The Politics of Drawing: Children, evidence, and the Darfur conflict

The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence,and the Darfur Conflict1

Claudia Aradau

King’s College London

and

Andrew Hill

The Open University

Drawing has been largely neglected in discussions of visuality, conflict,and violence. In 2007, the International Criminal Court accepted 500children’s drawings depicting the conflict in Darfur as contextual evi-dence for war crime trials against Sudanese officials. Starting from thisevent, and the attention that the Darfuri children’s drawings have gar-nered internationally, this article explores the role that drawings, andchildren’s drawings in particular, play in the visualization of conflictand violence. Rather than focusing primarily on the relation betweenimage and text, the article argues that visuality needs to be understoodas both an aesthetic and social object, whose production, circulation,and reception transform its political effects. It then shows how chil-dren’s drawings are both differentially produced, and productive of dif-ference and ambivalence, in the “truthfulness” of conflict.

In November 2007, it was announced that 500 children’s drawings, depicting theconflict in Darfur and collected by the UK NGO Waging Peace, had beenaccepted as evidence by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the war trialsfor Ahmad Harun, the Humanitarian Affairs Minister in the Sudanese govern-ment, and Ali Kushayb, a Janjaweed militia leader (Grice 2007a,b). In 2009,media reports further indicated that the drawings would be used in the caseagainst the Sudanese President, Umar Hassan Al Bashir, after the ICC issued anarrest warrant against him on charges of crimes against humanity and warcrimes. In 2010, a further arrest warrant was issued for Al-Bashir under the accu-sation of genocide.2

1Authors’ note: We would like to thank the participants to the 8th International Centre for Comparative Crimino-logical Research (ICCCR) Conference, “Constructions of Evidence,” for their comments, and Johanna Motzkau inparticular for organizing a panel on drawing. We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their generousengagement with the piece. We gratefully acknowledge the permission granted by Waging Peace to use the draw-ings included in this article. We also acknowledge the use of Human Rights Watch drawings under the CreativeCommons license. Further details on Waging Peace’s work can be found at http://www.waginpeace.info/index.php/sudan/8-sudan/147-the-drawings. For Human Rights Watch, see http://www.hrw.org/legacy/photos/2005/darfur/drawings.

2At present, these cases remain stalled due to the lack of cooperation from Sudan.

Aradau Claudia and Andrew Hill. (2013) The Politics of Drawing: Children, Evidence, and the Darfur Conflict.International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/ips.12029� 2013 International Studies Association

International Political Sociology (2013) 7, 368–387

The drawings had been collected in June and July of 2007 by the WagingPeace researcher Anna Schmidt who, while gathering testimonies from Darfurirefugees in a camp in Eastern Chad about their experiences of the conflict inDarfur, had given the children paper and pencils and asked them to draw theirdreams for the future and their strongest memories (Grice 2007a). Schmidt wasshocked to see what the drawings depicted (Waging Peace 2007a,b,c). As sherecounted,

While a handful of children had submitted drawings of daily life in the village orin the refugee camp, the majority of the drawings described the attacks on theirvillage by Sudanese Government forces and their allied Janjaweed militia. Manyof the drawings depict adult men being killed, women being shot, beaten andtaken prisoner, babies being thrown on fires and Government of Sudan helicop-ters and planes bombing civilians. (Waging Peace 2007a,b,c)

Waging Peace was not the only NGO to obtain children’s drawings fromDarfur. Two years earlier, in February 2005, Human Rights Watch had sent twoof its workers to refugee camps on the Sudan–Chad border to interview refugees.The researchers gave paper and crayons to children, “to keep them occupiedwhile they spoke with the children’s parents. Without any instruction or guid-ance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur”(Human Rights Watch 2005a,b). These drawings depicted similar scenes to thosedescribed in the drawings collected by Waging Peace, including tanks and heli-copter gunships attacking villages, uniformed figures raping and kidnappingwomen and girls, and raids by figures on horseback identified as the Janjaweed.And earlier still, in 2004, Jerry Ehrlich, a doctor working for M�edecins sans Fron-ti�eres (Doctors without Borders), had also gathered more than 100 drawings bychildren caught up in the conflict in Darfur.3

While the drawings gathered by Waging Peace were submitted to the ICC—constituting the first time children’s drawings would be used as evidence ininternational law—the impact of these three sets of drawings extended wellbeyond this, generating considerable media and public attention. They werewidely reproduced in the news media, exhibited on the NGOs’ Web sites and intouring exhibitions, and in the case of the drawings Ehrlich collected, featuredin the documentary Crayons and Paper.4 As Annie Sparrow of Human RightsWatch has noted, the level of attention generated by the drawings collected bythe NGO exceeded anything Human Rights Watch had previously experienced(Sparrow 2008).This article argues that conceptualizing children’s drawings as both aesthetic

and social objects allows us to understand how evidence of the “truth” about theDarfur conflict is produced differentially in media and legal representations ofconflict. While the last couple of decades have witnessed an increased interest in“the visual” across the social sciences, drawing has all but been neglected fromthis process (for example, Rose 2000; Pink 2006; Banks 2008).5 Similarly, analy-ses of the Darfur conflict have focused on the use of photography and satelliteimagery rather than drawing. The recent attention to visuality in theories ofsecuritization (Vuori 2010; Hansen 2011a,b; Schlag and Heck 2012), the broader“aesthetic turn” (for example, Bleiker 2001), or the role of images in the repre-sentation and legitimation of war (for example, Butler 2005; Campbell 2007;M€oller 2007) offer important reflections upon the role of images in the politics

3SUNY holds an archive of these drawings, at http://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/handle/1951/43011.(Accessed April 25, 2013.)

4Available at http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/10515/Crayons-and-Paper.(Accessed April 19, 2013.)

