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Over the last few decades, critical IR and security studies have progressively incorporated into their analyses visual elements such as images and videos (Hansen, 2015; Lenoir, 2000; Power, 2007; Weber, 2006; 2008; 2014). This is part of a more general trend that has affected various disciplines, which Mitchell labelled the 'pictorial turn' (2011: 69). While the specific foci of the scholars involved in this academic endeavour vary, this literature compellingly demonstrates that visual elements deserve greater attention than they are generally granted by the mainstream literature. From the perspective of this investigation, the most relevant aspect of this literature lies in the emphasis that some scholars place on the militarising potential of the visual elements considered, although it should be kept in mind that images can work both ways, as they can also be used and read as critical interventions into political debates (Hansen, 2015). Nevertheless, the extent to which the visual, securitisation, and militarisation have come to be seen as related is testified, for example, by the fact that in 2007 the journal "Security Dialogue" published a "Special Issue on Securitization, Militarization and Visual Culture in the Worlds of Post-9/11", which includes articles that address the power of the image and 'recognise the forces at work in contemporary visual culture, which have affected practices of securitization and militarization' (Campbell and Shapiro, 2007: 132).

Cynthia Weber is one of the scholars that have forcefully advocated the inclusion of the visual into the study of IR. According to her, 'much politics is conducted through popular visual language' (2008: 137), expressed through photography, film, and web-

based windows. Among other aspects, Weber focuses on the effects of some types of remediations, i.e. representations of one medium in another, such as television news broadcasts transformed into documentaries or films, and how thanks to the use of both documentary and cinematic techniques, remediations can make the mediated events feel both real and immediate, turning the viewer from an observer into a virtual participant (ibid.: 139). As remediations shift the point of view from the third to the first person, they change 'the temporal feel of the event from past to present' (ibid.: 147). A major issue linked to successful remediation is that it 'mak[es] the past so present, so hyper- immediate' (ibid.: 152) that it diverts the audience's attention away from "the present", standing in the way of a critical appraisal of the contemporary circumstances. Weber uses the example of various remediations of the story of the United Airlines Flight 93 (UAF93), one of the planes hijacked on 9/11, to illustrate how powerful remediation can be. Among the various remediations, she argues that thanks to the use of popular visual language the film "United 93" successfully changes the perspective of the audience and makes them experience the sounds and images of the film as the truth (ibid.: 150). In turn,

by offering Americans a catharsis based [...] on the virtually real immediate experience of USF93, United 93 unfortunately remediates political responsibility out of America's real present and instead locates it in a cinematically structured, virtually real American immediacy that makes no difficult demands on Americans politically or morally (ibid.: 152 - emphasis in the original)

In other words, all of the events related to the military interventions in both Afghanistan and Iraq are kept at a distance, allowing Americans to sidestep the moral issues entailed by the military response to the attacks. In that sense, remediation and the use of popular visual language can stand in the way of an appraisal of militaristic behaviour.

The importance of film for politics is also asserted in Weber's work on the securitisation of the unconscious (2005). Her core argument in that regard is that the latter can be performed not only in "fact", i.e. US foreign policy, but also, and most importantly, in fiction (film). To develop her argument she draws on "Minority Report", a film based on a futuristic story that critically examines a domestic system of preemptive justice applied in the US by the imaginary Department of PreCrime, released shortly after Bush introduced the Doctrine of preemption in 2002. Her point of departure is that both the Doctrine and the Department of PreCrime claim that securing either the individual or the state is a matter of securitising the unconscious, i.e. of bringing the unconscious into the realm of US security practices (ibid.: 483). In so doing, she argues, they 'articulate a specific (pre)vision of American morality and what I call 'US moral grammars of war' - codes and contexts that structure the meaning of US morality tales about war by grounding them in a specific articulation of the US 'we'' (ibid.: 483). While "Minority Report" provides a moral grammar of war that invites the audience to rethink the 'we', and by extension the system of preemptive justice, Weber states that by associating the invitation to rethink this 'we' to a feminine character, there are limits to what this 'we' can become. The female characters are so caricatured through gender stereotypes that 'the film at best sends mixed messages about the feminine and what it wants 'us' to see' (ibid.: 494). Ultimately, the film implies that these female characters secure what is 'traditionally domestic' (ibid.) and that they lack credit for making meaningful moral action.

Along similar lines, Weber also shows how other films, such as "We Were Soldiers" also develop a US 'we', a moral grammar of war, and a path for how to become a moral America/American that echoes the official story about moral America in the wake of 9/11, as presented by the Bush administration (2006).

In addition to films, the literature concerned with the links between visual elements and militarisation has also focused to a great extent on the use of digital technologies for entertainment, simulations and actual warfare. While the military states that there is 'no direct correlation between video games and an increased urge to kill' (Power, 2007: 275), there are various scholars that think that war video games have a bigger impact on people, and as a result on society, than the military like to admit. Leander for instance states that the development of video games 'might be expected to contribute significantly to the "militarisation of visual culture"' (Leander, 2010: 215)

Lenoir is one of the scholars that have addressed the links between the military and video games (Lenoir, 2000; 2003; Lenoir and Lowood; 2005). Building on Eisenhower's notion of the military-industrial complex, he argues that against the expectations that the complex would fade away when the cold war came to an end, the military-industrial complex has reorganised itself more efficiently than ever, becoming the military-entertainment complex (2000: 175). Crucially, 'whereas the military-industrial complex was more or less visible and identifiable during the Cold War, today it is invisibly everywhere, permeating our daily lives' (2000: 175).

