A Good Storyline Won’t Win a War – Did the Taliban out-communicate our Generals?

(Written with Alister Miskimmon) Following the death of Osama bin Laden, political pressure is mounting for an early scaling down of British military troops presence in Afghanistan ahead of David Cameron’s deadline of 2014 for the end of Britain’s combat mission. With this in mind the British defence establishment is trying to understand their role in Afghanistan since 2001. Much of this soul-searching has focused on trying to explain why British forces have not been able to pacify sections of the Afghan population. Their explanation is that they have not been able to project the right storyline to Afghanis. They feel that they are being out-communicated by the Taliban, losing out to a more effective strategic narrative. This is presented as one reason Britain and NATO have failed to win hearts and minds. 

An example of such thinking was witnessed in Westminster this week in a session of the House of Commons Defence Select Committee.  General Sir Nicholas Houghton, Vice Chief of the Defence Staff, identified a critical moment as Britain’s efforts at "poppy eradication at the time of the deployment". "In the minds of some local Helmandis, and within the narrative of the Taliban," he said, this created the "idea that these [British] forces are coming here to eradicate your poppy and take your living away." Ultimately, "that worked against us in terms of strategic narrative." The incredulity of our most senior military officers that they could not convince Afghanis in Helmand of their good intentions suggests that they think of communication as an easy solution; as if finding the right strategic narrative would solve their operational problems.

Such a stance exposes the lack of clear goals in the first place. Failure to convince Afghanis stems more from a lack of clear British strategy than the ability of Taliban forces to present a more convincing counter narrative.

In our fast moving media ecology, projecting a coherent message is a challenge. However, there are some instances when governments are able to deliver a clear narrative. For example, the killing of Osama bin Laden was so clear it did not need to be explained – least of all to the United States’ citizens seen celebrating on the streets of American cities after the President announced the mission. President Obama did not even engage in the ensuing debate about the legal status of such an action. He let his actions speak for themselves.

Once war has begun, strategic narratives are about keeping domestic audiences on side, not about convincing those who you are invading. When hostilities begin it is too late to convince them. Trying to tell a reassuring or uplifting story to Afghanis that is contradicted by what they see and hear on the ground only opens up space for Britain to be accused of hypocrisy – a narrative with a long precedent in Central Asia and the Middle East.

2011-05-10 Ben O'Loughlin to speak at KCL on strategic communications

On May 9-10, 2011 King's College London will host a conference, 'Strategic Communications: The Cutting Edge' organised by David Betz and colleagues in partnership with CIWAG, US Naval War College. Ben O'Loughlin has been invited to speak about 'Harnessing the Media Ecology: Power and Decision-making in Diffused War'. 

Conference background: After an era of apparent stability during the Cold War, strategic communications faces a dilemma; some venture to call it a crisis. Gone are the certainties of a government’s ability to rely on a stable audience, clear-cut enemy, and reliable home support. A new media ecology has seen traditional outlets of press, radio and television interact with new, digital technologies of internet, mobile telephony and computers. These communications networks connect diverse and fragmented populations enabling vast amounts of data and images to cross the globe instantly whereby a local event can become an international news-story within minutes. As traditional barriers between home and foreign audiences disappear, the effect has been to undermine states’ attempts to project consistent and coherent strategic narratives into geopolitics. In recent months the release of hundreds of thousands of raw data files by the online whistleblower WikiLeaks has highlighted the degree to which states are vulnerable to fast-moving, high-volume communications. Wrong-footed by the latest potentially damaging revelation, state communicators appear defensive and their policy statements increasingly disjointed. More recently the events across the Middle East have served to underline the problems even authoritarian governments face when challenged by populations exploring a dynamic and porous media environment. This conference asks: is there a constructive way forward or is strategic communications dead?

The 2003 Iraq War will not be forgotten

The killing of Osama bin Laden allows political leaders to further disentangle Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole war on terror concept; to wind down some operations and refocus others; to bring some stories to light and push others aside, to be forgotten. But how do those who served in these wars feel about this? In today’s New York Times Captain Shannon P. Meehan, a US veteran of the 2003 Iraq War, published a powerful statement of alienation on this matter. Meehan felt no closure on hearing of bin Laden’s death. It only brought a sense of distance and disconnection. It reminded him he had been part of the bad war, the war whose meaning is already settled in what he calls the ‘shifting public memory of war’. And he must live with the severe injuries he suffered regardless. He writes: 

So, as much as I want to feel a part of this moment, to feel some sense that I contributed to it, I do not. As a veteran of the Iraq war, I do not feel entitled to any sort of meaningful connection to this achievement. Years of political and public criticism of the Iraq war has pushed me to believe that I did not fight terror, but rather a phantom.

With all the physical, mental and emotional pains I still have, I feel like a dying man who fought in a dying war, and that my body braces and hearing aids serve as a reminder that my greatest “achievement” in life will be remembered as a mistake.

