Martin Bell on 'The Twilight of News'

Our colleague Andrew Hoskins at the University of Nottingham is hosting the following event:

Department of Culture, Film & Media, School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Centres for Memory Studies and for the Study of Post-Conflict Cultures

 invite you to a Special Guest Lecture:

‘THE TWILIGHT OF NEWS’ by

MARTIN BELL OBE

UNICEF Ambassador for Humanitarian Emergencies

and former independent MP and war correspondent

 

Friday 3 December 2010 6.15pm 

Lecture Theatre B63

Law and Social Sciences Building, University Park Campus

R.S.V.P: 19th November: Please reply to Beverly Tribbick , e-mail: beverly.tribbick@nottingham.ac.uk

This lecture is supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project: ‘Conflicts of Memory: Mediating and Commemorating the London Bombings’ and the SAGE journal of Media, War & Conflict.

Too many bodies? Communicating the population question

The question of human over-population of our planet seems to resurface every few decades, driven by fears that there are too many people to feed, clothe and shelter, or that the sheer volume of human beings working, travelling and polluting is causing environmental damage. But the persuasiveness of such claims is weakened empirically and normatively. In terms of facts, it does not help the over-population claimants that every time the population question is raised, humanity seems to deal with the problem. People do find food, clothing and shelter. And in terms of values, the notion of limiting or reducing the number of human beings appears a slippery slope to calls for coercion and perhaps eugenics in the name of ‘the greater good’. But in 2010 the question is being asked again.

At Royal Holloway last night, Professor Diana Coole presented early analyses from her new three year project, Too many bodies? The politics and ethics of the world population question. She is interested in why the question is re-emerging now and why it is in developed countries that calls are loudest for something to be done, according to her analysis of media and policy documents. Size of world population seems to have causal links to the development of climate change, water and food security, managing waste, and preserving diversity. The Royal Society’s working group People on the Planet raises this explicitly, as did the Stern Report – though neither recommended any proposals to intervene in human population numbers. As Coole argued, the tools we have for managing demography – fertility, mortality and migration – are all political minefields. Governments quietly manage birthrates through tax and welfare regimes and campaigns on family planning, but few policymakers in liberal democracies would explicitly institute a one-child or two-child policy for families.

It is interesting that Coole, a critical theorist in the continental tradition, should be asking why the population question remains a taboo. Materiality, vital matter, the non-human and post-human futures have all been on the critical theory agenda recently, in IR and more broadly. People are not the only things that matter. This scholarly focus parallels public-political claims for ‘sustainability’ in which the maintenance of ecosystems are considered more pressing than the continuation of humanity and certainly more pressing than economic growth. Might it be that a new strategic narrative will be formed and brought to bear on policy, a ‘smaller, better humanity’ narrative? Population projection statistics are ambiguous and can easily be used to support Malthusian narratives. And Coole’s project may unpick the factual and normative discourses that silence talk of the population question, so that the smaller-better narrative can be heard. 

New article: Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media

First results are emerging from our project with the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) with partners at the Universities of Lancaster and Nottingham, including the following new journal article:

Analyzing the semantic content and persuasive composition of extremist media: A case study of texts produced during the Gaza conflict

Sheryl Prentice, Paul J. Taylor, Paul Rayson, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin

Information Systems Frontiers – click here (subscription only).

Abstract

While terrorism informatics research has examined the technical composition of extremist media, there is less work examining the content and intent behind such media. We propose that the arguments and issues presented in extremist media provide insights into authors’ intent, which in turn may provide an evidence-base for detecting and assessing risk. We explore this possibility by applying two quantitative text-analysis methods to 50 online texts that incite violence as a result of the 2008/2009 Israeli military action in Gaza and the West Bank territories. The first method—a content coding system that identifies the occurrence of persuasive devices—revealed a predominance of moral proof arguments within the texts, and evidence for distinguishable ‘profiles’ of persuasion use across different authors and different group affiliations. The second method—a corpus-linguistic technique that identifies the core concepts and narratives that authors use—confirmed the use of moral proof to create an in-group/out-group divide, while also demonstrating a movement from general expressions of discontent to more direct audience-orientated expressions of violence as conflict heightened. We conclude that multi-method analyses are a valuable approach to building both an evidence-based understanding of terrorist media use and a valid set of applications within terrorist informatics.

