Images as weapons of war: Representation, mediation and interpretation

Review of International Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 71-91

  O'Loughlin, Ben ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79953100587     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510000811     Document Type: Article

References (140)

1. Akil N. Awan, 'Virtual Jihadist media: Function, legitimacy, and radicalising efficacy', European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:3 (2007), pp. 389-408;
2. Indymedia, 'Fatima's letter and the subsequent assault on Abu Ghraib' (4 December 2004), {http://www.indymedia.org/en/2004/12/866081.shtml}.
3. After it was originally posted on Free Arab Voice (First posted on: {http://www.freearabvoice.org/Iraq/Report/report148.htm} - now unavailable) it was allegedly translated from Arabic into English by Mohammad Abu Nasr. The credibility of Nasr was doubted by the US State Dept (USINFO, 2005).
4. Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, The 'Taguba Report' On Treatment Of Abu Ghraib Prisoners In Iraq, Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, (2004), {http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/iraq/tagubarpt.html} .
5. BBC News, 'Details of US 'abuse' memos' (21 December 2004), {http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4114455.stm};
6. Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review of Books, 2004);
7. George R. Fay and Anthony R. Jones, Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Prison/Detention Facility and 205th Military Brigade, Department of Defense (2004), {http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/reports/ar15-6/AR15-6.pdf}.
8. Charles Babbington, 'Lawmakers Are Stunned By New Images of Abuse', Washington Post (13 May 2004), pA01, {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A22464-2004May12.html}.
9. Simon Cottle, Mediatized Conflict: Developments in Media and Conflict Studies (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), pp. 51-2.
10. Though the letter did inspire others to produce images representing 'Fatima', for example, 'Fatima: The virgin of Abu Ghraib', at: {http://analogizing.blogspot.com/2005/07/fatima-virgin-of-abu-ghraib.html}.
11. Marie Gillespie, Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the Iraq Crisis 2003: Full Research Report, ESRC End of Award Report, RES-223-25-0063 (Swindon: ESRC, 2007).
12. Howard Tumber and Frank Webster, Journalists Under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices (London: Sage, 2006), p. 21.
13. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Cambridge: Polity, 2010).
14. 'Juba' is a presence posting videos on jihadist websites of assassination-style killings 'he' claims to have carried out, but who may be many people. See Audrey K. Cronin, 'Cyber-Mobilization: The New Levéen Masse', Parameters (Summer 2006), pp. 77-87;
15. David Wright, 'Baghdad Sniper: Myth or Menace?', ABC News (10 February 2006), {http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1604797}.
16. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Fear (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), p. 19.
17. Milena Michalski and James Gow, War, Image, Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 5.
18. Milena Michalski and James Gow, War, Image, Legitimacy: Viewing Contemporary Conflict (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 205-18. Such an approach is deemed impossible by Brian McNair, who celebrates the unpredictability of meanings a story can generate. For McNair this 'chaos' is a democratic force, disrupting authorities' capacity to control communication.
19. See Brian McNair, Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World (London: Routledge, 2006).
20. Tumber and Webster, Journalists Under Fire.
21. Marvin Kalb and Carol Saivetz, 'The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict', Press/Politics, 12:3 (2007), pp. 43-66;
22. Angus Taverner, 'Dimensions of Perception: Shaping the British Approach to Information Strategy During Military Operations', in Sarah Maltby and Richard Keeble (eds), Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Bury St. Edmonds: Arima, 2007).
23. Helena K. Finn, 'The Case for Cultural Diplomacy', Foreign Affairs, 82:6 (2003), pp. 15-20; (Pubitemid 37364709)
24. David Hoffman, 'Beyond Public Diplomacy', Foreign Affairs, 81:2 (2002), pp. 83-95; (Pubitemid 41390264)
25. Karen P. Hughes, "'Waging Peace": A New Paradigm for Public Diplomacy', Mediterranean Quarterly, 18:2 (2007), pp. 18-36; (Pubitemid 46958357)
26. Liam Kennedy, 'Remembering September 11: photography as cultural diplomacy', International Affairs, 79:2 (2003), pp. 315-26;
27. Rhiannon Vickers, 'The New Public Diplomacy in Britain and Canada', British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6:2 (2004), pp. 182-94. (Pubitemid 38615667)
28. BBC News, 'Nine killed as Afghans rage at US' (13 May 2005), {http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south-asia/4544833.stm};
29. Philip Seib, The Al Jazeera Affect: How the New Global Media are Reshaping World Politics (Washington, DC.: Potomac Books, 2009), p. 52.
