Introduction

This chapter presents the puzzle of visual politics in the context of migration and border politics. It introduces the study’s research questions, empirical focus, and contextual background against which the analysis unfolds, outlining developments during the long summer of migration of 2015. Moreover, it presents the book’s main arguments: the book argues that how images come to matter is contextually bound. It illustrates that visual border politics do not work in straightforward ways, but instead are situated practices of meaning-making that are fragmented locally and changing. Whether images can be mobilized to legitimize certain policies depends on a number of contextual factors, such as previous policies, the wider public and policy discourse, domestic developments, collective visual memories, respective identity constitutions, and viewing habits. Finally, the chapter maps existing research on visual representations in visual International Relations (IR), (critical) migration and border studies, as well as media and communication studies to argue for an analytical framework that takes into account both conceptualizations of borders as well as of images.