Street art as everyday counterterrorism? The Norwegian art community’s reaction to the 22 July 2011 attacks

Introduction

On 22 July 2011, Anders Breivik detonated a van bomb in Oslo’s Government Quarter, before driving to the island of Utøya and shooting dead 69 adolescents of the Workers’ Youth League summer camp. The attack was unlike anything experienced by Norway in the past and, in the overall climate of the war on terror, many assumed the perpetrators to be Islamist extremists. This premature assumption resulted in immigrants and Muslims being verbally insulted and, in some cases, even assaulted (Bech Gjørv, 2012), and led many to expect the strengthening of the operational capabilities of the security services to be the state’s main reaction. However, these intolerant and xenophobic reactions led the then Prime Minister to state that the solution lay in ‘more democracy, more openness and greater political participation’ (Pidd and Meikle, 2011). In the post-9/11 world, the Norwegian reaction runs contrary to mainstream reflexes of increased surveillance and curtailment of civil liberties in the name of collective security. The Norwegian public rallied behind the PM’s refusal to let vengeance dictate policy (Orange, 2012) and many artists contributed with works that reflected the spirit of the PM’s statement. In Oslo, one such contribution came from T&J Art Walk, whose exhibits aimed at reminding the Norwegian public of the significance of tolerance, of acceptance of difference and their role for peace.

Spurred by this ‘unconventional’ attitude towards terrorist violence, this article sets out to investigate the role that street art’s aesthetics, agency and spatiality can play, when contrasted with the exclusionary logic(s) of illiberal governance (a) in making visible marginalised voices in society; (b) in promoting alternative, more quotidian approaches towards international relations (IR), as well as (c) more critical ways of doing/thinking security, community and peace. While of course we accept the fact that conflicts are marked by difference in issues, dynamics, actors and development, the characteristics of the Norwegian case – with its inclusionary and genuinely democratic response – make it stand out in terms of counterterrorism, agonistic politics and critical research on peace. This is significant because said characteristics manifest in practice that ‘peace’ is neither linear nor static, but, rather, a continuous struggle of engagement and resistance – agonist ¹ concepts that are antithetical to the war on terror’s prevailing and virtually ubiquitous exclusionary politics and legislation on the one hand, and exceptional, urgent and illiberal policies on the other hand, deployed in the name of a security that, seemingly, can never be attained. The aesthetic expression of the works exhibited in Oslo (but also similar initiatives in other cities) and the coincidence of the message they sought to convey with that expressed by initial political reactions are imbued with agonistic references. As the calls increase to engage more critically with the study and practice of peace (Jutila et al., 2008; Mac Ginty and Richmond, 2013; Patomaki, 2001; Richmond, 2007), the article aims to unmask the insights that street art may have for critical peace research. More concretely, it sets to investigate the agency that is produced by art (as object), artists and their audiences (as agents) in the street – that is, a specific space (an immaterial dimension) and place (a material dimension) (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 3).

One of critical theory’s main preoccupations is, of course, emancipation. While it has been varyingly defined (Booth, 2007; Habermas, 1984; Horkheimer, 2002 [1972]; Linklater, 2007), a general acceptance of emancipation’s main drive is the improvement of the lives of individuals and communities through the provision and safeguarding of social justice and human rights. To do that, however, means that instances where social justice is not attributed and/or human rights are violated must be resisted. ² This is evident in Fossen’s definition of ‘emancipation’ (which this article borrows) as the ‘permanent attempt to lay bare and redress the harms, injustices or inequities caused by exclusions and restrictions of pluralism’ (2008: 377). This raises two important implications, the first one being the extent to which (if at all) street art and aesthetics in general may be considered acts of resistance (or ‘counter-power’, according to Foucault (1995: 219)) that can have an emancipatory potential. As Murphy and Omar have put it, ‘[a]esthetic agency as a practice of freedom seeks to transform and transcend established oppressive situations that, even when critiqued, tend to designate “the other-victim” as inferior, deficient, and less-than’ (2013: 352). There exist, of course, examples where art – and street art, in particular – is used to foment violence: the murals in Belfast that serve as a call to arms and the pro-violence graffiti in the streets of East Timor (Parkinson, 2010) are two such examples.

Notwithstanding, the Norwegian response in the aftermath of the 22 July attacks was formulated in a way that resisted the dictation of the current liberal order of islamophobia and curtailment of civil liberties in the name of security. As will be further explained below, this was also the aim of the artistic initiatives in Oslo and elsewhere in the country. But, perhaps, the resisting agency (and emancipatory potential) of aesthetics is best viewed in regions that are not so democratic, and particularly the reaction of their political elites to aesthetic expressions. The arrest and severe beating of Ali Ferzat, one of Syria’s most famous political cartoonists, by Assad’s security agencies in the beginning of the Syrian uprising (Ali, 2011) or the case of the even more recognisable Ai Wei Wei in China are indicative of the establishment’s perception that political artistic expressions are a threat to the(ir) status quo. As Foucault has argued (1978: 95), resistance eludes the docility that power aims for, which is why the latter targets the former as an adversary.