Charlotte Epstein, Two talks on IR, discourse and communication

“Discourse, the subject and identity in International Relations”

Dr. Charlotte Epstein, University of Sydney

FW101, Founder’s Building, Royal Holloway University of London, 1.30pm

Following the Strategic Narratives programme of research initiated since 2009 to explore how states project their values, interests and identities in the international system, this Wednesday Dr. Epstein will address a series of our concerns:

Abstract: ’The concept of identity has attracted increasing attention in International Relations (IR). Yet what does it mean to study the ‘selves’ of international actors?’ The two pieces explored in today’s reading group propose that the discourse approach offers a more theoretically parsimonious and empirically grounded way of studying identity in IR than approaches developed in the wake of both constructivism and the broader ‘psychological turn’. In the second piece for instance, Dr. Epstein starts with a critique of the discipline’s understanding of the ‘self’ uncritically borrowed from psychology. Jacques Lacan’s ‘speaking subject’ offers instead a non-essentialist basis for theorizing about identity that has been largely overlooked. This insight allows us to steer clear of the field’s fallacy of composition, which has been perpetuated by the assumption that what applies to individuals applies to states as well. This is illustrated empirically with regards to the international politics of whaling.

Dr. Charlotte Epstein is a senior lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. Homepage:

http://sydney.edu.au/arts/government_international_relations/staff/academic_staff/charlotte_epstein.shtml

Participants must have read the following two pieces and be ready to discuss them:

1. The introduction to Charlotte’s book, The Power of Words in International Relations : Epstein Ch1 sample chapter

2. Charlotte’s latest piece in European Journal of International Relations, entitled ‘Who speaks? Discourse, the subject and identity in international relations’ : Who Speaks?

Please note that Dr. Epstein will also deliver a presentation to the staff-student research seminar at 5pm in FW101.

A gulf in understanding?

Last week I participated in a workshop at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha, Qatar, which brought to an end the ESRC’s Radicalisation & Violence programme of research projects, led by Prof. Stuart Croft. I was one of several researchers invited to present recent research on ‘terrorism, resistance and radicalisation’. My fledgling experience of academia has thus far been that debates rarely get politicised. It is noteworthy when it happens, triggering a visceral thrill or horror as we depart from our scripts of professional civility. The Radicalisation & Violence programme has been politicised from the outset. Anthropologists and sociologists were unhappy that researchers might apply to carry out fieldwork in dangerous regions, that the FCO was offering some funding towards the programme and hence it was ‘state-sponsored’ to an extent (although so is the ESRC), and nobody carrying out research could be unaware that in the UK in the 2000s people at universities were being arrested for having ‘radical’ material on their computers, even if they were carrying out legitimate research. It is no surprise, then, that the concluding event retained this political edge. Talking about terrorism in this particular region could not be otherwise.

The event was a success, but I came away with two reservations. The first concerns the possible failure of Anglophone security studies to find ways to engage with the rest of the world in ways that don’t come across as dominating. Croft has written about this himself recently (chapter in here), noting that ‘interdependence’ is a concept we in elite universities in North America, Europe or S.E. Asia might be comfortable with, but might seem threatening to others. Our research might contribute to the very problems of international conflict and cooperation it seeks only to explain. Sure enough, in Doha the Arabic professors consistently argued that the migration of Western terms like ‘terrorism’ and ‘radicalisation’ is itself aggressive, a continuation of colonial practices. ‘They begin in English dictionaries but are applied in Arabic countries’, said one participant. And the fact that ‘we’ don’t provide clear definitions is an act of power: ‘The vagueness is deliberate. They [Western academics] want to hold in their hands what is legitimate’, said another. Western academics will define terrorism to suit our states’ interests. From this perspective, perhaps, for us ESRC-funded researchers to go to Doha and use such terms was an affront.

We can easily contest these claims. How can ‘they’ so lazily conflate Western researchers with their national governments? How can anyone expect a consensual definition of terms that are political and essentially contested? But at the same time, do we have a duty to discuss politics and security in other discourses? How can all parties translate and recognise each other’s vocabularies, histories, and problem framings? Without some thought about this, a space is created for pointless misunderstanding and mutual aggravation.

