THE VISUAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT ON THE ROMANIAN ARMED FORCES SOCIAL MEDIA SITES

Abstract

The recent evolution of social media networks has brought to the attention of researchers in the field of security studies new resources and methods for understanding international dynamics, as well as new media actors such as the military forces. Today, the Romanian Armed Forces have their own official Facebook pages through which they produce and promote media content, mainly visual, which reaches a significant number of individuals. Thus, the visual representations that are disseminated in the online environment and, especially on the military social networks, become important sources of knowledge and interpretation of reality, true spaces in which policies are born. The main purpose of this paper is to explore how the “responsibility to protect”* is visually constructed in the photos published by the Romanian Armed Forces on own Facebook pages. To accomplish this objective, photographs illustrating interactions between Romanian soldiers and Afghan children during the Resolute Support Mission were collected. The method used for the analysis of these photographs is visual social semiotics, a recent approach in the study of security issues, which brings to light the meanings hidden in the various modes of representation.