The second implication, which is more related to the agenda of critical peace research, is that the space and the place where this artistic message is expressed (the street) are not behind closed doors and/or materialised exclusively by ‘experts’ in security, whose decisions often affect people beyond a specific territory. Viewed in this light, the messages of the art exhibited in Oslo were an expression of the everyday that was – and still is, predominantly – marginalised from security decisions, policies and strategies that are formulated and implemented in its name and for its protection. As several scholars have argued to date (Guillaume, 2011; Jarvis and Lister, 2013b; Richmond, 2009; Sylvester, 2013), the ‘everyday’ is not (and should not be) an abstraction in IR analyses of power management, power relationships and violence, for its agency (although often times penalised and marginalised) is a clear response to and resistance against the established and dominant international agenda(s) (Solomon and Steele, 2017).

Understanding the everyday’s agency implies that one must first clarify what the everyday is. To begin with, it is a site of knowledge, even if said knowledge is unconscious (de Certeau, 1984: 71). Our study (and many others in the field of peace and conflict studies that preceded and informed ours) demonstrates that, when it becomes conscious, it also becomes political. This, in turn, renders it a practice ³ and a space (the street where this message/idea is delivered). The everyday also constitutes a level of analysis for two reasons: first, because its expression of alternative possibilities of conceptualising ‘security’, ‘peace’ and ‘community’ makes it distinct from, but equally important to, other, higher levels where decision and policy making are formulated and implemented. Second, this importance is (partly) ascribed to it by us (the researchers, the gazers, the observers) the very moment we become aware of its existence. What makes its agency political is the very consciousness of its acts/actions insofar as these aim at the alteration of power relations, the significance ascribed to them by the current status quo and their current meaning within it. To put it figuratively, this is how the micro-practice of 15 boys painting a graffiti in a street corner in Daraa, Syria (Macleod, 2011) has led to the macro-practice of civil war, international (non-)intervention and mass refugee waves that, in turn, gave rise to xenophobia and racism in the entire continent of Europe.

Besides the agency of the artist (as expressed through his/her objects of art) and the agency of the audience (through the interpretation(s) of said art), spatial agency also contributes to the transformation of places into spaces of peacebuilding. Such agency is ‘not only discursively constructed but [is] acted out in-the-place and often part of the performance of critical agency’ (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2016: 5). As such, it ‘entails a commitment to social change with the aim of altering the behaviour of others, changing policies and politics and transforming ideational structures’ (Björkdahl and Mannergren Selimovic, 2015: 170–171). The distinctive thing about street art is that it is physically located in the public domain, and what makes it quotidian, everyday art, is that it is viewed by a mass, un-selected public. The street functions both as content and intervention (the what), as well as the method (the how) of analysis (Nayak, 2017: 202). ‘[R]ecognizing social spaces as sites of political significance in terms of meaning-making through embodied experience’, as Solomon and Steele (2017: 277) contend, may disclose ‘a more complex and frenzied representation of politics, one that discloses struggle and risk’ (Solomon and Steele, 2017: 280). Arguably, the mutual relationship between this transpersonal affective experience and the social space in/by which it is provided, and the dual ontology of the street as both content and method makes street art related to other forms of everyday resistance, such as (among others) the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the peace camps in the US in the wake of the Iraq war. ⁴ By explicitly contrasting the open, public nature of this art form with the behind-closed-doors, exceptional logics of illiberal governance that have characterised much of western policy making since 9/11, street art can facilitate critical peacebuilding in two ways: (a) by making marginalised voices in society more visible; and (b) by raising alternative ways of doing/thinking security, community and peace (thus, having those alternative conceptions resonate in the public’s consciousness).

Against this backdrop, the next section examines the Norwegian dissensus when it comes to exclusionary politics of security before it turns to exploring the potential and the implications of spatiality and aesthetics for critical peace, particularly in relation to post-9/11 counterterrorism. As we argue, critical peace research usually focuses on conflict zones – which often happen to be outside the West – in order to uncover instances of marginalisation and alienation. Yet, as Norway’s case indicates, post-9/11 counterterrorism policies have created exclusions within western countries of voices that are critical of such hard-security agendas. Aided primarily by iconography and semiotics, the final section of the article looks at T&J Art Walk in Oslo and includes information provided by semi-structured interviews with two of the artists involved (although all participating artists were contacted) and five members of the public affected by the attacks: three employees of the ministries affected by the events at the ministerial quarter (selected because of their lived experience of the attacks and the effect – if any – the art works had on them) and two Oslo citizens (selected in order to gauge a broader and more general reaction of the everyday public). The interviews were conducted via email (questionnaire), Skype and LINE Messaging App (informal and open). Ultimately, the section’s objective is to evaluate street art’s role in the empowerment of marginalised voices and the ways in which it could benefit a critical agenda of peace research.

