Observant States Quotes

“The aspiration to security is thus misguided and certainly unachievable. As Foucault (2007) has remarked, security is not a state to be realised; it is always elusive, an absolute end that cannot be attained. But it is also through this pervasive sense of insecurity that populations are governed, from the scale of the body to the realms of international politics.”
― Fraser MacDonald, Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture

“The very strategies of security that are meant to secure and reassure generate insecurity and neurosis (Isin 20024).”
― Fraser McDonald, Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture

“Famine images remain powerful and salient in modernity because they recall a precarious pre-modern existence that industrialised society has allegedly overcome. Understood as a natural disaster in which there is a crisis of food supply, famine is seen as a symptom of a lack of progress that results in the death of an innocent. It is for this reason that famine images are, more often than not, of individuals, frequently including children, barely clothed, staring passively into the lens, flies flitting across their faces.”
― Fraser McDonald, Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture