Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age 9781315673394

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 6
Copyright......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
List of figures......Page 10
Foreword......Page 11
Acknowledgments......Page 13
Author biographies......Page 15
PART I Theorising popular culture and world politics in the digital age......Page 18
1 World politics 2.0: an introduction......Page 20
2 The potentiality and limits of understanding world politics in a transforming global media landscape......Page 31
3 Authors and authenticity: knowledge, representation and research in contemporary world politics......Page 49
PART II Interrogating social media......Page 66
4 Like and share forces: making sense of military social media sites......Page 68
5 Marketing militarism in the digital age: arms production, YouTube and selling ‘national security’......Page 85
6 Remaking the global: social media and undocumented immigrants in the US......Page 100
7 The digital politics of celebrity activism against sexual violence: Angelina Jolie Pitt as global mother......Page 118
PART III Digital entertainment......Page 136
8 Playing war and genocide: Endgame: Syria and Darfur is Dying......Page 138
9 The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war......Page 154
10 ‘Pocket-sized’ politics: binders, Big Bird and other memes of the 2012 US presidential campaign......Page 170
11 Collaging internet parody images: an art-inspired methodology for studying laughter in world politics......Page 192
Index......Page 206

Citation preview

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Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age

The practices of world politics are now scrutinised in a way that is unprecedented, with even those previously – or conventionally assumed to be – disengaged from international affairs being drawn into world politics by social media. Interactive websites allow users to follow election results in real-time from the other side of the world, and online mapping means that the world ‘out there’ is now available on your mobile phone. Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age engages these themes in contemporary world politics, to better understand how digital communication through new media technologies changes our encounters with the world. Whether the focus is digital media, social networking or user-generated content, these sites of political activity and the artefacts they produce have much to tell us about how we engage world politics in the contemporary age. This volume represents the starting point of a dialogue about how digital technologies are beginning to have an impact on the research and practice of scholars and practitioners in the field of International Relations, with the collection of cutting-edge essays dealing specifically with the intertextuality of world politics and digital popular culture. This book will be of use to International Relations research academics (and critically engaged publics) interested in the core themes of global politics – subjectivity, militarism, humanitarianism, civil society organisation, and governance. The book also employs theories and techniques closely associated with other social science disciplines, including political theory, sociology, cultural studies and media studies. Caitlin Hamilton is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at UNSW Australia. She is also the Managing Editor of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Laura J. Shepherd is Associate Professor of International Relations at UNSW Australia. She works at the intersection of gendered global politics, security, and the politics of representation. Laura is the author/editor of five books, including Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2015) and Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories (London: Routledge, 2013).

Popular Culture and World Politics Edited by Matt Davies, Kyle Grayson and Simon Philpott Newcastle University

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Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes University of Bristol

The Popular Culture World Politics (PCWP) book series is the forum for leading interdisciplinary research that explores the profound and diverse interconnections between popular culture and world politics. It aims to bring further innovation, rigor, and recognition to this emerging sub-field of international relations. To these ends, the PCWP series is interested in various themes, from the juxtaposition of cultural artefacts that are increasingly global in scope and regional, local and domestic forms of production, distribution, and consumption; to the confrontations between cultural life and global political, social, and economic forces; to the new or emergent forms of politics that result from the rescaling or internationalization of popular culture. Similarly, the series provides a venue for work that explores the effects of new technologies and new media on established practices of representation and the making of political meaning. It encourages engagement with popular culture as a means for contesting powerful narratives of particular events and political settlements as well as explorations of the ways that popular culture informs mainstream political discourse. The series promotes investigation into how popular culture contributes to changing perceptions of time, space, scale, identity, and participation while establishing the outer limits of what is popularly understood as ‘political’ or ‘cultural’. In addition to film, television, literature, and art, the series actively encourages research into diverse artefacts including sound, music, food cultures, gaming, design, architecture, programming, leisure, sport, fandom, and celebrity. The series is fiercely pluralist in its approaches to the study of popular culture and world politics and is interested in the past, present, and future cultural dimensions of hegemony, resistance, and power. Gender, Violence and Popular Culture Telling stories Laura J. Shepherd Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy John Champagne

Genre, Gender and the Effects of Neoliberalism The new millennium Hollywood rom com Betty Kaklamanidou

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Battlestar Galactica and International Relations Edited by Iver B Neumann and Nicholas J Kiersey The Politics of HBO’s The Wire Everything is connected Edited by Shirin Deylami and Jonathan Havercroft Documenting World Politics A critical companion to IR and non-fiction film Edited by Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest Sexing War/Policing Gender Motherhood, myth and women’s political violence Linda Ahall Popular Culture, Political Economy and the Death of Feminism Why women are in refrigerators and other stories Penny Griffin Post-Communist Aesthetics Revolutions, capitalism, violence

Anca M. Pusca Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age Caitlin Hamilton and Laura J. Shepherd

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Understanding Popular Culture and World Politics in the Digital Age Caitlin Hamilton and Laura J. Shepherd

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial material, Caitlin Hamilton and Laura J. Shepherd; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Caitlin Hamilton and Laura J. Shepherd to be identified as authors of the editorial material, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Shepherd, Laura J., editor. | Hamilton, Caitlin, editor. Title: Understanding popular culture and world politics in the digital age / edited by Laura J. Shepherd and Caitlin Hamilton. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Popular culture in world politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016002244 | ISBN 9781138940284 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315673394 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Digital media—Political aspects. | Social media—Political aspects. | Popular culture. | International relations. Classification: LCC HM851 .U529 2016 | DDC 302.23/1—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002244 ISBN: 978-1-138-94028-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67339-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Contents

List of figures Foreword by Kyle Grayson Acknowledgments Author biographies

ix x xii xiv

PART I

Theorising popular culture and world politics in the digital age 1 World politics 2.0: an introduction

1 3

C A I T L I N H A M ILTON

2 The potentiality and limits of understanding world politics in a transforming global media landscape

14

S E B A S T I A N K A E MP F

3 Authors and authenticity: knowledge, representation and research in contemporary world politics

32

L A U R A J . S H E PHE RD

PART II

Interrogating social media 4 Like and share forces: making sense of military social media sites

49 51

RHYS CRILLEY

5 Marketing militarism in the digital age: arms production, YouTube and selling ‘national security’ S U S A N T. J A C K S ON

68

viii Contents 6 Remaking the global: social media and undocumented immigrants in the US

83

M E G H A N A V. NAYAK

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7 The digital politics of celebrity activism against sexual violence: Angelina Jolie Pitt as global mother

101

A N N I K A B E R GMAN ROS AMOND

PART III

Digital entertainment 8 Playing war and genocide: Endgame: Syria and Darfur is Dying

119 121

J E S S I C A A U CHT E R

9 The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war

137

M . E V R E N EKE N

10 ‘Pocket-sized’ politics: binders, Big Bird and other memes of the 2012 US presidential campaign

153

S A N D R A YA O

11 Collaging internet parody images: an art-inspired methodology for studying laughter in world politics

175

S A A R A S Ä R MÄ

Index

189

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Figures

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3

Robert Barker’s Panorama in London’s Leicester Square The Battle of Wagram (1809) by Wilhelm Alexander I think this might be Photoshopped Sleeping boy with stones; photograph by Abdul Aziz al Otaibi Smiling boy with stones; photograph by Abdul Aziz al Otaibi, edited by author 4.1 The US Army on social media in October 2014 4.2 Top ten military Facebook pages as of 10/10/2014 5.1 Word cloud from the transcripts of the arms industry videos 9.1 Your teammates are urging you to cut off the leg to save a squad-mate’s life 9.2 You are witnessing the pain your teammate suffers 10.1 U is for unemployed 10.2 Obama kills Bin Laden, Romney wants Big Bird 10.3 We kill Big Bird – Romney Joker 10.4 Trap her, keep her 10.5 No one puts Baby in a binder 10.6 One does not simply. . . 10.7 Young woman in a binder 10.8 Don’t put me in a binder 10.9 Example of ‘Horses and Bayonets’ 10.10 Example of ‘Horses and Bayonets’ 11.1 Missile Envy, 2013, by Saara Särmä

16 17 36 40 40 55 60 75 146 147 159 160 160 162 162 163 164 165 167 167 184

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Foreword

Despite its commercial availability and embedding into everyday life for over three decades, the impact of digital technologies on politics remains contested. From neo-Luddites to internet evangelists, the coercive and liberating powers of digital technologies are often treated as mere tools that help to express sentiments or initiate actions that have originated elsewhere. As Caitlin Hamilton suggests in the opening chapter to this volume, while such analyses are not uninteresting or unimportant, they miss the mutually constitutive production of the digital, the political, and the cultural. Therefore, it is important to examine ‘popular cultural manifestations of world politics in digitised media’ not as a proxy for some other kind of politics or interest, but as important sites where our political worlds are created and our political imaginations of the world are cultivated. In this volume, each contributor addresses unique aspects of how digitised media contributes both to the theories and practices of world politics, probing both how contemporary common-sense is established and the ways in which it is being challenged. The first section of the volume explores meta-political questions raised by digitised media and its new ecologies. Key ontological, epistemological, and methodological challenges are identified and navigated. In subsequent sections, a wide range of case studies that build upon these challenges are examined including social media usage by militaries, the arms industry, undocumented migrants, and celebrities as well as war gaming and the politics of memes. And in looking at these cases, the analyses contend with both the material and representational aspects of contemporary world politics. Thus, this volume makes two important original contributions to our understandings of popular culture and world politics—and international relations more generally. First, it extends the examination of popular culture into quotidian digitised sites and treats these sites as world creating rather than as allegorical reflections of some more ‘important’ political force. Second, by doing so, it clearly demonstrates myriad ways in which ‘common-sense’ and consent become institutionalised through everyday practices and the ways in which both are also being challenged through digitised media. In presenting compelling cases for the importance of digitised media to the production of our political worlds and our political imaginations, this volume adds to work previously published in the Popular Culture and World Politics series. For example, Griffin (2015); Kiersey and Neumann (2013); and van Munster and

Foreword

xi

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Sylvest (2015) have also highlighted how world politics is produced and conditioned through cultural artefacts in ways that extend beyond the allegorical. The point is that culture and politics are always intertwined and inextricable. Thus, this volume contributes to the aim of our series to deepen understandings of how political meaning is established, entrenched, and resisted. Kyle Grayson, Co-editor of the Popular Culture World Politics Series

Works Cited Griffin, P. (2015). Popular Culture, Political Economy, and the Death of Feminism: Why Women are in Refrigerators and Other Stories, Abingdon: Routledge. Kiersey, N.J and Neumann, I.B. (2013) (eds). Battle Star Galactica and International Relations , Abingdon: Routledge. Van Munster, R and Sylvest, C. (2015). Documenting World Politics: A Critical Companion to IR and Non-Fiction Film, Abingdon: Routledge.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Routledge and the editors of the PCWP series – Matt Davies, Kyle Grayson, Simon Philpott, Christina Rowley and Jutta Weldes – for their support for the project. I am also grateful to the members of the audience at the panel ‘Introducing @_PopularCulture to #WorldPolitics2.0’ in New Orleans at the 2015 ISA Conference – their insights into the draft chapters presented were immensely useful and their enthusiasm for the collection encouraging. I owe a great debt of gratitude to, first and foremost, my mum – Jane Hamilton; you are pure dead brilliant. My thanks also to, in no order, Anna Yanatchkova, Jim Milne, Kevin Kwan, Nikki Strong-Harris and Zaky Orya. Hopefully you already know just how much I think of you, but what better opportunity than this to say how very glad I am that each of you is in my life. Thanks also to Emilie Auton, Nick Apoifis and Will Clapton. Your humour, your voices of reason during my cranky moments and your exceptionally good taste in lunch venues are just some of the many reasons why I think you are just wonderful. I am exceptionally fortunate to have the privilege of working with Laura in a number of different capacities. She is my supervisor, my boss, my mentor and my friend – and now I can add to the list, with pride, my co-editor. Laura, your consistent generosity with your time and insights despite your formidable schedule makes me certain you must have some sort of fandangled time-making machine hidden away somewhere. Because of you I am, without a doubt, a better writer, a better thinker and a much better font-changer. Last but most certainly not least, it has been so exciting to watch this collection grow from a pile of abstracts into a fully-fledged book and for this, we owe the biggest acknowledgement to the marvellous contributors to this volume. Sebastian, Rhys, Susan, Meghana, Annika, Jessica, Evren, Sandra and Saara: it has been such a pleasure to work with all of you and truly an honour to engage with your research – thank you. Caitlin Hamilton, UNSW Australia, December 2015 It is always a pleasure to conclude a project successfully, but it is even more pleasing when it is a collaborative project and at its conclusion you are still positively disposed towards your collaborators. Producing this volume has been a delightful and wholly rewarding endeavour, and I am grateful to every one of our contributors for their excellent chapters, their thoughtful engagement with our

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Acknowledgments xiii feedback and their timely responses to our comments and questions. Like Caitlin, I am grateful to the series editors for their belief in the value of the collection and to Routledge for accommodating our slightly revised timeline for delivery (ahem. . .) My own chapter benefitted enormously from discussing aspects of visual politics with a number of people over the course of the last twelve months: my thanks in particular to Roland Bleiker, Will Clapton, Rhys Crilley, James Der Derian, Penny Griffin, Megan MacKenzie and to the participants at the panel on ‘Visuality, Research Practice and Ethical Encounters’ at the 56th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans, February 2015, including Lene Hansen, Nick Robinson, Saara Särmä and Marysia Zalewski. I would be remiss not to also acknowledge the support and general awesomeness of my lovely husband, Brian Teague, whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the interwebs came in especially handy for this project (not least for the section in my chapter that discusses the memeification of ‘shopping’, which I did not realise was A Thing until he told me so), and whose willingness to engage with and help me strengthen my chapter was much appreciated (if the argumentation is weak, obviously it is all his fault). I am very privileged to be able to say without hesitation (most days, at least) that I love my job; there are few things better than getting to spend my time reading interesting things and talking to interesting people about interesting things. Some projects, though, are more fun than others. This project has been nothing but fun, and I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to work with Caitlin on this book over the last year or so. Her creativity, her attention to detail and her finely-tuned judgement of when an academic cat gif is the only appropriate response to a query make her the perfect co-editor. This book was really her idea, and her energy drove the project from concept to reality; I’m extremely grateful to have been along for the ride. Laura J. Shepherd, UNSW Australia, December 2015

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Author biographies

Jessica Auchter is Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. Her research focuses on the politics of dead bodies and visual culture and practices. Her work has appeared in Review of International Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies and International Feminist Journal of Politics, and her book, The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations, was published by Routledge in 2014. Annika Bergman Rosamond is Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Department of Political Science, Lund University (LU). She is also the director of the Masters in Global Studies at LU, Faculty of Social Science. She has held permanent lectureships and research positions in IR at the Universities of Leicester and Edinburgh as well as the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). Her recent research focuses on feminism, gender and cosmopolitan protection as well as gender(ed) discourses and practices of celebrity humanitarianism and interventionism. Her publications include War, Ethics and Justice: New Perspectives on a Post-9/11 World (co-edited, Routledge 2012), and Women, Peace and Security – and Denmark: DIIS report 2014:32, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, as well as numerous chapters and articles in Global Society and Cooperation and Conflict. Rhys Crilley is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, UK. His research examines how political actors use images and narratives on social media platforms to claim legitimacy for the use of force. His thesis builds upon recent work in International Relations and Security Studies by providing a theoretical framework for the visual politics of legitimation. This is then explored empirically through two case studies concerning the British Army and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces. He has a publication forthcoming in Critical Studies on Security, and he is the winner of the International Studies Association International Communication Section 2016 Best Paper Award. He is a deputy editor of E-IR (www. e-ir.info), co-founder of the blog Critical Securities (www.criticalsecurities. com/) and can be followed on Twitter @rhyscrilley.

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Author biographies

xv

M. Evren Eken is a PhD student in Critical Geography at the University of London. His main academic interests lie at the intersections of Contemporary Social Theory, Social Change, Visual Culture and Critical Geopolitics. Following a BA in Public Administration in Turkey, he conducted postgraduate level studies, respectively, in History of Art, Sociology and International Relations at various institutions in Turkey (Hacettepe University, Middle East Technical University), Germany (Chemnitz University of Technology) and the UK (University of Sussex). Caitlin Hamilton is a doctoral candidate in International Relations at UNSW Australia. Her research looks at the intersection of world politics and everyday IR, with a particular focus on popular cultural artefacts, including internet memes, graphic novels and craft. Her research interests more broadly include critical approaches to security, as well as narrative and aesthetic approaches to IR. She is the Managing Editor of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. Susan T. Jackson’s research focuses on militarisation and the global political economy with emphasis on the role of corporations in general and arms producers and military services companies in particular. Susan is the principal investigator of the Militarization 2.0 Project, a four-year research project investigating militarisation’s social media footprint through a gendered lens. Militarization 2.0 focuses on the role of arms producers, video game corporations and private military and security companies in circulating militarism in the everyday, and how representations and re-representations of corporate presence on social media is a part of this militarism. Sebastian Kaempf is Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland (Australia). His research interests include the ethics and laws of war in contemporary US warfare and the role a transforming global media landscape is playing in today’s conflicts. He co-convenes an interactive web platform, called www.thevisionmachine.com. Meghana V. Nayak is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pace University. Her research focuses on the politics of gender violence, the construction of US identity and the gendered and racialised categorisation of migrants. She has published in International Studies Review, Politics and Gender, International Feminist Journal of Politics, and is co-author with Eric Selbin of Decentering International Relations (Zed Books) and co-editor of Occupying Political Science: Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World (Palgrave Macmillan). She is also author of Who Is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and U.S. Immigration Politics (Oxford University Press). Saara Särmä is a feminist, an artist and a researcher. She is the co-founder of Feminist Think Tank Hattu and the creator of “Congrats, you have an all male panel!” Her doctoral dissertation Junk Feminism and Nuclear Wannabes –

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xvi Author biographies Collaging Parodies of Iran and North Korea (University of Tampere, Finland 2014) focused on internet parody images and memes and developed a unique art-based collage methodology for studying world politics. She’s interested in politics of visuality, feminist academic activism and laughter in world politics. She has presented at the International Studies Association Conference multiple times and is a regular participant at the Popular Culture and World Politics conferences and workshops. Her artwork can be seen at www.huippumisukka.fi. Laura J. Shepherd is Associate Professor of International Relations at UNSW Australia. She works at the intersection of gendered global politics, critical approaches to security and International Relations theory. Laura is the author/ editor of five books, including Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations (Routledge 2010) and Gender, Violence and Popular Culture: Telling Stories (Routledge 2013). Laura has published many scholarly articles in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Review of International Studies and Journal of Gender Studies. She tweets from @drljshepherd and blogs at http:// genderinglobalgovernancenet-work.net/comment and http://wpsac.wordpress. com/blogs/. Sandra Yao is a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Currently focusing on mobile-app games, her research interests concern analysing the politics of gaming and the development of new research approaches to the study of video games in International Relations.

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Part I

Theorising popular culture and world politics in the digital age

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1

World politics 2.0 An introduction

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Caitlin Hamilton

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. John Perry Barlow (1996)

In 1996, John Perry Barlow, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), posted ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ online. Published on the same day that the United States’ Telecommunications Act came into effect, Barlow’s manifesto is a scathing critique of attempts to regulate and control the internet made by the ‘Governments of the Industrial World’, the ‘weary giants of flesh and steel’. The Declaration comments directly on political power; Barlow uses the language of sovereignty, borders and territories, independence and governance. He speaks of the ‘hostile and colonial measures’ represented by states’ attempts to ‘[erect] guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace’ by way of legislation. He concludes with the quote that opens this chapter, which offers an optimistic outlook on the internet and its seemingly endless potential to bring about good. Twenty years have passed since the Declaration was posted, and while Barlow’s optimism wasn’t entirely misplaced, the internet has also proved to be a more complex site of political activity than the EFF perhaps envisioned. It has brought about new ways to maintain old relationships, in the potentially fruitful practices of digital diplomacy, or ‘e-diplomacy’ (see, for example, Sandre 2015). Many commentators have pointed to the potential of digital technology to help citizens mobilise in support of human rights and to foment ‘communicative freedom’ (see Shirky 2011). Overseas travel has seen the rise of electronic visas that travellers apply for online, and Australia has announced plans to trial ‘cloud passports’, storing data on travellers’ identities and biometrics online, thus negating the need for physical passports (Bourke 2015). These are all largely positive, even exciting, developments. However, with advantages inevitably come disadvantages, and in the case of digital world politics, some of these drawbacks are significant. Our digital footprints contain a staggering amount of information about everything from

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4

Caitlin Hamilton

the financial transactions we have entered into, to where we have been (and when we have been there), from the online discussions we have participated in, to our online shopping baskets (see also Bonelli and Ragazzi 2014, 477). It has become possible to sign petitions and share protest messages with virtual communities, though online activism has been critiqued for being vacuous and superficial (see, for example, Drumbl 2012), giving rise to pejorative descriptions of ‘clicktivism’ or ‘slacktivism’. Furthermore, oppressive regimes have made the most of new technology to finesse their surveillance activities and their means of controlling populations (Morozov 2011), while cyberwar has become the latest in a suite of warfare options available to states and non-states alike. Digital interactions may well bring greater understanding across cultures and the fostering of peace, but they can just as easily bring about misunderstandings and new forms of violence. In short, politics online are just as complex and tangled as they are ‘irl’ (‘in real life’). In this volume, though, we do not simply examine what happens when political practices go online; we focus specifically on popular cultural manifestations of world politics in digitised media. Popular culture has become an increasingly studied site of world politics in the past two decades, but the beginning of the scholarly consideration of ‘low data’ (Weldes 2006) can be traced back further than this, to Roland Barthes (2009 [1957]). In his book Mythologies, Barthes took everyday practices and artefacts and treated them as serious sites of analysis. The objects and activities that he featured – including margarine and children’s toys, soap powder and wine – were representative of the banal, the trivial, the everyday. Far from being insignificant, however, Barthes established that the banal, or the ‘what-goes-without-saying’ (2009, xix, emphasis in original) is eminently worthy of closer attention and analytical scrutiny. Despite this intellectual heritage, the study of popular culture has sometimes been met with resistance in those disciplines dedicated to the study of world politics, one of the reasons for this being that ‘[p]opular culture is ostensibly everything that world politics is not: fiction, entertainment, amusement’ (Rowley 2015, 361, emphasis in original). However, a growing number of scholars see a great deal of value in popular cultural sources. In fact, recent scholarship on the intersection of popular culture and world politics is broad and diverse.1 Kyle Grayson et al. (2009, 158), for example, hold that popular culture has the potential to ‘change how we understand IR as a scholarly discipline by transforming our perception of the sights, sites and cites of power’. The contributors to this collection clearly subscribe to this view, all working from the premise that studying world politics through the prism of digital popular culture, and popular culture more generally, attunes us to different places, voices, views and experiences. Our view of the world and of international politics expands when we look at how interactions take place on ‘personal, political, local and global’ (Shepherd 2013, 2) levels. Studying world politics through popular cultural sources therefore offers possibilities for accounts of the world that more closely reflect lived experience. Taking popular cultural sources seriously as sources of knowledge of world politics – and as practices of world politics – reminds us that world politics take

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World politics 2.0 5 place in a vast multitude of places and involve a greater variety and number of actors than has been conventionally acknowledged by much research into the international. Digital popular culture isn’t either a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ development for world politics; cyberspace is simply another site at which world politics are variously experienced, represented, challenged, engaged with and sometimes mocked. Theorising popular culture and world politics as mutually constitutive – or at the very least acknowledging a deep saturation of the realm of popular culture in the realm of global politics, such that ‘cultural texts and images are seen as storage places for meaning in a particular society’ (Neumann and Nexon 2006, 13) – requires different epistemological considerations than those from which conventional enquiries into world politics proceed. Terrell Carver (2010, 421–422) offers an elegant elaboration of such an epistemology, suggesting that international relations take place in ‘three “life-worlds”: that of the academic “knower”; that of the “state-actors” who do (know) the most visible kinds of politics that IR is centrally interested in; and that of “ordinary people”, who are neither of the foregoing’. Those in the first category include researchers studying international relations in universities, research institutes and think tanks; ‘state-actors’ refer to world leaders and other policymakers; and “ordinary people”, everyone else – those who do not fall within the first two categories. What happens, Carver wonders, if we arrange them by commonalities instead of by difference, or collapse the three worlds into one? What all three categories have in common, he proposes, is that we all share ‘common ground as movie-goers’ (429). ‘“World leaders”’, he continues, ‘interpret international politics through vocabularies and meanings that arise from popular culture, including movies, as much as anything, and probably not very much from IR “knowledge” in articles and textbooks’ (431). Popular culture is, therefore, central to our understanding of how the world works. But we are no longer just ‘movie-goers’; thanks to cyberspace, we are also social media users, digital entertainment consumers, link-clickers, meme-creators, digital image-makers, status-updaters and media-disseminators. So too are heads of state, senior policymakers and diplomats and other notable figures in world politics. Barack Obama, for example, has touted his health insurance policy on the news and entertainment website Buzzfeed and uses his @POTUS Twitter handle to do everything from commenting on his favourite basketball team, the Chicago Bulls (1 July 2015: ‘butler’s a great player on o and d; let’s sign him up long term. go bulls!’), to exchanging banter with former President Bill Clinton (19 May 2015: @billclinton: ‘Welcome to @Twitter, @POTUS! One question: Does that username stay with the office? #askingforafriend’, @POTUS: ‘Good question, @billclinton. The handle comes with the house. Know anyone interested in @FLOTUS?’). Internet memes of Hillary Clinton are the subject of the Tumblr site, ‘Texts from Hillary’ (Lambe and Smith 2012). Digital media has further expanded the sites at which popular culture manifests and blurred the lines even further between the cultural, the political and the popular. Much of what we know about the goings-on in the world is now gleaned from online sources; many of the traditional sources of world politics knowledge, like documents, speeches and briefing papers, are available digitally whenever and

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wherever we may choose to peruse them. We turn to digital news sources for up-tothe-minute information by way of online newspapers, blogs, social media streams, live video and audio streams, podcasts and so on. However, we don’t just use our computers and tablets and smart phones to access these serious sources; digital entertainment has thrived in the online world. We share links, images, stories and discussions with our friends and followers on social media; we have access to innumerable photographs, videos and music; we download games, movies, music and television programs along with podcasts, webcasts and apps. Internet memes might appear on our social media newsfeeds, alongside ‘trending’ topics. Every photograph of Kim Jong-un that is released seems to become an internet meme (see, for example, Sarkisova 2013), while in Russia in 2015, the national internet regulator reminded users about the prohibition against ‘using a photo of a public figure to embody a popular internet meme which has nothing to do with the celebrity’s personality’ (see Sampat and Bugorkova 2015). Beyond these digital politics, there are also politics of the digital. First and foremost, access to the internet is by no means universal because ‘digital technology, while apparently the instrument of global integration, in fact creates societal fractures and a technological apartheid that separates the info-rich and the infopoor’ (Fischer 2006, 181). There is therefore a ‘digital divide’ (Allen 2005, 63), made up of internet ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Those who do have access are not dispersed evenly around the globe. The distribution of the internet population is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Western, developed regions of the world; Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Qatar and South Korea have the highest internet populations worldwide, while many Sub-Saharan African countries have much more limited internet penetration (Graham and De Sabbata n.d.). Even improvements in infrastructure and access still make for uneven access; those living in urban areas tend to be more connected than those in rural areas, and identity markers such as ‘race/ethnicity, geography, income level, and education level’ (Leggon 2006, 100) as well as gender, age and language influence online connectivity. Access to the internet is one aspect of the politics of the digital; another is control over the internet. The internet is not a physical entity; as Lorenzo Cantoni and Stefano Tardini (2006, 36) explain, ‘[t]he internet, being in itself neither physical, nor geographically defined, rather a worldwide continuous stream of information and transactions with an ever-changing configuration, has posed new challenges to every effort of ruling it’. Vigorous debate has accompanied the introduction of legislation in a number of states to restrict access to certain websites and to allow for the tracking of users, including Turkey (Uranli 2014), Australia (Grubb 2015) and Iran (Moghtader 2014), while the ‘Great Firewall’ of China sees swathes of the internet censored and rendered inaccessible, in theory at least, to Chinese internet users (Mesoznik 2015). However, the internet is reliant on physical infrastructure, which can render it vulnerable to misfortune. In 2010, for example, an anchor dropped at an inopportune place hit one of the three optic fibre cables that provided internet connections for part of the east coast of Africa. Although it didn’t entirely disable connectivity, it did slow down access for millions of people (Smith 2012).

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Contributions to this volume The contributors to this volume locate all of the above issues in specific digital sites, including digital images, video games, social media, YouTube and internet memes. In Chapter 2, Sebastian Kaempf offers an analysis of the mediation of world politics, and, specifically, how the emergence of digital technology has brought about a new global media landscape that requires us to drastically rethink the traditional relationship between the media and world politics. Kaempf argues that where ‘old’ media technology saw close relationships between states and media providers (with obvious utility in times of political upheaval or conflict), digital ‘new’ media technology has brought about the ‘Balkanisation’ of the media, with both more and different media actors gaining influence. This shift has significant implications for how world politics are mediated – bringing with it some significant advantages and drawbacks. Laura J. Shepherd follows with a discussion of the ethics of digital images. She begins by examining how knowledge claims are made and evaluated in the study of world politics and, specifically, in the discipline of International Relations, before suggesting that the increased digitisation of the sources that we draw from will force the rethinking of how the authenticity and authority of our evidence is measured. Through her discussion of Photoshopped and misrepresented digital images, as well as Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog in which the author’s ‘real life’ identity was very different from the one that they adopted online, Shepherd explores what context, deception and circulation mean for researchers of world politics in the digital age and, in turn, the ethical considerations that are often raised when conducting research using digital sources. Rhys Crilley takes as his focus the social media presence of national militaries in Chapter 4, paying particular attention to the British Armed Forces. As Crilley notes, the British Armed Forces place a great deal of importance on (and resources into) their social media presence; their sites are carefully curated with photographs taken by British Army photographers and other visual content, which drive narratives about the values of the institution and the experience of soldiering. Though interesting in their own right, the posts and photos are rendered even more analytically valuable by the opportunities to engage offered to visitors to the page; users can like or share photos with their own followers or leave a comment on one of the posts. Crilley incorporates some of these into his research, offering insights not only into the production and publication of the visual representations of the British Army, but also about how they are received by others online. In Chapter 5, Susan T. Jackson writes on the ways in which the arms industry uses digital materials – including video advertisements on YouTube – to market their products. As Jackson notes, these videos are particularly interesting because the weapons being promoted – sophisticated fighter jets, for example – tend not to be available for purchase by the average YouTube viewer. These videos must, therefore, be for some other purpose than to sell these particular products. Jackson argues that an alternative purpose to sales is to perpetuate the process of

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militarisation, secure the support of the public, naturalise the need for weapons and justify the use of force in protecting national interests and ensuring national security. In the chapter that follows, Meghana V. Nayak considers how undocumented immigrants and their supporters have turned to social media to share their lived experience and challenge the dominant representations of undocumented immigration. She explores a variety of ways in which this takes place online; social media is used to share stories, art and performances about what it means to live as an undocumented immigrant, highlighting their struggles and survival strategies. Twitter and online message boards have also been used to engage with proposed legislation affecting undocumented youths, the DREAM Act, with online users contributing to discussions about the eligibility criteria, amongst other things. Finally, Nayak shows how social media has contributed to a conversation about the rhetorical aspects of undocumented migration, pointing to the online campaign against the use of the dehumanising term ‘illegal’ in the context of undocumented immigration. In Chapter 7, Annika Bergman Rosamond explores the intersections of celebrities, foreign policy and digital platforms. With a focus on the ways in which Angelina Jolie Pitt’s activism against conflict-related sexual violence are represented digitally, she examines how celebrity humanitarianism manifests in the digital sphere. In her identification of a number of discursive markers that characterise Jolie Pitt’s representation, Bergman Rosamond unpacks how these narratives – about Jolie Pitt, about gender, about western privilege and about world politics – work and, more importantly, identifies how they influence our understanding of world politics. Jessica Auchter considers how war and genocide are represented in digital entertainment, specifically video games Endgame: Syria and Darfur is Dying, in Chapter 8. In the former, the player adopts the identity of a Syrian rebel fighting in opposition to the Assad regime, while in the latter, the winner of an MTV competition, the player attempts to distribute aid and prevent conflicting groups from meeting one another and engaging in violence. Both of these games were designed to draw attention to their respective conflicts but, as Auchter notes, there are some very real ethical questions raised about using the format of video games to represent actual and ongoing conflicts and humanitarian crises. M. Evren Eken also takes video games as the subject of his analysis, considering how helmet-cam videos and first-person shooter games mediate our understanding of conflict and, specifically in this chapter, inform our understanding of the War on Terror. Illustrating his argument that these digital representations mark a shift from a passive consumption of war to a more active participation in warmaking, and demonstrating the affective nature of these videos and games, Eken offers close readings of two sources: the first is a video filmed from the helmet of a US soldier as he comes under fire from members of the Taliban, and the second is a content analysis of the gameplay of video game Battlefield 4: Fishing in Baku. He argues that the representations of self and other in these sources inform how we assess and respond to ‘real’ conflicts, thus making a full understanding of the

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World politics 2.0 9 representations and narrative structures contained within popular culture all the more pressing. In Chapter 10, Sandra Yao considers how the internet memes that were produced and circulated during the United States’ 2012 presidential campaign functioned as political artefacts. As she discusses more fully, internet memes have immortalised some of the more memorable points of the campaign – from Barack Obama’s ‘horses and bayonets’ retort to Mitt Romney, to the latter’s infamous ‘binders full of women’ gaffe and to Big Bird’s seemingly impending unemployment as Romney proposed subsidy cuts to PBS, America’s public broadcaster (and home of Sesame Street). Internet memes therefore offered a running commentary on the progress of the campaign and constituted a form of participatory politics that hadn’t previously been seen to such an extent. As Yao argues, the read/write culture of Web 2.0 has seen the blurring of boundaries between the producer and consumer of digital content, including in the context of political engagement. While internet memes may seem frivolous, these digital artefacts actually started a number of important conversations during the 2012 campaign, including about funding, stratified income groups, the inclusion of women in politics, gender equality and defence politics. Saara Särmä also puts internet memes at the centre of her work, but she does so by incorporating them into collages in humorous ways in a method she calls ‘junk feminist collaging’. In the final chapter of the volume, Särmä takes internet memes as a ‘silly digital archive’ which consists of everyday ‘stuff’ and develops her analysis of these representations of world politics through the artistic process of collage-making. In her chapter, she shares some of the methodological benefits and challenges of using digital material in her work and at the same time challenges our ideas about what it means to study world politics and engage in political interventions.

Conclusion There are two overarching themes that run through this edited collection: engagement and storytelling. The first commonality across the chapters is that they all consider how we – as individuals, as political subjects, as scholars – engage with digital artefacts. Särmä looks at new and innovative ways of engaging with digital artefacts by bringing them back into the analogue world of glue and paper, while Yao looks more closely at the processes of political engagement by way of mememaking, sharing and interpreting. Auchter and Eken, in their respective chapters, look at the active engagement inherent to playing video games – where the players adopt new bodies and identities and strategic interests – while Eken and Jackson look at how videos of conflict and arms production, respectively, engage viewers. Nayak looks at how social media users engage – with each other, with stories and with laws – online, while Crilley’s focus on Facebook compels us to consider what it means to engage with photographs or posts of military actors, when users like, comment or share the social media output of these actors. Shepherd considers how we can engage in an ethical way with digital artefacts, while Kaempf looks at how the

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shift in media from ‘old’ to ‘new’ brings with it a concomitant change in how world politics are mediated and thus engaged with. Bergman Rosamond argues that by engaging with media on Angelina Jolie Pitt, users are increasingly engaging with the global ethical agenda, and world politics more generally. A second way of thinking about the chapters is that they present and examine a whole host of different stories being told online about world politics. Bergman Rosamond discusses the stories about gender, motherhood and hardship (amongst others) that have infused discourse surrounding celebrity humanitarianism. Nayak looks at the stories that undocumented immigrants in the United States tell about themselves and their experiences, while Crilley looks at the story/ies that the British Army tells about itself to its Facebook followers. Kaempf tells the story of a shift in technologies, while Shepherd looks at true stories, not true stories and kind of true stories, questioning the basis on which these distinctions are meaningful – even possible – in the digital age. Eken and Auchter both look at the stories of various conflicts – including Syria, Darfur and Afghanistan – told through the medium of videos and video games (Auchter through eyes of the victims of conflict, and Eken through eyes of combatants). Jackson, on the other hand, looks at how arms producers craft stories about themselves, their weaponry and the purchasers thereof, while Yao looks at how internet memes can not only tell stories about political events, but play with them, subvert them, and often mock them. In a similar vein, Särmä’s collage work draws from internet memes and crafts them into a new narrative – one that plays on the subversive nature of the digital artefacts and highlights the fragmentary nature of world politics told through memes. As shown by the contributions to this collection, popular culture is digitally mediated, inescapably so, to the extent that digital applications and artefacts are central to world politics in the contemporary age and have a direct impact on the ways in which we encounter the real world. This space has not yet received comprehensive analytical attention; research on digital popular culture and world politics remains scant – something that this volume hopefully begins to address. By conducting research at the nexus of world politics, popular culture and digital technologies (such as that offered by the contributors to this volume), we can better understand how people encounter politics in the contemporary world and develop a greater appreciation for the multiple ways in which world politics are manifest.

Note 1 There is a significant – and growing – body of work (sometimes referred to as the ‘PCWP agenda’) in which scholars have considered how world politics are represented through a variety of media including film, television, music, poetry, fashion, literature, museums, advertisements, internet memes, video games, graphic novels and art (see, for example, Weldes 2006; Grayson et al. 2009; Caso and Hamilton 2015; Rowley 2015). Film and television have received significant attention within the popular culture and world politics research agenda (on film, see, for example, Shapiro 1999, 2009, 2015; Weber 2005 [2001]; Buzan 2010; for television, see, for example, Weldes 2003; Nexon and Neumann 2006; Holland 2011; Rowley and Weldes 2012; Shepherd 2013). Other sites that have received attention include art (Sylvester 1996, 2009; Särmä 2015), music (Franklin 2005; Davies and Franklin 2015), video games (Bos 2015; Robinson 2015) and graphic novels (Dittmer 2015).

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Bibliography Allen, S. (2005) ‘Digital divisions: Online reporting and the network society’, 63–79 in Lacy, M.J. and Wilkin, P. (eds) Global Politics in the Information Age, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Barlow, J.P. (1996) ‘A declaration of the independence of cyberspace’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 8 February 1996, available at https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/DeclarationFinal.html, accessed 8 September 2015. Barthes, R. (2009 [1957]) Mythologies, translated by A. Lavers, London: Paladin. Bonelli, L. and Ragazzi, F. (2014) ‘Low-tech security: Files, notes, and memos as technologies of anticipation’, Security Dialogue, 45(5): 476–493. Bos, D. (2015) ‘Military videogames, geopolitics and methods’, 101–109 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir. info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Bourke, L. (2015) ‘Australia to trial cloud passports in world-first move’, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 October 2015, available at www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/ australia-to-trial-cloud-passports-in-worldfirst-move-20151028-gkkkr3.html, accessed 11 November 2015. Buzan, B. (2010) ‘America in space: The international relations of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 39(1): 175–180. Cantoni, L. and Tardini, S. (2006) Internet, Oxon, USA and Canada: Routledge. Carver, T. (2010) ‘Cinematic ontologies and viewer epistemologies: Knowing international politics as moving images’, Global Society, 24(3): 421–431. Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds)(2015) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Davies, M. and Franklin, M.I. (2015) ‘What does (the study of) world politics sound like?’, 120–147 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Dittmer, J. (2015) ‘On Captain America and “doing” popular culture in the social sciences’, 45–50 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Drumbl, M.A. (2012) ‘Child soldiers and clicktivism: Justice, myths, and prevention’, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 4(3): 1–5. Fischer, H. (2006) Digital Shock: Confronting the New Reality, translated by R. Mullins, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Franklin, M.I. (ed.)(2005) Resounding International Relations: On Music, Culture, and Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Graham, M. and De Sabbata, S. (n.d.) ‘Internet population and penetration’, Information Geographies, available at http://geography.oii.ox.ac.uk/?page=internet-population-andpenetration, accessed 11 November 2015. Grayson, K., Davies, M. and Philpott, S. (2009) ‘Pop goes IR? Researching the popular culture-world politics continuum’, Politics, 29(3): 155–163. Grubb, B. (2015) ‘Australian senate passes controversial anti-piracy, website-blocking laws’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 2015, available at www.smh.com.au/digitallife/digital-life-news/australian-senate-passes-controversial-antipiracy-websiteblockinglaws-20150622-ghuorh.html, accessed 11 November 2015.

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Holland, J. (2011) ‘When you think of the Taliban, think of the Nazis: Teaching Americans “9/11” in NBC’s The West Wing’, Millennium, 40(1): 85–106. Lambe, S. and Smith, A. (2012) ‘TTYL’, 11 April 2012, available at http://textsfromhillary clinton.tumblr.com/, accessed 30 November 2013. Leggon, C.B. (2006) ‘Gender, race/ethnicity, and the digital divide’, 98–110 in Fox, M.F., Johnson, D.G.J. and Rosser, S.V. (eds) Women, Gender, and Technology, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Mesoznik, K. (2015) ‘The ins and outs of the Great Firewall of China’, The Huffington Post, 11 November 2015, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/karen-mesoznik/the-ins-andouts-of-the-g_b_8510918.html, accessed 11 November 2015. Moghtader, M. (2014) ‘Iran expands “smart” internet censorship’, Reuters, 26 December 2014, available at www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/26/us-iran-internet-censorship-idU SKBN0K40SE20141226#adA2joeklvH4GMPO.97, accessed 11 November 2015. Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, England: Penguin Books. Neumann, I.B. and Nexon, D.H. (2006) ‘Introduction: Harry Potter and the study of world politics’, 1–26 in Nexon, D.H. and Neumann, I.B. (eds) Harry Potter and International Relations, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Robinson, N. (2015) ‘Videogames and IR: Playing at method’, 91–100 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir. info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Rowley, C. (2015) ‘Popular culture and the politics of the visual’, 361–374 in Shepherd, L.J. (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, 2nd edition, London and New York: Routledge. Rowley, C. and Weldes, J. (2012) ‘The evolution of international Security Studies and the everyday: Suggestions from the Buffyverse’, Security Dialogue, 43(6): 513–530. Sampat, R. and Bugorkova, O. (2015) ‘Russia’s (non) war on memes?’, BBC News, 16 April 2015, available at www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-32302645, accessed 28 October 2015. Sandre, A. (2015) Digital Diplomacy: Conversations on Innovation in Foreign Policy, Maryland and London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sarkisova, B. (2013) ‘Gallery: 20 hilarious Kim Jong-un memes’, Complex, 27 April 2013, available at http://au.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/04/20-hilarious-kim-jong-unmemes/, accessed 28 October 2015. Särmä, S. (2015) ‘Collage: An art-inspired methodology for studying laughter in world politics’, 110–119 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/edited-collection-popular-culture-andworld-politics/. Shapiro, M.J. (1999) Cinematic Political Thought: Narrating Race, Nation and Gender, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Shapiro, M.J. (2009) Cinematic Geopolitics, London and New York: Routledge. Shapiro, M.J. (2015) ‘Film and world politics’, 83–90 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing, also available at www.e-ir.info/2015/04/22/ edited-collection-popular-culture-and-world-politics/. Shepherd, L.J. (2013) Telling Stories: Gender, Violence and Popular Culture, Oxon and New York: Routledge.

