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The aim of this short article is to present a programmatic call for the chromatological investigation of security, and more generally to bring the analysis of colour-use to International Relations and beyond.[i] Chromatology, the study of colours in relation to people, can comprise multiple theoretical and methodological research programmes, and can add to the emergent engagement with visualities in the field of security studies (see Andersen et al., 2015a). In this paper we present some of the different analytical rationales behind mobilising a chromatology of security by presenting what colours are and why we should analytically concentrate on colour-uses rather than on what colours mean. Colours are inherently ambiguous and plural in their social meaning, and they can come about for a variety of reasons. There is therefore a necessity to devise specific analytical and methodological strategies to make an analytics of political colour-use, what we term chromatology, a robust scholarly endeavour.

Matching Colours with Methodologies

We have already deployed three analytics and related methodological tools for this task. First, we have mobilised multimodal social semiotics in order to take the practice of colouring prisoners seriously (see Andersen et al. 2015b). Doing so, we shown how the social structures of Nazi concentration camps were at work and explained how colour–use enacted the dehumanisation and diffuse securitisation of opponents. Indeed, security practices can be read chromatically in order to understand their meaning-making processes, enactments, affordances, and appropriations.

Second, we have mobilised a genealogical analysis in order to demonstrate how the social meaning of the battlefield has evolved in western Europe since the emergence of the modern state (see Guillaume et al. 2016). Doing so, we applied a classical sociological finding – people are what they wear – to the evolution of the colouring of European military uniforms. Since the emergence of the modern state, the use of colour in battlefield uniforms has evolved from highly visible colours to camouflage. This evolution has been intimately tied to the evolution of specific modes of being and action among soldiers, and the related social imaginaries and practices of soldiering. The use of colour in battlefield uniforms, then, has operated to embody the nation, turn the citizen into a soldier, daunt the enemy, and conceal a hunter.

Finally, we have used material semiotics in order to exhibit how national flags have shaped not only social interactions in the international, but the shape of the international itself (Andersen et al. 2016). Doing so, we have shown how flags – objects that can only take on meaning through colours – are both an emblematic picture and a symbolic object. Flags not only represent states, non-state actors, and social and political movements in our most quotidian experience of the international, they are also a specific materialisation of the international. Indeed, political communities have not been included in the system of states without a flag. At the same time, the flag is able to make this abstract system tangible by allowing for acts such as the burning of a flag, stepping on one, dying for a flag, or wrapping the dead in a flag.

As the above examples illustrate, colour-use shapes and participates in social imaginaries that are of critical importance to the international, which is why it needs to be studied systematically as part of an international political sociology. In overall terms, we can enter such imaginaries........

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