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Real war is a cruel theater of death, yet it is also an exciting narrative exploited for national, political and commercial purposes and turned into numerous films, television shows, computer games, news stories and reenactment plays. These essays examine the relationship between war, visual media and entertainment from a number of academic perspectives. Key topics include how war is used as an imaginary site to stage dramas; how boundaries between war, media, and entertainment dissolve as new media alters the formal qualities of representation; how entertainment is used to engage audiences; and what effect products of war and entertainment have on consumers of popular culture.

This book examines the digital explosion that has ripped across the battlefield, weaponizing our attention and making everyone a participant in wars without end.'Smart'devices, apps, archives and algorithms remove the bystander from war, collapsing the distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon. This has ruptured our capacity to make sense of war. Now we are all either victims or perpetrators. In Radical War, Ford and Hoskins reveal how contemporary war is legitimized, planned, fought, experienced, remembered and forgotten in a continuous and connected way, through digitally saturated fields of perception. Plotting the emerging relationship between data, attention and the power to control war, the authors chart the complex digital and human interdependencies that sustain political violence today. Through a unique, interdisciplinary lens, they map our disjointed experiences of conflict and illuminate this dystopian new ecology of war.

During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war's end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.

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.

This book examines how image affects war and whether image affects our understanding of war. Crucially, how can moving-image representation of conflict affect the legitimacy, conduct and outcome of contemporary warfare?The collapsing Twin Towers of September 11; the hooded figure at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; the images of beheadings on the internet; the emaciated figure in a Bosnian-Serb concentration camp; the dancing flashes across the skylines of Baghdad as US-led air bombardment deals blows to another ‘rogue'regime: such images define contemporary conflict.Drawing on a wide range of examples from fiction and factual film, current affairs and television news, as well as new digital media, this book introduces the notion of moving images as the key weapons in contemporary armed conflict. The authors make use of information about the US, the UK, the ‘War on Terror', the former Yugoslavia, former Soviet states, the Middle East and Africa.War, Image and Legitimacy will be of great interest to students of war and security studies, media and communication studies, and international relations in general.

This monograph, part of a larger study of ways to reduce collateral damage undertaken for the U.S. Air Force, analyzes media and public reactions to civilian casualty incidents, whether these incidents affect media reporting or public support for military operations, and, if so, how. It analyzes case studies of incidents of civilian deaths in the February 1991 bombing of the Al Firdos bunker in the Gulf War, the April and May 1999 attacks on the Djakovica convoy and Chinese embassy during the war in Kosovo, the June 2002 attack involving an Afghan wedding party during operations in Afghanistan, and the March 2003 incident involving a large explosion in a crowded Baghdad marketplace to describe and explain how the U.S. and foreign media and publics have responded. For each case study, the study team examined press, public, and leadership responses to these incidents and found the following. First, while avoiding civilian casualties is important to the American public, it has realistic expectations about the actual possibilities for avoiding casualties. Second, the press reports heavily on civilian casualty incidents. Third, adversaries understand the publicÂ's sensitivities to civilian deaths and have sought to exploit them. Fourth, during armed conflict, the belief that the United States and its allies are trying to avoid casualties most affects support for U.S. military operations, both at home and abroad. Fifth, while strong majorities of Americans typically give U.S. military and political leaders the benefit of the doubt when civilian casualty incidents occur, this does not necessarily extend to foreign audiences. Sixth, when civilian casualty incidents occur, it is at least as important to get the story right as to get the story out. Finally, attention to and concern about civilian casualties both at home and abroad have increased in recent years and may continue to do so.