Introduction

Abstract

“How do we see refugees? The refugee has become a multifaceted symbol, the most prominent political figure of our time” states the brochure of an art retrospective by Khaled Hourani, a Palestinian artist reflecting on the reduction of refugees to abstract symbols of victimhood by humanitarian representations. In the eyes of the artist, the blue figure (Fig. 1.1), so common in relief organizations´ visual depictions, is the migrating human being, without a specific national, religious, ethnic, or gender identity. Yet, the visual landscape of contemporary displacement is anything but abstract. Images of overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean, refugee camps, improvised shelters along migration routes, children and families in need, and people stranded behind fences and walls have come to constitute a powerful reminder of contemporary conditions of displacement for people on the move. Yet, the question remains: how do we see refugees?

“How do we see refugees? The refugee has become a multifaceted symbol, the most prominent political figure of our time” states the brochure of an art retrospective by Khaled Hourani, a Palestinian artist reflecting on the reduction of refugees to abstract symbols of victimhood by humanitarian representations. In the eyes of the artist, the blue figure (Fig. 1.1), so common in relief organizations´ visual depictions, is the migrating human being, without a specific national, religious, ethnic, or gender identity. Yet, the visual landscape of contemporary displacement is anything but abstract. Images of overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean, refugee camps, improvised shelters along migration routes, children and families in need, and people stranded behind fences and walls have come to constitute a powerful reminder of contemporary conditions of displacement for people on the move. Yet, the question remains: how do we see refugees?¹

Fig. 1.1

©Khaled Hourani, The Blue Figure 2017

This is a book on the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs play in migration governance through visual representation. It offers an innovative account of how relief organizations’ visual depiction of Syrian displacement contributes to reproduce and reinforce a securitized account of refugees, one in which refugees are framed in terms of threat. Images of overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean Sea, refugee camps, improvised shelters along the migration routes, children and families in need, and people stranded behind fences and walls have come to constitute a powerful reminder of today conditions of global displacement. While visual representation is certainly media-driven today, more than ever, it is humanitarian organizations – and NGOs in particular – who while doing their relief work produce the great bulk of the images presented to the public that contribute to shape our understanding of the refugee issue. In this context, how do transnational humanitarian NGOs represent refugees? What are the implications of this visual depiction within the larger role that relief agencies play in global governance?

The text is based on a multi-method and multi-modal analysis of the role that humanitarian NGOs now play in global governance. The visual investigation focuses on the photographic material representing Syrian displacement published by four major transnational NGOs (CARE, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontier, and Oxfam) over the years of the so-called ´European refugee crisis´, between 2015 and 2016. The book analyses a dataset of over 1000 images through a combination of visual methodologies: visual content analysis for a preliminary classification; iconography for its potential in identifying visual trends and patterns in a large body of images, and visual social semiotics for its attention to visual signs and means of representation within a situated cultural and social context. Simultaneously, the exploration of humanitarian visual material has been combined with fieldwork in three of the countries that have hosted, and still host, some of the largest populations of Syrian refugees (Greece, Jordan and Lebanon). Interviews with key informants were combined with analysis of the organization’s guidelines and strategic documents.

This book adopts a critical approach to study humanitarianism, humanitarian visuality, and their interrelation with global governance and securitization with the ultimate goal of shedding light on the political, cultural and ethical dynamics at play. It shows that the way through which transnational humanitarian organizations engage in the international political arena is manifold. On the one side, the different NGOs’ organizational culture (including mission, vision, approach to humanitarian action, funding strategy and advocacy objectives) shape the distinct roles that each of them has chosen to play in their interaction with state-nation politics and in global governance. On the other side, it empirically demonstrates how relief agencies engage with world affairs through the analysis of their visual production.

