David Shim

University of Groningen, International Relations and International Organisation, Faculty Member

Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy, Hamburg (IFSH), European Peace and Security Orders, Faculty Member

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My research contributes to the study of visual politics in the field of International Relations. My work
is located at the intersection of exploring the visual dimension of global politics and the political
dimension of the visual. In this way, I have engaged different visual media and artefacts including
comics, memorials, film, photography, satellite imagery and video. My work appeared in, among
others, International Political Sociology, Geoforum, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific and
Review of International Studies. My book Visual Politics and North Korea is available at Routledge.

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Books by David Shim

Digital Images in Peacebuilding

by Frank Möller and David Shim

In this chapter, we discuss the role and function of digital images in peacebuilding, as identifi... more In this chapter, we discuss the role and function of digital images in peacebuilding, as identified in visual peace research. We argue that the digital image can improve peacebuilding on the condition that the non-linearity and multi-directionality as well as the complexities and ambiguities of both peacebuilding and the conditions in which it interferes are acknowledged and consciously used in peacebuilding efforts. We start by briefly introducing visual peace research and its underlying understanding of peace images as derivate, illustrative, and constitutive of peace as well as representative, pro-active, and participatory. In the following section, we ask what the digital image can offer to peacebuilding—e.g., multifaceted ways of interaction and a surge in the number of peace image makers—so as to create a virtual community of visual peacebuilders from below. Focusing on artificial intelligence and separating a photojournalistic peace photography from a peace photography reflecting peace and conflict studies, we then explore the contribution of AI-generated images to peacebuilding in the narrative tradition which aims to complexify conflict narratives in order to transform a given conflict. Finally, we analyze the contribution of digitization to the practical work of peace researchers and peacebuilders in terms of network building and knowledge production.

Showing Climate Action – Exploring Fridays for Future Germany’s Visual Activism on Flickr (OA)

Visual Communication, 2024

This paper examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to... more This paper examines how Fridays for Future Germany (FFFG) uses photographs of climate protests to convey the politics of climate change to wider audiences. The author argues that FFFG is an ideal-type form of visual activism in which visual imagery is central to its climate activism. The paper builds on climate change communication scholarship and visual social movement studies to contribute an inquiry about FFFG's visual activism. The focus is on FFFG's visual self-representations on the social media platform Flickr, which promises to give insights into its strategies of self-legitimation. The empirical analysis discusses the recurring visual patterns in FFFG's visual activism based on illustrative examples and provides an interpretive reading about the implications of certain ways of seeing and showing climate action. The conclusion puts the findings in a wider political context, highlighting the importance of visualization in the (self-)legitimation of FFFG in debates about global climate governance.

Visual Politics and North Korea

In the realm of international relations, there are seemingly few states like North Korea. Whether... more In the realm of international relations, there are seemingly few states like North Korea. Whether it is the country’s human rights situation, its precarious everyday life or its so-called foreign policy of coercion and nuclear brinkmanship, no matter what this ‘pariah’ nation says and does it affects the state and stability of regional and global politics. But what do we know about North Korea and how do we come to know it? This book argues that visual imagery plays a decisive role in this operation. By discussing two exemplary areas – everyday photography and satellite imagery – the book takes into account the role of images in the way that particular issues related to North Korea are understood in contemporary geopolitics. Images work. They do something by evoking a particular perspective of what is shown in them, allowing only specific ways of seeing and knowing. In this sense, images are deeply political. Individual methodological usages in the book can provide a procedural basis from which to start or rethink further studies on visuality, both in IR and beyond. It also opens an innovative path for future studies on East Asia, making the book attractive to a range of specialists and thus holding an appeal beyond the boundaries of a single discipline.

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Journal Articles by David Shim

Performing legitimacy – exploring video clips by climate activists as everyday practices of (de)legitimation (OA)

International Studies Review, 2025

This contribution argues for the value of analyzing protest performances of climate activists on ... more

Personalising climate change—how activists from Fridays for Future visualise climate action on Instagram (OA)

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2024

The visual communication of climate change by social movements has become an emerging subject of ... more The visual communication of climate change by social movements has become an emerging subject of research in recent years. Much of the existing literature on visual climate change communication focuses on how environmental movements and protests are depicted by mainstream media outlets. This exploratory study examines the visual climate change communication by social movements themselves. Its focus is on one ‘new narrator’ in the mediated politics of climate change: Fridays for Future (FFF), arguably one of the most significant communicators of climate change. The research question seeks to understand how FFF activists narrate climate action through images posted on Instagram. I discuss examples from major branches of FFF and contribute to existing research by emphasising personalisation as a powerful tool in climate storytelling. The paper’s visual thematic analysis presents three themes that illustrate the personalisation of climate storytelling by FFF activists: localising the effects of global climate change, using performances to convey climate messages, and visualising contentious politics. The implications of this research further underpin the need to recognise climate activists as important actors in the visual communication of climate change.