Together with Lowood, Lenoir notes that the links between the military and the entertainment industry work both ways (2005). Commercial games have shaped many of the ideas for military simulations. In turn, military simulations have impacted commercial entertainment, as they have provided the content and the technology for computer and video games. This has gone as fare as video games using images taken from actual battles, which, they argue, also has an impact on the relationship between digital and physical reality. An example is provided by the commercial game "Doom II", whose code was rewritten by the Marines to include real-world images. In addition to being

used by the Marines, the code for "Marine Doom" was publicly released. In Lenoir's and Lowood's words, the implication is that 'you too can become a military assault commando' (2005: n.a.). In "Falcon 4.0" the weapon modelling is so realistic that reviewers of the game report using actual manuals when operating the weapons. For Lenoir and Lowood, this epitomises not only 'the calculated emergence of a military- entertainment complex but also [...] the fusion of the digital and the real happening around us' (ibid.).

Lenoir further develops the idea of a fusion between the digital and physical reality, as he states that our channels of experience are remodelled by the new media. The fact that we spend increasing amounts of time in virtual space, he argues, is going to affect how we understand both materiality and reality (2003: 289-290). This leads him to speculate that a posthuman state, characterised by the lack of separation between physical existence and computer simulation, might well come into being, as a result of technological advancement.

In his work on "virtuous war" and what he calls the Military-Industrial-Media- Entertainment Network (MIME-NET) (2000; 2001), Der Derian offers a critique of the implications deriving from the use of new technologies in relation to contemporary warfare and how the latter is perceived as a result. He focuses particularly on virtual technologies, used both for training purposes and to fight actual wars. According to him, due to the virtualisation of violence coupled with 'a new ethical imperative for global democratic reform' (2000: 772), war has gone from being virtual to being virtuous. This is also linked to the fact that the representations of war offer a vision of clean, bloodless conflicts (ibid.), a vision that however, he states, could not be any more deceitful. Der Derian is also critical of the role played by the MIME-NET, a notion he uses to refer to

the military-industrial complex as identified by Eisenhower (1961) with the addition of both the media and entertainment industries. Once the US military realised these industries' ability to affect mass consciousness, he argues, they were used in order to influence the public, in line with the military's interests (Der Derian cited in Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013: 67). As he rightly points out, what is particularly worrying is the belief that the use of these new technologies engenders. In Der Derian's words, a major issue lies with the fact that 'new technologies are also creating new virtual theologies, the most dangerous one being the belief that virtuous war can supernaturally solve the most intractable political problems' (2001: 220).

Power's work on digital war games (2007) explores the links between the US military and video games, together with the impact that the latter have on the militarisation of American popular culture and in shaping popular understandings of geopolitics. In Power's view, digital war games represent a powerful medium to explore the ways in which visual culture can be employed to both justify and legitimise US foreign policy (ibid.: 273-274). According to him, the narratives on the US and its foreign policy that these digital games convey, largely through the use of images, are particularly important in manufacturing consent. America's Army, the official US Army game and one of its most successful recruiting tools, is used to illustrate how realism is used selectively to bring across specific messages in line with the US Army's interests. For instance, even though the games does not explicitly name the enemy, there are clear references to the Afghan landscape (ibid.: 281). Players can also select their character from "real" soldiers that have been engaged in recent US interventions. At the same time, however, realism is abandoned when it comes to injuries and death, e.g. in the games dead bodies simply vanish. He concludes that digital war games present 'a clean, sanitized and enjoyable

version of war for popular consumption, obscuring the 'realities', contexts and consequences of war' (ibid.: 274).

Finally, in his article on the relationship between the war and home fronts, Shapiro focuses on various montage techniques to show how these influence perceptions on the locations and presence of war (2011). His core argument in that regard is that the boundaries between the two fronts are becoming increasingly blurred, largely due to the role played by media technologies:

I came to appreciate that the home front is now more than ever connected to the war front [...] because of the documentary and fictional media that enter the home, because some "warriors" use satellite-assisted media to fight remotely from their home, and because modern technologies bring the war home, sometimes instantaneously, as soldiers communicate with their families, even in the very moments when they are facing or deploying live fire (Shapiro, 2011: 124).

In addition to his point on the domestic and war fronts becoming increasingly blurred, a particularly interesting aspect of Shapiro's article is his discussion of an exhibition by Martha Roesler. The exhibition features photomontages showing commodity-saturated domestic interiors in advertisements alongside violent warfare moments, which are thereby brought into the domestic sphere. For instance, one photomontage shows a home with people comfortably seated in patio chairs watching tanks. With regard to this type of critical art, Shapiro argues that 'the juxtapositions of the commodity-saturated domestic interiors with war scenes [...] have an unsettling effect that must engender reflection on the ways in which everyday domestic life is politically insulating' (ibid.: 117). Shapiro reads these images as articulating the artist's critical perspective on the distracting character of entertainment and commodities, as they distract people from the violence

certainly compelling, and most likely reflects Rosler's intention, it is interesting to note that iRobot has used a similar type of photomontage on the homepage of its website, e.g. showing a soldier on the field alongside a woman holding a child in a domestic environment, although presumably it has done so for marketing purposes and not to engender a critical response on the part of the viewers. Rosler's and iRobot's photomontages differ in that iRobot does not integrate the war image into the home but rather puts the two scenes on the same level.

Overall, the literature reviewed shows that there is agreement among various scholars that visual material can have a militarising and securitising character. In general, the argument about the need to assign greater weight to the visual when studying politics than mainstream studies do is compelling, as the visual does have an impact on how people think and understand political issues. Nevertheless, it seems that a more nuanced approach, which also assigns weight to the textual in shaping people's ideas, might be desirable, particularly since, as Rose points out, the visual is often accompanied by some form of text (2001: 10). In this investigation, studying only the visual elements involved in iRobot's construction of its self-image would leave out crucial aspects of the company's narrative.