signification (Barthes,
[1964] 1973) that is not necessarily limited to a delimited set of actors that define – through lan-
guage and practices – what security is. The chromatological analysis of security as a site, encoun-
ter, enactment or institution provides for the study of visual modalities that are not limited to
individual or sequential visual forms or shapes (drawings, photographs, videos, etc.), but that are
an inevitable aspect of all material security practices. Such an approach broadens the visual study
of security beyond the current visual modalities at the heart of previous visual analysis put forth in
security studies (e.g. Campbell and Shapiro, 2007; Hansen, 2011), and more broadly in the field of
international studies.
Colours are an important locus of research for societal issues because, through the significations
attached to them, colours (can be used to) do things in a performative sense. Colours, for instance,
are able to provide meaning to objects that would not otherwise have clear meanings (e.g. flags; see
Vuori et al., forthcoming). Furthermore, colours are a genealogical indicator of evolution in modes
of being and action in specific institutions (e.g. the role of military uniforms on the battlefield; see
Guillaume et al., 2015). Importantly, the study of colour use enables us to understand the affordances
of systems of signification, and thereby practices such as security. Indeed, the constraints and
affordances of colour use differ from those of text or sound (Kress, 2010). This makes colour use a
central and efficient semiotic vehicle in many systems of signification that participate in the classi-
fication, hierarchization and marking of individuals, groups, ideas, values, and so on, into specific
symbolic categories (e.g. class, gender, nation, race or security). Colours can be used both to rein-
force and to tone down other dimensions of a system of signification such as security, whether these
are linguistic, material or practical. Central to our argument is that colour is both materially and
historically distinct from other vehicles of meaning production – it has different semiotic affordances
and can therefore be used to project or mark meaning in different ways than, for example, speech or
images. This also means that colour use can be researched as an aspect of the enactment and appro-
priation of security in ways that are different from, but do not exclude, those visual security studies
have previously concentrated on. As the visual study of security becomes more established, there is
also a need to become more nuanced in terms of visual modalities of security. The present article is
a first step along this path, wherein lies its main contribution.
Indeed, the investigation of colour use, and the evolution/reconfiguration of meanings attached
to colours, enables us to engage in longitudinal and transversal analyses of societal and political
connotations of certain phenomena or things that relate to colours. In effect, the meanings attached
to colours not only evolve through time, but also circulate across the symbolic boundaries of mul-
tiple political and societal groups. From such a perspective, the examination of colour use as a part
of systems of signification (Barthes, [1964] 1973), systems of the sensible (Rancière, [2008] 2011),
actor networks (Law, 2009) or forms of practice (Bourdieu, 1990) provides windows into societies,
institutions (e.g. the police or the military) and their practices (e.g. social sorting or the perfor-
mance of norms) that pertain to security.
Colour use can be approached from a multitude of angles. While the material and optical phys-
ics or the psychological and physiological aspects of colour perception are important aspects of
how colour comes about, the present article focuses on the visual semiotic games and international
political sociology of colour use: like Wittgenstein, ‘we do not want to establish a theory of colour
(neither a physiological one nor a psychological one), but rather the logic of colour concepts’
(Wittgenstein, 1977: §22). Furthermore, our intent is to propose not the deciphering of a general
semiotics of colour use, but the examination of particular ones that are at play in certain enactments
442 Security Dialogue 46(5)
or sites that pertain to security. Indeed, we cannot determine the meaning of a particular colour
always and everywhere, as colours are continuously used in political communication and meaning-
making in a variety of conventional ways. Yet these conventions and the codifications they rely on
can be detected, which aids us in understanding how they are interlaced with power and politics.
As Michel Pastoureau notes, ‘colours foremost are conventions, tags, social codes. Their primary
function is to distinguish, to classify, to associate, to oppose, to hierarchise’ (Pastoureau, 2010: 69;
see also Minah, 2008: 3). Moreover, a colour is ‘an intellectual category, an ensemble of symbols’
(Pastoureau and Simonnet, 2005: 112).
The examination of colour use as part of the enactment and (re)appropriation of security contrib-
utes to the growing literature on the visual analysis of security, which has become a feature of criti-
cal studies of security to the extent that visual analytics are now included in methods books (e.g.
Vuori, 2013; Moore and Farrands, 2013; Andersen et al., 2015). There is indeed a need to include
visual aspects into the investigation of security, as ‘language and visual forms of semiosis differ
from each other in a fundamental sense’ (O’Halloran, 2008: 447): linguistic texts tend to unfold their
meaning progressively along syntagmatic chains, while the whole of a visual image tends to be
perceived before its individual parts. While, for example, speech happens as sequences of time,
images are ‘displayed’ in framed spaces or surfaces (Kress, 2011: 55). Visual semiotic tends to be
continuous, sensorial and spatial, whereas language is often abstract, discontinuous, linear and gov-
erned by syntactic conventions (Saint-Martin, 1995). Accordingly, systems of meaning in visual
imagery are not the same as systems of meaning in language systems (Barthes, [1964] 1973).
Although there is increasing interest in the visual study of security, these investigations have
largely, and quite paradoxically, remained achromatic, and have concentrated on the forms, shapes
or sequences of images (e.g. Campbell and Shapiro, 2007; Hansen, 2011). This may be due to the
foregrounding of certain semiotic modes (e.g. language) and the backgrounding or ‘automatiza-
tion’ of others (Halliday, 1982), whereby elements such as colour ‘appear so normal and natural as
to become invisible’, or because colour is taken as ‘ideologically neutral [since] it can be seen to
have served a wide range of aesthetic and symbolic purposes’ (Gage, 1990: 518). Therefore,
changes and shifts in colour use are taken for granted (Iedema, 2003: 40). Yet colour is a major
aspect of visuality in general and visual communication in particular: the semiotic mode of colour
can have a major bearing on how the meaning of a sign is made, how a certain object attains a role
in a network or how a practice is operated. Indeed, political communication is replete with colour
and metaphors of colour, which is why scholars engaged in the analysis of politics cannot remain
blind to them or to treat colour as ‘noise’ (Rancière, 2009: 24–25). Instead, we argue, security
scholars need to include colour as an aspect of dividing the sensible within practices and dis-
courses. Strikingly, colour use has many practical applications for the practitioners of security, as
colour is a powerful shorthand in communication (e.g. military and security uniforms) and can be
used in functional ways to make something visible (e.g. reflective neon vests), to obscure (e.g.
camouflage), to relay complex information efficiently (e.g. maps), to communicate identities (e.g.
colour-marked protest movements) and to connect ideas with objects (e.g. corporate identities).
Thus, the agenda of this article is to highlight how security becomes intelligible, and thus is
enacted or appropriated, in part through the use of colours. As a first step, we discuss the reason
why a chromatology of security is necessary. We do this by situating the chromatology of security
in the wider scholarly engagement with colours in society, and within the field of visual culture
studies. From this we move on to propose a methodological approach to colour use in security stud-
ies: multimodal social semiotics (for other approaches, see Guillaume et al., 2015; Vuori et al.,
forthcoming). This approach to colour use as a crucial modality in the intelligibility, and thus
enactment and (re)appropriation, of security in specific circumstances or sites unfolds in three
steps of investigation: (1) colour can be a particular visual modality in human communication
(Kress, 2011), whereby (2) colour use can be an element of systems of signification in certain fields
(Barthes, [1964] 1973), which in turn are part of (3) systems of the sensible (Rancière, [2008]
2011) that modulate what is considered sensible rather than noise, what can be seen, and so on; this
allows us to make sense of colour use and the politics it involves in relation to security. Finally, we
offer an empirical example of such multimodal social semiotics by analysing colour use in highly
securitized sites – enemy-prisoner and concentration camps. The added value of including colour
use in the study of security comes from understanding the affordances it enables beyond other
modalities of meaning-making.
Why a chromatology of security?

