Politics, Policy-Making and the Presence of Images of Suffering Children

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Politics, policymaking, and the presence of images of suffering children

Helen Berents Senior Research Fellow School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology [email protected]

Abstract In 2017 Trump expressed pity for the “beautiful babies” killed in a gas attack on Khan Shaykhun in Syria in before launching airstrikes against President Assad’s regime. Images of suffering children in world politics are often used as a synecdoche for a broader conflict or disaster. Injured, suffering, or dead; the ways in which images of children circulate in global public discourse must be critically examined to uncover the assumptions that operate in these environments. This article explores reactions to images of children by representatives and leaders of states to trace the interconnected affective and political dimensions of these images. In contrast to attending to the expected empathetic responses prompted by images of children, this article particularly focuses on when such images prompt bellicose foreign policy decision-making. In doing this, the article forwards a way of thinking about images as contentious affective objects in international relations. The ways in which images of children’s bodies and suffering are strategically deployed by politicians deserves closer scrutiny to uncover the visual politics of childhood inherent in these moments of international politics and policymaking.

Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents

Introduction On the 4 April 2017, images started circulating on Twitter; images of children and adults struggling for breath, limp bodies being hosed down by first responders, small children on makeshift hospital beds with oxygen masks over their faces. Then later, other photos appeared of adults and children lying dead on the streets, relatives and friends gathered in mourning. Particularly arresting was the images of Abdul Hamid Youssef, clutching his dead ten-month-old twins, Aya and Ahmed to his chest. They look like they are sleeping, their faces just visible above the blankets they are swaddled in. Youssef’s face is anguished. The images were of a chemical attack in Khan Shaykhun1, in Idlib Governorate in Syria. Youssef also lost his wife and several other members of his family. All together more than eighty people died in this attack.2

When these images of the consequences of the gas attack on civilians in Khan Shaykhun spread on social media and then traditional international media, reactions were of horror and outrage. Social media users retweeted images and video of adults and particularly children choking and struggling to breathe. Politicians around the world also shared in this outrage, only their condemnation came with the weight of foreign policy decision making. French President Francois Hollande, in the final months of his presidency, called the attack a ‘massacre’; German Chancellor Angela Merkel similarly named it a ‘massacre of innocent people’.3 The UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson decried the violence against civilians and called it a ‘war crime’4, a position echoed by Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau5 and Australian Prime Minister Turnbull6.

1 Also spelled Khan Sheikhoun and Khan Sheikhun. 2 It wasn’t the first (or last) instance of gas attacks against civilians in Syria. Previously significant attacks were recorded in 2013 in Ghouta near Damascus where estimates suggest up to 1,300 people were killed and then again, a year later in 2018 in the city of Douma. It also is not the only time the civilians of Khan Shaykhun were killed as a consequence of the ongoing war in Syria. 3 Jefferson Chase, ‘Merkel, German government say US missile strikes in Syria 'understandable', Deutsche Welle, 7 April 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/merkel-german-government-say-us-missile-strikes-in-syria- understandable/a-38341124, accessed 25 June 2019. 4 BBC News, “Syria conflict: ‘Chemical attack’ in Idlib kills 58”, BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-39488539, accessed 10 June 2019. 5 Justin Ling, ‘“War Crime”: Tough talk from Trudeau hasn’t matched his government’s work in Syria’, VICE News, https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/bjdegv/trudeau-ratchets-up-rhetoric-on-removing-al-assad-after- chemical-attack, accessed 13 March 2019. 6 Tom McIlroy, ‘“A shocking war crime”: Malcolm Turnbull condemns chemical weapons deaths in Syria’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April, 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-shocking-war-crime- malcolm-turnbull-condemns-chemical-weapons-deaths-in-syria-20170405-gvdvu0.html, accessed 13 March 2019.

2 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents

In the United States, President Donald Trump, less than three months into his presidency, was reported as being deeply moved by the images. His condemnation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who he blamed for the attack, was prompted because in his words ‘even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered’7. In a departure from the ‘America First’ foreign policy position, which he had vocally touted throughout his presidential campaign, wanting to avoid involving the US in conflicts abroad, the attack in Khan Shaykhun prompted Trump to issue a ‘retaliatory’ airstrike against Syria.

Two and a half years earlier, images of another Syrian child’s death had prompted different kinds of policy responses by states in the global north. The death of Alan Kurdi, a three-year old Syrian boy of Kurdish background, found drowned on a Turkish beach, had caused an unprecedented global outpouring of sympathy and grief and had directly prompted some states to more humane refugee policies. Germany and Canada in particular increased their intake of refugees from the Syrian conflict. Famously German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced: ‘We can do [/manage] this’8. The phrase was initially picked up as a mark of Germany’s hospitality; however, it later came to be used by anti-immigration campaigners against Merkel and Germany’s asylum policies9. In Canada, in the midst of a national election, the promise to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees became a key part of the Liberal Party’s then-candidate Justin Trudeau’s election campaign.

While media10 and academic11 attention has largely focused on the empathetic reactions of states to the death of Alan Kurdi, it is true that for some states, Kurdi’s death instead

7 Mark Lander, ‘Acting on instinct, Trump upends his own foreign policy’, New York Times, April 7 2017, https://nyti.ms/2oa2cs3, accessed Jan. 19, 2018. 8 In full: “Wir haben so vieles geschafft – wir schaffen das” [We have managed so many things — we will also manage this]” 9 Janosch Delcker, ‘The phrase that haunts Angela Merkel’, Politico EU, 19 Aug. 2016, https://www.politico.eu/article/the-phrase-that-haunts-angela-merkel, accessed 15 March 2019. 10 For example, see: Justin Peters, ‘News organizations that chose not to run the most horrific photo of the dead Syrian boy were wrong,’ Slate, 3 Sept 2015. Accessed 20 Nov. 2017. http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/09/03/the_horrific_photo_of_aylan_news_ organizations_that_chose_not_to_run_it.html; Sylvia Stead, ‘Public editor: why The Globe published photos of a drowned Syrian boy.’ Globe and Mail, 3 Sept. 2015. Accessed 25 Nov, 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/inside-the-globe/public-editor-why-the-globe- published-photos- of-a-drowned-syrian-boy/article26204629/. 11 Lilie Chouliaraki and Tijana Stolic, ‘Photojournalism as political encounter: western news photography in the 2015 migration ‘crisis’, Visual Communication, online first, 2019, pp. 1-21; Metter Mortensen, Allan Stuart and Chris Peters, ‘The iconic image in a digital age: editorial mediations over the Alan Kurdi photographs’, Nordicom Review, 38: 2, 2017, pp. 71-86; Farida Vis and Olga Goriunova, eds., The iconic image on social media: a rapid research response to the death of Aylan Kurdi*, (Visual Social Media Lab, 2015); Thomas