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World politics 2.0 13 Shirky, C. (2011) ‘The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change’, Foreign Affairs, 90(1): 28–41, available at www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/2010–12–20/political-power-social-media, accessed 7 September 2015. Smith, D. (2012) ‘East Africa internet access slows to a crawl after anchor snags cable’, The Guardian, 29 February 2012, available at www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/28/ east-africa-internet-access-anchor, accessed 11 November 2015. Sylvester, C. (1996) ‘Picturing the Cold War: An art graft/eye graft’, Alternatives, 21: 393–418. Sylvester, C. (2009) Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It, Boulder: Paradigm Publishers. Uranli, A.K. (2014) ‘Internet censorship is a big problem for Turkey?’, The Huffington Post, 21 February 2014, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/arzu-kaya-uranli/internetcensorship-is-a-_b_4824142.html, accessed 11 November 2015. Weber, C. (2005 [2001]) International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edition, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Weldes, J. (2003) ‘Popular culture, science fiction and world politics: Exploring intertextual relations’, 1–27 in Weldes, J. (ed.) To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Weldes, J. (2006) ‘High politics and low data: Globalization discourses and popular culture’, 176–186 in Yanow, D. and Schwartz-Shea, P. (eds) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

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The potentiality and limits of understanding world politics in a transforming global media landscape Sebastian Kaempf

Politics have never just been acted out at summit meetings, in parliaments, during protest marches, through revolutions, during violent conflict or at peace conferences, but also in and through the media. World politics, throughout history, have always been mediated. Poems, sculptures, paintings, frescos, books, theatre plays, newspapers, the telegraph, photographs, radio airwaves, television broadcasts, satellites, cinema, cell phones and – most recently – digital new media platforms all have depicted and mediated politics. This mediation has influenced how we have viewed and approached global politics. Media in this sense has always played an important role in shaping political events and our understanding thereof. Given the longstanding and intricate relationship between media and politics (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010), recent claims over the transformative, even revolutionary, nature of today’s digital new media and its alleged impact on global politics should give us pause (Shirky 2008; Morozov 2011). Politics from the ancient Greek agora and the Roman Senate to the more recent media coverage of the Arab Spring and the Syrian refugee crisis have always been subject to political interpretation through editing choices, propaganda, censorship and more or less distorted representations. How then can one plausibly claim that there is anything qualitatively new or even revolutionary about the nature of digital new media today, let alone its relationship with global politics? This chapter argues that today’s emergence of digital new media technology constitutes a sea change.1 The rise of this new media technology has resulted in a structural shift from a multipolar to a heteropolar global media landscape in which newly empowered non-state actors, groups and individuals contest the media narratives hitherto controlled by conventional media platforms and in which traditional media platforms themselves have started to converge with digital new media technology. Heteropolarity thus refers to the multiplication and simultaneous diversification of structurally different media actors. This current transformation of the global media landscape has, in turn, impacted heavily on and altered the traditional relationship between media and global politics, creating a more multifaceted, complex, diverse hyper-mediated reality through which world politics are acted out.

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World politics in a global media landscape 15 The argument presented is that before the rise of digital new media technology, ‘old’ media at its heart displayed a fundamental division between sender and receiver, a division which for a long time had structurally, materially and politically conditioned the nature of the relationship between old media and politics. With the recently emerging digital new media technology, however, this age-old separation between sender and receiver has been eroded. Thus, alongside traditional media platforms, an entirely new form of media technology has arisen. This is not to argue that traditional media has disappeared (these media formats remain politically powerful and important), but that it has been supplemented by a newer, dissimilar form of media technology. This development has transformed the hitherto multipolar nature of the old media landscape and has led to a heteropolar global media landscape in which the age-old relationship between media and world politics has been altered. In making this argument, I first discuss the nature of old, traditional media platforms by identifying this technology’s structural separation between sender and receiver. This fundamental separation, I go on to show, conditioned the multipolar nature of the old global mediascape, which was dominated by multiple yet similar media poles whose structure largely determined the relationship between old media and world politics. In the second part, I examine how the nature of digital ‘new’ media (in particular its erosion of the separation between sender and receiver) has undercut and transformed these very traditional configurations within old media platforms. The different structure of digital new media has transformed the global media landscape into one no longer characterised by similarity, but by difference; not by multipolarity but by heteropolarity. By exploring how digital new media poles are forming and old media poles are evolving, I critically examine the potentiality and limits of this seismic shift in the global media landscape and investigate how it requires us to re-evaluate our understanding of the nature of the relationship between media and world politics today.

The structural nature of ‘old’ media and the ‘old’ media landscape To begin examining the nature of conventional old media and its intersection with world politics, it is helpful to revisit an early form of mass communication, the eighteenth/nineteenth century panorama. At first sight, this media platform might strike us as an odd and antiquated choice given that we tend to associate so-called old media more strongly and intuitively with the printing press, radio broadcasters or television stations. Yet, as this section will illustrate, the panorama was, in its time, a state-of-the art media platform employed to turn politics into a form of mass entertainment (Benjamin 1980, 23; Oettermann 1997). More importantly, it also functioned along the very same technological and structural lines as its more familiar successors in nineteenth and twentieth century media. As such, it usefully illustrates important political dimensions of media that we see again in more recent traditional media platforms, such as the printing press, radio waves and satellite television.

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Napoleon, the panorama and the politics of war On 17 June 1787, Robert Barker received the official patent for a new art form which was to replace the large fresco painting as the predominant mass medium: the panorama (Oettermann 1997, 5). Etymologically, ‘panorama’ stems from the two Greek words ‘pan’ (all) and ‘horama’ (viewing). It is a technical term describing an enormous painted canvas that reproduces a 360-degree vista, affording spectators the opportunity to relive the experience of a scenic view from a summit. As a visual experience, the panorama was one of the first forms of illusionary space entertainment (Buck-Morss 1992, 22), forming the first virtual mass medium of the industrial age (Benjamin 1980, 23). With its capacity to liberate human vision (and to limit and ‘imprison’ it anew through its choice of representations), it became the eighteenth and nineteenth century forerunner of today’s movie and IMAX theaters (Oettermann 1997). It proved so popular with the bourgeois masses (and profitable for its owners) that it quickly spread from Leicester Square in London and the Champs-Élysées in Paris to the rest of Europe and throughout North America (see Figure 1). What is most fascinating, however, is how this medium became linked with politics and, in particular, with the politics of war. In 1810, a panorama in Paris displayed the Battle of Wagram, which Napoleon had won the previous year. The Emperor came to see it and appeared highly gratified by his depiction as a military hero. Whether he was motivated by his depiction or by an immediate appreciation of the propaganda value of panoramas remains unclear, but he afterwards

Figure 2.1 Robert Barker’s Panorama in London’s Leicester Square Source: (LateralArt n.d.), www.lateralart.com/digital_mural/robert-barkers-panorama-a-room-witha-view

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World politics in a global media landscape 17 gave instructions for the architect Jacques Cellerier to design seven panoramas on the Champs-Élysées, which were to display glorious French victories from both the revolutionary era and the Empire (Oettermann 1997, 152). In addition to the exhibitions in Paris, plans included sending mobile panoramas on a tour through France and its conquered territories. In the end, his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 meant that Napoleon’s plans were never carried out. Nevertheless, the political (propagandistic) value of the panorama as a mass-industrial-entertainment medium glorifying war and the prowess and authority of the victors was not lost on other political leaders (see Figure 2). The panorama was – in its time – a media platform employed to turn politics, in this case the politics of war, into a form of mass entertainment spectacle. It is telling that 90 per cent of all panoramas ever built displayed war themes (Wickens 1978, 424), making the panorama the precursor of the weekly newsreels on the progress of military campaigns shown in cinemas during the Second World War (Oettermann 1997, 152). Panoramas displayed the very same technological and political characteristics as other old media platforms that emerged in the forms of the printing press in 1439, the mechanical telegraph in 1794, electromagnetic waves in 1896, radio after World War One, television after World War Two and the first version of the internet (Web 1.0), which became available to the public in 1994. Of course, within the category of the various old media platforms, key differences existed in terms of formats, access, geographical spread, public accessibility or transmission speed. For instance, panoramas were geographically and spatially fixed, whereas later old media platforms became trans-spatial, thus radically expanding both audience and accessibility: the panorama exhibition in Paris could only have been viewed by a fraction of spectators compared to the masses

Figure 2.2 The Battle of Wagram (1809) by Wilhelm Alexander Source: (Kunstkopie n.d.), www.kunstkopie.de/a/von-kobell-wilhelm-alexan/die-schlacht-beiwagram-1.html

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listening to Churchill’s famous radio broadcasts during the Blitz, the global viewers who tuned in to follow the Vietnam War or CNN’s Peter Arnett reporting from a hotel rooftop in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War. Equally, while in Berlin in 1812, the opening of a new panorama which depicted the burning of Moscow only three months after the real event was celebrated as a sensation in ‘real-time’ (Oettermann 1997), it can hardly compare to the live and instantaneous television broadcasts of 9/11 or ‘Shock and Awe’ in 2003, let alone the difference between still images or prints (paintings, photographs and print media) and the moving images of the newsreel, the cinema and home-owned television sets. On all these levels, key technological innovations have occurred over time that have impacted upon the way in which politics has been reported and represented (Latham 2003). Most fundamentally, however, and underpinning all of these old media was a structural division between sender and receiver (Rid and Hecker 2009, 6). They were media platforms of mass monologues, one-directionally transmitting information generated by very small, yet highly specialised and powerful elites to the receiving masses. For the masses of passive receivers themselves, the ability to generate and transmit information through active participation, ‘user-generated content’ or ‘interactivity’ only became a possibility in 2002 when, due to the emergence of the Web 2.0, the technological preconditions for public media dialogue were created (Rid and Hecker 2009, 6–7). Until the advent of the dialogical capacities of digital new media platforms,2 the separation between sender and receiver in old media meant that information was only transmitted in one direction, from the producer to the consumer. Prior to the Web 2.0 digital revolution in 2002, all conventional media platforms operated along a common axis: the fundamental structural separation between sender and receiver, between the producer and the consumer of media (Louw 2003; Rid and Hecker 2009). This was already present from the time when Greek tragedies were staged in ancient amphitheaters, when Robert Barker built the first panorama, to the Fall of Berlin Wall and the 2003 real-time television coverage of the invasion of Iraq. This fundamental separation between sender and receiver means that all traditional media poles were of inherently similar type – irrespective of their differences in age, geographical reach or dissemination speed. The structural similarities of these poles outweighed their differences and conditioned the multipolar nature of the old global mediascape, a global media order that was dominated by the existence of multiple media poles of the same structural type. This multipolar old media landscape has had significant ramifications for the relationship between old media and world politics. But what are these ramifications and how do they impact upon the broader political dimensions of world politics? It is to these questions that the chapter now turns.

World politics and the old multipolar media landscape Building, operating and maintaining traditional media platforms (from the panorama to the mass printing press, the telegraph, radio/television stations and cinema) was exceedingly expensive and could therefore only be afforded by those

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World politics in a global media landscape 19 with sufficient financial sources and political power – the church, princes, sovereigns and, more recently, states and global media corporations (Benjamin 1980; Münkler 2006, 72–76). Throughout history, therefore, empires and sovereign states have not only been the primary sponsors but also – in most cases – the direct owners of conventional media platforms (Louw 2003; Rid and Hecker 2009). This intimate relationship between the state and state-owned traditional media has meant that the latter has regularly functioned as a mouthpiece and as a highly censored propaganda tool for the former (Münkler 2006, 72–76; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Carruthers 2011). The most obvious examples of this power relationship can be found in authoritarian regimes, ranging from Goebbels’ use of the transistor radio, the Soviet propaganda apparatus under Stalin, the state-owned hate radio station in Rwanda, to North Korea’s and Russia’s state-owned media. Here, direct ownership of traditional media platforms has allowed authoritarian regimes to directly control the dissemination of news and information. In liberal democratic societies, the media in recent times has generally been owned by private citizens or news corporations and celebrated as the ‘fourth estate’, the guarantor of freedom of speech independent from government control (Schultz 1998). Nevertheless, the state has maintained a large amount of influence over the dissemination of news. This becomes most visible at times of conflict, the most extreme form of political activity. Such levels of government influence have traditionally been achieved through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from outright censorship, denial of access to the battlefield, to systems of embedded reporting (Carruthers 2011; Conetta 2012). For instance, most democratic states (France since Algeria in the 1950s, the US since Vietnam in the 1980s, Israel since Lebanon in 1983, the UK since the Falklands War, but also Australia, Germany and Italy) have systematically started embedding journalists directly with their military forces (Münkler 2006, 72–76; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Carruthers 2011, 96–98). There are two reasons why media conglomerates have been receptive to such systematic government controls at times of conflict. On the one hand, media in democratic countries has regularly displayed a tendency to voluntarily forgo its scrutinising role in times of war out of a sense of patriotism (Elter 2005; Louw 2010). On the other hand, war has become one of the most profitable businesses for corporatised media companies (Elter 2005). The exclusive coverage of the 1991 Iraq War, for instance, transformed CNN from a near bankrupt television station into a multi-billion dollar business venture (Ottosen 1991). War in particular, but political crises and humanitarian catastrophes more generally, have been a financially lucrative business. Therefore, for media oligopolies, gaining access to the events, even at the cost of (self-)censorship, has often been prioritised over political independence and freedom of speech (Elter 2005). This relatively intimate relationship between Western governments and traditional media outlets has meant that in times of political crisis, the fourth estate (Schultz 1998) as a control mechanism scrutinising states’ conduct of wars has been significantly compromised (Elter 2005; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010). This does not mean that the

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traditional media in democratic societies has necessarily lost its political independence but that at times of crisis the information it can publish and the images it can use are – not dissimilar to authoritarian regimes – oftentimes controlled by states (Elter 2005; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Louw 2010). Facilitating states’ ability to influence and, at times, control the mediation of politics has been the structural separation between sender and receiver that characterises old media. Agency, or the ability to produce and disseminate news, has traditionally rested in the hands of a very small minority of highly specialised and materially powerful actors, and traditional media platforms function according to mass-industrial modes of production (Rid and Hecker 2009).3 They are materially vast and expensive infrastructures that could only be afforded by powerful actors such as states or corporations. Furthermore, the actual production of news requires a large pool of highly trained specialists such as journalists, technicians and editors. This creates a fundamental separation between sender and receiver; one that endows a small minority with agency whilst reducing the vast majority of citizens to passive media consumers. This fundamental division between producers and consumers means that old media platforms create a news environment of mass monologue where news production and communication flow in only one direction (Louw 2003). Agency within traditional media can therefore be seen as clearly lodged with particular elites and a caucus of professional journalists. It is a clearly defined sector of society mandated to produce and disseminate news. Agency therefore is lodged in a clearly defined web of material and social relations that limit the range of participants in this sector and thus limit agency. Limited agency has meant that the number of central media gatekeepers that governments have to control in order to exert political influence over how their politics are being mediated is relatively small. In fact, this traditionally small number has shrunk dramatically over the last few decades as a result of oligopolisation, a process whereby (through mergers and hostile take-overs) progressively fewer individuals or corporations control increasing shares of the global media market (Warf 2007; Louw 2010). This concentration of traditional media ownership started in the 1980s and has since seen the rise of ever-larger, profit-oriented media conglomerates with a global reach. For instance, the number of independent television stations in the United States alone has been reduced from over 100 in the early 1980s to just seven by 2012 (Rodman 2008). In Latin America, 85 per cent of the media today is owned by just seven news corporations (Al Jazeera 2012). In Australia, ownership of most traditional media outlets is now shared between News Corporation, Time Warner and Fairfax (Lewis 2001; Turner 2013). These media oligopolies have invested their assets across various media platforms (television, radio, newspapers, publishing houses, music production, cinema and internet) and are global in reach (Turner 2013). For instance, by 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the world’s second-largest news conglomerate (after the Walt Disney Company), owned 800 media companies in 50 different countries with an annual revenue of $34 billion (Newscorp 2013). This concentration of global media ownership has had direct implications for the quality and diversity of news reporting. Driven primarily by profit-interests

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World politics in a global media landscape 21 and concerns for market shares rather than by the desire to uphold the highest journalistic standards and to critically scrutinise government policies, many media oligopolies have started replacing serious news with ‘infotainment’ (Louw 2010; Stahl 2010; Turner 2013). This process, which has been the flipside of oligopolisation, is most visible in the decline of investment in investigative journalism within old media platforms. More than any other sector of journalism, investigative journalism has traditionally symbolised the media’s self-proclaimed role as the fourth estate, which scrutinises, questions and checks government policies (Schultz 1998). However, because it requires larger, more long-term investment often with an uncertain outcome, investigative journalism has become the biggest victim of today’s corporatised global media landscape (Al Jazeera 2013). For most Western governments, concerned with how their politics are being represented and visualised, the process of oligopolisation has been good news: as noted above, it has meant that the number of crucial media gatekeepers that need to be controlled has dropped dramatically. This contraction in the distribution of agency in conventional media has not only restricted the potential for diverse news coverage but also facilitated the ability of states to control the nature of news reporting, in particular at times of political crisis. While this clearly applies to state-owned media in authoritarian states, it is also of relevance to conventional media in liberal democracies (Elter 2005). This is significant because powerful actors throughout history have sought to influence and control news reporting. Developments in communications and information technologies have, over the centuries, provided both opportunities and challenges to this quest. Between the invention of the printing press and the emergence of satellite television, factors such as time and space have become increasingly compressed. While most representations of political violence have been made retrospectively (i.e., taking place after the events), innovations in media technology have led to ever more instantaneous forms of news reporting. Robert Barker took several months to construct his first panorama (Seitz 2008). Battlefront news from the Crimean War took several days before it was received at the news desks of European capitals (Carruthers 1996, 149). The television footage of the Vietnam War on average took two days before it was watched in American living rooms. In the case of the 1991 Gulf War, the time lag was still 24 hours. It was not until the events of 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq that global TV coverage of war could be experienced in real-time (Carruthers 2011). In other words, the representation of politics, in this case of war, has become instantaneous. In this first part of the chapter, I have identified the structural separation between sender and receiver as lying at the heart of traditional media platforms. Irrespective of the latter’s inherent differences across time, spread and speed, this structural separation conditioned the nature of the old global media landscape that was dominated by the existence of multiple media poles of the same type. The material and structural nature of this old multipolar media landscape had significant ramifications for the relationship between old media and world politics in that sovereign states have not only been the primary sponsors but also – in most cases – the direct owners and controllers of conventional media platforms (Rid and Hecker 2009).

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This intimate relationship between the state and traditional media has meant that states have enjoyed a strong influence over the use of traditional industrial mass media platforms, in particular in times of political crisis.

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Digital new media and the Balkanisation of the global media landscape The nature of this relationship between traditional media and conflict is of significance given that, since 1945, there has been a gradual, yet fundamental shift from a multipolar state-centric to a heteropolar world order. Alongside states, powerful actors have emerged in the forms of international organisations, nonstate armed groups, NGOs, humanitarian agencies, powerful business enterprises and globally operating private interest groups. And yet, while the structure of the international system had started to become more heteropolar, the global media landscape had structurally continued to be multipolar in nature. In turn, this meant that states continued to hold a key advantage over these newly emerging new-state actors in terms of their influence over existing mass industrial media platforms (Münkler 2006). This structural situation, however, has changed fundamentally with the emergence of digital new media technology in 2002 (Kaempf 2009). The rise of the latter has resulted in a structural shift from a multipolar to a heteropolar media landscape, one that is no longer characterised by similarity but by difference, not by multipolarity but by heteropolarity (Copeland 2009; Der Derian 2012). This multiplication and simultaneous diversification of structurally different media actors has heavily impacted upon and altered the traditional relationship between old media and world politics. In this brave new media world, the latest technological quantum leap has empowered non-state actors and individuals alike to be become media producers, to resist and to challenge and to directly impact on how world politics is being mediated. Unlike conventional mass media platforms, digital new media technology breaks down the age-old division between sender and receiver. Due to its cheap and user-friendly nature, together with its interconnectivity, simultaneity, ubiquity and interactivity, this has resulted in newly super-empowered non-state and individual media actors emerging alongside traditional media actors.4 Thus, there has been massive broadening and diversification of the number of actors who can produce media and utilise media platforms as part of their political agenda. Furthermore, digital new media technology is much harder to control by state actors and thereby has offered non-state actors a strategic tool to break the state’s influence over the framing and the visual representation of world politics. In contrast to the old multipolar media landscape where all media actors were structurally comparable, the emerging media heteropolarity has empowered different types of actors at different hierarchical levels (including states, non-state actors and individuals) to mediatise world politics. In the heteropolar mediascape, these diverse media poles share little in common as the material and structural differences between them far outweigh their similarities. Digital new media technology, in

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World politics in a global media landscape 23 this sense, has fragmented or Balkanised the old global media landscape (Münkler 2006; Sparrow 2012). Tracing the contours of heteropolarity and its implications for the relationship between world politics and media reveals two major developments: first, entirely new media poles are forming, and second, old media poles are evolving. Both developments have impacted on the mediation of world politics. The first development – the formation of entirely new types of media actors – has afforded a broad range of non-state actors to become directly involved in the conversation about world politics. An early example of this development can be found in the Zapatistas, one of the first groups to successfully employ the internet as a means to rally global political support for their cause alongside their military struggle against the Mexican government (Gray 1997). Other, more recent examples of this development can be found in terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda, ISIS, Jamal Islamya or Boko Haram, who use various digital new media platforms to debate and refine their strategies, to recruit sympathisers into their ranks and to visually counter the media campaigns of their enemies. Yet they can also be found amongst the protestors in Iran, Thailand, Burma, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, who have rallied support and organised themselves against their governments through Twitter and Facebook. Citizen journalists, from the famous ‘Baghdad blogger’ Salam Pax and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement to ‘Anonymous’ and the Syrian citizens who – in the absence of traditional foreign media in the country – have generated most of the footage of the civil war, they all have been able to directly lend their voices to the mediation of today’s world politics. Other digital platforms such as Wikileaks have demonstrated the potentials of whistleblowing in a digitally wired world, whilst social media channels like ‘Democracy Now!’ and ‘The Intercept’ have added critical investigative voices to the media airwaves. Humanitarian NGOs like savedarfur.org have teamed up with Google and Facebook to visually map and bring public attention to the mass atrocities in Darfur, whilst the infamous 30-minute clip ‘Kony 2012’, released by the activist group ‘Invisible Children, Inc.’ on 5 March 2012, yielded the fastest growing viral video of all times, attracting 94 million viewers on YouTube and another 16.6 million on Vimeo within six months of its release (Carbone 2012). Private organisations like the US-based ‘Minute Man Project’ use social media sites to patrol the MexicanAmerican border in search for illegal immigrants (Medrano 2014; Minute Man Project n.d.), while US soldiers placed images of the abuses in Abu Ghraib onto their personal websites (Hersh 2004). All these non-state actors can have a view, can have an image and can express a perspective outside traditional media outlets. At the same time, digital new media have also allowed states to become direct media producers, providing them a news presence independent of the traditional media gateways. For instance, the Israeli Army banned all foreign media from its 2008 military campaign in Lebanon and instead conducted its entire media campaign (including press conferences) through social media sites (Bennett 2013). During the Iraq war, the Pentagon has set up its own YouTube channels and – in response to the Abu Ghraib scandal – has introduced ‘milblogs’, a platform through which media-trained US soldiers report their war experiences to a general public

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(Peebles 2011, 12–14). In 2008, the State Department ventured into a new form of digital surrogate warfare. In partnership with Google, Facebook, YouTube, MTV, Howcast, CNN, NBC, MTV and the Columbia Law School, it founded ‘Alliance of Youth Movements’, an initiative which has since trained global youth groups in how to use digital media ‘to promote freedom and justice’ against oppressive and authoritarian regimes (Louw 2013). The Syrian and Iranian regimes successfully used Facebook and Twitter as surveillance tools to identify and subsequently arrest protestors. Furthermore, the Pentagon has developed free online first person shooter games like ‘America’s Army’ as a way to successfully recruit young people into military service (Stahl 2010) and has started using digital new media not only for surveillance and drone warfare but also to treat soldiers for post-traumatic stress disorders. Far from being an exhaustive list, these examples briefly illustrate how digital new media technology has afforded the formation of entirely new media actors to directly generate and disseminate news without having to through established traditional media ‘filters’. Alongside these new media poles forming, old media poles are evolving at the same time. Digital new media technology, in other words, has not left traditional media outlets unaffected. Besides triggering significant budget crises amongst old media platforms, including ever-growing numbers of outright foreclosures (especially in the newspaper sector), traditional media have evolved by incorporating and drawing on digital new media tools and sources. Here, traditional media today often draw directly on footage taken from the internet, be this in its coverage of the Syrian civil war, the Iranian post-election protests in 2009 or the political crisis in Thailand. And TV channels incorporate online video statements from their viewers into prominent shows like Al Jazeera’s flagship programme ‘The Listening Post’. The impact of this dual development (new media poles forming and old ones evolving) on the mediation of world politics has been to fragment it, making it very hard (for political actors) to generate a uniform perspective and (for media audiences) to be presented with a monological view of the truth. Instead, the mediation of today’s politics is generated by a whole range of people, from accredited, embedded, professional journalists, to terrorist organisations, street protestors or ‘citizen journalists’ who are putting out press releases and uploading images and videos; from governments who are putting out pre-produced packages explaining their side of the story to soldiers writing military blogs presenting their own point of view from the battlefield itself, posting photographs on Flickr and Facebook. At the same time, traditional news organisations are facing serious budget pressures due to the growing popularity of alternative news media, whilst still trying to provide day-to-day news coverage according to highest journalistic standards. In short, digital new media has introduced a wider range of voices into the mediation of world politics. On a global level, then, digital new media technologies have become a force multiplier and potential game-changer for non-state actors vis-à-vis states. They have leveled the media playing field by empowering previously disadvantaged non-state actors to reconceptualise and appropriate public media as a battleground of ideas, views and political agendas. They have afforded non-state actors the

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World politics in a global media landscape 25 ability to contest the conventional media representation of world politics without having to go through the filters of accredited news organisations. In essence, they have empowered non-state actors to lend their own voice to the discussions and controversies of world politics. This emancipatory dimension of digital new media technology has – alongside traditional media outlets – generated a multiplicity of new perspectives, voices and visualisations of world politics. All these different actors have contributed to a more diversified and complex discussion by lending their voices to a conversation about world political issues that had previously been confined to a handful of powerful media outlets.

Beware of the limits For many commentators, this development constitutes a process of media democratisation that not only allows everyone with a smart phone and internet connection to disseminate news, but that also promises – through its diverse and multiple nature – the potential of a more balanced, ‘all-viewing’ perspective of contemporary world politics. This is predicated on the idea that we can now disseminate and engage in a multitude of perspectives of politics and that lining up all these multiple perspectives allows us to get a clearer, better, more objective insight into world politics. For instance, the Syrian civil war has exposed us to a heavily splintered visuality, generated by a multitude of media actors ranging from the embattled Assad regime to opposition forces, ISIS fighters, average citizens, religious leaders, humanitarian aid workers, international human rights groups and global news networks. And whilst each of these insights produced by the multitude of actors certainly comes with its own political agenda and spin, the sum of all these views taken together seemingly allows for a more nuanced and arguably more accurate insight into the nature of the conflict. In other words, by splintering and fragmenting the mediation of world politics, digital new media has generated a multiplicity of perspectives that promises the potential of ‘all-viewing’. But while digital new media has certainly fragmented and ‘Balkanised’ the global mediascape, the processes through which information arrives on our screens and enters into our minds are far less all-viewing, multifaceted and diverse than some of the literature and commentary suggest. At first sight, this might seem counter-intuitive, but looking behind the screens of our computers, phones and tablets reveals processes, technological functions and political dynamics that influence what information appears on our screens and enters our minds in the first place. In this final section of the chapter, I outline four general factors that compromise and limit our ability to experience the promise of digital new media generating an all-viewing perspective of world politics. First, whilst digital new media has certainly rocked the foundations of the old global mediascape and triggered a crisis for traditional media outlets like newspaper, radio and television, there still remains a vast viewer discrepancy between established news outlets and digital new media ones. Traditional news outlets by and large still attract significantly higher numbers of readers, listeners and watchers than the vast majority of digital new media outlets. Whilst younger generations

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of digital natives have been the biggest driving force with regards to the growth in digital new media consumption (a trend that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future), very few digital new media channels today can actually rival established news outlets in terms of mass consumption and followership. In addition, there remains a sense amongst media consumers – regardless of whether it is justified or not – that established news outlets are more objective, professional, in line with journalistic ethics and less biased than most of today’s digital new media platforms (Gillmor 2010; Louw 2010). In other words, traditional media outlets have far from disappeared; they have remained politically powerful media actors. Second, digital new media technology in general, and cyberspace in particular, have become increasingly policed and controlled by states. Some fifteen to twenty years ago, most governments did not think about the internet at all and very few even had internet policies. Fast forward to the post-9/11 world, and we can see how cybersecurity has become top of most governments’ agendas worldwide. In a way, given how much technology and critical infrastructure is connected to the internet, it was inevitable that the state would get involved more forcefully through internet governance. But this development has generated a new market, with the rise of a new political economy in the cyber-security realm, where the interests of the internet economy and the aims of state security have been converging around the same functional needs to collect, monitor and analyse as much data as possible. As Ron Deibert (2013) shows in a groundbreaking study, many internet firms are now servicing both segments of the market, like those companies that market facial recognition technologies who service both Facebook on the one hand and the CIA or authoritarian regimes on the other. Internet firms which were once associated with wiring the world and connecting individuals are now offering off-the-shelf software for social media infiltration, computer network attacks and cellphone tracking that have turned those wires into secret weapons of warfare and repression (Deibert 2013). These developments impact heavily on the ability of digital new media for social mobilisation and dissent, in particular at times of conflict or when regimes are under threat. A few years back, many celebrated the Arab Spring as the paradigm of what these technologies could do in terms of ending authoritarian rule. Unfortunately, Syria has become the Arab Spring’s dark aftermath (Shirky 2008; Morozov 2011; McChesney 2013). Researchers have shown how the very means of online organisation can become sources of insecurity, as groups sympathetic to the Assad regime have employed off-the-shelf malware crime-kits that infiltrate social networks, in order to arrest, torture and murder opposition groups (Deibert 2013). This was not an isolated incident. Instead, across cyberspace, regime opposition, dissidents and human rights activists have become targeted by advance spyware manufactured by Western companies (Deibert 2013). Products that provide advanced deep package inspection, content filtering, social network mining, cellphone tracking and even computer network attack capabilities are being developed by western firms, put into the hands of policymakers and used to limit democratic participation, isolate and identify opposition and infiltrate meddlesome adversaries all over the world. This growing role of the state in cyberspace means

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World politics in a global media landscape 27 that digital new media platforms are increasingly becoming governed and policed. In turn, dissenting voices in and visualities of world politics today are finding it harder than ever to reach their target audiences. Algorithms are the third factor that limits the availability of diverse information through digital new media (Podolny 2015). Asked by a journalist about the algorithmic logic of the Facebook newsfeed, Mark Zuckerberg answered that ‘A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa’ (Kirkpatrick 2011, 296). Facebook and most digital new media platforms organise information along this logic because algorithms largely determine how information is flowing online (Luckerson 2015). Take Google, for example: if two people, at the same time, based in the same room, use the same google.com search engine to search for the very same word, such as ‘Syria’, they tend to get different search results. The reason for this is that Google uses 57 different signals to generate personally tailored information, ranging from the user’s geolocation, the type of device and browser used and the user’s digital footprint and browsing history. The Washington Post, the Huffington Post, The New York Times and Yahoo! News (one of the biggest news sites in terms of global users) now all use personalised newsfeeds (Jolly 2014; Podolny 2015). What this means is that we have moved into a world where digital new media shows us things that it thinks we want to see but not necessarily what we think we want or need to see. As Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, said ‘It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them’ (Jenkins 2010). In other words, the algorithmic nature of digital new media platforms generates a filter bubble, where the media consumer no longer decides what enters one’s screen and what is edited out (Jolly 2014; Luckerson 2015). With regards to world politics, this algorithmic logic of gatekeeping revolts against the idea of a balanced viewing as the technology itself – unbeknownst to the user – generates the information that the system itself thinks best fit the user’s political interests. The user no longer decides what is relevant, important, uncomfortable or challenging to his or her worldview. Instead, with algorithms increasingly deciding what we get to see and (perhaps more importantly) what we do not get to see, digital technology has moved us further away rather than closer to the idea that we are exposed to a multitude and diversity of views about world politics. A fourth and final factor that limits the all-viewing promise of digital new media is the behaviour of the media consumer her/himself. Recent research has shown that whilst media consumers have more different news sources available to them than any generation before, they tend to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of sources at their disposal. Most interestingly, the general response by the average media consumer to this historically unprecedented ability to access different sources has been to pick and choose those very sources that confirm the user’s already existing political, religious or ideological worldviews (Gillmor 2010). In other words, the average media consumer has become increasingly disinclined to consume news that challenges their existing assumptions or that contradicts their worldview. Thus, instead of making use of the unprecedented possibility to

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engage in a diversity of different and contradicting viewpoints, media consumer habits have moved in the opposite direction, drawing on a diversity of sources that all confirm rather than unravel one’s viewpoint. This means that the average user tends to gain a deeper insight into world politics, but an insight that has become more one-sided and narrower, despite the multitude of views and sources available online. What these four factors show is that whilst digital new media technology has splintered and fragmented the global mediascape and allowed for a multitude of voices and visualities about world politics, the processes through which information arrives at our screens and enters our consciousness are far less permissive of an all-viewing perspective than is generally assumed.

Conclusion The rise of digital new media technology has transformed the global media landscape. Gone is the old multipolar mediascape made up of structurally similar media entities. In its place, a new heteropolar mediascape has emerged as a result of the multiplication and simultaneous diversification of structurally different media actors. Today’s global media landscape is no longer characterised by similarity but by difference, not by multipolarity but by heteropolarity. In other words, digital new media has fragmented, or Balkanised, the traditional mediascape. This emancipatory dimension of digital new media technology has – alongside traditional media outlets – generated a multiplicity of newly empowered perspectives, voices and visualisations of world politics. All these actors have contributed to a more diversified and complex discussion by lending their voices to a conversation about world political issues that had previously been confined to a handful of powerful media outlets. And yet, while digital new media has certainly fragmented and ‘Balkanised’ the global mediascape, the processes through which information arrives on our screens and enters into our minds are far less all-viewing, multifaceted and diverse than some of the literature and commentary want to make us believe. Here, the chapter pointed to four factors (the still-existing discrepancy between traditional and new media sources, the increasing policing and censorship role of the state in cyberspace, the selection logic of algorithms and the behavioural patterns of the individual media consumer) whose aggregate effect seems to indicate that our perspectives of and insights into world politics are actually very limited. In other words, the emergence of a heteropolar media landscape has not automatically translated into an all-viewing perspective on global politics. This might be frightening to some and sobering to others but what it shows is that – as societies and citizens – we need to become more medialiterate and take an active interest in the politics media technology: looking behind the screens of our computers and phones reveals processes, technological functions and political dynamics that – knowing and unknowingly – largely determine what information is allowed to enter our screens and minds in the first place.

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Notes 1 This chapter draws a distinction between ‘old’ (traditional, conventional) and ‘digital new’ media. When referring to ‘old’ media, the terminology of ‘old’, ‘traditional’, ‘conventional’ is used interchangeably, indicating a semantic, not substantive difference. 2 ‘Dialogical’, stemming from the noun dialogue, refers to the two-way communication/exchange which has been structurally enabled through the advent of digital media technology. 3 There have always been, of course smaller independent media organizations, or newspapers produced by lobby groups or political organizations to promote their causes. However, they do not dominate the traditional media scape and the same dynamic of the separation between producer and audience applies. 4 As just one example of this new phenomenon, by 2011, 72 hours of video was uploaded onto YouTube every minute. See www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics, accessed on 31 January 2013.

Bibliography Al Jazeera (2012) ‘Listening post, Latin America’s media battlefields’, podcast, 22 December 2012, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEhAF_fXP6Y, accessed 31 January 2013. Al Jazeera (2013) ‘Listening post, game of drones’, podcast, 16 February 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILgIaAHuSK0, accessed 10 March 2013. Benjamin, W. (1980) ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, 1–77 in Benjamin, W. (ed.) Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Bennett, D. (2013) Digital Media and Reporting Conflict, London: Routledge. Buck-Morss, S. (1992) ‘Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s artwork essay reconsidered’, October, 62 (Autumn): 3–41. Carbone, N. (2012) ‘Top 10 viral videos of 2012’, Time Magazine, 4 December 2012, available at http://entertainment.time.com/2012/12/04/top-10-arts-lists/slide/kony-2012/, accessed 17 November 2015. Carruthers, S. (1996) War, Culture and the Media: Representations of the Military in 20th Century Britain, Wiltshire: Flicks Books. Carruthers, S. (2011) The Media At War, Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillan. Conetta, C. (2012) ‘Innverview: Carl Conetta’, the vision machine, 12 March 2013, available at http://thevisionmachine.com/2012/10/innverview-carl-conetta/, accessed 31 January 2013. Copeland, D. (2009) Guerilla Diplomacy: Rethinking International Relations, London: Lynne Rienner. Deibert, R.J. (2013) Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace, Toronto: Random House. Der Derian, J. (2012) ‘Conflict and heteropolarity’, the vision machine, available at http:// thevisionmachine.com/2012/03/conflict-in-a-heteropolar-media-landscape/, accessed 31 January 2013. Elter, A. (2005) Die Kriegsverkaeufer: Die Geschichte der US Propaganda, 1917–2005, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. Gillmor, D. (2010) ‘Mediactive’, available at http://mediactive.com/wp-content/ uploads/2010/12/mediactive_gillmor.pdf, accessed on 12 August 2015. Gray, C.H. (1997) Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, London: Routledge. Hersh, S. (2004) ‘Torture at Abu Ghraib’, The New Yorker, 10 May 2004, available at www. newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/10/torture-at-abu-ghraib, accessed 17 November 2015.

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Hoskins, A. and O’Loughlin, B. (2010) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Cambridge: Polity Press. Jenkins, H.W. (2010) ‘Google and the search for the future’, The Wall Street Journal, 14 August 2010, available at www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575 423294099527212, accessed 17 November 2015. Jolly, J. (2014) ‘How algorithms decide the news you see’, Columbia Journalism Review, 20 May 2014, available at www.cjr.org/news_literacy/algorithms_filter_bubble.php, accessed 17 November 2015. Kaempf, S. (2009) ‘Waging war in the new media age: Images as strategic weapons and the ethics of contemporary warfare’, 130–138 in Creeber, G. and Martin, R.D. (eds) Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kirkpatrick, D. (2011) The Facebook Story, London: Random House. Kuntskopie (n.d.) 'Die Schlacht bei Wagram 1808 – Wilhelm Alexander Wolfgang von Kobell’, available at www.kunstkopie.de/a/von-kobell-wilhelm-alexan/die-schlacht-beiwagram-1.html LateralArt (n.d.) ‘Robert Barker’s Panorama: a room with a view’, available at www. lateralart.com/digital_mural/robert-barkers-panorama-a-room-with-a-view Latham, R. (ed.)(2003) Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship between Information Technology and Security, New York: The New Press. Lewis, K. (2001) ‘Pluralism in the Australian print media’, Asia-Pacific Media Educator, 11: 100–112. Louw, E.P. (2003) ‘The “War against terrorism”: A public relations challenge for the Pentagon’, Gazette: The International Journal for Communication, 65(3): 211–230. Louw, E.P. (2010) The Media and Political Process, London: Sage Publications. Louw, E.P. (2013) ‘Social media = Revolution?’, the vision machine, available at http:// thevisionmachine.com/2013/04/facebook-revolutions/, accessed 13 April 2013. Luckerson, V. (2015) ‘Here’s how Facebook’s News Feed actually works’, Time Magazine, 9 July 2015, available at http://time.com/3950525/facebook-news-feed-algorithm/, accessed 17 November 2015. McChesney, R.W. (2013) Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy, New York: New Press. Medrano, L. (2014) ‘What happened to Minute Man Project?’, Christian Science Monitor, 30 April 2014, available at www.csmonitor.com/USA/2014/0430/What-happened-toMinuteman-Project-It-s-still-roiling-immigration-reform, accessed 17 November 2015. Minute Man Project (n.d.) available at http://baesic.net/minutemanproject/, accessed 17 November 2015. Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World, London: Allen Lane. Münkler, H. (2006) Vom Krieg zum Terror, Zurich: VonTobel Stiftung. Newscorp (n.d.) available at www.newscorp.com/investor/index.html, accessed 21 January 2013. Oettermann, S. (1997) The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, New York: Zone Books. Ottosen, R. (1991) The Gulf War with the Media as Hostage, International Peace Research Institute, Oslo. Peebles, S.L. (2011) Welcome to the Suck: Narrating the American Soldiers’ Experience in Iraq, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Podolny, S. (2015) ‘If an algorithm wrote this, how would you even know?’, The New York Times, 7 March 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-analgorithm-wrote-this-how-would-you-even-know.html?_r=0, accessed 18 November 2015.

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World politics in a global media landscape 31 Rid, T. and Hecker, M. (2009) War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age, Westport, CT: Praeger Security International. Rodman, G. (2008) Mass Media in a Changing World, New York: McGraw Hill. Schultz, J. (1998) Reviving the Fourth Estate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seitz, D.W. (2008) ‘War and truth’, Film and History, 38(2): 68–71. Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together, London: Penguin Books. Sparrow, P. (2012) ‘Innerview with Susan Carruthers: Media and US warfare’, the vision machine, available at http://thevisionmachine.com/2012/10/innerview-with-susancarruthers-media-and-us-warfare/, accessed 31 January 2013. Stahl, R. (2010) Militainment, Inc: War, Media and Popular Culture, New York: Routledge. Turner, G. (2013) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, London and New York: Routledge. Warf, B. (2007) ‘Oligopolization of global media and telecommunications and its implications for democracy’, Ethics, Place and Environment, 10(1): 89–105. Wickens, G. (1978) Philosophy and Myth in Thomas Hardy’s Novels and “The Dynasts”, Doctoral dissertation, University of Western Ontario.

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Authors and authenticity Knowledge, representation and research in contemporary world politics Laura J. Shepherd

This book proceeds from the assumption that world politics manifests in digital spaces and that the manifestations of world politics that occur in the digital realm are, by virtue of the accessibility of such spaces, popular cultural artefacts (see Hamilton, this volume). In this chapter, I explore what it means for disciplinary practice when we bring these artefacts into our research programs. The mutability of digital representations and the circumstances of their production and circulation raise interesting questions about the authorship and authenticity of the artefacts we research. In this chapter, I begin with an interrogation of what has traditionally counted as knowledge in the study of world politics. I outline the conventions of knowledge production in the discipline of international relations and interrogate the disciplinary emphasis on evidence-based argument that organises how we conceive of validity or credibility in research. Following this overview, in the second section I engage with the dismissal of Brian Walski, former staff photographer at the L.A. Times covering the Iraq war, who was fired in 2003 for Photoshopping two images together for dramatic effect. I argue that this case demands that scholars of global politics in the digital age who use digital images in their research need to consider carefully the issues that Walski’s case illuminated. In the third section of the chapter, I discuss a photograph that circulated widely on social media in 2014, showing a child sleeping between two grave-like mounds of stones. The image was staged by a photographer as part of an art project, but was often reproduced and shared with text suggesting that the image depicted a Syrian orphan sleeping between the graves of his dead parents. I use this analytical vehicle to argue that the truth value of the artefact is irretrievably compromised in the digital age, but that even staged or fabricated texts can provide meaningful insight into contemporary understandings of global politics. In the final section of the chapter, I explore the implications of a ‘turn to digital culture’ in terms of the effect that such a turn might have on disciplinary conceptualisations of authenticity and the subject of the author in processes of knowledge production. I explore the internet reactions to the revelation that the author of the blog, Gay Girl in Damascus, was in fact a straight man from Georgia, USA. I juxtapose Gay Girl with the Iraqi blog Baghdad Burning, written by the pseudonymous Riverbend, to comment on some of the difficulties presented by researching digital materials. It is my contention that the form of the media throws into stark relief issues of authority, truth and power and

Authors and authenticity 33 the blurry lines between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, which exist everywhere in the study of world politics. Engaging these issues in the digital context can – or should – change the way that we think about the politics and practice of knowledge production in IR.

