This thesis investigates the concept of violence in International Relations whilst formulating an alternative theoretical framework that observes critique and politics from an aesthetical judgement. It assumes aesthetics as the sensory experience of perception. The subjectivity apprehends the world as it appears to them while creating the common ground of meanings and visibility among others. Therefore, this thesis highlights the place of experience to problematise the conditions of possibility to understand violence as a relevant phenomenon. Then, the aesthetic provides the legibility through which we may understand (and frame) conflict while highlighting the limits and potentialities left for politics. This work advances that violence, within traditional methodologies, is framed by the dynamics between war and peace. Nevertheless, as a category of understanding the social world, I shall argue that conflict is a theoretical abstraction because it draws from what reality supposedly is. In this regard, highlighting how we apprehend phenomena allows an enlargement of alternative narratives and ways of seeing conflict and violence in IR. With this assumption, this thesis brings Walter Benjamin s thinking as an inspirational framework to discuss the concept of violence by shedding light on the bodily experience of violence and what is left from it. To do this, I will rely on works of art as methodological support to comprehend how we apprehend the phenomena aesthetically. This work explores how art can be considered an epistemological endeavour to comprehend conflict differently, beyond a representation of violence. To pursue this reasoning, this work will consider artworks from Rio de Janeiro s plastic artists that discuss contemporary violence in the city to highlight how art could function as a device of thinking and visibility.