3 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents prompted a hardening of borders and of foreign policy rhetoric that centred the irresponsibility of Kurdi’s father, Abdullah, and those like him; and positioned their border policies as the correct response as a deterrent for such behaviour to avoid similar deaths in future. This was true of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, who used Kurdi’s death to justify his country’s hard-line anti-refugee stance.12 Even ISIS used the image of Kurdi’s death as an illustration of the consequences of abandoning ISIS territory to deter people from attempting to leave.13

These different cases and different policy responses all pivot on one thing: the presence of visual representations of suffering and dead children. However, the above examples are not unique. Children are often invoked as rationale or justification for political action; ‘the child’, a product of particular western historical, cultural and political developments, as innocent, vulnerable, and in need of protection has become universalised in significant ways.14 Katrina Lee-Koo, writing in the context of children in the war in Afghanistan, notes that stories of children are often easy to understand, that their ‘simple but powerful portrayal offers a compelling moral framework for audiences to contextualise military and political debate’.15 Images of children are deployed and politicised by a range of actors, and have long been used as motivators for political action. While most often this action is a compulsion to intervene to save or provide aid, images of children can also be a prompt for military intervention, shaming (as a normative response to inaction), or sanctions. Thus, images of children function as potentially powerful political and social drivers for policy change or maintenance.

Olesen, ‘Memetic protest and the dramatic diffusion of Alan Kurdi’, Media, Culture and Society, 40: 5, 2017, pp. 656–672; Meenakshi Gigi Durham, ‘Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs, memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 35: 3, 2018, pp. 240-258; Helen Berents, ‘Apprehending the “telegenic dead”: considering images of children in global politics’, International Political Sociology, 2019, 13:2, 2019, pp. 145-160. 12 Ian Traynor, ‘Migration crisis: Hungary PM says Europe in grip of madness”. The Guardian. 3 Sept. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/migration-crisis-hungary-pm-victor-orban-europe-response- madness , accessed 15 March 2019 13 Joanna Paraszczuk, ‘A drowned Syrian boy as ISIS propaganda’, The Atlantic, 11 September 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/aylan-kurdi-isis-propaganda-dabiq/404911/, accessed 12 April 2019. 14 Vanessa Pupavac, ‘Misanthropy without borders: the international children’s rights regime’, Disasters, 25: 2, 2001, pp. 95-112; Tabak, Jana and Leticia Carvalho. “Responsibility to protect the future: children on the move and the politics of becoming.” Global Responsibility to Protect 10, no. 1-2 (2018): 121-144; Anna Holzscheiter, Children’s rights in international politics: the transformative power of transnational discourse (New York, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2010). 15 Katrina Lee-Koo. ‘Not suitable for children: the politicisation of conflict-affected children in post-2001 Afghanistan’, Australian Journal of International Affairs. 67:4, 2013, p. 483.

4 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents The relationship between images and policy change is contentious; yet their taken-for-granted status means the complexity of their presence is not often explicitly examined. At stake is not whether these images prompted a politician to be ‘sad enough’ to change policy, but that the mobilisation of these images can prompt affective responses that often influence (or even demand) a policy response. But while that response is often presented as neutral or pre- determined, this article suggests that it is not. Rather it is contested, strategic and often self- serving.

In this article I make visible the underpinning logics of the use of these images; I seek to denaturalise an acceptance of their presence in international political discourse, and argue for a more critical reflection of the role of representations of children in these spaces. There are three main dimensions to the relationship between images of children and policy responses articulated by political leaders and their representatives that will be explored here: a personal emotional appeal, invocation of protectionist responses, and a condemnation of others. These are interrelated not distinct, and can be understood as the logics that inform the ways that these images function as what I term contentious affective objects. Before these three dimensions are explored, this article will first critique the lack of attention children receive in IR and make an argument for their inclusion in analyses; and second, will explain what is meant by the term contentious affective object as it is used in this article to describe images of suffering children. Certain framings of childhood underpin bellicose foreign policymaking; together these sections begin the work of taking seriously images of children’s suffering as a key site of security and policy contestation in global politics.

Visual Politics of Children

Visual representations securitise and can be objects of securitisation16, and there is a relationship between images and collective affective responses.17 Academic attention has also

16Lene Hansen. ‘Theorizing the image for security studies: visual securitization and the Muhammad cartoon crisis’, European Journal of International Relations 17:1, 2011, pp. 51-74; Lene Hansen, ‘How images make world politics: international icons and the case of Abu Ghraib’, Review of International Relations 41: 2, 2015, pp. 263-288. 17 Roland Bleiker, Aesthetics and world politics. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Michael C. Williams, ‘Words, images, enemies: securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47: 4, 2003, pp. 511-531; Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison, ‘Fear no more: emotions and world politics’, Review of International Studies, 34, 2008, pp. 115-135; Liam Kennedy, ‘Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy’, International Affairs, 79: 2, 2003, pp. 315–326.

5 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents been paid to the power and impact of dead bodies in global politics.18 However, the way in which certain children’s bodies become global icons19, particularly in death20, requires unpacking the affective political dimensions of their circulation. Children are a ubiquitous feature of global conflict and crises, yet their presence has not been meaningfully engaged or theorized in international relations.