To offer an analytics of colour use – that is, of the relationships between security, colour and people
– it is first necessary to get a sense of what colours are. Overall, our visual experiences are inter-
twined with physiological, cultural, social, political and emotional dimensions (Arnkil, 2008: 15).
It is therefore good to distinguish between the physical reasons for colours and the forms in which
humans physiologically experience colours from the social, cultural and emotional aspects of col-
our use. Colours appear to humans in countless ways. Just as colours can be made to mean many
things, the one and the same colour can come about for a variety of reasons. It is also good to real-
ize the differences between the optical and the material production of colour impressions. In most
Indo-European languages, but not limited to them, the etymological root for the term ‘colour’ is
linked to a skin, an envelope, to something that wraps or covers (Pastoureau, 2010: 238–239). In
this sense, colour is material; Fanon’s ([1952] 1991) Black Skin, White Masks eminently points to
the duality of colour in terms of both its materiality (skin) and its operational importance in per-
forming racial and political hierarchies (mask). Yet colours are also (a spectrum of) light, percep-
tible either with the naked human eye or through various instruments. In this regard, the perennial
questions are those Goethe posed to Newtonian colour physics: whether colours exist indepen-
dently of humans or whether they reside in human perception, and in which physiological part of
the perceptive process colour resides. Here, the scientific study of colours has shifted from physics
and optics to psychology and the physiological study of vision in humans and animals, which
emphasizes ‘culture’s boundaries with visual nature’ (Mitchell, 1995: 543). Currently, some take
colours to ‘reside’ in the brain rather than in physical objects, light or the eye: we do not see with
our eyes but with our brain (Zeki, 1999).
While such physical, optical and psychological viewpoints are important, colours not only mat-
ter for human practices, but are also co-produced through them. To Saunders (1998: 702), the ‘co-
production of colour science and “colour” stresses that what is currently called “colour” is
inseparable from its processes of manufacture in the laboratory and pragmatic realization in “the
world”’. This suggests that it is precisely the ‘techniques, experiments, apparatus, measurement …
entities, objects, subjects, practices’ that ‘make colour real’ (Saunders, 2002: 2). Colour is a socio-
technical production, where ‘the historiography and historical epistemology of colour’, as well as
‘material, political and social historical concerns’ are of relevance (Saunders, 2002: 8). Colour is a
part of techno-cultural systems and ‘entanglements’ of science, art and security (Forsyth, 2014:
128). Colour use is implicated in practices that ‘not only detect objects and people but also
produce’ them with certain statuses and as ‘surveillant subjects’ (Harris, 2006: 102).
An analytics of colour use is ‘in essence a trans-documentary field of observation’ (Pastoureau,
2010: 240). Colours are a social fact; more so, they are a fact of society. Colour use, and its attached
symbolic functions or ‘modal affordances’ (Jewitt, 2011b: 24), is thus linked both to material
aspects, such as the ability to produce certain colours, and to social and cultural aspects. In
Pastoureau’s (2010: 240) terms, ‘More than nature, pigment, the eye or the brain, it is society that
“makes” colour, which gives it its definition and its meaning, which sets its codes and values,
which organises its practices and determines its issues’. In our everyday life, colours are constantly
used to draw our attention to, or divert it from, certain things. At the same time, colours are used to
signify and communicate messages, genres and identities. Therefore, what is important to keep in
mind here, and what we want to concentrate on in this contribution, is that one of the most central
features of colour use is meaning-making: how colours operate in societies is both learned and
constantly reconfigured. What colours mean is not an intrinsic feature of colour. In this article, we
precisely engage with the question of what is at stake in reading the ambiguity, presence or absence,
use and transformation of colours in the enactment and (re)appropriation of security. Studying
colours is studying the social (Albers, [1963] 2006: 52) and, as we argue here, studying the politi-
cal within security.
Even though colours have been and continue to be central in symbolic practices, and even
though colour is ‘undoubtedly, a very important resource of visual communication’ (Kress and Van
Leeuwen, 2002: 347), colours have largely been absent from or taken for granted in research
beyond the natural sciences and philosophy. Indeed, in their semiotic treatment of colour, Kress
and Van Leeuwen (2002: 347; see also Van Leeuwen, 2011: ix) note that they pass over colour in
their seminal work on Reading Images (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) in favour of ‘design’.
When viewed through the social sciences, our social worlds seem to lack coloration; they appear
as achromatic. They are neither shades of grey nor black-and-white, for these would already pro-
vide them with symbolic dimensions encapsulated by the symbolism of these colours and their
semiotic associations. Even when we take but one of the most complex analysis of our societal
processes, namely Pierre Bourdieu’s (1979) La distinction, colours are absent from an analysis that
precisely centres on what distinguishes individuals through their symbolic capital, among which
dress codes and practices are central (Pastoureau, 2010: 37–41). This absence is striking, as clothes
– and their colours – are often used to embody standpoints on identity and politics, and to demar-
cate social groups (e.g. class and popular subcultures; see Archer and Stent, 2011: 119).
The same absence of a systematic or sustained treatment can be found in central works in visual
studies, such as Rose’s (2007) otherwise comprehensive and elucidating Visual Methodologies.
Engagements with colour are largely absent in the broader literature on public communication and
