Description
This paper aims to conceptualize the link between aesthetics, national roles, visions, anxiety, and ontological security within IR theory. Focusing on agents’ temporal reflexivity along with social, it examines how identity is manifested through visions of the future, portraying the Self, and acting as mechanisms for managing anxiety and the function of the roles in that. It analyses roles’ connection to scripts, their performative, relational, colorful moving story nature, with deliberate aesthetics akin to drama. Nations may want to play a consciously constructed roles in a certain script that can be tied to aesthetics, wanting to appear and presenting themselves in specific way and contexts. The paper explores how an image does not solely exist; rather, nations enact roles, project an image or aesthetic representations to create visions, achieve ontological security, and manifest identities. Drawing on previous literature defining visions as ‘poetic images’ and ‘creative spaces,’ it investigates the aesthetic dimension of visions as stages for performing their roles, specifically through roles projected in visual productions. It examines how visual narratives create specific roles and project distinct images of nations. What role are they projecting, showing, what kind of image, and what is the aesthetic dimension of that role.