5The exception here is psychology, and in particular child psychology.

Claudia Aradau and Andrew Hill 369

of conflict and violence. Yet, drawing has been accorded relatively little attentionas an object of study within these debates.6 This might be due partly to theconcern to develop theories of visuality and images more generally, and partly tothe prominence of photography in representations of conflict. This neglect isitself revealing about the way in which drawing is regarded, and the seeming lackof status and significance accorded to it as an activity and mode of depiction(Taylor 2008). Moreover, in representations of conflict, drawing—either as car-toons or art—has appeared to lend itself to practices of resistance rather thanthe (re)production of a visual regime of representation (see for example, Dodds2007).How do children’s drawings acquire the status of evidence of the Darfur con-

flict and what are the political implications of drawings as evidence? To answerthese questions, the article is set out in three stages. The first section traces theemergence of children’s drawings in the “scopic regime” (Jay 1994; Campbelland Power 2010) of the Darfur conflict and analyzes the production of drawingsas evidence of the conflict in global media. As drawings are intimately connectedwith the child witness, the children’s drawings are particularly apposite to expressa humanitarian discourse of conflict. In the second section, we unpack the strat-egies that NGOs use to render the children’s drawings acceptable as legal evi-dence to the ICC. The evidentiary nature of the Darfuri children’s drawings isconstituted differently depending on whether they are integrated in a globalhumanitarian and media discourse or a legal criminal one: the subjective andemotional testimony of the humanitarian and media discourse is transformedinto the objective positivity of evidence. The aesthetic form of drawing is imbri-cated with the social production of drawing as a “truthful” representation of con-flict. The final section then analyzes how drawings are also productive ofdifference and ambivalence in the “truth regime” of the Darfur conflict.

“Through Children’s Eyes”: Visualizing the Darfur Conflict

In the case of Darfur, the drawings collected by Waging Peace and the otherNGOs entered into a wider “scopic regime” of the conflict. Images of a conflictare integral to their receiving attention in the West—without images, conflictstend to disappear from the Western media and the public’s imagination (Camp-bell 2004, 2007). NGOs highlighted the relative absence of imagery from Darfurand the problems this caused in terms of generating attention about what hadbeen happening in the region, pointing to the efforts of the Sudanese govern-ment to limit photography, and filming in the conflict zone (Sparrow 2008:130–131).While from 2004 photographs of the conflict had started to appear in Western

news media (Campbell 2007:366–375), these tended to take the form of imagesof refugees and the suffering the conflict had generated, rather than violenceitself. At the same time, the conflict also saw the increased use of satellite imag-ery, with geospatial images and survey data used to emphasize the extent towhich what was happening in Darfur was not taking place unseen, and to sup-port the opinion that genocide was occurring in Darfur. Images were thus inte-gral to a humanitarian imagination of the conflict.The literature on the Darfur conflict has focused on these visual genres and

has embraced a performative approach to the visual, or what Campbell (2007:

6See, however, Gibbon (2011). Even when the literature deals with cartoons, art drawings, or comics, it is theimage that is the object of analysis rather than drawing itself. Vuori’s (2010) discussions of the Doomsday clockglosses over the fact that the clock is a drawing. Similarly, Hansen’s (2011a) discussion of cartoons engages littlethe history of cartoons as aesthetic objects. We are grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers for pointing out thatsome of the literature deals with drawings.

370 The Politics of Drawing

361) has called the “visual performance of the social field.”7 We draw on thisperformative approach to understand how children’s drawings enacted a particu-lar “scopic regime” of the conflict. Unlike Campbell, however, we do not analyzedrawings as just discursive. Rather, we place drawings within an art historical andsociological theorization. Children’s drawings are also a social form that emergesdifferently in particular social and historical contexts. To paraphrase John Tagg’s(2009) formulation about the medium of photography, aesthetic forms are alsolocal outcomes that emerge through power relations and institutional practices,including art historical practices. Drawings are not just constitutive of the Darfurconflict, they are themselves differentially constituted as testimony and evidence.This section focuses on how the children’s drawings were mobilized as part ofthe “scopic regime” of the Darfur conflict and how their testimonial natureemerges in the media.Satellite visualizations of destruction and changes in the environment wrought

by the conflict were widely disseminated. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s(USHMM) project, “Crisis in Darfur” (2009), using the Google Earth platform,and Amnestly International USA’s “Eyes on Darfur” (2007) made use of GISimagery, to document the violence and destruction taking place in Darfur, andto name the situation there as “genocide.” Amnesty International, for example,used this imagery to show “irrefutably that civilians were targeted in the Negeharegion of south Darfur with whole villages burned to the ground” (Koettl 2011).The then US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, also made use of such imagery tolabel what was taking place in Darfur as “genocide” (Finn 2010). As a refugeefrom Darfur, quoted in the Washington Times, asserted, satellite imagery functionsas a global panoptic eye: “President Bashir needs to understand he is beingwatched … He is not going to be changed, but he is going to know that 200 mil-lion people who didn’t hear about the situation [in Darfur] before, they’regoing to know now” (Miller 2007). Satellite imagery is not only used for the pur-poses of “awareness raising;” it can also capture details unavailable to the nakedhuman eye, and which otherwise would have kept violence “secret,” outside thepurview of global publics.8 Although having the potential to be more attuned tothe complexities of conflict situations and their quick pace of change (Levinger2009), GIS technology is not without problems. For instance, Lisa Parks arguesthat the USHMM and Google Earth project miss the potential of satellite imag-ery, as “satellite images are traversed in favor of closer views and representationsof humans, many of which feature injured bodies and/or displaced women andchildren” (Parks 2009:538). Similar concerns emerge in Campbell’s analysis ofphotographs from The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK. Mostlyfocused on women and children, the photographs “decontextualized people andportrayed them as passive and pitiable” (Campbell 2007:369).In the midst of the dissemination of photographic and satellite imagery of

what was taking place in Darfur, children’s drawings started to receive globalmedia attention. As a starting point it is important to recognize that in offeringchildren’s perspectives on what was happening in Darfur, these drawings are par-ticularly evocative of the trauma wrought by violent conflict and thus could beseen to reinforce the testimonial depictions of the conflict as a humanitarianissue. Children in conflict situations are typically perceived as highly vulnerable,as innocent victims and defenseless actors, caught up in situations not of theirmaking. (The fact that these were specifically African children’s drawings also

