BBC spy miniseries upsets China, but how real is it? Let’s play Spooks bingo!

The BBC has offended the Chinese government because its primetime show Spooks (Mi5 in North America) has depicted Chinese intelligence agents in an unflattering light, reported here and here in the last few days. The plot saw MI5 trying to prevent an ‘ethnic weapon’ falling into Chinese hands, with much chasing around London and a few sinister and, perhaps, stereotypically Chinese baddies (judge for yourself in the Guardian screenshot here). 

As somebody who has written about Spooks and the war on terror (Chapter 7 of this), only to meet gentle mockery from my students, colleagues and indeed co-author, I can only say thank you to the Chinese government for suggesting Spooks is significant; that representations of international politics make a difference to international politics; enough of a difference to kick up a diplomatic rumpus.

But how much do the threats represented in Spooks match the priorities and intelligence of British defence and security agencies? One way to find out is to look at the threats listed in Britain’s latest National Security Strategy, just out, and see what happens in the next series of Spooks in 2011. That’s right, its time to tick off the threats as they appear, and you can play along at home or on BBC i-player. Here are threats, ranked into three tiers:

National Security Strategy: Priority Risks

Tier One: The National Security Council considered the following groups of risks to be those of highest priority for UK national security looking ahead, taking account of both likelihood and impact.

• International terrorism affecting the UK or its interests, including a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack by terrorists; and/or a significant increase in the levels of terrorism relating to Northern Ireland.

• Hostile attacks upon UK cyber space by other states and large scale cyber crime. • A major accident or natural hazard which requires a national response, such as severe coastal flooding affecting three or more regions of the UK, or an influenza pandemic.

• An international military crisis between states, drawing in the UK, and its allies as well as other states and non-state actors.

Tier Two: The National Security Council considered the following groups of risks to be the next highest priority looking ahead, taking account of both likelihood and impact. (For example, a CBRN attack on the UK by a state was judged to be low likelihood, but high impact.)

• An attack on the UK or its Oversees Territories by another state or proxy using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) weapons.

• Risk of major instability, insurgency or civil war overseas which creates an environment that terrorists can exploit to threaten the UK.

• A significant increase in the level of organised crime affecting the UK.

• Severe disruption to information received, transmitted or collected by satellites, possibly as the result of a deliberate attack by another state.

Tier Three: The National Security Council considered the following groups of risks to be the next highest priority after taking account of both likelihood and impact.

• A large scale conventional military attack on the UK by another state (not involving the use of CBRN weapons) resulting in fatalities and damage to infrastructure within the UK.

• A significant increase in the level of terrorists, organised criminals, illegal immigrants and illicit goods trying to cross the UK border to enter the UK.

• Disruption to oil or gas supplies to the UK, or price instability, as a result of war, accident, major political upheaval or deliberate manipulation of supply by producers.

• A major release of radioactive material from a civil nuclear site within the UK which affects one or more regions.

• A conventional attack by a state on another NATO or EU member to which the UK would have to respond.

• An attack on a UK overseas territory as the result of a sovereignty dispute or a wider regional conflict.

• Short to medium term disruption to international supplies of resources (e.g. food, minerals) essential to the UK. (HM Government, 2010: 27)

2011-03-09: Dr Aeron Davis speaking

March 9, 2011: Dr Aeron Davis (Goldsmiths, University of London).

Time: 5.30pm.

Location: Founders FW101. All welcome.

Title: to be confirmed.

About Aeron Davis

Aeron Davis has worked in departments of politics, sociology and media and communication. His research and teaching merges elements of each of these disciplines, and includes: public relations, politics and political communication; promotional culture, media sociology and news production; markets and economic sociology; elites and power. He has investigated communication at Westminster, the London Stock Exchange, amongst the major political parties and across the trade union movement. Along the way he has interviewed close to 300 high-profile individuals employed in journalism, public relations, politics, business, finance, NGOs and the civil service. He has published on each of these topics in journals and edited collections and is the author of Public Relations Democracy (MUP, 2002), The Mediation of Politics (Routledge, 2007), and Political Communication and Social Theory (Routledge, 2010). He is currently working on a book for Polity Press on the rise of promotional culture. He is the Director of the Goldsmiths MA in Political Communication, an active member of the Centre for the Study of Global Media & Democracy and a participant in the Goldsmiths Leverhulme Media Research Centre.

After Wikileaks; or, the next phase of Diffused War?

In Diffused War, Andrew Hoskins and I argued we’ve entered a new paradigm of warfare. The wikileaks stories seem to confirm much of this account. War is mediatized, we wrote, as the institutions of war and those affected by war take a form governed by continual media recording, display and archiving. This creates diffuse causal relations between action and effect, since mediatization can amplify or contain the cognitive and emotional response any action generates in ways not dependent on the initial action itself. Militaries, NGOs, insurgents, journalists – none can predict the outcomes of their actions or the display of their actions. US and UK military practitioners did not envisage their communications going public, but their institutions allowed those records to exist. Hence this leads to greater uncertainty for those conducting war. While who sees what, when, and where is usually largely controlled (most people still rely on mainstream media), the potential for surprises is permanent and unavoidable, such that the worst case must always be built into decision-making.

In contrast to the splutterings of military chiefs, for my students wikileaks is already the norm. So what should we expect to see next? Where might novelty lie? Let’s take a risk and look briefly at some ideas in contemporary art, which has long dealt with mediatization and how it reconfigures human relationships and our ideas of the image and representation. Nicolas Bourriaud recently wrote that, in our ‘control+S’ culture of instant archiving of all political and social life, ‘an insistence on the “here and now” of the artistic event and a refusal to record it are a challenge to the art world’.  What is notable now is what goes unrecorded or is not made public. He discusses Brian de Palma’s 2003 Iraq war film Redacted, which pieces together soldiers’ blogs, cameraphone footage and other media from the war to produce a style of ‘organized proliferation’ that is now common in TV and movies generally. Pushed to its limit, Bourriaud suggests, ‘the degree of spatial (and imaginary) clutter is such that the slightest gap in its chain produces a visual effect’. In other words, we now expect the depiction of war to amalgamate several media recording technologies, a chain of styles, textualities and episodes edited into any single news summary or Hollywood movie. And if a gap occurs, something is wrong. If no citizen-generated content emerges, that is surprising. If footage from the helicopter gunship’s point of view is absent from the news report, and we now know such a perspective is continually recorded, then at least a few members of the audience might begin to ask why.

We’d expect the next phase of military media management to employ the full range of textual styles to which audiences are now accustomed. But perhaps a truly pre-emptive PR agent would deliberately create a full, convincing range of leaks for wikileaks such that a controlled version of the worst is already admitted, and so it appears there are no surprising gaps. 

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.