Aesthetic Imagination and Security Policy
By Roland Bleiker
9 November 2025
Context of this Blog
This blog summarises my chapter “Imagination and the Korean Crisis,” in Andrew Carr (ed), Strategic Imagination: Essays in Honour of Brendan Sargeant (Canberra: ANU Press 2025).
The book is open access and was launched at the ANU on 27.10.2025.
I am grateful to Andrew Carr for the invitation to contribute a chapter, which draws on my previous work on security and visuality in Korea.
All photographs are my own.
The Aesthetic Imagination
I never had the opportunity to meet Brendan Sargeant, who tragically passed away in 2022 and who, as this book edited by Andrew Carr reminds us and demonstrates, was one of Australia’s leading security practitioners and strategic thinkers. I was surprised and delighted when Andrew kindly invited me to contribute to this book. I was even more surprised and delighted when I found out that Sargeant had used my book on Aesthetics and World Politics in some of his work on the strategic imagination.
When developing the concept of the strategic imagination Sargeant had in mind the challenge of dealing with seemingly intractable conflicts. Perhaps more importantly, he had in mind questioning strategic policy approaches that are so dominant and so entrenched that they are no longer able to offer innovative ways of understanding and dealing with these intractable conflicts. Or so at least I interpret Sargeant’s quest for a theory of the imagination: as a scholarly and practical call for innovative solutions in strategic thinking and in defence policies.
The chapter I wrote in response explores how aesthetic approaches to security can offer such a form of strategic imagination. At first sight, this seems far-fetched. Aesthetic approaches tend to be associated with art and literature and the kind of ‘soft’ inquiries that are worlds away from the ‘hard’ world of security and defence policies. Not so, I argue.
Aesthetics refers not only to practices of art – from painting to music, poetry, photography and film – but also, and above all, to the type of insights and understandings they inspire and engender. Aesthetics in this sense, is about the ability to step back, reflect and see strategic dilemmas and policies in new ways. It is about cultivating an open-ended level of sensibility about the political.
Reimagining Security on the Korean Peninsula
In my chapter I focus on the security situation in Korea to illustrate how aesthetic approaches can generate the type of imagination that Sargeant had in mind.
It is hard to find a protracted conflict that is more in need of strategic imagination than the one in Korea. The legacy of a highly destructive war remains ever present and so is the hostile Cold War juxtaposition between two ideologically opposed regimes that are armed to the teeth. The geopolitical impotence of the divided Korean peninsula, and the involvement of several great powers, renders the situation even more volatile. Crises appear in regular intervals. No lasting peace agreement seems in reach.
This is why defence policies in and towards Korea call precisely for what Sargeant advocated repeatedly: a “larger conception of strategy, a richer discourse and a more searching questioning” that can help develop innovative polices and defence strategies.
A Visual Autoethnography of the Korean DMZ
I reflect on my experience of working in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where I was stationed as a Swiss Army officer between 1986 and 1988. I employ my own photographs to examine how an appreciation of everyday aesthetic sensibilities can open up new ways of thinking about security dilemmas.
In doing so I draw on research I have done before on this topic and on the concept of visual autoethnography, which I developed in an essay published in The European Journal of International Security and summarised in a blog here. Autoethnography is an approach that breaks with convention by using an author’s own experiences to re-imagine the world. Visual autoethnography uses photographs to do so.
But why should my experience, and my photographs, taken decades ago, be of any relevance today?
The key argument I advance is that visual autoethnography as a form of strategic imagination can be insightful not because it offers better or even authentic views – it cannot - but because it has the potential to reveal how prevailing political discourses and practices are so entrenched that we no longer see their partial, political and often problematic nature.
First: I show how a self-reflective engagement with my own photographs of the DMZ reveals the deeply entrenched role of militarised masculinities that transgress the border and shape security policies on both sides.
