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Gothic visibilities and International Relations: Uncanny icons, critical comics, and the politics of abjection in Aleppo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2023

Frederik Carl Windfeld*
Affiliation:
Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Italy
Marius Hauge Hvithamar
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lene Hansen
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
*
*Corresponding author. Email: frederikcarl.windfeld@eui.eu

Abstract

The war in Syria has been communicated to global audiences through images of dead and injured children, decapitated and tortured bodies, and ruined cities. The article shows how news media coverage of the war's impact on the city of Aleppo invoked a Gothic tradition. Drawing on Kristeva and Freud's concepts of the abject and the uncanny, the article argues that the Gothic tradition can further International Relations research on the constitution of Selves and Others. The Gothic Other is constituted through the (Gothic) Self's repulsion, fascination, and desire, and the Gothic tradition revolves around an understanding of the invisible as an in-between space of fear and anticipation. The ability to recognise Gothic themes in an image depends on one's familiarity with the Gothic tradition, hence images are theorised as having a Gothic potentiality. The article focuses on how the Anglo-Saxon Gothic tradition enabled Western readers to identify Gothic themes in news coverage of the war in Aleppo. The article adopts a multimethod strategy including a content analysis of 457 images published by Western news media; a discourse analysis of news stories; an analysis of three Gothic, uncanny iconic motifs; and an author-created comic drawing on Gothic elements from the published photographs.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

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3 Barnard, ‘How Omran Daqneesh’; on iconic remediation, see Hansen, Lene, ‘How images make world politics: International icons and the case of Abu Ghraib’, Review of International Studies, 41:2 (2015), pp. 263–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Katrine Emilie Andersen, and Lene Hansen, ‘Images, emotions, and international politics: The death of Alan Kurdi’, Review of International Studies, 46:1 (2020), pp. 75–95.

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9 We use ‘Aleppo’ as a shorthand for ‘the Syrian war as fought over and in Aleppo’ and to indicate the constitution of Aleppo as a site.

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13 Jennifer Mitzen, ‘Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma’, European Journal of International Relations, 12:3 (2006), pp. 341–70; Filip Ejdus, ‘Abjection, materiality and ontological security: A study of the unfinished Church of Christ the Saviour in Pristina’, Cooperation and Conflict, 56:3 (2021), pp. 264–85.

14 Vivienne Jabri, ‘(Uni)form instrumentalities and war's abject’, Millenium: Journal of International Studies, 27:4 (1998), pp. 885–902; Charlotte Epstein, ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and the study of identity in international politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 17:2 (2011), pp. 327–50; Jessica Auchter, ‘Border monuments: Memory, counter-memory, and (b)ordering practices along the US-Mexico border’, Review of International Studies, 39:2 (2013), pp. 291–311.

15 Richard Devetak, ‘The gothic scene of international relations: Ghosts, monsters, terror and the sublime after September 11’, Review of International Studies, 31:4 (2005), pp. 621–43; Anara Karagulova and Nick Megoran, ‘Discourses of danger and the ‘war on terror': Gothic Kyrgyzstan and the collapse of the Akaev regime’, Review of International Studies, 37:1 (2011), pp. 29–48; Caron E. Gentry, ‘The mysterious case of Aafia Siddiqui: Gothic intertextual analysis of neo-Orientalist narratives’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 45:1 (2016), pp. 3–24.

16 Kate Manzo, ‘Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood’, Antipode, 40:4 (2008), pp. 632–57; Helen Berents, ‘Apprehending the “telegenic dead”: Considering images of dead children in global politics’, International Political Sociology, 13:2 (2019), pp. 145–60; Berents, ‘Politics, policy-making’; Adler-Nissen et al., ‘Images, emotions’.

17 Ejdus, ‘Abjection, materiality’, p. 277; Debbie Lisle and Heather L. Johnson, ‘Lost in the aftermath’, Security Dialogue, 50:1 (2019), p. 24.

18 Auchter, Global Corpse; Debrix, Global Powers; Thomas Gregory, ‘Dismembering the dead: Violence, vulnerability and the body in war’, European Journal of International Relations, 22:4 (2016), pp. 944–65.

