Visualidade e percepções nas Relações Internacionais: um estudo de caso da fotografia de Alan Kurdi.

Abstract

Representations are an important manifestation of the power relations present in international politics. Based on this understanding, the main objective of this work is to explore the political dimension of Alan Kurdi's photography, identifying its impacts and understanding the aesthetic elements that made such impacts possible. In this sense, theorists of the Aesthetic Turn emphasize the fundamental role of images in providing alternative insights for understanding international events by questioning the boundaries between the visible and the invisible, the imaginable and the unimaginable, and whether or not they can be part of the political discussion. The present work, therefore, uses exploratory research based on pluralist methods for visual global politics. At first, a bibliographic review is carried out on the main concepts and developments of the Aesthetic Turn in International Relations. Afterwards, another literature review is carried out on the influence of representational practices on the political understanding of refugees, both throughout the evolution of the international regime for refugees and during the 2015 refugees’ crisis, in the light of the Aesthetic Turn. The third part of the work brings a semiotic analysis of Alan Kurdi's photography, in order to identify what were the characteristics that transformed the image into an important political tool. Finally, this last section also discusses how the photography was able to bring new insights into the 2015 refugees’ crisis.