Children are not given much attention by scholars of international relations.21 However, children are in fact often fundamentally present and invoked when discussing global political events. Often reduced to stereotypical framings of victim or delinquent, these frames position children as symbols of innocence and hope, often violated as the victims of a particular group or government. Children as innocent, ‘human becomings’22 are understood as also being ‘pre- social’—without political subjecthood of their own23, and thus their presence obligates adults to undertake action on their behalf. These framings of childhood, presented as universal, are in fact profoundly historically and culturally situated. Western notions of children as essentially innocent, in need of protection, and on a teleological pathway to full, rational adulthood, have been exported globally.24 Katrina Lee-Koo notes that children in images are “mute and paralysed, seen but not heard’25, they are ‘representational bodies to justify and

18 Among others, see: David Campbell, ‘Horrific blindness: images of death in contemporary media’, Journal of Cultural Research, 8:1, 2003. Jessica Auchter, ‘Paying attention to dead bodies: the future of security studies’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 1: 1, 2016, pp. 36-50; Thomas Gregory, ‘Dismembering the dead: violence, vulnerability and the body in war’, European Journal of International Relations, 22: 4, 2016, pp. 944-965. 19 Hansen, ‘How images make world politics’ 20 Berents, ‘Apprehending the “telegenic dead”’ 21 There is slow growing attention to children in international relations, particularly in the sub-fields of critical security studies and peace studies. Illustratively, but not exhaustively see J. Marshall Beier, ‘Children, childhoods, and security studies: an introduction,’ Critical Studies on Security 3: 1, 2015, pp. 1–13.; Berents, ‘Apprehending the “telegenic dead”’; Kim Huhyn, Bina D’Costa, and Katrina Lee-Koo, Children and global conflict, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016); Helen Brocklehurst, ‘”Mind the gap”: the politics of child protection and the challenge to human security’, International Studies Review, 19: 2, 2017; Alison M S Watson, ‘Resilience is its own resistance: the place of children in post-conflict settlement’, Critical Studies on Security, 3: 1, 2017, pp. 47-61; Jana Tabak, The child and the world: child-soldiers and the claim for progress. (Athens GA, Georgia University Press, forthcoming). 22 Jens Qvortrup, ‘Childhood matters: an introduction,’ in Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta and Helmut Wintersberger, eds., Childhood matters: social theory, practice and politics (Hants: Avebury, 1994), pp. 1-23. 23 J Marshall Beier, ‘Ultimate tests: children, rights and the politics of protection’, Global Responsibility to Protect, 10: 1-2, 2018 pp. 164-187. 24Pupavac, ‘Misanthropy without borders’; Liisa Malkki, ‘Children, humanity, and the infantilization of peace’, in L Feldman, M Ticktin and A Ticktin, eds., In the name of humanity: The government of threat and care (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) 25 Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘Children’, in Roland Bleiker, ed., Global visual politics (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 48-54 at p. 52.

6 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents legitimise security discourse’26 but are not actors in their own right. Malkki draws on Wall to describe the way children are made visible as being placed on a ‘ethereal pedestal’27 that provides no concrete grounds for moral authority and action; the problem with such a position is children are not able to act, but rather ‘they are set apart by adults in an infantile utopian dimension…They are called on to speak for mankind and ritually miniaturized into silence; they are intensively commodified and sacralised as priceless’.28 As Erica Burman argues, these children are not individuals, but function as representations of a notion of ‘the child’.29 Of crucial relevance here is that this symbolic representation of children and childhood, presented as natural and universal, is dependent on western ideas of children, that enable then to be placed ‘outside the complications of history’30, as motivators of an assumed universal affective response.

The ways in which children are made visually present in global politics are often to elicit empathy and action.31 The child is suffering, and victimised and in need of external aid: Erica Burman describes this ‘spectacle’ as a form of ‘disaster porn’,32 where these images preclude a more complex engagement with the context in which those images arise. Images of suffering children are not only about the child themselves, but also function to critique the community or nation of adults that has—as evidenced by an image of suffering—not done enough to protect the child. They function as a ‘synecdoche for a country’s future’33 but also that the ‘well-being of children has come to speak to the overall health of a political climate’34. Children’s pre-social status, their assumed universal experience which elides geographic, cultural and social differences and uneven global power relations, and their ability to be read as potent symbols of hope, sets the politics of representations of children apart from images of other victimised and vulnerable groups often shown in such contexts.

26 Kate Botterill, Peter Hopkins, Gurchathen Sanghera, and Rowena Arshad, ‘Securing disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities, and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland’, Political Geography, 55, pp. 124-134 at p. 125. 27 Malkki, ‘Children, humanity’ p. 66 28 Malkki, ‘Children, humanity’ p. 79 29 Erica Burman, ‘Innocents abroad: western fantasies of childhood and the iconography of emergencies,’ Disasters, 18: 3, 1994, pp. 238-253 30 Malkki, Children, humanity’ p. 65 31 Erica Burman, Developments: child, image, nation, (New York, Routledge, 2008) 32 Erica Burman, ‘Innocents abroad’ p. 246 33 Susan D. Moeller, ‘A hierarchy of innocence: the media’s use of children in the telling of international news’, Press/Politics, 7: 1, 2002, pp. 36-56, at p. 39. 34 Moeller, ‘A hierarchy of innocence’, p. 49.

7 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents Children are a useful visual cue for global discourses on crisis and suffering because they avoid the ambiguity teenagers or ‘youth’ might provoke. Tropes of innocence fix ‘children’ as the ideal suffering-civilian in contexts of war.35 As young people age out of childhood into the ambiguous temporality of youthhood their innocence can become more suspect. As an example of this, even though she was only nine years old at the time, when publishing the image of the so-called Vietnam War ‘Napalm Girl’, Kim Phuc, the New York Times photo editor edited out a shadow over her crotch that could have been perceived to be pubic hair, so as to reinforce her childhood and vulnerability.36

Images of children can have a powerful impact on political discourse. In 1973 the photo of Kim Phuc galvanised anti-war sentiment in the United States.37 Nick Carter’s Pulitzer Prize- winning photograph of the starving Sudanese girl and the vulture in 1994, published by major newspapers around the world, prompted an increase in humanitarian aid to the crisis. Carter’s image of emaciated children was also echoed more recently in 2018 in images of children in Yemen taken by Tyler Hicks for the New York Times38. While this article focuses on the images of children in Khan Shaykhun, the conflict in Syria has generated several profoundly difficult images of children’s suffering and death including the iconic image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying dead on a Turkish beach in 2015. Kurdi’s death caused an unprecedented global outpouring of outrage and grief, and impacted the discourse and policy response to the arrival of asylum seekers and migrants to Europe in that year.39 Understanding and recognising the ways in which stereotypes about children function within political discourse helps uncover the connections between images and policy making. This article now turns to theorising and considering these connections more closely.