social movements too (Elliott, 2007: 522). Until the late 1970s, this was the case even in the most
obvious fields of study, such as art, painting or clothing history (Gage, 1993, 1999; Pastoureau,
2010: 112–114). With the absence of colour from much of social science investigation, it is hardly
surprising that the field of security studies has not paid much attention to its uses either.
The very existence of colours, and whether we experience them independently of our specific
socialization, has long been the topic of discussions in philosophy, physics, anthropology and cog-
nitive science. Colour vision plays a pre-eminent role as a problem for (and thus an agent in the
emergence of) cognitive science (Saunders, 1998: 698), as well as in the emergence of modern,
Newtonian, physics, that separates the object studied from the perceiver. This separation provoked
the ire of Goethe, whose Farbenlehre teaches that both those impressions originating in the outer
world (like Newton’s electromagnetic spectrum) and those originating in the inner world of the
mind and perception (like the afterimages of complementary colour that occur after looking at a
monochrome colour) are colours in equal right (Grandy, 2005: 33, 35). The liveliest debate, some-
what counter-intuitively, has not been on this Goethe–Newton disagreement on whether, and how,
colours exist, and whether they exist independently of the observer (see Grandy, 2005). The main
debate has instead been waged on the relation between language and colour (see Batchelor, 2008:
18). Main foci here have been the semantics of colour and which (if any) colour concepts exist in
different languages – that is, whether ‘colour universals’ and a transcultural ontology of colour
exist (Wierzbicka, 2008).
Finally, it is worth noting the discussion on colour in two fairly large literatures, namely, those
on race and racism, and gender. The former literature has only recently begun to make contact with
security and international relations scholarship (see Anievas et al., 2015). This research has
approached colour as something that is given – visible on the skin of people – yet open to inscrip-
tion, and from that starting point examined its social effects, for example, how stereotypes and
prejudices are attached to certain colours. Colour constitution has a part in this research, but new
colour categories are seen to develop and acquire meaning from pre-existing beliefs attached to
whiteness, non-whiteness and the variations in between. Such tendencies are viewed to result in
what Pierre (2008: 23) calls ‘pigmentocracy’. The study of skin bleaching in Ghana has shown how
‘the rendering of whiteness through its visible properties, white skin, specifically white face’
(Pierre, 2008: 19) is attached to a discursive hierarchy in which ‘whiteness – specifically white
skin – represented virtue and civilization’ (Pierre, 2008: 18), and is expressed in how ‘light skin
colour is directly linked to social and economic privilege, in addition to aesthetic privilege’ (Pierre,
2008: 23).
This research has spun off an interesting literature that investigates how beliefs about skin col-
our, temper and race influence the overall relationship with colours (Batchelor, 2008: 18; Mirzoeff,
2009: 49–52). The colourful is associated with the colonial, leading to an aesthetic of colour avoid-
ance that Batchelor (2000) terms ‘chromophobia’. This evokes a colonial fear of the colourful,
evident in Goethe’s comment that ‘savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great
predilection for vivid colours’ (quoted in Mirzoeff, 2009: 54). Batchelor’s (2000: 22–23) conclu-
sion, that colour is both dangerous and trivial – either ‘made out to be the property of some “for-
eign” body’ or ‘relegated to the superficial’ – is echoed by Michael Taussig. He depicts colour as
‘both deceitful and authentic’ (Taussig, 2009: 21), a ‘medley of fear and fascination’ in which
‘vivid colour manifests its allegiance with the deepest streams of Orientalism’ (Taussig, 2009: 19).
Taussig playfully points to the enduring prevalence of chromophobia by taunting the reader with a
question we hereby pass on: ‘who of you reading this text would even dream of painting the living-
room wall bright red or green, or even any other color than off-white?’ (Taussig, 2009: 18).
For its part, the literature on gender has also mobilized colours to understand constructed gen-
dered identities. Recent studies suggest that ‘culturally transmitted colour–gender associations
(i.e., pink is for girls, blue is for boys) set the stage for the automatic activation and expression of
gender stereotypes’ throughout our life (Cunningham and Macrae, 2011: 598). Colours thus par-
take in the construction of stereotypical gender roles, identities and attributes. The use of colour is
studied in its capacity to simultaneously invoke and construct gender – for instance, in order to give
identity to, or brand, not only communities and products, but also wars. An example here is how
yellow ribbons were used in the USA to rally support for the 1991 war in Iraq (Elliott, 2007). This
shows how, in connection to security, colour’s power to brand can be used hand in hand with its
ambiguity. As Elliott notes: ‘Yellow ribbons took on myriad connotations, which allowed virtually
everyone to participate regardless of their moral or political stance on America’s involvement in
the war…. The result was a public, and ultra-visible, illusion of solidarity’ (Elliott, 2007: 527; see
also Santino, 1992). Colour not only advances a particular idea, but is a medium through which
something becomes contestable and contested (Elliott, 2007: 521, 526).
As the literatures on race and gender indicate, colours play a crucial part in many human prac-
tices and processes that pertain to politics, including security. Therefore, security studies needs to
go beyond its current chromophobia and see how colour use operates in the enactment and (re)
appropriation of security. Seen from this perspective, it becomes abundantly clear that studying
security as achromatic, or its colour uses as accidental or epiphenomenal, is a methodological
choice that acts, that enacts chromophobia within social sciences (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014;
Batchelor, 2000).
Making sense of colour-use: Semiotics in the study of security