Norwegian dissensus, the ‘spatial turn’ and the implications of aesthetics for critical peace

It must be a cardinal principle of a liberal democracy in dealing with the problems of terrorism, however serious they may be, never to be tempted into using methods which are incompatible with the liberal values of humanity, liberty and justice. (Wilkinson, 2001: 115)

Despite the significant and increasing corpus of research critiquing the counterterrorist strategies and policies of the war on terror so far (Gomis, 2016; Holland, 2012; Jackson, 2014; Jackson et al., 2011; Jarvis and Lister, 2014; Pisoiu, 2014; Stampnitzky, 2013; Stump and Dixit, 2013), Norway’s reaction to the attacks is one of the very few examples (if not the only one) where the aim was to achieve security through peace, rather than the other way around. In the post-9/11 order, policy and politics have legitimated ‘an array of illiberal practices’ (such as Guantánamo, extraordinary renditions, etc.) ‘through claims about necessary exceptions to the norm’ (Neal, 2006: 31) and in the name of perpetual extraordinary security (Fisher, 2013); proscription of organisations and groups have strengthened constructions of a dangerous Other (Jackson et al., 2011; Jarvis and Legrand, 2016; Jarvis and Lister, 2014); targeted and victimised entire communities (Jarvis and Lister, 2013a; Lindekilde, 2012), often counter-productively (Pantazis and Pemberton, 2009), or without tangible improvements in security (Amoore and de Goede, 2008); and debilitated (Richmond and Tellidis, 2012) or even outlawed attempts for peacebuilding (Haspeslagh, 2013). ‘Dissident’ research on terrorism, as Stump and Dixit (2013: 4) call it, has also provided alternative methodologies that ‘challenge established “truths” about terrorism and political violence’ (Toros, 2013: 57), unmask the insecurities that counterterrorism produces in daily life (Ryan, 2013) and highlight how visual methods may uncover instances where iconography serves to legitimise the portrayal of the state as the ‘good guy’ that saves the lives of people threatened by ‘evil terrorists’ (Debrix, 2013).

In this light, the Norwegian society’s and the then government’s aim to strengthen and safeguard inclusive plurality as a means to achieve security is undoubtedly going against the current, and perhaps feels like the opening up of a new space to think (and talk) about security. Rather than listing the actions of the Norwegian government in the aftermath of the attack, Gomis eloquently highlights the importance of all those things that Norway did not do:

in general, the media, police and government did not overreact; the country did not consider the threat to be more pervasive than it was; it did not create a new set of laws infringing on civil liberties and human rights; it did not stigmatize a whole section of the Norwegian population based on the views held by Breivik himself; and, overall, it did not put in place drastic measures likely to create a whole new set of unintended consequences. (2016: 185, emphasis added)

When it comes to counterterrorism in urban settings, the expression ‘in place’ has a very literal meaning too. Security measures such as traditional and architectural barriers, surveillance cameras, visibly armed-to-the-teeth police officers in airports or on the streets during special cultural events, and other such approaches intend to transform places into spaces of security, safety and confidence – although they often have the opposite effect (Aly and Green, 2010; Coaffee and Rogers, 2008; Grosskopf, 2006; Marcuse, 2006). As Vogel (2018: 3) notes, ‘the space is not neutral per se, but alters the power relations and constraints to which non-state actors are subjected’. This points to the significance of the study of spaces and places as simultaneously products and producers of meaning.

Though scholars have been attempting to draw attention to the importance of space for IR for more than 20 years, it was not until recently that spatial theory became the focal point of peace scholars. Following Lefebvre’s argument, for example, that space is a complex social construction composed of social norms, values and ascribed meanings (Lefebvre, 1991: 26), Forsberg argued that ‘influence of space is as crucial for society as social processes are for space’, since ‘space is dialectically and historically constructed’ (1996: 358). Following from that, more recent investigations put forward the argument that space generates (or restrains) agency, but only because social practices and interactions enable it to do so (Björkdahl and Buckley-Zistel, 2016: 3). ‘Space may act as a compass of meaning to the exercise of agency, and place is the immediate setting in which agency and practice “take place”’ (Therborn quoted in Björkdahl and Kappler, 2017: 10).