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On science/scientism: producing knowledge and the study of world politics This chapter (indeed, this volume as a whole) is concerned with the study of world politics. While by definition a multidisciplinary endeavour spanning arts, humanities and social science disciplines, the contribution I wish to make here to the study of world politics is located in the discipline of International Relations (IR), variously conceived as a sub-field or sub-discipline of political science or as a field of the social sciences in its own right. IR is concerned with the study of political practices, processes and exchanges at the international level, with ‘relations international’, as Christine Sylvester has put it (2002, 10), the better to illustrate the focus on relationality that is hidden from view in many conventional accounts of the discipline. Much, in fact, is hidden from view in conventional IR accounts of world politics (see, for example, Enloe 1996 on the invisibility of the ‘margins, silences and bottom rungs’ of international affairs). The starting point for the argument presented here is the recognition that the study of IR has historically been disciplined by a preference for a particular approach to the production of knowledge, which in part explains the disciplinary myopia mentioned above. The strong preference in IR has been for analyses of world politics that explain rather than understand. As Martin Hollis and Steve Smith have argued, the epistemological differences between the two bodies of scholarship that pursue these two ends are such that there is ‘no easy way to combine’ the two approaches (1990, 6) and IR as a discipline has conventionally valued explanation (‘outsider accounts’, in Hollis and Smith’s terminology, see 1990, 3, passim) over understanding. Hollis and Smith’s overview presents an image of ‘two intellectual traditions’, informed by their belief ‘that both traditions are fertile for the study of international relations’ (1990, 1), but does not take into account the ‘disciplining function’ of science in IR (Jackson 2011, 9, emphasis in original) that produces – and is produced by – the prestige accorded to science as a regulatory ideal in the conduct of research. That is, research conducted from within the discipline of IR is expected to explain why the world is the way that it is (and perhaps the circumstances under which it might change) and to do so according to a set of principles borrowed from the natural sciences: ‘scientific’ is a synonym for quality in IR (King et al. 1994, 7). This adherence to the ideal of ‘science’, also expressed as a commitment to scientism, has particular effects on the discipline: Ontologically, the literature tends to operate in the space defined by rationalism; epistemologically, it is empiricist and, methodologically, it is positivist. Together these define ‘proper’ social science and thereby serve as the gatekeepers for what counts as legitimate scholarship. (Smith 2000, 383, emphasis added)

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If the converse holds, and IR defines ‘legitimate scholarship’ as ‘proper social science’, certain research imperatives emerge related to the replicability and objectivity of our studies. ‘Proper’ IR knowledge is generated through the objective examination of data; what we might therefore term ‘improper’ IR – produced by those of us who suffer from Ken Booth’s ‘professional disorder, the symptoms of which involve believing that the study of IR can gain more from studying Foucault than NATO’ (Booth 1995, 109) – has its own alternative metrics of validity. While these metrics emphasise the importance of credibility and confirmability rather than truth and objectivity (see Wilkinson 2013, 135), it is important to note that even the most critical scholarship of global politics relies in some sense on the provision of evidence to support the arguments presented. Producing knowledge in IR, then, relies on the interpretation of data; knowledge claims rest on evidence. One researcher might collect and interrogate data on military spending alongside data on the number of women in parliament to establish whether there is a statistically significant relationship between the two, and another researcher might produce a ‘thick description’, in Geertz’s terminology (1973, 5–6), of the everyday life of a female soldier deployed to Afghanistan. Both would argue that their studies are contributing to knowledge about gender and security practices, broadly conceived; it is likely that these two studies would be received differently by different audiences, however, on the basis of their research design. The point that I try to make here is that both the statistical survey and the ethnography rely on evidence to generate knowledge claims. They might treat that evidence differently, conceptualise it differently, consider different forms of socio-political practice as evidence, but ultimately even the most committed post-positivist in the discipline of IR puts forward knowledge claims that are based in evidence. This is why the nature of evidence, and its stability, is so significant. It has profound effects on the discipline if the concept of evidence itself is called into question, if that which is presented as a true representation of the social world is digitally manipulated or fabricated, or if that which is presented as one thing is actually – or also – something else entirely. These considerations demand that we think carefully about evidence and knowledge, given that the authority of the claims that we make in IR rest so heavily on the authenticity of the evidence that we draw upon.

Authenticity and authority: digital images as a source of knowledge In this section I focus on digital images as a form of evidence to draw out some of the issues around authenticity, and concomitant authority, of the artefacts we interrogate. I use imagery for two reasons: first, the manipulability of digital images is such that it is likely that every image circulated in news media or on social media has been edited in some way; and, second, there are famous cases of the manipulation of images in news media that can be used to illuminate some of the concerns that face researchers using digital images. I discuss the case of former Los Angeles Times staff photographer Brian Walski, who was fired in 2003 for submitting a digitally manipulated photograph that was circulated by a

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Authors and authenticity 35 number of Tribune News Corporation media outlets. This case provides insights into the nature of researching digital images and also raises questions about ethical practice in research. Questions about the authority and authenticity of photographic representations of world events, usually in the form of press photography (photojournalism), are not new. Contestations over the truth status of photographs have existed, and the complexity of interpretation has been acknowledged, for many decades (see Bleiker 2012, 6–7, for an overview of these debates; see also Berger 1972; Barthes 1997; Sontag 1977). At the heart of these debates is the idea that ‘[p]hotographs are really experience captured’ (Sontag 1977, 3). The truth status of the photograph, particularly press photographs, derives from the assumption that the image functions as a direct representation of reality: ‘The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture’ (Sontag 1977, 5). The viewer of the image thus may suppose that, through making sense of the image, she can access ‘what’s in the picture’ largely unmediated. In other words, it is precisely the appearance of verisimilitude that characterises digital visual news media artefacts which masks or at least minimises the presence of the author in the photograph itself; paradoxically, it is the absence of an author that lends a press photograph its authority. This dual authenticity/authority is complicated, however, by the recognition that the production process of every visual media artefact of whatever genre, from news to advertising to art, is characterised by ‘artistic and inevitably subjective decisions taken by the photographer’ (Bleiker 2012, 7). Bluntly put, although the author/artist is rendered absent from the press photograph by the assumption of its objective truth status (its authenticity), the author/artist is in fact ever present in the decisions made about composition, lighting, framing, perspective and so on. This means that the press photograph is not simply a mimetic representation but a political representation, in that all representations are inherently political. In the moment of photographic representation – the split-second opening of the shutter to commit to digital memory the scene composed in negotiation between the photographer and the photographed – various subjects and objects are fixed and a relationship between them constructed, such that meaning can be made of the image thus produced. Stuart Hall states that ‘meaning . . . depends on the contingent and arbitrary stop – the necessary and temporary “break” in the infinite semiosis of language’ (1997a, 54; see also Hall 1997b); here I suggest that the ‘contingent and arbitrary stop’ is provided by the click of the shutter button, rendering the photograph itself a political text, as it is produced by and productive of power relations in the same manner as all other forms of representational practice. Roland Barthes calls this the ‘photographic paradox’: The photographic paradox can then be seen as the co-existence of two messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), the other with a code (the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric, of the photograph). (Barthes 1977, 19)

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The ‘rhetoric’ to which Barthes refers is that which is analysed by sociologists, political scientists and scholars of cultural theory when digital visual news media artefacts are used as sources of knowledge about the world that we live in. These artefacts are assumed to be more or less authentic in their depiction of ‘the real’, depending on the theoretical commitments of the scholar; crucially, there is no objective determination that can be made about the facticity of a given representation because of the imbrication of interpretation in the very text itself. These questions of authenticity when analysing images can also be extended to other forms of digital text. Scholarship in the digital age is challenging precisely because of these questions about authenticity. Any computer user can purchase and install technology that enables them to mask their location and identity. Computer users do not even need to take this step to perform a particular identity online; to participate in most blogging, microblogging and chat forum sites we do not have to prove that we are who we say we are. Similarly, software packages that facilitate the easy manipulation of text and images are widely available and require no specific expertise. The manipulation and reproduction of images, often overlaid with text, creates a form of digital communication known as a ‘meme’, and the easy manipulation of images has become a meme in its own right.1 ‘This looks shopped’ has circulated online as a meme from 2008 (where ‘shopped’ references Photoshop, the popular Adobe image manipulation program), often overlaid on images that have clearly been put together in a deliberately clumsy way. Users modify the tagline in a number of ways (see Figure 1), but the core message remains consistent, juxtaposing

Figure 3.1 I think this might be Photoshopped Source: KnowYourMeme (n.d.), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/23371-this-looks-shopped

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Authors and authenticity 37 the phrase ‘This looks shopped’ or ‘I think this might be Photoshopped’ with an image that has clearly been edited. The meme not only pokes fun at the process of digital manipulation but also mocks the unwary consumer of digital images. By making a joke of the fact that an image ‘looks’ or ‘might be’ edited (when it clearly has been edited, and edited poorly at that), this meme reminds the audience that all images might have been edited and that, when viewing these images, audiences should thus remember that it is likely that the composition elements of the images may have been modified in some way. In the scholarly literature on visual communication, such consumer awareness is cited as a causal factor in the increasing reflexivity of producers of digital visual news media artefacts: ‘the new technology so blatantly demonstrates overt and covert image manipulation that we understand on ever-deepening levels the need for careful, conscious interpretation of daily news to readers’ (Newton 1998, 6). Photojournalist communities have long been acutely aware of the tensions inherent in image-production (the tensions between creating desirable artefacts and the need to ‘minimize fiction within a particular context’, see Keith 2014, 67) and much of the debate seems to be framed in terms of ethics and professional practice (see Harris 1991; Newton 1998; Johnston 2003; Carlson 2009). Perhaps as a result of increasing rates of visual literacy among consumers of digital visual news media artefacts, audiences are quick to identify attempts at manipulation, which complicates what John Taylor refers to as the ‘contract’ between news media outlets and their readers. This contract ‘trades on the link between the witnessing photographer and whatever pictorial evidence is later offered as proof’ (Taylor 2000, 131–132). As noted by Taylor and others (Johnston 2003; Carlson 2009), the consequence of breaking this contract is, at a minimum, reduced credibility of the outlet in the eyes of the audience. In the realm of IR scholarship, or social science more broadly, a similar contract exists with the disciplinary community in which the researcher is embedded: whereas photojournalists rely on the facticity of their representations for the credibility of their reportage, social science researchers rest the credibility of their arguments on the validity of their evidence. Cases where evidence is manipulated, poorly interpreted, or falsified outright are rare, but the reactions of the disciplinary community to any suggestion that evidence has been compromised or misinterpreted illustrate the extent to which evidence is the disciplinary ‘gold standard’ of argumentation (see, for example, disciplinary discussions of the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone [GDELT] in Nexon 2014; Weller and McCubbins 2014). The case of Brian Walski, former staff photographer at the L.A. Times, exemplifies the issues discussed above. Walski was fired in 2003 for editing two images together for dramatic effect (the images are widely available online if you search ‘walski photograph controversy’). On 30 March 2003, Walski was sent to a location near Basra, southern Iraq, to photograph conflict between British troops and Iraqi paramilitaries. Later that same day, he witnessed a number of civilians trying to escape from the violence, and shot a particular sequence of images that he later combined ‘to “improve” the composition’ (quoted in Van Riper 2003). The two pictures both show a crowd of people, presumably Iraqi civilians, sat in a rough

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circle around a British soldier, who is standing. In the first picture taken, a solider is making an ambiguous gesture with the flat of his hand to an assembled crowd of civilians. The solider looks actively engaged with the scene, and his pose suggests a certain anxiety or at least disquiet. The gesture could mean ‘calm down’, or ‘sit down’; in the background of the picture a man holding a child is shown moving towards the soldier, but looking away. The second picture shows the same scene, with the man-with-child figure closer to the foreground, looking towards the soldier. In this second image, however, the soldier stands in a relaxed posture, with his hand by his side rather than outstretched. The composite image took the active stance of the soldier from the first image, and the proximity of the man-with-child from the second image, and brought them together in front of a darkening sky. The image Walski created through manipulation is much more demanding of attention than either of the other two; the positioning of the figures and the relationship between them creates a sense of urgency in the situation, while the lighting provokes an ominous feeling. Walski submitted the manipulated image for publication and it was used on the front page of both the Los Angeles Times and the Hartford Courant the day after submission. When a Courant employee noticed that the photograph had been edited (by identifying civilians in the background of the shot that appeared more than once), the director of the Times photography desk was notified; the Times issued an online apology to readers immediately and ran both original images the following day by way of retraction (Johnston 2003). As noted in Matt Carlson’s (2009) study of the case, there was widespread community condemnation of Walski, which tended to invoke the ideals of the community as a means of disciplining Walski’s transgression. Chief amongst these ideals is the principle of ‘photograph as artefact of truth’ on which the credibility of photojournalism rests: ‘The bottom line is, “you never change reality”’ (assistant managing editor of photography at the Washington Post, quoted in Johnston 2003). Carlson identifies the condemnation as a discursive practice of ‘paradigm repair’: ‘the community separates the individual violator from the presumably healthy practices of other journalists’ (2009, 129) and, in doing so, preserves the integrity of photojournalism more broadly. The counter-discourse, however, is still present. Despite the existence of professional codes of ethics, and clear instruction from the Times that ‘Times policy forbids altering the content of news photographs’ (quoted in Johnston 2003), Walski deliberately manipulated the image he submitted for publication. There was much deliberation about whether, the egregiousness of Walski’s error notwithstanding, minor manipulation of press photographs was not, in fact, commonplace (Bates 2003; Van Riper 2003; Ward n.d.). As Stephen Bates (2003) notes, ‘Walski was doing no more than war photographers have done throughout history. Some of the most famous, iconic images of war are not quite what they seem’. The key issue in contemporary world politics is the ease with which manipulation can occur, and the blurriness of the line between enhancing the composition of an image (cropping to reframe or refocus the original image, for example, or tinting component parts to emphasise one aspect over another) and changing its status from factual

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Authors and authenticity 39 to fictive. These debates around digital modification have profound implications for the study of global politics because when we choose a selection of images to analyse, in a study of, for example, representations of war (Campbell 2007) or humanitarian emergencies (Hutchison 2014), we must account for the assumptions that we make about the truth status of the artefacts that we analyse. Digital manipulation challenges us to think about issues of composition and credibility in ways that scholars of world politics might perhaps not yet be comfortable with; we need to be careful about the production of evidence-based argument, the disciplinary non-negotiable as discussed above, when our evidence may not unproblematically represent ‘the truth of the matter’. In the following section, however, I outline why this recognition can liberate scholarship not only of digital culture but of world politics more broadly.

When is a hoax not a hoax? The complexity of intentionality Several of the debates over the issue of manipulation and the concomitant challenge to authenticity and authority of the press photograph as digital artefact revolve around the issue of credibility, more specifically around the question of deception (Irby 2003; Johnston 2003). The author – in the case discussed above, Brian Walski – intends to deceive when submitting a manipulated photograph for publication, which compromises the authenticity of the image and the authority of the news outlet that publishes it. In the digital age, however, there are numerous examples of images and even words that have been taken from their original context, edited (or not) and recirculated through social media networks. Some of these achieve viral circulation rates, which is illustrative of their resonance with the demographic involved in sharing the artefacts. In these cases, there is not necessarily an attempt to deceive the audience or consumers and even when there is an attempt to deceive, it may be the case that the artefact still has something useful or interesting to tell us about global political practices. Towards the end of 2013, Abdul Aziz al Otaibi, a keen amateur photographer and artist, undertook an independent art project to ‘show in pictures how the love of a child for his parents is irreplaceable’ (quoted in Doornbos 2014). The image he produced shows a child apparently sleeping between two grave-like mounds of stones (see Figure 2). Al Otaibi posted the image on his blog and on Facebook in January 2014; the images were posted along with contextual information that explained that the child was al Otaibi’s nephew and that the graves were fabricated for the purposes of the shoot. Al Otaibi even posted an accompanying picture of the young boy sitting up between the ‘graves’, smiling and flashing a ‘V’ sign for the camera (see Figure 3). Al Otaibi included these contextual materials because he ‘just wanted to be sure that people drew no wrong conclusions’ (quoted in Doornbos 2014). Whether it was an innocent mistake or a deliberate exploitation of the image for political purposes, however, the depiction of the sleeping boy shown in Figure 2 was circulated on Twitter with a caption suggesting that the boy was a Syrian child orphaned by

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Figure 3.2 Sleeping boy with stones; photograph by Abdul Aziz al Otaibi Source: iMediaEthics (2014a), www.imediaethics.org/hoax-photo-of-syrian-boy-sleeping-betweenparents-graves-was-staged/

Figure 3.3 Smiling boy with stones; photograph by Abdul Aziz al Otaibi, edited by author Source: iMediaEthics (2014a), www.imediaethics.org/hoax-photo-of-syrian-boy-sleeping-betweenparents-graves-was-staged/

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Authors and authenticity 41 the Assad regime. The author of this tweet, @americanbadu, had over 187,000 followers on Twitter (Doornbos 2014), meaning that the image – and @americanbadu’s new caption – was potentially seen in the initial view by over 187,000 people. A good number of those people immediately reproduced @americanbadu’s tweet in a ‘retweet’, meaning that they sent the image and caption unchanged to their own followers, exponentially increasing the audience (these people in turn may have retweeted to their own followers and so on; given that the initial image was seen by 187,000 people and each of those could have had a similar number of followers, this creates the viral effect that ensures rapid circulation throughout the media public). Many of the media outlets that reported on the appropriation of al Otaibi’s image referred to it as a ‘hoax’ or a ‘fake’ (Haaretz 2014; iMediaEthics 2014a; Traywick 2014), with some suggesting that this case raises many of the same issues raised in the Walski case discussed in the previous section (Hooten 2014), although it is clear from correspondence with the artist that it was not his intention to fake anything (Doornbos 2014). The fact that it is difficult to distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ or ‘hoax’ photographs is not, however, the point I want to make here. Rather, I want to consider how scholars of world politics can still learn from the captioned and circulated image, through the very fact of its circulation. The Twitter user @americanbadu clearly recognised something in the image that he thought would resonate with a wider population, when framed with a caption relating it to the ongoing conflict in Syria. The image achieved viral circulation because of its communicative capital: the users of social media that circulated the image were, for the most part, sympathetic to the forces opposed to Assad’s regime: ‘Especially in jihadi circles the image spread like wildfire’ (Doornbos 2014). Various organisations contributed to the circulation of the image through retweeting or regramming (reproducing the image on Instagram, an image-based social media network), with one outlet running the photograph, edited to incorporate the text ‘#syria’, alongside a Reuters news item titled ‘Death Toll in Syria’s Civil War Above 150,000: Monitor’ (iMediaEthics 2014b). The content of the image clearly communicates something that this community wishes to broadcast widely. With this in mind, the veracity of the image is of less significance than its message. The circulation of the image is a political practice, and the interrogation of this practice does not rely on the truth status of the artefact; in the analytical moment, we can thus suspend questions about truth, authenticity and digital manipulation. The manifest and latent content of the image resonate with the community sufficiently to warrant its viral circulation; what is interesting, then, is not so much whether the image is true, but why and how it resonates so effectively and with what effects. Bluntly put, regardless of whether the image is a staged product of an amateur art project or an accurate representation of a Syrian orphan sleeping between the graves of his parents, the artefact itself and its logics and codes are worthy of study. This is true not only because such study will enable us to potentially understand better why the image was circulated so widely, but also because we can never be sure about the existence of the ‘real life’ that a photograph or other artefact purports to represent.

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This relates to the poststructural rejection of the idea of an extra-discursive realm of the real, accessible outside of discourse. In this sense, the artefact does not gain its meaning or significance through reference to reality; instead, the meaning and significant of the artefact resides in the image itself and its positioning within a given discursive field. This is not to presume that there is no such thing as reality, but to make the rather different argument that we cannot access reality, even in our most literal representations or faithful reproductions. We can only ever interpret the artefact (or event, or phenomenon) as it emerges through discourse: An earthquake, or the falling of a brick, is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of ‘natural phenomena’ or ‘expressions of the wrath of God’, depends upon the structuring of a discursive field. What is denied is not that such objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive conditions of emergence. (Laclau and Mouffe 2001 [1985], 108) For the study of popular culture and world politics in the digital age, the effect of this epistemological move is to compromise the truth status of the artefact, in that even fabricated or manipulated artefacts provide insights into the processes and practices of global politics. What is shared widely, what is manipulated, and how, and with what effects, become the subject of investigation; scholars can explore how these artefacts are made meaningful through their own logics and through the circumstances of their reproduction. Such analysis does not rely on the artefact being authentic or reflecting the real. The artefacts reference – and constitute – the real and thus we can learn much about the characteristics of this domain from interrogating these texts.

Researching global politics in the digital age In the section above, I used the example of a photograph showing a young boy sleeping between two mounds of stone, an image which was widely circulated in social and news media in early 2014 as it was believed to show a Syrian orphan between the graves of his parents. The willingness of the media public to circulate the image, the rapidity and extent of its circulation, and the attempts made to fix the meaning of the image to suit various political agendas, provide insights into how we as scholars can work with such artefacts. It does not matter in the moment of analysis if the image is authentic and the story behind the image is true. The circulation and interpretation of the image are what make it meaningful. As Jenny Edkins comments, we must ‘look at the effects of a story, at what the story does. How does it work? What is its impact on the world?’ (2013, 286); this is true of both fictive and factual representations. In this section, I explore textual digital artefacts to make a similar argument about researching global politics in the digital

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Authors and authenticity 43 age: given the mutability of digital representations and the infinite possibilities of their production and circulation, how we know world politics in the digital age must rely on popular cultural artefacts as sources of truth about world politics, and we must simultaneously recognise that the idea of access to a singular truth is profoundly, irretrievably, compromised. This has significant implications for how we study world politics and for what we claim as ‘IR knowledge’. In February 2011, a man called Tom MacMaster created a blog titled Gay Girl in Damascus, under the pseudonym of Amina Abdallah Arraf al-Omari. In June 2011, posing as al-Omari’s cousin, MacMaster published a post stating that alOmari was missing, presumed to have been arrested by Assad’s security forces. The blog’s fans and followers began to reach out to each other and to state agencies in an effort to find out what had happened to the young woman whose life the blog had chronicled: As soon as ‘Free Amina’ groups popped up on Facebook and the [US] State Department began looking for her, the story began to seem a lot like fiction. No one had ever talked to Amina. . . . The biographical details in her blog posts did not check out. Amina Arraf couldn’t be found in any public records . . . and the names of her father and mother also turned up nothing. (Peralta and Carvin 2011) On 12 June 2011, MacMaster published a post on the blog titled ‘Apology to readers’, in which he stated that he was in fact the blog’s author and that he had created the character of Amina Abdallah Arraf al-Omari to draw attention to the difficult situation facing many Syrians under the oppressive regime (BBC News 2011). MacMaster claimed that the fictionality of his representation was immaterial: ‘While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground’ (quoted in BBC News 2011). In the context of the argument I have developed above, this is particularly interesting. If I am interested in analysing the particular representational practices of a particular popular cultural event or phenomenon, though, I have to be careful about the claims that I can make in the analysis that I produce. I must be careful about how I treat the evidence and the work that I make this evidence do in the arguments I produce. For example, there is a blog called Baghdad Burning, which chronicles the life story of a young Iraqi woman based in Baghdad who uses the pseudonym of Riverbend to publish her posts. The opening post, published on 17 August 2003, provides the following information: ‘A little bit about myself: I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway’ (Riverbend 2003). Riverbend blogged regularly from 2003 until 2007, and then was silent until 2013, when she published a lengthy post reflecting on ten years of American occupation in Baghdad (Riverbend 2013). I can analyse the blog posts (which are all still accessible – see http://riverbendblog.blogspot. com.au/), interrogate the ways in which they represent life in Baghdad under the occupation of US American forces, interpret these textual practices and organise my interpretations into an argument about the socio-political ramifications

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of the military intervention in 2003. What I cannot do is base this argument on a foundation of truth: I cannot know, short of travelling to Iraq, interviewing her and watching her post to her blog to verify that Riverbend is who she says she is. Without such investigation, though, there is little to differentiate Baghdad Burning from Gay Girl in Damascus: both offer perspectives on war zones and ostensibly chronicle the life experiences of young Arab women. With specific reference to the case of Tom MacMaster’s blog, Frost-Arnold argues that, ‘given the importance of the information conveyed and the risks to activists, it was reasonable to hold bloggers [who claimed to be based in Syria] to norms of authenticity’ (2014, 9). Frost-Arnold’s argument rests on the political effects of MacMaster’s deception. She distinguishes between ‘the epistemic vice of MacMaster’s imposture and the epistemic virtue of resistant tricksters’, in order to argue that ‘betrayal is epistemically virtuous when it undermines exclusive networks of trust that damage objectivity’ (2014, 2). There are good lies, in other words, lies that challenge, subvert or directly counter dominant (exclusive, oppressive, disempowering) regimes of truth. Crucially, though, this determination can only be made ex post facto. Frost-Arnold is only able to distinguish a good lie from a bad lie (a trick from an imposture) once the effect on the epistemic community becomes apparent. This does not help answer the question of whether the truth status of the artefact is significant at the moment of its incorporation into an analytical frame. The theoretical and epistemological moves I make in this chapter lead me to the conclusion that the truth status of the artefact is compromised, but without ‘truth’ as the foundation for ethical decision-making (in terms of enabling decisions about which representations should be included in our analysis of political practices and which should not) the basis on which certain practices should be validated is less than clear. All communicative acts bring into being particular subjects, the presumed authors of the narratives, and situate these subjects in relation to other subjects in their narrative frame. Fictional or factual, these subjects are worthy of study because at a minimum they provide insights into perceptions of socio-political life in a given context: the subjects that are produced in a given discursive terrain represent complex webs of understanding and being, even when the digital subject is not reflective of a physical subject ‘irl’ (‘in real life’). The discipline of International Relations has already begun to explore what it means for our understanding of world politics when the truth status of our knowledge claims is not the foundation of authority: this move is evident in the emergent literature that offers fictionalised engagements with the stuff of world politics, in order to better explore the complexities of the research context and to engage readers in our understandings (see, for example, Dauphinee 2013; Jackson 2014; Park-Kang 2014). The disciplinary implications of bracketing the question of ‘truth’ or authenticity, while we retain a commitment to evidence-based argument are also yet to be known, but the spirited creativity with which scholars have approached the fictionalisation of world politics suggests that similar forays into digital research spaces will be productive indeed.

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Note 1 A ‘meme’ is a communicative practice that is easily replicable and widely replicated. The neologism, an abbreviation of ‘mimeme’ (from the Ancient Greek μίμημα, ‘imitated thing’, see Wikipedia 2014), was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, to convey ‘the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation’ similar in function to a gene as a unit of biological transmission (1989 [1976], 192). Memes in digital space (internet memes) often take the form of short phrases, Photoshopped images or images overlaid with text.

Bibliography Barthes, R. (1977) Image, Music, Text, translated by S. Heath, London: Fontana. Bates, S. (2003) ‘Faking it: Mock-ups of war’, The Age, 10 May 2003, available at www. theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/09/1052280440531.html, accessed 12 September 2014. BBC News (2011) ‘Syria Gay Girl in Damascus blog a hoax by US man’, BBC News, 13 June 2011, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13744980, accessed 12 September 2014. Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin. Bleiker, R. (2012) Aesthetics and World Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Booth, K. (1995) ‘Human wrongs and international relations’, International Affairs, 71(1): 103-126 Campbell, D. (2007) ‘Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict’, Geopolitics, 26(4): 357–382. Carlson, M. (2009) ‘The reality of a fake image: News norms, photojournalistic craft and Brian Walski’s fabricated photograph’, Journalism Practice, 3(2): 125–139. Dauphinee, E. (2013) The Politics of Exile, London: Routledge. Dawkins, R. (1989 [1976]) The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doornbos, H. (2014) ‘Saudi photographer tells me: This is not Syria, it’s not a grave and the boy’s parents are not dead’, 17 January 2014, available at https://haralddoornbos. wordpress.com/2014/01/17/saudi-photographer-telle-me-this-is-not-syria-its-not-agrave-and-the-boys-parents-are-not-dead/, accessed 23 February 2016. Edkins, J. (2013) ‘Novel writing in international relations: Openings for a creative practice’, Security Dialogue, 44(4): 281–297. Enloe, C. (1996) ‘Margins, silences and bottom rungs: How to overcome the underestimation of power in the study of International Relations’, 186–202 in Smith, S., Booth, K. and Zalewski, M. (eds) International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frost-Arnold, K. (2014) ‘Imposters, tricksters, and trustworthiness as an epistemic virtue’, Hypatia, Online First Version of Record 30 June 2014, DOI:10.1111/hypa.12107. Haaretz (2014) ‘Heartbreaking photo of Syrian orphan is a hoax’, Haaretz, 19 January 2014, available at www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.569389, accessed 12 September 2014. Hall, S. (1997a) ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, 51–59 in Woodward, K. (ed.) Identity and Difference, London: Sage Publications. Hall, S. (1997b) ‘The work of representation’, 13–74 in Hall, S. (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, London: Sage Publications. Harris, C.R. (1991) ‘Digitization and manipulation of news photographs’, Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality, 6(3): 164–174.

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Hollis, M. and Smith, S. (1990) Explaining and Understanding International Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hooten, C. (2014) ‘“Heartbreaking” Syria orphan photo wasn’t taken in Syria and not of orphan’, The Independent, 17 January 2014, available at www.independent.co.uk/news/ world/middle-east/heartbreaking-syria-orphan-photo-wasnt-taken-in-syria-and-not-oforphan-9067956.html, accessed 12 September 2014. Hutchison, E. (2014) ‘A global politics of pity? Disaster imagery and the emotional construction of solidarity after the 2004 Asian tsunami’, International Political Sociology, 8(1): 1–19. iMediaEthics (2014a) ‘Hoax: Photo of Syrian boy sleeping between parents’ graves was staged’, iMediaEthics, 27 January 2014, available at www.imediaethics.org/News/4346/ Hoax__photo_of_syrian_boy_sleeping_between_parents_graves_was_staged.php, accessed 12 September 2014. iMediaEthics (2014b) ‘Muslim Observer newspaper apologizes after fake photo of Syrian boy’, iMediaEthics, 11 April 2014, available at www.imediaethics.org/News/4498/ Muslim_observer_newspaper_apologizes_after_fake_photo_of_syrian_boy.php, accessed 12 September 2014. Irby, K. (2003) ‘L.A. Times photographer fired over altered image’, Poynter, 2 April 2003, updated 2 March 2011, available at www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgatheringstorytelling/9289/l-a-times-photographer-fired-over-altered-image/, accessed 12 September 2014. Jackson, P.T. (2011) The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics, London: Routledge. Jackson, R. (2014) Confessions of a Terrorist: A Novel, London: Zed. Johnston, C. (2003) ‘Digital deception’, American Journalism Review, available at http:// ajrarchive.org/article.asp?id=2975, accessed 19 August 2014. Keith, S. (2014) ‘Back to the 1990s? Comparing the discourses of 20th and 21st century digital image ethics debates, Visual Communication Quarterly, 21(2): 61–71. King, G., Keohane, R. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. KnowYourMeme (n.d.) ‘I think this might be Photoshopped’, available at http://know yourmeme.com/photos/23371-this-looks-shopped, accessed 5 September 2014. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C. (2001 [1985]) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso. Newton, J. (1998) ‘The burden of visual truth: The role of photojournalism in mediating reality’, Visual Communication Quarterly, 5(4): 4–9. Nexon, D. (2014) ‘GDELT’, ISQ Blog, 1 April 2014, available at www.isanet.org/Publications/ ISQ/Posts/ID/321/categoryId/49/GDELT, accessed 19 September 2014. Park-Kang, S. (2014) Fictional International Relations: Gender, Pain and Truth, London: Routledge. Peralta, E. and A. Carvin (2011) ‘“Gay Girl In Damascus” turns out to be an American man’, The 2-Way: Breaking News from NPR, 12 June 2011, available at www.npr.org/ blogs/thetwo-way/2011/06/13/137139179/gay-girl-in-damascus-apologizes-revealsshe-was-an-american-man, accessed 12 September 2014. Riverbend (2003) ‘The Beginning. . .’, Baghdad Burning, 17 August 2003, available at http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com.au/2003_08_01_archive.html, accessed 12 September 2014. Riverbend (2013) ‘Ten Years On. . .’, Baghdad Burning, 9 April 2013, available at http:// riverbendblog.blogspot.com.au/2013_04_01_archive.html, accessed 12 September 2014.

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Authors and authenticity 47 Shepherd, L.J. (2013) ‘Transdisciplinarity: The politics and practices of knowledge production’, Disorder of Things, 23 November 2013, available at http://thedisorderofthings. com/2012/11/23/transdisciplinarity-the-politics-and-practices-of-knowledge-production/, accessed 26 August 2014. Smith, S. (2000) ‘The discipline of International Relations: Still an American social science?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2(3): 374–402. Sontag, S. (1977) On Photography, New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Picador). Sylvester, C. (2002) Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, J. (2000) ‘Problems in photojournalism: Realism, the nature of news and he humanitarian narrative’, Journalism Studies, 1(1): 129–143. Traywick, C. (2014) ‘Whoops! Tragic photo of orphaned Syrian boy is a fake’, Foreign Policy, 17 January 2014, available at http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/17/ the_syrian_oppositions_latest_pr_gaffe_photo_of_orphaned_syrian_boy_fake, accessed 12 September 2014. Van Riper, F. (2003) ‘Manipulating truth, losing credibility’, The Washington Post, 9 April 2003, available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/essays/vanRiper/030409. htm, accessed 11 September 2014. Ward, D. (n.d.) ‘PhotoSTOP’, Angelingo, available at www.usc.edu/schools/college/ angelingo/issue01/politics/ward.html, accessed 12 September 2014. Weller, N. and K. McCubbins (2014) ‘Raining on the parade: Some cautions regarding the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone Dataset’, Political Violence at a Glance, 20 February 2014, available at http://politicalviolenceataglance.org/2014/02/20/rainingon-the-parade-some-cautions-regarding-the-global-database-of-events-language-andtone-dataset/, accessed 19 September 2014. Whitaker, B. (2011) ‘Gay Girl in Damascus was an arrogant fantasy’, The Guardian, 14 June 2011, available at www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/13/gay-girlin-damascus-hoax-blog, accessed 12 September 2014. Wikipedia (2014) ‘Meme’, page last modified 28 August 2014 at 21:07, available at http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme, accessed 12 September 2014. Wilkinson, C. (2013) ‘Ethnographic methods’, 129–145 in Shepherd, L. (ed.) Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods, London and New York, NY: Routledge.

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Part II

Interrogating social media

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4

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Making sense of military social media sites Rhys Crilley

On 22 May 2014, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) published an article titled 11 Reasons Why Our New Aircraft Carriers Are Totally Awesome on the website Buzzfeed (Ministry of Defence 2014a). Described as ‘the website you visit to see pictures of the world’s most fashionable hamster or take part in improving quizzes such as “Which Circle Of Hell Will You Go To?”’ (Marsh 2014), Buzzfeed appears as somewhat of a strange platform for the MoD to use to promote its new aircraft carriers. However, the publishing of this Buzzfeed article is simply the latest incarnation of the MoD using digital social media for the purposes of ‘strategic communication’ (Ministry of Defence 2012a). At the time of writing, the MoD and the various branches of the British Armed Forces utilise a wide variety of online websites, blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages in the name of strategic communication. Unsurprisingly, the military use of digital social media is not limited to the United Kingdom. The United States, Israel, Australia, France, Germany and many other Western militaries maintain an online presence across various digital social media platforms, as do the armed forces of non-Western states such as Pakistan, India, Russia and China. The military use of digital social media is thus a relatively widespread phenomenon. In this chapter, I explain why it matters for global politics. The discipline of International Relations (IR) has so far given little thought to how digital social media has an impact on the subject matter of the field (see Carpenter and Drezner 2010, and Hamilton in the introduction to this volume). In contrast, militaries have been relatively quick to recognise the importance of using these technologies. I argue that the military use of social media is important for several reasons. First, military social media sites collapse the gap between the military and the media, as militaries themselves become media actors. Second, and perhaps because of the first point, militaries are investing a lot of resources into the use of social media. Put simply, if militaries think social media is important, and I suggest that they do, then so should scholars of global politics. Third, military social media sites contain a vast amount of content relating to war, conflict and state-sanctioned violence. Recent work has drawn attention to how war and conflict cannot be fully understood without exploring the role of media in it (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010), and therefore examining how such phenomena are represented on social media sites can provide valuable insights into how political actors articulate legitimacy,

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power and authority in the digital age. Fourth, military social media sites are popular, and their content is seen by a large number of people. Finally, rather than simply seeing this content, audiences are able to engage with military social media sites in ways that are unique to social media (such as liking, sharing and commenting), thereby enabling online content to circulate to larger audiences in different ways than ever before. This chapter begins with an exploration of literature on mediatised war that recognises that media representations are now a fundamental aspect of contemporary war, and I then address the above five points in turn. Throughout the chapter I argue that we should be cautious of simply viewing social media as a tool of critique that enables us to challenge state narratives of war.

Mediatised war in the digital age Contemporary war and conflict are often described as being ‘mediatised’ (Cottle 2006; Fahmy 2010; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010; Maltby 2012; Parry 2012; Roger 2013; Balabanova and Parry 2014) in so much as that they can’t be understood or explained ‘unless one carefully accounts for the role of media in it’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010, 4). For many this has led to a focus on ‘how the media do things with conflict’ (Cottle 2006, 9 emphasis in original) where research has often centred on media representations of war and conflict (Cottle 2006; Fahmy 2010; Griffin 2010; Parry 2011, 2012) or upon the relationship between the media and military actors (Carruthers 1998; Der Derian 2009; Stahl 2010; Maltby 2012). Whilst providing welcome insights into the dynamics of contemporary war and conflict, both these approaches to mediatised war fail to engage with how social media enables militaries to communicate ‘directly to their target populations – bypassing the traditional media altogether’ (Banham 2013, 614). Kyle Grayson et al. have argued that ‘there is an imperative to look at how traditional political actors seek out conduits in more recent forms of popular culture and for what specific purposes they do so’ (2009, 160). In regards to the ‘traditional political actor’ of militaries, there is little work that has addressed this imperative by looking at the official military use of social media. Even with just a cursory glance, we can see that the content of military social media sites is overwhelmingly visual – consisting of photographs and videos – and we cannot begin to make sense of these sites without paying attention to visuality. Within the discipline of IR, a burgeoning literature located under the broad umbrella of the ‘aesthetic turn’ (Bleiker 2001) has focused on visual politics (see Bleiker et al. 2013; Shim 2013), visual security (see Williams 2003; Hansen 2011, 2014; O’Loughlin 2011; Heck and Schlag 2013) and visual peace (see Möller 2007, 2009, 2013) and has shown the ways in which images matter for global politics. There is also work that outlines how scholars of global politics and security can study images (Rowley 2010; Hansen 2011; Moore and Farrands 2013; Andersen et al. 2015), and together this visual focus of the aesthetic turn constitutes a solid platform from which to begin appreciating the role of images and visuality in global politics. Aesthetics, specifically images, are now an essential part of military social media sites and are central to the actions of important actors

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in global politics. Therefore, an appreciation of aesthetics is vital in understanding how militaries use social media in the contemporary security ecology. Work on visuality, militaries and social media has so far focused on how individual serving soldiers have used digital social media in ways that counter official military narratives of war. Scholars have explored how soldiers use photographs of destruction on internet forums (Andén-Papadopoulos 2009a, 2009b) as well as the use of personal helmet cameras and first-person videos on YouTube (Christensen 2008; Mortensen 2009; McSorley 2012; see also Eken, this volume). There is also work on the phenomenon of ‘milblogging’, where soldiers maintain blogs whilst serving in conflict zones (Burden 2006; Allen and Matheson 2007; Wall 2009, 2010; Shapiro and Humphreys 2013). In comparison, there is relatively little attention paid to the official military use of digital social media. Despite this, a small but highly insightful body of work on the military use of digital social media does exist. Here, I aim not to simply rehearse what has already been said; I build upon it by positing several critiques due to the rapidly evolving nature of digital social media and the increasingly savvy ways that militaries are using it. James Der Derian is perhaps the most prominent author writing on the intersections of war, media and technology (2000, 2009). Almost a decade and a half ago, Der Derian wrote that The nature of war is mutating, morphing, virtualizing with new technologies and strategies. New media, generally identified as digitized, interactive, networked forms of communication, now exercise a global effect if not ubiquitous presence through real time access . . . war reaches not only into every living room but splashes onto every screen, TV, computer and cinema. Der Derian (2000, 775) Written several years before the creation of Web 2.01 platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, it seems that Der Derian’s words have an almost prophetic quality. Indeed, we should now add the screens of portable tablets, mobile phones and wearable technologies like smart watches and Google Glass to Der Derian’s list. As he is writing about ‘virtuous war’ (see Der Derian 2000, 2009) prior to the development of digital social media as we now know it, the phenomenon of military social media sites are not explicitly dealt with in Der Derian’s work. However, others have since begun to explore the concept of virtuous war and its humanitarian, hygienic representation on digital social media. A 2002 chapter by Andreas Behnke examines NATO’s website during 1999 and shows how this platform was used to tell selective narratives about the Kosovo crisis that were in turn used to claim legitimacy for NATO’s bombing campaign. A narrative of virtuous, depoliticised humanitarian intervention was supported by photographic and video images that reinforced ‘NATO’s claim to have conducted a moral campaign in which “collateral damage” is the regrettable, if unavoidable, exception to the rule of a just and hygienic war’ (Behnke 2002, 141). More recent research has demonstrated how digital representations of virtuous, clean war have been used in the age of Web 2.0 technologies. Christian Christensen has analysed the

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videos uploaded to the ‘US Multi-National Force – Iraq’ YouTube channel during 2007 and he has suggested that these videos constitute a notion of clean, hygienic warfare as they ‘maintain an air of “victimlessness”, with the human casualties of war not shown’ (2008, 165). Christensen then goes on to show how videos uploaded to YouTube by non-official military sources shatter this illusion of clean, virtuous war. In these videos filmed by soldiers or taken from cameras on board military aircraft, we see bodies exploding, the Geneva Conventions being violated and civilians being humiliated (Christensen 2008, 167–170). For Christensen, this juxtaposition requires a rethinking of traditional notions of propaganda. He argues that the control of information and images is one of the central elements of successful propaganda and that the decentralised nature of social media sites makes such control impossible (Christensen 2008, 172). This leads to a conclusion that social media sites have ‘begun to restructure the balance of story-telling power’ (Christensen 2008, 173). This somewhat optimistic argument is also apparent in Sebastian Kaempf’s work (2008, 2013; see also this volume), which argues that social media ‘has become a means of visual resistance’ (2008, 135) for those who wish to challenge Western representations of warfare as virtuous, clean and bloodless. Due to the Pentagon’s supposed lack of control over social media, these sites offer a platform ‘through which the uninterrogated virtual reality offered by US operations can be put into question’ (Kaempf 2008, 134). Groups such as al-Qaeda have challenged the dominant framing of virtuous war in order to delegitimize US operations in the global war on terror (2008, 134–138). Moreover, social media enables US soldiers ‘to capture and publish their personal experiences in ways that are beyond the Pentagon’s control’ (2008, 137). Writing more recently, Kaempf has also argued that social media has ‘afforded newly empowered non-state actors and individuals the ability to contest these hitherto state-policed war narratives and coverage’ (2013, 602; see also Kaempf, this volume). Whilst this optimistic approach to social media as a source of critical empowerment is not entirely misplaced, I argue for a more cautious approach: one that doesn’t view social media as a source of critical empowerment and does take into account, recent developments in military social media management. This approach views social media as a tool that can be, and is used by states and militaries to pursue their own agendas.

The context of military social media: ‘a five and dime store in an eBay world’? There are three reasons for my scepticism. First, whilst Western militaries such as that of the US may have ‘functioned like a five and dime store in an eBay world’ (Rumsfield quoted in Kaempf 2008, 134) in the mid 2000s, they have since begun to use social media seriously, incorporating it into their strategies and operations. Second, militaries have become extremely proficient at using their soldiers’ use of social media for their own purposes. Third, issues pertaining to censorship and the relationship between states and those who own social media sites challenge the idea of social media as a modality of visual resistance.

