The research investigates a specific theatrical form of political protest: the hanging and burning of effigies. It is a widely known form of protest, since the production of affective images for distribution in the news media is essential to the practice. Collecting these images and reports provided the material for the research. Beginning with a close reading, the the images were ordered according to various criteria: geography, chronology, motifs, themes and associations and arranged into montages that make the relations between images visible and legible. As tools for the research, these image montages directed the inquiry into different disciplines (history, art history, anthropology, performance studies, photography theory, iconology, image studies, and political philosophy), bridging documentary and discursive modes of artistic practice with academic research. The images montages—in the dissertation arranged parallel to the text—are also integral part of the argumentation. This transdisciplinary approach makes it possible to comprehensibly assess the effigy protest practice in a single study.

Taking recent protests as points of departure, the study investigates the conditions of this visual genre of protest, its roots and genealogies in a number of countries, its aesthetics and politics. Hanging and burning effigies appears as an archaic and ritualistic form of protest, that is nevertheless effectively communicated by global news media to access trans-national public spheres. As an indicator of injustice and violence it is a symptom of fundamental conflicts at the internal and external limits of modern liberal democracy.