Description
The so-called visual turn in IR has demonstrated that constellations of seeing and depicting are highly relevant for the discipline but so far, only scant attention has been paid to data visualization in spite of the international prominence of these practices. The paper addresses this lacuna by closely investigating the Visualising Palestine (VP) project that produces infographics related to the Israeli rule over, and violence against, the Palestinians. Drawing on visual analysis of the VP materials, I argue that the VP project works against strategies of obscuration, justification and relativization of the Israeli state violence by rendering Israeli policies legible and clearly communicated. In doing so, the paper makes three contributions. First, it provides an exploratory conceptual discussion of the salience of infographics for international politics. Second, it introduces and employs the notion of anti-colonial legibility to make sense of the VP’s practices. Last, it enriches the investigations of visual constellations in Israel/Palestine by discussing how the projects such as the VP contest the Israeli dominance via visual materials.
