International Winter School Program 2025, Media in Wartime

American Journal of Sociology, 2006

European Journal of International Relations, 2020

The 2011-2012 Arab Spring posed an existential threat to the Gulf Cooperation Council's six monarchies. A major response was the 2012 GCC Internal Security Pact, an innovative project to enhance cross-border repression of domestic opposition and thus bolster collective security. Yet despite its historic weakness, ongoing domestic unrest, and initial enthusiasm for the agreement, Kuwait's monarchy did not ultimately ratify the accord. Building on theories of foreign policy roles and identity, this article presents an ideational explanation for this puzzle. The Security Pact failed because it sparked identity contestation. For many Kuwaitis, the prospect of the Sabah monarchy imposing this scheme for greater repression was incompatible with the regime's historical role of tolerating domestic pluralism and protecting Kuwait from foreign pressures. This role conception of a tolerant protector flowed from historical understandings and collective memory and was cognitively tied to a national self-conception of "Kuwaiti-ness." The mobilizational scope and symbolic power of this popular opposition convinced the regime to acquiesce, despite possessing the strategic incentive and resources to impose the treaty by force. The Kuwaiti case therefore exemplifies how domestic contestation over regime identities and roles can constrain foreign policy behavior, even in authoritarian states facing severe crises of insecurity.

Eric Davis's new book joins a growing body of literature in Middle East studies that examines how the state builds the nation. It focuses on how the modern Iraqi state, created after World War I, experimented with various styles of historical memory so as to provide a historical depth to the modern idea of Iraqi nationhood. Davis argues that throughout its history the Iraqi state, just like Iraqis themselves, had one of two choices for constructing a sense of historical memory: an Iraqist nationalist model, which accepted the new state, or a pan-Arabist model, which emphasized that Iraq was a natural region within a larger Arab world. Davis argues that the Iraqist nationalist model was more suited to the multiethnic realities of the country. He traces most of the maladies of modern Iraq to the triumph of the pan-Arabist model, first under a Hijazi monarchy, which had no roots in Iraq, and subsequently under various republican regimes. The pan-Arabist model benefited from the fact that its proponents dominated the educational establishment as well as a good part of the officer corps. It also benefited from the fact that throughout Iraq's modern history, it was only pan-Arabists who took historical memory seriously. They could further offer a simple, coherent narrative based on the notion of an Arab golden age centering around the Baghdad ca-liphate. In addition, by highlighting the Arab nation as a victim of various colonial conspiracies, the pan-Arab narrative seemed to reflect the genuine feeling of a significant segment of the populace. By contrast, the Iraqist nationalist vision was more nuanced and thus less capable of being deployed politically. Iraqist nationalists furthermore seemed to have abandoned questions of culture and collective memory altogether, and their intellectual discourse remained elitist and Western oriented. The resilience of the pan-Arab paradigm in Iraqi political culture is evident in that major setbacks to the Arab world at large, including the debacle in Palestine in 1948, seemed only to strengthen and further validate its narrative of a great nation victimized by imperialist forces and their local acolytes. Davis views the Qasim regime following the monarchy (1958–63) as one moment that offered hope for a coherent and popular compromise to the question of Iraq as a nation. That opportunity was squandered because of many factors, including the new regime's combination of indecisiveness and authoritarianism. With Saddam Hussein monopolizing power by 1979, the Iraqi state's investment in historical memory assumed epic proportions. The state sponsored the building of monuments glorifying its own vision of history, brought forth countless cultural magazines, conferences, and publications,

2007

The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the practices of public discourse pertinent to conflicts and identities in the Arab and Muslim world. They all take an ethnomethodological stance, which reveals the illusionary character of any 'culturalist' interpretation of conflicts related to the Middle-East and Islam of the kind proposed, for example, by Huntington. It instead points to the close association of the categorization processes, the audiences toward which speeches are oriented, and the media used.

Middle East Journal, 2017

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a critical juncture in both countries' histories. With unprecedented access to internal Iraqi documents about the invasion of Kuwait, this article underscores how the Iraqi leadership perceived Kuwait, assesses the Iraqi regime's objectives in Kuwait, and analyzes Kuwaiti resistance to the Iraqi occupation. The article ultimately aims to show that Iraq's policies of violence and dispossession in Kuwait were similar to tactics the Ba'thist regime had used before against internal opponents.

Handbook of terrorism in the Middle East , 2022

This chapter examines the use of violence by Islamist actors in the Kuwaiti context by exploring the ideological challenge posed by Islamist ideology and how it has been co-opted in the service of different agendas. First, we will unpack the lexicon of Islamist actors in Kuwait, including Kuwaiti Brotherhood and Salafi movements. Second, we will examine trajectories of activism amongst Kuwaiti Islamists and the spheres in which these actors exert influences and the transformative role of the first Gulf War (July 1990 to February 1991) on the Islamist space. Following this we will examine the relationship between Kuwaiti Islamists and political and violent activism, including the role of Kuwaiti Brotherhood and various Islamist affiliated associations in supporting jihadist factions in current regional conflicts, i.e. Syria, Iraq and Libya. The final section will explore state responses to extremism and various projects undertaken by the state to counter the appeal of Islamist ideology. All of this will be demonstrated in an effort to argue that while Kuwait has taken very positive steps to delink itself from Brotherhood influence, the depth of penetration of Brotherhood-driven Islamist narratives makes the task a complex one. In addition, countering the appeal of extremist narratives amongst Kuwait’s local population is complicated by structural features of Kuwaiti society, such as the presence of large numbers of quasi-stateless ‘Bidoon’ who do not enjoy the rights of citizenship and thus remain vulnerable to anti-state grievance narratives.