7This literature is relatively limited. We have located four articles which identify different forms of visuality inrelation to the Darfur conflict: David Campbell (2007), Matthew Levinger (2009), Lisa Parks (2009), and JonathanFinn (2010).

8On the revolutionizing capacities and limits of satellite imagery, see the editors’ introduction to a special sec-tion in Geoforum: Dodge and Perkins (2009).


serves to enhance the framing of these drawings in this way.) As such, thesedrawings come to figure as testimonies of the damage and destruction wroughtby mass violence.The particular evocativeness of these drawings is attested to by the Human

Rights Watch researchers who had collected drawings from Darfur in February2005. As they stated in an introduction to a slideshow of drawings that appearedon the Web site Slate, in July of that year, “To hear and read the testimony of vic-tims of atrocities is very powerful; it is even more horrifying to see such mayhemthrough the eyes of children, uncoached and often uneducated but clearlyexposed to brutal ethnic cleansing” (Sparrow and Bercault 2005). Here, thesedrawings are located explicitly as expressing something more powerful than theverbal accounts offered by the adult interviewees the researchers had spoken to.At the same time, this statement is revealing in the reference it makes to thedepictions these drawings offer of the children’s experiences as “uncoached” and“uneducated,” in its echoing of the long-running notion that the attempt to inter-vene and teach children how to draw is somehow “corrupting,” in serving to inter-fere with the way in which drawing functions as something directly expressive ofchildren’s experience (Anning 2008:93).The sense in which these drawings function as direct testimony is supported

by the apparent spontaneity of their production. As the Waging Peace andHuman Rights Watch researchers both recounted, they did not set out with thedeliberate intention of gathering children’s drawings of what had been takingplace in Darfur. Rather, in the case of Waging Peace, conversations with adultshad led Anna Schmidt to ask the children to draw “their dreams for the futureand their strongest memories,” with the results of what the children producedcoming as a shock to her (Waging Peace 2007a). And in the case of HumanRights Watch, children were given pencils and crayons as a means of keepingthem occupied, while their parents and guardians were being interviewed(Human Rights Watch 2005a,b).The sense in which these drawings offered an unsolicited and spontaneous

account of what was taking place in Darfur was reiterated by the Human RightsWatch researchers in their comments on how the very first drawing they saw wasproduced: “The first child, a 12-year-old shepherd, had never held a crayon orpencil before, so he gave the paper to his brothers, who drew, without anyinstruction, pictures of mounted Janjaweed shooting civilians, Antonov planesdropping bombs on civilians and their homes, and a tank firing on fleeing vil-lagers” (Sparrow and Bercault 2005). Indeed, such was the access to the per-ceived truth of children’s experiences associated with these drawings, that, whileinterviews with adults had produced numerous testimonies to the atrocities tak-ing place, in the words of Anna Schmidt, “It was their children who providedperhaps the most significant indication yet of exactly what has gone on in Dar-fur. Most of them could not read or write. But they could draw. And, unpromp-ted, they started to reveal what they had seen with their own eyes” (Grice2007a).At the same time, the impact of these drawings is underpinned and enhanced

by the style in which they were drawn. The very lack of technical skill and verisi-militude—the very “childishness” of the techniques employed in many of thesedrawings—can be seen to at once invoke and express the childishness of thosewho produced them, serving to heighten their emotional resonance. Indeed, itmight be argued that the more obviously childish the drawing—see for example,Figure 1, a drawing by an eight-year-old girl collected by Human Rights Watch,that shows “a tank” and “a soldier” (in green) attacking a hut, with a womanlying injured at the top—the greater their impact as evocative of the position ofthe drawer as an innocent witness–victim caught up in a conflict which they bearwitness to. If, to refer back to the Human Rights Watch researchers’ claim that it


is “more horrifying” to witness such events through the “uncoached” and “uned-ucated” eyes of children, then the more uncoached and uneducated a drawingappears, the greater its capacity to register in these terms.Yet, the power of drawings to function as testimonies of conflict and be widely

circulated in the media in an attempt to raise awareness about war crimes inDarfur, can only be understood if children’s drawings are also analyzed as “socialobjects.” As social objects, drawings become testimonies through the mobiliza-tion of psychological and psychotherapeutic knowledge on the one hand, andart historical knowledge on the other.Since the commencement of the study of children’s drawings in psychology in

the late nineteenth century, children’s drawings have been regarded as providingsomething directly expressive about children’s experiences, a notion that haspersisted through to the present (Anning 2008). This is a conception of drawingthat contrasts with the ways in which children’s verbal testimonies have oftenbeen regarded, both within formal, legal contexts and more generally. Skepti-cism about the value and veracity of children’s verbal testimonies derives, inpart, from children’s limited language skills, including their limited vocabulary,as well as doubts about children’s sense of objectivity and their perceived sug-gestibility (Bull 1998; Wakefield and Underwager 1998:177–178). More specifi-cally, experiences of trauma have been regarded as particularly difficult forchildren to put into language (Wakefield and Underwager 1998:176–178, 86).For Cathy Malchiodi, an art therapist and researcher who has written extensivelyon how to understand traumatized children’s drawings and the Darfuri chil-dren’s drawings in particular,

