Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript

Publication Type: Roundtable
Abstract: The IRA’s training manual, the Green Book, stresses the importance of preparing their sympathetic audiences for impending attacks through propaganda campaigns that vilify the intended target and otherwise support the moral legitimacy of the action. Such ‘defensive propaganda’ creates the conditions in which a population with normal moral values can either support or be apathetic towards terrorist actions. Or drawing on Bandurian terms, the strategy facilitates the community’s moral disengagement from an inherently immoral action and in doing so protects the popular support upon which the republican movement relies for its military and political existence. This paper examines the IRA’s use of defensive propaganda against members of their sympathetic community and introduces a conceptual model for understanding the structure of such campaigns. In doing so it deals with the different forms of media and Arts employed by the organisation and the factors that promote or erode the message content.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: U.S. news coverage leading up to the invasion of Iraq has been almost universally acknowledged as fundamentally flawed and inaccurate, even by the two most influential dailies in the U.S. What has not been widely conceded, however, are the fundamental flaws in news coverage during the occupation of Iraq. The central question guiding this study focuses on whether or not the propaganda and the indexing models are compatible as tools for a comparative media analysis.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The paper introduces some tentative arguments based on the theoretical framework of a research project dealing with the current international system. In the project it is maintained that: 1) The U.S. has gained so much power in the international system that the system is changing from anarchical into hierarchical. 2) The hierarchical international system is being constructed and maintained both militarily and narratively. 3) Just war has replaced the just enemy. The difference between war and politics is becoming more obscure as war is not merely an instrument of politics but has become an essential form of it. War no longer needs political reasoning – in the narrative constructed by the U.S., the War on Terrorism is only a just and necessary reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

I will elaborate this framework further by introducing four additional arguments. In relation to the construction of the hierarchical system, I suggest that 4) the ten-year period from the end of the Cold War to the U.S. War on Terrorism fabricates a continuum of significant wars where the gradual metamorphosis of the system from anarchical into hierarchical manifested itself differently in its various stages. The three following wars in particular can be regarded as crystallizations of the gradual transformation of the international system and as phases and junctions of development of the hierarchical international system: the Gulf War (1990-91), the Kosovo War and 3) the U.S. War on Terrorism (2001-). In relation to the construction and maintenance of the system I suggest that 5) in the hierarchical international system the significance of so-called “world public opinion” – and thereby the media’s potential for influence – on the decision-making of the system’s leading state is marginal. However, regarding the home front, I suggest that 6) as the system turns hierarchical, propaganda and censorship also enter the time of peace – or to put it more comprehensively – propaganda and censorship are essential in the development and maintenance of the hierarchical system. And finally, as a result of the above, I argue that 7) the system turning hierarchical, in which the difference between war and peace as well as war and politics is obscured (together with the image of war) has also broader implications for the social and political reality.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Twice in the twentieth century the United States government formally established agencies whose purpose was to generate and mobilize public support for war. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) during World War I and the Office of War Information (OWI) during World War II directed extensive wartime propaganda efforts at the American public. While governmental activities to generate public support for foreign policies are not unique in American history, the scope of activities of these official propaganda agencies in times of war represented governmentally directed campaigns of an unprecedented scale in the history of American foreign policy. This paper represents a component of a larger research project that examines the organizational structure and activities of the CPI and the OWI, as well as the role of private agencies in formulating propaganda messages for the home audience during the world wars. In this paper I examine the overall context of American propaganda during World War II with an emphasis on the institutional role and activities of the OWI as well as various private sources of propaganda. A Gramscian theoretical approach is utilized in the analysis which highlights the contribution of World War II propaganda in constructing a domestic consensus in support of an internationalist and interventionist post-war American foreign policy.