ABSTRACT
In this introductory chapter, Rune S. Andersen and Juha A. Vuori argue that a distinctive visual security studies is emerging as a subfield of security studies, drawing on insights from (critical) security studies, visual culture studies, and media studies. Visual security studies builds on the pictorial turn in the social sciences, the related aesthetic turn in international relations research, and innovative research programmes in security studies that have incorporated first the use of security language and later practices of enacting security. Rather than providing a different theory of security, Andersen and Vuori argue, it can add to the study of security by showing how visuality is important to security as a modality of security representations, as a component of security practice, and as providing visual methods that can scrutinize security. They conceptualize the chapters in Visual Security Studies as a series of adventures that, rather than attempting to limit and define the meeting point between visuality and security, experiment with understanding visual security representations, visual security practices, and visual methods for security studies.