Drawing is a natural mode of communication that children rarely resist and thatoffers a way to express feelings and thoughts in a manner that is less threateningthan strictly verbal means. For the child who has experienced trauma or loss, ithelps to externalize emotions and events too painful to speak out loud and isone of the only means of conveying the complexities of painful experiences,repressed memories, or unspoken fears, anxieties, or guilt. (Malchiodi 2001:21)

Psychological and therapeutic knowledge have widely used drawings and havemade particular interpretations of drawings and their main uses. Drawing has

FIG 1. http://www.hrw.org/legacy/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/5.htm(Human Rights Watch 2005a).


been regarded as a means by which children are able to depict “the truth” oftheir experiences, unimpeded by the obstacles their limited capacity to use lan-guage places in their way. The perceived value of drawing in this respect wasbehind the turn to utilizing children’s drawings in legal contexts, which tookplace from the 1980s onwards in countries in Europe and North America, andsaw the use of children’s drawings as legal evidence in cases of physical and sex-ual abuse.9

At another, related level, these drawings were configured in terms of an imagi-nary opposition between our expectations of children’s psychology and what thedrawings “depict” in the case of Darfur. As Rebecca Tinsley of Waging Peacenotes, “Childish lines that look as though they should be depicting fairgroundsor farmyards, instead show helicopter gun attacks, tanks bearing the Sudaneseflag, and soldiers wearing the uniform of the Sudanese army alongside vehicleswith machineguns driven by Janjaweed” (Grice 2007a).The capacity of these drawings to convey the experience of children caught

up in the Darfur conflict was further enhanced by their ability to generate asense of intimate connection with those who drew them. This capacity has,equally, a social history, which has been forged in the art historical debatesabout the relation of drawing to other art forms. As a series of commentatorshave attested, drawing possesses a capacity, beyond perhaps any other form ofvisual depiction, to register the embodied presence of its producer (Derrida1993; Schmidt 2008:110–112; Van Alphen 2008). It is a practice in which thehand and body of the drawer is rendered present in ways which are often seem-ingly elided in other forms of depiction, including photography and film. Incomparison with drawing, one could ask whether it would be similarly possible—or as easy or straightforward—to identify photographs and filmed footage as hav-ing been shot by children. Such contrasts serve to highlight the particularly inti-mate, subjective quality of drawing. Nowhere perhaps is this more apparent thanin comparison with the satellite imagery of Darfur, discussed above. While thelatter presents a highly technological mediated gaze, one that stands far away,and seeks through its very objectivity and distance to provide evidence of whathas taken place, it is through their subjectivity and the sense of intimacy theygenerate with what has taken place that these drawings serve to convey a testi-mony of the conflict from the perspective of those caught up in it.In their testimonial capacity, the drawings are intimately linked with the chil-

dren’s subjectivity and dominant representations of childhood. The intimateexperience of war is devoid of any mediation. In representing war to global pub-lics, the drawings are inseparable from the figure of the innocent child. Theirproduction as truthful testimony is intimately connected with the circulation ofideas about childhood and children’s drawings as expressive of children’s experi-ence. However, for the drawings to enter the legal sphere, they need to be pro-duced differentially as evidential objects. The next section turns to how thisproduction entails a move from the subjective and expressive nature of drawingto that of objective evidence.

Aesthetics of Evidence

Following a meeting with the NGO, Waging Peace, in The Hague in November2007, the ICC accepted the drawings collected by Waging Peace as contextualevidence for the trial of Ali Kushayb and Ahmed Harun. This acceptance is

9Although following a series of high profile reviews of such cases, considerable doubts came to be expressedabout how these drawings had been presented and used as evidence, prompting considerable debate about pre-cisely how children’s drawings should be used in these contexts (see also Wakefield and Underwager 1998:177–178,83; Veltman and Browne 2002).


perhaps not surprising given the role of the representation of children’s drawingas authentic testimonies about the violence and atrocities of the conflict. How-ever, producing the children’s drawings as legal evidence also entailed differentprocesses, which focused on integrating drawings within legal histories of theuse of visual evidence and legal standards of proof.As we have shown, the drawings invoke childhood as truth-telling, innocent, and

vulnerable, and the art of drawing as immediately linked with the child witness. Itis by virtue of being children’s drawings that the drawings seem to garner testimo-nial authenticity. Yet, the subjectivity of children’s testimonies has long been a mat-ter of contention for legal proceedings. One of the main impediments in thehistory of children’s testimony and that of children’s drawings is that of accuracyand reliability, given extensive fears about the children’s suggestibility.10

Although children’s suggestibility remained unmentioned, the NGOs’ presenta-tion of the drawings as potential evidence can be read as a process of distancing thechildren’s drawings from the children’s subjectivity, and rendering them credible aschildren’s drawings, as particular evidentiary objects. As Pierre Bourdieu (1986:830)reminds us, law is organized around a set of protocols, assumptions, and behav-iors, and evidence needs to be performed in accordance with standards of proofin order to become acceptable. The children’s drawings therefore need to beintegrated within a history of visual evidence and legal standards of proof. Theirevidentiary nature is produced through three interlinked strategies: the persis-tent signaling of details to establish accuracy; the establishment of a patternthrough content analysis to secure reliability; and the use of analogy with otheraesthetic forms, such as photography or film, for the purposes of admissibility.In the commentary the Human Rights Watch researchers offer on the slide-

show on Slate, the accuracy of the drawings is repeatedly asserted through theemphasis on details. Alongside the drawing shown in Figure 2, the researchersnote, “The children’s drawings often include astonishingly accurate depictions ofelements from the Sudanese armory, including assault rifles, machine guns,tanks, armored personnel carriers, military planes, and helicopters” (Sparrowand Bercault 2005). Or, as Rebecca Tinsley points out about the Waging Peacedrawings in a lecture at the University of Chicago, “There’s a tank flying a Suda-nese flag. You can’t get more obvious than that. An aeroplane, you couldn’t sug-gest these things to these children, this is what they’d seen.”11

FIG 2. http://www.hrw.org/legacy/photos/2005/darfur/drawings/2.htm(Human Rights Watch 2005b).

