Geopoetics: A Visual Language of Peace in Wim Wenders’ Films

Abstract

In line with the critical movement that in the last two decades has led to an ‘aesthetic turn’ in the International Relations (IR) field, this article introduces the notion of geopoetics as a useful conceptual category for the analysis of peace, security, and politics. Conceiving geopoetics as an operative concept that helps to understand the political and social experience of geographical space through the most varied forms of artistic expression, this article investigates the work of the German filmmaker Wim Wenders, seeking to show how his filmography, when examined as a whole, constitutes a kind of geopoetic discourse of peace that offers an aesthetic critique, immanent to the very formal possibilities of cinematic technique that challenges dominant geopolitical and geostrategic approaches that continue to naturalise war and violence as necessary instruments of international politics. Relying on the concept of geopoetics and on the political relevance of cinema within the aesthetic turn observed in the IR field, the article argues that geopoetics contributes to expand the epistemological and methodological boundaries of the IR field and to developing a broader conception of peace in the discipline.