This oversight constitutes one focus of this article, which explores a series of questions concerned with the visual politics of truth and reconciliation: how do images produce knowledge about war, conflict, and the possibility of peace And how does the comics medium enrich, dilute, or otherwise shape the messages it projects In answering these questions, we build on the burgeoning IR literature concerned with visual and popular culture.
Art Spiegelman Maus Deutsch File How To Manage YourClose this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.English Franais Review of International Studies Article contents Abstract Introduction: Aesthetics, politics, and outreach Sierra Leone: the conflict and post-conflict years The politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics: Sierrarat and Maus Conclusion References A cat-and- Maus game: the politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics.Practitioners have looked to bridge this gap by developing outreach programmes, in some instances commissioning comic books in order to communicate their findings to the people they seek to serve.
Art Spiegelman Maus Deutsch File Series Of QuestionsIn this article, we interrogate the ways in which post-conflict comics produce meaning about truth, reconciliation, and the possibilities of peace, focusing in particular on a comic strip published in 2005 as part of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report into the causes and crimes of the 19912002 Civil War. ![]() Although the Report displays striking formal similarities with Art Spiegelmans Maus (a text also intimately concerned with reconciliation, in its own way), it does so to very different ends. The article brings these two texts into dialogue in order to explore the aesthetic politics of truth and reconciliation, and to ask what role popular visual media like comics can play in their practice and (re)conceptualisation. Keywords. Footnote 1 As a discourse, TJ has shaped how international and transnational organisations have responded to crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other atrocities, while as a field of practice its prescribed methods for post-conflict peacebuilding have come to predominate on the global stage. Footnote 2 More recently, however, several scholars have argued that the institutional mechanisms through which TJ is commonly promoted can often operate at a distance from affected populations, in the process alienating rather than engaging the people they seek to represent. Footnote 3 TJ practitioners have responded to these concerns by developing outreach programmes in order to communicate their findings to local populations, as at the International Criminal Tribunals for both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Footnote 4 Although reactions to these initial efforts have been mixed, the principles underpinning them have informed almost all subsequent TJ initiatives: outreach is now very much part of the TJ playbook. Footnote 5 What little scholarly attention outreach programmes have thus far received within IR has tended to focus on questions of effectiveness, understood quantitatively in terms of how widely key messages have been disseminated to relevant publics. Footnote 6 While these studies can offer some insight into the reach and scope of particular outreach efforts, however, they are unable to provide any analytical or critical purchase on the sensitivities and complexities associated with the communication of institutional practices to a wider community. These methodological limitations matter because the messages transmitted as part of TJ outreach efforts are not politically neutral, and therefore require interpretation and evaluation. As Martha Nussbaum argues, life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something. Footnote 7 Outreach should not be understood as a simple broadcasting exercise, then, but rather as a dynamic and productive discursive intervention into specific, often fragile social milieus. Footnote 8 One notable feature of recent outreach programmes that has received little attention within the literature is their frequent use of comic strips, especially as a means of communicating with children and teenagers. Footnote 9 This is a development that deserves critical attention for two further reasons. The first of these concerns the popular-cultural space that comics occupy. As Lene Hansen observes, comics are sociologically significant for the mediation and experience of foreign policy, Footnote 10 and as such they form part of the popular culture-world politics continuum that delimits how global politics (including TJ) is seen, experienced, understood, and ascribed meaning. Footnote 11 Secondly, however, comics also by necessity engage with certain formal conventions and expectations that shape the messages they project. As Hillary Chute has argued, comics offer a unique spatial grammar of gutters, grids, and panels that together comprise a form that is deeply rooted in the specificity of its medium as a source of cultural, aesthetic, and political significance. Footnote 12 To reach out towards a target audience with a comic, in other words, is to draw on a particular formal tradition that must be accounted for in any interpretive or analytical search for meaning. ![]()
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