Images as Contentious Affective Objects

35 Kate Manzo, ‘Imaging humanitarianism: NGO identity and the iconography of childhood’, Antipode, 40, 2008, pp. 36 Guy Westwell, ‘Accidental Napalm Attack and hegemonic visions of America’s war in Vietnam’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28: 5, 2011, p410; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, ‘Public identity and collective memory in US iconic photography: the image of ‘accidental napalm’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 20: 1, 2003, pp. 35-66. 37 Westwell, ‘Accidental Napalm Attack’. 38 Declan Walsh and Tyler Hicks, ‘The tragedy of Saudi Arabia’s war’, The New York Times, 26 Oct. 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/26/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-war-yemen.html, accessed 15 May 2019. 39 Vis and Goriunova, eds., The iconic image on social media.

8 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents The relationship between portrayals of suffering by the media and policymaking is contentious. It is contentious in relation to the possibility of claim-making about causality in many circumstances; it is contentious in terms of whether its impact prompts a new policy direction or interrupts existing policy; and it is contentious in the new media landscape where previous analyses of the relationships between traditional media outlets and policy makers are complicated by dissemination of images and video on social media and through ‘networked publics’40 that disrupt, pre-empt or preclude traditional media’s domination. When such images become the vehicle for digital advocacy their use in norm contestation over appropriate policy responses is brought in to sharp relief.41 The ‘CNN-effect’, a term coined in the 1990s to describe large scale, continuous coverage of disaster or crisis as influencing policymaking, has been critiqued for being too simplistic and ignoring multiple other factors.42 Steven Livingston argued that the ‘key variable to media’s effect on foreign policy is not the presence or absence of cameras, but rather the presence or absence of political leadership’.43 I would argue here that these are not hierarchical but rather interdependent: the presence of cameras and the images they generate is crucial to ensure attention is paid to a crisis, but political leadership determines the way in which the media’s coverage might come to impact foreign policy.

The affective dimensions of images are contentious also. Images are an affective site of politics; as a form of representation, images shape political and social spaces, but are also shaped by them. Images also are sites of politics themselves.44 The ways in which images do political and affective work is interconnected; because representations draw on both cognition but also affect45. Images ‘frame or reframe the political either by entrenching

40 danah boyd, ‘Social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications,’ in Zizi Papacharissi, ed., Networked self: identity, community, and culture on social network sites, (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 39-58. 41 Nina Hall, ‘Norm contestation in the digital era: campaigning for refugee rights’, International Affairs, 95: 3, 2019, pp. 575-595. 42 Andrew Natsios, ‘Illusions of influence: the CNN effect in complex emergencies’, in Robert I Rotberg and Thomas Weiss, eds, From massacres to genocide: the media, public policy and humanitarian crises, (Cambridge MA: The World Peace Foundation), pp. 149-168. 43 Steven Livingston, Clarifying the CNN effect: an examination of media effects according to type of military intervention, Research paper R-18, http://genocidewatch.info/images/1997ClarifyingtheCNNEffect- Livingston.pdf, (The Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, 1997), p. 1. 44 See Roland Bleiker, ‘The aesthetic turn in international political theory’, Millennium, 30: 3, 2001, pp. 509- 533; Michael Shapiro, The politics of representation: writing practices in biography, photography and policy analysis, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). 45 Emma Hutchinson, ‘A global politics of pity?: disaster imagery and the emotional construction of solidarity after the 2004 Asian tsunami’, International Political Sociology, 8:1, 2014, pp. 1-19; Emma Hutchison, Affective Communities in World Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

9 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents existing configurations of seeing, sensing and thinking, or by challenging them’46. Barbie Zelizer explains that images work by ‘twinning denotation and connotation, matching the ability to depict the world “as it is” with the ability to couch what is depicted in a symbolic frame consonant with broader understandings of the world’.47 Taking representations of children seriously as a constitutive part of international politics requires thinking about what form that representation takes. Underpinning this is a recognition of the fundamental links between the affective dimensions of these images and their political consequences. These images of children can be understood as ‘contentious affective objects’ that have real impact on the securing practices of states. I want to unpack this term here.

Firstly, I use ‘objects’ deliberately here, because in the moment of the photo being taken and circulated these children cease to exist a subjects in their own right and rather their iconicity renders them objects to be talked about (and which do not talk).48 Images of suffering depict individuals as singular, however the singular stands in for collective experiences, ‘metonymically’.49 When they gain particular traction and recognition, these singular depictions are often referred to as ‘icons’: ‘widely recognized and remembered, are understood to be representations of historically significant events, activate strong emotional identification or response, and are reproduced across a range of media, genres, or topics’.50 Icons are not ‘universal’ images, as Mette Mortensen argues, but rather ‘constructions in public discourses involving intense circulation across media platforms along with repeated statements about their iconic status…’51. By the time that images have been constituted as icons, through discursive contestation and constitution52, the subject of the image has become objectified and abstracted. Just as the image cannot ‘speak’ on its own53, the child-icon is ‘mute’54 and lacking subjecthood55. The way these images are embedded, and read through

46 Roland Bleiker, ‘Mapping visual global politics’, in Roland Bleiker, ed., Visual global politics, (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 1-29 at p. 20. 47 Barbie Zelizer, About to die: how news images move the public, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 3 48 REDACTED FOR PEER REVIEW 49 David Campbell, ‘The iconography of famine’, in Geoffrey Batchen, Nancy Miller, and Jay Prosser, eds., Picturing atrocity: reading photographs in crises, (London: Reaction Books, 2011). 50 Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No caption needed: iconic photographs, public culture and liberal democracy, (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2007), p. 27; see also: Hansen, ‘How images make world politics’, p. 263. 51 Mette Mortensen, ‘Constructing, confirming, and contesting icons: the Alan Kurdi imagery appropriated by #humanitywashedashore, Ai Weiwei, and Charlie Hebdo’, Media, Culture, and Society, 39: 8, 2017, pp. 1142- 1161 at p. 1141. 52 Hansen, ‘How images make world politics’ p. 274. 53 Hansen, ‘How images make world politics’, p. 265. 54 Katrina Lee-Koo, ‘Children’, p. 52. 55 Burman, ‘Innocents abroad’.