The places where the street art pieces were exhibited in Oslo made the streets the spaces where the audiences’ gazes were exposed to the message that alternative understandings and practices of counterterrorist security are possible – a message that many of the unselected, ordinary, ‘unrecognized’ (de Certeau, 1984: 68), and thus everyday, gazers embraced. This is true not only semantically but also by images of the artworks being uploaded online after their removal, thereby allowing the continuity of their existence and that of their messages, as well as their visual and narrational access, to reach everyday audiences beyond Norway. The Norwegian and international everyday’s embrace, therefore, is its agency in constructing a counter-narrative to official discourses that counterterrorism must rest on liberalist principles of unanimity, consensus and homogeneity (Mouffe, 2000: 19) in order to be successful. But if unanimity and homogeneity were a precondition for politics, ‘politics’ would merely equate with ‘administration’ (Fossen, 2008: 380) – or, as Rancière put it, ‘consensus consists […] in the reduction of politics to the police’ ⁵ (2010: 42). For Rancière, aesthetics is dissensus because it disrupts the established order of things (Frost, 2010: 435). This form of resisting the status quo is of great significance for the Norwegian case, because if one considers the uniformity of post-9/11 counterterrorism measures implemented across countries and affecting the everyday lives of billions, irrespective of the degree to which they are exposed to such type of political violence (Zulaika, 2012), then it becomes evident that the call for increased openness, democracy and participation in the Norwegian case is not merely a matter of administration but also one of politics in the pluralist sense. Dissensus and resistance are also highlighted in spatial theory. As Busteed (in Vogel, 2018: 5) notes, ‘resistance creates its own geographies, sometimes indeed utilizing the spatial lacunae left by hegemonic power, sometimes using even those spaces which are effectively controlled but escaping censure by careful use of tactics’. Further, according to Kappler (2014: 23), actors create abstract spaces which they then ‘use to display their agency vis-à-vis other actors’ spaces’. In Norway, the very geography where terrorist violence took place and (as international post-9/11 norms dictate) counterterrorist visibility should be enacted was appropriated as the space for the articulation of alternative understandings of community, security and peace.

The Norwegian public and political reaction of more democracy, participation and openness following the attacks coincides with the calls for a more critical agenda for peace research that deals with the ontological and epistemological problems that the concept, the study and the praxis of peace entail (particularly in the IR context) – namely, that the aim of liberal uses and praxes of the concept of ‘peace’ was that of a disciplinary order through the replication of hegemonic structures of cultural and political domination, exclusion and marginalisation (Shinko, 2008). The Norwegian case points to a concept and ontology of peace that is neither linear nor forever attainable; instead, it highlights the efforts that need to be continuously deployed for peace to be preserved, sustained and self-sustained, within agonistic frameworks of respect. Frequently referred to as a beacon of pluralist democracy, with strong pacifist values which it often employs in its peace-brokering initiatives around the world, Norway’s reaction to the 22 July attacks is unique in its implications for everyday international counterterrorism because similar attacks elsewhere have failed to produce this kind of pluralist understanding – Orlando’s nightclub shooting and Jo Cox’s murder days before the British EU referendum, both in June 2016, are two such examples. As Breivik confessed, it was these very values of tolerance and co-existence that he wanted to attack (Lewis, 2012).

Considering the ontology of art as a non-linear, expression- and sentiment-based activity, it seems to us that it goes against the prevalent liberal-realist frameworks that claim universality and expertise when it comes to dealing with post-conflict peacebuilding circumstances, even when there is a publicity imbalance – that is, between the works of famous artists and those that are not so well known. Consider, for example, the most famous instance of peace-seeking, conflict-transforming, power-resisting art: the wall separating Gaza from Israel earned international attention when it was used as a canvas for graffiti and stencils by Banksy and 14 other international street artists (Parry, 2010). Other examples, such as Murad Sobay’s stencils of the faces of people who disappeared in Yemen during the last 40 years (Hammond, 2012), or the various socio-political pieces in Egypt generated during the Arab Spring (Kennard, 2012), or indeed the pro- and anti-violence graffiti found in the streets of East Timor (Parkinson, 2010), have gained much less attention than they deserve. From a research perspective, methodological attention should also be exercised, for art has also been used to foment the spreading of violent and/or anti-peace messages (as in the aforementioned case of East Timor, or the murals in Northern Ireland), or simply has the opposite effect to that which is desired: some Palestinians reacted strongly to Banksy’s aforementioned intervention because it ‘beautified’ the wall.

This is quite telling of the difference between the agency behind art’s creation and the agency behind art’s interpretation, particularly with reference to security. As Dixit (2013: 338) contends, dominant discourses of security tend to either render ‘others’ invisible by making ‘our’ visualisations central to the analysis, or, where the ‘others’ are visible, they are so ‘within and through dominant representations’. What renders the Norwegian art community’s reaction significant for critical peace research is that it resists such dominant interpretations and it offers alternative understandings of who the political subjects of security are/should be, the kind of security they envisage and the political horizon(s) they aim for.

Decolonised art and aesthetics, therefore, seem very much aligned to a critical peace research agenda that calls for ‘[a]n emancipatory version of peace [that] would be based upon, and revolve around, forms of communication designed to facilitate emancipation both for the individual and for others, leading to empathy between them’ (Richmond, 2008: 452). In other words, and in line with our argument, critical peace research incorporates the dissensus against policies and strategies that seemingly seek to establish peace as the outcome of security for some but not for all. As such, and with its focus on the agency of the everyday, it is a form of resistance against illiberal securitisation(s) that mask desires for domination and control. The following section examines the role of aesthetics, and street art in particular, to challenge security assumptions and arguments, ‘help “reframe” familiar situations and encourage fresh thinking and new perspectives’ (Francis, 2010: 23).