Monitoring North Korea: a visual autoethnography of humanitarian-aid practices (OA)

In this visual essay, I draw on my own photographs taken as a so-called food-aid monitor working ... more In this visual essay, I draw on my own photographs taken as a so-called food-aid monitor working in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea for the United Nations World Food Programme. I provide an autoethnographic account to allow consideration of the visual dimension of humanitarian aid: everyday observations, field visits and snapshots inform humanitarian action. I intend to shed a different light on the inherent visual politics of this aid practice and, hence, build a different kind of knowledge concerning (aid assistance in) the country.

Selected by the University of Groningen Library as its monthly open access publication: https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/blog/open-access-publication-in-the-spotlight-september-monitoring-north-korea-a-visual-autoethnogr

#UprootTheSystem - Exploring Fridays for Future’s Visual Climate Storytelling

Global Cooperation Research - A Quarterly Magazine, 2021

This contribution examines visual climate storytelling of Fridays for Future’s (FFF) global clima... more This contribution examines visual climate storytelling of Fridays for Future’s (FFF) global climate strike on 24 September 2021. Running under #UprootTheSystem, the climate strikes meant a return to public spaces after Covid-19-related restrictions heavily impacted the movement’s ability to reach global audiences. We situate our piece in the ongoing debate about climate communication and climate storytelling (e.g. Bloomfield and Manktelow 2021). Given FFF’s success in recent years to bring the issue of climate change onto the global agenda despite the Corona pandemic, we believe it is important to understand how the movement is, so to say, telling the story of climate change to wider audiences. In our heuristic analysis we discuss (visual) narrative elements of the official Instagram account of the international edition of FFF.

Visualising Korea: Critical Moments in History, Society and Politics

by Roland Bleiker, David Shim, and David Chapman

Asian Studies Review, 2021

The purpose of this special issue is to examine how visual representations have shaped changing n... more The purpose of this special issue is to examine how visual representations have shaped changing notions of Korean society, culture and nationhood. While images surround us, and are increasingly recognised as crucial, we know surprisingly little about the role visuality plays in the context of Korean politics and society. Only a few selected studies engage the issues at stake. To address these issues, the authors in this collection explore how the Korean peninsula has been imagined, represented and displayed through images during critical historical and contemporary moments over the past century. The key moments that the contributors address include Japanese colonialism and its legacy, national division and authoritarian rules in North and South Korea, interactions with the international community, and the transition to democracy in the South. The visual realms the contributors draw upon include photographs, film, monuments, and digital reproductions of them. The key questions each contributor asks are: how have visual factors influenced key events? What can we learn from visual sources that we cannot learn from textual ones?

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Militarizing antimilitarism? Exploring the gendered representation of military service in German recruitment videos on social media

by Frank A Stengel and David Shim

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2021

This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube serie... more This article analyzes the gendered representation of military service in the German YouTube series Die Rekruten (DR) (The Recruits), a popular web series produced on behalf of the German armed forces (Bundeswehr) for recruitment purposes, which accompanies 12 navy recruits during their basic training. The article is situated within research on masculinity and the military, in particular military recruitment. It supplements current scholarship by studying a previously neglected case that is of particular interest given Germany's antimilitarist culture, which should make military recruitment and military public relations more difficult. The article asks how military service is represented in DR, what its discursive effects are, and what role (if any) masculinity plays in this process. We find support for recent feminist research on military masculinities (including in military recruitment) that emphasizes ambiguity and contradiction. What distinguishes the construction of military masculinity in DR from, for example, recruitment advertisements in the United States or the United Kingdom is its markedly civil character. This not only broadens the military's appeal for a more diverse audience but also increases the legitimacy of the military and its activities. It does so by concealing the violence that has for the past two decades also been a very real part of what the Bundeswehr does.

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Memorials’ Politics: Exploring the Material Rhetoric of the Statue of Peace

Memory Studies, 2021

Open access! This paper discusses the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace built in front o... more Open access!