10 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents an understanding of childhood as an assumed universal, constitutes their iconicity and status as ‘objects’ within certain discourses. These children’s specific experiences and identity is not important for motivating the political response to these images, rather, an idea of ‘a child’ who is a passive, idealized victim stands in.

These images can also be understood as affective; they invoke an emotional response that draws on a wider affective register which prompts action. A growing literature in recent years has explored the relationship between emotions and world politics. Roland Bleiker and Emma Hutchison note that emotions play an ‘obvious and omnipresent role in world politics’56 and yet are often overlooked. Jonathan Mercer highlights the need to consider emotions to fully understand “rational” decisions by political actors and considers how we can understand emotions at the level of the state57 (a body which Hutchison and Bleiker note ‘have no biological mechanisms and thus cannot experience emotions directly’58). There is an important discussion here in relation to this question of whether states can express emotions59; however, in the context of this article I am not necessarily making this claim. I am rather am interested in how representatives of a state express individual emotional reactions to images of children’s suffering that contribute to a broader affective impact on policy and decision making.

As others have noted there is a complex and rich debate about the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ in international relations. Hutchison draws a distinction between emotions as a ‘conscious manifestation of bodily feeling’ while ‘affect is perceived to be a visceral force that influences political thinking in a diffuse yet analytically inaccessible way’60. I agree with Hutchison that these two concepts are interrelated with affect framing and guiding more conscious emotional evaluation. As Linda Åhäll demonstrates, drawing on Sara Ahmed, emotions and affect are interrelated; affect is co-constitutive with the experience of

56 Bleiker and Hutchinson, ‘Fear no more’, p. 115. 57 Jonathan Mercer, ‘Human nature and the first image: emotion in international politics,’ Journal of International Relations and Development, 9, 2006, pp. 288–303; Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotional beliefs,’ International Organization 64: 1, 2010, pp. 1–31; Jonathan Mercer, ‘Emotion and strategy in the Korean War,’ International Organization, 67: 2, 2013, pp. 221–52. 58 Hutchison and Bleiker, ‘Theorising emotions in world politics’, p. 492. See also Constance Duncombe ‘The Politics of Twitter: Emotions and the Power of Social Media’, International Political Sociology, online first, for a discussion of the actions by states, emotion, and role of social media. 59 See Paul Digeser, ‘Friendship between states,’ British Journal of Political Science, 39: 2, 2009, pp. 323–44; Karin Fierke, ‘Emotion and intentionality’, International Theory 6: 3, 2014, pp. 563–67. 60 Hutchison, Affective communities, p. 16.

11 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents emotions.61 Here, then, I am interested in how these images do affective work, shaping individual and collective understandings of events through the emotive politics of children’s suffering.

How images are produced, circulated, and engaged must also be critically evaluated in terms of differentiated positions of privilege.62 Assumptions are often made about the subject of a photograph and the assumed audience; when images of suffering are broadcast and reproduced, when they ‘go viral’, critical questions should be asked about the depiction of other people’s pain on this scale63. Ariella Azoulay argues that images demand something of the viewer, but that this demand is for more than just viewing; Azoulay calls this the ‘civil contract’ of photography.64 Others have approached this moment of encounter by considering what ‘bearing witness’ means in relation to images, particularly those of suffering that is distanced in space or time. Witnessing requires audiences not only to see, but demands a response: “they should send money, demonstrate, write letters and send emails, or sometimes just look closely, see and remember’65. Much of this literature considers the general public as the audience. However, I am particularly interested here not in the general audience, but rather to ask what ‘witnessing’ demands of those with the power to make policy changes to address the root causes or at least alleviate suffering: the politicians.

Finally, I describe these images as ‘contentious’ to recognize that the affective politics at play are not straightforward. In addition to the broad ways images of suffering are contentious as outlined above, images of children’s suffering prompt particularly contentious politics, that are often overlooked. While it is often simply assumed that children will provoke empathetic responses it is important to distinguish between the response and the action. Several people may have an empathetic response to an image of a suffering child, but then undertake very different actions as a result of that emotional reaction. Thus, such images can mobilise contested political actions driven by the affective response to the visual representation of the child-object. The ways in which politicians and policymakers engage with and publicly respond to images of children’s suffering are good examples of Zelizer’s observation of

61 Linda Åhäll, ‘Affect as methodology: feminism and the politics of emotion’, International Political Sociology, 12, 2018, pp. 36-52. 62 REDACTED FOR PEER REVIEW, p. 7 63 Sontag, Regarding the pain of others. 64 Ariella Azoulay, The civil contract of photography, (New York, Zone Books, 2004). 65 Lilie Chouliaraki, Michael Orwicz, and Robin Greeley, ‘Special issue: the visual politics of the human’, visual Communication, online first, 2019, pp. 1-9 at p. 3.

12 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents images “twinning” of denotation and connotation. Such images denote suffering clearly, but they also are used to deploy powerful symbolic frames, connotating and implicating others in the suffering and are deployed to justify certain political action.

Together, images of children’s suffering and death can be understood as contentious affective objects; and thinking of children’s representations in this way can help make visible the politics of childhood inherent in the rhetoric and policymaking of political leaders in the contexts of conflicts and crises.

The Affective Contentious Politics of Suffering Children This article now turns to consider the various dimensions of affective response that are invoked by politicians in response to images of suffering children. It explores the personal emotional appeal; the protectionist language commonly used to discuss children’s welfare as well as international policy rhetoric by leaders in the global north; and the invocation of an ‘other’ who can be condemned and blamed for the violence done to children and which legitimates action. These three dimensions are not distinct but fundamentally intertwined. I draw them out separately here to unpack the way images of suffering children play a role in policy discourse and debates.