19 Tim Aistrope and Stefanie Fishel, ‘Horror, apocalypse and world politics’, International Affairs, 96:3 (2020), p. 633.

20 Gregory, ‘Dismembering the dead’, p. 952; Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011).

21 Gregory, ‘Dismembering the dead', p. 952.

22 Gregory, ‘Dismembering the dead'; Auchter, Global Corpse; Debrix, Global Powers.

23 Elizabeth Dauphinee, The Politics of Exile (London, UK: Routledge, 2013); Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee (eds), Narrative Global Politics: Theory, History and the Personal in International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2016); William A. Callahan, ‘The visual turn in IR: Documentary filmmaking as a critical method’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:3 (2015), pp. 891–910; Sophie Harman, Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019); Roland Bleiker, ‘Visual autoethnography and international security: Insights from the Korean DMZ’, European Journal of International Security, 4:3 (2019), pp. 274–99; Lene Hansen and Johan Spanner, ‘National and post-national performances at the Venice Biennale: Site-specific seeing through the photo essay’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 49:2 (2021), pp. 305–36.

24 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Lene Hansen, ‘Reading comics for the field of International Relations: Theory, method and the Bosnian War’, European Journal of International Relations, 23:3 (2017), pp. 581–608; Henry Redwood and Alister Wedderburn, ‘A cat-and-Maus game: The politics of truth and reconciliation in post-conflict comics’, Review of International Studies, 45:4 (2019), pp. 588–606.

25 David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2004), p. 3.

26 Punter and Byron, ‘The Gothic’, p. 4; Alfred E. Longueil, ‘The word “Gothic” in eighteenth century criticism’, Modern Language Notes, 38:8 (1923), pp. 453–60.

27 Aistrope and Fishel, ‘Horror, apocalypse’, p. 645; Robert Miles, ‘The Gothic aesthetic: The Gothic as discourse’, The Eighteenth Century, 32:1 (1991), p. 39.

28 Round, Gothic in Comics, p. 13.

29 Madeline B. Gangnes, ‘Hysterical reality: Weimar Germany and the Victorian Gothic in Mattotti and Kramsky's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 8:6 (2017), pp. 510–20; Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (New York, NY: Gottfried & Fritz, 2015 [orig. pub. 1840]), pp. 38–50; Devetak, ‘The gothic’, p. 625; Nick Groom, The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 43; Longueil, ‘The word “Gothic”’, p. 455.

30 Punter and Byron, The Gothic, p. 262.

31 Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic ghost of the counterfeit and the progress of abjection’, in David Punter (ed.), A New Companion to the Gothic (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2012), pp. 496–509.

32 Round, Gothic in Comics, p. 10.

33 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015 [orig. pub. 1757]), p. 42.

34 Misha Kavka, ‘The Gothic on screen: Influence and technique’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 209; David Annwn Jones, ‘Gothic and photography: The darkest art’, in David Punter (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 171–86; Fred Botting, Gothic (London, UK: Routledge, 1996), p. 2; Round, Gothic in Comics.

35 Ann Radcliffe, ‘On the supernatural in poetry’, in Clive Bloom (ed.), Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 60–9; Radcliffe's use of the terms differs from that of Cavarero.

36 David Annwn Jones, Gothic Effigy: A Guide to Dark Visibilities (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 6.

37 Round, Gothic in Comics, p. 76.

38 Ibid., pp. 22–3.

39 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 123.

40 Ibid., p. 132.

41 Freud uses the term ‘aesthetics’ here in reference to the sensorial and emotive: as ‘relating to the qualities of our feeling’. Ibid., pp. 123, 148.

42 Ibid., p. 124.

43 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014), p. 48.

44 While the abject, as a psychoanalytical concept, is ‘Essentially different from “uncanniness”’, the two are underpinned by a shared theorisation of the Self-Other relation as one of ambiguity, unease, and intertwinement. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 4–5.

