Taking Images Seriously, How to Analyze Them?

The democratization of digital technologies and the proliferation of pictures and videos have forced researchers to adopt new frameworks to study how societies and media take part in international politics. This chapter shows how images can be taken into account in political science and international analysis. To do so it presents various methodologies and concepts that can be used individually or together and detail different approaches. It firstly looks at why and how to build up corpuses of images dealing with traditional questions of political science. It then shows how a researcher can deal with the question and the policies behind the production of images. The core of the analysis focuses on the issue of how to analyze images themselves, using aesthetics and visual concepts in political analysis. Finally, the chapter deals with the questions of the circulation and reception of these images