In this sense, inspired by the securitization theory elaborated by the Copenhagen school, the book argues that humanitarian NGOs’ visual representation of Syrian displacement is contributing to the securitization of the refugee issue. Through visual analysis, it empirically demonstrates how the securitization process takes place in three different ways. First of all, even if marginally, through the reproduction of mainstream media and political accounts that have depicted refugees in terms of threats. Secondly, and more consistently, through a representation of Syrian displaced people that, despite the undeniable innovative aesthetic patterns focusing on dignity and empowerment, nevertheless continues to reinforce a visual narrative around refugees in terms of victimhood and passivity. In so doing, the book does not want to deny the efforts NGOs are currently making to challenge victimizing and essentializing representations of displaced people. On the contrary, they are to be commended. However, there are still many aspects that without further problematization end up impairing their attempts, something this book aspires to untangle. Third, through the dialectic between what is made visible in the picture and what is not, transnational humanitarian NGOs reinforce a representation of Syrian refugees that reduces the portrayed individuals to abstract humanitarian subjects, eventually eliding any political claim and agency that Syrian people on the move might have.

The book argues that there is also another important dynamic at play. While on the visual level NGOs continue to securitize and depoliticize Syrian refugees (despite dramatic recent changes in the way humanitarian information is communicated), the analysis of NGOs’ policy and strategic documents, and the interviews with practitioners have also revealed a countertrend. Indeed, relief agencies put a great deal of effort into trying to empower the beneficiaries of the assistance and also to go beyond the traditional humanitarian communication that – as humanitarian actors they are themselves perfectly aware of – unfairly depicts refugees in terms of victimhood and helplessness. In this sense, despite the consistency of contemporary visual representations in portraying refugees with no (or very limited) agency, it also seems that the continuous intellectual engagement and efforts put into changing this depiction is creating what Yurchak defines as the “minute internal displacements and mutations into the discursive regime in which they are articulated” (Yurchak 2013, 28).

These micro mutations are visible to a certain extent in the wider range of aesthetic topics that some NGOs present to the public. For example, when the represented subjects encompass the actual threats looming over people in their countries, in the hosting countries and along the migration routes (such as perpetrators of violence, border apparatus, law enforcement, fences, and detention centres), and the complexity of displacement condition not only in terms of humanitarian need, but also in terms of everyday life, community solidarity, and mundane details not necessarily linked to the experience of loss. It is in expanding the visual patterns used to portray refugees into a photographic portfolio that humanitarian organizations have the opportunity to offer a discourse counterpoising the mainstream, one able to account for the complexities and multiple narrative facets of displacement.

1.1 Contributions

This book intends to make four important academic contributions. First, it sets out to expand the body of literature on migration and securitization by providing a thorough study of visual representational practices of transnational humanitarian NGOs. The analysis will not only touch upon themes such as the changes in aesthetic patterns over time, but will also highlight similarities and differences among the four major relief organizations’ visual registries and narratives. Scholars have shown the different ways in which humanitarianism and securitization interplay (inter alia see Aradau 2004a; Andersson 2014; Musarò 2017; Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2017). A few have pointed out the role that relief organizations play as actors of securitization (Aradau 2004a; Watson 2011). However, none of the existing studies have demonstrated empirically how these dynamics work. This book intends to fill this gap by showing how humanitarian NGOs contribute to the securitization of the refugee issue through their visual representations.

Secondly, in the field of International Relations (IR), nobody has systematically carried out an analysis using visual social semiotics. More generally, as Lene Hansen – one of the scholars who has produced the most ground-breaking work on visual securitization – has noticed, very few studies in IR have engaged in the investigation of large bodies of images. Most existing studies have employed content analysis that focuses on the identification of the portrayed subjects. However, none of these works have explored how these forms of content analysis differ or could be combined with other visual methodologies (Hansen forthcoming). Moreover, as Andersen et al. have observed the “most recent ‘visual security’ work in IR has been on the iconic image and has assumed a ‘powerful intertextuality around the image’ which puts the image ‘in danger of vanishing” (Andersen et al. cited in Hansen forthcoming, 8). This book seeks to address these challenges in three ways. It is based on a large body of images (over a thousand). It combines the content analysis with a more qualitative visual methodology, and it addresses the need to attribute more attention to the image per se.

This study draws on an additional innovative methodological approach. It is not only based on a multi-methods analysis that combines different visual methodologies, but it is also a multi-modal investigation. Thorough visual analysis has been combined with fieldwork in three of the countries that have hosted, and still host, some of the largest populations of Syrian refugees. Since most academic work on images and security has been based on content analysis, by combining it with visual social semiotics, and especially by incorporating fieldwork, this study intends to offer a different understanding of the role and impact of images within the wider context of global governance.