This same week the last British male veteran of WW1 died. Claude Choules, who went on to spend most of his life in Australia, also seemed to remember his war with critical distance. In its public notice of Choules’ death, the UK Ministry of Defence noted, ‘Despite his impressive military career, Mr Choules became a pacifist. He was known to have disagreed with the celebration of Australia's most important war memorial holiday, Anzac Day, and refused to march in the annual commemoration parades.’ Although WW1 is settled in public memory as the ‘Great War’, Choules resisted this interpretation. What is interesting, today, is that Meehan is publicly reflecting on such a settled narrative. His challenging article is in mainstream media and being spread through social media. Choules had no such opportunity in his day. The new media ecology seems to accelerate both the creation and the contestation of war memory.

But memory is not just about media. Meehan draws attention to his physical pain, to injuries that remind him daily of the Iraq war. In Diffused War Andrew Hoskins and I explored Jay Winter’s concept of ‘embodied memory’ as something that is shared by the body of the sufferer and the gaze of the onlooker. If we have an obligation to remember, we must also look at veterans’ bodies and not just war films, news photos and milblogs. War memory is inscribed on bodies, and there are a lot of bodies from Iraq.

The killing of bin Laden and drawing back from Iraq won’t make the Iraq war disappear. The US and its allies will have to decide how they want to remember it, what memorials will be built, and how to deal with the ambiguities and divisions within the shifting public memory of the war.

Will the IRA blow up Will and Kate?

Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an event I attended this week, Patrick Mercer OBE, Conservative MP for Newark and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Transatlantic and International Security, warned that the three security threats facing Britain are Al-Qaeda inspired terrorism, violence ‘attached’ to student protests, and ‘Irish terrorists’ attacking the royal wedding. Mercer questioned the wisdom of holding a royal wedding so close to Easter, a time with historic significance for Irish republicans. The Easter Rising insurrection against British rule in Ireland began on 24 April 1916. The wedding date is also close to the 30th anniversary of the death of republican prisoner Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike on 5 May 1981. Don’t we understand ‘how Irish terrorists think’, asked Mercer. Yet, talking informally to journalists in London, I discovered many didn’t want to raise the matter because it might appear to strike a negative note and alienate readers at a time many view as one of national celebration.

If there is a threat of violent attacks on the wedding – and it is unlikely security services would make details public even if there were evidence that there was a threat – what would be an effective way to communicate it? Where does the balance lie between informing and scaremongering? This has been a dilemma for security journalists for decades. Government and journalists will face the same dilemma at the Olympics in a year’s time so it will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next week. 

Does the Arab Spring show how strategic narratives work?

Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday that moves the debate forward. As I have already written, strategic narratives are state-led projections of a sequence of events and identities, a tool through which political leaders try to give meaning to past, present and future in a way that justifies what they want to do. Getting others at home or abroad to accept or align with your narrative is a way to influence their behaviour. But like soft power, we have not yet demonstrated how strategic narratives work. We are documenting how great powers project narratives about the direction of the international system and their identities within that. We see the investments in public diplomacy and norm-promotion. We have not yet demonstrated that these projections have altered the behaviour of other states or publics. Does the Arab Spring show these narratives at work?

Many leaders in the West and protestors taking part in the Arab Spring promoted a narrative about the spread of freedom, often conflating this with the hope and vigour of youth and emancipatory potential of social media. Of course this narrative may be bogus, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno argues in yesterday’s New York Times. However, the key point Price makes is that narratives set expectations, regardless of their veracity. Narratives defined what NOME leaders were expected to do: step aside! We can see the power of narratives by seeing what happens to those who defy them. Mubarak and Saif Gaddafi both gave speeches where they were expected to align with the narrative. The narrative set the context and expectation for how they should behave. But they did the opposite of what was expected. Price writes:

From a perspective of "strategic narratives," Mubarak and young Gaddafi were speaking as players in an episode, set by key actors, international and domestic, who had the expectation that their wishes as to the playing out of the drama would be fulfilled. Their speeches did not match the sufficiently accepted script, in the case of Mubarak, or the incomplete outlines of one, as in the case of young Gaddafi.

Who has successfully promoted an overarching narrative? Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy? Where did the ‘Arab Spring’ narrative come from? How does an overarching narrative play out in each country? What room does it leave for individual governments and public to create their own destinies? In the next year, building up to a debate at the International Studies Association (ISA) convention in San Diego in April, we will be exploring this. 

CNN Effect revisited - Media, War & Conflict special issue out

I am delighted to announce that Media, War & Conflict have published a special issue revisiting the 'CNN effect' which drew so much attention in the 1990s. Back then, policymakers feared that if their publics could see events overseas unfold in real-time, those publics would expect their governments to take action. The space between event, deliberation and action seemed to be compressed to the instant. Over 15 years later, in a transformed media ecology, what is the relationship between media, publics and policy in the field of foreign policy?

The table of contents is below. For those without a subscript, please email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for copies of any of the articles.

New article - Distancing the Extraordinary: Audience Understandings of Radicalisation

A new article by Ben O'Loughlin, Carole Boudeau and Andrew Hoskins has been published exploring how audiences make sense 'radicalising' media such as jihadist websites even if they have never come into contact with them. The journal is published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, as part of a special issue on media and security cultures. The article can be accessed here. For those without a subscription, email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for a pdf version. The authors are grateful to Hari Harindranath and John Tebbutt for putting a great special issue together. 

