Fractured Gazes: Dual Perspectives and the Construction of Truth in International Relations

This dissertation, “Fractured Gazes: Dual Perspectives and the Construction of Truth in International Relations”, investigates the visual turn in IR, where aesthetic images, movies, soundtracks, and drone footage are actively constructing perspectival truths instead of reflecting objective reality. Based on Foucault's paradigm of power and knowledge and Mulvey's theory of the gaze, this research investigates the fractured gazes of elite voyeurism, which constructs security and heroism discourses, and subaltern gazes that expose ethical fractures and partialities. Using visual semiotics and discourse analysis, this research deconstructs five cases: the Bollywood films ‘Haider’ (2014) and ‘Madras Café’ (2013) on South Asian insurgencies, the Hollywood drone films ‘Eye in the Sky’ (2015) and ‘Good Kill’ (2014), and ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ (1970) on Pearl Harbor, to demonstrate how dual gazes aestheticize violence, manipulate emotions through soundtracks, and fracture truth into multiplicities that correspond to Butler's grievable lives and Baudrillard's hyperreality. The results contest positivist IR, encouraging a post-structuralist integration of the visual as a discursive space that maintains hegemony but also enables the possibility of resistance, with implications for policy reflexivity (e.g., drone ethics) and media ethics (balanced journalism). Through the proof of truth as