Last, but not least, this book links visuality with governance. This is particularly interesting when one considers that humanitarian communication and governance interplay at different levels. Relief organizations have at certain historical times worked in competition with nation-states and international policies, such as in the case of the aid blockade during the Biafra crisis, and more recently during search and rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean which contrast with European migration policies. At the same time, NGOs’ the funding and advocacy strategies of many humanitarian are tightly connected with states’ political agenda. In today’s highly competitive media environment aid agencies represent the refugees at the same time that they represent themselves, their mission, and goals. In this sense, transnational humanitarian organizations, and their communication practices, merit study because they do political work in a political environment. This book unpacks the dynamics through which relief agencies contribute to the humanitarian systems of governmentality through their visual communication and shows empirically how these two dimensions of visuality and governance do relate to each other and interact.

1.2 Why ´How Do We See Refugees´ Matters

Questions around the representation of refugees and the implications of visual narratives in the understanding and management of displacement are particularly relevant in the context of contemporary political debate on the ´refugee crisis´. It should be noted that I use the term critically because, as many scholars have pointed out, the intensity of arrivals in Europe has neither been a new phenomenon in the history of migration, nor has it constituted the ´invasion´ that has been presented in public accounts (see among others Fargues 2015; De Genova et al. 2016; Krzyżanowski et al. 2018). The large majority of refugees are still hosted by Syria’s neighbors. It is undeniable that the term ´refugee crisis´ has come to define a specific historical phenomenon that entails important political implications in the way refugees are represented, perceived, and ultimately managed and how societies in countries of destination are deciding to face contemporary questions of international mobility. In today’s securitized context (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018; Mountz 2015; Huysmans 2016) it is therefore particularly interesting to explore the role played by some of the most important actors in the management of the refugee crisis – the humanitarian organizations – which are not commonly associated with the securitization effort routinely performed by other entities (such as Frontex, law enforcement agencies or national border apparatuses).

All this is especially thought-provoking if we consider the role that humanitarian NGOs have been performing in terms of humanitarian governance (Fassin 2011; Barnett 2013) not only in the Global South (e.g. Syria’s neighboring countries), but also at the very centre of the Mediterranean vis-à-vis refugees, European migration policies, and domestic politics. The highly politicized and mediatized debate around refugees’ mobility (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018) has been further intensified by discussions around maritime SAR and accusations made by populist governments that NGOs facilitate irregular migration. NGOs have produced research reports reflecting on the impact of their maritime operations and concluded that not only are the accusations unsubstantiated, but that the “involvement of humanitarian vessels was associated with a significant improvement in maritime safety compared to other periods” (MSF 2017b). Even though legal accusations may, at least for the moment, have diminished (Repubblica 2018b), statal institutions (especially the Italian Ministry of Interior and the Libyan coast guard) were – at the time of writing – preventing SAR operations from happening (Repubblica 2018a; Rome 2017; Cuttitta 2018). The topic remains therefore very actual and relevant as public political debate rages and political scientists have shown how NGOs with SAR operations have contributed to the re-politicization of international waters into a political environment from which they can advocate for humanitarian commitment, political change in migration management, and solidarity (Stierl 2018; Cuttitta 2017), while at the same time they themselves “become part of a hybrid border management system” (Cuttitta 2017, 20).

From a visual perspective the odyssey of people attempting to find better lives in third countries has attracted unprecedented public attention with the publication of sadly famous pictures such as that of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian whose lifeless body was washed up on the Turkish shore after his inflatable boat capsized. Such images, together with those of rubber dinghies full of people arriving on Greek shores, those of child victims of chemical gas attacks and of Syrian cities bombed and besieged have animated national and international public debate. This study is important because it pays special attention to the visual representation of displacement and it unpacks the implications that humanitarian visuality has on the refugee issue. For focus on humanitarian visuality “can help address a gap in visual studies, which in its analyses of the myriad of significant actors shaping the ways in which images are created, selected, displayed, and interpreted – whether we think of national governments, private corporations, media organizations, political movements and campaigns, or lay audiences – has tended to overlook the crucial role of NGOs in informing the visual cultures of national and global civil societies” (Kurasawa 2015, 44).