And it’s in this space, marked by the lack of shared terms and meanings, that my second concern emerges. Misconceptions about ‘the West’ were used so routinely, by individuals who could be considered opinion leaders in Arabic media, individuals who are familiar enough with life in North America or Europe to know that these are misconceptions, but who continue to perpetuate them in a manner that reifies the notion of a war between Islam and the West. As mild instances, the notions that ‘Westerners burn Qurans’ and ‘the West is Islamophobic’ were raised several times. A colleague pointed out, if you try to burn a Quran in the UK you will quickly be arrested, and if a person or institution discriminates on religious or ethnic grounds then legal proceeding should kick in. This is not to say Islamophobia doesn’t exist, but that it can be challenged and is challenged. Everyday multiculturalism has survived the war on terror. And does it make sense to even talk of ‘the West’ now anyway? Well, from those outside it, who feel on the receiving end of ‘Western’ action, it seems so. But there is a danger of explaining the world through Orientalism and finding the world is Orientalist.

These reservations aside, such events are a useful platform for overcoming mutual blind spots and only highlight the need for more engagement. 

CfP Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries, Kathmandu, Nepal, May 2011

The 11th IFIP Working Group 9.4 International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries will be held in Kathmandu, Nepal during 22-25 May 2011.

The Conference theme is “Partners for Development: ICT Actors and Actions” and the Call for Papers is available at: http://www.ifipwg94.org.uk/ifip-wg94-conference.

Submission deadline: 15th November 2010

While information and communications technologies (ICT) are now generally accepted to have a key developmental role, the actual process through which development is influenced remains a much debated issue. With the conference theme, Partners for Development: ICT Actors and Actions, we hope to draw special attention to the role played by multiple actors - public and private, activists and entrepreneurs as well as other kinds of intermediaries - within the ICT for development processes and their associated impacts. The conference hopes to provide a space for articulating a variety of approaches and views from these different types of actors in relation to ICT and sustainable development.

In addition to papers from the field of information systems, the conference chairs also invite contributions that address the conference theme from a variety of other perspectives such as development studies, political science, political economy, social anthropology, and sociology. Multidisciplinary papers and cases grounded in theory and panel proposals are very welcome.

For further information please contact Dr. G. Harindraneth, Conference Co-Chair, G.Harindranath@rhul.ac.uk

Cyber warfare and legal responsibility: drifting further apart?

Two cyber warfare trends are catching the eye, but both raise the same major question. First, cyber attacks have been democratised in recent years because of social media and easy to use denial of service attack (DDoS) tools. Popular armies have returned, made up not of a mass of bodies charging, a Clausewitzian centre of gravity on a field, but constituted by curious and enthusiastic citizens on the internet. As William Merrin argued at a keynote in 2009, security has been crowdsourced. US officials set up webcams along the Mexico border so that citizens can sit at leisure and watch for shadowy figures moving through the desert (and they do watch). Other national leaders have encouraged citizens to launch DDoS attacks against strategic targets. Sometimes, ordinary people just feel the urge to participate without any guidance, for instance the ‘Help Israel win’ group of students who targeted Hamas in the 2008-09 Gaza conflict. If thousands or even millions of people act collectively this way, where does legal responsibility lie for any harm caused? Is there legal responsibility for encouraging people to participate? Are people using digital media today out of patriotic gusto in ways that will later incriminate them?

Second, news media have reported a new super-cyber-weapon this week, the first digital nuke, apparently capable of destroying real-world objects. Previous malware just shut down systems or stole data. Once this new piece of malware touches a digital system (e.g. through a USB stick) the malware itself secretly takes control of the system, and can make it destroy whatever it is managing – a bank, a nuclear plant, whatever you can imagine. The designer can tell it what to target, but thereafter the software does its own thing. In terms of responsibility, whoever funds, designs and delivers such a weapon would seem the locus of responsibility. But not many nations have the expertise to detect such software. Successful attacks would just seem like industrial mishaps. Expect reports of mystery explosions near you (especially if you live in Iran).

Where does this leave international law? We’ve caught up with World War II and the regulation of mass armies and nukes. Who has the technical expertise, political will and diplomatic savvy to draw up laws for a world of crowdsourced armies and weaponized software?

(Cross-posted at http://duckofminerva.blogspot.com/)

(Thanks to Lawrence Ampofo for discussions about this topic)