We now turn to security to see what the relevance of looking at colour use is for security studies by
exploring one possible methodological approach to colour use among others. The purpose of the
present article is to be an opening; the intent is not to be disciplinary or to close off how colour use
can be studied as an aspect of security. Furthermore, the intention is not to propose a new theory of
security. The aim is to open up the field for how colour use is intertwined in meaning-making, com-
munication, performance, practice and (re)appropriation, and how these can be approached through
an analytics of colour use.
The attention to visual aspects of security has increased quite dramatically in the decade since
Michael Williams’ (2003) call for securitization theory to pay attention to the visual articulation of
security. As argued in a recent review of this literature (Andersen et al., 2015), the segregation of
visual security as a subfield of security studies has limited it to the study of ‘visual artefacts’ such
as images, paintings and other objects made to look at. Both the visual study of security and the
study of security in general could benefit from a further integration of and exploration in visual
analysis in order to study ‘the visuality of whichever security-related practice one is dealing with’
(Andersen et al., 2015: 92). The study of colour use in conjunction with security aims exactly at
bridging this divide by expanding the scope of visual analytics of security.
In this programmatic article, we limit our discussion to one methodological approach, which
serves to situate colour use in relation to more familiar means of meaning-making: multimodal
social semiotics. As we have argued earlier, colour uses shapes and participates in social imaginar-
ies, which is why the use of colours needs to be studied systematically as part of an international
political sociology of security enactments and (re)appropriations. To analyse imaginaries and
affordances of colour, three steps of investigation can be highlighted. First, colour can be a particu-
lar visual modality in human communication (Kress, 2011). Second, colour use can be an element
in systems of signification that participate in meaning-making in certain fields (Barthes, [1964]
1973). Finally, colour use in systems of signification is part of systems of the sensible (Rancière,
[2008] 2011) that modulate what is considered sensible rather than noise, what can be seen, and so
on. As we will show with the empirical focus on ‘colouring’ prisoners later, such a methodology
can be combined with theories of security to provide new insights into how colour use operates as
one of the semiotic modes of security as a system of signification.
Semiotics and systems of signification