45 Ibid., p. 4.

46 Ibid., p. 13.

47 Ejdus, ‘Abjection, materiality’, p. 268.

48 Ibid.; Jabri, ‘(Uni)form instrumentalities', p. 896; Kristeva herself rejects a conceptual link between the abject and desire, though this reservation arguably stems from the latter term's use by Lacan as embedded in the (psychoanalytical) symbolic order. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 9.

49 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3.

50 Ibid., p. 9.

51 Ibid., p. 28.

52 Auchter, ‘Border monuments’, p. 296.

53 On images as having an emotional potentiality, see Hansen and Spanner, ‘National and post-national performances’, p. 316.

54 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, UK: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 8.

55 Hansen, ‘How images’, p. 265; Hansen draws on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's concept of nodal point. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, UK: Verso, 1985).

56 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 27; Hariman and Lucaites's definition is of photojournalistic icons; Hansen expands it to cover images in general, ‘How images’, p. 268.

57 Hansen, ‘How images’, pp. 271–2; David Campbell, ‘Atrocity, memory, photography: Imagining the concentration camps of Bosnia – the case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part 1’, Journal of Human Rights, 1:1 (2002), p. 1.

58 Lene Hansen, Rebecca Adler-Nissen, and Katrine Emilie Andersen, ‘The visual international politics of the European refugee crisis: Tragedy, humanitarianism, borders’, Cooperation and Conflict, 56:4 (2021), p. 373; David D. Perlmutter, Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Icons of Outrage in International Crisis (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), p. 11.

59 Gregory, ‘Dismembering’; Auchter, Global Corpse.

60 Karagulova and Megoran, ‘Discourses of danger’.

61 Aisha Majid, ‘Most popular news websites: Top 50 biggest websites in the world’, Press Gazette (2021) available at: {https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/top-50-largest-news-websites-in-the-world-right-wing-outlets-see-biggest-growth/} accessed 4 May 2021.

62 For example, the search operation employed for BBC was: {site:bbc.com ‘Aleppo’}. Only the first image in each story was coded.

63 Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, Emma Hutchison, and Xzarina Nicholson, ‘The visual dehumanisation of refugees’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 48:4 (2013), pp. 398–416; Chris Methmann, ‘Visualizing climate-refugees: Race, vulnerability, and resilience in global liberal politics’, International Political Sociology, 8:4 (2014), pp. 416–35; Hansen et al. ‘The visual international’.

64 Cohen's Kappa scores for each coding category are shown in Appendix 1.

65 The majority of the five hundred articles were published in late 2016 as the siege tightened.

66 For visual discourse analysis of a larger number of images in IR, see Methmann, ‘Visualizing’, and Hansen et al. ‘The visual international’.

67 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials (London, UK: SAGE, 2016), p. 206.

68 In one case we were unable to obtain permission to include the photograph in the article. Instead we include two other photographs (Figures 7 and 9), which capture the same themes.

69 Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 362.

70 Chantal da Silva, ‘Chilling photos show how Aleppo has changed since Syrian conflict started’, Independent (15 October 2016), available at: {https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-chilling-photos-show-how-the-ancient-city-has-changed-since-the-syrian-conflict-started-a7362796.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

71 James Masters, ‘Aleppo has become a “ghost city”’, CNN (27 September 2017), available at: {https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/26/middleeast/aleppo-syria-bombing-aid/index.html} accessed 7 August 2021; Holly Yan, ‘Aleppo: Who still lives in this decimated city – and why?’, CNN (21 November 2016), available at: {https://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/20/middleeast/who-is-left-in-aleppo/index.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

72 We have given the photographs in the figures captions based on the photographer's description (Figure 1) and the text provided under ‘description’ in Ritzau Scanpix (Figures 2–9). The photograph in Figure 1 was published in Somini Sengupta and Anne Barnard, ‘U.N. envoy to Syria announces possible truce in Aleppo’, The New York Times (17 February 2015), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/world/middleeast/syrian-forces-try-to-cut-supply-route-to-aleppo-as-hezbollahs-role-grows.html} accessed 27 September 2022.

