Short Abstract

This panel addresses questions regarding the visibility, invisibility, and visuality of African interventions, discussing methodological approaches and what they reveal about intervention practices. It interrogates and introduces novel ways of situated seeing and knowing of African interventions.

Long Abstract

Knowledge production on African interventions is shaped by multifaceted visibilities, invisibilities, and visualities. African interventions are differently ‘(in)visible’ due to unequal access to research materials and based on the chosen research approach. Simultaneously, and even less studied, African interventions produce and may depend on different kinds of visualities (e.g., to make them visible, known, legitimate). In this panel, we address these aspects from a methodological perspective and with respect to what they reveal about interventions. The latter are understood broadly as practices relating to ordering processes in the domain of peace and security, including non-traditional, more recently securitized areas of intervention. The panel asks how such interventions become, or are made, visible or invisible. It explicitly seeks to explore visibilities and visualities, approached as the active and affective (de)construction of social realities through visual artifacts and representations of African interventions more broadly. The panel thus draws on the conference theme of African Prisms by engaging with multiple perspectives of situated seeing and knowing of interventions in two interconnected ways: First, it invites contributions that interrogate which and how interventions are known, for example focusing on specific intervention practices or actors. Second, it invites contributions that rely on visual methods and analyze specific visual artifacts, such as maps, photographs, and online appearances relating to African interventions. Overall, the panel seeks to advance research that explicitly engages with intersectional understandings of seeing and knowing African interventions, illuminating notions of power, politics of representation, and the subjectivities and positionalities involved in doing so.

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