ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief state of the art of what is increasingly described as a new, iconic turn in critical security studies. It provides an overview of the recent turn to visuality in International Relations (IR) and discusses the different epistemological and ontological positions which come along with picture theory. Although references to visuality have increased in IR, scholars have only implicitly theorized the images, or to be more precise, the icon, as a genuine research object. The chapter gives a brief overview of an iconic act theory for theorizing images for security studies in an innovative way. In recent years, IR scholars have addressed the relation between visuality and politics in different ways. Keeping the influence of media representations on politics in mind, it has become commonplace in critical security studies to state that security is a social construction.
