ABSTRACT
Images and image-producing devices are often deployed as part of the surveillance systems – made up of technologies, rules, bureaucracies, laws, databases, knowledges and procedures – that record and analyse phenomena of relevance to global politics. As surveillance plays a part in the management of ever-increasing spheres of social and biological life, the phenomenon under visual surveillance in the name of global politics can be almost anything. On the one hand we have surveillance systems, the rationale of which is to provide foresight, to anticipate what will happen in the future. On the other hand, we find visual surveillance practices that follow a rationale of providing hindsight, a forensic aim to make the past known and transparent through making it visible. The use of visual surveillance with reference to global politics is already too vast to map, and it is sure to expand in the coming years.