30. Richard C. Eichenberg, 'Victory has Many Friends: US Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force, 1981-2005', International Security, 30:1 (2005), pp. 7-45.
31. Cynthia Weber, 'Popular visual language as global communication: the remediation of United Airlines Flight 93', Review of International Studies, 34: S1 (2008), pp. 137-53.
32. W. J. T. Mitchell, 'There Are No Visual Media', Journal of Visual Culture, 4:2 (2005), pp. 257-66.
33. Cf. Nick Couldry, Sonia Livingstone and Tim Markham, Media consumption and public engagement: beyond the presumption of attention (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 5.
34. See for example Martin Shaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 139.
35. Luc Boltanski, (Translated by Graham Burchell), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
36. Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006).
37. Research by the Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG) in the 1980s and 1990s also sought to analyse audiences, texts and producers, including in the study of war and conflict; see for example GUMG, War and Peace News (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985). However, where the GUMG analysed single issues in short time periods, Shifting Securities was an iterative, flexible three-year study in which emerging hypotheses and findings from one methodological strand fed into the others, and hypotheses were tested across a number of events and issues.
38. Marie Gillespie, (Guest editor) 'After September 11 2001: Television News and Transnational Audiences', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32:6 (2006), pp. 923-46;
39. Marie Gillespie, (Guest editor) 'Media, Security and Multicultural Citizenship' Special Issue, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10:3 (2007), pp. 275-93;
40. Marie Gillespie, James Gow, Andrew Hoskins, Ben O'Loughlin, and Ivan Žveržhanovski, 'Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy', Ethnopolitics, 9:2 (2010), pp. 239-53;
41. Marie Gillespie, James Gow, Andrew Hoskins, Ben O'Loughlin, and Ivan Žveržhanovski, 'Shifting Securities: Theory, Practice and Methodology: A Response to Powers, Croft and Noble', Ethnopolitics, 9:2 (2010), pp. 269-74.
42. Gillespie, Shifting Securities;
43. Michalski and Gow, War, Image and Legitimacy.
44. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009);
45. Hoskins and O'Loughlin, War and Media.
46. Marie Gillespie and Ben O'Loughlin, 'News Media, Threats and Insecurities: an Ethnographic Approach', Cambridge Review of International Studies, 22:4 (2009), pp. 667-85.
47. Giles Moss and Ben O'Loughlin, 'Convincing Claims: Representation and Democracy in Post-9/11 Britain', Political Studies, 56:3 (2008), pp. 705-24.
48. The Shifting Securities project was funded by the ESRC as part of the New Security Challenges research programme (Award Ref RES-223-25-0063). Between October 2004 and March 2007 fourteen ethnographers spoke to 239 individuals across the UK, interviewing the same groups and families on several occasions to trace shifting perceptions of security, legitimacy and identity over time. The researchers were: Ammar Al Ghabban, Habiba Noor, Awa Hassan Ahmed, Atif Imtiaz, Akil Awan, Noureddine Miladi, Karen Qureshi, Zahbia Yousuf, David Herbert, Sadaf Rivzi, Somnath Batabyal, Awa Al Hassan, Olivia Allison and Marie Gillespie. In the same period James Gow and Ivan Žveržhanovski conducted 19 focus groups and 21 semi-structured interviews with news editors, journalists, government and military policymakers, and security 'experts'. Full project details can be found at: {www.mediatingsecurity.com}.
49. For confidentiality reasons it is not possible to identify their roles in any more detail.
50. Moss and O'Loughlin, 'Convincing Claims'.
51. Gillespie, Shifting Securities.
52. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group Z2.1, lines 290-97.