Politicians and personalised emotional appeal

Over eighty people were killed in the chemical attack Khan Shaykhun including approximately thirty-three children, while more than 500 were injured.66 Images and video spread through social media before being picked up by mainstream outlets; and the public as well as political leaders reacted with shock and outrage. Speaking to reporters in the White House rose garden the day after the attack on Khan Shaykhun President Trump said: ‘I will tell you, that attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me—big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing’.67 A day later, at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, he blamed President Bashar al-Assad, saying the attack had,

66 The facts surrounding the attack on Khan Shaykhun, like many instances of the Syrian conflict, were fiercely contested by parties on all sides of the conflict. Reports on the numbers of dead and injured vary. On the 7 April 2017, the White Helmets reported on Twitter that 89 were killed, including 33 children, with 541 injured, and these numbers have been widely used by media: The White Helmets, “"4th joint report between SCD & Idleb health directorate in regards to Khan Shaykhun chemical attack. 89 killed (33kids & 18wmn), 541 injured’, 4 April 2017, @SyriaCivilDef. https://twitter.com/SyriaCivilDef/status/850323422894850048 67 Quoted in Lander, ‘Acting on instinct’; italics added.

13 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents choked out the life of innocent men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many. Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.68 Trump’s public statements on the Khan Shaykhun attack neatly link his personal reaction to seeing images of children with his decision to act as the President of the United States. In his statements, despite the dead including men, women and children, he singles out the children as having a particular impact, including the curiously phrased ‘beautiful babies’ that were killed.

The rhetorical power of the images of children’s suffering is evident in statements by several world leaders. US President Trump directly linked the presence of children and their suffering to his position on Assad. After noting that the ‘attack on children’ had a ‘big impact on him, he went on to say: ‘My attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much … You’re now talking about a whole different level’.69 In statements by other world leaders, children are singled out as a form of civilian that was killed including among others by Turkish President Tayyip Ergodan and French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.70

This specification that the dead included children is not new, but a common rhetorical device in condemnation of civilian tragedies. It draws on well-established tropes about the feminisation and infantilization of civilians as ‘womenandchildren’71. Its use here though is to justify militarised action by the US against Syria. There are profoundly gendered politics at play here also, where (particularly male) politicians invoke pity for the passivity and vulnerability of children to reinforce masculinist and militarist responses72.

68 Quoted in Lander, ‘Acting on instinct’; italics added. 69Julian Borger, ‘Syria chemical attack has changed my view of Assad, says Trump’, The Guardian. 6 April 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/05/syria-chemical-gas-attack-donald-trump-nikki-haley- assad , accessed 15 March 2019. 70 Ellen Francis, ‘Syria conflict: Dozens dead, including children, in suspected chemical attack in Idlib’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 April 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/world/syria-conflict-dozens-dead-in-suspected- chemical-attack-20170404-gvdq0x.html, accessed 25 July 2019. 71 See Cynthia Enloe, ‘Womenandchildren: making feminist sense of the Persian Gulf crisis’, Village Voice, 25 Sept. 1990; Charli R Carpenter, ‘Innocent women and children’: gender, norms and the protection of civilians, (Routledge: London, 2006). 72 Helen Berents, “Hashtagging girlhood: #IAmMalala, #BringBackOurGirls and gendering representations of global politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 18: 4, 2016, pp. 513-527; although I cannot explore it fully in this article, I am grateful for an observation during audience discussion by Laura Shepherd at ISA 2019 in Toronto about how the expression ‘beautiful babies’ holds echoes of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s ‘beautiful souls’ and the implications in considering the ways in which the young children in this situation enable and justify militaristic thinking.

14 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents The specific attention by politicians to children’s deaths was particularly evident when Alan Kurdi died in 2015. UK Prime Minister Cameron invoked his own fatherhood in response: ‘Anyone who saw those pictures overnight could not help but be moved and, as a father, I felt deeply moved by the sight of that young boy on a beach in Turkey’.73 Such invocations of fatherhood were common responses to the image of Kurdi. As Anna Burns argues the invocation of parenthood shows that ‘deaths can be reframed as more significant, and more shocking, once the victim has been ‘un-othered”’.74 Despite Cameron’s emotionally driven statement, his reaction did not prompt him to increase the UK’s refugee intake or other humanitarian methods. In fact, although at a Conservative Party event he noted that it was ‘impossible to get the image of that poor Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi out of [his] mind’ the UK’s assistance should only be in supporting ‘neighbouring countries, the Syrian people and the refugee camps’.75

Images of suffering children prompt individualised emotional responses from politicians. The personalised identification of politicians with such images—that they look like their own children—is used rhetorically to position the politician and their policy choices as justified. Yet, as evidenced by Trump’s observation of the ‘beautiful babies’ that had died in Khan Shaykhun, their presence as politicised objects carry affective weight but contested outcomes. Moving from the individualised response to policy action, this article now examines the way such images become the basis for militarist responses.

Protectionist impulses and interventionist policy That these images prompt visceral, emotive, affective reactions is not in question. The shock and horror of the visuals from Khan Shaykhun were widely shared. Here, however, I am interested in the different ways affective reactions to images of suffering children provoke policy responses. While attention to the empathetic reactions prompted by images such as that of Kurdi and other children has significantly increased in recent years76, less attention

73 Matt Dathan, ‘Aylan Kurdi: David Cameron says he felt 'deeply moved' by images of dead Syrian boy but gives no details of plans to take in more refugees’, Independent. 3 September 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/aylan-kurdi-david-cameron-says-he-felt-deeply-moved-by- images-of-dead-syrian-boy-but-gives-no-10484641.html, accessed 10 June 2019. 74 Anna Burns, ‘Discussion and action: personal and political responses to the Alan Kurdi images’, in Vis and Goriunova, eds., The iconic image on social media: a rapid research response to the death of Aylan Kurdi*, (Visual Social Media Lab, 2015), p. 39. 75 Osborne, Samuel, ‘David Cameron: Britain would be 'overwhelmed' if it opened its doors to every refugee’, The Independent. 7 October 2015, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-britain- would-be-overwhelmed-if-it-opened-its-doors-to-every-refugee-a6684541.html, accessed 10 June 2019. 76 Including, but not limited to: Mortensen, ‘Constructing, confirming, and contesting icons’; Mortensen et al, ‘The iconic image in a digital age’; Olesen, ‘Memetic protest’; Vis and Goriunov, eds., ‘The iconic image on

15 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents has been paid to the use of children as justification for more bellicose or punitive responses. Here then, I explore political narratives that used these images of children’s suffering to launch more belligerent responses.