Abstract:

The term radicalization proliferated in official and media discourses in the UK in 2005 and has become an anchoring concept in debates about jihadist-inspired political violence. This article presents original research from an investigation conducted in the UK and France in 2008 – 09 to elicit how audiences understand the term and concept of radicalization from multi-methodological analysis of their ordinary language. As a contribution at the intersection of media and security studies, our analysis indicates that audiences are aware of official and media discourses of radicalization, and that they establish disjunctures between those discourses and their own understandings of the concept of radicalization. Critically, these disjunctures are found in the way people talk about radicalization: in their use of language rather than the content of arguments expressed. In establishing these disjunctures through ordinary news talk, audience members position themselves as not-your-typical-viewer, making presumptions about other members of the same audience to which they belong. This supports Scannell’s theorization of mass media as for-anyone-as-someone structures, through which individuals are able to articulate their own sense of difference and identity.

Imperial War Museum trip - a student's view

Artist Jeremy Deller next to the car exhibitWalk into the foyer of the Imperial War Museum in London and you may be forgiven for thinking you were inside a ‘Modelzone’, a shop devoted to collectable war replicas. Littered across the atrium are countless examples of British military iconography. The Spitfire hangs valiantly from the rooftop, emblematic of the triumphalism often associated with military success and War in general. However, juxtaposed against these adulated instruments of warfare lies a burnt-out Volvo from Iraq. Simply entitled ‘5th March 2007’, the wreckage was salvaged from a car bomb explosion that took the lives of 38 people in a busy Baghdad market. Resembling little more than a contorted, rusting wreck, the car acts as a powerful image illustrating not only the literal implications of the Iraq conflict, but of War in general.

The museum offers a very different approach to mediatized forms of war reporting or dramatizations. No framing is in operation, no templates of previous conflicts are used, and exasperated Hollywood storylines do not feature. Instead the eclectic mix of exhibits offers scope for personal interpretation. The wreckage overrules the abstract notion of warfare we develop through the dissemination of news content. Often the constant barrage of images depicting violence and the subsequent unfathomable tally of casualties and fatalities make it difficult to comprehend the human cost of conflicts. Instead, here, the broader political relevance of warfare takes priority. Where the Imperial War Museum really excels is through the collections' ability to deconstruct this discourse and illustrate the realism of conflicts either through symbolism (e.g. 5th March 2007) or through moving personalised narratives, as witnessed within the Holocaust exhibit.

The effect of unmediated communication, directly from a person affected by a conflict to the information consumer, is extremely relevant in the New Political Communication field. Just as the private accounts of Holocaust survivors at the museum caused a much more emotive, tangible interpretation of the traumatic events of the Second World War, social media tools are increasingly connecting personal accounts of conflicts to individuals globally, as seen in recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. This poses an interesting question as to how these direct relationships will affect frame dominance during military action.

Thank you to the Imperial War Museum and Dr O’Loughlin for organising an engaging and informative tour.

James Dennis - @dennisdcfc

MSc New Political Communication 2010-11

Fight Back! A Reader on the Student Protests

It is clear that the student movement of last winter could well represent the genesis of a broader anti-cuts movement that poses not only serious questions to the coalition government and its policy agenda of budgetary austerity, but to how politics itself is conducted and contested in the UK over the coming years.

This movement, founded upon street protest, flashmobs and the utilization of online networks to organise, co-ordinate and disseminate its message(s) represents a shift away from a belief that the best approach to affecting policy outcomes is through the offline A to B march, lobbying and the parliamentary process. Indeed the favoured dictum of many protestors in the face of naysayers before the vote on the 9th of December was resolute and defiant,  "...what parliament can do, the streets can undo".

It is this mantra, manifest in the motifs and tactics of the movement, that seem to mark a return to non-parliamentary forms of political contestation in this country that are unprecedented in scale since before the Second World War and seem set to only grow stronger.

Fight Back! is an exploration of an important phase in the emergence of these dynamics. As Stuart White at Open Democracy put it "...Fight Back! is a 350 page reader that is both an initial, hasty record of the protests of November and December...as well as an argument about their originality. As such it has been welcomed from Andreas Whittam Smith in The Independent to Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing." It is as much a record and chronicle as it is analysis and critique.

Elsewhere White adds "...if indeed a new politics does emerge in response to the ultra-Thatcherism of the Coalition, the free downloading of Fight Back! may be seen as one of its starting points."

The text is keen to look at networked forms of protest and we are proud that it is publicly available as a free e-book and that the same values of open, participatory co-production through networks are maintained in how it is distributed. We are seeking to identify the genesis of new modes of political contestation and hope that the chosen model of co-production and distribution is equally innovative.

The launch of the hard copy of Fightback! will be on April 6th at Housmans bookstore where contributors including Nina Power, Anthony Barnett and Aaron Peters will speak.

Go to bit.ly/fightbackUK to download Fight Back! for free, read it on Kindle, join the debate and find out about forthcoming Fight Back! events. 

[Aaron Peters is a PhD student in the New Political Communication Unit. His research examines the internet, protest, and collective action.]