When I first took my photographs, decades ago, I noticed everything about the DMZ, except its striking gendered nature. As a military officer, and having grown up in a patriarchal society, I simply took for granted and accepted the militarised and gendered value system that surrounded me. This was the case in Switzerland but also when I arrived in the Korean DMZ.
A self-critical look at my own positionality, and my changing relationship to my own photographs over a period of three decades, reveals how deeply entrenched militarised approaches to Korea security are and how much they are implicated in the conflict itself.
Employing the strategic imagination here would entail identifying the problematic aspects of these security patterns and looking for innovative solutions beyond them.
Second: I reflect on my photographs of everyday life in North Korea. I show how and why it is impossible to see the Korean conflict in neutral ways.
Drawing on my positionality and photographs I then reveal a reality that is different from prevailing strategic and public discourses, which depict the North as a grim and authoritarian state, solely responsible for the recurring nuclear crisis that destabilize the region.
I do not deny the massive human rights abuses that take place in the North or trivialize Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
But my photographs, subjective as they are, show that life in North Korea is far more complex and diverse. They also show that demonising North Korea as an irrational rogue state hinders opportunities to understand why Pyongyang acts the way it does.
Here, the strategic imagination would seek to comprehend how the world looks like from North Korea to develop more effective security policies and diplomatic initiatives.
Rethinking Evidence and Strategy
I don’t pretend that a short chapter on the strategic imagination can re-evaluate the complex security situation in Korea. But I hope that the above illustrations make a conceptual point in support of the strategic imagination: that its usefulness should be judged not by the empirical accuracy of the insights that are generated but by how they help helps us view entrenched security problems in a new light. Doing so is the precondition for finding innovative political solutions to conflicts that seem to have become intractable, like the one on the Korean peninsula.
This is why the usefulness and the power of visual autoethnography lies not in providing more accurate knowledge of empirical realities, but in the ability to reveal how prevailing ways of seeing, thinking and conducting security politics are so deeply entrenched and taken-for-granted that their often problematic nature is no longer recognized, yet alone discussed and addressed.
Scholarly works and policy recommendations based on the strategic imagination should thus be pursued and evaluated by criteria that go beyond traditional social scientific validations. This is because the strategic imagination is not about offering an accurate depiction of existing security dilemmas. It is about overcoming them. It is about re-imagining the world around us, including the most pressing defence policy problems. Sargent highlights this point and stresses that the “quality of a country’s strategic imagination may be judged by how it responds to the world - the space it creates for action.”
Opening up such spaces is to break with existing habits and policy traditions. It is to take risks. A new strategy might be unproven and not yet empirically validated. But this does not render this strategy invalid because, ultimately, and as Sargeant stressed, the most crucial ‘proof’ will be how this policy “might shape and therefore change the world as it is.”
Sources and Readings
Åhäll, Linda. 2016. “The Dance of Militarisation,” in Critical Studies on Security 4(2).
Bleiker, Roland. 2009. Aesthetics and World Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bleiker, Roland. 2019. “Visual Autoethnography and International Security,” in European Journal of International Security 4(3).
Cho, Grace M. 2008. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Choi, Shine. 2023. “Terrible security problem: an aesthetics approach and study of the Korean Nuclear Crisis,” in Critical Studies on Security.
Hwang, Ihntaek. 2018. “Militarising National Security through Criminalisation of Conscientious Objectors to Conscription in South Korea,” in Critical Studies on Security, 6(3).
Kim, Elena J. 2022. Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters Along the Korean DMZ. Duke University Press.
Sargeant, Brendan 2021. The implications of climate change for Australian strategic and defence policy in relation to the alliance and Pacific island states. Brisbane: Griffith Asia Institute.
Sargeant, Brendan. 2022. “Challenges to the Australian strategic imagination,” in Australian Journal of Defence and Strategic Studies, 4(1).
van Houtryve, Tomas. 2009. “The Land of No Smiles,” in Foreign Policy, 172.
Roland Bleiker is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland.
