Libya and ‘the shadow of Iraq’

At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the Vietnam template in an op-ed: ‘in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise, because what we’re seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive’ (here, subscription required). The White House rarely responds to op-ed columns. Perhaps alarmed by possible parallels – afraid of the “quagmire” analogy – it responded directly to Friedman’s claim (here).

Yesterday the BBC’s Andrew North wrote:

There was something familiar in the night-time television images of broken concrete and twisted metal from Col Muammar Gaddafi's Tripoli compound - the shadow of Iraq.

The largest military intervention in the Middle East since the Iraq war is now well under way, and to many the goal looks the same - regime change.

North suggests two things can be seen, the television images and ‘the goals’. There is an implied relationship between how things look and the motives behind the actions that lead to the images. The television images look like television images we saw in Iraq, so what might be happening might be what happened in Iraq, for the reasons that motivated those intervening in Iraq. What happened in Iraq could be a convenient ‘template’ for future events, and North is trying to fit Libya into that template. North adds weight to his argument by claiming that the goals look the same ‘to many’. ‘Many’ is a nebulous collective, but the many are watching these images and perhaps the many are thinking what North is thinking. He tries to alert readers to ways in which history is repeating itself:

Twelve years of no-fly zones and sanctions could not dislodge Saddam Hussein - and in the meantime it was the Iraqi people who bore the cost.

The choice of templates is political, not just a matter of convenience. North is using the 2003 Iraq War template to make a point. He could have used other templates to make other points. The comparison may be valid, and such speculation may serve to provoke readers into more serious thought about what is happening in Libya. But clearly, at this moment, there is space for journalists to offer a range of frames and North has chosen to frame Libya as falling under ‘the shadow of Iraq’, a metaphor for the cost that fell on Iraqi people. North has used a journalistic technique to warn political leaders against a course of action. Let’s see whether this template gains traction, as Thomas Friedman’s did in 2006.

MSc New Political Communication for 2011 entry

For those seeking to understand the interplay of digital new media and communication technologies, political institutions, behaviour and public policy, with emphases on citizen engagement, mobilization, campaigning, and the role of new media in the global system.

The MSc, which has run since 2007, combines specialisation in the area of New Political Communication with the flexibility to choose from a wide range of optional courses. A 10–12000 word supervised research dissertation is written over the summer. Teaching is conducted in small group seminars, supplemented by individual tuition for the dissertation.

The MSc New Political Communication is accredited by the UK ESRC on a 1+3 basis as part of the South East Doctoral Training Consortium.

For further information and to apply online visit the MSc New Political Communication page.

Hoskins & O'Loughlin: new Journalism article on gatekeeping and translation

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.

A new article by Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin has been published in Journalism, entitled ‘Remediating jihad for western news audiences: The renewal of gatekeeping?’ The article is part of a special issue focusing on transcultural journalism and the politics of translation. Many thanks to Marie Gillespie and Gerd Baumann for putting the volume together and all the reviewers for helpful feedback on the article.

 

Click here to access the article (subscription required). The abstract is below.

Digitization creates an ontological challenge to broadcast-era metaphors (gate, channel, flow), not least to understandings of who news gatekeepers are, where gates lie, the presumed audience, community or culture gatekeeping is done for, and what it means to gatekeep. Analysing how jihadist speeches by bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri and others are translated and remediated from their original websites, languages and contexts by various intermediaries and by western mainstream news, including the BBC, illuminates an apparently simple, settled gatekeeping model that produces systematic patterns of translation, selection and omission. Western news creates an obstacle to understanding why such texts may be appealing to some audiences by ignoring intermediaries such as terrorism-monitoring sites, Arabic media, and jihadist websites’ own self-monitoring services, delimiting a ‘mainstream’ understanding. A focus on multilingual, multiplatform gatekeeping demonstrates how loci and forms of power and authority are changing in the ‘connective turn’, to which media practitioners and scholars must adapt.



New MSc programme, Transnational Security Studies

A new MSc programme in Transnational Security Studies has been launched by the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. The one-year MSc will run from September 2011.

The programme includes the course Media, War & Conflict as well as several options courses covering issues of global security and political communication.

For further details, including how to apply, see: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/politics-and-IR/News-and-Events/New-MSc-Programme.html

New journal article by Andrew Chadwick: "Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables"

Andrew Chadwick (2011) “Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables” Journal of Information Technology and Politics 8 (1): 21-40.

Abstract
This article presents an exploratory case study based on fieldwork consisting of in-depth, semistructured interviews and group discussions with administrative, legal, political, and technology staff involved in an online citizen engagement initiative in “TechCounty,” a pseudonymous U.S. local government authority operating in one of the most favorable sociodemographic and technological contexts imaginable. In contrast with many of the dominant approaches in the literature, the article reveals how a rich, complex, and sometimes surprising array of internal institutional variables explains the initiative’s failure. The article highlights the fragile and uncertain adoption of online engagement by public organizations and the significance of this study’s method for building theory and guiding future research.

Keywords: Citizen engagement; democracy; e-democracy; governance; Internet; online consultation; online forums; organizations; public services.

Link.

Email me or direct message me on Twitter if you would like a free PDF copy of this journal article.

India’s soft power is unclear

India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its political institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of others’ perceptions of India. Hence it was a surprise that a conference held in London this week, India as a Soft Power, concentrated almost exclusively on India itself.

It was certainly interesting to hear what Shashi Tharoor and other leading Indian political and cultural figures think about what story India should tell the world. As a nuclear power with tricky relations to regional neighbours like China and Pakistan, how India balances its use of military and economic resources against the softer methods of diplomacy or intangible cultural “influence” is important, both for local problems (Burma, Afghanistan) and the broader transition this century to a multipolar or non-polar order. How the Indian story is told through global media around breaking events and crises may also contain lessons for other states about controlling or letting go of “the message”. All governments try to manage opinion; can India avoid the sin of being seen to do so? 