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In regards to the first point, militaries have incorporated social media into their strategy and operations and they now use it to bypass the traditional media in order to communicate their messages directly to audiences. A 2010 US Department of Defense memorandum states that ‘internet-based capabilities are integral to operations across the Department of Defense’ (Department of Defense 2010, 1) and US military forces such as the Army recognise that social media enables them to communicate in new ways, to a larger audience and faster than ever before (US Army 2014a, 1). At the time of writing, the US Army maintains over 2,000 official social media sites that represent leaders, installations and Army units across a wide variety of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest (US Army 2014b). The British Armed Forces have also recognised the importance of using social media for strategic and operational purposes. In 2012 the Ministry of Defence released a doctrine note outlining the concept of strategic communication. Defined as ‘advancing national interests by using all Defence means of communication to influence the attitudes and behaviours of people’ (Ministry of Defence 2012a, 1), strategic communication incorporates the use of digital social media and serves to update earlier doctrine on media and information operations. The MoD states that strategic communication ‘is the key element for Defence since it underpins our approach to delivering outputs – the alignment of words, images and actions to realise influence’ (Ministry of Defence 2012a, 3–4). Therefore, the use of social media is not peripheral to the British Armed Forces; rather, it is right at the heart of their operations. Further evidence of this is found in the amount of research into the use of social media that is being funded and conducted by militaries such as the British Armed Forces (Quinn 2014). As part of the MoD’s research into cyberwarfare, there are projects that explore online behaviour in order to understand how to influence people ‘in a global information environment that is connected, congested and contested’ (MoD Spokesperson quoted in Quinn 2014). Together these points suggest that since the time of Christensen and Kaempf’s writing, both the US and

Social Media Platform Total of Official Sites Facebook

1612

Twitter

392

Flickr

330

YouTube

253

Vimeo

26

Other*

81

* Includes Pinterest, Instagram, Wordpress, Slideshare and Ustream.tv sites. All categorised as ‘Social Media’ by the U.S Army.

Figure 4.1 The US Army on social media in October 2014 Source: (US Army 2014b)

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the British militaries have begun to incorporate social media into their strategy and operations. This is seen through the formulation of doctrine and guidance for the military use of social media, in the proliferation of official military social media sites and also in the research that militaries are conducting into how social media can be used for their purposes. Furthermore, both the US and the British militaries have realised that serving soldiers will, and do, use social media and have thus attempted to limit and shape the ways in which they do so whilst also utilising this for their benefit. This is the second reason to be more sceptical of social media as a critical tool that challenges Western militaries’ framing of war. Both the US and the UK now provide detailed guidelines on what can and can’t be posted online by soldiers (Ministry of Defence 2012c; US Army 2014a). These guidelines centre on operational information and personal security and include detailed advice such as reminding military personal to refrain from using ‘social media (teen) language in professional posts (ex: i wanna b ur bff 2day & 4evr)’ (US Army 2014a, 24). The British Armed Forces also use social media to provide guidance to soldiers regarding appropriate use. The Twitter account @SoldierUK is used to both provide guidance for soldiers, tweeting advice such as ‘Loose Tweets Sink Fleets’ (SoldierUK 2014a), whilst also being used to engage with soldiers who are using social media inappropriately (SoldierUK 2014b). In these instances, militaries are guiding and policing how soldiers use social media, but they are also trying to draw upon the soldier’s uses of social media for their own benefit. The MoD promotes the use of sponsored online presences as ‘a means for Service or MOD personnel to engage with the public at a personal and informal level but with the official blessing of their Service or MOD’ (Ministry of Defence 2009, 4). Similarly, the US Army promotes official registered social media sites because ‘Social media allows every Soldier to be a part of the army story’ (US Army 2014a, 1). Therefore, whilst social media may allow soldiers to publish material that bypasses the control of their superiors and may serve to delegitimise military operations (Kaempf 2008, 137), militaries are now attempting to shape how soldiers use social media and are becoming increasingly astute in using this for official purposes. A third reason to be cautious of social media as an outlet that challenges the ‘state-policed war narratives and coverage’ (Kaempf 2013, 602) pertains to the issue of censorship and relationships between states and those in control of social media sites. A recent investigation by the Washington Post suggested that the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) online surveillance programmes such as PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management) were reliant on the compliance of technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and Skype (Gellman and Poitras 2013). Whilst these companies denied such involvement, often stating that the NSA never had ‘direct access’ to users data, it has been pointed out that the narrow wording of these denials suggests that the NSA had access to copies of users data (Peterson 2013). Furthermore, content that challenges government narratives can sometimes struggle to appear on and even disappear from social media platforms. Zeynep

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Tufekci (2014) has highlighted how Facebook and Twitter’s algorithms impacted on the coverage of the protests and civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri following the police shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown. In regards to Facebook, content took a day to appear in the News Feed, and on Twitter content failed to trend at all (Tufekci 2014). Coverage of the ongoing conflict in Syria has also been victim to censorship on Facebook. The British blogger Elliot Higgins has estimated that over 75% of Syrian opposition pages on Facebook and YouTube have been deleted due to their content, which is deemed too graphic and in breach of these sites’ terms and conditions (Higgins quoted in Morse 2014). According to Higgins, almost all of the Facebook pages that reported the August 2013 use of chemical weapons have been removed (Higgins 2014) as the Syrian opposition disappears from Facebook (Pizzi 2014). In 2012, Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that ‘[b]y giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored’ (2012). However, the deletion of accounts from Syria suggests that voices will only increase in number and volume if they tell the right kind of stories about, and show the right kind of images from, wars and conflicts. If they don’t, not only will they be ignored; they will be deleted. Taking a more sceptical stance on social media and the mediatisation of war, Cynthia Banham has argued that social media enables militaries to ‘disseminate their messages directly to their intended recipients without any filtering by the traditional media’ (2013, 615). Using Israel as an example, Banham shows that democratic states have been wily in using social media to claim legitimacy for war (2013, 617–618). In doing so, Banham argues for a shift beyond focusing on social media as a potential democratising force (2013, 605). The above discussion has supported Banham’s cautious perspective by showing that the US and UK militaries have begun to take social media seriously. They are now incorporating social media into their operations, attempting to shape how soldiers use social media whilst also using this for their official purposes. Moreover, issues concerning the relationship between militaries and the owners of social media are important as matters of algorithmic selection and editing, and censorship more broadly, play a crucial role in determining who can share and view experiences or images from wars and conflicts. Taking these points into account, I argue against the idea that social media is something that ensures visual resistance to, or even balances, Western representations of virtuous war.

Production and circulation: ‘In no way, shape, or form do we do propaganda’ This attention to the production and circulation of content on military social media sites begs the question of what exactly militaries are trying to do through the use of social media sites. In regards to this, the doctrine publications, notes, handbooks and memorandums of military forces can help to provide an answer. In one doctrine note, the British MoD talks about the use of social media in the context

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of strategic communication that involves building trust in defence institutions and changing attitudes and influencing behaviour (Ministry of Defence 2012a). Interestingly, those working on social media within the British Armed Forces place an emphasis on using social media to simply inform rather than to influence.2 In doing so, they argue that they present factual information that is uncensored, unvetted, unedited and therefore different from the propaganda of yesteryear (Cole 2014). As one British Army photographer has put it; ‘in no way, shape or form do we do propaganda; we shoot as it happens, and document the truth’ (Blake quoted in Middlebrook 2013, 71). In a similar vein, the US military conceptualises visual media content on social media platforms as a strategic tool to disseminate information (Department of Defense 2010, 2011; US Army 2014a). Although the UK and US emphasise the informative use of social media, other militaries understand their use of social media in different ways. The founder of the Israel Defense Force’s new media unit has stated that ‘computers and keyboards are the weapons, Facebook and Twitter are the battlefields. It is there that we fight, each and every day’ (Dratwa quoted in Urich 2011). For some militaries, social media is a tool for sharing information, whereas for others, it is a battlefield where content is weaponised. It is therefore of paramount importance to the study of global politics that military social media sites and their content are understood and explored in context. One important feature that is common across many military social media sites is the production and circulation of a vast amount of content, most of which is visual in form; consisting of photographs mainly, but also including videos and infographics. As Figure 1 above illustrates, even with just one branch of the Armed Forces of the US military, there are over 2,000 official social media sites. This presents a large volume of social media sites producing a large volume of warrelated content. For instance, during the month of September 2014, the official US Army page posted 85 ‘things’ on Facebook (US Army 2014d) with only four of these consisting of text without any kind of visual image as an accompaniment. Professionally-trained US Army photographers, camera operators and media producers produce this visual content, which makes up the majority of the content on military social media sites. According to the Department of Defense, there are an estimated 6,000 military and civilian personnel who have been trained and equipped to ‘provide visual communication capability’ (Department of Defense 2011, 1). Similarly, the head of online engagement at the MoD has described the British military social media presence as being ‘picture-led’ (Norris quoted in Mediacor 2013), and it is also reliant upon content produced by professionally media-trained photographers and combat camera teams (Ministry of Defence 2012b; British Army 2014). This suggests that, in a changing media environment, whilst citizen journalists lack the resources and ability ‘to fill the void left by the shrinking traditional media’ (Banham 2013, 617), militaries are becoming increasingly adept at filling this gap by producing professional visual media content. This content is circulated to the media through military press offices and websites where high-resolution images can be downloaded and used free of charge by media outlets (Department of Defense 2014; Ministry of Defence 2014b). These images are also circulated directly to online audiences through military social media sites.

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In regards to the aforementioned content posted by the US Army during September 2014, of the 85 ‘things’ posted, 10 posts were videos, 67 were large photographs, 1 was a large infographic, 3 posts were mainly text and had a small thumbnail image, and only 4 consisted entirely of text and featured no images whatsoever (US Army 2014d). Clearly, if we are to understand military social media sites, we need to take into account the importance of images. The visual nature of social media also has broader implications for the study of global politics and security. A recent survey of 30,000 Facebook brand pages found that 75 per cent of the content they shared included a photograph (Ross 2014), and according to one source ‘63% of social media is made up of images and more than 750 million images are shared daily on social media’ (Pulsar 2014). Therefore, to not account for images when studying the intersections of social media, global politics and security is to – pun intended – fail to see the big picture.

Reception: ‘I’m only ten but I’m ready for war!’ Moving on from the contexts of production and circulation leads us to the context of reception and the fourth and fifth reasons to consider military social media sites as important for global politics. Respectively, these points concern their popularity with online audiences and the ways in which audiences can engage with this material. Grayson et al. (2009, 159) have argued that understanding how audiences interpret popular culture artefacts is important; in a similar vein, Christina Rowley has noted that ‘the study of popular culture requires the study not only of commercial commodities, but, crucially, how these products are actively interpreted and used by people: consumption is not passive’ (2010, 311). Indeed, when exploring military social media pages it is important to explore how audiences interpret, consume and use the content. The social media analytics company SocialBakers places military social media sites in the ‘governmental’ category of sites and provides a way of examining their popularity. Within this category, military sites are popular. The most popular military Facebook page is the United States Marine Corps which, at the time of writing, has almost 4 million fans (SocialBakers.com 2014a). Whilst the Marine Corps may be 100 million fans away from the 104 million fans of the most popular celebrity’s Facebook page – Shakira’s (SocialBakers.com 2014b) – the relative popularity of these military pages suggests that plenty of people are ‘liking’ them and engaging with their content through likes, comments and shares. Figure 2 shows the top ten most popular military Facebook pages ranked in the order of those with the most fans. However, it is important to note that this is not the total audience for these pages; Facebook’s news feed is individualised and reliant on an algorithm that takes into account over 1,000 factors in order to decide what appears on an individual’s news feed (Kacholia 2013). Thus, we cannot know exactly how many fans of a military page actually see the content without having access to the specific page’s insights, which are only available to those who maintain it. Moreover, a page’s audience is not limited to those who ‘like’ it. When individuals interact with a page by commenting, liking or sharing, this may

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Military Facebook Page

Number of Facebook Fans

Rank in ‘Governmental’ Facebook Pages

United States Marine Corps

3942901

4

U.S. Army

2967594

6

Marines

2850118

7

United States Air Force

1873326

14

U.S Navy

1834031

15

National Guard

1732620

18

Israel Defence Force

1466460

23

British Army

1203609

28

Indian Air Force Fans*

1066449

30

Pakistan Army*

855817

42

* Unofficial Fan Pages

Figure 4.2 Top ten military Facebook pages as of 10/10/2014 Source: (Socialbakers.com 2014)

appear in their friends’ news feeds, and recent updates to the Facebook algorithm are designed to ensure that ‘popular organic Page posts have a higher chance of being shown to more people’ (Backstrom 2013). When researching military social media sites, we need to take into account the ‘algorithmic power’ that lies behind what is visible on social media (Bucher 2012), as information on these platforms, including that concerning war, is now overtly individualised through algorithms (Pötzsch 2013, 83–85). While these factors are extremely important, they pose a number of methodological challenges. On sites like Facebook, the only way to know the exact audiences of this content would be to have access to the military page’s insights, and militaries are rarely willing to share this with researchers. Further, the factors involved in the algorithms that determine how audiences see content on social media sites are highly prized trade secrets for companies such as Google and Facebook (Hodson 2014). This means that even estimating who might make up the audience becomes difficult, as no one outside of these companies knows the exact details of how these algorithms work. This issue is compounded by the fact that these algorithms are constantly being developed and changed, so even if you were to work out what was involved, ‘that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be like that tomorrow’ (Wilson quoted in Hodson 2014). On this note, it is worth reflecting on the fifth reason why military social media pages matter for global politics. This relates to how social media enables audiences to engage with military content in ways that are unique to social media. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are examples of Web 2.0 technologies that enable, encourage and are reliant upon the active participation of the audience (Mandiberg 2012, 1). To use Jay Rosen’s term, ‘the people formerly

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known as the audience’ (2012) are now active; they don’t ‘want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share’ (Thompson quoted in Rosen 2012, 14). Web 2.0 technologies facilitate this through ‘new social and expressive practices for contemporary Internet users’ (Song 2010, 269) ensuring that much of what people do on the internet, and especially on social media sites, is visible to others. Social media sites such as Facebook enable users to like, share, and comment on content. These interactions are then visible to other people who are part of that user’s social network. This leads to content on military social media sites potentially having a vast reach beyond those who actively seek it out, like, comment on or share the content. Again, this is bound up with algorithmic selection, and, without having access to a site owner’s insights, we cannot know the exact reach of content. However, we can begin to speculate about the potential reach of content. Take, for example, the changing of the US Army’s cover photo on Facebook on 11 September 2014. At the time of writing, the photograph has gained 29,016 likes, 179 comments and 1543 shares (US Army 2014c). If the average Facebook user has 338 friends in their social network (Pew Research Centre 2014), the potential audience reach of the US Army’s change of cover photo through user engagement is an additional 10,389,444 people beyond those who already ‘like’ the official US Army page. Of course this is speculative, but it does suggest a need for scholars of global politics to begin to take these issues seriously. If we are concerned with how audiences interpret artefacts of popular culture, how are we to do this when we don’t – and possibly can’t – ever fully know exactly who the audience is? How can we even begin to make sense of audience engagement on military social media sites? I suggest that ‘likes’ may provide an easily quantifiable indicator of the popularity of online content, but the content of comments and shares offers a more insightful body of material to engage with. Research on popular culture and global politics has focused on the contexts of production and representations themselves, however there is a need to also focus on the context of audience reception and engagement (Rowley 2010, 311). With social media, researching audiences becomes vital due to how these Web 2.0 technologies work. The comments that users post to the content of military social media sites thus provides us with an insight into how audiences interpret, use and consume this content. Recent work exploring the intersection of war and popular culture has recognised that militarism now exists as ‘a generalized cultural condition’ (Stahl 2010, 48), and this has been critiqued due to its failure to ‘[provide] a reading of the specific, situated and local effects of militarism’ (Rech 2014, 258). The comments posted by individuals on military social media pages present a way for researchers to explore the effects of militarism in a specific and situated context. Take, for example, a relatively mundane gallery of photographs taken on a training exercise and shared on the British Army’s Facebook page in early 2012. ‘I’m only ten but I’m ready for war!’3 is the first comment posted by an audience member. This comment speaks volumes about the general cultural condition of militarism, as a British child literally expresses their readiness for war; however, further comments by other individuals challenge the ten-year-old’s perspective. One individual replies ‘Don’t be too eager for war! My son is twenty-five and has

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been to Afghanistan two times and seen some distressing sights’. Another comments, ‘Good man, but please slow down and enjoy being a kid. War is not fun. It’s not a game. It’s not like Call Of Duty or films, war is tough nasty and brutal. People get hurt and die’. A third responds, ‘I can see the determination in your face, but you have to battle through the teenage years first, and then see how you feel’. And, finally, a teenager comments: Even if you do think war is like a video game, can’t you see the pain and torment they go through? Not fun. . . . . . I know I’m only thirteen but I can see that war is not all honour and glory and I thank all the armed forces for fighting out there. This brief discussion suggests that audiences are not passive and uncritical in their engagements with contemporary war. The comments made by individuals on military social media pages present researchers with an insight into how audiences actively interpret, understand and make sense of identities and political, national, historical and geographical imaginaries that are mobilised in order to make statesanctioned violence possible. They can give us an insight into the nuances of militarism as a general cultural condition, and therefore exploring them is pertinent.

Conclusion If we accept that ‘media are becoming part of the practices of warfare to the point that the conduct of war cannot be understood unless one carefully accounts for the role of media in it’ (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010, 4), then understanding how and why social media is utilised by militaries is important. This chapter has articulated several interrelated arguments for why these military social media sites matter for the study and practices of contemporary global politics. Military social media sites collapse the gap between the military and the media, enabling militaries to become the media themselves. It is now imperative that we at least attempt to understand how and why militaries are using digital social media as ‘states have proven themselves to be wily adapters at manipulating new communications technologies to their own advantage and purposes’ (Banham 2013, 61). Indeed, social media is now incorporated into their strategy and operations. Whilst the aesthetic turn has been critiqued for stretching the boundaries of IR as a discipline (Holden 2010), it seems that those state and military actors who are often the focus of our research have undergone an aesthetic turn themselves. Military social media sites consist of a plethora of stories, images and audio-visual multimedia content related to war and conflict. Understanding what’s going on here therefore requires an attention to aesthetics, and how it is deployed in the service of states and militaries. Moreover, military social media sites have large audiences who can engage with the relevant content in ways that are unique to social media, such as liking, sharing and commenting. Whilst there are obstacles to fully understanding audience engagement online, we can begin to make sense of an audience’s active interpretation, consumption and usage of military social

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media sites through the comments they make. Militaries now operate on most digital social media sites, and many people across the globe engage with them every day. In a world where the content on Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines is individually determined through algorithms, I can only speak through personal experience, but there is something strange about seeing videos of military operations in Afghanistan alongside photographs of my friend’s cat and various status updates about the everyday goings on of family and friends. The vernacular like and share forces of military social media sites are complex, and researching them (as with most things online) can seem daunting, but when children are commenting on them, saying they are ‘ready for war!’, it would seem that we should begin to take them seriously.

Notes 1 Although the definition of Web 2.0 is contested, herein it is used to refer to internet sites that rely upon and facilitate user interaction and content creation (see Song 2010; O’Reilly 2012). 2 Based on interviews with British Army Combat Camera Team personnel and those working at the Defence Media Operations Center conducted in August 2014. 3 The comments sampled in this section have been slightly edited in order to protect the identity and privacy of the individuals quoted.

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Hoskins, A. and O’Loughlin, B. (2010) War and Media, Cambridge: Polity Press. Kacholia, V. (2013) ‘News Feed FYI: Showing more high quality content’, Facebook Business News, available at www.facebook.com/business/news/News-Feed-FYI-ShowingMore-High-Quality-Content, accessed 28 October 2014. Kaempf, S. (2008) ‘Case study: Virtual war’, 131–138 in Creeber, G. and Martin, R. (eds) Digital Culture: Understanding New Media, Maidenhead: Open University Press. Kaempf, S. (2013) ‘The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape’, Australian Journal of International Affairs, 67(5): 586–604. McSorley, K. (2012) ‘Helmetcams, militarized sensation and “Somatic War”’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 5(1): 47–58. Maltby, S. (2012) Military Media Management: Negotiating the “Front” Line in Mediatized War, Abingdon: Routledge. Mandiberg, M. (2012) ‘Introduction’, 1–12 in Manidberg, M. (ed.) The Social Media Reader, New York: NYU Press. Marsh, D. (2014) ‘15 reasons to love BuzzFeed’s style guide’, The Guardian, 5 February 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/feb/05/15-reasonslove-buzzfeed-style-guide, accessed 12 June 2014. Mediacor (2013) ‘UK’s Ministry of Defence is taking digital seriously’, Mediacor.hr, 4 November 2013, available at http://mediacor.hr/bloguk-ministry-of-defence-is-takingdigital-seriously/, accessed 1 October 2014. Middlebrook, M. (2013) ‘Cpl Steve Blake RLC – Turning Pro Magazine feature’, Turning Pro Magazine, available at www.scribd.com/doc/119694082/Cpl-Steve-Blake-RLCTurning-Pro-Magazine-Feature, accessed 31 October 2014. Ministry of Defence (2009) Online Engagement Guidelines, available at www.gov.uk/ government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/27933/20090805UMOD OnlineEngagementGuidelinesVersion10.pdf, accessed 21 October 2014. Ministry of Defence (2012a) Joint Doctrine Note 1/12 Strategic Communication: The Defense Contribution, available at www.gov.uk/government/publications/joint-doctrinenote-1-12-strategic-communication-the-defence-contribution, accessed 1 October 2014. Ministry of Defence (2012b) Soldiers First – The Role of Army Photographers, available at www.gov.uk/government/news/soldiers-first-the-role-of-army-photographers, accessed 10 October 2014. Ministry of Defence (2012c) Using Social Media – A Guide for Military Personnel, available at www.gov.uk/government/publications/using-social-media-a-guide-for-militarypersonnel, accessed 27 October 2014. Ministry of Defence (2014a) ‘11 reasons why our new aircraft carriers are totally awesome’, Buzzfeed, 22 May 2014, available at www.buzzfeed.com/defenceheadquarters/11reasons-why-our-new-aircraft-carriers-are-total-qlpf, accessed 12 June 2014. Ministry of Defence (2014b) Defence Imagery Website, available at www.defenceimagery. mod.uk/fotoweb/, accessed 10 October 2014. Möller, F. (2007) ‘Photographic interventions in post-9/11 security policy’, Security Dialogue, 38(2): 179–196. Möller, F. (2009) ‘The looking/not looking dilemma’, Review of International Studies, 35(4): 781–794. Möller, D.F. (2013) Visual Peace: Images, Spectatorship, and the Politics of Violence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, C. and Farrands, C. (2013) ‘Visual analysis’, 223–235 in Shepherd, L.J. (ed.) Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods, London: Routledge.

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Morse, E. (2014) ‘Social media must stop censoring images of war’, Ottawa Citizen, 16 February 2014, available at http://ottawacitizen.com/news/social-media-must-stopcensoring-images-of-war, accessed 19 October 2014. Mortensen, M. (2009) ‘The camera at war: When soldiers become war photographers’, 44–60 in Schubart, R., Virchow, F., White-Stanley, D., Thomas, T. (eds) War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict, Jefferson: McFarland. O’Loughlin, B. (2011) ‘Images as weapons of war: Representation, mediation and interpretation’, Review of International Studies, 37(1): 71–91. O’Reilly, T. (2012) ‘What is Web 2.0?’, 32–35 in Mandiberg, M (ed.) The Social Media Reader, New York: NYU Press. Parry, K. (2011) ‘Images of liberation? Visual framing, humanitarianism and British press photography during the 2003 Iraq invasion’, Media, Culture & Society, 33(8): 1185–1201. Parry, K. (2012) ‘The first ‘clean’ war? Visually framing civilian casualties in the British press during the 2003 Iraq invasion’, Journal of War & Culture Studies, 5(2): 173–187. Peterson, A. (2013) Why the tech company ‘denials’ don’t necessarily mean they weren’t cooperating with NSA spying’, Think Progress, 6 June 2013, available at http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/06/06/2118531/direct-access-nsa-spying/, accessed 19 October 2014. Pew Research Centre (2014) ‘6 new facts about Facebook’, Pew Research Center, 3 February 2013, available at www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/02/03/6-new-facts-aboutfacebook/, accessed 30 October 2014. Pizzi, M. (2014) ‘The Syrian opposition is disappearing from Facebook’, The Atlantic, 4 February 2014, available at www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/thesyrian-opposition-is-disappearing-from-facebook/283562/?single_page=true, accessed 19 October 2014. Pötzsch, H. (2013) ‘The emergence of iWar: Changing practices and perceptions of military engagement in a digital era’, New Media & Society, 17(1): 78–95. Pulsar (2014) ‘The Visual Social Media Lab launches’, Pulsar Social Data Intelligence, available at: //www.pulsarplatform.com/blog/2014/the-visual-social-media-lablaunches/, accessed 30 October 2014. Quinn, B. (2014) ‘Revealed: The MoD’s secret cyberwarfare programme’, The Guardian, 16 March 2014, available at www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/mar/16/mod-secretcyberwarfare-programme, accessed 27 October 2014. Rech, M.F. (2014) ‘Recruitment, counter-recruitment and critical military studies’, Global Discourse, 4(2–3): 244–262. Roger, N. (2013) Image Warfare in the War on Terror, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosen, J. (2012) ‘The people formerly known as the audience’, 13–16 in Mandiberg, M. (ed.) The Social Media Reader, New York: NYU Press. Ross, P. (2014) ‘Photos are still king on Facebook’, SocialBakers.com, available at www. socialbakers.com/blog/2149-photos-are-still-king-on-facebook, accessed 23 October 2014. Rowley, C. (2010) ‘Popular culture and the politics of the visual’, 309–325 in Shepherd, L.J. (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, Abingdon: Routledge. Shapiro, S. and Humphreys, L. (2013) ‘Exploring old and new media: Comparing military blogs to Civil War letters’, New Media & Society, 15(7): 1151–1167.

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Shim, D. (2013) Visual Politics and North Korea: Seeing is Believing, Abingdon: Routledge. SocialBakers.com (2014) ‘Facebook society statistics tagged as governmental’, SocialBakers.com, available at www.socialbakers.com/facebook-pages/society/tag/governmental/, accessed 23 October 2014. SocialBakers.com (2014a) ‘United States Marine Corps: Detailed statistics of Facebook pages’, SocialBakers.com , available at www.socialbakers.com/facebook-pages/ 21609611713-united-states-marine-corps, accessed 28 October 2014. SocialBakers.com (2014b) ‘Facebook celebrities statistics’, SocialBakers.com, available at www.socialbakers.com/facebook-pages/celebrities/, accessed 28 October 2014. SoldierUK (2014a) ‘“Loose Tweets Sink Fleets!” THINK before you post http://twitpic. com/bz982r #GetSafeOnline Advice page(s): www.gov.uk/think-before-you-share’, @SoldierUK, available at https://twitter.com/SoldierUK/status/526637265913909249, accessed 27 October 2014. SoldierUK (2014b) @SoldierUK Twitter Timeline, available at https://twitter.com/Soldier UK/status/526637265913909249, accessed 27 October 2014. Song, F.W. (2010) ‘Theorizing Web 2.0’, Information, Communication & Society, 13(2): 249–275. Stahl, R. (2010) Militainment, Inc.: War, Media, and Popular Culture, Abingdon: Routledge. Tufekci, Z. (2014) ‘What happens to #Ferguson affects Ferguson’, The Message, available at https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0, accessed 19 October 2014. Urich, J. (2011) ‘Meet the head of the IDF’s new media desk’, IDF News, available at www. idf.il/1398–12231-en/Dover.aspx, accessed 10 October 2014. US Army (2014a) United States Army Social Media Handbook Version 3.2 March 2014, available at www.slideshare.net/USArmySocialMedia/social-media-handbook 32–38656179, accessed 10 October 2014. US Army (2014b) The US Army on Social Media, available at www.army.mil/media/social media/, accessed 17 October 2014. US Army (2014c) US Army Facebook Cover Photo, available at www.facebook.com/ USarmy/photos/a.10150592663223558.392304.44053938557/10152460967308558/?ty pe=1&theater, accessed 30 October 2014. US Army (2014d) US Army Facebook Page, available at www.facebook.com/USarmy, accessed 27 October 2014. Wall, M. (2009) ‘Taming the warblog’, 33–42 in Allen, S. and Thorsen, E. (eds) Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, New York: Peter Lang. Wall, M. (2010) ‘In the battle (field): The US military, blogging and the struggle for authority’, Media, Culture & Society, 32(5): 863–872. Williams, M.C. (2003) ‘Words, images, enemies: Securitization and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 47(4): 511–531. Zuckerberg, M. (2012) ‘Zuckerberg’s letter to investors’, Reuters, 1 February 2012, available at www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/01/us-facebook-letter-idUSTRE8102MT20120201, accessed 19 October 2014.

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Marketing militarism in the digital age Arms production, YouTube and selling ‘national security’ Susan T. Jackson1 This Video Contains No Technical Data Covered by the ITAR or EAR.2 Official Sikorsky S-97 Raider™ Rollout Video

The military plays a central role in domestic and foreign policymaking around the world, whether directly as an actor or indirectly as an idea or policy option. As part of this policymaking, official state identity by and large comes back to the issue of maintaining sovereignty and relies on the military as the form of protection of national security. Maintaining this type of state identity relies on the seepage of military values into civilian life, a seepage that is explained through the broad and multifaceted process of militarisation, in which arms producers are important actors. However, despite being powerful actors in the global political economy, arms-producing companies and related entities that comprise the arms industry remain an understudied element in international relations (IR). Among other things, the arms industry has direct access to those who decide on whether and what weapons to build and on how to formulate related domestic and foreign policies. These decisions do not happen in a vacuum, however, nor are they stand-alone events. Rather, we need to interrogate the place of the arms industry in perpetuating the role of militarism in societies around the world; that is, we must investigate the ways in which the arms industry contributes to militarisation. Militarisation can be described as the ‘contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence’ (Gillis 1989, 1). As the process through which societies around the world promote military values in civilian life (see, for example, Enloe 1989; Regan 1994; Bowman 2002; Davies and Philpott 2012), militarisation centres on accepting these values as common sense and accepting military ‘needs’ as valuable and normal (Enloe 1989, 2000). It is an ongoing process that needs continual maintenance (Galtung 1985; Enloe 2000; Jackson 2012), something to which the arms industry’s YouTube videos contribute. One key way in which the arms industry is part of militarisation is in the creation and dissemination of the idea of the military, and relatedly the arms industry too, as a ‘good, natural and necessary’ actor in society (Jackson 2012). One of the places in which we can find these representations of the arms industry is online. Social media use has outpaced other uses of the internet (see, for

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Marketing militarism in the digital age 69 example, Golbeck 2013; Qualman 2013), not least as a means of distribution of news and information. As more and more people and companies participate in the digital world, digital popular culture artefacts lend themselves to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of international politics (for example, see Fuchs (2014) for a discussion on politics, power and social media). However, according to Klaus Krippendorff (2009, 300), ‘[a]ctions within cyberspace are limited to what computer interfaces enable, but they make possibilities available beyond the imaginable’ thus making it difficult to formulate adequate theories. It is this challenge I seek to confront in this chapter. By bringing together the common sense acceptance of the ‘good, natural and necessary’ role of the military in state identity and the implications this acceptance has for other aspects of society, for example in policymaking, I examine how digital popular culture artefacts (here, arms industry YouTube promotional videos on official corporate channels) can contribute to the normalisation of military values in civilian life. I first outline how militarisation works and why social media can provide rich information on international relations, in particular on the politics of marketing of the arms trade. I next present a blended approach that brings together quantitative content analysis with a discursive analytical approach to tease out the potential contribution of arms industry promotional materials to militarisation and what political messages or meanings the industry seems to convey in these materials. Together, the theory and the analysis provided here offer an aspect of militarisation not yet addressed in the IR literature. By examining these videos, I expose how these corporations use language to provide a sanitised and heroic version of their products, including by obscuring the actual role/effects of the large conventional weapons systems they produce, to focus instead on the pride of craftsmanship and community.

Militarisation and national security The world’s top 100 arms producers made US$395 billion in arms sales in 2012, a 29 per cent increase in real terms over arms sales in 2003 (Perlo-Freeman and Wezeman 2014). Even in times of ‘austerity’, the sale of large conventional weapons systems remains higher than a decade ago when the US and others were part of one, and ramping up for a second, war in the Middle East. These material aspects of warcraft indicate a positive disposition towards the funding and arming of the world’s militaries. Because the acceptance of certain value systems as common sense makes it difficult to question political concepts that have been depoliticised in wider discourse (Krugman 1995), the position of common sense acceptance of various political views plays a crucial role in my theorising of the internet and politics. Power is ‘all the more effective when it rests on understandings which appear disinterested or unrelated to hierarchy, for example, based in science, culture, or art’ (Leander 2009, 13).3 The role of the arms industry in the global political economy, combined with these ideas about common sense, provide the basis for examining the politics of the arms industry’s online presence, in particular their promotional videos posted on

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official corporate YouTube channels. The intersection of arms producers, the weapons they make and the ways in which they market/brand themselves on social media produces and is produced by a common sense notion of national security as tied to military security, a very important view in terms of conventional state identity. Further, the videos present scientific/technological statements through a popular culture medium, statements that either allude to or outright state the necessity and inevitability of the large conventional weapons systems for ‘our’ national security. Yet these industry actors produce things that are not everyday products – something attested to in the disclaimer on marketing materials regarding non-violation of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR), as seen in the quote that opened this chapter. In contrast, however, within arms industry advertisements, the viewers often are reminded that arms production is a welcome and expected part of the global political economy, especially in terms of local jobs. The understanding amongst arms industry workers is that they are participating in something special, and that this ‘specialness’ is a benefit that is shared with their families and the communities around them only enhances this understanding. As an employee of Raytheon, one of the world’s largest weapons producers (see Perlo-Freeman and Wezeman 2014), stated, ‘[w]e have strong ethical values toward staff and our customers. You don’t just leave that at the office. You take it home to your family, to your friends, to the community and it really creates that positive Raytheon brand’ (Raytheon 2011, 3.35 minute mark). These everyday expressions of the arms industry activity, the workers in the industry and the products and services the industry produces are powerful contributors to the normalisation of military values in civilian life. I view militarisation as a process that largely rests on the acceptance of two key notions as common sense: national security is best achieved via military security (Enloe 2000; Heeg Maruska 2010), and the military is ‘good, natural and necessary’ (Jackson 2012). Because militarisation is close to universal, with nearly all states heavily investing in the military economically, politically and ideologically (Kirk 2008), it is important to problematise these common perceptions. Yet state sovereignty as a concept is by and large unquestioned in conventional IR approaches to security, thus leaving those studies incomplete at best (see elaborations of this argument in Kantola 2007; Shepherd 2007). The ‘good, natural and necessary’ (GNN) assumption stems from the state sovereignty principle that calls on military security to provide national security in that the GNN assumption justifies the privileging of the military over the civilian as part of the means for maintaining the state. Because it is accepted as ‘common sense’, it is difficult to question the GNN assumption; as a result, it becomes easier to follow along with conventional wisdom which, in turn, reinforces the GNN assumption, and so on.

Social media as IR? Among other things, the internet offers a space for ‘the dissemination of ideas and information’, so taking digital popular culture artefacts seriously challenges what we know about IR and how we know it (see Hamilton, this volume). This type of

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Marketing militarism in the digital age 71 dissemination is a key function of social media and is one of the foundations of my argument as to why scholars of world politics need to consider social media as important to understanding militarisation (see Crilley, this volume). In this way, marketing messages and corporate promotional materials propagated through social media can inform what we know about world politics, especially when the messages are produced by a prominent set of domestic and foreign policy actors (here, producers of large conventional weapons systems) and market the idea of national security as military security. The companies’ content both implicitly and explicitly orients the viewers in a particular way, and thus has the potential to influence the ways in which viewers understand the production and use of large conventional weapons systems, indicating that social media is a site of political activity that should concern scholars. Representations are political in that they require a series of decisions on how to make them, what to put in them and where to post them; that is, representations are never neutral (see Shepherd, this volume). Further, representations are more difficult to question if they reflect (and reaffirm) commonly held beliefs; as Iver Neumann (2009, 61) notes, ‘[r]epresentations that are put forward time and again become a set of statements and practices through which certain language becomes institutionalized and “normalized” over time’. The importance of interrogating the arms industry representations on social media is that these representations can act as ‘legitimate’ representations of large conventional weapons systems and their usages. Even though there would seem to be a large amount of vested interest in presenting these weapons systems as ‘good, natural and necessary’ for a variety of reasons, these interests are by and large bypassed or ignored in conventional accounts (see Jackson 2012). The usage of social media in this study stems from James Der Derian’s explanation of new media, which is ‘generally identified as digitized, interactive, networked forms of communication’ (2009, 247). This type of communication has what Der Derian calls ‘a global effect if not ubiquitous presence through real time access’ such that ‘[v]irtuous war reaches not only into every living room but splashes onto every screen, TV, computer and cinema’ (2009, 247). For the current study, I identify social media as a specific kind of new media that includes sites for social networking, media sharing and micro-blogging. I treat online media as a continuum that develops from more traditional websites that have social media functionality (for example, news sites that embed YouTube videos in their online articles) to platforms that facilitate the creation and sharing of user-generated content, such as microblogs, social networking sites and video sharing sites.

Arms industry and social media As a site of popular culture, social media and the politics of/on social media are part of militarisation via access and expression in the everyday. As Matt Davies and Simon Philpott (2012, 42) contend, [m]ilitarization is part of a larger process that tends to remove contentious and contested areas of social life from democratic political engagement; popular

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culture, as this very sort of terrain, constitutes itself as both an object for militarization and an arena where contentious subjectivities are formed. The presence of the arms industry on social media is part of this access and expression, such as, for example, through promotional messaging for large conventional weapons systems, in ways that normalise the role of the military in society and further normalise the possibility of military deployment as a policy option. Roger Stahl (2009, 3) discusses the naturalising function that treating war as spectacle can have, arguing the ‘dominant perspective has been to regard the presentation of war in terms of the “spectacle”, that is, to argue that these discourses tend to function to control public opinion by distancing, distracting and disengaging the citizen from the realities of war’ even as more recently we have moved toward interactive war so that viewers are simultaneously detached from the war while being ‘invited to project themselves into action’. The idea of interactive war, and the construction of viewers as potential virtual participants, is important in analysing the industry’s social media presence as political in that this presence is tailored to inviting the receiver to envision being part of the industry representations. Stahl’s discussion of ‘militainment’ can be applied to arms industry representations on social media, especially those representations that can be readily perceived as entertainment such as YouTube videos (in contrast with, e.g., a LinkedIn post). Stahl (2009, 6) defines militainment as ‘state violence translated into an object of pleasurable consumption’ that suggests ‘this state violence is not of the abstract, distant, or historical variety but rather an impending or current use of force, one directly relevant to the citizen’s current political life’. In considering the arms industry videos on YouTube, for instance, it is possible to recognise current mainstream security understandings in the ‘films’ the industry posts. In this sense, when video producers choose to represent the enemy as fitting stereotypes in the US, Canada and Western Europe about militants and terrorists (a specific kind of ‘other’ necessary to justify military security), these stereotypes reflect and reinforce images presented in news on the recent and on-going US-led and domestic wars in the Middle East. Further, since the 1991 Gulf War, citizenry has been reframed as ‘an audience of war consumers’, such that news programming assumes features that fit with its other business (i.e., promoting consumerism especially via commercials). As we see the citizen turned into citizen-spectator, the ‘development of war coverage [has been] fastidiously scrubbed of images of death, references of death, and the language of death’, to be replaced by ‘obsession with the power and pleasures of high-tech war machinery’ (Stahl 2009, 14). It is now regular corporate practice to have an online presence across a variety of social media platforms. However, because of the products and services these corporations sell (e.g., equipment that governments use to control populations, threaten other states and non-state actors with, wage war and so on), the indications of arms industry presence on social media are politically different from other industries. Further, because the industry is not selling directly to ‘us’, ordinary citizens, a consumer product or even a consumer idea but rather an idea about what security is, who can have security and under what circumstances, it is important

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Marketing militarism in the digital age 73 to consider how present the industry is, on which platforms and with what representations. As one industry figure stated, ‘[i]n terms of social media, we use it to educate and inform key audiences, including [Washington, DC] Capitol Hill staffers, reporters, employees and perspective employees, investors, members of local communities where we operate, and influencers in the DC area’ (Power 2013). This type of communication normalises certain perspectives of security and has material outcomes that impact societies more broadly, such as decisions on military spending and weapons procurement and militarised foreign policy responses.