While it is seemingly natural to focus on the unifying, and compassionate responses to images of children’s suffering, it should not be a surprise to find them centrally implicated as justifications for violence. Children as a category have long provoked profoundly protectionist policies. This notion of childhood as a time in need of additional protections and support has its roots in western ideas of childhood and has been exported through international human rights norms.77 Recognising this is not to say that children, particularly those in conflict and violence affected contexts, do not need protection and support. Children are disproportionately affected and impacted by conflict and disaster globally. However, this protectionist impulse, exported globally, is also laden with racialized and paternalistic power relations between the global north and global south.78 Suffering children are, as Moeller notes, an ‘indicator species’79; they speak to broader societal issues, and their suffering implicitly condemns the adults around them80. This necessitates intervention by the global north, and reinforces these uneven global power hierarchies81.

The tension between denotation and connotation in images that Zelizer describes82 is evident in the ways images are used for political purposes. Images must resonate beyond the personal to have collective, political and social impact83. While images of conflict or crisis are often used to mobilise empathetic responses, humanitarian impulses and narratives conveyed by images can also be appropriated to justify western military intervention, as Robinson et al argue in relation to the visual repertoire of images used by the US military and media post

social media’; Durham, ‘Resignifying Alan Kurdi’; Paul Slovic, Daniel Västfjäll, Arvid Erlandsson, and Robin Gregory, ‘Iconic photographs and the ebb and flow of empathic response to humanitarian disasters’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114: 8, 2017, pp. 640-644; Laura G. E. Smith, Craig McGarty, and Emma Thomas, ‘After Aylan Kurdi: How Tweeting About Death, Threat, and Harm Predict Increased Expressions of Solidarity With Refugees Over Time’, Psychological Science 29: 4, 2018, pp. 623-634. 77Pupavac, ‘Misanthropy without borders’; Burman, ‘Innocents abroad’; Beier, ‘Ultimate tests’ 78Berents, ‘Hashtagging girlhood’; Cecilia Jacob, ‘“Children and armed conflict” and the field of security studies’, Critical Studies on Security, 3: 1, 2015, pp. 14-28. 79 Moeller, ‘A hierarchy of innocence’. 80 Burman, ‘Innocents abroad’. 81 Berents, ‘Hashtagging girlhood’ 82 Zelizer, About to die, p.3 83 Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, ‘Theorizing emotions in world politics’, International Theory, 6: 3, 2014, pp. 491-514 at p. 499.

16 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents ‘liberation’ in Iraq in 2002.84 Political calculus is often not far beneath the surface in the use of images and selfish national interest is often closely aligned with apparent altruistic humanitarian intervention.85 This is also evident when consideration is given to the volume of human suffering that never makes it to a newspaper front page or television screen—that some people’s suffering remains invisible.86 Images can also be deployed strategically by actors to influence global political discourse and policymaking. A particularly chilling example is the use of graphic videos and images of beheadings and other killings of journalists and citizens of western nations by ISIS, designed explicitly to influence policy decisions of the victims’ home countries.87 While not only children are used to justify intervention and military engagement, they can function powerfully as rhetorical signals that the international order is under threat and mobilise political actions that reaffirm often contentious political actions.

While thousands had died in Syria, it was images of suffering children in particular that caught the attention of newly inaugurated President Trump and prompted him to change his non-interventionist policies and launch airstrikes on Syria. Syrian President Assad was already a rhetorical target of Trump’s speeches and tweets; the fact that children in particular were invoked by Trump to justify military action evidences how protectionist discourses operate powerfully. The images of children in Khan Shaykhun are affectively deployed; their suffering is the justification, but serve to fulfil broader political goals.

Condemnation of Others Another key factor at play in terms of the affective politics of representation is the implicit condemnation of others who are positioned as orchestrating this violence. While it took time to confirm events in Khan Shaykhun, condemnation of Assad’s regime was swift. British Prime Minister May, for example, described the attack as ‘inhuman’ and ‘not something civilised nations do to their people’. In the immediate aftermath of the attack the US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki R. Haley, held up photos of the attack on Khan Shaykhun at

84 Piers Robinson, Peter Goddard, Katy Parry, Craig Murray and Philip Taylor, Pockets of resistance British new media, war and theory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, (Manchester, Manchester University Press), pp.170-2 85 Piers Robinson, ‘CNN effect’, in Roland Bleiker, ed, Visual global politics, (New York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 62-67 at p. 66. 86 Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of others, (London: Penguin, 2003); Judith Butler, Frames of war: when is life grievable? (London, Verso, 2010). 87 Simone Molin Friis, ‘“Beyond anything we have ever seen”: beheading videos and the visibility of violence in the war against ISIS’, International Affairs, 91: 4, 2015, pp. 725-746.

17 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents the UN Security Council to threaten unilateral action by the US if the UN did not act.88 In this performative arena, the images of children’s suffering were used as an indicator of the moral righteousness of acting against the Assad regime, and to condemn Russia for objecting to a UNSC resolution drafted by the US, France and the UK.89 Holding images of child victims of the attack, Ambassador Haley explicitly asked the UNSC “how many more children have to die before Russia cares?’.90 While Syria was also sitting on the UNSC at the time and strenuously denied the claim that the Assad government was responsible it was the affective politics of the images of child victims, invoked rhetorically and then literally made visible by Haley, which underpinned the diplomatic negotiations.