1.3 Research Design

1.3.1 The Syrian Crisis

This book is based on the analysis of the visual representation of Syrian refugees offered by four major transnational humanitarian NGOs (CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières) between 2015 and 2016. It looks particularly at the images produced and disseminated online through the agencies’ websites and Facebook pages.

Since the beginning of the conflict in 2012, Syrian people have sought refuge in neighboring countries. At the time of the research, over 5.5 million people were registered as Syrian refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (UNHCR 2017c). Turkey hosted the biggest proportion (nearly three and a half million people), Lebanon registered a million refugees, Jordan 655,000, Iraq 230,000 (in addition to 3.2 million internally displaced people), and Egypt around 115,000 (UNHCR 2017c). The humanitarian effort inside Syria has been severely hindered by the very limited access to affected populations, dramatic level of violence, and serious security concerns for humanitarian staff. Most relief has been delivered in neighboring host countries where UN agencies, international organizations and most transnational NGOs have established or substantially enlarged their operations. Starting from March 2012, the coordination of the humanitarian response has been systematized at the regional level under the leadership of UNHCR, as specified under the UN-wide cluster system.² The number of agencies that participated in the Humanitarian Regional Response Plan rose from 34 in 2012 (UNHCR 2012) to 144 in 2017 (UNHCR 2017a). Organizations active in the response to the Syrian crisis mostly include UN agencies, transnational and local NGOs, and a few foundations. Over the years, relief agencies have been working in all sectors of humanitarian interventions (such as health, education, shelter and protection). Their regional aggregated budget has risen from $84,159,188 in 2012 (UNHCR 2012) to $4,400,570,955 in 2017 (UNHCR 2017a).

In 2015, the movement of Syrian people took another direction. For a variety of reasons, including the worsening of the situation in several neighboring countries (Achilli 2015; UN 2015), and opening of the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan route (Fargues 2015), Syrians also started to move toward Europe, where a little less than a million people applied for asylum (UNHCR 2017b). The intensity of arrivals of people of different nationalities – but mostly from Syria – on Europe’s southern coasts, and especially on Greek shores, between 2015 and 2016 led many humanitarian, institutional and academic commentators to talk about a refugee, migrant or Mediterranean ´crisis´ (ECHO 2015; UNHCR 2015; Fargues 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2016). The monthly number of sea arrivals in Europe increased from around 5000 people in January 2015 to a peak of over 220,000 in October 2015, after which it gradually decreased until the end of 2016 (UNHCR 2017d). At the end of 2016 the number of arrivals in Europe drastically decreased, de facto concluding the crisis. What happened was the entry into force in March of that year of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey, the so called EU-Turkey Agreement (European Council 2016). The deal aimed at stopping irregular migration flows from Turkey to Europe by preventing Syrians (and others on the move) from travelling from Turkey to Greece or from Greek islands to the Greek mainland and then onwards into Europe and also by forcibly returning those judged to have moved irregularly.

Together with this new strict migration regime European discourse on migration became increasingly militarized and securitized (Perkowsky 2016; Garelli and Tazzioli 2017; Musarò 2017). This study focuses specifically on this period, from January 2015 to December 2016, a time whose seemingly unexpected association of humanitarianism and securitization discourses in the response to the ´crisis´, provides a unique opportunity to empirically explore their interconnected and mutually constitutive nature (Aradau 2004a).

1.4 The Non-governmental Organizations

Within the variegated landscape of humanitarian organizations responding to the Syrian crisis, I have had to circumscribe the object of analysis. Acknowledging that humanitarianism has undeniably various expressions originating from different historical and cultural backgrounds (Kennedy 2005; Fiori 2013), I also agree with Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2013). They have noted how dominant humanitarian theory has been based on a tradition of Western humanitarianism with its specific set of values and practices. Present-day humanitarianism – defined by some authors as a ‘new humanitarianism’– with its special relationship with the political sphere and its assumingly universal language, is even more embedded in Western culture (Chandler 2001). Without denying the relevance of ´other´ important forms of relief action, my book will focus on the tradition of Western professionalized and transnational humanitarianism.