10On the ambiguities of the concept of suggestibility and its uses in juridical practice, see Motzkau (2009).11Drawings of Genocide: Darfur through the eyes of children, October 27, 2010. Available at http://news.uchi-

cago.edu/multimedia/drawings-genocide-darfur-through-eyes-its-children. (Accessed April 24, 2013.)


The details of specific pieces of military hardware are at times accompanied byphotographs which seek to demonstrate the accuracy of children’s drawing. Thiswas the case with the photograph of an Iranian Antonov plane inserted along-side one drawing in the attempt to make clear how it provided evidence of theuse by government forces of this type of aircraft (Sparrow and Bercault 2005).However problematic, these interventions may be, what interests us here is notprimarily the actions of NGOs, but how drawings are produced not just as sub-jective testimony but also as objective evidence. The identification of such detailsstrives to establish the drawings’ veracity by highlighting their mimetic, ratherthan expressive or evocative, quality.The accuracy of details in the drawings is further emphasized in textual expla-

nations which Waging Peace, for instance, formulates and runs alongside thedrawings:

The young boy was 10 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2003. SudaneseGovernment forces in pick up trucks, helicopters and airplanes and Janjaweedmilitias on horsebacks are seen attacking a village. In the left of the drawing, anAntonov is bombing the village, putting fire to the huts. Sudanese forces on theground and perched in trees are targeting young women, men and children.Three women are tied up and taken away by a Sudanese soldier while men arekilled and thrown into the valley. (Waging Peace 2007a) (see also Figure 3)12

Similar details are present in the ICC decisions concerning the prosecution ofSudanese government officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Dar-fur. In the Pre-Trial Chamber I decision, in the case of Ahmad Harun and Ali Ku-shayb, the depiction of the attack focuses on details of weapons and strategy:

FIG 3. http://www.wagingpeace.info/index.php/sudan/8-sudan/147-the-drawings (Drawing 14)(Waging Peace 2007a).

12The digital archive of the drawings collected by Waging Peace does not contain these lengthier explanations,but only brief titles which capture the forms of violence.


The town was attacked by members of the Sudanese Armed Forces travelling in anumber of camouflaged coloured Land Cruisers mounted with heavy machineguns together with Militia/Janjaweed on horse- and camel-back and some onfoot… Three Sudanese Air Force planes also dropped bombs. (ICC 2007:19)

The strategy of highlighting details isolates particular elements of the conflictin order to construct a narrative of victimhood and violence. At the same time,the use of details integrates the children’s drawings within positivist understand-ings of legal evidence as objective and unadulterated. “In a positivist perspec-tive,” remarked Carlo Ginzburg, “the evidence is analyzed only in order toascertain if, and when, it implies a distortion, either intention or unintentional”(Ginzburg 1991:83).The second strategy is that of a general pattern that emerges through the

drawings. They tell similar stories of violence against civilians, ethnic conflict,skin color, clothes, and weaponry that distinguish the attackers from the victims.The Sudanese militias wear military gear, bear weapons, fly Antonovs, bomb vil-lages, and ride camels, while the victims are civilians, unarmed, women and chil-dren included. The NGOs point out the details that are similar from onedrawing to another and thus establish a “pattern” that can evidence the conflictand the violence perpetrated by the Janjaweed militias and the government ofSudan. For instance, more than 500 drawings gathered by Waging Peace work,therefore, both individually and collectively to offer a representation of the con-flict. Analyzed cumulatively, the drawings are proof of violence. Through theemphasis on individual details and collective pattern, the children’s drawingscan be integrated within the “fact positivism” of legal discourse on evidence(Nicolson 1994). The existence of a “pattern” appears as a guarantor of accuracyand objectivity as opposed to implicit problems of children’s suggestibility andsubjectivity. At the same time, establishing a pattern is instrumental to the legaldefinition of crimes against humanity. In deciding on whether crimes had a“widespread” and “systematic” character, the ICC also emphasizes that “thereare reasonable grounds to believe that the … attacks often shared a commonpattern” (ICC 2007:21).Third, the drawings are integrated into a continuum of aesthetic evidence

used in legal cases. The Darfuri children’s drawings are not immediately appar-ent as evidence. They need to be “ordered” in particular ways to become part ofa legal reading of the conflict. The drawings need to be integrated withinalready established modes of evidence, such as photography or film. In analyzingthe emergence of photography as evidentiary, Jennifer Mnookin has pointed outthe importance of analogy with previous forms of visual evidence to understand-ing this new technology (Mnookin 1998). Interestingly, if the evidentiary natureof photography was initially derived from analogy with maps and diagrams, draw-ings are now reinterpreted through analogy with photography. The NGOs readthe drawings in similar terms to photography and other types of direct film foot-age, which are now established forms of evidence given their supposed capacityto capture and offer immediate access to the truth of a situation:

“This is the proof,” said Rebecca Tinsley, a director of Waging Peace, who willsubmit the drawings to the ICC and plans to exhibit them to rally support fortougher international action against Sudan. “If this is not evidence, I don’t knowwhat is. The children have provided a photographic record. They have not been manip-ulated. The pattern that emerged in the drawings is amazing. It corroborateswhat we know is happening and disproves what we are being told by the govern-ment of Sudan.” (Grice 2007a)

