This collection of essays explores current issues surrounding the media and conflict in the Twenty-first Century. Essays will look at the role of evolving media technologies, the globalization of television and communications, public diplomacy, gender and war coverage, terrorism, and other issues.
A leading foreign correspondent looks at how social media has transformed the modern battlefield, and how wars are fought Modern warfare is a war of narratives, where bullets are fired both physically and virtually. Whether you are a president or a terrorist, if you don't understand how to deploy the power of social media effectively you may win the odd battle but you will lose a twenty-first century war. Here, journalist David Patrikarakos draws on unprecedented access to key players to provide a new narrative for modern warfare. He travels thousands of miles across continents to meet a de-radicalized female member of ISIS recruited via Skype, a liberal Russian in Siberia who takes a job manufacturing "Ukrainian" news, and many others to explore the way social media has transformed the way we fight, win, and consume wars-and what this means for the world going forward.
As the nature of war has changed, so has the role of civilians caught up in war. In an increasingly interconnected and globalized world, the way that media, civil society, and nongovernmental actors engage with conflict can be as important as what happens on the battlefield. Forty years after the birth of the human rights movement, nongovernmental activists use naming and shaming and other tactics to draw boundaries on warring parties' actions and to shape the legal standards by which they will be judged. Meanwhile, the growth of "embed journalism" and the 24-hour news cycle gives the public a ringside seat to conflict. The articles in this anthology focus on the small cadre of individuals-journalists, lawyers, humanitarians, and civil society activists-who are often caught between the population and combatants in modern conflicts. Experts outline the dilemmas these individuals face in navigating the complexity of 21st century conflict environments and analyze their impact on modern warfare. Book jacket.
Warfare has migrated into cities. From Mosul to Mumbai, Aleppo to Marawi, the major military battles of the twenty-first century have taken place in densely populated urban areas. Why has this happened? What are the defining characteristics of urban warfare today? What are its military and political implications? Leading sociologist Anthony King answers these critical questions through close analysis of recent urban battles and their historical antecedents. Exploring the changing typography and evolving tactics of the urban battlescape, he shows that although not all methods used in urban warfare are new, operations in cities today have become highly distinctive. Urban warfare has coalesced into gruelling micro-sieges, which extend from street level – and below – to the airspace high above the city, as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets and districts. At the same time, digitalized social media and information networks communicate these battles to global audiences across an urban archipelago, with these spectators often becoming active participants in the fight. A timely reminder of the costs and the horror of war and violence in cities, this book offers an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction to urban warfare in the new millennium for students of international security, urban studies and military science, as well as military professionals.
Based on interviews and workshops with refugees in both countries, the book develops the concept of "migrantification" - in which people are made into migrants by the state, the media and members of society.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. This boldly original book traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. Kris Fallon examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that the ideological rifts of the period inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape the documentation of everything from widespread cultural spectacles like wars and presidential elections to more invisible or isolated phenomena like the Abu Ghraib torture scandal or the “fake news” debates of 2016.
In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans. Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.
Eisenstein tracks developments such as racialized ethnic and gender conflict; the new male democracies of eastern Europe; the new Democrats of the Clinton era - exploring the `politics of hate'. In HATREDS, Zillah Eisenstein charts the plural politics of the twenty-first century, which she defines as having begun with the fall of communism and the gulf war. Exploring the politics of hate on both global and local levels, Eisenstein tracks developments such as racialized ethnic and gender conflict, the new male democracies of eastern Europe and the new Democrats of the Clinton era, the sexual exploitation of the west and the sexual violence of nationalisms, and the importance of western feminisms' promissory standpoint of freedom to women in the third world.
Policy Analysis in the Twenty-First Century is designed to familiarize students with the diversity of experiences that they can expect to face in their practitioner role. Case studies illustrate realities in the current policy analysis environment as well as the analyst's personal values and career goals.