This edited volume examines theoretical and empirical issues relating to violence and war and its implications for media, culture and society. Over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of books, films and art on the subject of violence and war. However, this is the first volume that offers a varied analysis which has wider implications for several disciplines, thus providing the reader with a text that is both multi-faceted and accessible. This book introduces the current debates surrounding this topic through five particular lenses: the historical involves an examination of historical patterns of the communication of violence and war through a variety sources the cultural utilises the cultural studies perspective to engage with issues of violence, visibility and spectatorship the sociological focuses on how terrorism, violence and war are remembered and negotiated in the public sphere the political offers an exploration into the politics of assigning blame for war, the influence of psychology on media actors, and new media political communication issues in relation to the state and the media the gender-studies perspective provides an analysis of violence and war from a gender studies viewpoint. Violence and War in Culture and the Media will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, media and communications studies, sociology, security studies and political science.

"What is the role of the British media in our perception of warfare? Are the impressions which we glean from war films, television news reports and newspaper stories reliable? What are the issues - practical and political - involved in bringing reports of armed conflict to our television screens? Are British military institutions fairly represented, and how are enemy forces portrayed? How are ideas of nationalism and patriotism incorporated into the presentation of war?" "These are some of the questions addressed in this new collection of essays. The book is intended to provide students and general readers with a concise introduction to the main arguments and issues surrounding war and the moving image media in 20th century Britain, as well as contributing new perspectives to this increasingly important area of debate." "Among the subjects discussed are: the media build-up to the Gulf War; representations of the First World War; reporting terrorism; British imperialism in film; transmission technologies and the news reporting of armed conflict; the meaning of war-toys and war-games; and postmodernism and military history."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

For at least 45 years, the Cold War was the most important fact of American public life. It conditioned what people thought, said, wrote, watched, read, and heard; it shaped politics, journalism, education, art, literature, all forms of popular entertainment and even children's toys. 'Cold War Culture' is a concise guide to the expression of American Cold War sensibilities.

Portrayed in Western discourse as tribal and traditional, Afghans have in fact intensely debated women's rights, democracy, modernity, and Islam as part of their nation building in the post-9/11 era. Wazhmah Osman places television at the heart of these public and politically charged clashes while revealing how the medium also provides war-weary Afghans with a semblance of open discussion and healing. After four decades of gender and sectarian violence, she argues, the internationally funded media sector has the potential to bring about justice, national integration, and peace. Fieldwork from across Afghanistan allowed Osman to record the voices of many Afghan media producers and people. Afghans offer their own seldom-heard views on the country's cultural progress and belief systems, their understandings of themselves, and the role of international interventions. Osman analyzes the impact of transnational media and foreign funding while keeping the focus on local cultural contestations, productions, and social movements. As a result, she redirects the global dialogue about Afghanistan to Afghans and challenges top-down narratives of humanitarian development.

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media. War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics. This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.

Militainment, Inc. offers provocative, sometimes disturbing insight into the ways that war is presented and viewed as entertainment—or "militainment"—in contemporary American popular culture. War has been the subject of entertainment for centuries, but Roger Stahl argues that a new interactive mode of militarized entertainment is recruiting its audience as virtual-citizen soldiers. The author examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the ways that war now invites audiences to enter the spectacle as an interactive participant through a variety of channels—from news coverage to online video games to reality television. Simply put, rather than presenting war as something to be watched, the new interactive militainment presents war as something to be played and experienced vicariously. Stahl examines the challenges that this new mode of militarized entertainment poses for democracy, and explores the controversies and resistant practices that it has inspired. This volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the relationship between war and media, and it sheds surprising light on the connections between virtual battlefields and the international conflicts unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan today.

By exploring the role of both culture and the mass media, this volume fills a gap in the literature on war and peace. Outstanding scholars provide an overview of critical mass media research and open up entirely new perspectives on the ongoing debate over communications issues in war and peace. The contributions bring together common themes including the military-industrial-communications complex, cultural imperialism and transnational control of communications. Various perspectives are covered, such as gender issues, language study and bureaucratization.