Seeing and unseeing war in Afghanistan: War, trauma and contestation of the human rights frame

This chapter explores the relationship between war, human rights, and images within the context of the recent war in Afghanistan to disentangle the potential of images to both sustain and critique the violence and human rights violations (or human rights pretensions) of war. We first argue that visual representations of the war helped legitimize the International Coalition’s 2001 invasion. Yet, (certain) visual modes have also worked to challenge the legitimacy of (the) war and revealed alternative stories of human rights and trauma. Here, we focus on Mark Neville’s Battle Against Stigma (BAS) to interrogate how, and under what conditions, this alternative account of war and human rights can emerge. We argue that BAS constitutes an imminent critique by making visible embedded constraint and complicity and the traumatic experiences of war. This renders intelligible and destabilizes the martial gaze, liberal military meaning-making, and the human rights claims of humanitarian militarism.