73 The photographs and the comic are published in colour online and in black-and-white in the printed version.

74 Kyle Grayson and Jocelyn Mawdsley, ‘Scopic regimes and the visual turn in International Relations: Seeing world politics through the drone’, European Journal of International Relations, 25:2 (2019), pp. 431–57; Joanna Tidy, ‘Visual regimes and the politics of war experience: Rewriting war “from above” in WikiLeaks’ “Collateral Murder”’, Review of International Studies, 43:1 (2017), pp. 95–111.

75 Devetak, ‘The gothic scene’, pp. 624–5.

76 Gangnes, ‘Hysterical reality’, p. 517.

77 Maryam Maruf and Kanishk Tharoor, ‘Return to Aleppo: The story of my home during the war’, BBC (10 June 2017), available at: {https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40194794} accessed 8 August 2021; Masuma Ahuja, ‘What Aleppo looked like before the war’, CNN (13 December 2016), available at: {https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/13/world/what-aleppo-looked-like-before-the-war-trnd/index.html} accessed 7 August 2021; Joanna Ruck, ‘Destruction of Aleppo: Then and now – in pictures’, The Guardian (21 December 2016), available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/21/aleppo-syria-war-destruction-then-and-now-in-pictures} accessed 7 August 2021; Silva, ‘Chilling photos’; Loveday Morris, ‘A tale of two cities in Aleppo: Rubble on one side, packed restaurants on the other’, Washington Post (19 March 2016), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/a-tale-of-two-cities-in-aleppo-rubble-on-one-side-packed-restaurants-on-the-other/2016/03/19/3758a0cc-e55e-11e5-a9ce-681055c7a05f_story.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

78 Silva, ‘Chilling photos’.

79 The photograph in Figure 2 was published in Marie Borreau and Benjamin Barthe, ‘Confusion à Alep après la capitulation des rebelles’, Le Monde (14 December 2016), available at: {https://www.lemonde.fr/syrie/article/2016/12/14/confusion-a-alep-apres-la-capitulation-des-rebelles_5048707_1618247.html} accessed 27 September 2022.

80 Matthew Clapperton, David Martin Jones, and M. L. R. Smith, ‘Iconoclasm and strategic thought: Islamic State and cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria’, International Affairs, 93:5 (2017), pp. 1205–31.

81 The photograph in Figure 3 was published in ‘Aleppo man: The story behind the viral photograph symbolising six years of Syrian civil war’, Independent (15 March 2017), available at: {https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-viral-photograph-old-man-story-behind-syria-civil-war-six-years-mohammed-moheidin-anis-abu-omar-joseph-eid-a7630691.html} accessed 24 May 2021.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

85 Diane Long Hoeveler, ‘The secularization of suffering: Toward a theory of Gothic subjectivity’, The Wordsworth Circle, 35:3 (2004), pp. 113–17.

86 Erica Burman, ‘Innocents abroad: Western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies’, Disasters, 18:3 (1994), p. 240.

87 Berents, ‘Politics, policy-making’, p. 596.

88 Vanessa Pupavac, ‘Misanthorpy without borders: The international children's rights regime’, Diasters, 25:2 (2001), pp. 95–112; Burman, ‘Innocents abroad’, p. 240; Manzo, ‘Imaging humanitarianism’.

89 As a discrete iconic image, the scene of Omran Daqneesh in the ambulance has been published in slight variations. One version can be found at Barnard, ‘How Omran Daqneesh’.

90 Barnard, ‘How Omran Daqneesh’; Sarah Larimer and Lindsey Bever, ‘The stunned, bloodied face of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh sums up the horror of Aleppo’, The Washington Post (18 August 2016), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/17/the-stunned-bloodied-face-of-a-child-survivor-sums-up-the-horror-of-aleppo/} accessed 26 June 2021. Insider Staff, ‘Seeing orange’.