Colour use evolves in significatory processes across space and time, whereby colours have differ-
ent conventional meanings that may circulate. Thereby, from a semiotic perspective, paying atten-
tion to (1) the ways in which the colours of security have emerged, (2) how they have evolved, (3)
how they have been inserted into larger systems of signification, and (4) how they have circulated,
been enacted upon or (re)appropriated should be focal points for understanding the chromatics of
security. Such an approach studies colours as semiotic resources through their histories (e.g. the
materialities and technologies of colour), semiotic practices (e.g. how colours are used as codes in
specific social contexts), semiotic change (e.g. why some practices that use colour appear and
disappear; see Van Leeuwen, 2011: 1–4) and semiotic affordances (e.g. how colour use is appropri-
ated by multiple actors in reproducing or contesting specific security codes articulated in secu-
ritized sites; see Kress, 2010). What distinguishes a semiotic study is its focus on what allows for
shared meanings to emerge from ambiguous signifiers, among diverse individuals and groups in
large societies. In this sense, we can paraphrase Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson’s (1991: 184)
application of semiotics to art history with regard to how a semiotics of colour can be used to
investigate security:
Semiotic analysis of [security] does not set out in the first place to produce interpretations of [security], but
rather to investigate how [security is] intelligible to those who view [it], the processes by which viewers
make sense of what they see.
Roland Barthes ([1964] 1973) has observed that visual signs form ‘systems of signification’
rather than languages, and visual semiotics is the approach for investigating such systems. The
realm of security is replete with systems of signification that use colour. For example, national
flags (Vuori et al., forthcoming), military uniforms (Guillaume et al., 2015), and the signs and
signals of urban spaces can all be examined as systems of signification. Such systems differ in how
strong they are (Barthes, [1964] 1973); some are very formalized and limited, while others can
allow for very rich and varied forms of expression. Strong systems make for poor syntagms or units
and exact meaning (i.e. strong systems make for simple elements with fewer syntactic variables
and thereby stronger rules of meaning-making), while weaker systems with greater syntagmatic
complexes make for ambiguous meaning (and weaker rules of meaning-making). Units with only
a few semiotic elements in them (e.g. the Doomsday Clock; see Vuori, 2010) allow for quick and
easy deciphering, whereas semiotic complexity requires more effort and provides for multiplicity
in meaning.
Yet, to limit oneself to what colour use might mean in a specific context or culture, or how this
meaning has come about, is but a first step in integrating colours to an analytics of security. For
Barthes ([1957] 2000: 128–131, 142–143), the goal of examining systems of signification is to
denaturalize the depoliticized language of myth. To examine security as a system of signification
through one of its modes is effecting the same critical work: to repoliticize what ultimately produces
political myths (see Huysmans, 1998). Of special interest to Barthes ([1957] 2000: 114–115) were
second-order semiological systems that went beyond the details of linguistic schema, or ‘language
objects’. Such an approach allows the analyst to go beyond the individual first-order sign, or the
signifier and signified, to examine the myth within the second-order meaning that the specific sign
participates in.
On the level of first-order signs, it is for example possible to examine the elements of colour in
images and other types of signs. One possible way to achieve this is to distinguish between the
geometric and the colourful aspects of a visual syntax. For Max Bense (1971), form and colour are
the constituents of visual perception, which he termed formemes (e.g. points, lines, surfaces) and
chromemes (elements of colour perception). Thus far, visual analyses in security studies have con-
centrated on formemes, but have left out the chromemes. Often, however, it is analytically difficult
to consider one without the other in processes of meaning-making, as formemes and chromemes
form visual signs in conjunction and not independently. To give but one small example of how
formemes and chromemes operate in conjunction, we can point to flags and other visual signaliza-
tions of political units, movements or security (see Vuori et al., forthcoming). While both aspects
are required to produce a token of an official national flag, the chromemes are more versatile: the
connotations of a flag can be produced with its colours alone by painting them on one’s face. In
contrast, the connotation of a flag is difficult to realize with just the formeme of a particular flag
on a person’s face (yet think of the swastika).
In first-order terms, then, we can analyse the semiotic features that make up a certain national
flag. While this can be quite relevant for those with an interest in vexillology, of importance for
students of politics is the second order of the international system of national flags, the different
hierarchies that are implied in it, the embodiment of larger systems of signification through them,
and the naturalizations of social and political relations therein (see Vuori et al., forthcoming). This
speaks to Rancière’s ([2008] 2011) systems of the sensible. Such systems, as security can be, are a
part of aesthetic regimes that modulate not only what is seen and said, but also what is done and
what can be done. Aesthetic regimes work to form a common sense of the visual, inclusive of col-
our use. The common sense here means ‘a community of sensible data’: shared visibility, modes of
perception and conferred meanings. Concomitantly, it binds individuals or groups together into ‘a
spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared
ways of perceiving, being affected and imparting meaning’ (Rancière, [2008] 2011: 99).
Such ‘common senses’ construct different realities, and thereby also different aesthetic regimes
of visibility. Hence, we argue, the study of colour use enables us to decipher these regimes of vis-
ibility and, by extension, the different ways in which security is constituted as a system of signifi-
cation in specific circumstances, encounters and sites. Naturally, intelligibility and systems of the
sensible raise the question of who or what is the equivalent of the ‘viewer’ in relation to security,
of who performs the act of interpretation and makes sense of the colours of security. Indeed, social
semiotics emphasizes the situatedness of meaning-making and the malleability of the rules and
regularities that enable certain semiotic resources to be used to produce meanings (Jewitt, 2011b:
23); the rules for ‘what goes with what’ and ‘what can signify what’ undergo constant challenges
and changes (Iedema, 2003: 38). This is ultimately an empirical question that is dependent on
the analytical choices made by the researcher as well as on the conventional specificities of the
practices, encounters or sites researched.
An analytics of colour use in systems of signification facilitates the identification of conven-
tional specificities and the potential ‘viewers’ and ‘makers’ of such systems by putting forth a
contextual approach to security. In effect, the plurality of such conventions works to make the
meaning of colour unpredictable, ambiguous, even anarchic; there is no one single language of
colour (Van Leeuwen, 2011). As Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen (2002) suggest, the diffi-
culty here may be about our notions of grammar rather than our colour terms as such. They propose
that we focus on specialized groups and their use of colour rather than develop a general grammar
for its uses. Indeed, specific ways for using colour in meaning-making can develop in accordance
with specific needs (Archer and Stent, 2011: 117). It is thus indispensable to possess means for
semiotic analysis that take into account the plurality of potential modes by and through which
security meanings gain their affordances.
Multimodal social semiotics

