to feminist research on violence’ at Gender Studies of the University of Helsinki in Finland. She studies emotions in war experience in Chechnya and Ukraine. She is also a partner of the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Russian Studies, Aleksanteri Institute. Hast is currently writing a hybrid monograph book with audio material on songwriting, performance and war experience in Chechnya for E- International Relations.
Tommi Kotonen holds a PhD at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. In 2012, he defended his doctoral theses with the title To Write a Republic: American Political Poetry from Whitman to 9/11. He works currently as a Research Coordinator at the University of Jyväskylä.
[13]Bruno Lefort currently works on a postdoctoral grant funded by the Alfred Kordelin Foundation at the University of Montreal’s Department of Political Science. He is also an associated researcher at the French Institute for the Near East (IFPO) in Beirut. He holds a doctoral degree in Social Sciences and Political Science from the University of Tampere and Aix-Marseille University. His recent publications include ‘The Art of Bypassing: Students’ Politicisation in Beirut’ in Mediterranean Politics (forthcoming).
Kia Lindroos is University lecturer and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research explores the interdisciplinary field of political theory, philosophy and arts. She is the convenor of the ECPR SG Politics and the Arts (www.jyu.fi/ytk/laitokset/yfi/en/research/projects/research-groups/polarts). She is also Member of the Finnish Academy Research Council for Culture and Social Sciences.
Dana Mills teaches political theory and feminist theory at Oxford. In 2016– 2017 she will be a Visiting Fellow at NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts and the Hannah Arendt Archives. Her first book, Dance and Politics: Moving beyond Boundaries, is out with Manchester University Press in the fall of 2016.
Cynthia E. Milton holds a Canada Research Chair in Latin American History at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She presently works on historical and artistic representations in the aftermath of conflict, in particular contemporary Peru. She is the editor of Art from a Fractured Past: Memory and Truth-Telling in Post-Shining Path Peru (2014), a co-editor of Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011) and The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005). Honors include the Bolton-Johnson Prize for The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007) and the Alexander Von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship. Milton was named to the inaugural cohort of The College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.
Frank Möller is a Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, University of Tampere, Finland, and the Co-Convenor of the ECPR Standing Group on Politics and the Arts. Recent publications include ‘Politics and Art’, Oxford Handbook Online Political Science (Oxford University Press, 2016) and ‘From Aftermath to Peace: Reflections on a Photography of Peace’, Global Society (2016). His most recent book is Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorsdhip and the Politics of Violence (2013).
[14]Louie Palu is an award winning documentary photographer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in festivals, publications, and exhibitions internationally. He is a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a 2016–2017 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. Louie Palu is the recipient of numerous awards including a Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Grant.
[15]Preface
The ECPR (European Consortium for Political Research) Standing Group on Politics and the Arts was founded in 1996 by Maureen Whitebrook, who called the group for the first initial workshop in Bordeaux. Already at that time, the idea was to analyse art as a form of political discourse. Over the years, the activities of the Standing Group revolved around such issues as terror and art, violence and non-violence, art and reconciliation, and aesthetic representations of and interventions in international conflicts. Furthermore, the Standing Group explored the politicization of film, literature and photography; the poetic form; narrative practices; and, most recently, the art of peace.
Art as political witness was included in the Group’s research agenda for the first time on the occasion of the 2013 ECPR General Conference in Bordeaux. In Glasgow, one year later, the Group intensified its engagement with the role and function of art as political witness in a section entirely dedicated to this subject. We invited panels and papers expanding the range of political science by problematizing the concept of art in connection with political witnessing; elaborating the political-ness of artistic witnessing; and exploring the concept of artistic witnessing as political activity. We were interested in the temporality of witnessing including reflection of the past and anticipation of the future in artistic and aesthetic engagements with politics and the political.
We would like to thank all friends and colleagues – those who are contributing to the Group’s overall activities, and especially those who participated in the intense discussions on art as political witness in Bordeaux, Glasgow and elsewhere. Special thanks are due to the contributors to this volume and the artists who generously granted permission to reproduce their work in this book. Indeed, the Standing Group has always been interested in dialogue between scholars and artists and we are extremely happy to have Louie Palu among the contributors to this volume. We are also grateful to the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere and the School’s dean, Risto Kunelius, for subsidizing the language-editing stage of this project. Finally, many thanks are due to Barbara Budrich Publishers, especially to our editor Sarah Rögl, and also to Jakob Horstmann and Ulrike Schmitz for their initial interest in this project.
Kia Lindroos, Jyväskylä
Frank Möller, Tampere
[16][17]Plate 1: Louie Palu, An Afghan soldier eats grapes during a patrol in Pashmul in Zhari District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu
[18]Plate 2: Louie Palu, A man with hands bound behind his back and killed execution style on the banks of a river in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu
[19]Plate 3: Louie Palu, Anti Sinaloa Cartel leader Chapo Guzman graffiti that has been painted over on a wall in the Juarez Valley located east of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu
[20]Plate 4: Louie Palu, Migrant labourers from Guerrero State working at a farm near Culiacan, Sinaloa picking tomatoes destined for export across the border to the United States and Canada. 2012 Photo © Louie Palu
[21]Plate 5: Louie Palu, A detainee prays in his cell in Camp 5, which is a maximum-security detention facility where the most uncooperative as well as detainees with the most intelligence value are housed at the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. 2008 Photo © Louie Palu
[22]Plate 6: Louie Palu, Cover of the publication “Guantanamo Operational Security Review” a self published