91 UNICEF, ‘Photo of boy pulled from rubble reminder of “unimaginable horrors” Syrian children face’, UN News (19 August 2016), available at: {https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/08/537042-photo-boy-pulled-rubble-reminder-unimaginable-horrors-syrian-children-face} accessed 14 May 2021; Elizabeth Chuck, ‘Brother of Omran Daqneesh, boy who became the symbol of Syria's suffering, dies’, NBC (20 August 2016), available at: {https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/aleppos-children/brother-omran-daqneesh-boy-who-became-symbol-syria-s-suffering-n635121} accessed 14 May 2021.

92 Stephanie Höppner, ‘Children in Aleppo: “I'd rather die”’, DW (23 October 2016), available at: {https://www.dw.com/en/children-in-aleppo-id-rather-die/a-36129033} accessed 4 July 2021; Karen Attiah, ‘Opinion | Omran Daqneesh and the world's pathetic failures on Syrian refugees’, Washington Post (18 August 2016), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/08/18/omran-daqneesh-and-the-worlds-pathetic-failures-on-syrian-refugees/} accessed 4 July 2021.

93 Barnard, ‘How Omran Daqneesh’; Chris Harris, ‘How children are still dying at sea one year on from Alan Kurdi and that photo’, Euronews (1 September 2016), available at: {https://www.euronews.com/2016/09/01/how-children-are-still-dying-at-sea-one-year-on-from-alan-kurdi-and-that-photo} accessed 19 May 2021.

94 Peggy Noonan, ‘A wounded boy's silence, and the candidates’, The Wall Street Journal (25 August 2016), available at: {https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-wounded-boys-silence-and-the-candidates-1472168178} accessed 4 July 2021.

95 Ibid.; Nicole Puglise, ‘Obama cites letter from child offering home to young Syrian refugee’, The Guardian (22 September 2016), available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/obama-letter-alex-syrian-refugee-child} accessed 4 July 2021.

96 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by President Obama at Leaders Summit on Refugees’, The White House (20 September 2016), available at: {https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/20/remarks-president-obama-leaders-summit-refugees} accessed 14 September 2021.

97 Daqneesh's father expressed uncertainty in 2017 on Syrian state news media on whether Russia or Syria were responsible for the attack. Mortensen and Mollerup, ‘The Omran Daqneesh imagery’, p. 270.

98 Berents, ‘Apprehending’, p.148; Wasinski, Christophe, ‘“Post-heroic warfare” and ghosts: The social control of dead American soldiers in Iraq’, International Political Sociology, 2:2 (2008), p. 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manzo, ‘Imaging humanitarianism’.

99 The photograph in Figure 5 was published in Ben Hubbard, ‘“Doomsday today in Aleppo”: Assad and Russian forces bombard city’, The New York Times (23 September 2016), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/world/middleeast/aleppo-syria-airstrikes.html} accessed 27 September 2022.

100 Auchter, Global Corpse, p. 137.

101 Debrix, Global Powers, p. 128.

102 The photograph in Figure 6 was published in Robert Fisk, ‘Massacre of innocents: As Syria and Russia bombard eastern Aleppo children are also dying in the west of the city’, Independent (29 October 2016), available at: {https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/syria-civil-war-aleppo-conflict-latest-innocent-children-killed-isis-assad-russia-nusra-a7385791.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

103 Ibid.

104 Devetak, ‘The gothic scene’, p. 636.

105 Dan Merica and Richard Roth, ‘Trump on Assad: “That's a butcher”’, CNN (13 April 2017), available at: {https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/12/politics/donald-trump-bashar-al-assad-butcher/index.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

106 Frederik Pleitgen, ‘From stalemate to slaughter: On Aleppo's front line’, CNN (12 February 2016), available at: {https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/11/middleeast/aleppo-syria-military/index.html} accessed 8 August 2021; ‘Aleppo: Pro-government forces slaughter at least 82 civilians while closing in on Syrian city, UN says’, Independent (13 December 2016) available at: {https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/aleppo-latest-battle-un-syrian-army-forces-government-regime-kill-civilians-massacre-assad-russia-a7471416.html} accessed 8 August 2021.

