Description
Abstract
Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others argued that the photographic representation of suffering shapes, and often distorts, how distant audiences come to know and feel about war. This paper revisits Sontag's argument in the age of the smartphone, where the photograph has been displaced by the live stream, the story, and the algorithmically curated feed, and where the subjects of suffering increasingly narrate their own pain rather than being framed by an external photographer. Drawing on this updated optics of suffering, the paper undertakes a comparative analysis of how conflict-related vulnerability is rendered visible, or rendered invisible, on Instagram across three cases: the war crimes documented in Gaza and Ukraine, and the conflict-driven food insecurity experienced in Uganda. While the former two have generated an intense, globally circulated visual record, often produced by victims themselves, the latter remains comparatively absent from the same platforms and publics, despite comparable or greater levels of human insecurity. The paper asks what accounts for this asymmetry of visibility, and what it reveals about the politics of who gets to be seen as suffering. Methodologically, the study employs critical discourse analysis of a corpus of Instagram posts (images, captions, and stories) from each context, examining how personal narrative, visual testimony, and platform affordances combine to construct conflict and vulnerability for distant audiences, and how these constructions are received, amplified, or ignored. In doing so, the paper contributes to debates on conflict, cooperation, and global inequality by foregrounding the unequal distribution of visibility itself as a site of insecurity.