This paper discusses the material rhetoric of the Statue of Peace built in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea. Installed in 2011 to commemorate so-called “comfort women”—the former sex slaves forced to work in brothels during Korea’s occupation by the Empire of Japan—, several identical-looking copies of the statue have since spread throughout the country and beyond. While many observers have noted the symbolic politics of the sculpture, I argue for taking into account its material dimension too—with the aim of furthering our understanding of how commemorative practices are enabled by mnemonic installations. Building on the scholarship that has addressed the rhetoric of objects and places of remembrance, I ask how the statue acts on and engages with its viewers. Among others, site visits, observations, own experiences, interviews, and visual documentation serve as the basis of the discussion.

Cinematic Representations of the Gwangju Uprising: Visualising the “New” South Korea in A Taxi Driver

Asian Studies Review, 2020

Open access! The civic unrest in Gwangju in May 1980 marks one of the most important turning poi... more Open access!

The civic unrest in Gwangju in May 1980 marks one of the most
important turning points in modern South Korea’s history and
collective memory. The so-called Gwangju Uprising did nothing
less than herald South Korea’s transition from dictatorship to
democracy. Images played an important role in this critical moment
of change. Footage of the security forces quelling unrest showed
the outside world what was happening in the city. One of the
avenues through which the protests have been consistently reimagined
is popular film. This article asks how the story of radical
political change is articulated in A Taxi Driver, South Korea’s mostviewed
and highest-grossing film on the Uprising. Contrasting with
previous research, I argue, first, that A Taxi Driver adds to our
knowledge of the Gwangju protests a story about the essential
role of images in the contentious politics of the democratisation
movement. Second, I contend that the film produces a specific
account of the Uprising, one that allows us to see the politics of
contention as an interrelation of different visibilities, which includes
symbolic imagery, inside/outside configurations and male/female
agency.

Visions of Peace in International Relations

International Studies Perspectives, 2019

In this paper, we engage with IR͛s recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with th... more In this paper, we engage with IR͛s recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field͛s focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography into IR͛s emerging agenda on peace. Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large-scale violence and inter-state war. In contrast, we provide an alternative approach which aims to broaden our understanding of (the study of) peace in IR. First, we explore a positive conception of peace at the individual and everyday level of analysis. Second, we advocate methodological pluralism by examining different analytical sites of peace photography. Third, we concentrate on the potentialities of peace photography in Colombia and Brazil – notorious spaces of everyday violence. We argue that the analytical perspectives developed in this paper have also relevance beyond our examples: if peace photography can be found here, than it can also be found elsewhere. Put differently, everyday visions of peace constitute particular instances of the international.

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Sketching Geopolitics: Comics and the Case of the Cheonan Sinking

International Political Sociology, 2017

Recent scholarship in international relations (IR) and international political sociology (IPS) ha... more Recent scholarship in international relations (IR) and international political sociology (IPS) has made significant contributions to the study of images. Chief among such studies on visual politics has been the focus on popular visual media including cartoons, film, photography, and video games. This article takes a look at another prominent medium: the comic. Comics provide ample potential starting points for IR scholars and political sociologists; the comic's aesthetic qualities—the way in which it narrates geopolitical events to public audiences through condensed image-word relations—reveals a distinct politics of representation. Thus, the study of comics contributes to a better understanding of visuality—theoretically, methodologically, and empirically. This article complements existing work by engaging an example outside of familiar European-language contexts. It discusses a comic booklet that was published by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense in the aftermath of the sinking of the Cheonan, a navy vessel that was allegedly sunk by a North Korean torpedo in 2010. Recognizing comics as narrative sites of (geo)politics, the article explores the booklet's own way of seeing by discussing its dramatic structure and rhetorical devices. In this way, the article provides an exemplary reading of comics, which can serve as a conceptual basis for future studies in the field.

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Social Media, Gender and the Mediatisation of War: Exploring the German Armed Forces’ Visual Representation of the Afghanistan Operation on Facebook

by David Shim and Frank A Stengel

Global Discourse, 2017

Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual persp... more Studies on the mediatisation of war point to attempts of governments to regulate the visual perspective of their involvements in armed conflict – the most notable example being the practice of ‘embedded reporting’ in Iraq and Afghanistan. This paper focuses on a different strategy of visual meaning-making, namely, the publication of images on social media by armed forces themselves. Specifically, we argue that the mediatisation of war literature could profit from an increased engagement with feminist research, both within Critical Security/Critical Military Studies and within Science and Technology Studies that highlight the close connection between masculinity, technology and control. More specifically, it examines the German military mission in Afghanistan as represented on the Bundeswehr’s, the German Armed Forces, official channel on Facebook. Germany constitutes an interesting, and largely neglected, case for the growing literature on the mediatisation of war: its strong antimilitarist political culture makes the representation of war particularly delicate. The paper examines specific representational patterns of Germany’s involvement in Afghanistan and discusses the implications which arise from what is placed inside the Bundeswehr’s frame of visibility and what remains out of its view.