Among the wide range of different organizations operating in the humanitarian sector, I decided to focus on non-governmental organizations, as opposed to UN agencies and state actors, for two main reasons. First, because although it is a fact that humanitarian assistance is today provided by a multiplicity of actors, NGOs have nowadays become one of the most prominent actors of the humanitarian sphere, performing “the vast majority of the operating work of the international humanitarian system” (Maxwell and Walker 2014, 117). Secondly, and most importantly, a large body of scholarship has explored the relationship between International Organizations (IOs) and securitization (see for example the work of Abrahamsen 2005; Andersson 2012; Chandler 2007; Gabiam 2016; Geiger and Pécoud 2014; Gerstl 2010; Russo and Giusti 2017; Longo 2013; Mason 2014; Musarò 2013, 2017). Analysis of the securitizing role of NGOs has been much less investigated (with the notable excptions of Duffield 2007, 2014; Aradau 2004a; Watson 2011).

The world of transnational humanitarian NGOs is still populated by a numerous and variegated set of agencies. The term NGO encompasses organizations with different geographical membership and activities. There are national organizations that only operate in a specific country and transnational ones that intervene across borders and are composed of a variety of members in different States. This study concentrates on the latter because of their wider geographical presence, outreach and potential to shape the transnational humanitarian discourse. Among all organizations, I decided to focus on the major ones. Cottle and Nolan (2007) describe the Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, CARE and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as “the world’s major aid agencies” (Cottle and Nolan 2007, 862) and show how these organizations have contributed to shape the discourse of today’s humanitarianism. Similarly, Barnett and Weiss (2008) list MSF, CARE, S, World Vision International, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and Oxfam as the best-known humanitarian agencies. Among these organizations, I have selected the four NGOs identified by the authors quoted above (i.e. CARE, MSF, Oxfam and Save the Children). Moreover, since the time-space framework of the research is the humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis both in the neighboring countries and in Europe between 2015 and 2016, this study will focus on the organizations that have or had operations in all those areas. This will inevitably exclude World Vision and CRS as they have not participated in the refugees/migrants emergency response in the Mediterranean. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been excluded because, although often referred to as an NGO, it has in fact a hybrid status.³

1.5 Multi-modal Analysis

The case study is based on a multi-modal analysis that combines the use of multiple methods, namely: visual methodologies (visual social semiotics and iconography) and multi-sited fieldwork. As Bleiker has argued, the “political significance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods” (Bleiker 2015, 872). Since images circulate and acquire meaning at various overlapping levels, simultaneously in the international arena and in the viewer’s mind, Bleiker has observed how their meaning is always dependent on context and interpretation. For this important reason the methodology of this book is based on the combination of visual methods with a multi-sited fieldwork in three countries along with analysis of NGOs’ strategic documents, policies, and guidelines.

1.5.1 Images Collection and Classification

The visual data used for this study consist of 1184 pictures. Images have been collected from the websites and Facebook pages of the four selected NGOs according to the following criteria: (1) images should be photographic images; (2) they should represent Syrian displaced people and/or the causes of their displacement and (3) they should have been published between 2015 and 2016. Data have been stored on Nvivo software for classification and analysis purposes. For websites, I privileged the pictures published on the NGOs international profile as opposed to the websites of the different country offices. Given the impossibility of navigating websites historically, I have collected images using the way back machine free software that periodically takes snapshots of websites’ different pages and stores them online. Through this tool, it has been possible to access NGOs’ website pages from January 2015. Every relevant page was saved in PDF and HTML format every 4 months until December 2016. All pictures have been individually uploaded on Nvivo.