Aesthetics, street art and ‘artivism’: Alternative ways of doing/thinking peace and security

When it comes to war and conflict, artists’ works as a form of action or intervention is certainly not new. Throughout history, art has been made to display the horrors of war and conflict as well as to promote a more pacifist consciousness. The tapestry copy of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica adorning the entrance to the UN Security Council’s room is an indicative example of art informing international security politics. Nonetheless, the ‘aesthetic turn’ in international relations is a relatively recent phenomenon and increasing research on its potential shows that it may be one of the tools that facilitate inter-ethnic interaction and understanding (Zelizer, 2003). The arts create those spaces that allow people to express, heal and reconcile themselves, revealing a potential for transforming interpersonal and intercommunal conflicts (Shank and Schirch, 2008) by ‘creating more inclusive and pluralist historical narratives’ (Premaratna and Bleiker, 2010: 377). As Roland Bleiker remarks in his seminal Aesthetics and World Politics:

Aesthetic sources can offer us alternative insights into international relations; a type of reflective understanding that emerges not from systematically applying the technical skills of analysis which prevail in the social sciences, but from cultivating a more open-ended level of sensibility about the political. We might then be able to appreciate what we otherwise cannot even see: perspectives and people excluded from prevailing purviews, for instance, or the emotional nature and consequences of political events (2009: 2).

For positivist approaches, the aforementioned words may not be worthy of much attention. Yet, if ‘valid inferences by the systematic use of well-established procedures of inquiry’ (King et al., in Bleiker, 2001: 509) have yielded little practical knowledge so far with regards to making peace, perhaps alternative methods that broaden our understanding may also be useful, without necessarily overthrowing or outcasting conventional scientific methodologies (Bleiker, 2000). The problem with conventional methodologies is that they become solidified and even naturalised. In that regard, alternative methodologies such as aesthetics ‘can expose political practices whose problematic dimensions are no longer recognised because years of habit have turned them into common sense’ (Bleiker, 2009: 11). This is as much true about how one goes about discovering knowledge (academia) as it is about how one goes about applying it (policy making). ‘Artistic engagement […] is not only about strategic and geopolitical manoeuvring, but also about the search for political visions and the need to adjust our intellectual and policy attitudes to changing circumstances’ (Bleiker, 2000: 66). Understood in this way, one may argue that Bleiker’s position (that the gap between the form of interpretation and the object of that interpretation is where politics happens) extends Rancière’s claim that aesthetics disrupt the established order of things.

Street art evidently falls within the category of visual aesthetics but, despite the accumulating studies on the subject (Ganz, 2004; Gastman et al., 2007; Lazarides, 2009; Lewisohn, 2008; Mathieson and Tápies, 2009; Shove, 2009), a unanimous definition has proven elusive. Armstrong (2005) defines it roughly as unsolicited art that is somehow attached to a surface or placed in public view, either by the artists themselves or by someone supportive of their cause or project, while others have highlighted its ephemerality (Riggle, 2010) and its accessibility, considering it ‘free public art’ (McCormick, 2010). Others, still, consider problematic any attempt to define such a diverse and varied form of art (Danysz, 2010: 12). Often associated with graffiti (not least because of its illegality (Alpaslan, 2012)), street art has also been linked to Dadaism and the Situationist principles. Inherent in these is the element of resistance to hegemonic discourses as well as the exposure of marginalised voices. As Irvine argues (2012: 241), it points to ‘viewing art as act, event, performance, and intervention, a détournement – a hijacking, rerouting, displacement, and misappropriation of received culture for other ends’.

Street art can therefore not be, within this loosely defined framework, considered a new art form. Yet what is generally considered street art today has risen to acclaim since the late 1990s and has gathered greater interest in the public domain after the widespread use of the internet. It is particularly worth noting that, since the turn of the 21st century, street art has entered the world of galleries, auction houses and biennales, alongside more traditional arts such as painting and sculpture. Even with its focus on human rights and pacifying goals, the T&J Art Walk examined in this article is partly a show in the streets of the sort of works sold at the contemporaneous charitable Blomqvist auction. Young graffiti artists are still heavily fined or even incarcerated, while role models’ works are being hung in museums and bought from galleries by the very establishment that pay private security firms to protect their whitewashed walls. This is quite telling of the relationship between art and its commercialised consumption, and some would say that the former allowed itself to be co-opted by the latter (as part of capitalism’s ontology) as its ideological support (Ray, 2009: 80), rather than foment its character as an indicator and/or enabler of alternative futures (Stavrakakis, 2012). Yet, to claim that the capitalist patronage of art always and entirely removes or alters the messages it seeks to convey is a sweeping generalisation. As with the critiques of post-liberal peace, where the relationship between the marginalised local and the imposing international is as competitive as it is co-constitutive (Hameiri, 2011), art and capital compete with and co-opt each other. Visual sociology and/or reception studies would perhaps be more appropriate in shedding light on the constant recirculation of art works as ‘memes’, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr posts: was it the interpretation of the art work’s message that led users to recirculate the work itself or its ‘fashionability’ following the fame it acquired through the capitalist ways of dissemination? The political character of the agency depends on how one answers this question.

