OBSERVING THE INTERNATIONAL: GOVERNMENTALITY OF GEOPOLITICS, VISUAL CULTURE AND THE SOCIAL LOGISTICS OF WAR MAKING

It is common in International Relations to read that “war made states and states made war”. Despite a
growing literature on the relationship between visual culture and geopolitics, there is a gap around the
manner in which war-making ability of states is dependent upon the population and the conduct of
geopolitical subjects. This doctoral thesis interrogates the ways in which the mainstream US visual
culture structures the possible field of geopolitical actions and imaginations of the population during
the Global War on Terror (GWoT) to understand and explain why this gap matters. It analyses how
visual culture encapsulates the population as an affective interpretative repertoire and is conducive to
the war-making ability of the US. The project contributes to academic literatures on `Governmentality
Studies`, `Critical Geopolitics`, `Critical Military Studies`, `Visual Culture ` and `the Sociology of the
State` and offers a framework for making sense of the relationship between visual culture, war-making
and governmentality. To do so, a new methodological approach, procedural rhetorical analysis is
developed to empirically document the ways in which geopolitical subjectivities are produced through
visual culture. Following theoretical discussions, there are three case studies, each focusing on a
different visual cultural platform to analyse the patterns recurring in these platforms: documentaries;
films; and first person shooter video games. Overall, the thesis argues for the significance of visual
culture in sustaining the social logistics of war making ability of the population during the GWoT.