53. Robert Fisk, quoted in 'Iraq: The Hidden Story', Dispatches, Channel 4, 29 May 2006.
54. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
55. See Boltanski, Distant Suffering, pp. 10-11 on vengeance and the satisfaction some viewing of suffering can elicit.
56. Martin Bell, In Harm's Way (New York: Penguin, 1996, Revised Edition).
57. Boltanski, Distant Suffering;
58. Keith Tester, Compassion, Morality and the Media (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001);
59. Chouliaraki, Spectatorship.
60. Shifting Securities, Strand C, Focus Group 11, paragraph 14.
61. Shifting Securities, Strand C, Focus Group 11 paragraph 19.
62. Strand C, Focus Group 11 paragraph 18.
63. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Groups Z2.1, Z2.2, Z2.3, Z2.4 and Z2.5.
64. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group Z2.2, lines 33-45.
65. Sontag, Regarding, pp. 19, 21.
66. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999);
67. Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon: The Iraq War and Global Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
68. See also Keith Moxley, 'Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn', Journal of Visual Culture, 7:2 (2008), pp. 131-46.
69. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group Z2.2, lines 91-8.
70. Chouliaraki, Spectatorship, pp. 79-81. Additionally, the role of captions is therefore overlooked here. Yet whatever the medium through which Dominique viewed the Abu Ghraib photographs, the photographs would have been accompanied by a caption or voiceover - all media have multimodal properties.
71. For an overview of the journalists, scholars and policymakers who advanced the CNN effect thesis from the early 1990s onwards, see Eytan Gilboa, 'Global Television News and Foreign Policy: Debating the CNN Effect', International Studies Perspectives, 6 (2005), pp. 325-34.
72. The few studies to demonstrate observable effects of specific types of media coverage on specific types of policy decision are Piers Robinson, The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention (London & New York: Routledge, 2002);
73. and Steven Livingston, 'Clarifying the CNN Effect: An Examination of Media Effects According to Type of Military Intervention', Joan Shorenstein Center, Harvard University, Research Paper R-18 (1997).
74. Nik Gowing, Real-time television coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: Does it pressure or distort foreign policy decisions? (Cambridge, MA.: The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, 1994);
75. 'Global Television News';
76. Hoskins and O'Loughlin, Television and Terror, pp. 53-73;
77. Michalski and Gow, War, Image and Legitimacy, pp. 128-9;
78. W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence and Steven Livingston, When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), pp. 219-20, fn. 31);
79. Derek B. Miller, Media Pressure on Foreign Policy: The Evolving Theoretical Framework (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 10-7.
80. Bernard C. Cohen, 'The view from the academy', in W. Lance Bennett and David Paletz (eds), Taken by storm: The media, public opinion, and US foreign policy in the Gulf War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 174.
81. Michael Mandelbaum, 'The reluctance to intervene', Foreign Policy, vol. 95, p. 16.
82. Peter Lehr, Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 12-3.
83. Timothy M. Karcher, Understanding the 'Victory Disease', From the Little Bighorn, To Mogadishu, to the Future (2003, Fort Leavenworth, KS: Army Command and General Staff College, School of Advanced Military Studies).
84. Livingston, 'Clarifying the CNN Effect';
85. Piers Robinson, 'Operation Restore Hope and the Illusion of a News Media Driven Intervention', Political Studies, 49 (2001), pp. 941-56. (Pubitemid 33388241)
86. Gilboa, 'Global Television News'.
87. Livingston, 'Clarifying the CNN Effect'.
88. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 265.
89. On the 'bodybag effect' see also Lawrence Freedman, 'Victims and victors: reflections on the Kosovo War', Review of International Studies, 26:3 (2000) pp. 335-58.
90. Sontag, Regarding, pp. 32-3. Emphasis added.
91. Eric V. Larson and Bogdan Savych, Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime (Santa Monica, CA.: RAND Corporation, 2007).
92. Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 56-79.
93. Bill Durodie, 'Fear and Terror in a Post-Political Age', Government and Opposition, 42:3 (2007), pp. 427-50.
94. MSNBC.com 'US probes shooting at Fallujah mosque' (16 November 2004), {http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/6496898/}.
95. Shifting Securities, Strand C, Focus Group 11, para. 19.
96. Marie Gillespie, James Gow, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, 'Shifting Securities: News Cultures, Multicultural Society and Legitimacy', Ethnopolitics (2009).