One of the most powerful aspects about street art is that whether you are low or high in a society, you are invited to recognise a part of yourself in the work and you are confronted by the message, whether or not you wish to be – not unlike advertisements. Unlike graffiti artists, street artists include a message in the work, be it political, subversive or purely aesthetic, as can be seen by works throughout the world whose messages focused on critiquing, opposing and ridiculing the war on terror (Mathieson and Tápies, 2007). Artivism, a concept older than the coined term, conjures notions of art and activism as artivists are agents of social and political change through their artistic practices, which are often multimedia. Considered to have arisen in connection with the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements in recent years, artivism ‘confronts, interrogates or even shrugs off the status quo’ (Artivism Network, quoted in Diverlus, 2016: 191). However, established artists have often distanced themselves from political engagement and been wary to take up the role of the activist rather than the artist genius cultivated under Modernism. Nevertheless, the concept describes precisely what critical peace research has been advocating: a project of resistance to hegemonic discourses and empathy towards marginalised agency/ies that other theoretical and conceptual tools have failed to identify. Rather than passively and normatively accepting top-down policies and decisions, artivism’s ability to make evident the voice of the otherwise ‘voiceless’ holds a contributive potential for the design, implementation and execution of agonistic promotion of peace.

Street art in Oslo following the attacks: Street art as agonistic counterterrorism

After 22 July, street art responded in the same way that it commonly does – with instinct and immediacy. Across Norway, pieces started appearing reflecting the solidarity found across Norwegian society. A common sight was Oslo written with two hearts (♥SL♥) proclaiming a love for the city and its inhabitants, at the same time as it reflected the fact that the events remain in everyone’s hearts (https://bit.ly/2G2leLp) – a simple gesture of support for the city that had been overturned by the attacks, yet one that managed to rise up against the horrific actions by stoically standing together in solidarity. La Staa (loosely translated: Let it be/stand) turned the number 22 into a heart with July written in the centre, which was found both in Oslo and Bergen (https://bit.ly/2DS9IMW). Habitus made a more conventional memorial with his piece 22.7.11, in which blue and green birds are flying through the air (https://bit.ly/2G1MtG2). ‘I have chosen to show love and consideration in the best way I can. Take care of each other. The greatest of all is love’, he stated in his (now deleted) website. ⁶ Slogans also appeared on the anniversary of the attacks, such as ‘We shall live in Peace Someday’ (https://bit.ly/2pF127x) or ‘For a Multi-coloured society’, both dated 22.07.2012 by unknown artists. In other cities, artists created varied memorialising responses to the attacks, such as Lillehammer’s Showdown and Stavanger’s NuArt festivals. Sao Paolo-based Herbert Baglione’s piece for NuArt covered three walls with the names of the victims and proved particularly emotionally strong (https://bit.ly/2pzHoe0; NuArt, 2011).

In Oslo, a multitude of works was exhibited in August 2011 under the auspices of the T&J Art Walk. Initially the project’s goal was to support Human Rights Watch but the attacks led the organisers to change their focus. As one of them, Katinka Traaseth, stated in an interview with the daily newspaper Dagsavisen, since the beginning, ⁷ street art has been used for political messages and voicing of public opinions: ‘After such tragic events, art can keep people together and give something positive to the city’ (Vollan, 2011). Some participating artists also made concessions to their works; Martin Whatson, for example, stated that he changed the text of his pieces. ⁸ One has to assume that the flowery weapon by Shepard Fairey also connects to the rose that became the symbol of resistance to the terror and solidarity with the victims in the weeks that followed the event (https://bit.ly/2INMRG5). In Norwegian politics the red rose is also a commonly known symbol for the Norwegian Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) and in the days following the attacks the red rose appeared all over the country – outside churches, at Utøya and on walls. On 25 July, a memorial demonstration gathered a record 200,000 people at Rådhusplassen in Oslo carrying red and white roses.

Positivity was central to The London Police’s (TLP) mural at Bygdøy Allé 1 (https://bit.ly/2GmfJH2), where their characteristic ‘lads’ frolicked in a sci-fi landscape. Clearly influenced by comic book figures and cartoons, the London-based duo, Bob Gibson and Chaz Barrison, refer to their art as positive anarchy: ‘We want to spread joy to the people of Oslo’ (Kvittingen, 2011). Positivity has been at the heart of another mural project which TLP was involved with, namely ‘Piece for Positivity’ (https://bit.ly/2IPb6n7) organised in Pristina, Kosovo, in 2009 by Rienke Enghardt for Hope Box. ‘Piece for Peace is a worldwide trace of community art pieces made by local [and] international Hope Box Angels artists within the theme of peace’ (Hopebox, 2012). Piece for Peace aspires to bring people together and leave behind a positive and meaningful work of art in a community that otherwise would not have it. It is clear that in TLP’s mural in Oslo light-heartedness played a large role, as the rocket-like figure is prepared by astronauts and smaller ‘lads’ fly around by way of smiley balloons. Even though TLP agree that the essence of street art is that people stop and contemplate their work, they also admit to being part of the art establishment and not part of a political movement. Yet, street art can certainly ease debate on issues that have been considered taboo or are too difficult to put into words.