Photographs and other technically produced images have become the “med-ium of evidence par excellence” and have overcome the traditional juridical


image skepticism (Vismann 2008:2). Although photography and video are nowassociated with objective proof, their use in courts in the nineteenth century wassubject to debate, and their taken-for-granted understandings today the result ofstruggles over what counts as knowledge and what does not. Historians of lawhave noted the distrust of images in legal proceedings up until the nineteenthcentury (Golan 2008). The introduction of photographs appeared to appeasesome of the anxiety about images, as photographs “recorded details more accu-rately and communicated them more efficiently than any other visual or verbalagent. All participants in the debate over photographic evidence have acknowl-edged that it packed persuasive powers unlike any other visual image” (Golan2008:80). Thus, particularly in the case of the use of film evidence, questions oftruth, accuracy, and admissibility have been raised. Scholars have drawn a dis-tinction between the so-called “evidence v�erit�e” (filmic evidence such as thatfrom surveillance cameras) and “evidence non-v�erit�e” (filmed evidence such asvideo testimonies for instance) to think about the role of subjective experiencein legal proceedings (Silbey 2001). Evidence v�erit�e in particular is now taken forgranted in courts as a representation of unadulterated reality. However, digitalimage processing has also recently unsettled this seemingly established distinc-tion between image truthfulness and non-truthfulness.Drawings are distanced from the children’s subjective experiences by being

imagined in similar terms to “evidence v�erit�e.” Just like the camera capturing thecriminal act, drawings cannot lie. In this analogy, the aesthetic form of the draw-ing cannot lend itself to adulteration. Unlike other visual evidence non-verit�e,drawings are represented as unable to conceal, as any adulteration of the line ofthe blank sheet of paper would become visible. Thus, the appeal of the chil-dren’s drawings as objective evidence can be also understood through the arthistorical imagination of drawing as aesthetic object. As Emma Dexter haspointed out in her analysis of drawing as an aesthetic form,

The primal qualities of drawing are also conjured through the simplicity and pur-ity of the blank sheet of paper, while the act of drawing itself betokens honestyand transparency—all the marks and tracks, whether deliberate or not, are therefor all to see in perpetuity. Any erasures or attempts to change the line mid-floware obvious—drawing is a form that wears its mistakes and errors on its sleeve.(Dexter 2005:5)

As an aesthetic form, drawing is seen as unable to hide something; it also can-not be adulterated. This understanding of drawing makes it apt for integrationwith legal uses of visual imagery. If the global humanitarian and media dis-courses emphasize subjective experience and innocent witnesses, legal standardsof proof mean that NGOs such as Waging Peace need to construct differentsocial interpretations of the drawings.This is not to say that the testimony of violence is of less importance for the

legal realm. After all, testimony is part of legal protocols. Rather, the Darfurichildren’s drawings make possible the combination of several legal protocols fordeciding evidence, which reinforce their evidentiary value. According to MichelFoucault (1996), it is possible to trace the historical emergence of four forms ofproducing legal evidence. First, there is the so-called “rational form of proof anddemonstration.” Scientific and expert systems are one of these forms. Second,there is the art of persuasion, which attempts to convince the opponent or theaudience of the truth of one’s words. Third, one can speak of knowledgethrough witnessing, through memory, and through inquiry. Investigation is thepreferred procedure of this form of truth discovery and an often-encounteredjudicial form. There is also a fourth form of truth production or discovery, whichis evident in the flagrant d�elit—the surveillance knowledge which gets access to


the truth of an event or a situation through the invisible gaze. All these modali-ties of establishing evidence are mobilized in different ways in the legal process.The children’s drawings allow for a “truthful” and unadulterated story to be

told about the conflict in Darfur; they bear testimony to the children’s sufferingand offer a persuasive narrative about the events. On the NGO Web sites, draw-ings do not appear unmediated, but they are accompanied by explanationsabout the forms of violence that are depicted. As moments of witnessing throughremembrance, they are also persuasive, rhetorical, and affective in their expres-sion of violence. At the same time, they support an expert humanitarian andlegal discourse, reinforced through the supposed “unbiased” and unadulteratedphotographic lens which offers both judges and audiences worldwide a snapshotinto the conflict.The children’s drawings garner the power of evidence through a process in

which particular elements of drawings are highlighted at the expense of others.These processes are not straightforward, nor can they be taken for granted.Rather, as the next section shows, the drawings are not just productive of, butcan also challenge, the “truth regime” they were meant to buttress.

(With)Drawing Knowledge: Political Ambivalence

The public and legal uses of children’s drawings raise a series of epistemologicalproblems about conflict and violence. The “scopic regime” is also a “truthregime,” it renders particular interpretations as authoritative and creates codesof understanding conflict and violence. However, the production of children’sdrawings as differentiated aesthetic and social objects gives rise, in turn, to differ-ence and ambivalence.First, the production of drawings as subjective testimony and objective evi-

dence aims to efface the role that NGOs play in the production and circulationof children’s drawings. As we have shown, NGOs appear simply as neutral medi-ators of crayons and paper to children or of information to global publics. In acomparison of children’s drawings of WWI and drawings of the Darfur conflict,Higonnet (2006:1574) has warned that we need to “exercise caution inapproaching the child’s view of violence in wartime.” She does not suggest deny-ing or diminishing in any way children’s experiences of violence. Rather, sheargues that drawings should be part of the “setting in which social institutionsaffect the ways children organize experience” (Higonnet 2006:1574). Indeed,the drawings cannot be treated as offering unmediated access to the past. Therefugee camp, the children’s livelihoods, the perceived role of the researchers,all these elements need to be integrated in an analysis of the drawings. Yet, ineffacing the role of NGOs, drawings are then supposed to be neutral renderingsof the violent past, upon which the present and presence of NGO researchershave no bearing. The role of NGOs in acquiring the drawings, collectingthem, mediatizing them, and integrating them in legal processes remainsunmentioned.Integrating the NGOs in the production of drawings opens questions about