Mapping militarisation Relying on Hardy et al. (2004), I utilise content analysis with a discursive analytical approach for this study. I provide a ‘subjective interpretation’ of the videos by systematically using ‘coding and identifying themes or patterns’ (Hsieh and Shannon 2005, 1278), in particular by using Stahl’s (2009) three tropes of militainment and working with the conceptualisation of the military having been constructed as ‘good, natural and necessary’ (Jackson 2012). This analysis relies on putting words and phrases into context in order to ‘categorize, code and count’ through qualitative and quantitative techniques (Klotz and Lynch 2007, 19). Through this process, it is possible to identify a sample of the industry presence that succinctly illustrates the arguments made here and allows for an interpretive analysis on the content in terms of national security as military security and as ‘good, natural and necessary’. In terms of the operationalisation of the tropes and concepts and of video selection, I used the companies in SIPRI’s Top 100 Arms-producing and Military Services Companies, 2012 list (SIPRI 2014), to map presence across eight social media platforms, between 24 October and 30 November 2014. Company presence on social media is not uniform (for example, 88 of the 100 mapped have official corporate YouTube channels though some of these are for corporate parent companies, some are for subsidiaries or divisions and some are for the actual weapons systems), though it is possible to make generalisations about the arms industry presence more broadly and about the individual messaging within or between the different headquarter countries. I examine arms-producing companies as opposed to the wider potential industry actors such as lobbyists and trade associations in order to set a baseline for a set of corporate representations. The short corporate films are digital popular culture artefacts that offer promotional messaging on the day-to-day culture of the arms production industry, as well as commentary on the weapons systems and services their employees produce and provide. I chose seventeen videos to analyse here, videos that represent a variety of countries and types of weapons producers and systems yet that are quite uniform in their messaging. All spoken and written language was in English, another common feature across the large weapons producers’ marketing materials around the world. In line with Hermann (2009), I consider that frequency of use represents the salience of particular representations, in my case, to the companies. The discursive understanding of these representations exposes the normative power of

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meaning in that companies might employ, for instance, ‘support the troops’ in a way that I might resist. However, frequent use of certain representations that correspond to the tropes and the GNN concept and can contribute to militarisation indicates a consistent representation across industry actors that ‘support the troops’ is at least a legitimate marketing tool. Across the seventeen videos, of the 4,295 words that were spoken and presented onscreen (for example, as subtitles, technical information, names and job titles), I selected 390 that I thought reflected the tropes and the GNN construction. I calculated the frequency of each word and then went back to the original transcripts and placed each word into broader context. I also noted when words or phrases that I expected to appear often were actually very low in frequency, such as ‘soldier’. Independently, few words represent militarism of any sort nor are any reminiscent of Stahl’s three tropes or the GNN construction. However, when placed within context, the keywords in my list indicate one or more of the tropes and/or the GNN construction are at play. Gripen NG: a new generation is ready. Are you? We are Gripen pilots. We make a difference – to the nations we represent, and to the people we protect. The world’s most advanced multi-role fighter just became the next generation of fighters. Our sensors, our weapons and our performance are superior. And with the world’s most advanced tactical link, we have the information advantage. We are Gripen pilots, and this is our story. (Saab AB 2013, YouTube video description) [category: Science & Technology] Inspired Work Global Video: Our new global video brings the story of our brand to life, helping to show who we are, what we do, and what we stand for. At BAE Systems, we serve the needs of our customers by delivering a full range of advanced defence, aerospace and security solutions. We work together with local partners to develop and deliver programmes that sustain local economies, increase defence sovereignty, and safeguard commercial interests. Our story is about 88,200 talented people on six continents who are committed to creating solutions that help transform the world. That’s work that inspires us. That’s work that protects lives and strengthens nations. That’s BAE Systems. (BAE Systems 2013, YouTube video description) [category: Science & Technology] The word cloud shown in Figure 1 provides a visualisation of the transcripts, with the larger font showing higher levels of frequency. The cloud does not include pronouns and prepositions (due to software limitations). This technical omission is important in that some of the context of some of the pronouns is really quite informative of the industry’s messaging. For example, many of the companies’ YouTube videos transmit a sense of inclusion: the viewer seems to be invited to be a part of the company, of supporting the soldiers and of creating and benefiting

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Figure 5.1 Word cloud from the transcripts of the arms industry videos

from a particular form of national security. This sense of inclusion can be seen in the many uses of ‘we’, for example: ‘we make the visible invisible’ ‘we build . . . trust’ ‘we were thrilled’ to be invited into the weapons program ‘we [soldiers] uphold’ a vast area ‘we’ have a company to partner with in Europe ‘we’re going to be cruising at 220 knots’ ‘we want to give the war fighter the capability’ ‘we make a difference’ ‘we’re saving [soldiers’] lives’ ‘we take risks’ to build what is needed ‘we are working closely with US Government’ ‘we’re . . . national sponsors for MathCounts’ ‘we deliver’. At times the companies also use ‘you’ and ‘they’ to create and extend a sense of inclusion. For example, by using ‘you’ in similar ways to we: ‘. . . it just makes you feel good. It makes you feel like you are doing something, you’re part of something that is helping our country achieve its goals’. In this instance, the viewer is made to feel part of the team, making the inclusion difficult to question. ‘World’ is another example of the inclusion effect because it is assumed in most of the videos that there is common agreement on what threats the ‘world’ faces and

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how those threats should be countered: invariably the solutions that the companies provide. The economy is another aspect of the inclusion idea in that several times the videos mention how the systems are affordable and/or will do great things for the country’s economy (though which country’s economy is unclear since these weapons are, by and large, exported elsewhere). The tropes are not simple, clear and straightforward statements but rather often rely on euphemisms and other linguistic techniques. Many of the words, when viewed in context, overlap between multiple tropes and with GNN. I also noted when companies position themselves, for example as world leaders. This mundane kind of marketing works to normalise the companies’ products and services by leaving out that they are leaders in building war materiél. Clean war Within the militainment framework, ‘clean war’ is ‘a manner of presenting war that maximizes viewer alienation from the fact of death in order to maximize the war’s capacity to be consumed’ (Stahl 2009, 25). This type of presentation can be seen in language that obfuscates the actual war activity: ‘sorties’ versus bombing raids; ‘surgical strikes’ and ‘theater of operation’ instead of the ‘battlefield’ as a site of war; and the depersonalisation and legitimation of killing civilians by referring to dead people as ‘collateral damage’, among others. The YouTube videos examined here have a number of examples that indicate the ‘clean war’ trope whether by using language that separates the product from its actual intended use, or by referring to the buyers as ‘customers’, thus normalising the transaction as a consumer action. In one example, the company representative refers to the original announcement of the plans to research and develop a new attack helicopter as embarking on an ‘adventure’. In another, ‘men and women out there’ are courageous in spite of ‘danger’; they are not represented as soldiers in war, conflict or battle. ‘Customers’ are ‘enabled’ and ‘hostiles’ are ‘destroyed’, while high ethical standards are maintained at the company and communicated at home to ‘family, friends, community’ in a way that promotes the company’s brand. There are a multitude of ‘innovative solutions’, though these solutions are limited to military responses in ‘reality’, responses to threats that mostly are left undefined though have something to do with ‘national security’. In addition, company representatives ‘love to hear from’ the men and women who ‘use their products’ regarding how these products saved their lives and brought them home, but without a mention of the possibility that someone else (i.e., one of ‘them’) might have been killed in the process or that perhaps the presence of the men and women in a conflict would contribute to actual armed conflict elsewhere. Companies are preoccupied with helping customers to achieve ‘mission success’, though what success means here is not actually stated nor is the customer identified as the state, or even the military or the soldier, when technically in these kinds of sales the customer is supposed to be the state.

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Technofetishism ‘Technofetishism’ is something that ‘entails the worship of high-tech weaponry’ (Stahl 2009, 28). As pointed out in Stahl’s discussion of militainment, high-tech weapons are often considered to be more (and inherently) ethical than other types of weapons. This view can see high-tech weaponry represented using sexual imagery, or by something aesthetically pleasing and neutralising such as a sunset in the background, as well as references that place enemy weapons as something more barbaric than ‘ours’. While I did not quantify each type of onscreen image, sunsets are a staple in these videos. In addition, those videos that showcase aircraft often have views of the pilots that are movie-like as in views of the pilot with the full headgear (usually a helmet with a darkened visor pulled down over the eyes). These companies have professionals who stage these settings; Lockheed Martin (2014), for example, employs ten professional photographers who are ‘jet ready’ (in other words, they are trained and physically fit to withstand the strain of flying in combat aircraft). All the videos viewed for this study have statements that connote technofetishism. The words in this category are quite broad, ranging from ‘game-changing’ and ‘revolutionising’ to more technical specifications such as ‘stealth’. These technologies often relate to the idea of ‘supporting the troops’ and company representatives regularly state their pride in working on these systems. Often, it is not clear from the technical language what the technology actually does, thereby creating a gap in understanding for the viewer. For instance, the acronym ‘FLIR’ is used several times without explanation; viewers are expected to understand that the system shown in a particular video includes forward-looking infrared – hence ‘FLIR’ – thermal imaging, to enable people/soldiers to ‘see’ at night. The corresponding images in the video try to draw out that inference but the term itself is dropped into the narration in a way that seems to glamorise the technology. The F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter (the most expensive weapons system in history) is mentioned no less than twenty-five times across five videos alone. Its technology is coupled with ‘partner’, ‘future’, ‘STOVL’, ‘composite’ and a variety of other words, phrases and technical abbreviations that do little to inform the viewer of what threat this plane is supposed to counter; but we do know after watching the videos that it is a really very advanced aircraft. Another technique used in the videos is to not define the ‘other’ but to present them as a general ‘enemy combatant’, often with equipment that is assumed to be, and thus presented as, inferior because the companies in the YouTube videos build the capability that enables customers (i.e., the ‘good guys’) to ‘intercept enemy missions’. Technology makes it possible for ‘us’ to ‘track down the bad guys’ and to ‘bring the good guys home’. The viewer is reminded that reality does not offer second chances and that is why the customer also needs training simulators, which means these simulations can protect those who use them (the ‘customer’) though what the simulations train (killing and conflict) is not advertised in the videos. And at the end, the viewer is promised ‘a safe and more peaceful world’ via the

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technology showcased in the videos – that is, the assumption that building war machines is a ‘peaceful’ measure to take (Samsung Techwin 2013).

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Support the troops As Stahl (2009, 29) goes on to argue, the ‘support the troops’ trope ‘resembles technofetishism in that it functions to turn civic attention away from debates about legitimacy and toward the war machine itself’ by using a number of mechanisms such as phrases calling for gratitude for volunteers (which makes it difficult to go against the policy that placed the soldiers in the war). This trope also relies on euphemisms. For instance, the ‘support the troops’ trope often centres on issues of family and community, setting the ‘men and women who protect us’ (and therefore deserve our gratitude) within the context of ‘needing’ dedicated arms production employees in order for soldiers to ‘return home to their families’. Across all of the videos, the words ‘soldier’ and ‘troops’ are used only once each. Generally when speaking of soldiers, the company representatives in the videos call them ‘men and women’ or ‘people’ who are in either ‘harm’s way’, a ‘danger zone’ or some other similar place and protecting ‘our’ freedoms, but rarely on the ‘battlefield’, which is used only twice (and one of those uses is in the context of simulation). Going back to the ‘clean war’ trope and the comment regarding the unidentified customer, there is an insinuation that the customer is the soldier rather than the actual buyer, which is the state. This insinuation makes it difficult to question policy because it would mean questioning the ‘brave men and women’ who protect us. After all, the ‘good guys’ are meant to come home using the equipment produced by these companies, which makes ‘the best and the brightest minds’ who work ‘24/7’ to design and build the equipment (the weapons systems) ‘proud’ and ‘thrilled’ to do such ‘awe-inspiring’ work. Good, natural and necessary The GNN concept is useful for illustrating where and when the military and arms production is normalised in addition to and/or beyond the three more specific tropes. The GNN assumption is reflected in ‘game changing’ technology in a way that covers the three tropes by equating war with a game, fetishising the role of technology, meaning that the troops get even better support through better equipment: these things are good, unquestioningly inevitable and obviously needed – or so we (the viewers) are encouraged to believe. There are a number of examples throughout the videos of the GNN concept as separate from any of the tropes. It is in the interest of the companies to guide the viewers in a way so the viewers do not question the ‘necessity’ of designing, building and paying for these weapons systems. The companies can accomplish this task in a number of ways. One strategy is deflection; for example, reminding the viewers that the systems are ‘affordable’ though actual cost is never mentioned nor

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Marketing militarism in the digital age 79 is there a comparison with what else might be prioritised and considered affordable. Further, companies imply that the protection provided by the equipment they produce is supplied to ‘us’ as well as to those who cannot take care of themselves, an implication that rests on the idea that military responses are necessary solutions in part because some ‘other’ needs us. For example, in one video the narrator discusses how a country of strategic value could be overrun at any time and the combat aircraft (Saab’s Gripen) used by the joint international command is necessary in order to keep everything under control as ‘brother turns against brother’ (Saab 2013). These types of portrayals insinuate it is good, natural and necessary to have a military response ready so that national security (but whose?) is maintained. In addition, the continual references to the future being now and to seeing what is next seem to insinuate the necessary aspect with the assumption that the companies’ solutions are the answers to whatever we think national security ‘needs’ are. One company even outright states that it is building its ‘defence’ business in order to protect [our] ‘safety and happiness’ and to ‘defend peace and happiness’ (Samsung Techwin 2013).

The international relations of YouTube Using Stahl’s three militainment tropes and the GNN concept as ways in which to understand international relations on YouTube, it is possible to see how the social media marketing or branding of the world’s leading arms producers reflects and contributes to the conventional common sense notion that national security is military security. Whether it is removing war from the message, fetishising advanced technology, supporting those who perpetrate war and/or expressing these weapons systems as part of the GNN military, the YouTube promotional videos posted by arms producers reinforce a certain value system regarding what national security is and how it is best achieved. The arms industry is active across a variety of social media platforms and vigorously engaged in marketing its products and services, despite the fact that its products and services are not for general consumption/sale. The presence of these companies, and the types of messaging they use, are political phenomena and should thus inform how we think about and research world politics. Whether by using explicit messaging about ‘our brave men and women’ or implicit meaning by leaving out key political relationships by referring to states (and soldiers) as customers, these videos contribute to international politics in the everyday and provide an element of militarisation that is specifically tied to social media. As touched on at the beginning of this chapter, this messaging has power in part because it is presented through advertising posted on YouTube in the form of short films. That is, the producers of corporate branding and short films would seem to be disinterested in politics, yet the very notion that is being sold is militarised national security, and the products and services are an important element in the foreign policies between states and the domestic politics within states. In this way, these promos are part and parcel of militarisation on/ through/by social media.

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Notes 1 This chapter is part of Militarization 2.0: Militarization’s Social Media Footprint through a Gendered Lens, a four-year project funded by Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Science Research Council). The main goal of the project is to map and analyse the social media presence of the arms and military services industry and military video games industry and how this presence might contribute to militarisation in a variety of ways. The project includes researchers from Leeds University in the UK and Leibniz University and Siegen University in Germany and is part of the ‘Framework Grant: The Digitized Society – Past, Present, and Future’, funded by Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Science Research Council). My sincere thanks go to the editors of this volume for their availability and thoughtful feedback as well as to Linn Ehde for early-on assistance in video transcription and company mapping, and to Saveno Mano and Dennis Arndt for interesting discussions. All transgressions herewith are my own. 2 ITAR stands for the International Traffic in Arms Regulations and EAR for Export Administration Regulations. The arms industry is closely tied to the state (as the sole holder of the legitimate use of force), needing permission and often support to sell its products. For a short description of these regulatory regimes, see UMass Lowell (n.d.). 3 There are a variety of ways to conceptualise power in terms of the arms industry. For example, militarisation is inherently gendered in that the process promotes the military and its assumed ‘needs’ as valuable and normal, thereby privileging masculinity (Enloe 1989, 2000). That is, there is a ‘privileging of masculinity [and a corresponding devalorisation of the other through feminisation] that is paradigmatic to militarism and war’ (Peterson 2007, 11). This militarised masculinity is hegemonic in terms of how the modern state is defined such that national security (a pivotal goal of the sovereign state) relies on war and threat of war (Heeg Maruska 2010).

Bibliography Bowman, K. (2002) Militarization, Democracy, and Development: The Perils of Praetorianism in Latin America, University College, PA: Penn State University Press. Davies, M. and Philpott, S. (2012) ‘Militarization and popular culture’, 42–59 in Gouliamos, K. and Kassimeris, C. (eds) The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo-Militarism, New York, NY: Routledge. Der Derian, J. (2009) Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Complex, New York, NY: Routledge. Enloe, C. (1989) Bananas, Beaches, Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, London: Pandora Press. Enloe, C. (2000) Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Fuchs, C. (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction, London: Sage Publications. Galtung, J. (1985) ‘Military formations and social formations: A structural analysis’, 1–20 in Wallensteen, P., Galtung, J. and Portales, C. (eds) Global Militarization, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Gillis, J. (1989) ‘Introduction’, 1–10 in Gillis, J.R. (ed.) The Militarization of the Western World, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Golbeck, J. (2013) Analyzing the Social Web, Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann (Elsevier).

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Marketing militarism in the digital age 81 Hardy, C., Harley, B. and Phillips, N. (2004) ‘Discourse analysis and content analysis: Two solitudes?’, Qualitative Methods Newsletter (American Political Science Association), 2(1): 19–22. Heeg Maruska, J. (2010) ‘When are states hypermasculine?’, 235–255 in Sjoberg, L. (ed.) Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives, London: Routledge. Hermann, M.G. (2009) ‘Using content analysis to study public figures’, 151–167 in Klotz, A. and Prakesh, D. (eds) Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hsieh, H. and Shannon, S.E. (2005) ‘Three approaches to qualitative content analysis’, Qualitative Health Research, 15: 1277–1288. Jackson, S.T. (2012) ‘The national security exception, the global political economy and militarization’, 214–235 in Gouliamos, K. and Kassimeris, C. (eds) The Marketing of War in the Age of Neo-Militarism, New York, NY: Routledge. Kantola, J. (2007) ‘The gendered reproduction of the state in international relations’, BJPIR, 9: 270–283. Kirk, G. (2008) ‘Contesting militarization: Global perspectives’, 30–55 in Sutton, B., Morgen, S. and Novkov, J. (eds) Security Disarmed: Critical Perspectives on Gender, Race, and Militarization, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Klotz, A. and Lynch, C. (2007) Strategies for Research in Constructivist International Relations, Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe. Krippendorff, K. (2009) On Communicating: Otherness, Meaning, and Information, Oxon, UK: Routledge. Krugman, P. (1995) ‘Dutch tulips and emerging markets’, Foreign Affairs, 74: 28–44. Leander, A. (2009) ‘Thinking tools’, 11–27 in Klotz, A. and Prakash, D. (eds) Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Neumann, I. (2009) ‘Discourse analysis’, 61–22 in Klotz, A. and Prakash, D. (eds) Qualitative Methods in International Relations: A Pluralist Guide, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Perlo-Freeman, S. and Wezeman, P.D. (2014) ‘The SIPRI Top 100 arms-producing and military services companies 2012’, SIPRI Fact Sheet, January, Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Peterson, V.S. (2007) ‘Thinking through intersectionality and war’, Race, Gender and Class, 14(3/4): 10–27. Power, D. (2013) ‘How B2B defense contractor Raytheon leverages social media’, Sproutsocial.com, 14 August 2013, available online at http://sproutsocial.com/insights/ b2b-social-media-examples. Qualman, E. (2013) Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Regan, P. (1994) Organizing Societies for War: The Process and Consequences of Societal Militarization, Westport, CT: Praeger. Shepherd, L. (2007) ‘Victims, perpetrators and actors’ revisited: Exploring the potential for a feminist reconceptualisation of (international) security and (gender) violence’, BJPIR, 9: 239–256. Stahl, R. (2009) Militainment, Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture, London: Routledge. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) (2014) ‘Sources and methods’, SIPRI, available at www.sipri.org/research/armaments/production/Top100/sources_methods. UMass Lowell (nd) Difference between ITAR and EAR, available at www.uml.edu/docs/ Differences%20btwn%20ITAR%20and%20EAR_tcm18–2476.pdf.

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Video datasets BAE Systems (2013) ‘Inspired Work Global Video’, YouTube, 8 May 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwS2rrW_QJM&list=PLPu-oVtZ1cgC9TqU-P7_ Z_HbF3R_ND470. Chemring Plc. (2013) ‘Chemring – Delivering Global Protection’,YouTube, 26 September 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIBPV4mtR-s&list=UU9qJ1_ uyQWCK3-H58a4UyRQ. Cobham Plc. (2013) ‘Cobham Group Video’, YouTube, 1 October 2013, available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=TIBPV4mtR-s&list=UU9qJ1_uyQWCK3-H58a4UyRQ. Cubic Corporation (2014) ‘CubicCorporation: I/ITSEC 2014 Trailer’, YouTube, 13 November 2014, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIBPV4mtR-s&list=UU9qJ1_ uyQWCK3-H58a4UyRQ. Embraer (2014) ‘Rollout Embraer KC-390’, YouTube, 21 October 2014, available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=NN9RwpNAZFQ. Exelis (2014) ‘Exelis Electronic Warfare’, YouTube, 8 September 2014, available at www. youtube.com/watch?v=vZ5aZ6Z8mnk. Harris Corporation (2014) ‘Harris Corporation – Overview 2014’, YouTube, 15 September 2014, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MdMlqCA4o. Kongsberg Gruppen (2014) ‘Lt Gen Bogden on KONGSBERG Delivery’, YouTube, 1 October 2014, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkQBRNAw_Oo&list= PLYRlj6pxwuY_E5tPCYP-ML8TivNQgOV3f&index=2. Lockheed Martin (2014) ‘Capturing Aerial Photos of the World’s Most Advanced Jets’, YouTube, 7 October 2014, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Nvd_eWg7nk. Lockheed Martin (2010) ‘F-35B: Taking STOVL to a New Level’, YouTube, 16 April 2010, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD-J1KksHUQ. Navistar Defense (2012) ‘Navistar Defense: Our Company’, YouTube, 24 October 2012, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=fK0WXNJwvI0&index=14&list=UU5DzNE9 BzdpLlkTaWJw1OCg. Raytheon (2011) ‘Raytheon Company – We Are Raytheon’, YouTube, 4 May 2011, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hYloaLV2g0. Rockwell Collins (2014) ‘F-35 Helmet Display System’, YouTube, 1 July 2014, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0btzIvlScI. RUAG Group (2013) ‘RUAG Group – Looking into RUAG’, YouTube, 22 October 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_KGASXfaY. Saab AB (2013) ‘Gripen NG: A New Generation Is Ready. Are You?’, YouTube 10 January 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKlQyPOiRuE. Samsung Techwin (2013) ‘Samsung Techwin America: Samsung Techwin Introduction’, YouTube, 13 March 2013, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTzh6sTrM2M. Sikorsky Aircraft (2014) ‘Official Sikorsky S-97 Raider™ Rollout Video’ YouTube, 9 October 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cucSg6dd9a0.

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Social media and undocumented immigrants in the US Meghana V. Nayak

Undocumented immigrants residing in the US do not have legal authorisation to enter, live or work in the country. Some might be domestic workers, while others might be seeking asylum. Others may have inadvertently or purposely overstayed their visas. Their stories are rife with the complexities of violence, pain and survival. But mainstream popular culture discourses simplistically racialise and represent non-citizens, particularly from non-Western parts of the world, as ‘illegals’, criminals leeching US resources and contaminating its cultural fabric (Cisneros 2008). Those who intervene and resist find that these discourses hold on for dear life (Yu-Hsi Lee 2014). In this chapter, I explore how undocumented immigrants and their allies in the US utilise social media to confront the negative perceptions about these communities. By doing so, undocumented immigrants exercise political agency and challenge how the US enacts sovereignty. Because popular culture intersects with, draws upon and informs governmental discourses (Grayson et al. 2009), we can use social media as a lens to trace how countries behave towards non-citizens, thus revealing how global power relationships work. By ‘global power relationships’ I do not mean some self-contained world ‘out there’ where governments engage with each other. Rather, I am referencing the distinctions that underscore asymmetrical global interactions: inside/outside; us/ them; here/over there (Nayak and Selbin 2010; Nayak 2013). The ‘global’ emerges through how a variety of political actors, whether communities, individuals, countries or organisations, interact with each other. These actors may draw upon, transform or resist classifications of who does and does not belong to a particular place, or who should and should not make decisions and policies, and about whom. Exploring how undocumented immigrants use social media to challenge and subvert these distinctions is important for two reasons. First, international relations (IR) scholars need to better understand the experiences of undocumented immigrants in the context of global politics. As Demo (2005) points out, we must go beyond discussions of racialised perceptions of undocumented immigrants (see Chávez 2008) to explore how these ideas are fundamentally tied to representations of sovereignty. Sovereignty is usually understood as authority over a given territory and people, represented as uncontested, meaning that it is taken for granted that a sovereign power decides who gets to enter and live in that territory.

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Countries are participating in global politics when they invoke sovereignty to justify which foreign nationals, or non-citizens, are deemed eligible for entry and inclusion. Prevailing notions in popular culture of undocumented immigrants as unworthy of entry into the US find traction in, and are fueled by, governmental discourses and policies. Indeed, anti-immigration discourses use images of the country’s borders and attendant vulnerabilities, such as of unidentified hordes of people pouring into the country (Demo 2005, 299). Undocumented immigrants are securitised; they are constructed as threats that make necessary the enactment of sovereignty through the militarisation of the border, the incarceration and warehousing of non-citizens and methods of surveillance and profiling (Gerard 2014). Thus an inquiry into how undocumented immigrants challenge how they are constructed and treated can reveal lessons about the global workings of sovereign power. Second, the very communities who might be demonised or marginalised in popular culture/society can engage social media in order to reconstitute perceptions and meanings. But we need to know more about how they do so. I explore how undocumented immigrants engage in ‘storytelling’ via social media to rewrite the ‘outsider’ as ‘insider’. I also examine how the social-media-coordinated campaign to eliminate the use of the term ‘illegal’ disrupts how popular culture and governmental officials frame immigration debates. Finally, social media enables undocumented immigrants to share and utilise tactics of survival to circumvent violent practices of sovereignty. As I illustrate, these three ways of using social media help us rethink what makes and remakes the global, by subverting ‘inside/ outside’ and ‘here/over there’ distinctions.

Storytelling: IR’s ‘Others’ speak Laura Shepherd discusses the problematic production of knowledge claims in IR in her contribution to this volume, imploring readers to consider what counts as evidence. I am particularly interested in how knowledge claims in IR feign objectivity, thus deflecting how ‘knowledge’ draws upon and strengthens hierarchical power relationships, particularly between the objective ‘knower’ and the people to be ‘known’. One group of scholars is making a critical intervention by exploring how storytelling, creative expression, autobiography and ethnography are key starting points for understanding global politics (Brigg and Bleiker 2010; Selbin 2010; Inayatullah 2011; Muppidi 2012; Dauphinee 2013; Edkins 2013). Those who seek to produce knowledge can explore their own social histories and their relationships with the people and places they study. Those who are studied are already telling their stories, often challenging what is perceived as ‘objective’ knowledge in IR. So the very distinction between expert and subject collapses. To situate the import of people’s stories, LHM Ling conceptualises a dialectic relationship between ‘Westphalia World’ and ‘Multiple Worlds’ (Ling 2014). Westphalia World is what we would normally recognise as IR: the world of nationstates, interacting in lopsided power relationships, seeking conquest, order and the silencing of Others, particularly those perceived to be insignificant or threatening

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Remaking the global 85 to sovereignty or international hierarchy. This is a ‘World’ obsessed with border control and national security. Multiple Worlds, however, are where we find ‘the histories, philosophies, languages, memories, myths, stories, and fables of the human condition’ (Ling 2014, 13). Multiple Worlds manifest as the attempts to communicate across differences, to recognise multiple subjectivities, rather than casting aside or categorising people as threats or burdens. Storytelling, therefore, is as powerful an act as diplomacy or militarisation in shaping IR. Coming out When undocumented immigrants tell their own stories, they recast their outsider status to show that we cannot understand sovereign power without taking seriously their experiences crossing into and creating lives ‘inside’ the US. Undocumented immigrants are increasingly using the rhetoric of ‘coming out’ as a form of political resistance, drawing upon rituals created by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities of revealing one’s sexual or gender identity. ‘Coming out’ is now more frequently referenced in popular culture and serves to destroy taboos, to create space to live authentically or to invite support and affirmation (Rivera-Silber 2013). Expressing oneself on social media in particular provides safety yet permits a ‘cathartic experience to excise the shame often associated with being undocumented in America’ (Rivera-Silber 2013, 73). For several, ‘coming out’ means revealing not only undocumented status but also a non-conforming sexual or gender identity. Social media has facilitated ‘undocuqueer’ activists to hold accountable both immigrant rights advocates and LGBT movements for their histories of excluding each other. For example, in April 2013, the Center for American Progress launched out4citizenship.org, an online forum to mobilize support for LGBT undocumented people to gain access to citizenship. The digital facilitation of the intertwining of these two movements shatters the idea of undocumented immigrants as always already ‘outside’. They are intimately involved in American movements for social justice and share identities with marginalised US citizens and residents. Through the process of outing, they are shattering the presumed line between outsider and insider, as they occupy both spaces. As Negrón-Gonzales (2014) notes, they are ‘re-articulating’ their connection to the country by breaking expected codes of silence and participating as if they are citizens and members of the body politic. This is because they do have an ‘insiderness’ from growing up in the US or experiencing firsthand differential and exclusionary treatment (ibid, 260). It is an ‘insider’ status that is uniquely rooted in contradictions, thus forcing a rethinking of categories such as citizen. Art shared online enables this coming out process. For example, queer undocumented artist and activist Julio Salgado’s tumblr (http://juliosalgado83.tumblr. com/) showcases his illustrations about the experiences of undocumented LGBT communities. He writes words across the bodies of the characters he creates that are associated with being undocumented: lazy, dumb, undesirable, suspect, criminal, dangerous, threat. But each character rejects these words through gestures such as sticking out his or her middle finger or giving a ‘thumbs down’ (Salgado

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2014b). In another image, a woman in a graduation cap and gown stands under the words ‘undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic’ (Salgado 2014a). People may email a picture of themselves with a quote about being undocumented and queer, and Salgado will create an image that can be used for activism purposes. Each image he creates bears the words, ‘I Am Undocuqueer’. Salgado joins several other undocumented artists in depicting the lives and political desires of undocumented people. Buzzfeed, an online entertainment and news media company, showcased some of these artists (Carrasquillo 2014). Consider Alberto Ledesma, who grew up undocumented in California and is now the Graduate Diversity Director at University of California Berkeley’s Division of Arts and Humanities. He pushes for more analysis of the ‘psychic costs’ of being undocumented, particularly as these communities contribute to policy debates but also undergo internal battles around their identities (@nilogardezi 2014). He eventually received amnesty through the Immigration Reform and Control Act and is author of Diary of a Dreamer, a graphic novel inspired by his story. On one page, he draws a man holding an American flag, with a bald eagle atop his head. The panel reads: ‘The truth is that no matter how hard I try to show them few people consider undocumented immigration as a kind of American experience’ (emphasis added; http://culturestrike.net/diary-of-a-dreamer). DREAMers ‘Out’ undocumented immigrants are at the forefront of mobilising for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a proposed bill that would provide conditional permanent residency for undocumented people. Eligible people arrive in the United States as minors (before the age of 16), live in the country continuously for at least five years, and complete either two years of military service or two years at a four-year institution of higher learning. They must also be of ‘good moral character’. Proponents of the DREAM Act who would benefit from its passage call themselves DREAMers. DREAMers use the political artwork discussed above to buttress their claims. For example, Salgado founded Dreamersadrift.com, which gives testimony to the experiences of undocumented youth but through methods such as poetry, prose, spoken word and art. The ultimate aim is to galvanise support for the DREAM Act and other related suggestions to address the unauthorised statuses of tens of thousands of immigrant youth. Technological designs can also function aesthetically to illustrate the ‘dreams’ DREAMers aim to fulfill. Recently, in November 2013, Mark Zuckerberg, cofounder of Facebook, sponsored a ‘hackathon,’ an intensive programming session, for undocumented immigrants. DREAMers created projects or tech applications to facilitate the ability of undocumented immigrants to explain how they could benefit from immigration reform. The winner of this event’s storytelling category was the app ‘Undoculife’. This app creates a virtual world so that anyone can experience the daily decisions and difficulties facing undocumented people. The app also helps people contemplate what they might do to promote their rights (Nevarez 2013). Anyone can engage in digitised alternative realities that open

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conversations about what is at stake with immigration reform. The following is a scenario one can experience through the app: A father goes to work only to be asked to work overtime. The father tries to explain that his young daughter has a recital that he does not want to miss, but the boss dismisses the concern and keeps insisting that he work. The supervisor suggests that he may call immigration on him, but he then counters that he will call the Labor Department to report the employer for wage and hour violations. The employer tells him to enjoy his daughter’s recital (Llorente 2013) This is certainly not a scenario everyone would experience, nor would such a pleasant outcome be the norm; other scenarios include threats from police. Reviews by journalists and gamers reveal excitement about the possibilities this app offers for creating conversations about immigration reform (see Arce 2013). Marginalised stories Precisely because the DREAMers’ movement continues to create unprecedented grassroots mobilisation and visibility for the concerns of undocumented immigrants (de la Torre III and Germano 2014), some are creating space through social media to consider which voices might be marginalised within the immigrant rights movement. As I explored the digital traces of the stories of undocumented people, I attempted to be attentive to the silences. Which stories cannot be told? And for whom is coming out not a possibility or desire? For example, online discussions abound about the DREAM Act’s requirement for ‘good moral character’. Do stories only resonate if the storyteller assures the audience that he or she is undoubtedly American through one’s socialisation, desires and values? Can only undocumented students with certain skills and resources have the opportunity to participate in events such as the hackathon? I found that some of the online rhetoric around DREAMers, not necessarily by DREAMers, pivoted forcefully on the idealised ‘all-American’: the valedictorians, volunteers for charity, professing love for the US. But people’s fears about being deported from the ‘only country they have ever known’ (a familiar refrain) do not necessarily mean they support exceptionalist views of the US or that they do not have critiques of racism. Thus online discussion and presence is a crucial part of making visible the stories of marginalised undocumented youth who are even further removed from US governmental respectability politics: if you’re the right kind of non-citizen, if you are exemplary, we will allow you to stay. Consider the example of the California-based group 67 Sueños. Sueños is Spanish for dreams. ‘67’ indicates the estimated 67 per cent of undocumented youth who would not be affected by the DREAM Act. The group created a video (http://vimeo.com/24033813) noting that most undocumented youth fall in between the far-right’s image of the ‘illegal’ and the progressives’ image of ‘the exceptional’. Powerfully, this group’s slogan

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is ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’, which it notes is a sentiment borrowed from disability rights movements (www.67suenos.org/mission). This organisation helps to capture the experiences of undocumented youth who drop out of high school or experience marginalisation within undocumented communities. ‘Imagine 2050’, an online community dedicated to thinking about the possibility of a multiracial democracy, asked via twitter: ‘Does pro #DreamAct messaging focus too narrowly on ‘exceptional’ folks? Y/N? Why?’(Flanagan 2011). @DreamAct, a twitter handle for immigration reform activists, retweeted the question to its 24,000 followers. The answers included the following: @redhotdesi: Yes, of course[,] it’s the narrative of American exceptionalism and exception . . . And the ‘good moral character’ designation that veils the criminali[s]ation of migrant bodies needs to be deconstructed. Stories of DREAM miracles also conceal or forget discourses of neo-liberalism and the development of underdevelopment. I’m sure Dreamers are going to be a welcome addition to the fabric of American empire. I think most people convince themselves that they are different and their lives don’t serve those goals. @TrojanTopher: Exactly! Which gets into larger philosophical notions of who’s[sic] ‘worth’ and salvation + glamor of confession/misery in culture. @Ksramirez3: Yes, b/c it’s necessary 2 focus on these folks, so people can understand why DreamAct is so important 2 pass. @DomenicPowell: There’s an immigration reform campaign & an immigrant rights movement. One tokenizes, the other doesn’t. Guess which is which. The discussion about ‘worthiness,’ ‘tokenisation’ and the perceived ‘differences’ between DREAMers and others reveals how people are grappling with discourses of exceptionalism. In an open letter to the DREAM Movement, undocumented immigrant and activist Raúl Al-qaraz Ochoa discusses his hesitations about the Democratic Party’s cooptation of the movement in support of undocumented youth. In addition to calling out the presumption that DREAMers would want to be in the military or support US military action, Ochoa laments the need to ‘vilify’ parents. He contests the discourse that DREAMers ‘had no choice’ and were subject to the ‘obviously bad’ decisions of their parents. It is not okay to allow legislation to pass that will stand on and disrespect the struggle, sacrifice and dignity of our parents. What about blaming U.S. led capitalist and imperialist policies as the reasons that create our ‘refugee’ populations? Our parents’ struggle is not for sale. We must not fall for or feed into the rhetoric that criminali[s]es us or our parents. We all want justice, but is it true justice if we have to sell out our own family members along the way? (Ochoa 2010) The ensuing anger, hopelessness and acknowledgment that ensued in the online comments reveal the debates that are rarely included in journalistic discussions of

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Remaking the global 89 the DREAM Act, which often present undocumented youth as a monolithic group. Several websites dedicated to addressing the DREAM Act and immigrant rights circulated the letter, and academics such as Karma Chávez (2013, 105) and Jeff Chang (2014, 332) discussed the letter in the broader context of coalition politics and the racialisation of communities, respectively. The conversation started and built up momentum online, spread by social media. The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is rooted in the constructed difference between ‘here’ (the best country in the world!) and ‘there’ (horrifying, violent, strange). The ‘good’ undocumented immigrant should ostensibly accept this distinction, rather than point to the violence experienced ‘here’. Hing argues: The immigration rights movement, forced into a defensive posture, is down on its knees begging for crumbs. Pleading to keep only the ‘good’ immigrants in the country, those who will labor with their heads down, without asking for rights. . . Who has room in their hearts for people whose life stories also include a past of pedestrian crimes or even larger transgressions. . . ? Who has time to fight for those whose lives are contextuali[s]ed within the struggles of real-life racism and poverty? Hing (2009) Indeed, plenty of undocumented youth, including those who grew up in the US, do not feel at home. They have endless examples of racism and violence, ranging from assaults in detention centers to everyday experiences of fear and harassment. These stories are crucial in order to break down the distinction between good and bad immigrants, as anyone who is undocumented can be targeted by systematic, institutionalised violence. For example, Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement recently released video and audio recordings of detained immigrants (Coley 2014). Stories can be accessed at www.endisolation.org, or by following the YouTube channel or the twitter handle @EndIsolation. The stories are not limited to those by immigrant youth, but they detail how the violence operates. We learn about Victoria and Yordy’s experiences of transphobic and homophobic abuse in a detention center. Yu describes solitary confinement as a form of torture. Sylvester details transfers between detention centers for over eight years. Eric’s transfer to a detention facility increased his isolation as he was forced to leave a facility that was in his community and his only access to support. Allies of undocumented communities also participate in documenting the lives of endangered undocumented people. For example, artist Valarie James repurposes the discarded items of people crossing into the US, compelling viewers to think about the subjectivity of those trying to survive (Neustadt 2013). One series of sculptures are created from the fibers of clothing shed during the dangerous journey; they depict the figures of mothers who are waiting and hoping to see their children again. Another installation is a carefully arranged stack of shoes, covered in dust, laces untied. Yet another combines a package of birth control pills with a bra to reveal that women often take the pill during their journeys to prevent pregnancy

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given the high rates of rape at the hands of border patrol, vigilantes, smugglers or other sojourners. While the artwork was presented physically at the Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona, one can also access the virtual gallery (http:// flagartscouncil.org/2012/09/beyond-border-wall-people-land/) or explore the mothers’ sculptures on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3eYDo3L5a4). University of Michigan’s Jason De León and his students came across the body of a deceased woman who had attempted to cross Arizona’s Sonoran Desert (Steinhauer 2013). He subsequently launched the Undocumented Migration Project (http://undocumentedmigrationproject.com/), which uses ethnographic methods and analysis of artefacts left behind to understand migrants’ journeys. One of the projects created, ‘States of Exception’, was on display at the University of Michigan and is accessible via YouTube. Digitised access increases circulation of images and stories that might otherwise be sidelined or ignored. And much of the artwork that is not created ‘online’ can be accessed virtually. Undocumented immigrants thus may not be ‘out’ due to fears or experiences of violence, detention and deportation; they may not see themselves as DREAMers. Yet, they still use social media to detail their journeys to the US or to describe their fears and anxieties (Anonymous 2012). The networks undocumented immigrants form online help to counter and deal with societal messages ‘that you are supposed to be afraid of being present, of being anywhere around, so everything is a sense of panic’ (quoted in de la Torre III and Germano 2014, 453). For example, the New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC), an organisation created by undocumented youth to address a variety of concerns, publishes a blog with a weekly advice column, ‘Ask Angy’. Angy is an undocumented student who started the column in response to the large number of emails sent to her and NYSYLC by undocumented students grappling with whether to ‘come out’ (de la Torre III and Germano 2014, 461). The online exploration of these struggles allows recognition of people who are ‘here’, entrenched in their communities and daily routes, but invisible. While Santana (2013) claims that online anonymity contributes to uncivil discourse, the ability to hide one’s identity while also participating in a conversation or seeking resources is crucial for undocumented communities. Anonymity does not necessarily mean, as is often presumed, that online commentators lie or engage in problematic behaviour; rather, it can create space for painful honesty. The rage, sorrow, anxiety can be witnessed. The pain of being Other can be held and embraced. The distortion, silencing and co-optation of stories can be confronted. Social media allows deft movement between revealing and hiding. For example, ‘Lourdes’ posted a series of videos and updates on her Facebook page about her attempts to cross into the US. Her reflections ranged from hopeful to distressed. But even while “Lourdes’ is somewhat ‘out’ on Facebook, the journalist who describes her story still changes the name and blurs the face on the videos to protect her identity (Garsd 2014). Social media can also be used to challenge the coming out narrative. Queer theorists and LGBT activists argue that coming out can have dangerous consequences or simplistically portray sexual orientation and gender identity as some

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Remaking the global 91 essentialised core to be revealed. Similarly, immigrant rights activists have emphasised that coming out is not a prerequisite for participating politically. ‘Undocumented’ can mean different kinds of legal and socioeconomic situations, so even claiming undocumented status may not capture the complexities of a person’s life. In effect, these forms of storytelling lay bare Westphalia’s anxieties. Stories help people who are undocumented to transform pain and silence but also to allow those with citizenship and legal privileges, particularly those who participate in and consume popular culture, to think through the subjective experiences of marginalised people. Undocumented people narrate themselves not as aliens and strangers but as political agents who desire to belong to the nation-state, yet hold governments accountable for their treatment of non-citizens. Finally, digitally facilitated discussions open space for more complexity and nuance to the issue of who belongs to the US and on what terms.

Beyond semantics: the refusal of dehumanising terms Another way undocumented immigrants and their allies use social media is to confront the cavalier yet virulent way the term ‘illegal’ circulates in popular culture. ‘Illegal’ is used in popular and governmental discourse to denote not only unauthorised status but also people. As Rinku Sen notes, the construction of people as ‘illegals’ delimits the conversation on immigration, such that the focus is on stopping the entry of ‘criminals’ rather than on the root causes of undocumented immigration (Democracy Now 2013). ‘Illegal,’ like ‘terrorist’, is a classification that perpetuates policies and decisions that make life ‘harder, not easier’ for undocumented immigrants, such as through increased deportation, detention and militarisation of borders (Lakoff and Ferguson 2006; Thompson 2011). The term illegal is also normalised as shorthand for any immigrants or people of colour, particularly Latino/a communities (Santa Ana 2002; Chávez 2008). Further, illegal is often used in conjunction with alien, signifying that undocumented immigrants are not quite human. The social-media-co-ordinated ‘Drop the I-Word Campaign’, launched in 2010 by the Applied Research Center (now Race Forward), helped to restrict the use of the word ‘illegal’ by the Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle and other media outlets (www.raceforward.org/practice/tools/drop-i-word-campaign). Indeed the AP Stylebook, a guide for journalists, now notes this entry for illegal immigration: Entering or residing in a country in violation of civil or criminal law. Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant. (The Associated Press 2015) The New York Times notes that alternatives to illegal immigrant can be considered ‘when appropriate to explain the specific circumstances of the person in question, or to focus on actions’ and advises sensitivity when describing those brought to the US as children. But it argues that the term is acceptable for ‘someone who enters, lives in or works in the United States without proper legal authori[s]ation’ (Haughney 2013).

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As a result, the campaign manager of the ‘Drop The I-Word’ encourages people to tweet The New York Times with the message ‘drop the i-word completely. #droptheiword’ (Plaid 2013b). While the Times notes that to drop the term completely would be tantamount to taking sides, activists argue that the usage of the word actually does take sides, by reducing people to their immigration statuses (ibid). In 2013, as the momentum built via social media to eliminate the word, US Congressman Bobby Rush (Illinois, First District, Democratic Party) proposed House Resolution 155, which calls upon Congressional members of the House of Representatives to stop using the term ‘illegal immigrant’. He sees it as a description that ‘dehumani[s]es’ because it fuels ‘racial profiling and violence directed toward immigrants’ (Plaid 2013a). He also references Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Mask and Wretched of the Earth, to argue that language ‘is the vehicle for affirming or distorting the humanity of marginali[s]ed or oppressed groups’ (ibid). Rush’s point is powerful, particularly if we consider the findings of a recent Colorlines.com report. This daily news site analysed the use of the terms illegal, alien, undocumented and unauthorised in American newspapers with the largest circulation (Thompson 2011). The study found that at the height of Congressional battles over immigration reform in 2006–2007, the usage of ‘illegal’ by journalists far outweighed the use of ‘undocumented’ or ‘unauthorised’ to describe the people whose lives would be most affected by new laws and policies. ‘Illegal’ is used as a neutral, technical descriptive term that then purposely or inadvertently ushers in fear, repulsion and insecurity. When Colorlines.com writer Mónica Novoa discussed the campaign on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, host Bill O’Reilly noted, ‘Then work to change [the laws]. Don’t demoni[s]e people who are accurate in the description as using a slur or using a hate word because that’s not true’ (Fox News Insider 2012). But a casual reference to ‘the illegals’ masks how legal status can break apart or at least severely strain families, subject people to unchecked employer abuse and work exploitation and psychologically devastate people. Social media allows consistent exposure of ‘illegal’ as a semantic trick to frame the immigration debates; it ensures that those making decisions about immigration policies are forced to look at the impact on actual people. Indeed, I saw digitised interventions even in seemingly unrelated discussions, with Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram users proclaiming ‘people are not illegal!’ Whether in jokes by late night comedians or in comments by governmental officials as they describe their tasks of keeping certain people out, immigrant communities argue that ‘illegal’ functions as a proxy for racism. At best, reference to ‘the illegals’ homogenises undocumented immigrants as a problem with which to deal. To make this word as unacceptable as other slurs such as ‘wetback’ or ‘beaner’ is to seek new ways to speak about the topic.