But the success of India’s story depends on others. Indian soft power becomes significant if it has effects on the behaviour of other states or on public opinion towards India outside its borders. Have there been any effects or signs of effects? How would those in the Indian government be able to tell? First, we need to examine the foreign policy decisions of those India is trying to affect. Is there any evidence that China, the EU or the US have modified their actions because they have bought into an Indian narrative? Second, we need to see whether India’s story is indeed viewed positively. State departments in the US, UK and Canada have tools to measure the impact of their public diplomacy initiatives using a variety of digital, survey and face-to-face methods. While embryonic, these tools allow governments to track public responses around the world to its statements at summits, treaty negotiations and so on. This makes it possible to begin to evaluate not just whether “other people like us” but also why. If India is spending money on projecting its soft power, we might expect the Indian government to have a way to find out whether its efforts are having any impact.

The popularity outside India of Bollywood movies, Tata cars or Indian IT services does not mean India’s rivals will alter their foreign policies to align more closely with Indian strategic interests. The export of Coca-Cola and HBO box sets has not created US allies or persuaded non-US publics of the virtues of US foreign policy. To realise its interests, India will have to upset others at some point, and it will have to use at least the threat of hard power. And if India is to become a leading power, it will face the same dilemmas others face. Should it use soft power to put an attractive face on the use of hard power? Can its actions match its positive narrative or, as with every other leading power, will India eventually be accused of hypocrisy? Either way, India will need to find a way to understand how it is perceived. Until then, little certain will be known about Indian soft power. 

2011-02-17 Twenty20 Cricket as a Media Event? One day workshop

Nick Anstead (LSE) and Ben O’Loughlin will tomorrow present at an event, Twenty20 and the Future of Cricket at Royal Holloway, University of London. Their paper, entitled, ‘Media, identity, and the co-escalation of political and cricket controversies’, examines how media framing of Twenty20 cricket provides a framework for players, administrators and audiences to think through the political controversies associated with two shifts in balances of power. The first shift is one of format, from test match cricket to T20 as ‘the future of cricket’. The second is one of power, as the game’s administration gravitates from England and Australia to the emerging geopolitical power that is India. Based on analysis of Indian, UK and Australian media, they ask whether each nation’s media frame T20 as a different kind of media event (in Dayan and Katz’s terms) – of potential sporting contest, political conquest, or tradition-affirming coronation – and how this impedes or enables a sense of shared destiny among cricket-playing nations.

With the Cricket World Cup beginning in India on Saturday, this should be a lively and timely discussion of globalisation, sport and media, with participants from the BBC, Cricinfo and the International Herald Tribune amongst others. Thanks to Prof. Chris Rumford for organising the event.

Obama and Egypt: The Power of Inception?

On 4 June 2009 US President Obama went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world, where, among other things, he addressed the question of political reform and democracy in the Middle East. In February 2011 one Al-Jazeera columnist has associated the tumultuous changes in Egypt and Tunisia to the persuasive technique Inception, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant ideas in individuals’ minds by infiltrating their dreams. Larbi Sadiki writes, ‘A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic dreams have begun by the display of people's power in Tunisia.’

For political communication analysts eager to evaluate the impact of Obama-type speeches, public diplomacy campaigns, American movies and TV as cultural exports, or other methods through which ideas may be planted in the minds of foreign publics, can we isolate the impact of those efforts when so many other factors come into play? Did Obama successfully use the power of inception, or would the last few weeks’ changes have happened anyway? This raises the larger problem of explaining outcomes whose causes may be extremely long term and difficult to identify – political scientists still struggle to explain revolutions. Certainly, in the coming weeks, months and years it will be interesting to see whether US public diplomacy teams claim any credit for incepting change.

New book: Radicalisation & Media - out now

Routledge has published Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology, co-authored by Akil Awan, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin. The book presents results from our two-year ESRC-funded project on Radicalisation & Violence, which was awarded the maximum ‘Outstanding’ grade by the ESRC in 2010.

Our chief finding, in a nutshell, is that despite the potential connectivity between radicalising networks like Al-Qaeda and ‘vulnerable’ youth and ‘terrorised’ publics, there is in fact a profound and structural disconnection. Security policymakers, journalists and audiences have little agreed understanding of what ‘radicalisation’ might mean, but a residual sense of anxiety that there is something threatening out there, possibly close to home. That diffuse threat is often spoken about as radicalisation through the internet, over the web, which could happen anywhere, to anyone, "at the click of a button". Such statements do not aid public understanding of how individual opinions are shaped by on- and offline experiences, nor any evidence base of how and why individuals have turned to violence. Caught in the middle of this confusion are mainstream Security Journalists who deliver to audiences spasmodic episodes of bombings, arrests and warnings, the occasional, subtitled glimpse of an angry jihadist, but little insight or explanation of how political and religious violence is generated or prevented. Such news contributes to assumptions about an enduring social mainstream and radical margin which may indeed feed back into potential disaffection by those identified as potentially radical. In short, we suggest that discourse about radicalisation may be as significant for Western societies as discourses of radicalisation, i.e. actual jihadist propaganda.

The study offers a cross-section of global (un)connectivities across a series of critical security events since 2006 by integrating three strands of data: audience research from the UK, France, Denmark and Australia, an ethnography of jihadist culture, and analysis of English and Arabic-language news.

Please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk if you require further information or wish to receive a review copy from Routledge.