This book offers an East-West comparative analysis of mediatised terrorism. This is the first country-specific analysis of the mediatisation of terrorism, with Pakistan and Australia representing the two worlds, respectively. Caught up in the ‘9/11 effect’, Australia is known for its anti-terror ‘hyper-legislation’, despite the implausible nature of the threat. In contrast, Pakistan is plagued by terrorism, yet the military establishment favours a duplicitous policy of fighting militant groups selectively. To understand how the two diverse cultural sites, with their very different experiences of terrorism, make sense of this unpredictable threat, the book uses Beck’s World Risk Society theory as a conceptual framework to examine the production and construction of news narratives around the risk of terrorism in both countries through textual analysis of local news stories and in-depth interviews with Australian and Pakistani journalists. Narratives about ‘global terrorism’ are mostly ‘Western’, with fear of its impact on ‘Western’ democracy and civilisation. This book aims to fill the gap and present a nuanced understanding of global terrorism by examining the characteristics of the phenomenon in a Western as well as an Eastern location and the ways in which the risk of terrorism is being played out in the two worlds. This book will be of much interest to students of critical terrorism studies, media studies, Asia-Pacific politics, and International Relations.

This is an excellent source which puts students in the heart of the contemporary discussion and encourages them to form opinions. It is a great resource for seminars as well as gateways to research. - Paul Matthews, University College Birmingham "An excellent text that covers not only how the media cover acts of terrorism but also how terror groups can manipulate the media." - David Lowe, Liverpool John Moores University Have the media contributed to exacerbating the political, cultural and religious divides within Western societies and the world at large? How can media be deployed to enrich, not inhibit, dialogue? To what extent has the media, in all its forms, questioned, celebrated or simply accepted the unleashing of a ′war on terror′? Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives brings together leading scholars to explore how the world′s media have influenced, and in turn, been influenced by terrorism and the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. Accessible and user-friendly with lively and current case studies, it is an essential handbook on the dynamics of war and the media in a global context.

This book analyses the Islamic State’s (IS) media and governance strategy from a critical media and cultural studies perspective. It deploys Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage and Foucault’s theories of dispositif (dispositive, apparatus) and biopower to understand the ways in which IS governed its subjects during the tenure of its so-called ‘caliphate’. This theoretical triangulation is used to situate the group as more than just a terrorist organisation, but rather as a more amorphous force with proclivities toward governance. The analysis of globally fluid and conjunctive terrorist strategies executed through media, governance and conduct, as part of and produced by IS’s dispositif, manifests in the group’s epistemology, discourse and social ontology. To analyse these processes, the book deploys a dispositif analysis of official IS administrative documents, media produced by the group’s English-language media wing (al-Hayat Media Center), and IS Twitter activity, including the use of nonhuman bots. In doing so, it seeks to reveal the resonance between IS’s media and governmental discourses, develop dispositif theory, and to argue for more context-specific formulations of biopolitics. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Terrorism Studies, social theory, media theory and International Relations.

This Handbook links the growing body of media and conflict research with the field of security studies. The academic sub-field of media and conflict has developed and expanded greatly over the past two decades. Operating across a diverse range of academic disciplines, academics are studying the impact the media has on governments pursuing war, responses to humanitarian crises and violent political struggles, and the role of the media as a facilitator of, and a threat to, both peace building and conflict prevention. This handbook seeks to consolidate existing knowledge by linking the body of conflict and media studies with work in security studies. The handbook is arranged into five parts: Theory and Principles. Media, the State and War Media and Human Security Media and Policymaking within the Security State New Issues in Security and Conflict and Future Directions For scholars of security studies, this handbook will provide a key point of reference for state of the art scholarship concerning the media-security nexus; for scholars of communication and media studies, the handbook will provide a comprehensive mapping of the media-conflict field.

Tarek Cherkaoui reveals how geo-political and ideological legacies of the past, which divide the world into a dichotomy of 'us' against 'them', play a dominant role in reinforcing the ensuing polarisation of our media.

This book examines the circulation and effects of radical discourse by analysing the role of mass media coverage in promoting or hindering radicalisation and acts of political violence. There is a new environment of conflict in the post-9/11 age, in which there appears to be emerging threats to security and stability in the shape of individuals and groups holding or espousing radical views about religion, ideology, often represented in the media as oppositional to Western values. This book asks what, if anything is new about these radicalising discourses, how and why they relate to political acts of violence and terror, and what the role of the mass media is in promoting or hindering them. This includes exploring how the acts themselves and explanations for them on the web are picked up and represented in mainstream television news media or Big Media, through the journalistic and editorial uses of words, phrases, graphics, images, and videos. It analyses how interpretations of the term 'radicalisation' are shaped by news representations through investigating audience responses, understandings and misunderstandings. Transnational in scope, this book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the connectivity and relationships that make up the new media ecology, especially those that appear to transcend the local and the global, accelerate the dissemination of radicalising discourses, and amplify media/public fears of political violence. This book will be of interest to students of security studies, media studies, terrorism studies, political science and sociology.

The first book-long analysis of the 'mediatization of politics', this volume aims to understand the transformations of the relationship between media and politics in recent decades, and explores how growing media autonomy, journalistic framing, media populism and new media technologies affect democratic processes.