Coming up against sovereignty State sovereignty seems impenetrable. How could it be otherwise, given the network of policing, surveillance, militarisation and violence underscoring the securing of borders? But as I investigated how undocumented immigrants and their

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Remaking the global 93 allies used social media, I discovered creative digital confrontations of that power, including strategies for survival. While various scholars have detailed undocumented immigrants’ survival strategies through community networks (GombergMuñoz 2010; Rosales 2013), I wish to expand this concern to online networking (see Zimmerman 2012). Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) is a company of artists and theorists who participate in digital nonviolent activism. They are allies of the movement to secure undocumented immigrants’ rights. EDT developed the Transborder Immigrant Tool (http://vimeo.com/6109723), which repurposes mobile phones with global positioning system (GPS) capability to make accessible both poetry and locations of water caches to immigrants crossing into the US from Mexico. The founders’ impetus is what they call ‘geo-poetic disturbance’, to interrupt the violence of border control (Nadir 2012). Indeed, the technology allows those without cellphone reception to cross dangerous terrain with the help of an additional ‘layer’ of geography and direction. Anyone using these phones also has access to ‘survival poetry’, which uses language from desert survival manuals, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry and prose on migratory crossings (Bird 2011). As Ricardo Dominguez, one of EDT’s co-founders, notes, [t]he question of aesthetics, at least for us, creates a disturbance in the ‘Law’ to the degree that it cannot easily contain the ‘break’ and is forced to enter another conversation . . . Immigrants are always presented as less than human . . . and certainly not as part of a community which is establishing and inventing new forms of life. . . . For us TBT [Transborder Immigrant Tool] is another marker for the queer turn in these unexpected – or better said, unconsidered- transemergences, both as new forms of desires and as new forms of life. (quoted in Nadir 2012) This technology disrupts the constructions of who counts as a citizen and a human. It also allows new subjectivities that cannot be contained in simple binaries such as citizen/non-citizen, insider/outsider, worthy/unworthy. Notably, people have not yet used this technology because of delays caused by a recent federal investigation about whether EDT was engaging in cybercrimes (Nadir 2012). There is significant discussion on how terrorist or state cyberattacks could challenge state sovereignty, in terms of transgressing borders, and whether cyberspace is an extension of the international state system (Kanuck 2010). But this example makes us consider how a multiplicity of non-state actors, including undocumented immigrants and their allies, can use cyberspace to challenge how state sovereignty is violently enacted. As Dominguez notes, new electronic codes that facilitate safe passage can create interaction between ‘data bodies’ (hackers) and real bodies (Warren 2011). Consider also immigration-related phone applications, which are ostensibly about legal literacy for undocumented immigrants (Costantini 2013): Pocket DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), for example, informs immigrants how to apply for this program and lists immigration rights organisations that

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can assist with the process (Dinan 2013). Some of the apps facilitate empowerment in the face of sovereign power. Deyvid Morales developed Derechos Herencia (‘inherited rights’) after the US Border Patrol detained him. The app is accessible in both Spanish and English and details one’s rights, particularly if detained. Another app sends out a pre-set message, with location identified, to a number of recipients including friends, family members, attorneys and local consular officials if the app user is getting arrested or apprehended. Two immigrant rights organisations, Respecto-Respecto and Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform, developed the application. Other apps help identify traffic patterns, wait lines and the best times to cross the US–Mexico border (Wise n.d.). Undocumented immigrants thus use social media for the political act of survival, calling attention to the insecurity they face as/after they cross borders. For example, they often strategise online about how to avoid police detection, such as by specifying particular routes to take to work (Fernandez 2012). Social media can also be used to halt deportation proceedings and detention. In 2012, Uriel Alberto and two other undocumented immigrants interrupted a North Carolina state legislature meeting to come out as undocumented. All three were arrested for disorderly conduct, but US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) placed only Alberto on immigration hold, which resulted in a scheduled federal immigration hearing for possible deportation. Alberto was singled out because of a police record that included speeding and driving with a revoked license. His supporters launched the Twitter hashtag #FreeUriel, online petitions and a Facebook support page. They also organised rallies outside the detention facility in which he was held. Alberto’s immigration hearing was canceled and he was released on bond (Zucchino 2012). In 2013, when ICE officials detained the mother and brother of well-known immigration activist Erika Andiola, the hashtags #WeAreAndiola and #SomosAndiola (‘We are Andiola’ in Spanish) brought significant attention to the case (Foley 2013). Her family members were released the next day, with many attributing the quick action to how immigrant youth co-ordinated the social media reaction (Hing 2013). In 2014, friends and allies of Luis Bravo, an undocumented immigrant detained in Santa Ana, California, used a social media and phone campaign to secure his relatively fast release. When Bravo was first arrested, his sister uploaded a video, begging for action. Several people, including those in immigrant rights groups, circulated the video with the hashtag #releaseluis and then organised phone banks to persistently call the detention center (Vo 2014). United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigration organisation in the US, offers a Mobile Action Network for its Education Not Deportation Program. People can participate in pressuring politicians via petitions for specific deportation cases, or they can fill out an online questionnaire about their deportation story in order to potentially access assistance. This anecdotal evidence certainly does not point to any evident pattern that social media pressure consistently works to end a deportation proceeding or release someone who is detained. And even successful actions do not protect immigrants from future detention or deportation proceedings. However, the use of online tools to attempt to confront sovereign power indicates the intersection of digital activism and global politics.

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Remaking the global 95 What is particularly fascinating is how beautifully and strangely these trending hashtags and survival tactics are interwoven throughout daily conversations and interactions in digital worlds. As easily as I, as a documented US citizen, can Instagram what I cooked tonight or like a post about my favorite Netflix series, I can retweet a message in solidarity with someone in a deportation proceeding. This could be a particularly grotesque method of activism (it takes two seconds and is quickly forgotten if I fail to take additional steps), or it could reveal that a concern about sovereignty is integrated into my daily life. If we take seriously the actions mobilised via online strategising, we can see how digital activism helps to demystify what sovereignty does. Sovereignty is not untouchable, the realm of high politics or world politics out of the reach of those who engage the ‘low data’ of popular culture (see Hamilton, this volume). As critical IR scholars (Weber 1995; Campbell 1998; Nayak and Selbin 2010; Ling 2014) have taught us, sovereignty has to be made and reinforced, repeatedly, to make real the imaginary boundaries between countries and communities. The border is not simply a line between the US and Mexico but must be performed in encounters between border patrol agents and people walking through a desert – indeed, any interactions a border-crosser may experience (Aguirre, Jr. and Simmers 2008–2009). It must be constructed in television shows with characters representing immigrants (Yu-Hsi Lee 2014); legislators allocating funds to building physical barriers; citizens learning about the experiences of noncitizens through an online forum. As undocumented immigrants and their allies increasingly use digital and social media methods to challenge how sovereignty is reinforced, and against whom, we learn more about sovereignty as contestable rather than stable.

Conclusion Digital media literacies are shaped by gender, class, geography and race (Costanza-Chock 2012, 4). So how do interactions on social media reflect or intervene in encounters in physical worlds? Whose interpretations of online content resonate? What are the languages in which these encounters happen? How effective are undocumented immigrants’ uses of social media in the face of how anti-immigrant groups use social media and digital tools to launch their own narratives or to track down or turn in undocumented immigrants? I end with these questions, wondering whether I am overly optimistic about the promise of social media. I also contemplate whether I devoted the most space to the storytelling strategy because stories are easier to track and find than are examples of the effective elimination of the use of the word ‘illegal’ or the use of survival tactics. The campaign to ‘drop the i-word’ may have an impact on journalists but can prompt backlash, by way of an indignant determination to use the word ‘illegal’. As contributors on right-wing forums note, they will not be bullied into censorship nor will they accept the label of racist; they will proudly use the word ‘illegal’ to protect their country from unwanted outsiders. Further, attempts to co-ordinate daily survival

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or stop detention or deportations often fail, or are stymied by the realities of US immigration restrictionist policies and practices. But as Shepherd (2014) reminds us, we can choose to celebrate the small moments, such as when hashtag activism, often created and mobilised by marginalised voices, engenders some kind of change. Given that harmful perceptions and discourses are propagated through social media and digital culture, it makes sense that undocumented immigrants and their allies would use these same digital tools to rework popular culture and governmental representations, instead forging identities as political agents who can shape and be a part of popular culture in numerous ways. I have highlighted just a few of the ways knowledge claims about and problematic practices toward undocumented immigrants can be disrupted. Accordingly, if we are to take seriously the link between digital contexts, world politics, and popular culture, we must investigate the insurgent, subversive uses of social media.

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7

The digital politics of celebrity activism against sexual violence Angelina Jolie Pitt as global mother Annika Bergman Rosamond

Social and digital media are central to the constitution and conduct of foreign and security policy and notions of global obligation. Thus, ‘digital popular cultural artefacts’ are ‘serious sites of enquiry’ (see Hamilton, this volume). Social media outlets have helped to blur the distinction between celebrity and political actors, with a range of celebrities communicating their ethical agendas and perceptions of global truths through a variety of digital platforms. In many cases, celebrities attract more attention from global audiences than do orthodox political actors and, given this, it is fruitful to seriously consider the discursive representations present in their social media outputs. The study of such representations, moreover, can bring new light to the conduct of world politics in online spaces. Photographs, film clips and online editions of newspapers and websites are popular cultural artefacts that can provide important textual platforms for the construction of world politics (see Shepherd, Hamilton, this volume). Hence, popular culture ‘profoundly affects politics’ and ‘it is within popular culture that morality is shaped, identities are produced and transformed . . . and narratives are constructed’ (Nexon and Neumann 2006, 6). Celebrities help to set the global ethical agenda through their words and deeds as they have ‘access to places, events and people that most of us do not’ (Brockington 2014, 113). Celebrities, and the media coverage of their private and public doings, within and beyond national borders, sit at the heart of the contemporary ‘mediatisation’ of society’ (Driessens 2012, 641) including both traditional and digital media outlets. Celebrities are ‘ever-present in news and entertainment media – boosted by formats such as reality TV – in advertising and activism, and [this] . . . has deeply affected several social fields, especially the political’ (Driessens 2012, 641). With a growing number of individuals, states and international bodies expecting celebrities to bring attention to global problems, as scholars of global politics we need to understand this development. The portrayal of such activism is frequently accessed through social and digital media, and such mediatisation of celebrity is therefore worthy of critical investigation. Below I focus on the ‘celebritisation’ of the sexual violence in conflict agenda, an ethical concern that has become strongly associated with celebrity humanitarian Angelina Jolie Pitt (hereafter referenced as Jolie) which has been widely portrayed in digital spaces. Given this, my analysis of Jolie’s efforts to put an end to sexual violence in conflict largely draws upon digital material and is theoretically situated

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102 Annika Bergman Rosamond within the budding academic field of celebrity humanitarianism (Chouliaraki 2013; Kapoor 2013; Brockington 2014; Richey 2015) and cosmopolitanism (Bergman Rosamond 2011, 2013, 2015). I argue that such celebrity discourses and practices are situated within western privilege and gendered power relations. Through an online ethnography (Bergman Rosamond 2015), I investigate the ways in which Jolie’s activism against sexual violence is represented in mainly digital material, either by the celebrity herself or through media accounts of her work. I focus on the intertextual linkages between digital re-presentations of celebrity humanitarianism, individual celebrity stories and the ethical conduct of international politics (see also Bergman Rosamond 2015). I commence by situating celebrity humanitarianism within debates on world politics and popular culture more broadly. I identify a close link between the constitution of world politics, celebrity and global ethical obligation and note that digital media has strengthened this link. I then go on to explore the ways in which celebrity politics and activism connect with cosmopolitan notions of ethical obligation. I argue that celebrities are increasingly performing the role of cosmopolitan communicator by promoting their ethical message across borders and using a range of social digital and traditional platforms to do so. However, I also note that celebrities who promote cosmopolitan solutions to global problems do not necessarily challenge statist practices and inequalities in the international order, but rather help to sediment these (Bergman Rosamond 2015). In the second part of the chapter, I unpack the digital representations of the ethical and gender(ed) contents and language of the sexual violence agenda, as adopted by Jolie. I identify a variety of discursive mechanisms in the texts and images that recount the star’s humanitarianism, ranging from conceptions of ethical obligation across borders to gendered notions of protection and mothering. This also involves an investigation into the discursive signs employed by the actor herself. To facilitate this analysis, I employ a broad discourse analytical framework, drawing upon the work of Lene Hansen (2006) and Laura Shepherd (2008) as well as the emergent field of digital discourse analysis (Jones et al. 2015, 6; see also Thurlow and Mroczek 2011).

Popular culture, international politics and celebrity humanitarianism Along with the other contributors to this volume, I subscribe to the position that popular culture and international politics are co-constitutive rather than existing in separate realms (see Hamilton in this volume; Weldes 2003; Bleiker 2009; Shapiro 2013; Åhäll 2015; Weldes and Rowley 2015) and that global ethical obligation is increasingly settled in digital contexts. While popular culture has many components, my contribution focuses on the significance of celebrity culture in enabling and disabling ethical obligation. Hence, ‘(c)ulture is not opposed to politics. Culture is political, and politics is cultural’ (Weber 2005, 188). Celebrity practices and discourses are political and ethical rather than innocent apolitical manifestations of the entertainment industry. Increasingly, it is through celebrity that discourses and practices of justice, peace and security are constituted, communicated and

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The digital politics of celebrity activism 103 located. The activist celebrity lends her voice and face to humanitarian projects and artefacts such as film, TV, Twitter, Facebook, journalism and photography, which are deployed to highlight pressing global issues. Digital media boosts the circulation of such humanitarian messages and the employment of photographic images attracts global audiences. A contemporary practice amongst international organisations, NGOs and governments is to secure celebrity endorsement of their global policy commitments. On its website, the United Nations, for example, makes use of aesthetically pleasing images of Jolie promoting its agendas regarding sexual violence and displaced people (UNHCR 2010a, 2010b, 2011). Cooper (2008, 7) contends that ‘the advantages of linking individual star power to a collective project are clear. Celebrities have the power to frame issues in a manner that attracts visibility and new channels of communication’. The communication of celebrity causes is facilitated by such things as ‘MTV and other mechanisms – including both text messaging and a proliferation of blogs about Bono and other celebrity diplomats – provide a multitude of connections to global audiences’ (Cooper 2008, 10). Similarly, David Marshall (2006, 3) highlights the discursive power of celebrity by arguing that it attracts ‘national and international audiences in the way only presidents, royalty and prime ministers can hope to achieve.’ Rather cynically, one might ask whether everyone has access to such connections or cares about the other-regarding aspirations of American film stars or aging Irish band members? Yet celebrity activists, such as Ben Affleck and George Clooney, are called upon to deliver their testimonies to the US Congress on global development. There is an assumption that they have ‘a unique capacity to reach out to and mobilise otherwise apathetic publics, and sometimes manage to give powerful voices to the disenfranchised in society and on the world stage’ (Marsh et al. 2010, 333). However, as I have noted elsewhere, their interventions are subjective and rest on Western privilege, gendered notions of protection of innocent others as well as the individual celebrity’s lived experiences (Bergman Rosamond 2011, 2015). Nonetheless, celebrity humanitarianism is rapidly gaining ground in the everyday online and offline practices and discourses of international politics, leading scholars to investigate this development (Cooper 2008; Tsaliki et al. 2011; Kapoor 2013; Chouliaraki 2013; Brockington 2014). Celebrity humanitarianism of this kind is constituted through words and images (Bergman Rosamond 2015), the latter of which ‘interact with more familiar forms of verbal rhetoric’ (Williams 2003, 527; also see Hansen 2011, 53 and also Hansen 2015). Hence, the individual celebrity’s spoken or written endorsement of a particular cause is important, but equally important is the online circulation of images of that person’s engagement in humanitarian endeavours (Bergman Rosamond 2015). Domestic and international audiences seem eager to consume images of their favourite stars on and off the red carpet, doing charitable work or travelling to war-torn regions, associated with the celebrity’s staged public self or ‘front’ (Rojek 2001, 11). Jolie’s interventions at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London in 2014 caught the attention of the global digital media. Her ethical message was coupled with gendered commentary on her choice of outfit; she had selected a white Michael Kors outfit (US Weekly 2014) that complemented

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104 Annika Bergman Rosamond her message of peace on the day. Increasingly important are visual representations of celebrities as ordinary people in news or social media. Such images of ‘the ordinary, everyday selves of the extraordinary, of celebrities, are sought-after and widely circulated commodities’ (Jerslev and Mortensen 2013, 2). Such ordinariness adds authenticity to the celebrity’s ethical endeavours by zooming in on his/ her human(e) qualities. The digital representation of the celebrity’s ordinary and extraordinary selves (Dyer 1979; Jerslev and Mortenson 2013) across multiple websites can create the impression that we know the truth about that individual (Meyers 2009, 295) and as such trust their ethical judgement. Below I will explore the conduct of what might be defined as digital celebrity politics in the context of cosmopolitan obligation.

Digital celebrity politics and cosmopolitan obligation Celebrities are called upon by international organisations, NGOS and governments to appeal to global audiences and function as sources of ethical inspiration, telling us what issues to care about and how far we should extend our sense of moral obligation (Bergman Rosamond 2011, 2013). Such appeals take place in online and offline settings, although the practice seems to have intensified along with the digitalisation of politics. ‘Celebrity diplomacy’, associated with the emergence of non-orthodox agents who through their interventions ‘shape the agenda of global issues’ (Cooper preface 2008; see also Street 2012, 352; Richey 2015), is, at least in part, a digital practice. Moreover, celebrity interventions in world politics are often constituted within the language of cosmopolitan obligation aiming to ‘further the oneness of humanity’ (Cooper 2008, 91). Hence, cosmopolitan-minded celebrities promote ‘a universal ethos’ which is ‘at odds with parochial attitudes and the tight restrictions of sovereignty’ (Cooper 2008, 91). Increasingly, the constitution and projection of such universal messages and truths are represented in digital spaces, opening up for more public scrutiny and support than was previously the case. Yet, there is a lack of attention paid to individuals, whether celebrities or not, in pushing forward a cosmopolitan agenda based on universal values and the extent to which the digitalisation of politics adds force to this trend. In this context, it is useful to very briefly identify the key premises of that cosmopolitan agenda. First, it assumes that we all inhabit a single, albeit notional, moral community, in which it makes sense to speak of global ethical obligation. Cosmopolitanism also stipulates that the welfare and security of individuals should be privileged over those of states. In its purest form it contests the moral significance of national boundaries, arguing that these are artificial and ethically meaningless; we should promote the rights of all people and reduce their suffering (Linklater 2006). Yet, very few individuals have first-hand knowledge of the living conditions of people residing in a particular conflict zone or a refugee camp; they increasingly rely on the online circulation of images and texts to relate to such developments. Celebrities are recruited to front global campaigns, often instigated by NGOs or international organisations, and the digitalisation of global politics ensures speedy deliveries of ethical messages to transnational audiences. Images of Jolie’s statements at the

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The digital politics of celebrity activism 105 United Nations and her many trips to conflict zones are rapidly circulated through social and digital media. So far, however, there has been limited scholarly interest in the role of celebrities as agents of cosmopolitan consciousness in a digital age, even if cosmopolitanism tends, ironically, to place the rights of individuals at the centre of its analysis (Bergman Rosamond 2015). Indeed, there are those who doubt the authenticity of celebrity cosmopolitanism in transforming world politics. Ilan Kapoor (2013, 1) argues that celebrity humanitarianism is ‘ideological’, ‘self serving’ and embeds the ‘very global inequality it seeks to redress’. Lilie Chouliaraki (2013, 79) contends that ‘the intensification of the relationship between humanitarian politics and commercial moralism . . . displaces public action in favor of personal diplomacy’. Celebrity humanitarianism inspires ‘narcissistic solidarity obsessed with our own emotions’, such that we would rather view images of our favourite celebrities engaging in charitable work than seriously consider the needs of ‘suffering others’ (Chouliaraki 2013, 79). Similarly, I have argued that: Most celebrities do not fundamentally challenge statist practices and discourses of sovereign integrity and capitalism . . . but reproduce these through their privileged position in celebrity society. Yet, there are examples of individual celebrities who do not shy away from loudly criticizing global injustices, colonial practices and unlawful war and intervention. (Bergman Rosamond 2015) By focusing on the trauma of certain nations and their citizens (while ignoring others), celebrity activists help to ‘excommunicate’ (Mattelart 1996) some forms of suffering while seeking to eradicate others. For example, by putting a lot of energy into the welfare of the people of post-earthquake Haiti in 2010, Sean Penn seemed to show disregard for other global issues (Bergman Rosamond 2015). Nevertheless, there is a lot of trust in celebrities’ abilities to generate support for humanitarian campaigns by mobilising digital media, with representations of Jolie’s visits to war zones and appearances at the UN frequently figuring in online spaces. Such texts and visuals are not neutral observations but help to constitute global ethical agendas. Through celebrities ‘world-views are described, located and asserted’ (Yrjölä (2012, 367), however, these do not necessarily challenge the gendered and Western power relations that underpin world politics, but rather sustain them (Bergman Rosamond 2013; Kapoor 2013). In the second part of this chapter I provide a discursive analysis of Jolie’s engagements with the global sexual violence agenda and, amongst other things, I note that her story cannot be told in the singular, but is multifaceted and rooted in a strong sense of global motherhood.

Angelina Jolie: multiple stories Multiple stories have been narrated about Jolie in media: the recovering addict; the femme fatale who wrecked girl-next-door Jennifer Aniston’s marriage to Brad Pitt; the faithful and loving wife and mother; the critically acclaimed actress and

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106 Annika Bergman Rosamond filmmaker who produces artefacts and is an artefact in her own right, being celebrated for her astounding beauty and sense of style. As Ann Jerslev (2014, 109) notes, ‘as a public persona . . . Angelina Jolie is a composite of glamorous megamainstream star, influential humanitarian, power mom, part of a celebrity couple and radical personality’. Social and digital media narratives increasingly focus on Jolie’s humanitarianism with emphasis on refugees, displaced people and/or victims of sexual violence (Jerslev 2014, 109). Such representations are bound up with images of her role as a mother caring for her own family and the children of other nations. Her desired self-identity appears to be that of a humanitarian: When I die, do I want to be remembered as an actress? No . . . I recently had a column published in a newspaper and at the end it didn’t say I was an actress. It said that I was a UN Goodwill Ambassador – that’s all. And I was really proud. (People 2007, 1) For more than a decade, Jolie has used her official appointments as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador (2001–2012) and the UN Special Envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (2012) to bring attention to the precarious situation of refugees and displaced people. In 2007 she was appointed to the think tank Council on Foreign Affairs on the basis of her efforts to bring attention to the urgency of the Darfur crisis, the need for more international education and the situation of displaced people (People 2007, 1). Aside from investing a lot in her role as a representative of the UN, Jolie tends to locate her activism within practices and discourses of mothering. As such, she has to navigate between her ‘hyper-celebrity’ (Chouliaraki 2011, 10) status and her humanitarian self. Her dual identity rests on her self-understanding as an ‘“everyday mum”, whose toy shopping trips make the gossip news, and a political actor in the global scene, whose private initiatives have turned her into an icon of the humanitarian world’ (Chouliaraki 2011, 10). She subscribes to an ethics of care that both embraces ordinariness and a ‘universal discourse of motherhood’ (Chouliaraki 2011, 10). Her authenticity as a mother combined with her mega stardom and privileged position in the world economy place her well to intervene in discourses and practices on global justice, rights and violence. As alluded to above, Jolie is what might be defined as a global mother with a dual sense of obligation to her own family and a notional family of humankind. Her global nurturing skills are digitally constituted across texts and visuals that portray the physical proximity between her and the subjects of her care. Digital spaces, such as the UNHCR website, frequently display images of Jolie’s intercultural encounters with refugees and displaced people, catching her sitting down on carpets in tents, and supposedly emotionally nurturing the needy and displaced by holding their hands if need be (UNHCR 2015a, 2015b, 2011a, 2005). The authenticity of this global mothering narrative is reinforced by online circulations of photographic images of the Jolie-Pitt ‘rainbow family’ holding hands at airports on their many travels across the world (Mirror 2015). The semiotic

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The digital politics of celebrity activism 107 distance between her private and global mothering efforts is seemingly reduced by such images that, in turn, lend credence to her humanitarianism. Her maternal instincts are not visibly governed by biology alone, with several of her children being adopted, but rather a more universal notion of care, nurturing and protection. Key here is Tina Managhan’s conception of motherhood as a ‘discursive and inherently contested practice’ (2012, 4); it is a discursive space that lacks definite boundaries and is open for redefinition, allowing Jolie to perform the role of global motherhood. In a New York Times (Jolie 2015a) article, writes that ‘for many years I have visited camps, and every time, I sit in a tent and hear stories. I try my best to give support. To say something that will show solidarity and give some kind of thoughtful guidance’. Jolie’s humanitarianism might be genuine and well meaning, however, it is situated within Western power relations and notions of protection that help to reaffirm her role as a saviour of distant others who are assumed to be without agency. Hence, images published in social media that catch Jolie doing humanitarianism in faraway places reveal a propensity to orthodox notions of care and nurturing. In the next section, I explore Jolie’s promotion of the global sexual violence agenda by linking it to her broad humanitarian commitments, and, by identifying the discursive markers that define her activism. Before doing so I shall say a few words about the method I employ to conduct the analysis.

Method My analysis of the representation of Jolie’s humanitarianism rests on the reading of a range of texts and visuals collected from online editions of magazines and newspapers, UN and NGO websites. It is worth remembering that the texts deconstructed below are not necessarily scripted by Jolie herself (although some are), but rather are narrated by journalists, media commentators or organisations such as the UNHCR (2010a, 2010b). I identify discursive markers in the digital texts and images that reveal the ethical, privileged and gender(ed) underpinnings of Jolie’s activism. My analysis is based on the assumption that discourses are not neutral reflections of reality, but rather help to construct that reality. The material is always interpreted through discourse (Hansen 2006) and as such there is no reality beyond the discourse (see Shepherd, this volume). From this follows that celebrity stories are mediated through discourse and even if some digital sources are staged to ensure global interest and support, they are still key to the constitution and meaning-making of world politics and ethical obligation (see Shepherd, this volume). I attempt to uncover such meaning-making (Epstein 2008) in the linguistic practices employed in digital texts narrating the Jolie humanitarian story/ies. Insightful here are Lene Hansen’s careful elaborations of research design and robust discussions of questions of method as they relate to such things as selections of texts. Moreover, feminist discourse analysis (Shepherd 2008) allows me to allocate gender dichotomies and identities in digital sources as well as privileges and cosmopolitan notions of obligation that surround the celebrity sexual violence agenda. Furthermore, I am inspired by the emergent field of digital discourse analysis, in particular its notion of hypertextual linking of texts across discursive fields

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108 Annika Bergman Rosamond (Jones et al. 2015, 6). Such scholarship tells us that intertextualities across sources are amplified by digital sources ‘because of its technological affordances for hypertextual linking, embedding, copying and pasting’ (Jones et al. 2015, 6), which is a visible tendency in the digital constitution of celebrity interventions in global politics. Hence, ‘texts build their arguments and authority through references to other texts: by making direct quotes or by adopting key concepts and catchphrases’ (Hansen 2006, 9). Jolie’s humanitarian story is thus constituted and told across a range of texts and various catchphrases, keywords and images are employed to articulate her positions on global issues (Marshall 1997, 58). Digital artefacts ranging from texts and images help to constitute collective understandings of global events, public demands for action and conceptions of gender and universal obligation. Important here are also the celebrity’s own brand and aesthetic attributes which help to raise awareness of global developments – a lot of commentary on Jolie’s efforts to raise awareness of the gendered violence agenda at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict held in London 2014 focused on her extraordinary beauty (The Guardian 2014b). Such digital representations of celebrity politics are rapidly circulated across social media reaching international audiences in no time. In what follows, I identify a range of ethical, privileged and gendered discursive markers that are frequently employed in and across texts that depict Jolie’s activism and humanitarian interventions.

The discursive markers of Angelina Jolie’s contributions to the eradication of sexual violence Jolie’s on-the-ground efforts and textual articulations of the urgency of sexual violence and appearances at events such as the London Summit in 2014 and the 25th African Union Summit in 2015 have been the subject of much offline and online media frenzy (see, for example, Grazia 2015 and Andriakos 2015). Such coverage helps to disperse her ethical message that ‘(t)here is a global epidemic of violence against women – both within conflict zones and within societies at peace – and it is still treated as a lesser crime and lower priority’ (MailOnline 2015b). Jolie’s activism in the field of sexual violence is situated within what appears to be her personal preference for cosmopolitan conceptions of global obligation and face-to-face encounters; in her words: I have met survivors from Afghanistan and Somalia, and they are just like us with one crucial difference. We live in safe countries with doctors we can go to when we’re hurt, police we can turn to when we’re wronged, and institutions that protect us. They live in refugee camps . . . in areas where there is no law, no protection, and not even the hope of justice. They struggle to keep their children safe, and if they admit to being raped, they are likely to face more violence and social rejection. (Jolie 2014)

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The digital politics of celebrity activism 109 Similarly, her call for states to do more to reduce the suffering of Syrian refugees is distinctively universal, with the activist encouraging states to offer a ’sanctuary to the most vulnerable refugees in need of resettlement – for example, those who have experienced rape or torture’. She argues that ‘it is not enough to defend our values at home . . . (w)e also have to defend them in the refugee camps of the Middle East’ (Jolie 2015b). Jolie’s humanitarianism and efforts to bring attention to gendered violence in conflict have taken artistic forms as well; the film In the Land of Blood and Honey, which Jolie wrote, produced and directed, tells the story of wartime rape and love during the Bosnian war (Jerslev 2014). The film was screened at the British Foreign Office in 2011 with British Secretary William Hague reporting that he was deeply affected by it. He went as far as to credit Jolie’s artistic creation for his commitment to the sexual violence agenda by noting that ‘Angelina Jolie’s film convinced me to act on war rape’ (Urwin 2015). This is suggestive of the coconstitutive relationship between popular culture, celebrity, ethical reasoning and the actual conduct of foreign and security policy. The digitalisation of both politics and ethical deliberation and the involvement of celebrities in both processes boost the emergence of such co-constitutive links because digital technologies ‘make it much easier to connect texts with other texts and to mix and mash text together’ (Jones et al. 2015, 6). The Jolie-Hague duo Jolie and William Hague entered into a close professional relationship when, in 2012, they jointly launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative, which aims to end impunity and punish the perpetrators of rape and sexual violence. Jolie and Hague have undertaken a number of trips to war-torn regions tainted by sexual violence, many of which have been closely monitored by media (BBC News 2013). Their reportedly close professional bond and Jolie’s stardom has at times overshadowed the actual issue of sexual violence leading some to comment on her association with Hollywood (BBC News 2013). The London Evening Standard journalist recently noted that; “Will.i.Ange” seems an unlikely double act: the most glamorous actress in the world and a politician who wore a baseball cap embossed with his name. But since the pair met at the foreign office at a screening of her 2011 film, In The Land of Blood and Honey, they have become a power duo. (Urwin 2015) The unlikeliness of their match was echoed by a Guardian journalist in 2013: It is the ultimate odd couple pairing, of course, of the sort that films are made about: the resolutely unflashy northern Tory and a world-famous Tinseltown progressive. But, on this issue, their views are so closely aligned that after a few days’ joint campaigning together they are finishing each other’s sentences. (Borger 2013)

110 Annika Bergman Rosamond

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Jolie’s close bond with Hague, which I return to below, gives rise to a set of ethical questions about privilege and power – the actress is being given access to the corridors of power without having been democratically elected to office and is entangled in the structural power relations of orthodox politics. In the next section, I will unpack the ethical, privileged and gender(ed) markers of Jolie’s promotion of the sexual violence agenda as portrayed in social and digital media. Cosmopolitanism Jolie’s statements and speeches on the eradication of sexual violence in conflict reveal a cosmopolitan conception of responsibility to distant other women (and men) who have been subjected to rape and sexual abuse. In Jolie’s words: ‘there is no stable future in a world in which crimes against women go unpunished; in which young girls are unable to reach their potential, where children see their mothers disrespected, violated and murdered’ (Reuters 10 February 2015). Moreover, ‘this is a crime that’s affected millions of women and girls and men and boys in our lifetime . . . In Nigeria, we’ve seen hundreds of girls taken in a single attack by a group that’s known to kidnap children to force them into sexual slavery’ (Metro News 2014). Jolie’s message is frequently accompanied by images that sustain her broad cosmopolitan commitment to the sufferers of sexual violence, displacement and economic hardship. More recently, iconic photographs (Hansen 2015) and videos of her visits to refugee camps housing Syrian women and children have circulated online through social media platforms (People 2015). Those digital images depict the celebrity’s conversations with the victims of rape and displacement so as to give the Jolie story a personal feel (People 2015). She has increasingly started to involve her children in her work by bringing them along to refugee camps and other humanitarian sites (People 2015), and, as such, adding to her digital image as a global mother. The same broad cosmopolitan undertone figured in a speech that she jointly gave with William Hague at the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict in London 2014: We are here for the nine-year-old girl in Uganda, kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery (. . .) We are here for the man in Bosnia, years after rape, still stigmatised, unable to earn enough money to buy bread for his family (. . .) We are here for all the forgotten, hidden survivors who have been made to feel ashamed or been abandoned (. . .) (a)nd for the children of rape – we want the whole world to hear their stories and understand that this injustice cannot be tolerated, and that sorrow and compassion are not enough. ( BBC News 2014b) Sexual violence and slavery are global issues that affect men, women and children and, as such, are borderless and not confined to one particular gender. Jolie (2014b) noted at the London conference that ‘these crimes of sexual violence are bigger than any one conflict or national interest’. The same cosmopolitan message is replicated on the UNHCR website, which frequently makes use of Jolie’s own voice

The digital politics of celebrity activism 111 in describing pressing international issues (UNHCR 2015a, 2015b) including rape and displacement. The use of celebrity utterances to sell the policies of UNHCR to digital global audiences is revealing of the close constitutive relationship between celebrity and ethical obligation (Bergman Rosamond 2015).

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Gender and Western privilege and the sexual violence agenda Stories published in social media and statements issued by Jolie herself demonstrate a certain self-awareness of the celebrity’s ‘situatedness’ within privilege and fame. Moreover, Jolie does not equate gender with women alone: numerous texts note that men and boys also suffer sexual violence and abuse (Jolie 2015a, 2015b; Metro News 2014). Indeed, the images, headlines and stories portraying Jolie’s humanitarianism in the field of sexual violence that are continuously reproduced in social media are suggestive of her wish to challenge and transform prevailing gender(ed) power relations in global politics (Jolie 2015a, 2015b; Metro News 2014). While recognising that both men and women are the victims of sexual violence and central parties to peace-building processes, Jolie tends to centre her attention on women’s situation in conflict, their empowerment and their rights to bodily integrity (Jolie 2015a, 2015b, 2014a, 2015b). In her words: ‘we need policies for long term security that are designed by women, executed by women – not at the expense of men, or instead of men, but alongside and with men’ (Jolie 2015b). Yet, there appears to be a gap in her discussion of sexual violence whereby the life stories of perpetrators of sexual crimes (Metro News 2014) are neglected, some of whom have themselves been subject to sexual and other forms of violence (Stern and Eriksson Baaz 2013). As alluded to above, Jolie’s sexual violence activism could be symbolically linked with her co-constitutive roles as the mother of six ethnically diverse children and a nurturer of humanity at large, regardless of ethnicity, nationality, religion or geographical location – what could be understood as a global mothering process. The physical expression of her efforts to relate to the suffering of others involves a willingness to embrace the victims of violence and to show care through physical proximity and dialogue – images of such encounters are discursively reproduced across digital spaces (UNHCR 2011b; Metro News 2014; Time 2014). Jolie refers to such gendered encounters in delivering her speeches at the UN and in other forums, drawing upon her hands-on experiences in conflict zones. Moreover, various media sites centre their reports on Jolie’s employment of personal encounters with victims in delivering her messages. On 10 June 2014, the BBC reported that Jolie ‘wanted to dedicate the conference to a rape victim she recently interviewed in Bosnia, who felt so humiliated by what had happened to her that she could not even tell her son’ (BBC News 2014b). Despite Jolie’s calls for feminist-inspired peace-building policies and the quest for the eradication of sexual violence in conflict, there is a tendency on the part of the activist herself and those telling her story in digital spaces to draw a close a link between women and victimhood and as such insufficiently engage with gender-just peace, agency and empowerment (Björkdahl 2012). Moreover, the

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112 Annika Bergman Rosamond digital portrayals of her efforts to draw attention to sexual violence are at times overshadowed by the media’s coverage of her celebrity status, choice of clothes and beauty. As such, Jolie’s humanitarian interventions become theatrical spectacles, heavily reported on in the digital space. Jolie is not unaware of her own brand or her own privilege. In several statements she identifies a link between herself and displaced women while conceding that her own privileged position sets her apart from sufferers. This construction is prominent in the following extract publicised on the UNHCR website: I have never understood why people are lucky enough to be born with the chances I had and why across the world there is a woman just like me with the same abilities, same desires, same work ethics and love for her family who would most likely make better films and better speeches, only she sits in a refugee camp and she has no voice. She worries about what her children will eat, how to keep them safe and if they will ever be allowed to return home. I don’t know why this is my life and not hers, but I will do as my mother asked me to do, the best as I can and be of use to others. (UNHCR 2013, 1) Jolie’s desire to problematise her own situatedness within privilege is present here. Yet, her humanitarian work is not always praised, indeed ‘many still find it hard to take her seriously in her most laudable endeavours, with raised eyebrows and curled lips accompanying every foreign aid trip she makes’ (Brand 2013). Whether sincere or not, it is important to critically consider her access to the corridors of power, whether within the UN or through her collaborations with William Hague and the British Foreign Office, a relationship that is often portrayed as extraordinarily strong in digital media: Several Hollywood actors through the years have tried to use their fame to change the world, or at least a government policy or two. And there has been no shortage of politicians who have sought to harness the megawattage of celebrity to push their policies. Few have pulled off this alchemy quite as effectively as Angelina Jolie and William Hague in their joint campaign for international action against mass rape in conflicts. (Borger 2013) The Jolie–Hague relationship is indicative of the celebrity’s willingness to work within well-established political and social structures rather than opting for a more radical approach to global politics (Bergman Rosamond 2015). In an interview with Women’s Hour (2014), she states that ‘working with a government official’ enables her to ‘get things done’ and ‘work with somebody who can help to enforce the laws’ and ‘not just coming from heart and humanity.’ William Hague, a long time British Conservative politician, whose party is not known for its radical stance on global feminism, might seem like an odd choice of a partner in the quest to end sexual violence in conflict. Hague’s situatedness within political

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The digital politics of celebrity activism 113 privilege and financial wealth is not something that appears to figure prominently in the Jolie sexual violence narrative as told in social media. Rather, Jolie has been quite willing to appear alongside him in numerous settings. Her position within the privileged ranks of international society has been further strengthened by her appearance alongside dignitaries such as Pope Francis and Queen Elizabeth II. In 2014, she was made an honorary dame by the British queen, who awarded her for her efforts to eradicate sexual violence (The Guardian 2014a). In receiving the award she said [T]o receive an honour related to foreign policy means a great deal to me, as it is what I wish to dedicate my working life to . . . working on the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and with survivors of rape is an honour in itself. I know that succeeding in our goals will take a lifetime, and I am dedicated to it for all of mine. (The Guardian 2014a) Foreign policy appears to have become the key aspect of Jolie’s working life rather than filmmaking or acting. The digitalisation of politics and the role of celebrity in the online constitution of ethical obligation across borders add force to Jolie’s foreign policy endeavours and possibly the creation of new online communities that subscribe to her ethical agendas on sexual violence, refugees and displacement. This is particularly so since in many cases celebrities attract more attention from global audiences than do orthodox political actors. The authenticity of Jolie’s humanitarianism in the field of sexual violence and refugee policy has been boosted by the assumption that she is knowledgeable and well read. William Hague, for example, has praised her ‘vast expertise’ in the context of sexual violence in conflict (BBC News 2014b). Further, she is represented as incredibly dedicated to the cause’ (Urwin 2015). The UNHCR website also makes discursive use of the vast number of visits that Jolie has undertaken to refugee camps in war zones (UNHCR n.d.), as such adding further authenticity to her global persona. It is also a discursive practice employed by Jolie herself who resorts to the same technique in personalising her story, drawing upon her encounters with suffers of sexual violence in boosting her moral messages (BBC News 2014b). Moreover, she professes to wish to work with local people and ‘learn about other histories and other peoples’ so as to ground her work in the local conditions of the conflict, and, as noted by Jolie herself, as a way of countering criticisms of her celebrity status (Women’s Hour 11 June 2014b). However, by and large, Jolie operates within existing political and institutional structures of the world order and capitalist system rather than seriously challenging them (Kapoor 2013; Bergman Rosamond 2015). For the most part, the portrayal of her humanitarian work in social and digital media does not challenge her privileged position within domestic and international society or her personal wealth that enables her to travel the world and fund a range of non-state-sponsored development projects, and, as such, individualising development and security policy (Chouliaraki 2013, 79). By identifying political allies such as William Hague

114 Annika Bergman Rosamond and by using her status within the UN, she has managed to attract global audiences and channels through which she can seek impact on international politics. Whether she is radically challenging gendered and racial hierarchies is another matter altogether.

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Conclusion This chapter began by situating celebrity humanitarianism within contemporary debates on world politics and popular culture. I identified a close relationship between popular culture, international politics and celebrity humanitarianism and went on to problematise this relationship. In particular, I noted that celebrity humanitarians are increasingly assigning cosmopolitan roles to themselves, leading them to undertake a range of global projects. I noted that this is not an unproblematic development since such activism is located within contemporary statist practices and gendered power relations as well as Western privilege. In this context, I noted that celebrities have the power to generate support for certain issues by mobilising digital media, while neglecting others and, in so doing, constituting the direction of the ethical global agenda. I sought to illustrate this reasoning through a deconstruction of texts and visuals telling the ‘Angelina Jolie sexual violence’ saga. I began by noting that there is a link between Jolie’s humanitarianism and her mothering discourses and practices. These are plain to see in a range of texts, either scripted by Jolie herself or figuring in digital descriptions of her humanitarianism. I suggested that Jolie’s own family brings credence to her cosmopolitan activism, a constitutive relationship that has been heavily reported on in digital spaces. I then went on to look more closely at Jolie’s engagements with the sexual violence agenda, as communicated to global audiences through social and digital media. More specifically, I allocated her activism within discourses of cosmopolitanism and distinct understandings of gender and privilege. Jolie appears to have a personal preference for cosmopolitanism as a moral platform and through her activism she seeks to bring attention to such things as sexual violence, displacement and refugee crises. Yet, as my brief online analysis has demonstrated, there is little evidence of Jolie’s humanitarianism radically challenging gendered assumptions of victimhood and perpetration. Online versions of newspapers and other sources do not sufficiently engage with Jolie’s occasional tendency to constitute women in singular language and as such reducing their agency considerably. Nor do such digital accounts sufficiently scrutisinise her close relationship with the corridors of statist and UN power. Because social and digital media are discursive platforms for the constitution of global ethical truths, it is important that commentary on celebrity humanitarianism casts more light on the gendered power systems and identities that underpin the digitalisation and celebrification of contemporary world politics. As noted above, Jolie’s close bond with William Hague and her honorary Dame status have been celebrated without much reflection on the merits of merging celebrity and orthodox practices of power (Bergman Rosamond 2015) and politics. Research on celebrity humanitarianism invites us to engage in such dialogue, and this chapter is a modest attempt to do so.

