The Paradox of Invisibility: the Ethical Limits and Liberation of the Arts in Times of Conflict

What are the risks and limits of visibilising the contributions that the arts make to the justice imagination in contexts of persistent violence? The burgeoning aesthetic turn argues that aesthetic sources and methodologies constitute forms of knowledge and knowledge production that enable us to access people and perspectives that would otherwise remain invisible. Yet, scant attention has been accorded to the risks, dangers and even limitations that accompany the visibilisation that aesthetic sources and methodologies offer. Using the empirically illustrative case of South Sudan, where conditions of enduring violence and impunity are pushing activists towards artistic expressions of their justice needs, this paper articulates the constellation of tensions that together form the paradox of invisibility around the arts as spaces of the justice imagination. I argue that, as spaces of the justice imagination, the arts are both liberated and limited by invisibility, along four distinct lines, and that the paradox of invisibility that this engenders demands careful ethical consideration among social scientists within the burgeoning aesthetic turn in the fields of transitional justice and peace and conflict studies more broadly. This paper proceeds firstly with a methodological discussion that details the qualitative and empirical orientation of this research, drawing on ethnographic field research conducted in South Sudan in 2022 and centralising a relational, care-based orientation that seeks to do research ‘otherwise’ i.e. as if people and spaces matter. Thereafter I introduce the paper’s main conceptual contribution, namely the paradox of invisibility surrounding the arts as spaces of the justice imagination in contexts of enduring violence and fragility. In the remaining sections of the paper I explore the four sets of tensions that comprise the wider paradox of invisibility: the shield of invisibility, the dilemma of recognition, the violence of desire, and the limits of inclusion. Each of these tensions gives rise to specific and salient ethical risks and demands that are empirically and conceptually treated in turn, namely: the risks of visibility, of re-storying the arts, of romanticising the arts, and of marginalisation through arts-based research engagement, respectively.