the production of a particular “truth regime” about the conflict. At the sametime, however, the effacement of NGOs creates ambivalence and tension whenconfronted with the legal rules of fact finding and evidence gathering. Legal“fact positivism” does not efface the producer of evidence, but submits the pro-duction of evidence to a set of rules. As we noted earlier, the drawings gar-nered such widespread attention given the lack of access and limited accountsof what was happening in Darfur. Given the security situation in Sudan, theICC also had to rely on third-party images and accounts. David Campbell hasnoted a similar conundrum for photojournalists who often had to rely onimages and photographs provided by the NGOs or gathered from the refugee


camps in Eastern Chad (Campbell 2007). The “neutrality” of NGOs and the“spontaneous” production of drawings fall short of the standards for fact find-ing. Legal experts have criticized the “creative investigative strategy,” employedby the Office of the Prosecutor, which used interviews with victims in thirdcountries; interviews with experts; collection of open source data; satellite imag-ery and remote sensing data; military and official documents; as well as evi-dence collected by the UN Commission of Inquiry (Agire Aranburru and Belli2011:369).13 This strategy was thought to be a sign of both ICC weakness and alack of neutrality on the part of the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) in pursuinginvestigations of war crimes. As a critic of the OTP points out, “Not only hasthe OTP relied on documents obtained from the UN and NGOs, it alsoaccepted that persons working for NGOs were the exclusive intermediariesbetween the OTP and the victims and witnesses” (Stuart 2008:414). The OTPappears thus at risk of jettisoning the very neutrality that is constitutive of legalreasoning, the right to a fair trial and the admissibility of evidence in court.The problem of a lack of neutrality also had wider political effects. When thegovernment of Sudan expelled all international NGOs from Sudan in 2009,their argument was that NGOs had been spying and “passing” information tothe ICC (Reuters 2009). Although the NGOs have immediately vouched neutral-ity, questions were raised about the exact role that drawings played and theneutrality of international charities.As the previous section has shown, the drawings’ objectivity is constituted

through a series of strategies that integrate drawings with the “fact positivism” ofevidentiary rules. However, by emphasizing particular aesthetic forms and con-tents—details, patterns, and photographic analogy—the NGOs downplay thesocial context of the production of drawings. Remembering, as Ian Hacking hasput it, is learned and implies understanding “[h]ow one remembers, what sortsof objects one remembers, what memories one tells, to whom one confidesthem” (Hacking 2005:225). The children’s memories are activated in an institu-tional context in the presence of humanitarian workers. They are also activatedwithin international humanitarian practices of witnessing conflict and communi-cating suffering to global publics. Rendering this social context as “neutral” orsimple background ultimately backfires, as critical discourses of the ICC investi-gative strategy suggest.Second, the children’s drawings need to be produced in ways that fit legal clas-

sifications of conflict. In being placed within a juridicized international context,drawings are not simply testimonies of violence. Both the NGOs and the ICCneed to integrate the drawing within the legal categories of crimes againsthumanity, war crimes, and genocide. After all, as legal theorists have made clear,a trial is not a search for truth but rather, “technically, it is a search for a deci-sion, and thus, in essence, it seeks not simply truth but a finality: a force of reso-lution” (Felman quoted in Silbey 2001:1265). It aims to allocate responsibilityand guilt in order to reach a legal resolution to the conflict. Yet, the drawingsalso produce ambivalence about the legal categories of understanding the con-flict.The limits of the humanitarian and legal discourses have been already aptly

analyzed in the literature on the Darfur conflict. For instance, MahmoodMamdani’s (2009) insightful critique of representation of the Darfur conflictin the West shows the work done by the legal-humanitarian categorization of

13This “creative investigative strategy” has been made possible by the evidentiary procedures of the ICC andinternational law more generally. For a discussion of the evidentiary rules and their problematic effects on therights of the accused, see Michel Caianiello (2011). He argues that “the ICC risks evolving in the direction of theworst hypothetical scenario: the creation of a system with a general accusatorial structure, though with specificinquisitorial provisions in crucial passages of the proceeding” (Caianiello 2011:409).


“genocide” in terms of making the conflict more intractable. Many have praised,challenged, or nuanced Mamdani’s powerful account.14 It is not our purposehere to rehearse these arguments about the representation of the Darfur con-flict. Rather, we would like to show how the children’s drawings as aesthetic andsocial objects are also productive of ambivalence concerning the legal reading ofthe conflict.In order to fit legal categories of crime and responsibility, the drawings are

read as evidence of a racialized and ethnicized conflict. The text accompanyingthe Waging Peace drawings—and similarly the HRW drawings—distinguishes vic-tims and perpetrators in racial and ethnic terms.For instance, the text accompanying this drawing (Figure 4) reads the facial

colors as evidence of the “Arab”-“African” distinction between victims and perpe-trators:

This boy was 9 when his village in the area of Aishbarra, Darfur, was attacked in2003 by the Sudanese Government forces and Janjaweed militia. The drawingshows houses burning, villagers being shot and even amputated. The villagersthat are attacked are coloured in black, while the attackers have lighter (orange)skin – showing the ethnic character of the attacks (for example, Arabs attacking“black Africans”—in this case Massalit). In the bottom right of the drawing aretwo young men, attached by the neck, led away by a janjaweed fighter. Theseboys could be taken into slavery, or may become child soldiers. (Waging Peace2007a)

This textual intervention brings a particular interpretation to the foreground,which resonates with the legal interpretation put forth in the ICC documents.Just as the ICC notes that the Janjaweed attacks were directed primarily againstFur, Zaghawa, and Masalit populations (International Criminal Court 2007), thetext accompanying the drawings explicates that the darker people are not justAfricans, but the Masalit, one of the tribes targeted by genocide. The explicative

FIG 4. http://www.wagingpeace.info/index.php/sudan/8-sudan/147-the-drawings (Drawing 1)(Waging Peace 2007a).