Multimodal analysis (Jewitt, 2011a) is a methodological approach that makes it possible not only
to move security analysts’ focus away from language per se, but also to take into account the con-
textually rich assemblages of modes used in security communication and practice. What is called
a ‘social semiotic approach to multimodal analysis’ (Jewitt, 2011c: 28–29) is particularly oppor-
tune here. For Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001: 20), semiotic products or events can be analysed
through several semiotic modes, allowing researchers to extend their focus from language to the
social interpretation of meaning-making by covering, for example, images, gestures and colours.
Language, therefore, is but a ‘part of a multimodal ensemble’ (Jewitt, 2011b: 14). In such ensem-
bles, certain modes may be privileged over others, whereby colour can be examined as one semi-
otic mode among others or as the principle one. Significantly, each mode in an ensemble carries
only a part of the entire meaning (Jewitt, 2011b: 25), and different modes can complement, rein-
force or contradict each other. Modes differ in terms of the kinds of resources they consist of
(Kress, 2011: 56) and the semiotic affordances they carry (Kress, 2010). Hence, it is important for
the researcher to critically design what modes will be investigated, as well as how and why (on
critical research design, see Guillaume, 2013).
For something to function as such a mode, it has to be an outcome of regularities of use within
the social interaction of communities; in other words, there has to be some shared sense of how to
organize sets of semiotic resources to produce situated meaning (Jewitt, 2011b: 21–22; Kress,
2011). Each of the various modes available in certain social situations are operated in accordance
with specific logics that provide different communicational and representational potentialities,
whereby not all modes are equally suited for all communication purposes (Jewitt, 2011b: 25).
Speech may be privileged over visual signs in certain security situations, but the contrary may hold
in others. This is a matter of the representational needs of a particular community (Kress, 2011:
59), and needs to be taken into account in the research strategies adopted by the researcher.
Michael Halliday’s (1978) metafunctional distinctions, at the heart of Kress and Van Leeuwen’s
(2002) approach, may assist in deciphering chromatic systems of security. This is because mean-
ings of colour use as a semiotic mode are ‘culturally made, socially agreed and socially and cultur-
ally specific’ (Kress, 2011: 59). From such a vantage point, colour is one possible semiotic mode
of a sign, and its use can serve several functions: it can construct representations in an ideational
function (transitivity structures that express representational meaning – e.g. denotation of classifi-
cations such as prisoners and ‘races’); it can enact specific social purposes and relations in an
interpersonal function (mood structures that express interactional meaning and relations – e.g.
‘colour acts’ like warnings); and it can marshal communicative acts into larger wholes in a textual
function (theme structures that express the organization of the message – e.g. coherence among
complexities like maps, visual identities of states or institutions) (see Halliday, 1978; Kress and
Van Leeuwen, 2002; Van Leeuwen, 2011: 11–12). In other words, how colour is used affords
modes of being and action in specific social contexts (such as the assimilation and enactment of
norms and behaviours in securitized sites; see later). Such an approach entails that while colours
can produce effects,2 colours are often themselves metafunctional in the sense that their function is
situated and tied to other expressions. As with any other mode available for communication, the
uses of colour have been shaped by cultural, historical and social factors so that they can work to
realize social functions through their particular mode of communicative work (Jewitt, 2011b: 15).
Various semiotic resources and modes, such as colour, can be used to communicate ideologies
and discourses (Jewitt, 2011c: 29), and to make arguments, including those that pertain to security.
Concomitantly, it becomes possible to map how such modal resources are used in given contexts
and fields to produce signs: social and material contexts have a major bearing on the choices avail-
able for sign-makers in meaning-making, whereby signs can be viewed as material residues of
sign-makers’ interests (Jewitt, 2011c: 30). In this way, the use of colour in signs can become a
window into their makers and the discourses, histories, resources and social factors that have had
a bearing on how signs have been made, as well as into what has been considered critical to present
in them (Jewitt, 2011c: 30–31). Concomitantly, the use of colour in signs can also become a win-
dow into the bearers or users of such signs by virtue of how they are used to enact, (re)appropriate,
transform and adapt the systems of signification that the sign-users partake in.
Colourful signs are material; they consist of and are constructed from something. This some-
thing affords the way in which signs can be displayed, whereby equal emphasis should be ‘placed
on the affordances of the material “stuff” of the mode (sound, movement, light and tracings on
surfaces, etc.) and on the work done in social life with that material’ (Kress, 2010: 80, emphasis in
original). What makes colour significant is that as a semiotic mode it affords integration with other
modes that can be found from images, architecture, clothing and object design, even writing, in a
very particular way. Colour perception is related to basic physiological human features and is thus
in a way always present (as is sound) in healthy individuals’ perception. Rather than having to be
displayed somewhere (as a written text), in the right illumination, it is present everywhere (see
Kress, 2010). Colour use is in this sense part of most material practices that pertain to security, and
thereby provides crucial ‘resources and potentials for social shaping’ (Kress, 2010: 81). The
affordances of colour use condition ‘what it is possible to express and represent or communicate
easily with the resources of a mode’ (MODE, 2012). As colours are displayed and displayable
almost everywhere, whether deliberately or not, they are a major affordance that structures security
encounters – where they immediately and easily signal identities of objects, individuals or groups
that partake in that encounter. Needless to say, other semiotic vehicles could do this structuring, but
colour is one of the most effective. Indeed, unlike images, which need to be shown somewhere, and
language, which needs to be uttered or read across time in a strict sequence, colour is inevitably
present. Thereby, security scholars then should question how colour partakes in the enactment of
the hierarchies and norms of security encounters, how it seeps through and permeates political
communication, and how it makes security (in)visible.
An illustration: Colour use as a technique of security practice