In Lost Hope (https://bit.ly/2INLiYJ) and Punk’s not dead (https://bit.ly/2IMXrNg) at Storgata 23, Martin Whatson created two very simple, yet suggestive pieces. In the former, two young men are seen painting, the one over the other’s words. In the latter, a female punk with an orange Mohawk leisurely walks her baby in an old-fashioned stroller. The changed text Whatson referred to in his interview is certainly the blanking out of the word ‘lost’, which reflects both the hope that Oslo’s inhabitants needed at the time and the need for a more permanent solution for street art artists within that city. Punk’s not dead, on the other hand, plays on juxtaposition, surprise and the meeting of the unexpected, a tough stereotypical 1980s punk with a little baby in her 1950s stroller. Whatson often finds inspiration in the ugly or dismissed and discovers beauty in a mixture of decay and birth. Logan Hicks’ haunting streetviews, emptied of any life, could have reminded the Oslo dweller of the days following 22 July (https://bit.ly/2I2sCmO). However, the shine of the metallic paint reflects glimmers of hope from within the scenes. The cold and harsh city is depicted as an organism and inside every photorealistic representation a streetlamp or a distant glowing light gives the impression of warmth and cellular growth.

D*face’s Pop art-inspired clown trips and spills his paint all over Urtegaten 9 (https://bit.ly/2pF2WWk and https://bit.ly/2IPbYYV), where the offices of Securitas (a private security firm) are located. The colourful piece clearly points to the artist’s interest in Pop art imagery, as well as a wish for a light-hearted response from the viewer. The clown’s hat flies off his head with cartoon-like wings and the paint can is made up of a real can, further pointing to the late 1950s art movement’s predecessor, Neo-Dada. D*face wants us to look at what surrounds us and our lives, not just see the work independently. American Depress, a print for sale in the auction, portrays each individual’s part in the economic crisis and the credit card company as the devil that helps lure it (https://bit.ly/2DSJRV4). The fascination with celebrity, fame, consumerism and materialism, so popular with Warhol, leads D*face to re-think, re-work and subvert the most familiar items of our lives to comment upon western society. The artist refers to the style as ‘aPOPcalyptic’, ‘a metaphorical backdrop for the corruptive persuasive consumerist folly that has been force fed into our society, a blend of “pop art” spliced with [the] fragility of life’ and delivers ‘a moral dilemma, embrace or reject, laugh or deny’ (T&J Art Walk, 2011: 40). The clumsy clown certainly would have put a smile on any by-passer’s lips. Mass culture iconography was also recognisable in Faile’s wheatpaste posters above the entrance to the auction exhibit at Blomqvist (https://bit.ly/2GljJY9). Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller (Faile) expose the duality of fragments through their appropriation and collage work.

Will Barras’ mural at Jernbanetorget 4 (https://bit.ly/2INMHyt), across from the Central Station, was less politically engaging and more of an abstracted imaginary landscape, with three female figures seemingly struggling to hold on to the mountainsides in a whirlwind of colours. Barras is the most painterly of all of the street artists who were involved in T&J Art Walk, which is clear to see from the canvases put up for sale in the Blomqvist auction Contemporary Street Art that accompanied the outdoor pieces. Furthermore, when asked, Barras responded that he did not make any changes or considerations in his designs following what had happened in Oslo. ⁹ The statement suggests that the fundraising for Human Rights Watch was planned ahead of the attacks and took an unexpected turn following the terror. However, placed in the context of the events, Barras’ young figures look both frightened and insecure. This is especially true of the small figure seated on a rock on the left side, reminiscent of the news images of the children at Utøya hiding from Anders Breivik’s bullets.

At Kirkeveien 59, in the neighbourhood of Majorstua, Shepard Fairey installed a massive wheatpaste-up on two sides of the clock tower overlooking the square in front of the metro station (https://bit.ly/2INMRG5). His poster-inspired mural proclaimed PEACE to hustling by-passers for two months after its instalment in August 2011. A variation on his prints M16 vs AK47 (2006, https://bit.ly/2ucMBNi), ¹⁰ Guns and Roses (2010, https://bit.ly/2uiijsO) and Peace Dove (2010, https://bit.ly/2G4OtNW), the original message is overturned and its imagery is used to express a message of anti-violence. In a statement to Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, Fairey said:

My message, a global prayer for peace, is now more pertinent than ever for Oslo. Xenophobia is used by extremists to manipulate the masses. We must maintain our love for peace, freedom and tolerance to prevent prejudices from spreading. Politics and emotions are complicated, and I hope my pictures can help people to remember that constructive dialogue for peace is a fundamental goal. Then art has been successful. (Trulsen et al., 2011)

The lily and the rose protruding out of the weapons reflect the aforementioned solidarity across Norway, as well as the lily’s trait as a memorial and peace signifier. The dove on the second wall of the tower is encircled by Asian-inspired ornamentation. The design is closely related to Fairey’s first mural in Scandinavia that summer in Copenhagen, where he created a dove at the centre of a target with ‘peace’ written underneath his Obey insignia. At Jagtvej the number 69 appears underneath the word, hinting at an alliance to the countercultural Youth House (Ungdomshuset), which used to be situated at the location. The flowers and the dove’s natural ornamentation at both locations link the artist’s work to the countercultural hippies, as well as the use of only three colours (red, white and black) that aligns his work with revolutionary posters in both China and the former Soviet Union. With these simple tools Fairey displays himself as an artivist and aligns himself with generations of political artists working towards change by peaceful means (see also Fairey, 2011).

