Data for: Visual regimes and the politics of war experience: Rewriting war ‘from above’ in WikiLeaks’ ‘Collateral Murder’

<b>This is an <a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati">Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)</a> data project. </b> <h3>The annotated article can be viewed on the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-international-studies/article/visual-regimes-and-the-politics-of-war-experience-rewriting-war-from-above-in-wikileaks-collateral-murder/C114DD6B918FF7274AC5B6E071139F93/core-reader#annotations:group:zvEVDE2R" >publisher's website</a>. <h3/>

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The publication undertakes an analysis of the visual politics of war experience within the wider social (re)production of war. Within this it traces in particular how dominant accounts of war can be complicated and contested. In order to explore these issues the article focuses on the release by WikiLeaks of what became known as the ‘Collateral Murder video’ – gunsight footage from an American Apache helicopter showing an air to ground attack in July 2007 in New Baghdad, Iraq. The analysis for the article centres on the WikiLeaks website devoted to the video, and associated materials - chiefly press coverage from the time of the video’s release. Discourse analysis was used to identify ways of seeing (conceptualised as visual - or scopic - regimes) interacting within the body of texts. The WikiLeaks website itself consists of eight pages, but within these pages are four embedded videos (between 1:30 and 39:14 minutes in length), collections of still images, transcripts, timelines, and links to associated materials, as well as contextualising narrative text. This website, along with the media reports accompanying its release, therefore formed a very rich text, comprised of various visual elements and accompanying written description (the use of the phrase ‘Collateral Murder’ being one over-arching example). These elements, and their contrasting visual perspectives, were juxtaposed across the website and it was the politics of this juxtaposition that formed the focus of the analysis.