97. On 20 May 2005 the New York Post in the US and The Sun in the UK published photos of Saddam Hussein in underwear.
98. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group K11, lines 206-17.
99. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group K11, lines 221-41.
100. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group K11, lines 493-7, 559-60.
101. Stephen Crocker, 'Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben', CTheory (28 March 2007), {http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574} .
102. A series of the photographs of the incident are available at: {http://www.guardian. co.uk/galleryguide/0, 6191, 377275, 00.html}.
103. Thomas F. Heck, Picturing performance: the iconography of the performing arts in concept and practice (Rochester, N. Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1999), p. 34. Iconography is a term and approach originating in art history.
104. See Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970)
105. and Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (London: Icon, 1972).
106. Andrew Hoskins, Televising War: From Vietnam to Iraq (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), pp. 106-25.
107. Gal Beckerman, 'The Unpeaceful Rest of Mohammed Al-Dura', Columbia Journalism Review (3 October 2007), {http://www.cjr.org/behind-the-news/the- unpeaceful-rest-of-mohamme.php?page=all}.
108. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group K14, lines 1645-65.
109. Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change (London: Routledge, 1995).
110. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Focus Group Z2.4, lines 82-5.
111. It is perhaps notable that in 142 interviews in the Shifting Securities study, cinema or miniseries were mentioned 14 times in this way.
112. Readers may also explore the literature on moral panics, which contain explorations of the sources of apparent underlying social fears. See Stan Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (St. Albans, UK: Paladin, 1973);
113. Stan Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (3rd edition) (London: Routledge, 2002);
114. Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Bryan Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978).
115. Boltanski, Distant Suffering.
116. Brigitte Nacos, 'Terrorism as Breaking News: Attack on America', Political Science Quarterly, 181:1, (2003), pp. 23-52. (Pubitemid 36593960)
117. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, p. 53.
118. Chouliaraki, Spectatorship, pp. 137-55.
119. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Interview K15, lines 451-6.
120. This is supported by several studies: Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (London: Routledge, 1991);
121. Ien Ang, Living Room Wars (London: Routledge, 1996);
122. John Fiske, 'Moments of Television: Neither the Text Nor the Audience', in Ellen Seiter, H. Borchers, G. Kreutzner and E-M. Warth (eds), Remote Control (London: Routledge, 1989);
123. Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity and Cultural Change;
124. David Morley, Television Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1992).
125. This is not an original claim but is often overlooked in policy and academic discussion of images as 'weapons'. Media studies scholars have long established that the meaning of images is 'anchored' in surrounding text or commentary. See for example, Robert Hamilton, 'Image and Context', in Jeffrey Walsh and James Aulich (eds), Vietnam Images (London: Macmillan, 1989).
126. Shifting Securities, Strand A, Interview MG2, lines 639-93.
127. Colin L. Powell 'Remarks to the UN Security Council'; (5 February 2003), {http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/iraq/2003/iraq-030205-powell-un- 17300pf.htm}.
128. Deborah Potter, 'Viewer Beware: Stations Are Re-enacting Scenes, Adding Sounds and Adopting Other Misleading Practices', American Journalism Review, 26 (February-March 2004).
129. Examples of studies attempting to understand how war and media are altered by this new context include: McNair, Cultural Chaos;
130. Hoskins and O'Loughlin, War and Media;
131. and Steven R. Corman, Angela Trethewey, and H. L. Goodall, Jr. (eds), Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Strategic Communication to Combat Violent Extremism (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
132. Useful accounts of global uncertainty, within which we can discern relations between war and media as but a part, include Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006);
133. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007);
134. and Philip Bobbitt Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century (London: Penguin, 2008)
135. Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst, Audiences - A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination (London: Sage, 1998).
136. On manufacturing consent, see Edward S. Herman, and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).
137. On recent models, see Bennett, Lawrence and Livingston, When the Press Fails;
138. Robinson, The CNN Effect;
139. Robert W. Entman, Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and US Foreign Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
140. For example the AHRC programme Beyond Text: Sounds, Voices, Images, and Objects; the AHRC-funded projects Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones and the BBC World Service {http://www.open. ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/}, and Mediating and Commemorating the 2005 London Bombings; the ESRC-funded project Legitimising the discourses of radicalisation: Political violence in the new media ecology.