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118 Annika Bergman Rosamond UNHCR (2011b) ‘Angelina Jolie urges more focus on reintegration for former Afghan refugees’, available at www.unhcr.org/4d6e7a8d6.html, accessed 2 March 2015. UNHCR (2013) ‘UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie wins award for humanitarian work’, 25 November 2013, available at www.unhcr.org/529354976.html, accessed 24 February 2016. UNHCR (2015a) ‘Iraq: Angelina Jolie visits displaced Iraqis’, available at www.unhcr. org/5416e8db9.html, accessed 9 April 2015. UNHCR (2015b) ‘UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie Pitt calls for action on World Refugee Day’, available at www.unhcr.org/558595e96.html, accessed 9 September 2015. UNHCR (n.d.) ‘A Special Envoy for refugee issues’, available at www.unhcr.org/ pages/49c3646c56.html, accessed 2 June 2015. Urwin, R. (2015) ‘Angelina Jolie’s film convinced me to act on war rape: William Hague on his mission to end sexual violence’, London Evening Standard, 16 March 2015, available at www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/london-life/angelina-jolies-film-convinced-me-toact-on-war-rape – william-hague-on-his-mission-to-end-sexual-violence-10110508. html, accessed 16 July 2015. US Weekly (2014) ‘Angelina Jolie wears white suit at Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict: Watch her speech now, US Weekly, available at www.usmagazine.com/ celebrity-style/news/angelina-jolie-white-suit-global-summit-speech-2014106, accessed 16 July 2015. Weber, C. (2005) International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Weldes, J. (2003) To Seek Out New Worlds Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weldes, J. and Rowley, C. (2015) ‘So how does popular culture relate to world politics?’, 11–34 in Caso, F. and Hamilton, C. (eds) Popular Culture and World Politics: Theories, Methods, Pedagogies, Bristol, UK: E-International Relations Publishing. Williams, M. (2003) ‘Words, images and enemies: Securitisation and international politics’, International Studies Quarterly, 4(4): 511–531. Women’s Hour (2014), ‘Angelina Jolie: However emotional we feel if we can’t end impunity and enforce law we won’t get very far’, BBC , available at www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/p020rwpr, accessed 15 September 2015. Yrjölä, R. (2012) ‘From street into the world: Towards a politicised reading of celebrity humanitarianism’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 14(3): 357–374.

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Part III

Digital entertainment

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8

Playing war and genocide

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Endgame: Syria and Darfur is Dying Jessica Auchter

We inhabit a world where online gaming and smartphones inform (especially Western) conceptions of politics. News is consumed through social media and the internet, but video and computer games are also key ways in which conceptions of violence are produced and consumed, evident by the debate surrounding whether violent video games lead to desensitisation towards violence in reality (Ivarsson et al. 2013). Meanwhile, games are also modes of news distribution and engagement: game developers are using current events as a background for their games, and organisations attempting to raise awareness are relying on the platform to get their message out. Some are advertised as forms of entertainment that engage with current events, such as Endgame: Syria. Others are marketed as raising awareness to audiences who might not otherwise encounter the issue, such as the computer game Darfur is Dying. The focus of this chapter is on gaming as a site of visual and political practice, where specific meanings are circulated about how violence should be viewed, perceived and engaged with. This chapter assesses Endgame: Syria and Darfur is Dying as a way to consider the ethics of awareness, audience and visibility when it comes to humanitarian crises. Both civilian deaths in Syria and the genocide in Darfur are important issues and raising awareness can be said to be a moral good. Yet playing at genocide or war can be seen as ethically problematic, in that it sees humanitarian crises turned into games, and renders serious events such as rape and killing as fodder for entertainment. Additionally, I analyse the notion that raising awareness in the developed world among those with access to this sort of technology is the key to unlocking the solution to political violence and explore the type of humanitarian relationship this inculcates. The line of questioning pursued is thus two-fold: what is the substance of games that speak to current issues marked by international violence, and how do these games fit within wider discourses of awareness promotion, intervention and global perceptions of the sort of conflict that specifically targets civilians? By analysing these games and answering these questions, I hope to contribute to a wider debate on the intertextuality of popular culture and international politics by interrogating what it means to be a consumer of both in the contemporary era. Scholars have recently drawn attention to the role of popular culture in understanding global politics, as other chapters in this volume also note. Iver Neumann

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and Daniel Nexon’s edited volume Harry Potter and International Relations (2006), Daniel Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies (2011) and Jutta Weldes’s To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (2003) all engage with film as a means to interrogate the intertextuality of popular culture and global politics, by looking at films ranging from Star Trek to Harry Potter to World War Z and the Dawn of the Dead multi-film franchise. Stephanie Buus (2009) has focused on the Swedish television series Beck and the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer to distinguish security cultures in these two states, focusing on how television can reflect and shape understandings of security that translate into support for particular security policies, such as unilateral intervention or the focus on preventive or preemptive strikes. Similarly, Laura Shepherd (2013) uses Buffy to explore how gendered understandings circulate in popular culture to impact our understandings of violence. And Cristina Rowley and Jutta Weldes (2012) explore the Buffyverse to re-envision security studies to focus on everyday life. All argue that popular culture provides a useful lens through which to interrogate previously held understandings of how world politics function and suggest that the meanings circulated in popular culture can have important implications. Weldes (1999, 2003) poses questions about how popular culture, including Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not only reflects but also shapes our understanding of issues, ranging from globalisation to conflict. Central to her reading of these texts is the concept of intertextuality, the relationship between culture and politics, which is premised on the assumption that popular culture both reflects and shapes politics. Weldes (2003, 15) argues that popular culture and global politics share the same ontological and epistemological bases: ‘their structural homologies, in other words, extend to their most basic assumptions: the nature of Self and Other, the character of knowledge . . . the possibilities for community’. Rather than viewing genres such as science fiction as purely fictional and removed from the considerations of international politics, Weldes troubles the line between the two by engaging with global politics as itself a form of culture. She provides examples of how world politics looks at science fiction as a model, such as the widely cited example of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) being referred to as ‘Star Wars’ – initially as a criticism, but then adopted colloquially as the name of the program (Weldes 1999). Similarly, globalisation is often referred to as spaceship earth, looking at the world poised on the cusp of a final frontier (Weldes 2001). But beyond this, Weldes argues that science fiction, and by extension, popular culture in general, can shape our perspective on warfare and the legitimacy of certain political views. The point these contributions make is that international relations has heretofore focused on ‘high politics’, while the popular has been a heavily undervalued aspect of international politics. If power can be broadly conceived as residing in economics, demography, gender, class, race and colonial relations, as Weldes argues, and not simply in material factors, then power must be produced culturally, and there is therefore a relationship between the stories that are told in the realm of popular culture and political narratives, broadening our understanding of what counts as political. Popular culture is both a window into the world that exists, and also a

Playing war and genocide 123 part of world politics itself, providing the cultural context for legitimating certain kinds of behaviour (Weldes 2003).

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Gaming, foreign policy and the consumption of international affairs Beyond the scholarly approaches to the topic, more attention is being paid in the policy world to the visual and virtual dimensions through which foreign policy is carried out, including drones and other technologies of war. This has extended to a nexus between foreign and military policy and video gaming. The Atlantic Council, for example, recently hired Dave Anthony, director and writer of the video game Call of Duty, as a new research fellow. Steve Grundman, a fellow at the Atlantic Council, got the idea for integrating the work of video game artists into the organisation when he saw his son playing a Call of Duty video game. It caused him to reflect on two main features of the game: the way it reflected the future of warfare, and the way it integrated familiar and innovative technologies to do so. Grundman drew on this inspiration and hired Anthony as part of a new project to ‘mine video games, narrative fiction and other interactive media for insights into the future of war’ (Gibbons-Neff 2014). Anthony argues that artists have a useful alternative approach to understanding conflict: ‘our job is to blow apart structure and come up with creative ideas. We come at it from an entirely different perspective’ (Gibbons-Neff 2014). His hiring was not without criticism though; as Justine Drennan notes, criticism of his employment mirrors criticisms of the game itself: one could question the wisdom of giving a prominent public platform to a director of a game some have seen as promoting an us-vs-them mentality and celebrating violence by white American males against non-white foreigners, leftists, and other Others of the world. That Call of Duty is incredibly popular within the U.S. military may be a sign of both the game’s realism and the concerns that Anthony’s hiring raises about blurring distinctions between actual and imagined war. (Drennan 2014) Still, there can be no doubt that the popularity of Call of Duty is symptomatic of increased attention to video games of this nature, and particularly how they shift our conceptions of threats and new technology. Drennan (2014) points to the fact that ISIS has made reference to the game Call of Duty in their recruitment. Video games are also increasingly coming to the attention of policymakers for their ability to simulate events in training as well, as in the US military game Tactical Iraqi that teaches soldiers the Arabic language and cultures to prepare them for deployment. Other video games are designed for military recruitment. Gaming has become an increasingly popular way to consume international affairs, even to the extent that governments and NGOs have relied on video games to realise their goals, as illustrated with the Atlantic Council and Call of Duty.

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Games are used to convey political messages; Congo Jones, for example, focuses on the deforestation struggle against the World Bank, who supported logging in the Congolese rain forest, while other games simulate election campaigns, global pandemics or government collapse. Many games of this nature derive from ongoing contemporary issues. For example, many users flocked to the game SAM Simulator in early 2014, a simulator of the type of rocket launcher that was likely used in eastern Ukraine to shoot down a Malaysian Airlines airplane (Peck 2014b). ISIS, the terrorist group in Iraq and Syria, has created its own video games to simulate attacks against their enemies, including Iran and Saudi Arabia (Peck 2014a). As Ian Bogost (2007) argues, all video games create a world in which there are particular constraints on action. It is these rules of the game that simulate or critique the world around us. What differentiates video games from other cultural and rhetorical forms is their interactivity: ‘they require user action to complete their procedural representations’ (Bogost 2007, 45). In that sense, they do not pose solutions, but rather outline processes. As Bogost (2007, 85) indicates, sometimes unwinnable games can pose the most interesting questions about the ambiguity inherent in something such as counter-terror operations, as in his example Kabul Kaboom, where the player is a character that must catch air-dropped hamburgers, and avoid bombs dropped from the sky. Eventually the bombs become unavoidable and the character is dismembered. It should be noted that games that depict real contemporary events are not without controversy. As one of the creators of Endgame: Syria, Tomas Rawlings notes: I’ve had to think a lot about the relationship between games and war as we’ve just launched a news-game about the war in Syria. This is tough as most games steer clear of recognisable current events. Look at the debacle of Six Days in Fallujah, announced in 2009 when the Iraq war was still very real indeed. It soon sailed into a storm of protest and has yet to emerge from this. It’s easy to do a WW2 game as the Nazis make great villains and everyone likes shooting 1940s fascists. So does that mean there is an invisible line we can’t cross that other media forms – the written word, video, audio and photography – don’t need to worry about? I don’t think so. Games, with their connotations of fun and frivolity seem the opposite of how we should cover a live conflict. Comics have that connotation too. Then pioneers like Joe Sacco and his amazing works such as ‘Palestine’ covered war from a different perspective to other media and showed clearly that it is not the medium that is the issue, but what you do with it. (Rawlings 2012) The game Six Days in Fallujah was ultimately never released due to controversy over the fact that it perhaps depicted the realities of the conflict too much, particularly given that the conflict was still ongoing. The difference between a Nazi enemy and an Iraqi one in the context of a video game, then, matters quite a bit. The other feature that Rawlings’ comment brings to the fore is the prevailing

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Playing war and genocide 125 perception that games are frivolous and fun, and that they reference fantastical worlds which do not bear much resemblance to our own. Games that focus on current global conflicts, then, are situated at a disconnect between notions about what games should be, and assertions about the serious nature of global events. For example, the game Bomb Gaza was released in mid-2014 at the same time as Israel’s bombing of Gaza. It controversially allowed users to pilot an Israeli Air Force plane to target terrorists in Gaza and forced users to confront the difficulty in distinguishing civilians from targets in the context of airstrikes. However, the notion that it was making a game out of the airstrikes and deaths that were actually occurring at the same time caused criticism, and ultimately Google removed it from its Play Store (NBC News 2014). The genre of newsgames, a term coined by Ian Bogost (2007) to describe intersections of games and journalism, is characterised by one of its other most well-known examples, the game September 12, in which the player must bomb sites in a Middle Eastern market to target terrorists. In doing so, the player must make choices about targeting civilians or sites resulting in civilian collateral damage, and strikes that kill civilians turn other civilians into terrorists (Swain 2013). Instances like these indicate the tensions between games as sites of play and the serious topics they increasingly confront. Just as there is a sense that global politics is ‘high politics’ while gaming is not even ‘low politics’ because it is not conceived of as being political at all, turning violence into play is ethically problematic, even when the aims are to draw attention to the ethical problems of the violence itself through a form of critical mimesis. I explore these ideas in the next two sections, in which I draw from two specific games to pose questions about the politics of video games, the ethical dimensions of playing war and genocide and the technological dimension of humanitarian awareness via video games.

Playing war in Syria Endgame: Syria is a game developed in 2012 that was first made available on the Android platform, and later became more widely available online. The player plays as Syrian rebels fighting the Assad government, who must choose to deploy various forms of strategic weaponry and alliances, and rely on the goodwill and recognition of other countries. It explores how these decisions, as well as unpredictable wildcard factors, can affect the outcome of a conflict. The game does not depict warfare: it is not a typical war game with a first-person shooter. Rather, the decisions play out on a war tableau with cards: it is more about a set of maneuvers than about experiencing conflict itself. In that sense it replicates the decision-making process associated with conflict rather than the combat. The creators describe their intention as raising awareness about what is happening in Syria: it is intended to be a game to help players understand the war, not simply to act as a form of entertainment (Rawlings 2012). To create the game, the designers referenced current news about the conflict in Syria to explore possible endpoints and relevant issues. In the game, supporters of both the Free Syrian Army and Assad’s regime become actors, including Iran, China, Russia, the US, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia and

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Turkey, who can give various degrees of logistical support to either the regime or the rebels. As the developers note, We wanted the political and military actions in the game to reflect these international forces so the player comes away with a sense of just how complex the conflict is. Added to that each military unit you deply [sic] comes with costs; at the end of the game, even if the war is won, there may be negative costs. The chances of these grow with certain types of unit, for example assassination as a tool is powerful but can have blowback. Islamic militias are often composed of experienced fighters, but they may wish to tread a different path from other rebels. In many ways these are the choices at the heart of the design and the point of the game; if your side is facing defeat and the only option to fight back is these more extreme actions, would you use them? . . . We also wanted to include a sense of how the civilians fare in all this – most military actions cost innocent lives, on both sides. The player is faced at the end of each round of fighting with the growing civilian death toll. You can’t escape this number rising, and the more powerful the military forces deployed (on both sides) the more people die. (Tomas 2012) The game tries to simulate the numerous actors that are involved, not only by modelling the impact of external support, but also by exploring the role of nonstate actors, such as radical groups. It fits within a larger genre of games that ‘play the news’, that focus on a contemporary event and allow players to adopt one or multiple perspectives in the context of that event. Another example of a game in this genre is A Force More Powerful, commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict as a tool to demonstrate nonviolent democratic revolution, intended for distribution to activist groups in countries pushing for democratic change (Bogost 2007, 79). It raises some of the questions that arise with regard to games that play the news, given that these games are developed in the Western world to engage with and explain activity elsewhere. A Force More Powerful exhibits a particular colonialist logic that imposes a certain kind of acceptable revolutionary activity. But what is unique about Endgame: Syria is that the game itself, and the situational constraints within the game, evolves as global events in Syria shift and change (Rath 2013). The game creators of Endgame: Syria write about what motivated the formation of the game: In trying to do this you face the question; why use games for this at all? Games won’t (nor should they) replace traditional news forms, but they can offer something new. Firstly as they allow the user to interact with the flow of events, they are a great way to explore a dynamic situation with multiple outcomes as they let the user explore many paths in different ways. Secondly they are a medium that many people relate to as a primary media form. This means that for many people games are the ‘natural’ frame they use to understand the

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world around them. For these reasons I think it is worth exploring games and news and why we’ve chosen to make a game about the war in Syria. (Rawlings 2012) The game creators thus rely on a conception of video games as political precisely because they have been naturalised as a frame with which to engage the world around us. The use of the term ‘natural’ implies a usefulness of the interactivity of games that makes them different than the engagement often proffered as the usefulness of other forms of new media. One provocation of the game is that it depicts an ongoing crisis in the form of a game, exemplifying the disagreement over intersections between the gaming genre as ‘fun’ and ‘serious’ politics. While this distinction should be problematised, it does raise a larger question of the implications of playing an ongoing conflict. One commenter on a story about the game succinctly exemplifies the perspective critical of games like Endgame: Syria: This game is either an extremely biting satire on hyperreality and “news” as “entertainment”, or, as I suspect, it’s shockingly opportunistic and shameful. This horror is actually happening, people, right now. It’s not something for you to “play” on your iPhone in your own comfortable world’. (Ronald 2014) Yet it is precisely the connections between the conflict and one’s own world, and perhaps the disruptions of one’s comfortable own world that the game creators are trying to cultivate, by raising questions about the difficult decisions of conflict and the way Americans may be implicated in these decisions. As Rawlings notes, ‘by making Endgame: Syria I hope that we’ve encouraged some people who didn’t know much about the situation in Syria, to find out more. After all, the chances are your taxes are going into this war in one form or another’ (Rawlings 2012). One of the interesting facets of Endgame: Syria is that it was originally denied permission to be sold on the Apple app store because it depicted a real political event, and the enemy was a real government. That is, it was denied permission to be distributed because it was too real; the expectation is that games based on conflict should be solely for entertainment and that games are not a medium through which to engage with political questions. The reality of the game is what replicates the informational attribute that news itself provides, but it is this same reality, together with its format as a game, that has rendered it unacceptable and overly disruptive. As Laura Shepherd notes in this volume, digital popular culture has an impact on how notions of truth are defined and circulated. However, it should also be acknowledged, as Craig Pearson (2013) does, that a game that portrays itself as a form of news and the intersection between journalism and games also raises questions about the objectivity of the news sources we consume, especially when the game depicts a particular message about conflict. He notes: ‘nothing Endgame: Syria does is an egregious use of the information it presents, but I do worry that being put in the position of the “rebels” is editorialising. Can you be considered

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a news source and only portray one side?’ (Pearson 2013). Any game of this sort must simplify the context of the conflict, but an issue with this game is that it ‘creates two nominally even sides, one representing the Assad regime and the other representing the rebels – as if the two organisations are somehow somehwhat [sic] equal in power and resources’ (Swain 2013). This not only raises questions about media coverage of events like the revolution in Syria, but also what political work it does for the rebels to be represented as the underdog. The game is intended to demonstrate that there are no good outcomes in war. As Eric Swain describes, I played and played searching for the best possible outcome. There is no positive outcome, just the least horrible. And time after time, the regime would beat me, or I’d squeak out a victory at a cost far too high. At one point, I thought I had done it. The regime was ousted with no sectarian violence, no destabilising of the region, and no religious extremists emerging. The only downside was the loss of hospitals, utilities, and other basic facilities from functioning properly. I mentioned this on Twitter and got the response I deserved. “So you made a desert and called it peace?”’ (Swain 2013) Swain describes that what victory ultimately hinges on, after playing repeatedly, is the support or lack of support of the international community. Indeed, many of the cards are focused on the support of various external actors for the rebels or Assad. Robert Rath similarly describes his experience playing the game: One interesting way this dynamic plays out – one that’s pretty subversive – is how frustrated the player becomes with the international community. While you need foreign countries to back you diplomatically in order to raise your Support, the continual hot air from otherwise unhelpful countries can become infuriating. I don’t give a shit about your +8 Statement of Support, Qatar. I found myself thinking at one point. Choppers are murdering my people and I need RPGs and a goddamn No Fly Zone RIGHT NOW. Even as someone who understands the risks and consequences of an international military intervention, being the one who’s wishing for foreign airstrikes – rather than the one considering whether they’d be a smart move – is a rhetorically interesting experience. (Rath 2013) At the end, the lesson of the game is that it is the international community, or specific powerful actors, that have the power to legitimate a democratic movement or a particular side in a civil conflict. That is, the take-away message is that external involvement in some form is the solvent that creates the best-case scenario for the conflict. This has the effect of making the individual visualise herself as a key political actor simply by playing the game, but also reinforces the idea that the moral and political considerations associated with the war in Syria may be too complex,

Playing war and genocide 129 leading the individual to come away with the notion that nothing can be done to help. The combination of the assumption that the situation is too complex for external intervention, even while external intervention is posited as the only thing that could solve the conflict, creates a situation of apathy under the guise of engagement.

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Simulating genocide: Darfur is Dying Darfur is Dying is a computer game that was popular in the mid- and late-2000s. It originated from a Music Television (MTV) competition that asked people to come up with a game that would achieve a lofty task: ‘end the crisis in Darfur’ (Bogost 2007, 95). Thus, at its outset, the competition itself places the agency of solving the crisis in the hands of the game designers. Ian Bogost (2007, 97) describes this in the context of the website for the game: ‘[it] arrogantly enjoins the visitor: “Play the game. End the killing”’. Bogost (2007, 95) describes one of the other finalists, the game Guidance, where the player attempts to distribute UN aid to competing groups while keeping the groups from encountering one another and engaging in conflict. The premise raises some ethical questions about the necessity of external intervention, and the portrayal of the conflict zone, Darfur in this case, as an area prone to primitive tribal divisions that can only be solved by external imposition, and that aid is the only possible solution. Julian Dibbell (2006) notes about Guidance that it ‘reimagines the complexities of murderous ethnic conflict as a Tetris-like abstraction of sliding colored dots’, problematising the way the conflict is abstracted from its political and historical context. The other finalist that was not chosen was called Ashanti Ambassadors, a first-person shooter game that does not allow you to shoot, depicting the difficulty unarmed Sudanese citizens face against government gunmen (Dibbell 2006). This, however, is also a problematic depiction of events, because there were armed militias in Darfur fighting the government, utilised by the government in Khartoum as an excuse for civilian targeting in the region. The game that was selected as the winner of the competition, played by nearly 1 million people in the first year it was available (Parkin 2006), is entitled Darfur is Dying. In this game, the player plays refugee characters, all women and children and no adult men.1 In the game, users select a character to fetch water while evading the Janjaweed militias that targeted specific ethnic groups and carried out much of the violence and killings in western Sudan that resulted in several hundred thousand dead. If the player’s character gets captured, that character is no longer eligible to play. Jose Antonio Vargas describes the experience of playing the game: In the online game “Darfur Is Dying,” launched at yesterday’s Save Darfur rally on the Mall, atrocity is a click of a mouse away. A player can be a 14-year-old girl in a blue dress with white polka dots named Elham, in search of water for her camp, chased by gun-carrying Janjaweed militiamen. Run, Elham, run! Suddenly a game that takes no more than 15 minutes to play seems too real and not real enough at the same time. (Vargas 2006)

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Ian Bogost (2007, 96–97) characterises the game as one which raises awareness, as a ‘videogame billboard’ that offers a simplified message about the conflict. It is intended to replicate the refugee experience for the user on the screen by emphasising the precarity of the refugee. What is interesting about its focus is that the experience of the Darfuri refugee, while precarious, does not depict the worst of the violence that has occurred in Darfur: the mass killings, destruction of villages, government-orchestrated bombing campaigns and rapes that have characterised the conflict remain outside of the picture of the game, tangential to what the player is told is the main story of the conflict to which s/he should devote more attention and direct awareness. This is not unlike the way humanitarian involvement often proceeds in cases of mass atrocity, of which both Rwanda and Darfur are illustrative examples: there is a general reticence to intervene to stop the violence, but a much greater likelihood to intervene to offer aid at refugee camps. Thus the game images the refugee camp as the aftereffect, the trace of genocide, rather than genocide itself; genocide is rendered an impossibility that cannot be imaged. Instead, players work towards a certain policy end that can be realised: intervention by way of refugee camps rather than in the genocide itself. The game replicates and reinforces the status quo of humanitarian intervention that tells us, as the players of the game, that we can only do so much, that we are powerless to stop the violence but that we can help the refugees. Certainly we can help the refugees, but by engaging more with the particulars of the conflict and its direct impact, the game could have resulted in additional actions.2 These political dynamics, including the way foreign powers are already implicated in how the conflict in Darfur proceeded, are elided from the game itself. And, as Ian Bogost (2007) notes, the game abstracts the historical dilemmas of the case that partially explain why the conflict has occurred and why, as a result, the available solutions are not without their difficulties. What stands out about Darfur is Dying, to Bogost, is that the game emphasises powerlessness because the player is not the powerful actor in the struggle, as is often the case in video games (Bogost 2007, 96). However, despite the fact that one’s character is a powerless actor, there is a dynamic of power that Bogost ignores. While the character in the game is powerless, the player is himself or herself placed in a position of power to decide the fate of the powerless actor s/he plays. That is, the gamer is taught by the game that s/he has the ability to affect change: this is the very point of a game that raises awareness. But at the same time, the rhetoric of the design competition – to end the crisis – is the same rhetoric replicated in the way the game is played and situated, as a game intended to reify the agency of the player while rendering the victim merely an instrument of that agency. Clearly helping victims of conflict is a moral good, but one must ask about the implications of positing specific forms of external intervention as the proper way to do so. I frequently discuss with students the role of popular culture in their intellectual lives, and one particularly interesting conversation regarding the role of Darfur is Dying in raising awareness about the Darfur genocide led a student to raise the notion of control. That is, he found games of this nature problematic compared to films because films seemed real, and evoked an empathetic response, whereas

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Playing war and genocide 131 games simulate reality rather than depicting it. Similarly, he noted that people are used to gaming platforms as platforms for entertainment and that the biggest difference between games and film is that, in games, the user is in control. There are constraints of the gaming platform and the material constraints imposed by the designers of the game that limit decision-making; however, the user generates his/her own scenario in the game, responds to stimuli, and this notion tends to distance the user from the material circumstances surrounding the game as some sort of authentic reality. When the user sees a Darfuri child being kidnapped by the Janjaweed and is told that the girl child is likely to be raped, they can simply play another character and control the fate of that character. Not hiding quickly or effectively enough results in rape and kidnapping; being good at the game means survival. The constraints of the game may not effectively replicate the constraints of the environment. The fact that the gamer controls the outcomes of the game by their game-playing skills triggers something that invokes competition and sport rather than identification and empathy. It reinforces lines of reality: that somehow the game is less real by virtue of the fact that it places the human and social world under our control in a way that we know it is not. If the human and social world are unpredictable, the fact that the game is predictable (an action leads to a specific anticipated outcome, every time: if one does not hide from the Janjaweed, one loses the game) renders it unable to evoke empathy and instead more about cultivating strategy. At the same time, the gaming platform itself reinforces the idea that the person playing is in control of what happens in Darfur in reality, not simply in the game, because the game is couched in terms of humanitarian involvement. The game is marketed to raise awareness of what is happened in Darfur, and thus the person playing the game is put in a position where s/he is told both that s/he controls what happens in the fictional Darfur on the computer screen, and also to some inconceivably far away land-that-may-as-well-be-fictional, the ‘real’ Darfur itself. This locates agency with the player of the game and implies that playing the game and becoming aware is an effective solution to the problems in Darfur. As Adam Knowlton (2009, 10) notes, the game has a very negative tone until the narrator calls for the player to take action, at which point the language takes a more positive approach. This is exemplified by the switch from the description of the harrowing circumstances affecting refugees, to the end of the game, when the player is called to action to email a representative, send the game to a friend, or start a divestment movement. What this signals is that the events being described are horrific, but the player’s role in the game can fix the negative effects of the conflict. While awareness is certainly a good thing, there is some concern to be raised surrounding the notion that the game-player is the locus of agency for such a global problem. It renders the Darfuris the passive instrument of, in this instance, Western teenage agency. This becomes more salient when the game statistics are explored. Coverage of the first year the game was available notes a high number of players: According to mtvU’s traffic numbers, more than 800,000 people have played the game over 1.7 million times since its launch on April 30th. Of those, tens

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of thousands have participated in the activist tools woven into the gameplay – such as sending emails to friends in their social networks inviting them to play the game and become informed about Darfur, as well as writing letters to President Bush and petitioning their Representatives in Congress to support legislation that aids the people of Darfur. (Parkin 2006) That is, there is a disconnect between playing the game and engaging in the type of activism that the game encourages, but at the same time, those who are playing the game are made to feel as though they are engaged because of the way the game is designed. This may also be true of the creators of the game, none of whom had visited Darfur or refugee camps in neighbouring countries, or spoken with refugees prior to creating the game (Boyd 2006); this renders the game disconnected from the realities on the ground. Though one does not need to have traveled to Darfur to engage in humanitarian action, the process of the creation of the game replicated an all-too-common phenomenon of foreign involvement without taking the time to understand the complexities of the situation in the conflict zone itself. Critics of the MTV contest posed questions about games that depict mass violence. Julian Dibbell’s (2006) resounding critique notes that when one’s character does not succeed in avoiding the Janjaweed, the game ends with kidnap, rape, and murder. He asks, is there even a rating for something this fucked up? . . . But since all of these games are intended to raise awareness, stop the genocide, and perhaps thicken the ozone layer, no one will ever confuse their abundant violence with that of the typical commercial video game. Say what you like about Grand Theft Auto or Mortal Kombat, but neither of them was ever so cruel as to delude anyone that playing a game might change the world. (Dibbell 2006) However, I want to make clear that my critique is not intended to depict the game as a site where these issues should not be hashed out. That is, it is not about the supposed affront that Dibbell notes – that games could ever actually have a real impact – but rather what processes they teach us about humanitarian involvement. That is, the problem isn’t that the game teaches us we can change the world, but rather that it teaches us that ‘we’ (American citizens/teenagers) are the only ones who can change the world, and that this can occur from us simply being aware. Our awareness is an end in itself in the humanitarian discourse of this game; we are so powerful as agents that our awareness is the be-all-and-end-all of global solutions, eliding the notion that complex problems require complex understandings and solutions.

Some conclusions on the ethics of playing war and genocide Engaging with these games simulates a reality where the player is the agent of change, where action hinges on the player’s awareness of the issue, whether it

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be the complexities of fighting the Assad government in Syria or the precarious existence of a Darfuri refugee. This is the case to the extent that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has developed a program where it works with video game creators to adapt the game world so that there are consequences for actions that violate Geneva Convention regulations on conduct in war. As the Red Cross indicates, There aren’t universal laws of war when it comes to video games. Players can disregard the rules of the Geneva Convention without encountering any consequences. The International Committee of the Red Cross wants to change that. (Red Cross 2013) This makes the game more interactive in that players even further respond to incentives of a real conflict environment in that they could choose to target civilians as a strategy, but knowing that there may be consequences. The ICRC notes that war crimes, such as civilian targeting and torture, occur in real conflict, but the encouragement of the adoption of consequences in these games also emphasises that the game is an environment in which the world can be altered in a more idealised sense. Given the lack of frequency with which war crimes are prosecuted, having such constraints in the context of a game does not simulate the real world, but rather creates an alternate reality where these norms are privileged by the actors engaged in the conflict more than they are in the real world. Video games cultivate notions of engagement when they address and simulate current global issues. They can raise awareness about humanitarian crises, such as genocide in Darfur or civil war in Syria. But as these games posit themselves as forums for engagement with these issues, and sometimes even as news themselves, questions must be raised about what it means to be a consumer of popular culture through video games, and the types of narratives they present about action. These two games play war and genocide, but in ways that place the player in a position of power to effect change, both within the game as the controller of the outcome and outside the game as the posited controller of the fate of individuals in Darfur or Syria. The unequal logic of agency this engenders becomes problematic because it proscribes certain forms of intervention as legitimate and others as not, and renders awareness as an end in itself in the context of humanitarian action, rather than as a means to an end. Games also invoke a sense of constant engagement because even if one’s character dies, the game can be played again, or the Syrian conflict can be replayed, invoking the sense that the player has some control over a distant or messy humanitarian crisis. Games offer an alternative way in which individuals can engage with politics by broadening what counts as political, but we must be aware that they circulate particular meanings and understandings of humanitarian action and the locus of the agent of such action. Gaming is, then, the affirmation of a reality that isn’t, where epistemological code surrounding the games portrays them as mimesis, as authentic artefacts of the conflicts depicted, akin to the way photographs are

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described as taken but not made.3 Reality is then made to be immutable and distinct from representation, even as the real is posited to be represented via the mechanism of the game itself.4 There becomes a taboo surrounding representing genocide or war in its reality and so instead a site is created which supplants the real, and which is then realised to not be desirable, necessitating intervention of which the player of the game must be the agent. By situating agency at the level of the individual player, the game plays with notions of reality and desirable outcomes, making the individual a key humanitarian actor in war and genocide. Ultimately, then, gaming is a key site of and for political practice, where particular meanings are circulating that often legitimise intervention or associate a moral status with playing the game as itself a form of engagement.

Notes 1 This is both because men tend to be the victims of killing more often and because they do not share the same vulnerabilities that women and children are posited to have. There is one adult male character in the game. However, upon selecting 30-year-old Rahman to forage for water, the player is told that ‘it’s very uncommon for an adult male to forage for water because he is likely to be killed by the Janjaweed militia. Choose another camp member to forage for water.’ This reinforces a gendered idea of vulnerability that may itself be problematic. See www.darfurisdying.com. 2 Such as, for example, American citizens, where the MTV game was predominantly played, pressuring the US government to stop recognising Omar al-Bashir as a legitimate leader, or to stop bartering away Darfuri lives in exchange for a Comprehensive Peace Agreement between North and South, both potential actions that were being discussed in policy circles at the time the game emerged. 3 Thanks to David Campbell for this point. 4 Thanks to Daniel Bertrand Monk for encouraging me to think about these issues.

Bibliography Bogost, I. (2007) Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press. Boyd, C. (2006) ‘Darfur activism meets video gaming’, BBC News, 6 July 2006, available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5153694.stm, accessed 24 May 2015. Buus, S. (2009) ‘Hell on earth: Threats, citizen and the state from Buffy to Beck’, Cooperation and Conflict, 44(4): 400–419. Dibbell, J. (2006) ‘Game from hell’, Village Voice, 7 February 2006, available at www. villagevoice.com/2006–02–07/screens/game-from-hell/full/, accessed 24 May 2015. Drennan, J. (2014) ‘Call of Duty: Star video game director takes unusual think tank job’, Foreign Policy, 22 September 2014, available at http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/ posts/2014/09/22/playing_at_strategy_dave_anthony_atlantic_council, accessed 24 May 2015. Drezner, D. (2011) Theories of International Politics and Zombies, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gibbons-Neff, T. (2014) ‘Can “Call of Duty” and other video games help plan for war? New project will find out’, Washington Post, 25 September 2014, available at www. washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2014/09/25/can-call-of-duty-and-othervideo-games-help-plan-for-war-new-project-will-find-out/, accessed 24 May 2015.

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Playing war and genocide 135 Ivarsson, M., Anderson, M., Akerstedt, T., and Lindblad, F. (2013) ‘The effect of violent and nonviolent video games on heart rate variability, sleep, and emotions in adolescents with different violent gaming habits’, Psychosomatic Medicine, 75(4): 390–396. Knowlton, A. (2009) Darfur Is Dying: A Narrative Analysis, Thesis (MA), University of Nebraska Omaha. NBC News (2014) ‘Google removes “Bomb Gaza” game from app store after public outcry’, NBC News, 4 August 2014, available at www.nbcnews.com/storyline/middle-eastunrest/google-removes-bomb-gaza-game-app-store-after-public-outcry-n172586, accessed 24 May 2015. Neumann, I. and Nexon, D. (eds)(2006) Harry Potter and International Relations, New York: Rowman and Littlefield. Parkin, S. (2006) ‘Darfur is dying’, Eurogamer, 9 April 2006, available at www.eurogamer. net/articles/i_darfurisdying_pc, accessed 24 May 2015. Pearson, C. (2013) ‘Endgame: Syria informs you as you play’, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, 8 January 2013, available at www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/01/08/endgame-syriainforms-you-as-you-play/, accessed 24 May 2015. Peck, M. (2014a) ‘Congratulations, you have been martyred!’, Foreign Policy, 28 March 2014, available at www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/28/congratulations_you_ have_been_martyred, accessed 24 May 2015. Peck, M. (2014b) ‘Think it’s easy to shoot down an airliner with a missile?’, Foreign Policy, 8 August 2014, available at www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/08/think_its_ easy_to_shoot_down_an_airliner_surface_to_air_missile_simulator_ukraine_mh17, accessed 24 May 2015. Rath, R. (2013) ‘Endgame: Syria updates the civil war’, The Escapist, 12 September 2013, available at www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/columns/ criticalintel/10593-Endgame-Syria-Updates-the-Civil-War.3, accessed 24 May 2015. Rawlings, T. (2012) ‘War in Syria: Using games to understand conflict’, Games Industry, 13 December 2012, available at www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012–12–13-war-insyria-using-games-to-understand-conflict, accessed 24 May 2015. Red Cross Wants Video Games to Get Real on War Crimes (2013) National Public Radio, 12 October 2013, available at www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/10/12/ 232480753/red-cross-wants-video-games-to-get-real-on-war-crimes, accessed 24 May 2015. Ronald (2014) ‘Comment’, 31 March 2014, on Tomas (2012) ‘Endgame: Syria’, Game the News, 8 December 2012, available at http://gamethenews.net/index.php/endgame-syria/, accessed 24 May 2015. Rowley, C. and Weldes, J. (2012) ‘The evolution of International Security Studies and the everyday: Suggestions from the Buffyverse’, Security Dialogue, 43(6): 513–530. Shepherd, L. (2013) Gender, Violence, and Popular Culture: Telling Stories, London: Routledge. Swain, E. (2013) ‘Syria’s endgame in “Endgame: Syria”’, PopMatters, 24 September 2013, available at www.popmatters.com/post/syrias-endgame-in-endgame-syria1/, accessed 24 May 2015. Tomas (2012) ‘The design and sources for Endgame Syria’, Game the News, 12 December 2012, available at http://gamethenews.net/index.php/the-design-sources-for-endgamesyria/, accessed 24 May 2015. Vargas, J.A. (2006) ‘In “Darfur is Dying”, the game that’s anything but’, Washington Post, 1 May 2006, available at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/30/ AR2006043001060.html, accessed 24 May 2015.

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Weldes, J. (1999) ‘Going cultural: Star Trek, state action, and popular culture’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 28(2): 117–134. Weldes, J. (2001) ‘Globalisation as science fiction’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies, 30(3): 647–667. Weldes, J. (2003) To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links Between Science Fiction and Global Politics, London: Palgrave.

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war

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M. Evren Eken1

One of the most remarkable features of modern society is the degree of mediation in how we gain our knowledge and experiences (Edles 2002, 79). The role of the visual particularly stands out in those mediation processes, not only because prior to ‘speech all communication was visual’ (Taylor 2003, 19), but also because the world we live in today is crammed with and constantly mediated by images (Mirzoeff 1999). We understand international politics through images as well (Dodds 2005; MacDonald 2006; Hughes 2007; Dodds et al. 2010; Grondin 2011; Salter 2011; Salter and Mutlu 2013; Andersen et al. 2015). By transcending and transposing spatio-temporal borders and orders, visuality and its accompanying technologies generate new human–computer interfaces, allowing us to communicate with various aspects of international politics that lie far beyond the constraints of our everyday (Manovich 2001; Galloway 2009; Ash 2015). In this way, war can be mediated, remediated and premediated (Gruisin 2010) with the push of a button, and thereby we can practice it through its various subject positions, affects and geographies. Hence, we can experience not only the whys and wherefores, but also the nuts and bolts of war-making, online, on-demand and on-screen. This chapter examines the role of digital experiences of war-making in informing our geopolitical imaginations in regards to the War on Terror. I focus on the affective dimensions and narrative similarities between helmet-cam combat videos shot by US troops in war zones and first-person shooter (FPS) video games and argue that the visual experiences of war have transformed the third-person spectatorship homefront into a first-person observership to sustain a minimum level of social consent to make wars possible. Following the work of Jonathan Crary (1992), I use the word ‘observing’ in its four different but interrelated meanings, instead of the verb ‘spectating’, which connotes a rather passive agency. 1. Watch: (slightly formal) to watch carefully the way something happens or the way someone does something, especially in order to learn more about it; 2. Notice: (formal) to notice or see; 3. Say: (formal) to make a remark about something; 4. Obey: (formal) to obey a law, rule or custom (Cambridge Dictionaries Online). In this regard, what I argue is that people are not spectating war and the international without involvement. They are not passive onlookers or spectators. Rather, they are observers, actively watching, noticing, saying and, more importantly, obeying.

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The war-making ability of states, as a social process, depends in large part on the will of the society (Van Veeren 2013; Eken and Sevin forthcoming). Put simply, states not only need armies and weapons; they also need ‘manpower’ to ‘man’2 those weapons (Tilly 2000). Yet neither the population in general, nor the soldiers in particular can be regarded as automatons acting on command without a second thought. As warfighting is inevitably about the very personal – and hence the very political – aspects of human life, neither the derring-do of combat, nor the life-like mediated practices of it can be left to lie fallow in the study of international relations (IR). In this sense, what makes people tick, and what do states do to make people tick in certain ways in times of war beyond disciplining and punishing? Moreover, what can the study of IR do to uncover the micro-ways in which international politics tick in and through war? To answer these questions, I look at popular culture and trace the ways in which FPS video games and helmet-cam videos immerse people in certain geopolitical narratives, carve out affective responses, and render distant wars accessible (McSorley 2013). I argue that whereas FPS games offer viewers the opportunity to play out virtual war through their given extracorporeal existences, helmet-cam videos offer corporeal experiences of real wars. As a result, large-scale industrial warfare becomes a war of the people, for the people and hence by the people, akin to liberal democratic ideals. Objective attitudes regarding the war effort of abstract notions are compromised by subjectified, personified and embodied feelings. The first section of this chapter emphasises the role of visuality in world politics and in the study of IR, by outlining the nexus between visual culture and critical geopolitics. The following section outlines the importance of the population in regards to war-making and the ways in which video games engage the two into each other. The third section focuses on the permeations between the real and the virtual war through FPS video games; to exemplify this, the fourth section analyses the official trailer of the ‘Battlefield 4’ FPS video game through rhetorical and affective narrative analysis. I conclude by outlining the wider implications of these engagements for the study of IR.

