International Relations

Despite trends to consider film in the context of international relations, there has been very little real focus on how filmic sources can assist the understanding of war and peace. There is merit in analysing film in its own right; however, beyond this it can be a useful device for teaching and researching particular wars and aspects of them, as well as the relationship of film to war in general. This is demonstrated here by reference to the films about the Yugoslav War of the 1990s. However, exploring the detail of combat or cause or social impact in a particular conflict is not the only role film can play in teaching or research strategies. It is within the power of the moving image medium to explore the very essence and character of both a particular war and the very nature of war itself. This is shown to be the case with Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, where the constant tussle between escalation and ethics, which underpins the conceptual frames of strategy, relating ends and means, is evident. War ceases to be war if the restraints are removed. When they are, the ‘river of escalation’ leads into the dark-hearted loss of soul, the critical loss of political perspective and purpose and the apocalypse of futility.

Using the concept of Information War we explore the conditions and mediation of contemporary war. Examples from British anti-war and peace movements are then employed to better understand the importance of ‘symbolic struggles’, focusing on the importance of the internet in recent opposition to wars. These examples signify a shift away from the era where the mediation of war could be closely controlled towards one where the influences of journalists and public opinion are more ambiguous and uncertain. While there is little doubt that those who wage war remain powerful and superior, their need to seek legitimacy amongst their publics, together with the use of new media, provide an environment through which voices of dissent can more easily be amplified.

How has the threat of terrorism been portrayed in recent election campaigns? Looking at detailed evidence from nightly news programmes in the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States shows various similarities, but also important divergences in the political salience of ‘terrorism’ in the context of the contemporary ‘war on terror’ in which the governments of all three countries are involved. The evidence suggests that messages about terrorism play an emotive and important role in American and Russian elections. The British media and audience, however, appear to remain more rational and less emotional in discussions about terrorism during a national election. The ‘fear factor’ seems to be a tempting card to play, offering political leaders means of entrenching their positions.

Overwhelmingly the images and narratives of war and confl ict in various parts of the world are constructed in the imagination of policy makers and the general public by journalists in the fi eld. But how do journalists operate ‘in the fi eld’? This article is based on an analysis of journalists' autobiographies. It examines how war reporters refl ect on their life and motives, their experiences and their work. How do the dangers and fears that they face impact upon the ‘truths’ that they construct? How are Western journalistic notions of truth and objectivity understood and kept at the core of the war correspondent? How do gender dynamics impact upon the lives of journalists and, as a consequence, on their work and therefore on popular understandings of particular confl icts, and of confl ict in general? Finally, the article focuses on ‘witnessing’ in the changed circumstances of war, and how that affects journalists and journalism.

With newsmakers striving for ever greater visual immediacy and proximity to events, developments in the portability and the availability of audio-visual recording and broadcast devices continue to transform both how we experience mass-mediated terrorist attacks and their impact. At the same time, through shifting context, the reframing of meaning and massive selectivity, television and the broader media plunder the past for signs of stability, as though to mitigate the inherent instability of an obsession with the here-and-now with an intelligible there-and-then. This article addresses some of these temporal and spatial transformations of the media–catastrophe nexus of the post-9/11 climate in both containing and exacerbating insecurities.

The article examines how multi-ethnic publics negotiate questions of legitimacy. It explains the deep public scepticism surrounding the Iraq war (2003) and subsequent security policy, not just in terms of declining trust in Prime Minister Tony Blair and in the news media, but as a corrosive ‘legitimacy deficit’ with significant implications for the prospects of participatory democracy and multicultural citizenship. The arguments are grounded in a collaborative ethnography of news audiences across the UK, including multilingual and multi-ethnic ones. Using a Weberian framework, the article analyses the patterning of interviewees' responses to the justifications given for going to war, and it assesses the implications of the ‘legitimacy deficit’ for notions of security and UK security policy.

This article employs data gathered in Lebanon, Northern Ireland and South Africa as part of a project entitled ‘Re-Imagining Women's Security and Participation in Post-Conflict Societies’. It refl ects on three different ‘imaginings’ of security–the state security discourse, the human security discourse and a gendered security approach–with the aim of showing that security discourses are currently undergoing a process of transition which parallels that taking place in post-conflict societies around the world. The article is particularly concerned to explore how a gendered security approach might empower women to re-imagine security in contextualised, bottom-up ways, and advocate social transformation within the broader processes of post-conflict transition. In order to consider women's demands for security policies and approaches in the twenty-fi rst century, the article explores the direct testimony of women in three post-conflict societies, with specifi c reference to three key areas of security central to women's re-imaginings of the concept.

This article argues that contemporary security as a concept, practice and commodity is undergoing a rescaling, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, with previously international security concerns penetrating all levels of governance. Security is becoming more civic, urban, domestic and personal: security is coming home. In the context of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), asymmetric confl ict, the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘splintering’ of cosmopolitan urban centres, policy is increasingly centred around military derived constructions of risk. This securitisation is bound up in neoliberal economic competition between cities and regions for ‘global’ status, with security emerging as a key part of the offer for potential inward investment. The result is increasing temporary and permanent fortifi cation and surveillance, often symbolic or theatrical, in which privileged transnational elites gain feelings of safety at the expense of the liberty and mobility of ordinary citizens.