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Symbolic practices of legitimation: Exploring domestic motives of North Korea's space program

by Philipp Olbrich and David Shim

International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 2019

Despite international sanctions and a strained economy, North Korea continues to spend scarce res... more Despite international sanctions and a strained economy, North Korea continues to spend scarce resources on a costly space program. Hitherto, research has usually explained this continuity in terms of international security and/or international reputation. Accordingly, Pyongyang uses its space-related efforts as a pretext to develop inter-continental ballistic missiles and to enhance its international reputation. This article argues that these explanations do not suffice and thus adds domestic motives for consideration. By engaging recent North Korean studies, which emphasize the importance of performance and symbol for the politics of the Kim regime, this article explores recurring actions and routinized behavior by the leadership as symbolic practices that reinforce domestic legitimacy. The goal is to provide a conceptual avenue through which to better understand North Korean affairs. Taking into

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Between the International and the Everyday: Geopolitics and Imaginaries of Home

The connection between the everyday and the international has received increasing attention in cr... more The connection between the everyday and the international has received increasing attention in critical IR in recent years. As many contributions aim to rethink the international in terms of the everyday, the mundane and the ordinary become a site of geopolitical analysis. The paper’s central idea is that we, as academics and persons, are constantly faced with what can be called an international political sociology of the everyday in world politics: How is life in “distant” places? Who lives in these places? And what are the people doing “over there”? By reflecting on how we get an idea of the everyday of certain places, this paper shifts its focus on representations or, more precisely, imaginations of the everyday for particular audiences. Precisely because the mundane can simultaneously be anything, everything and nothing, it is important to turn to the practices and, in this vein, to the (geo)politics of mediating the everyday to us. In this regard, the paper provides an interpretive reading of two aesthetic texts – a film and a photographic essay – with the purpose of addressing imaginaries of home, the special senses of belonging, as particular sites of the international. In this way, the paper contributes to current efforts to further decentralize conceptions of the international.

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Remote sensing place: Satellite images as visual spatial imaginaries

How do people come to know the world? How do they get a sense of place and space? Arguably, one o... more How do people come to know the world? How do they get a sense of place and space? Arguably, one of the ways in which they do this is through the practice of remote sensing, among which satellite imagery is one of the most widespread and potent tools of engaging, representing and constructing space. This paper argues that satellite imagery is not only a powerful means of gathering geographical and geopolitical information -for instance through overhead surveillance and the reconnaissance of sites considered suspicious -but is also decisive in producing geographical and geopolitical imaginations. Based on a discussion of the iconic satellite picture of the Korean Peninsula by night, this article shows how satellite imagery constructs -seemingly by itself -North Korea as a distant, foreign and secluded other place in world politics. Referred to in the paper as 'visual spatial imaginaries', remote sensing shapes how we imagine places, spaces and sites in what is widely believed to be a terra incognita of the world.

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Desiring the Dark: ‘A taste for the unusual’ in North Korean tourism?

Current Issues in Tourism, Aug 18, 2014

Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored... more Desire is a continuous force, fundamentally eccentric and insatiable, yet insufficiently explored in tourism studies. To examine desire in tourism to ‘unusual’ places of darkness and danger we propose four interpretations of this psychoanalytic concept: desire as recognition, ‘object’ cause of desire, desire for novelty, and desire for fantasy. Initial empirical evidence drawn from analysing online mass-media accounts of tourists in North Korea suggests that tourists access desire when travelling to such a country portrayed as one of the most reclusive, dangerous and feared in the world.

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'Real’ and ‘normal’ North Korea: on the politics of shining light on the darkness. Reply to: ‘Shining light on the darkness. Placing tourists within North Korean tourism’

Current Issues in Tourism, Apr 2015

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Post-2014 Afghanistan and its impact in Northeast Asia

Asian Perspective, Dec 2014

The economic, political, and social situation in post-2014 Afghanistan remains uncertain, particu... more The economic, political, and social situation in post-2014 Afghanistan remains uncertain, particularly because the effects of the US drawback from Afghanistan on national and regional stability are rather difficult to foresee. In this article, we explore how the debates about post-2014 Afghanistan impact others' thinking. Afghanistan forces national governments and political leaders to reflect deeply on their policies toward Afghanistan and the wider region. Hence, the “Afghanistan problem” becomes a geopolitical imagery within other countries' discourse. Here we scrutinize the impact of post-2014 Afghanistan on South Korean and Chinese foreign policy practices, enabling us also to become familiar with Chinese and South Korean understanding of their political position in Asia.

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