Debrix develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are organized by and supportive of a strong centralized US government - focusing on the exploitation of insecurities caused by 9/11 manifested in the US tabloid media.

This book analyzes the methods, effects, and mechanisms by which international relations reach the US citizen. Deftly dissecting the interrelationships of national identity formation, corporate 'news and opinion' dissemination, and the quasi-academic apparatus of war justification - focusing on the Bush administration's exploitation of the fear and insecurity caused by 9/11 and how this has manifested itself in the US media (especially the tabloid populist media). Debrix explains how all serve to defend and produce state power and develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are both organized by, and supportive of, a strong centralized US government. The field of International Relations sorely needs such analytics, in so far as it explains how people in their everyday lives relate to transnational issues. Tabloid Terror critically covers a wide variety of US popular culture from the Internet to Fox News; analyzes diverse authors as Julia Kristeva, J.G. Ballard and Robert Kaplan and takes into account renowned international relations interlocutors as Don Imus, Bill O'Reilly, and Tommy Franks.

This book introduces a constructivist approach to the study of terrorism and shows how language in the media affects our perceptions of 'terrorists' and how particular constructions of 'terrorist' automatically make certain counter-terrorism policies possible, logical and seemingly appropriate.

In this innovative new work, Steele shows how we might recognize how an alternative form of accountability in global politics has been present for some time, and that, furthermore, this form's continued presence remains one of the most politically powerful, if not endurable, possibilities for resistance in the near future.

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.

The US led programme of extraordinary rendition created profound challenges for the international system of human rights protection and rule of law. This book examines the efforts of authorities in Europe and the US to re-establish rule of law and respect for human rights through the investigation of the program and its outcomes. The contributions to this volume examine the supranational and national inquiries into the US CIA-led extraordinary rendition and secret detention programme in Europe. The book takes as a starting point two recent and far-reaching developments in delivering accountability and establishing the truth: First, the publication of the executive summary of the US Senate Intelligence Committee (Feinstein) Report, and second, various European Court of Human Rights judgments regarding the complicity of several state parties and the incompatibility of those actions with the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The collective volume provides the first stock-taking review of the state of affairs in the quest for accountability, and identifies significant obstacles in going even further -- as international law demands. It will be vital reading for students and scholars in a wide range of areas, including international relations, international law, public policy and counter-terrorism studies.

Deliberately eschewing disciplinary and temporal boundaries, this volume makes a major contribution to the de-traditionalization of political thinking within the discourses of international relations. Collecting the works of twenty-five theorists, this Ashgate Research Companion engages some of the most pressing aspects of political thinking in world politics today. The authors explore theoretical constitutions, critiques, and affirmations of uniquely modern forms of power, past and present. Among the themes and dynamics examined are textual appropriation and representation, materiality and capital formation, geopolitical dimensions of ecological crises, connections between representations of violence and securitization, subjectivity and genderization, counter-globalization politics, constructivism, biopolitics, post-colonial politics and theory, as well as the political prospects of emerging civic and cosmopolitan orders in a time of national, religious, and secular polarization. Radically different in their approaches, the authors critically assess the discourses of IR as interpretive frames that are indebted to the historical formation of concepts, and to particular negotiations of power that inform the main methodological practices usually granted primacy in the field. Students as well as seasoned scholars seeking to challenge accepted theoretical frameworks will find in these chapters fresh insights into contemporary world-political problems and new resources for their critical interrogation.