107 John Irish and Patrick Vignal, ‘France to propose U.N. Chapter 7 provision on Syria’, Reuters (13 June 2012), available at: {https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-france-idUSBRE85C0VR20120613} accessed 19 August 2021.

108 Devetak, ‘The gothic scene’, p. 636.

109 Rami Al-Bustan, ‘D'Alep à Damas, des vies en ruines’, Le Monde (5 March 2021), available at: {https://www.lemonde.fr/m-le-mag/article/2021/03/05/d-alep-a-damas-des-vies-en-ruines_6072124_4500055.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

110 We use the photos in Figures 7 and 9 instead of the one in our dataset for which we were unable to obtain permission to include it. That photo is published in Al-Bustan, ‘D'Alep à Damas’. The photograph in Figure 7 was taken by Mark Condren.

111 The photograph in Figure 8 was published in Laure Stephan, ‘A Alep, un an après, la vie renaît dans les ruines’, Le Monde (23 December 2017), available at: {https://www.lemonde.fr/syrie/article/2017/12/23/a-alep-un-an-apres-la-vie-renait-dans-les-ruines_5233876_1618247.html} accessed 27 September 2022.

112 Benjamin Barthe, ‘Syrie: à Alep, un carnage parmi les civils en fuite’, Le Monde (1 December 2016), available at: {https://www.lemonde.fr/syrie/article/2016/12/01/a-alep-la-fuite-sanglante-et-chaotique-des-civils-sous-les-bombes_5041193_1618247.html} accessed 7 August 2021; ‘Aleppo: Syria's key battleground’, BBC (1 December 2016), available at: {https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-37307643} accessed 7 August 2021; Anne Barnard, ‘“I saw my father dying”: A view from Aleppo's government-held side’, The New York Times (4 November 2016), available at: {https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/05/world/middleeast/aleppo-syria.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

113 Louisa Loveluck, ‘Russia, China veto U.N. proposal to stop deadly violence in Aleppo’, Washington Post (5 December 2016), available at: {https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/rebels-refuse-to-pull-out-of-aleppo-as-assads-forces-close-in/2016/12/05/26433e1c-baee-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html} accessed 7 August 2021; Associated Foreign Press, ‘L'armée syrienne stagne et continue de bombarder Alep’, Le Monde (28 July 2012), available at: {https://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2012/07/28/a-alep-l-assaut-a-commence-selon-une-ong_1739545_3218.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

114 Christoph Reuter, ‘Syria: Idlib province gets new lease on life’, Der Spiegel (28 September 2018), available at: {https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syria-idlib-province-gets-new-lease-on-life-a-1230480.html} accessed 7 August 2021.

115 ‘Syria will poison the region for years to come’, The Economist (5 September 2019) available at: { https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/05/syria-will-poison-the-region-for-years-to-come?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/ed/syriawillpoisontheregionforyearstocomeassadshollowvictory} accessed 7 August 2021.

116 Naumes, Sarah, all, ‘IsI” IR?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 43:3 (2015), p. 822Google Scholar.

117 Crilley, Rhys, ‘Where we at? New directions for research on popular culture and world politics’, International Studies Review, 23:1 (2021), p. 174CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis in original.

118 Frank Möller, Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 170.

119 Hansen, ’Reading comics’, pp. 593–5; Redwood and Wedderburn, ‘A cat-and-Maus game’, p. 604.

120 Another option would have been to choose a ‘de-Gothicising’ style presenting ‘the real war’.

121 Hansen, ‘Reading comics’, p. 590; Chute, Hillary, ‘The texture of retracing in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis’, Women's Studies Quarterly, 36:1–2 (2008), pp. 92110CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

122 The comic is published in colour in the online version of the article.

123 Xavier Guillaume, Rune S. Andersen, and Juha A. Vuori, ‘Paint it black: Colours and the social meaning of the battlefield’, European Journal of International Relations, 22:1 (2016), pp. 49–71.

124 Karagulova and Megoran, ‘Discourses of danger’, pp. 33–4.

125 Gentry, ‘The mysterious case’.