The protectionist impulses provoked by children require someone to blame; the statements by Trump and Haley single out the Assad government and Russia as negligent and morally lacking. This impulse to ascribe blame can be seen in other situations where images of children’s suffering and death are politicised also. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, in response to an attack by his own defence force that killed four children in 2014 rhetorically blamed Hamas arguing that Hamas knows that children are ‘telegenically dead’ and they use ‘telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause’91. Despite the fact that it was Israeli fire that killed the four boys on the Gazan beach, the contentious affective politics of images of their death was used to mobilise support against perceived enemies—in this case Netanyahu used them to criticise and accuse Hamas of being ethically lacking.

Even in the case of Alan Kurdi, while most emotive rhetoric was compassionate and empathetic; Kurdi’s father became the target of vitriolic attacks and the justification for harsher border policies. Kurdi’s innocence was placed against perceived immorality and his death claimed as evidence of his father’s lack of ability (or desire) to care for children. It was Kurdi’s father’s fault for putting him on a boat, and this is why deterrent policies were needed, to prevent callous ‘Others’ (men from the global south) risking children’s lives.

88 Somini Sengupta and Rick Gladstone, ‘Nikki Haley says U.S. may ‘take our own action’ on Syrian chemical attack’, New York Times, 5 April 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/world/middleeast/syria-chemical- attack-un.html, accessed 27 May 2019. 89 See Duncombe and Dunne for a discussion on the challenges the ongoing conflict in Syria poses to thinking about the ‘liberal world order’ and the changing tensions of humanitarianism: Constance Duncombe and Time Dunne, ‘After liberal world order’, International Affairs, 94: 1, pp. 25-42. The resolution proposed by the UK, US and France did not pass—vetoed by Russia, its eighth veto on Syria at the UNSC. 90 UN Security Council, ‘Chemical-weapons attack in Syria was largest such event since 2013, Disarmament Affairs Chief tells Security Council’, https://www.un.org/press/en/2017/sc12777.doc.htm, United Nations Meetings Coverage, 5 April 2017, SC/12777 91 Berents, ‘Apprehending the “telegenic dead”’.

18 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents Hard-line anti-immigration Prime Minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, wrote in September 2015: ‘Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe’92, positioning himself and his anti-immigration stance as the morally correct thing to do to avoid children’s deaths. Images of child asylum seekers and their parents became imbued with a contested politics, used to justify hard-line immigration policy changes. Invisibilised in this emotively laden discourse was the complicity of policies of states in the global north that had made it more difficult for asylum seekers to arrive safely in Europe. There is a moral argument presented in these cases, where governments of the global north are obligated to protect ‘the child’ suffering in conflict, while eliding responsibility or blame. In all these cases a reformulation of Spivak’s93 well known phrase is evident: the policy decisions are being made by white men ostensibly protecting brown children from brown men.

Together, tracing the role of affective discourse around images of children’s suffering in policymaking and international politics makes explicit these images as sites of contestation over personal and political action. The invocation by world leaders and their representatives of images of suffering children to justify punitive and restrictive policies situates them as a key location for critical examination of their role as contentious affective objects.

Conclusion

Ambassador Haley’s threat of unilateral US action at the UNSC came the same day that President Trump radically shifted his position on intervention in Syria while explicitly linking it to his affective response to the images of children in Khan Shaykhun. There were, undeniably, other factors at play in Trump’s decision to approve a retaliatory missile strike on Syria. This article is not arguing that Trump’s policy shift was solely due to the presence of images of suffering children. However, these images functioned as powerful contentious affective objects within high-level diplomatic spheres, and the foreign policy discussions in the United States as well as the United Kingdom and France who supported the strikes. It is notable that in none of these public statements did the images of children prompt politicians and their spokespeople to consider publicly a change to increase humanitarian arrivals from Syria or soften asylum policy at all.

92 Quoted in Traynor, ‘Migration crisis’. 93 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Patrick Willians and Laura Chisman, eds., Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, (Hertfordshire, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), p. 93.

19 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents

Images of children, in certain contexts can influence political discourse; often such images of children are not really about the children at all, but rather the children function as a synecdoche94 for broader political events. In this way, such images, and the bodies of children within them, are complicit in reinforcing and creating norms and understandings of politics. Children are often positioned as neutral, as passive victims of conflict, and there is an assumed universalized response to images of their suffering. These easy assumptions flatten our analyses. It can become easy to fall in to assumptions about the status of children and overlook the profound implications representations of children have for the maintenance of particular international political order. Images of children are not neutral but profoundly politicised. IR must take children more seriously as agents but also having affective agency to better understand popular and policy responses to conflict.

It is also important to reflect on absences here, and consider what images of children are not picked up by politicians to inform policy decisions. In Australia, for example, successive governments have resisted the use of images of asylum seeker children kept in offshore immigration detention—at one point banning the taking of photos of asylum seekers’ faces95—as the use of these images works to humanise a population that the Australian government has worked hard to alienate and Other.

Children are underexplored in international relations, and in relation to questions of security. It is often assumed that children will provoke empathetic and more humanitarian responses and this is presented as a given. Children—and more specifically, particular notions of childhood—are a powerful moral force96 and their affective power can mobilise strong political responses. Unpacking the role of such images can help inform more nuanced understandings of policy rhetoric and decisions by politicians when it comes to war and conflict.

This article has begun this exploration by looking at images of children from the Syrian conflict as particularly contentious affective objects. It has responded to the lack of attention to emotionally driven reactions to children’s images that are not humanitarian, but rather in

94 Moeller, ‘A hierarchy of innocence’. 95 Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, Emma Hutchinson, and Xzarina Nicholson, ‘The Visual Dehumanization of Refugees’, Australian Journal of Political Science, 48: 3, 2013, pp. 398-416 at p. 412. 96 Lee-Koo, ‘Children’.

20 Politics, policy-making and the presence of images of suffering children Accepted Manuscript International Affairs, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiz275 Helen Berents which empathetic responses prompt hawkish foreign policy and hardening of positions. It critically explores the affective dimensions of childhood that are evoked and are at play in these situations including gendered and racialized frames that intersect with age in key ways. These are the beginnings of further work that could be done in this space. The ways in which images of children’s bodies and suffering are strategically deployed by politicians deserves closer scrutiny to uncover the visual politics of childhood inherent in these moments of international politics and policymaking.