For Facebook pages, the international account has been taken into consideration, or the account specifically dedicated to the Syrian crisis. When the latter was not available, as in the case of Save the Children and Oxfam, the choice has fallen on the profile of the organization headquarters. Data were automatically extrapolated by Nvivo software through its application for social media analysis that creates datasets listing all posts, pictures, video, and metadata of the selected period. I eliminated the duplicates, keeping the image the first time they were used within a media. In the case of pictures used both on Facebook and an agency’s website, unless specifically required by the image (e.g., publication with a particular caption, of for belonging to a Facebook campaign), I privileged data found on websites where the compositional meaning could also be explored. Since the focus of the study is the transnational humanitarian NGOs’ representation of Syrian displacement, I have not considered the images that would only depict NGOs staff, though I kept the pictures representing NGOs workers and managers with Syrian refugees. The data collection of pictures from the websites and Facebook pages of the four selected NGOs has generated a corpus of 1184 pictures composed as indicated in the table below (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Breakdown of data collected, divided by producing NGO and media

1.5.2 Multi-sited Fieldwork

Field research for this study was carried out intermittently between March and November 2017. Through multi-sited ethnography and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, I gathered a ´visual reconnaissance´ of the locations of the so-called Syrian refugee crisis. This opened a window into how visual products are conceived and developed, the NGOs’ intentions and key messages behind the representation of the Syrian crisis, and practitioners’ understanding of their respective organizations’ visual communication policies and strategies. The presence and movements of both Syrian refugees and major humanitarian NGOs in Syria’s neighboring countries and in the Mediterranean makes a multi-sited research the most appropriate method of enquiry. I decided to focus on Lebanon and Jordan in the Middle East, and Greece on the European shore where Oxfam, SCF, CARE and MSF have ongoing humanitarian operations. For each of the four organizations on which this study focuses, I have gathered and analysed organizational guidelines, strategic documents, and policy briefs. In all locations I visited, project implementation sites, formal and informal refugee camps, I interviewed NGO staff, humanitarian advocacy and communication specialists, local authorities, photographers working for the NGOs, volunteers active in the emergency response, and academic researchers.

1.6 Methodological Considerations

A couple of methodological considerations are in order before proceeding. The first concerns my professional experience as a humanitarian practitioner. Although I am surely not the first researcher to have worked in the humanitarian sector before undertaking an academic career, I am inspired by a post-modern sensibility. I believe that to go beyond the object-subject dichotomy and the myth of the ´view from nowhere´ it is crucial to reflect on the researcher’s positionality. The best way to acknowledge the situated nature of my research (Finlay and Gough 2008) is to address the question of self-reflexivity. In this sense, I cannot deny that my experience in the field, and particularly my work in responding to the Iraqi displacement following the US-led invasion in 2003 and the Syrian refugee emergency caused by the conflict in Syria, have influenced my analysis. Although ultimately interested in contributing with my work to the solidarity effort undertaken by many organizations, I found myself increasingly reflecting on the nature of information flows within the sector in which I worked.

My research has also been a way to explore how some humanitarian practices were also causing more harm than good. Probably more often than I wanted, my eyes were at first looking for what was wrong about an image, taking for granted what was indeed good. And that is also why I had frequently to go back in my analysis and make more explicit the different meanings of the pictures so as to clearly acknowledge what I always expected to be included in the image: the ´good´ message. Eventually, my position toward the object of analysis and its situated nature, helped me to account for the polysemic character of images. Systematically reflecting and making sense of it throughout the research has been essential.

A second consideration regards the use of visual material. In showing with pictures what I was arguing I may have risked falling into the trap of inadvertently implying that what was presented visually was therefore ´true´ or somehow ´real´, a premise that I discard epistemologically in recognizing that all visual representation – photography included – constitutes an interpretation of reality and not its objective visual transposition. Drawing on Bal’s concept of expository tradition (1996), Szörényi (2006) notices how by presenting pictures of refugees, academic publications can reproduce the problematic dynamic that they were instead trying to challenge. That made me think that although throughout the study I have sought to provide alternative interpretation of the images presented, and to highlight the absence of the voice of the people represented in the pictures, my position toward the represented participants remains that of an outsider, one that does not give any voice to them, their interpretation, and their self-representation.

My last reflection concerns the methodological strength of much visual analysis. While acknowledging the existence both of extremely important contributions specifically focusing on the methodological aspect of visual analysis (Rose 2001; Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001; Hansen 2011; Heck and Schlag 2013) and also the fundamental advancement at this level, there may still be room for improvement. In many excellent IR and political science studies on visuality I read I could not help being struck that frequently the paper omitted to indicate and explain the methodology used for the visual analysis and the elaboration of the argument. This is not a minor flaw. For, especially in the relatively new field of visuality in IR, it ultimately undermines the power of the insight and the perspicacity of the argument. Against, this background, I hope that with the extensive effort put into the definition of a visual methodology from both a theoretical and practical perspective, I have been able to improve the strength of my insight.

