These works emerge from the pictorial and aesthetic turns.

The first two are the most common way of engaging images in IR: treating images as artefacts through which we come to know, make sense of, and act in the world through which we ‘see’ and ‘do’ international politics. Andersen and Vuori (2018) point out three ways the visual comes into international security: visuality as modality, where images represent and signal security as practice, where images construct (in)security and, as method, where images are a research tool used to make security visible. Acknowledging that we live in the ‘age of the image’ (Williams, 2018), IR scholars are turning to the visual in various, innovative ways. Rune Andersen and Juha Vuori’s (2018) edited volume on visual security studies (VSS) is testament to this and brings various disciplines together to focus on (in)security and war. Alongside poststructuralist approaches, critical security studies has been at the forefront of engaging the visual in International Relations (IR).