All works that were exhibited generated mostly positive and supportive debate. In informal conversations and semi-structured interviews, employees of the Ministries of Health and Agriculture and other citizens told us that although the paintings evoked difficult memories, they also helped them regain a sense of quotidianity. ¹¹ Two of those interviewed also stated that some of the paintings strengthened the then PM’s message of more democracy and representation. ¹² More importantly, the messages conveyed by the commissioned art in the aftermath of the massacre cannot but be seen as agonistic – perhaps, even, syn-agonistic (Karagiannis and Wagner, 2008) – expressions of an alternative (Stavrakakis, 2012), particularly with regards to violent and exclusionary counterterrorist policies that have now become internationally standard. In an era in which counterterrorism has come to imply the fortification of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, the messages that emanate from the works exhibited in August 2011 function as a reminder that concretisation of such dichotomies will only lead to the concretisation of antagonism.

Conclusion

In this article we set out to investigate whether street art, as an everyday object of aesthetic interpretation, may offer insights for critical peace research. Focusing on the reaction of the Norwegian street art community in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 attacks, the significance of this article lies in its argument that contrasting the aesthetics of street art with the exceptional logics of illiberal governance uncovers a coincidence with the agenda of critical peace studies in making visible dissensual/marginalised voices and in raising alternative ways of doing and thinking peace, security and community.

Depictions of the horrors of war have always been a theme for artists. Yet orthodox, traditional and positivist IR theories were more preoccupied with those that carried the agency to make war, rather than with those that suffered its consequences. The field of peace studies was also affected by such frameworks, often devoting its research to power politics as a way to peace, rather than investigating local, everyday communities’ needs and dynamics for peace. As a result, the agency/ies of the latter remained hidden and unexplored. In this article we have referred to numerous examples across the world where art has been used as a vehicle for the concerns, the needs, the wishes and the opinions of local, everyday communities that find themselves trapped between those that decide when and where violence will be used – both state and non-state actors.

One may argue that the Norwegian public is not as voiceless or as marginalised as its Yemeni, Chinese, Kosovar, Timorese, Syrian or other counterparts. Moreover, it is a country that is often used as an example of liberal freedoms, social co-existence, and of respect and upholding of universal rights. Nevertheless, there exists a need to reflect how current, post-9/11, attitudes to security have made it easy in the aftermath of a terrorist attack for all publics (and political decision makers) to find recourse to xenophobia or the victimisation of entire communities and/or ethnicities. One criticism this argument may attract is that such reactions did not take place in Norway because the perpetrator of the attacks was not a significant ‘other’ (usually, in our times, an Islamist fundamentalist). Yet this acceptance of the ‘other’ is precisely the reason Breivik offered as an explanation for the attacks. What is more, this is a claim that may be missing the point this article is trying to make: instead of making the Norwegian case fit to other case studies that seem more streamlined with each other as well as with our current conceptions of the war on terror and how it affects communities, perhaps we should let the Norwegian case be our guide.

For preventing the intolerance and xenophobia that lead to the justification of violence and terrorism by enacting ‘more democracy, more openness and greater political participation’ is certainly an unusual (re)action in the broader schema of post-9/11 counterterrorist everydays, where ‘you are either with us or against us’, and where curtailment of civil liberties has become a sine qua non of (state and national) security. However, what makes the Norwegian reaction seem counter-intuitive is our own habituation to a particular manner of securitisation implied and promoted by traditional liberal-realist frameworks. One may argue that the international dimension this article is bestowing to a local initiative may be far-reaching. Nevertheless, the fact that the (now erased and removed) works are still present online on various non-Norwegian websites means that their message was carried far beyond Norway, in countries where the context (of alternative ways of securing humans) is the same and just as relevant. This has significant implications for the conceptualisation(s) of both spatiality and its ability to generate agency, as well as what and where the everyday is and how its agency is deployed.

Far from advocating the use of arts as the panacea to local, inclusionary peacebuilding’s problems, this article sought to explore its potential insofar as the empowerment of communities is concerned when confronted with violence and conflict. Just as traditional, orthodox frameworks of analysing ‘peace’ seem stagnant, thus eliciting the need for more critical approaches, so in the case of Norway, the arts were only one tool used in reinforcing the solidarity among the community and the positive, inclusionary values it holds. As such, they too need to be complemented with other ‘tools’ whose analysis and understanding may yield even more theories and praxes of how to build and maintain peace.