PhD Thesis, 2010

This comparative evaluation of CNN and Aljazeera is informed by prior discussion of the following themes. Firstly, the conceptualization of media bias through the perspectives of media sociology, propaganda analysis, and the framing paradigm; secondly, the growing sophistication of wartime propaganda in the context of news media coverage and the public sphere generally; thirdly, the development of Orientalism and the official discourse on terrorism, as well as their convergence in constructing otherness during the post 9/11 era; fourthly, the emergence of CNN and its framing of conflicts in the Middle East; fifthly, the evolution of pan-Arabism and its influence on Arab transnational media, especially in regard to Aljazeera. This dissertation contributes to academic research by uncovering the workings of U.S. military propaganda in the context of the 2003 Iraq War, and showing how military propaganda practices worked in duo with framing processes adopted by American news media generally, and CNNI in particular. It also reveals how Arab news media, and particularly Aljazeera, counteracted the American military propaganda by employing counter frames rooted in local ideologies such as pan-Arabism. Consequently, Aljazeera’s critique helped, globally, to delegitimize U.S. military-media strategies associated with the preparations for, and prosecution of war. The originality of this study derives from the cross-cultural examination of how rival satellite television networks covered the same world event. The findings provide a platform for future studies concerning the mobilisation of media bias, and its contestation with regard to U.S. interventions in the Middle East.

Media, War & Conflict, 2020

This article explains why Iran was unsuccessful in its efforts to persuade Shiʿi Iraqis to support Iran during the critical early years of the Iran–Iraq war. Analysis of Iranian and Iraqi framing communicated to that target population shows Iran failed due to both structural and cultural factors. Its media strategy lacked reach and variety and it misunderstood the cultural identity of Shiʿi Iraqis. The author makes use of original archive material of radio transcripts from 1981–1983 as well as other primary sources and historical accounts. The research makes an original theoretical contribution by applying media contest theory to a military confrontation between two sovereign states, rather than between a state ‘authority’ facing a non-state ‘challenger’. The findings have implications for considering how Iran today may communicate more effectively beyond its borders through regional media strategies and thus the viability of a mediatized Shiʿism.

The contributions to the second part of this two-part issue of Ethnographic Studies focus on the practices of public discourse pertinent to conflicts and identities in the Arab and Muslim world. They all take an ethnomethodological stance, which reveals the illusionary character of any ‘culturalist’ interpretation of conflicts related to the Middle-East and Islam of the kind proposed, for example, by Huntington. It instead points to the close association of the categorization processes, the audiences toward which speeches are oriented, and the media used.

The Middle East Journal, 2017

The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was a critical juncture in both countries' histories. With unprecedented access to internal Iraqi documents about the invasion of Kuwait, this article underscores how the Iraqi leadership perceived Kuwait, assesses the Iraqi regime's objectives in Kuwait, and analyzes Kuwaiti resistance to the Iraqi occupation. The article ultimately aims to show that Iraq's policies of violence and dispossession in Kuwait were similar to tactics the Ba'thist regime had used before against internal opponents.

2016

This study seeks to understand the media's relationship with the Jordanian national identity as a problematic case study in the path of building the modern Jordanian state. It also seeks to identity the role of the media in formulating the Jordanian national identity and the positioning of the identity in the contexts of the Jordanian media from a critical perspective that benefits from the heritage and literature of media cultural studies and from the media dimension of the public field theory. The study concluded that the media's relationship with shaping the Jordanian national identity throughout history is a thorny and vague one in most stages as a result of the nature of transformations undergone by the state and society and of the regional circumstances that have cast their shadow on the demographic identity of the Jordanian society. While the media-political vagueness has actually served the path of constructing the identity at some stages, it has currently lost this ...

2004

Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 1 Information Dominance: The Philosophy of Total Propaganda Control? Chapter 4 2 From Bombs and Bullets to Hearts and Minds: U.S. Public Diplomacy in an Age of Propaganda Chapter 5 3 Selling the Iraq War: The Media Management Strategies We Never Saw Chapter 6 4 Measuring Success: Profit and Propaganda Chapter 7 5 Spinning War and Blotting Out Memory Chapter 8 6 Weapons of Mass Distraction: World Security and Personal Politics Chapter 9 7 Spectacle and Media Propaganda in the War on Iraq: A Critique of U.S. Broadcasting Networks Chapter 10 8 War as Promotional "Photo-op": The New York Times's Visual Coverage of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq Chapter 11 9 Murdoch's War-A Transnational Perspective Chapter 12 10 Glossy: American Hegemony and the Culture of Death Chapter 13 11 War, Propaganda, and Islam in Muslim and Western Sources Chapter 14 12 Enemy Image: A Case Study in Creating a Mata Hari Chapter 15 13 Anatomy of a B...

The Communication Review, 2017

National Identities 14:4 (erratum)

This study highlights research on Iraq that includes the Assyrians. It does not intend to argue the validity of definitions of ‘nationness’ and nationalism, but provides a brief description of the variety of ways in which Assyrians have been both included and excluded from modern research on the Middle East and, more specifically, Iraq. Moreover, it resituates the Assyrians in the debate and historiography of Iraqi Studies.