The visual study of security has mainly concentrated on ‘visual artefacts’ that communicate or
have become part of security discourses, whether they be symbols (Vuori, 2010), cartoons
(Hansen, 2011) or photographs (Schlag and Heck, 2013). As a step towards ‘visualities’
(Andersen et al., 2015) rather than such artefacts as the focus of analysis, we engage the chro-
matics of security practice and enactment. We explore how colour is used in the visual realiza-
tion of categories of unease, and how such practice can be reappropriated, circulated and turned
into political symbols in other political and security contexts. Colours can be a pertinent mode
of visual security practice; how colours are used can be a form of ‘diffuse securitization’
(Huysmans, 2014), either by intentionally effacing security or by doing so as part of security
micro-practices. In this way, the use of colour can be an integral aspect of such practices that
enact security. As an illustration, we examine the use of colour in security categorization
in highly securitized sites: the Nazi concentration camp and the US detention camps in the
so-called War on Terror.
Multimodal discourses can combine semiotic choices towards certain objectives, such as to stir
publics into accepting political violence against certain groups (O’Halloran, 2008: 444). The
inmates of Nazi concentration camps were categorized into various groups seen as threats and
enemies of the Nazis (Eberle, 2005: 91). These groups were identified with coloured badges that
the inmates were forced to wear as part of their dehumanization. As in other social and political
crisis conditions, where identities and affiliations need to be conveyed clearly (Archer and Stent,
2011: 124), these visual signs formed a system of signification that allowed for quick recognition
of which inmate-category an individual belonged in.
A uniform system of identification within camps was in place from 1938 onwards (Eberle,
2005: 93), where these visual signs operated on the basis of a shared syntax: the badges consisted
of geometrical shapes and colours (with some inclusion of letters for nationalities), which together
formed a taxonomy of prisoners (see Figure 1). The formemes (a downward triangle, a line above
a downward triangle, a downward triangle above a circle, and a downward triangle on top of an
upward triangle akin to the Star of David) defined whether the inmate was categorized as a repeated
offender, as belonging to a penal company (i.e. convicted soldiers) or as a Jew. The chromemes
defined whether the prisoner was political (red), a career criminal (green), an emigrant (blue), an
international Bible student (i.e. Jehovah’s Witnesses) (purple), a homosexual (pink) or ‘anti-social’
(black). While the contemporary imaginary tends to associate a single colour with specific badges
(Suderland, 2013: 120) – for example, brown for ‘Gypsies’ and yellow for Jews – it is important to
remember that what was put in use was a conjunction of formemes and chromemes in order to
distinguish, classify and hierarchize the camp population. For instance, a Jew identified as a ‘sex-
ual offender’ would be assigned a yellow triangle (pointing upward), for his/her ascribed religion,
upon which a pink triangle (pointing downward) would be placed to classify him/her as a ‘sexual
Figure 1. The forms and colours of captives in concentration camps.

Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konzentrationslager#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1993-051-07,_Tafel_mit_
KZ-Kennzeichen_(Winkel).jpg (accessed 15 March 2015).
offender’. In other words, to concentrate solely on formemes as semiotic markers is not always
sufficient to fully understand the multiple ways in which security practices, encounters and
(re)appropriations are enacted in such securitized sites and beyond.
Such use of colours and forms illustrates how there is hierarchization even among the most
oppressed, and how colour is used as shorthand for such categories. In an environment where ges-
tures and other rapid forms of communication were the only possibilities for exchanges, the col-
oured badges provided for quick social orientation (Sofsky, 1997: 124). The coloured badges in
concentration camps identified not only prisoner categories for the guards, but the overall prison
social structure (Suderland, 2013: 121). The colours assigned for each class of prisoner worked
both to divide the general population and to unite particular categories, largely in accordance with
pre-existing social prejudices that the camp environment radicalized (Sofsky, 1997: 123; Eberle,
2005: 101). Some categories of prisoner received privileges, while some categories could receive
no such alleviations to life in the camp despite their individual behaviour, which facilitated class
struggles and impeded solidarity among the prisoner society (Suderland, 2013: 162). The visual
signs made the social structures visible, and unavoidable: the individual became the colours and
the categories associated with them. With the badges, the groups of undesirables were resemiotized
(Iedema, 2003), and their individuality over-coded with combinations of formemes and chromemes.
The example of the concentration camp badges also shows how colour use can circulate and
facilitate resistance when previously oppressive uses are reappropriated, whereby colourful signs
are transformed to mean something else and become part of new systems of signification. For
instance, the yellow star – actually consisting of two yellow triangles – that marked out Jews
quickly became an enduring and widely recognized sign for the persecution of the Jews. Not only
that, by the 1970s, gay liberation movements in the USA and Western Europe reappropriated the
pink triangle as a political sign (Jensen, 2002: 323). ‘The pink triangle has served multiple func-
tions: it has united a diverse population of gay men and women, mobilized political action, and
provided an interpretative framework for contemporary experiences’ (Jensen, 2002: 346). The
reappropriation of the pink triangle made the continuous oppression of lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender (LGBT) people enter a system of the sensible. Displaying a pink triangle made visible
not only the oppression of male homosexuals in Nazi Germany, but also contemporary oppression
(e.g. violence, illegality or inequality) of first, homosexuals and later, LGBT people. The pink tri-
angle has become an emblem of male homosexual pride through its effect of making past and
contemporary insecurities visible, and thereby sayable.
This single and extreme example illustrates how colour has been specifically used in securitized
social settings, what the use of colour affords in security practices, and how the security uses of col-
our can be reappropriated. This is why it is vital for researchers not to ignore such chromatic dimen-
sions of security. The combination of formemes and chromemes was used as a technique of security
not only to assist the guards to identify which category the prisoner was included in, but also to divide
the prisoner population, whereby it served as social guidance between the prisoners themselves (see
Maher, 2013: 66–70). Colour alone did not produce the categories of prisoners in the camps or the
political discourse that enabled them. Yet colour use was a vital semiotic resource in that it afforded
instantaneous display of the categories that facilitated the banal performance, repetition and enact-
ment of categories, and later enabled their reappropriation for different political uses.
An example of contemporary security practice via colour use, one that has made prisoner-
colouring recurrent, is the use of prisoner uniforms in the so-called War on Terror. The orange
Guantánamo jumpsuits are the most famous instance, but other prisons of the ‘war’ have had a
more elaborate system of colour-coded prisoner uniforms. Reports from Camp Bucca in Iraq
testify that:
The prison was run along strictly hierarchical lines, down to a Teletubbies-like uniform colour scheme
which allowed jailers and captives alike to recognize each detainee’s place in the pecking order. ‘The
colour of the clothes we wore reflected our status,’ said Abu Ahmed. ‘If I remember things correctly, red
was for people who had done things wrong while in prison, white was a prison chief, green was for a long
sentence and yellow and orange were normal.’ (Chulov, 2014)
This exemplifies the recurrence of colour use as a resource for dehumanizing and categorizing the
enemy. Furthermore, like the Nazi use of pink for homosexuals, prisoner colouring in the War on
Terror has enjoyed its own forms of reappropriation. Not only have Amnesty and Witness Against
Torture in 2008 used the orange jumpsuit as a visual resource to easily convey their opposition to
torture in the War on Terror (Van Veeren, 2011: 1738), the well-known symbol has also allowed the
Islamic State movement to easily and efficiently communicate revenge, retribution and defiance
through its videos that show the executions of prisoners in orange jumpsuits. While then US
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the images of orange jumpsuits ‘probably unfortu-
nate’ (as cited in Van Veeren, 2011: 1722), the New York Times cites a former US official for a more
regretful opinion: ‘Imagine if we didn’t go down that road. Imagine. We played into the enemy’s
hand. Now we have American hostages in orange jumpsuits because we put people in orange jump-
suits’ ( Ali H Soufan, cited in Apuzzo and Risen, 2014).
To take the practice of colouring prisoners seriously allows us to enter into the social structures
of such camps and explain how colour use enacts the dehumanization of opponents and partici-
pates in diffuse securitizing processes in various ways. It also lets us follow the historical and
cultural circulations of semiotic modes and their symbolic reverberations in wider security/politi-
cal landscapes. As we have shown, material security practices can be read chromatically in order
to understand their meaning-making processes, enactments, affordances and appropriations. We
thus believe it is essential to start including colour use in our analyses of visual practices of security
and their related political processes of meaning-making and action. This kind of approach is dis-
tinct from the analysis of visual artefacts that communicate or are part of security discourses, yet
does not exclude it; this approach allows for the study of both visual security practice and how
elements of it can become symbolic in other contexts.
Conclusion
This article has presented a call for researchers to engage with colour use as an important mode by
which security is enacted and appropriated. The absence of colours from previous investigations of
security is an active (de)limitation of the chromatic dimension of security as simple ‘noise’ (Law,
2004: 143; Rancière, 2009), one that has political consequences (Aradau and Huysmans, 2014).
We have offered some first steps toward possible visual analytics based on social semiotics. This
is a move from the visual study of artefacts that communicate or are implicated in security dis-
courses towards the study of security visualities that are present in much of security practice.
Indeed, it is time for security studies to move beyond the chromophobia of social sciences.
Our hope is that this opening move inspires further theorizations and empirical research that
links colour use and security (we have already carried out some elsewhere; see Guillaume et al.,
2015; Vuori et al., forthcoming). Possible avenues here include questions that pertain to skin col-
our, race, immigration, social movements and their links to security. Just as relevant are issues that
relate to epochal and cultural differences in colour use and their conjunction with other semiotic
modes in enacting security, including the cultural and/or historical circulation of such modes.
Colours participate in the systems of signification we construct around ourselves; they are con-
stantly used to draw our attention to, or divert it from, certain things, as well as to signify and com-
municate messages, genres and identities; colour use is part and parcel of social sorting and
moulding. Even though colours are a natural phenomenon, their meanings are societal products
and part of our constructed visibilities. The ways in which colours are used are markers of what our
(international) societal and political orders and hierarchies are, and how they are contested.
Integrating colour in the study of security practices and representation therefore points to how
security and international relations are intersemiotic relations. Chromatology – studying the rela-
tion of colours and people – is a method for engaging the politics of colour use and for opening up
in particular how the political within security is expressed in the intersemiotic relations between
colours and other semiotic modalities.
Acknowledgements
The impulsion for this article came from conversations during the last workshop of the International
Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies (ICCM) in Edinburgh in May 2012, and we would like
to thank the participants for their kind patience towards us. A previous version of this article was presented at
the Finnish Political Science Association conference in Rovaniemi on 8 March 2013, and at the 2014
International Studies Association conference in Toronto. All translations are ours. We would also like to
thank Philippe Bourbeau, Stephan Engelkamp, Rob Walker and Cindy Weber, as well as the anonymous
reviewers for their help at various stages of this article. Any errors, opacities and quirks remain our own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit
sectors.
Notes
1. This article is part of a larger collaboratively written project on colour and security (http://chromatic-
security.tumblr.com/). The order of names reflects not a hierarchy in terms of authorship, but a collective
authorship. Feel free to scramble the order of names as long as you get the DOI right!
2. Empirical experiments have shown that colours have little-to-no direct physical effects on humans (e.g.
on blood pressure, the pulse or body temperature), but that colours can have an affective effect and can
influence our attitudes and emotions (Arnkil, 2008: 244–251).
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Rune Saugmann Andersen has a PhD from the Centre for Advanced Security Theory (CAST) at the University
of Copenhagen, and is a Guest Lecturer at the University of Helsinki. His interdisciplinary research has been
published in journals such as Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations and Journalism
Practice. Rune has pioneered visual methodology, using image manipulation as a method to research images.
He has led multiple workshops on video as a research method, and has published research video in Audiovisual
Thinking.

Chromatology of Security: Introducing Colours To Visual Security Studies

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Chromatology of Security: Introducing Colours To Visual Security Studies

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Why a chromatology of security?

Making sense of colour-use: Semiotics in the study of security

Semiotics and systems of signification

Multimodal social semiotics

An illustration: Colour use as a technique of security practice

Figure 1. The forms and colours of captives in concentration camps.

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