Aesthetic: (meaning) prioritizing visual appeal over public needs.
Visual propaganda legitimizes the state and obfuscates the reality on the ground
By Amanuel Tesfaye Kebede
Large swaths of the country are experiencing civil wars and remain outside government control, with 4.5 million people internally displaced, and 10 million citizens requiring humanitarian aid in 2025. Additionally, 9 million school-age children are out of school due to conflict and resource scarcity.
To push back against criticism, state actors and their digital proxies resort to visually striking transformations of urban spaces as proof that the government is succeeding despite naysayers. Aesthetic propaganda thus expands the toolkit of what has invariably been described as network propaganda, computational propaganda, and, recently, influencer propaganda.
https://globalvoices.org/2026/03/11/aes ... tarianism/