1.7 The Content of this Book

The book is divided into six chapters. Following the introduction, Chap. 2 presents the theoretical framework that constitutes the backbone of the whole study. After introducing the notion of humanitarianism and presenting the academic discussion around the interrelation between humanitarianism and politics, it outlines the role that civil society plays in global governance with a particular attention to the specific role of transnational humanitarian NGOs. In so doing, the section links present-day humanitarianism, sometimes referred to as ´new-humanitarianism´, with governance. In the second part, the chapter presents the analytical framework of the securitization theory elaborated by the International Security Studies (ISS) literature. It explains how the approach of the Copenhagen School is the one which is here adopted to explore securitization, one of the realms in which relief organizations actively participate in the international political arena and global governance. The section also outlines the different studies that have so far focused on the interrelation of humanitarianism and securitization and clarifies how this study is innovative, for the first time focusing on visuality, instead of practices. Finally, the last part, puts the work of transnational humanitarian NGOs into the contemporary context of communication and the highly competitive environment in which organizations contend for funds, public mobilization and media attention. This section touches upon the features of humanitarian communication, and how it has changed over time, with particular attention to the humanitarian representation of refugees.

Chapter 3 completes the theoretical framework by providing the intellectual premises of a visual approach to the study of IR. It frames visual analysis within the larger strand of critical discourse analysis to then explain the origin of the attention given to images and the added value of visual social semiotics – combined with iconography – as method of enquiry. Since this book is based on photographic images, this section also outlines what are the features and the political-epistemological claims of this specific genre and addresses the crucial aspect of the polysemic value of images.

Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 constitute the analytical part of the book. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the specific role that each of the four selected NGOs plays in global governance. The exploration is based on the investigation of each of the relief organizations’ background, humanitarian approach, mission, vision, funding policy, and advocacy strategy. The investigation of the four different organizational models allows us to highlight similarities and differences in the ways each of the four NGOs selected for this study perceives, describes and presents its own role within global governance.

Chapter 4 is the first of the following three chapters based on the visual analysis. It focuses on the different NGO representational practices that contribute to the depiction of Syrian people on the move as a threat. Through the visual analysis of five aesthetic patterns – vectors without goal, emergency, boats, conceptual structures, and the visual construction of the other – this section intends to shed light on the ways through which aid agencies, to a certain degree, reproduce and reinforce a culturally and politically dominant public and media securitized account of refugees.

Chapter 5 is the exploration of images that, in the attempt to challenge mainstream discourses of securitization around people on the move, privilege a representation of refugees that portrays them as referent object of a threat. In line with contemporary humanitarianism’s focus on human security, protection and the rights-based approach, these kinds of depictions introduce innovative elements and perspective. This section is dedicated to the exploration of six aesthetic patterns – pity, victimization, infantilization, suffering, innocence, and the savior-hero - that consistently represent Syrian displaced people securitized as referent objects of different kinds of existential risks. The aim is to show how these relatively new kinds of depiction continue to portray refugees in terms of victimhood, passivity and very limited agency.

The last of the analytical chapters, Chap. 6, focuses on invisibility, the absences that emerged from the visual analysis and the comparison between humanitarian (discursive) narrative and the elements visually present in the NGOs’ pictures. It approaches the representation of Syrian refugees with a particular attention to the dialectic between what is visible in the images and what is not, and the exploration of the various reasons behind absence. The chapter aims to show how various securitization processes are connected with visibility but also, and not less importantly, with invisibility. It argues that paying attention to this dialectic is important to glimpse glimmers of minor displacements and the way NGOs represent refugees. Finally, the conclusion sums up the various findings and shows how they empirically support the argument that transnational humanitarian organizations play a key role in global governance, specifically in the way in which their accounts of displacement interrelate with mainstream securitization discourses. However, within this visual depiction it is possible to distinguish signals of micro-displacements.