Description
As ‘brat summer’ came to an end in September 2024, NATO posted on Instagram an image of the word ‘peace’ on a neon-green background with black lowercase font in a parody of an album artwork. Named after the breakthrough album by Charli XCX, ‘brat summer’ – associated with notions of rejecting hegemonic feminity, day drinking, early 2000s fashion, recreational drugs, and ‘being a little messy’ – achieved popularity with the millennial generation in Western Europe. We seek to take an intersectional approach to this specific Instagram post and contextualise NATO’s ‘peace’ meme within wider debates about international organisations and their use of social media. What about this image, containing the innocuous word ‘peace’, provoked such a deep response of disbelief, cringe, and discomfort for Instagram users beyond other typical corporate posts? NATO represents an old-school form of traditional diplomacy, collective security, and militarisation – far removed from the ‘brat’ aesthetic. The hypocriscy of NATO implicitly endorsing a meme that is constitutive of illicit drug use and ‘white girl’ crime-evasion feels problematic. We take NATO’s ‘peace’ as an impetus to think around international agencies’ use social media as a de-politicising technology while communicating relatability and playfulness, obscuring their own role within violent hierarchies.