14For reviews of Mamdani’s main argument, see for instance, Edozie (2009); Johnson (2009); Koko (2010).


text also makes suppositions about the fate of the people being captured: tobecome either slaves or child soldiers.Racialized categories, which have framed public and legal discourses about the

Darfur conflict, are also invoked in the interpretation of the drawings: designa-tions of “Arabs” versus “Africans” help clarify the relations between protagonists.This interpretation resonates with the ICC assessment in Omar Al Bashir’s caseto establish that the violence was directed against a racially and ethnically differ-ent group:

In attacks, AL BASHIR forces consistently made statements such as “the Fur areslaves, we will kill them”; “You are Zaghawa tribes, you are slaves”; “You are Masalit.Why do you come here, why do you take our grass? You will not take anything today.” Thelanguage used by perpetrators of rape made also clear the genocidal intentunderlying their actions: “After they abused us, they told us now we would have Arabbabies and if they could find any Fur woman, they would rape them again to change thecolour of their children.” Perpetrators of other crimes have used language which isnot just ethnically derogatory, but evidencing an intention to destroy: “You areblacks, no blacks can stay here, and no black can stay in Sudan … The power of AlBASHIR belong to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end”; “we will kill all theblack”; “we will drive you out of this land”; “we are here to eradicate blacks (nuba)”; “Thisis your end. The Government armed me.” (ICC 2008:9)

The children’s drawings are, then, also productive of this interpretation ofconflict. Moreover, through their extensive circulation, they intensify its reach.At the same time, however, the drawings produce ambivalence as to this inter-pretation of the conflict. Not all drawings are representations of conflict in theterms offered by the ICC and humanitarian discourse. The digital availabilityof many of the drawings collected by NGOS makes clear that not all drawingsuse similar color coding and that in some drawings all the characters depictedmay have monochromatic faces. Moreover, not all drawings offer detaileddepictions of violence. Some drawings go in as much detail to trace ordinary,everyday objects in villages or village life (Figures 5 and 6). Drawings do notnecessarily fit the interpretative legal framework of retribution and responsibil-ity, but make visible the production of knowledge through selection, highlight-ing and coding of particular elements in the drawings as authoritative andtruthful.Charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide (in the case of

Omar Al-Bashir) also require explanations of the causes and identification of theperpetrators, of crimes. The ICC prosecutor for Darfur, Luis Moreno Ocampo,makes clear that the problem is explaining what happened in Darfur and whobears responsibility for the perpetration of violence:

He [President Al Bashir] has learned how to continue to commit crimes chal-lenging the authority of the UN Security Council, and ignoring Resolution 1593,as well as other resolutions … President Al Bashir and his supporters continuedenying the crimes, attributing them to other factors (such as inter-tribalclashes), diverting attention by publicizing ceasefire agreements that are violatedas soon as they are announced, and finally proposing the creation of specialcourts to conduct investigations that will never start. (Moreno Ocampo 2011:3)

Assigning responsibility for crimes is instrumental to the legal cases:

However the crimes covered in the Application are not the collateral damage ofa military campaign. At all times relevant to the Application Al Bashir specificallyand purposefully targeted civilians who were not participants to any conflict withthe intent to destroy them, as a group. In Darfur 35,000 people have been killedoutright in such attacks; an overwhelming majority of them are from the threetarget groups. (International Criminal Court 2008:4)


Yet, the explanation for the causes of war crimes and the assignation ofresponsibility emerge through processes of interpretation and coding. Althoughthese explanations are rendered as an extension of the legal “fact positivism,”the differences in children’s drawings make visible the work of interpretationand coding that is needed to produce evidentiary objects. Ultimately, the draw-ings are productive of ambivalence for the “truthfulness” of the conflict.

Conclusion

This article has started from the public and legal attention that a series of 500drawings by Darfuri children garnered in 2007, and subsequently. Although notunique, as other NGOs have been collecting children’s drawings about the con-flict, these drawings are particularly interesting for an analysis of visuality andconflict as they navigate humanitarian and legal realms. The drawings collectedby Waging Peace gained particular attention given their acceptance as contextualevidence by the ICC. Analyzing the drawings as both aesthetic and social objectsallows an understanding of how they are differentially produced depending onthe sites in which they are mobilized: public media discourses of humanitarianconflict and legal discourses of crime and responsibility.We have unpacked the production of children’s drawings as both subjective

testimonies and objective evidence. The drawings’ acceptance as contextual evi-dence by the ICC meant that they needed to be produced as an objective legalfact in accordance with legal standards of proof. Drawings are made differen-tially intelligible depending on the social context in which they are mobilized

FIG 5. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/hgstud_gallery/329/(Waging Peace 2007b).


and the particular histories of these contexts. Drawings tell a story of the chil-dren’s suffering and direct experience of conflict, thus mobilizing a discourseof humanitarian needs. They also tell a story about victims and perpetrators,crime and justice that can be processed by law. In so doing, the children’sdrawings also produce ambivalent political effects. On the one hand, theyenact a particular regime of truth about the conflict in Darfur. On the otherhand, the drawings also subvert the authoritative codes of interpreting the con-flict. It is their ability to reach into each of these realms that underlines theneed to pay close attention to the distinctive depiction they offer of thisconflict.

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The Politics of Drawing: Children, evidence, and the Darfur conflict

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