Critical geopolitics and visual culture Until the emergence of critical geopolitics in the 1980s, traditional geopolitical theories were mainly about statehood, strategic interests, military build-up and geographical resources and positions of nation-states and, hence, shared the realist views of IR (O’Tuathail 1996, 17). As O’Tuathail argues, ‘geopolitics’, a term first coined by R. Kjellen, ‘was intimately connected with the belligerent dramas of that century . . . to describe the geographical base of the state, its natural endowment and resources’ (O’Tuathail 2006, 1; Holdar 1992). However, critical geopolitics offers us new analytical departure points and sites of interest, including popular culture and visuality. Hence, ‘we must be attentive to the ways in which global space is labelled, metaphors are deployed, and visual images are used in this process of making stories and constructing images of world politics’ (O’Tuathail 2006, 1). In a similar vein, as Mitchell reminds us, the word ‘idea’ etymologically

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 139 derives from the Greek verb “to see” and is frequently linked with the notion of the “eidolon,” the “visible image” that is fundamental to ancient optics and theories of perception’ (Mitchell 1987, 5). Thus how people encounter world political events emerges from the relationship between visual culture and geopolitics. The images become sources of geopolitical revelation. The association between geopolitics and visual culture is an important critical advancement in geopolitical theory, and geopolitics cannot be described merely as a political elite activity influenced by the physical geography that exists out there in the ‘real world’. How we perceive the world cannot be separated from our cultural representations, perspectives and conceptual schemas. Therefore, culture itself mediates the real world and the political situations inside of it. ‘[O]ur seeing is already a writing (i.e. a cultural frame working) of the world’; ‘we are all embedded in cultural ways of seeing and constructing the world’ (O’Tuathail 2006, 6); ‘the term “visuality” is used to denote vision as something that is always culturally mediated’ (Hughes 2007, 978). So the visualisation of international political events enables a perception, provides evidence and knowledge frameworks, lays premises to act upon and moreover ascribes to the observer international political identities of ‘us’ against the ‘other’, ‘civilised’ against ‘uncivilised’, ‘developed’ against ‘underdeveloped’, and so on. Inasmuch as advances in visual media have given the observer a vantage point, the seen has become the irrefutable as well. In this way, ‘geopolitics and visual culture have become co-constitutive’ (Dodds et al. 2010, 2). Although the recent dissemination of visual media and advanced technologies has brought about a clearer and more explicit sense of seeing, visuality and imagination have always been central to political practices, as people understand and govern the physical reality through mental imageries to describe their ideas and situations. To highlight this, O’Tuathail introduces ‘ocularcentrism’ to the study of geopolitics (1996), ‘referring to the privileging of vision at the expense of all other sensory modes in Western modernity’ (Hughes 2007, 980). ‘[S]pace was homogenized . . . and measured from a central point, which was normally the seat of government or royal authority. This central point constituted the fixed spectatorial position from which panoramic visions of official state territory were constructed’ (O’Tuathail 1996, 12). Thanks to developments in visual media, particular ways of seeing enable certain vantage points to the geopolitical observer, which diffuse into the realm of everyeday life as well. Particular political actions more readily grounded through visualisations of geopolitics, not only for the decision-maker, but also for lay people. Colin Powell’s 2003 UN speech prior to the invasion of Iraq epitomises this entanglement of geopolitics, visuality and war (Powell 2003). On 5 February 2003, just before the Iraq invasion of the US military forces, then US Secretary of State and former military general Colin Powell assured the UN and people around the world via a particular ‘ocularcentricist’ discourse live on camera. Using black and white satellite imagery of ‘a weapons munition facility’, he guided the eye of the global public and uncovered the intricacies of geopolitics. Initially, for the unguided, lay eyes of the public, the images under consideration could have represented nothing more than trivial objects arbitrarily scattered around. Yet, thanks

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to Powell, we were initiated into a certain way of seeing and making sense of those images. ‘The two arrows indicate the presence of sure signs that the bunkers are storing chemical munitions . . . the truck you . . . see is a signature item. It’s a decontamination vehicle in case something goes wrong’ (Powell 2003). Thanks to Powell’s visual guidance, state secrets were revealed to the lay eye of the public and the immediacy of the international threat was evidenced by the ‘solid’ proof of the image. ‘My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence’ (Powell 2003). Soon after, despite the initial confidence about the existence of so-called facts and conclusions, the claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq were proved to be completely wrong. Yet a certain level of international consent and support for the invasion of Iraq had already been manufactured, and Iraq had already been invaded. Powell’s speech exemplifies why geopolitics cannot be reduced to formal acts and speeches, as it entails a wider ‘operation of cultures’ (O’Tuathail 2006, 12) which encompasses the lay cartographies of ordinary people as well. Thus, popular geopolitics ‘explores the ways in which geopolitical claims and scripts are produced and circulated within popular cultural forms’ (Hughes 2007, 979). Everyday life is replete with images from various sources representing world affairs, purportedly rendering the world transparent, issues apparent and substantial evidences witnessed for the ‘“participant’s eyeview”: a view that serves to collapse the distance between the viewer and things seen’ (Hughes 2007, 982). ‘In this swirl of imagery, seeing is much more than believing. It is not just a part of everyday life, it is everyday life’ (Mirzoeff 1999) and hence, visual culture itself become geopolitics (Campbell 2007).

Video games and the digitally deployed homefront As the ‘War on Terror’ spilled over into many regions and cultures all around the world, our geopolitical imaginations were increasingly occupied with images and stories about the ongoing war to respond to the vital questions of the liberal world regarding who kills whom, when and where, how and why. Visual culture, in this sense, has been significantly deployed and devised to inform the society about the whys and wherefores of the ‘War on Terror’ (Campbell 2003, 2011; Taylor 2003). The official deployment of combat photographers and embedded journalists to frontlines enabled the US to frame the War on Terror as legitimate and as just as possible, and this representation monopolised the perspective of war (Campbell 2013). The public will for war was crucial for such a vast, costly and deadly military effort (Eken and Sevin forthcoming), which was to be conducted in countries half a world away, against an unseen and unknown enemy, and for an indefinite period of time. This support rested on ‘[t]he public at home (and to a degree abroad)’ not only understanding that ‘the war is both necessary and achievable, but also legitimate, good, and just’ (Van Veeren 2013, 2). People had to been ‘re-enchanted’ by war (Behnke 2006) and filled with ‘war enthusiasm’ (Sylvester 2012, 484) to make the war possible. As Reid argues, liberal societies require ‘the

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 141 mobilization of their societies for a war of fundamentally illiberal proportions and dimensions. A war deemed to require the permanent mobilization of entire societies against an enemy which threatens their security from within’ (Reid 2009, ix). This is also why, ‘at no stage in the post-World War II period has the US or the UK military operated without detailed media management procedures designed to influence the information (specifically the pictorial) outcomes’ (Campbell 2003, 102). From high budget Hollywood films to high-end video games, from social media newsfeeds to documentaries, to urban monuments, newspapers and TV shows, the ‘War on Terror’ has seeped into our everyday lives. The mundane has become the political. The political has become the personal and the visual connects the homefront to the battlefront. As a result, the ‘War on Terror’ has been widely watched, played and practiced through its various visual mediations in civic spaces, and this has been widely supported by the US Military and Government since 2001 (Power 2007; Power and Crampton 2005; Der Derian 2009). As the distinctions between war, simulation and entertainment blur, so too does the involvement of the homefront in the battlefront. Der Derian (2009, 218) maps out the complex relations between the military, industrial, media and entertainment networks. Thanks to a software-driven revolution in military affairs, battlefields have been virtualised. As the lines between the virtual and the real blurred, so too did the lines between war-making and entertainment: In the manner of Hollywood follow-up movies, many games have been updated and expanded at least once. Indeed some are based on movies and TV series, and the opposite is also true. As the number of computers used in every field of life grew, the borders separating entertainment from ‘serious’ gaming and ‘serious’ gaming from war became increasingly fuzzy. (Van Creveld 2013, 262; see also Lenoir 2000, 289–335) However, while Der Derian explains the intricacies of this network designed to make war at the techno-bureaucratic level, the people are missing in his theory. To put simply, if this military–industrial–media–entertainment (‘MIME’) complex simulates an ‘all-too-real matrix’ of warfare and hence, of international politics, how does this network stimulate and incorporate the population and the bodies to function at the social level? In order to understand the ways in which the population is immersed and incorporated into this MIME complex (Der Derian 2009), which simulates wars as possible and reliable instruments of geopolitical action, we must explore the individual level of access to war experience and war enthusiasm. In this regard, I argue that war video games incorporate people into the world of international politics through the digital experience of warfare. This is because video games are one of the more powerful mediums of visual culture today, as they are intensely personal, interactive and affective mediums; in addition, they actually force the player to actively participate in given situations. The nature of gameplay means that you cannot stand as a bystander. This is at least partly why video games are implicated in modern military training today (Thomson 2008; Mead 2013).

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FPS video games enable us to virtually embody warrior subjectivities and experience war from our own first-person vantage points. In that sense, while playing an FPS game, we become soldiers, walk in their shoes, man their weapons, kill their enemies, die their deaths, respawn their new lives. We therefore personally experience the narrative of a geopolitical actor and make sense of the nuts and bolts of international politics. Drawing upon these narratives, players feel a mediated geopolitical awareness, and turn into active participants of war-making. As a result, rather than being a passive audience, spectating from the third-person view, we affectively participate in and embody the war effort from an active first-person standpoint.

Affective narratives of war-making In this section, I explore the ways in which visual narratives of war-making are entangled with the homefront through bodily sensations. By multiplying the affective experiences of mediated wars, these gameplays provide the narrative beginnings essential to immersion and making sense of the issue of ‘killing’. Killing in combat is not easy to do; armies and governments invest a lot in the training of soldiers to make them kill when ordered (Grossman 1996; Protevi 2013). In order to train and ‘micro-manage’ the killing ability of future soldiers, Contemporary military training cuts subjectivities out of the loop so that most soldiers’ bodies are able to temporarily withstand the stress of the act of killing. The first aspect is affective: soldiers are acculturated to dehumanize the enemy by a series of racial slurs. . . . At the same time as the group subject is constituted, the act of killing is rhetorically sterilized by euphemisms. (Protevi 2013, 133) Put simply, these acculturation processes are designed to desensitise future soldiers to the horrors of combat through dehumanisation, euphemism and simulation (see also Halliday 2011; Griffith 1989; Fennell 2011, 235; Moreman 2013, 93–94). In terms of FPS games, however, players are not simply located in a terrain and instructed to start shooting at anything that moves. Rather, prior to the first mission, players are generally allowed to choose a nom de guerre and pick their identity out of given options, including gender, race, colour, hair and facial hair types, uniform, gears and unit types. Game designs, in general, allow you to pick the appearance of the avatar you are going to embody, although you will not be able to see it, unless you come across a mirror during the gameplay, or you switch to the ‘replay’ mode to check how you did in the game. Next, to adjust to your new virtual body, the game often takes you to a short training camp. With a firstperson view of only seeing your hands and legs, you learn how to jump, sprint, prone, crawl or stand. Put differently, you learn how to command and control your extracorporeal faculties. Then you are taken to see firearms specialist to be instructed with weapon systems. From using knives to pistols, to shotguns, sniper rifles and automatic machine guns, from hand grenades to rocket launchers and

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 143 even night vision scopes, you learn how to hold, aim, fire and reload. Moreover, you learn how to communicate with, and give orders to, your teammates. Subsequent to gearing up your avatar with medical kits and picking your guns from various options, you are given mission briefings regarding the geopolitical context, geographical location, key objects of the mission and enemy’s firepower. In other words, you do not simply turn on your gaming device and start shooting for fun. Rather, FPS games are designed to immerse you in a simulated combat situation with certain geopolitical conditions. You turn yourself into a combatant with the legitimate right to kill in varying warzones all around the world. In that respect, you actually occupy a point of view, a specific vantage point in an extraterritory to do geopolitical deeds with your gun. Other than these virtual practices aimed at letting you get to know your ‘self’, you also gain situational awareness and hence acquire targets. In the movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), in a scene where the identity of the enemy is not known, Sam Wilson asks, ‘Hey Cap, how do we know the good guys from the bad guys?’. Steve Rogers replies, ‘If they’re shooting at you, they’re bad’. In a similar sense, in FPS games in general, the faces of the enemy are not clearly rendered; the enemy identity is always obfuscated. By that token, rather than attempting to pause and fathom the situation further to find another way out, the nature of the gameplay pushes you to embrace the given narrative and to construe the subjects situated in the gameplay not only as enemies, but also as killable objects (since otherwise you get killed). ‘[O]pen spaces should be crossed as quickly as possible because a player can never tell if there is a sniper hiding somewhere. A mere glimpse of an adversary triggers the learned gestures of raising the sights, aiming and shooting’ (Väliaho 2014, 34). Playing these videogames therefore constructs a relationship between players and international politics through certain shared narratives. Being able to decode what is going on in the world through those narratives, players become capable of making sense of the ways in which wars are fought and the world is run. The experience of these narratives structures the possible field of geopolitical imaginations, options and hence, actions of the homefront. Just as ‘stories inform our lives . . . and live on in our imagination, long after the author has disappeared, they make their presence felt in books, movies, speeches, excuses for war, campaigns for peace’ (Mani 2010, 1), the narratives we experience during the gameplays connect us with the wider world of international politics as well. This is because, [p]opular narratives are ideological, but not just because they are fabrications or because they dupe and distract. They also work to transform real social and political desires and insecurities into manageable narratives in which these can be temporarily articulated, displaced or resolved. (Martin 2006, 110) In that respect, resorting to violence, both in the real and in the virtual worlds, as experienced and learned first-hand through gameplay narratives, would be the short-cut or ideal way to manage the situation. ‘Though set in the near future,

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Modern Warfare 3 seems to render the reality of contemporary wars as an embodied virtual experience in households across the developed world, thereby reifying and reinforcing the militarization of civilian life’ (Väliaho 2014, 32). Added to that, quoting Geertz, Väliaho claims that ‘video games could be characterized . . . as ‘sentimental education’’ tools (2014, 31) as ‘[m]uch of gameplay happens on the levels that words cannot reach’ (37). These experiential narratives are designed to reach players affectively. Thus, gameplays not only cognitively but also somatically affect the bodies: ‘[v]ideo game imagery possesses the power to literally make us move by evoking fundamental feelings of arousal and kinesthesia at the heart of self-experience’ (Väliaho 2014, 29–30). By virtue of this, during the gameplay, players give bodily reactions mirroring the avatar’s actions, and ‘[p]eople move their hands, bodies, eyes, and mouths when they play video games’ (Galloway 2006, 4). As the body becomes the node where the real and the virtual converge, simulations stimulate subjugations and narratives ‘resonate and coincide with other key practices and imaginations defining the political reality of life today, from scientific formulas to military (ir)rationalities and economic pursuits’ (Galloway 2006, 4). As a result, an unseen yet affective social milieu pervading the understandings of contemporary international politics emerges out of the gameplay. Similar to FPS game experience, McSorley (2012, 13) suggests that ‘somatic war’, which is ‘recorded from camcorders mounted on soldiers’ helmets foregrounds sensory immersion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability – that the endless war in Afghanistan is currently being made perceptible and palpable’. These helmet-cam recordings shot by real-life combatants in the frontlines are widely available. Of the examples uploaded to YouTube, U.S. Soldier Survives Taliban Machine Gun Fire during Firefight (FUNKER530 – Veteran Community & Combat Footage 2012) is particularly interesting. This video places you into the body of an American soldier atop a hill in Afghanistan for three minutes and twentyeight seconds. The video begins in the middle of an intense firefight and you experience the lifeworld of a soldier through his sight. The solider, under heavy fire, walks down the hill to find a hiding spot and calls out his teammates. While responding to an unseen enemy across the field with his M4A1 rifle, he suddenly runs out of bullets and checks his magazine packs. As you watch the video, the line between you and the soldier gradually becomes fuzzier. Your sight and moves are being carried away by those of him, and you start to feel as though it is you experiencing the firefight. After reloading the gun, you continue to move down as fast as possible to get a better vantage point to shoot the enemy. Upon falling down and dropping the rifle suddenly, you hastily try to get up and continue moving. The sound of gunfire coupled with the clattering of bullets piercing the ground immerses you even deeper into the video. As if the body of the soldier is your extension, a survival instinct kicks in and arouses fear. At the two-minute mark, you get shot, fall down on your back, and again lose your grip on your weapon. You start calling out to your friends: ‘I’m hit’. Yanking yourself behind a rock to protect your body from incoming fire, you keep calling out to your teammates for help. No one comes. With bated breath, you lean forward to retrieve your weapon. From 2:25 onwards, you get shot yet again, more severely this time, and you continue to shout for help while trying to hide under the rock next to you and checking for any traces of blood.

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 145 Such a video recording of a stressful real-life experience of a soldier leaves the viewer agitated. Witnessing – and to some extent experiencing – the soldier running for his life left me uneasy, and more sympathetic to the everyday realities and vulnerabilities of the battlefield, heightened by the vantage point I was positioned into. I lost grip of my critical eye analysing the video and sided with the soldier and embodied his survival instinct: from mimicking his moves by unintentionally bending my head down to ward off the incoming fire, to feeling what it would be like to be there as a person, fear set in. My muscles unintentionally synchronised with those of my surrogate (the soldier), but also a sense of pathos made me more sympathetic to the soldier’s being/fighting there. Not only does he becomes my surrogate in the battlefield; I also become his surrogate at the homefront. We move each other.

Analysis: Battlefield 4 ‘Fishing in Baku’ gameplay To provide further depth to the argument sketched out above, in this section I examine the official video of the latest Battlefield FPS game, Battlefield 4, named Battlefield 4: Official 17 Minutes ‘Fishing in Baku’ Gameplay Reveal on YouTube. The video provides the most detailed insight into the visual rhetoric of the game. To gather data, I watched the video and recorded every event that happened; an example of an event recording is: ’4:20 the glass breaks at the building across the street from us, some people get wounded and fall down (we are not sure if they are dead)’. I recorded a total of 81 events during the seventeen-minute video. Applying analytic induction (Gibbs 2007; Charmaz 2008; Pascale 2011), I based my codes on visual cues of macro discursive and visual cues of self–other construction, paying particularly close attention to how the video shows the self, the other and the properties that the video assigns to these constructions, such as agency, fragility, fighting, killing and immortality. I identified four recurring themes: chain of command; fighting with the friend to kill the faceless foe; the red mist and its absence; and immortality. Chain of command This theme suggests that the player has a place in the chain of command, and he is regularly reminded of his duties by the game mechanics as well as by his teammates. The game often prompts the current objective to the screen in an imperative verb form; any time the player has an interaction with one of his teammates, he also takes an order. These orders range from driving a car to killing the enemy. An exemplar of the first type of encounter occurs through the fourth minute mark, till 4:12. After the players meet with the rest of the squad, they realise that the squad is missing a mate, and the teammates inquire about a location of the fourth and last teammate. At 4:00, a teammate breaks the radio silence to locate another teammate, who informs them that he is coming in ‘hot’ and needs cover fire. Following his request, at 4:12 the player approaches a window, and he is prompted with the mission objective on the screen ‘Protect Irish’ (the nickname of the other teammate). The player locks, loads and prepares for the firefight. Commands usually include orders such as ‘Keep your head down’, ‘Step on it’ or ‘Stay on this side of the train track’. The most interesting one, however, happens

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at 15:52. At that time, an assault helicopter is chasing the player’s car at very close range. After the helicopter’s attempts to destroy the car from the front fail due to the player’s extraordinary skill in dodging close-range helicopter missiles, the helicopter makes a move towards the rear of the car. Meanwhile, the player, while in the driver’s seat, opens the door and hangs halfway out, facing backwards, all the while coordinating with his squad-mate to hold the wheel. The squad-mate successfully does so, and he simultaneously hands the player a grenade launcher as the player hangs halfway from the car. At that very moment, during the exchange of the grenade launcher, the squad-mate yells out ‘Burn those motherfuckers!’ As the helicopter, now behind the car, starts to shoot, time slows down. The player aims and as he gets hit by helicopter bullets, he successfully lands a grenade on the front end of the helicopter, after which the helicopter goes down in flames. These orders, especially the former, game-imposed, orders, keep the player focused on the objective at hand. Traditionally, military FPS games do not give the players different ways in which they can complete their objectives (except for Flashpoint series). Coupled with constant reminders of what the players need to do, in the form of orders, this creates a very rigid playing style. Ahearn (2011) defines agency as ‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’ (Ahearn 2011, 112). Through the enforcement of the game’s pop-up commands and the command of chain structure imposed by the teammates, the player loses any space to exercise agency. In other words, the player lacks a sociocultural context that can mediate any capacity to act. As such, the player becomes a subject of the system in a twofold manner: first, via the imposition of the game’s mechanisms; and second, through constant commands by teammates.

Figure 9.1 Your teammates are urging you to cut off the leg to save a squad-mate’s life Source: Battlefield 4: Official 17 Minutes “Fishing in Baku” Gameplay Reveal, YouTube (2013); Battlefield 4 images used with permission of Electronic Arts, Inc.

The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 147

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Fighting with the friend to kill the faceless foe This theme emerged based on the player’s encounters with friends and foes. Without exception, every enemy in the video was faceless – from afar or from up close. From afar, they were just black figures, while up close and personal moments revealed that they were all wearing the same goggles and face masks, hiding their facial features and expressions. In contrast, the player’s squad mates did not have face masks of any kind and their emotive expressions were easily readable from their facial movements. The nine-minute mark shows a remarkable example of the faceless foe. The scene starts with several enemy soldiers defending a building while the player’s squad engages them from a distance. Using their fire as cover and distraction, the player circumnavigates and goes behind the building. The player then begins to engage the enemies at close range with a shotgun. After killing all the enemies on the first floor, the player climbs up to the roof, where he sees a lone enemy combatant shooting at a friendly helicopter, his back turned towards the player. The player sneaks behind him and pulls out his knife. Yanking the enemy’s head backwards, the player stabs the enemy in the neck and moves on. As the player yanks the enemy’s head back, his entire face is revealed – except that the enemy is wearing black goggles and a facemask underneath. Therefore any kind of human expression that the enemy’s face might have registered in a real situation – surprise, shock, fear, pain – is completely covered by the goggles and the mask. By contrast, the player encounters a full range of emotions when a friendly squad-mate experiences pain. Through the thirteenth minute, the player and his squad-mates fight on a building’s rooftop. The building collapses and at 14:22

Figure 9.2 You are witnessing the pain your teammate suffers Source: Battlefield 4 (2013). Battlefield 4 images used with permission of Electronic Arts, Inc.

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the player sees that a squad-mate’s leg is stuck under a big block of concrete. He orders the player to cut his leg off due to time constraints and the imminent threat of approaching enemies. The player takes out his military issue knife and cuts through the entire leg with one swift motion. The cutting is not only preceded by a confused look of fear and determination on the face of the squad-mate, but it is also accompanied by a painful scream, after which the squad-mate passes out due to shock and the player drops his blood-stained knife, overcome with sorrow for what he had to do. The enemy combatants are therefore faceless, emotionless and soundless as they suffer and die, whereas the player and his squad-mates are full of expressions, verbally and nonverbally. The red mist and its absence Red mist happens when the player engages an enemy combatant with his rifle. The player sees a red mist on the enemy he just shot, implying a spray of blood. Absence of a red mist, however, happens when the player engages the enemy through explosives, either a hand grenade or a grenade launcher. After the player throws an explosive to enemy players, the player knows that it was a successful hit through the absence of the enemy player. In other words, after an explosion, the enemy player vanishes, ceases to exist. The most intense encounter with the red mist happens at the nine-minute mark, when the player sneaks up on the enemy and stabs him in the neck on the rooftop. At that moment, the player sees blood gushing out of the enemy’s neck, while the entire screen goes red. An example of the absence happens just before this moment. The player engages enemies on top of a building with his grenade launcher. He aims, fires and watches as the enemies simply disappear. Both cases, especially the last, hide the real-world consequences of these actions. Immortality The theme of immortality is sustained throughout the video. The player does not die or even get hurt. Throughout the video, the player gets hit by bullets more than twenty times but keeps on moving. The only reaction the player gives to being shot is a grunt at 7:03. The environment also does not have any effect on the player. An example of immortality and the lack of pain happens at 11:22. The player and his squad take a service elevator to the top of a building for extraction. All seems well when suddenly an enemy helicopter appears right in front of the building and starts shooting at the elevator. The player gets hit five times by helicopter bullets, and the screen almost goes black. While the player tries to hide, the elevator reaches the top, also being impervious to helicopter bullets. When the elevator suddenly stops at the top, the player falls down. As the helicopter starts firing again, however, the player gets up and starts running, while the helicopter bullets – which did not have much effect on the player – tear apart the concrete around the building. An example of the effect of the environment is right after that scene, from the twelve- to the thirteen-minute marks, when the building that the player is standing

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The un-scene affects of on-demand access to war 149 on starts to collapse. The player starts to slide down the collapsing building, holding onto a ledge just before falling down. Holding on to the ledge, the player sees his extraction helicopter go down in flames. At the same time, a squad-mate slides down the building and starts to fall down right next to the player. The player manages to catch his squad-mate while holding onto the concrete ledge with one hand. As the building collapses further, however, the player slides down and falls from the roof of the factory. After several seconds of darkness, the player opens his eyes. His squad-mate pushes small pieces of concrete off of the player. The player merely stands up, dusts off and moves on.

Un-scene affects of war: there be dragons Throughout the gameplay and the helmet-cam video, we have been introduced to a war against unidentifiable, disordered, ill-motivated, faceless, flagless, emotionless, killable and unmournable objects. Yet the subject position we have occupied is the complete opposite: identifiable, ordered, faced, emotive, motivated, vulnerable and just combatants. The threat of the faceless enemy is amorphous and potentially anywhere: the virtual worlds of video games are coloured in particular with danger and anxiety related to the constant awareness of potential threat. Enemies lurk around corners, waiting to kill us while we try to keep one step ahead of them; we can never tell if there is an enemy sniper hiding somewhere; the threat of death is imminent. (Väliaho 2014, 35) According to the narrative of the Battlefield 4 gameplay as well, killable objects exist in multiple areas of the world – in this case in Baku, rather than the Middle East – as they can pop up anywhere as uncontrollable, unidentifiable, unpredictable, faceless, destructive threats. As I propose above, digital ways of experiencing combat have transformed a third-person spectatorship of the homefront into a first-person observership of the battlefront. This coalescence between the homefront and the battlefront, the virtual and the real, highlights two important ramifications for the study of IR. First, mediated forms of warfare enable the construction of an invisible, ostensibly peaceful, yet highly affective geopolitical repertoire to draw upon by the population/homefront in the face of real geopolitical events. The mediations of real combat and the experience of it through the virtual together create a self-contained narrative of world politics in which the belligerent steps taken to cope with the enemy, or rather with the outside world, is acknowledged, euphemised and condoned. The study of world politics should be more attentive to these connections, collapses and condonations between the real and the virtual. Second, as Sylvester argues, ‘to study war as experience requires that human bodies come into focus as units that have war agency and are also prime targets of war violence and war enthusiasms’ (2012, 484). Yet, as these aspects of war are made ‘perceptible and palpable’

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(McSorley 2013) to the public through visual culture, IR should question the lay understandings and experiences of geopolitics as well, because war has become a playfully transmitted form of violence.

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Notes 1 The author would like to thank to Pete Adey, Klaus Dodds, Ali Ersen Erol, Caitlin Hamilton and Laura Shepherd for their invaluable comments and supportive feedbacks. 2 The use of this verb is deliberately gendered to refer to the entanglement between gender and militarisation processes devised by governments (Sjoberg 2014).

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Power, M. (2007) ‘Digitized virtuosity: Video war games and post-9/11 cyber- deterrence’, Security Dialogue, 38(2): 271–288. Power, M. and Crampton, A. (2005) ‘Reel geopolitics: Cinemato-graphing political space’. Geopolitics, 10(2): 193–203. Protevi, J. (2013) ‘Affect, agency, and responsibility: The act of killing in the age of cyborgs’, 128–137 in McSorley, K. (ed.) War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience, London: Routledge. Reid, J. (2009) The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Salter, M. (2011) ‘The geographical imaginations of video games: Diplomacy, civilization, America’s army and Grand Theft Auto IV’, Geopolitics, 16(2): 359–388. Salter, M.B. and Mutlu, C. (2013) Research Methods in Critical Security Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Sjoberg, L. (2014) Gender, War, and Conflict, Cambridge: Polity Press. Sylvester, C. (2012) ‘War experiences/war practices/war theory’, Millennium Journal of International Studies, 40(3): 483–503. Taylor, P. (2003) Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tilly, C. (2000) Coercion, Capital and European States: AD 990–1992, New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell. Thomson, M. (2008) Military Computer Games and the New American Militarism: What Computer Games Teach Us About War, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Nottingham. Valiaho, P. (2014) Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power and the Neoliberal Brain, Cambridge: MIT Press. Van Creveld, M. (2013) Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Veeren, E. (2013) ‘Clean war, invisible war, liberal war: The clean and dirty politics of Guantánamo’, 89–112 in Knapp, A. and Footitt, H. (eds) Liberal Democracies at War: Conflict and Representation, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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10 ‘Pocket-sized’ politics Binders, Big Bird and other memes of the 2012 US presidential campaign Sandra Yao In the digital age, increased opportunities for immediate access to information have created new forms of political interaction. The compression of complex ideas into small, viral, ‘pocket-sized’ media such as internet memes has dramatically altered our engagement with politics. Memes are representative of a catalogue of significant popular cultural moments, where the online community itself curates and assigns value through processes of dissemination, replication and/or imitation. This chapter will seek to engage in a debate about the effect of internet memes on digital participation, a form of participation where ‘everyday’ individuals become empowered agents and agenda-setters. This is a space within which individuals participate through macro image creations that often carry compact criticisms about the current political atmosphere, thus frequently transcending geopolitics through digital means. This chapter traces the ways in which the memes that emerged during the 2012 US presidential debates represented a real-time translation of campaign events by the online community. They were facilitated by their succinct and easily accessible qualities, hence making them the ideal carriers of user-interpreted and simplified versions of campaign content. Internet memes represent a new springboard towards a politically driven grassroots engagement, where ‘everyday’ individuals may become empowered as agents and agenda setters with a reach that can transcend geopolitical boundaries through digital access. In the first section, I introduce the idea of ‘participatory culture’ in the digital age, its meanings and implications. A brief review of the definitions of memes used in this paper follows, along with an exploration of the three most prominent memes that were created to reflect online sentiment regarding the presidential debates. I conclude with a discussion merging the selected case studies and their meaning within participatory culture.

Participatory culture in the digital age ‘Participatory culture’ has been of increasing interest to media scholars and practitioners over the last decade. In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation established a $50 million dollar initiative that sought to explore the ways that digital media was beginning to transform the lives of young people (Delwiche and Henderson 2013). Henry Jenkins (2006) led a team of researchers as part of the larger project, focusing on new trends of the media industry and including the rise of ‘participatory

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culture’ in contemporary society. Participatory cultures, Jenkins (2006, 7) argues, are cultures that are characterised by ‘relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations and some type of information mentorship whereby what is known by the most experience is passed along to novices’. Essential to this contemporary form of participatory culture is a sense of contributing to the community, where ‘members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connections with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created)’ (Jenkins 2006, 7, emphasis added). It’s not hard to spot this newfound form of participatory culture around us. With the present dominance of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit, one need only have access to the internet in order to become part of this online community. Every day, people around the world actively engage with both close and external networks of users. These users have at their disposal tools that facilitate the curating of one’s own online image or persona in relation to the community they are or wish to be a part of. Information sharing capacities that were once monopolised by a few hierarchical institutions, such as newspapers, television stations, and universities, are now also shared by independent publishers, video-sharing sites, collaboratively maintained knowledge banks and other sites of user-generated content (Delwiche and Henderson 2013, 4). This new form of participatory culture however, is about more than increasing the level and amount of everyday citizen participation. Participatory culture in this current digital age has fundamentally transformed the ways in which people are able to communally collect, classify, organise and build new knowledge banks. Pierre Levy (2007) referred to this as the emergence of collective intelligence. As Lessig (2008) points out, what has emerged from what was once a ‘read-only’ media culture is a ‘read/write’ culture that has opened venues of participation among media audiences. New technologies have given those with access the opportunity to participate in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. YouTube, for example, exemplifies this ‘read/write’ culture that is filled with both creators and viewers alike. The existence of such spaces is significant. For example, as Burgess and Green (2009, 6) point out, for popular video-sharing sites like YouTube, ‘participatory culture is not a gimmick or a sideshow; it is absolutely core business’. One need only look at the subscription rates of some of the top YouTube channels to understand the type of scope that such forms of participation have garnered. As of July 2015, the top three YouTube channels were ‘Pew Die Pie’ with 38.5 million subscribers, followed by channel ‘Hola Soy German’ at 23.5 million and YouTube’s own spotlight channel, ‘YouTube Spotlight’ at 23 million. Even with this level of support however, YouTube channel hosts are only able to reach such large platforms through using YouTube – a Google-owned company – itself. The lines between production and consumption have become blurred. Atton (2004) argues that individually created media has been powerfully characterized by their potential for participation . . . Rather than media production being the province of elite, centralized organizations

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and institutions, alternative media offer possibilities for individuals and groups to create their own media. Atton (2004, 9) Powerful things happen when everyday citizens have access to such large information-sharing and knowledge-building forums. Instead of pioneers discovering the new frontier, they become creators and potential trend- and agenda-setters. As Lievrouw (2011, 19) notes, alternative forms of media can essentially ‘challenge or alter dominant, expected, or accepted ways of performing society, culture, and politics’. What is more important however, is that beyond ‘participatory culture’ lies what he calls ‘participatory democracy’, defined as ‘the widespread, direct involvement of citizens in both processes and governance’ (Lievrouw 2011, 149). This new form of mediated engagement therefore appears to enjoy what Fishkin (2009) describes as the ‘trilemma’ of democracy: equality, participation and deliberation. Therefore, in addition to creating digital communities and building knowledge bases, new media forms can also be used for political means. Arguing for the inherent value of participation to democracy, De Kosnik (2008, 96) states that ‘new technologies have opened up the possibility for fulfillment of a greater range of the potentialities inherent in the idea of democracy itself. A more participatory democracy, facilitated by digital tools, is a democracy more fully realized’. Asen and Brouwer (2001) support this idea and argue for the need to acknowledge and embrace the ‘multiplicity of the public’ in order to facilitate more inclusive deliberation. The internet may even have the potential to revive the public sphere supported by the attractive prospect of online anonymity, as argued by Papacharissi (2004): ‘Anonymity online obliterates real-life identity boundaries and enhances free an open communication, thus promoting a more enlightened exchange of ideas’ (267). New forms of public discourse are not, however, without their detractors and for good reason. While there are benefits to the increased level and numerous forms of participation that the digital age has provided, there are also concessions and costs of access that users must make in order to be part of any of the online communities. Most, if not all, social media sites come with packaged terms of agreement to which you must adhere if you wish to access the site. Furthermore, communities can also self-regulate by praising specific online behaviours while condemning others through exclusion or worse. For example, bulletin-style forum Reddit functions through a system of ‘up-votes’ and ‘down-votes’, where the most prominently-featured posts receive the former and disliked posts, the latter. Dalton and Klingmann (2007) further acknowledge that more open political participation can lead to a tyranny of the masses, as majority rule trumps minority rights, and unequal access favours those with the time and resources to participate. Furthermore, Van Zoonen (2005) argues that powerful institutions can manipulate ‘populist’ forms of public discourse to create antagonism, distract the public or even cheapen political discourse. Online ‘astroturfing’ is an example of this form of manipulation, where co-ordinated campaigns of messages supporting a specific

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agenda are distributed via the internet. The messages are deceptive in that they create the appearance of having been generated by independent individuals, while this is not the case. What is key is the creation of a false impression that the particular idea or opinion being disseminated has widespread support. An example of this is the ‘50-Cent Party’, a group of commentators hired by the Chinese government or the Communist Party of China to post comments favourable towards party policies and to shape public opinion on online message boards and forums. Contemporary artist and activist Ai Wei Wei (2012) published a story for the New Statesman, in which he interviewed a member of the 50-Cent Party, unraveling the many ways in which the paid commentators try to guide online opinion. Another example is a 2006 YouTube video called ‘Al Gore’s Penguin Army’, spoofing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Made to look like an amateur production posted by a single individual, the video was later linked to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C. public relations and lobbying firm whose clients included the Exxon Mobile Corp (Regalado and Searcey 2006). These examples demonstrate the ease with which such forums can be manipulated to build facades of genuine individual citizen action and participation, while hiding ulterior motives. The Web 2.0 ‘golden era’ of participation has therefore certainly produced some mixed results. It is sometimes credited with assisting in the liberation of Egypt, but it has not been able to implement the same effects in Bahrain or Syria. While social networks provide the user a means through which to share perspectives and potentially broaden their public sphere of influence, they are also fundamentally created and administered for such users by new industrial giants that make billiondollar profits based upon user participation. The very companies that provide these services in many ways have the final say in determining the boundaries of participation. As pointed out by Burgess and Green (2009, 24), ‘there is no necessary transfer of media power’ in a Web. 2.0 era. Therefore, voices are in essence mediated through and by dominant discourse and powerful institutions. Even if Web 2.0 has increased public participation, the terms of engagement are not being set by the public. However, a perhaps more optimistic conception of Web 2.0 as constituting an abundance of ‘user-generated content’ opens up the potential to crush the systematic and societal barriers to participation. Shirky (2008, 22) finds that we currently live in a world where ‘most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done’. The new age of media allows for individuals to have the freedom to explore, raise our voices louder and have them be heard by a wider audience, thus dramatically adding to the media that is being consumed.

Internet memes Internet memes are modern popular culture artefacts, curated and created through online participation. They represent a catalogue of culturally significant moments, where an online community itself curates and assigns value through processes of dissemination, replication and/or imitation. The term ‘meme’ was coined by biologist Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) and was meant to describe the flow and flux

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of culture. Dawkins saw the meme as the cultural counterpart to the gene, which is considered within biology to be strongly determinant of individual traits. In the Selfish Gene, Dawkins (1976, 189) starts with the premise that ‘most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: “culture”’. He continues: The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unity of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I was a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchphrases, cloth fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. (Dawkins 1976, 192) Memes are therefore artefacts that are passed from person to person by means of cultural imitation and appropriation. Taking Dawkins’ idea further, Shifman (2014, 41, emphasis added) provides a three part definition: ‘(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated and/or transformed via the Internet by many users’. Internet culture has embraced memes in a way that was not foreseen by Dawkins. Shifman (2014, 18, emphasis in original) points out ‘that the meme is the best concept to encapsulate some of the most fundamental aspects of the Internet in general, and of the so-called participatory or Web 2.0 culture in particular’. Memes have three different criteria: (1) they must pass from person to person but gradually build into a shared social phenomenon; (2) they can be reproduced through imitation and repackaging; and (3) they will propagate through a process of competition and selection (Shifman 2014). User-generated content sites such as Reddit, 4chan, Tumblr and Imgur thrive on and are the epicenter of participatory media artefacts and discourses. The memes produced by participants on these and other similar sites act as communication ties between various users. Images and text are combined in single images to share jokes, make an observation or propose an argument. Certain images or themes, however, gain more traction that others and this is due to their acceptance among the population. If a meme does not connect with other users, then it is likely to not be reproduced or recreated. The goal of such sites, in many ways, is therefore to attain approval.

The 2012 US presidential campaign The use of the internet and various forms of digital media were not particular to the 2012 US presidential campaign. Dubbed by some to have been the ‘YouTube Elections’, the 2008 US presidential campaign saw a real increase in the use of internet and digital media in US electoral politics. Various researchers have considered the varying levels of efficacy of such digital media outlets like Facebook, Twitter

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and YouTube (see, for example, Anstead and Chadwick 2008; Jamieson and Gottfried 2010; Kushin and Yamamoto 2010; Wattal et al. 2010; Kirk and Schill 2011; Towner and Dulio 2011). Although they offer somewhat differing conclusions regarding how effective the outlets were as new forms of democratic participation or for attracting the electorate, they do agree that the importance of digital media outlets will not diminish. In analysing the lessons of the 2008 US presidential campaign for British politics for example, Anstead and Chadwick (2008) point out how online campaigns have the potential to ‘democratise their organisational structures and electoral environment in ways likely to catalyse internet-enabled civic engagement’ (109). Kirk and Schill (2011) further point out that the Internet is not necessarily about transformation but instead about increased participation and conversation about the political issues. In October of 2012, the internet again became a sort of battleground during the US presidential elections. Then Democrat incumbent Barack Obama, running with Joe Biden, squared off against Republican Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan. They became central figures in a slew of internet memes that in many ways became crucial to the ways in which the public and media engaged with and interpreted the event. The campaigns had well-established online presences, including a wide range of online communities, weblogs and interactive features that became hotspots of political and election-related news. Popular online forum community Reddit hosted several forums dedicated to holding discussions regarding political and partisan issues, including a designated space ‘/r/2012Elections’. Twitter introduced an official election account @TwitterGovernment, in addition to a special index page that charted trending topics and compared the popularity of the two presidential candidates. Google and YouTube both launched dedicated sections that offered visitors and viewers access to collections of news updates, voter demographics and other relevant information. Dubbed by some as the first ‘Meme Election’, the 2012 US presidential election saw the emergence of campaign memes that proliferated and became a mechanism for initiating conversations about candidates and campaign events. The vast collection of memes archived during this period represent a culmination of online discussions that often compressed moments into ‘pocket-sized’ packages. Memes reflecting the events of the campaign were created through the appropriation of photos and soundbites into macro images. These were later personalised/altered/ remixed and shared from person to person through social networks. The various memes, I argue, represented a real-time translation of the campaign events that were deemed to be of most interest by the online community. Their quick and widespread diffusion was facilitated by their succinct and easily accessible qualities, making them the ideal carriers of user-interpreted and simplified versions of campaign content. Although the campaign was characterised by flurries of different memes throughout, I engage here only with some of the more prolific macro image1 collections that, in many ways, have become synonymous with public recollection of the campaign: Fired Big Bird, Binders Full of Women, and Horses and Bayonets.

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Fired Big Bird Originating from the long-running American educational children’s television series Sesame Street, the giant yellow-feathered Big Bird character became the star of an infamous collection of 2012 US presidential campaign memes. The controversy surrounded a proposed budget cut to the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) – an independently run non-profit organisation and provider of television programs to public television stations in the US. During the debate held on 3 October 2012 at the University of Colorado in Denver, Romney responded to a question posed by PBS journalist Jim Lehrer regarding the types of cuts he would implement to lessen the taxpayer’s burden, stating: I’m sorry Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird – actually I like you too, but I’m not going to keep spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for’. (Wall Street Journal 2012) Unbeknownst to Romney, the quote provided online creators the perfect source of inspiration for some of the most popular memes of the debates. Users took advantage of Romney’s use of a popular culture icon and spun it into what is now often referred to as the ‘Fired Big Bird’ meme. Romney’s comment regarding the beloved Big Bird quickly sparked the birth of Twitter accounts and hashtags like #FiredBigBird and #BigBirdRomney. Surrounding these trending topics was a debate regarding his proposed budget cut proposal and, of course, the fate of Big Bird himself, By the end of the debate at 10:30 pm EST, #SaveBigBird became the fourth highest trending topic on Twitter (Know Your Meme 2014). A flurry of image macro memes began to flood the Reddit and Tumblr sites, all in some way portraying Big Bird’s future life of unemployment (see Figure 1). Others poked fun at the implication from Romney that the US economic deficit could be solved through cuts to public funding, while some ridiculed the importance of his decisions (see Figures 2 and 3).

Figure 10.1 U is for unemployed Source:Know Your Meme (2012d), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/412239-fired-big-birdmitt-romney-hates-big-bird

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Figure 10.2 Obama kills Bin Laden, Romney wants Big Bird Source: Know Your Meme (2012a), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/411902-fired-big-birdmitt-romney-hates-big-bird

Figure 10.3 We kill Big Bird – Romney Joker Source: Know Your Meme (2012e), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/412481-fired-big-birdmitt-romney-hates-big-bird

While only the first image maintains purity in its use of Big Bird – playing on Sesame Street’s educational aspect – the two other images are examples of where single ideas like ‘Fired Big Bird’ can be remixed with other references to either reinforce or in other cases exaggerate and hyperbolise the ‘original’ idea. Figure 2 implies that Obama deals with serious issues and enemies (for example, Osama Bin Laden), while Romney focuses instead on a children’s show

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‘Pocket-sized’ politics 161 character, Big Bird. Figure 3 shows a more stylised macro image of Romney as the Joker character from the comic book and movie Batman franchise. In this case, the image draws from the pop cultural memory and interpretation of the Joker as a sadistic and twisted character in order to embellish the ‘truth’ underlying the meme – portraying Romney as someone who perhaps cares little for publicly funded programs. More than 67 million Americans tuned in to watch this debate, making it the most widely viewed first presidential debate in 32 years (O’Connel 2012). Although polls across the country showed that viewers believed that Romney had won the first debate (CBS, CNN, Gallup), ‘Big Bird’ actually became the most talked about moment of the debate. The next morning even Sesame Street responded to the event with a tweet as through written by Big Bird stating, ‘My bed time is usually 7:45, but I was really tired yesterday and fell asleep at 7! Did I miss anything last night?’ (Sesame Street Twitter 2012). This tweet has since been retweeted over 11,000 times and favourited more than 2,000 times (https://twitter.com/ sesamestreet/status/253852653367468032). The Big Bird meme is thus an example of how online communities can change focus and compress large sound bites into small, easy-to-digest images that can also be highly influential and powerful. Regardless of what form or style of meme the perception took, Romney remained the core villain of the story. Even after Sesame Workshop acknowledged that it actually received ‘very little funding from PBS’ and that the notion of any future president having the ability to kill Big Bird was ‘misleading’, Romney’s reputation had been set (Parker 2012a). He was unable to escape the negative association that had been created between himself and a loveable children’s TV show character, which made him an easier target for what was arguably the most memorable meme of the 2012 US presidential memes. Binders full of women The ‘Binders Full of Women’ collection of memes was inspired by a direct quote from former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, given as an answer to a question posed by an audience member, Katherine Fenton. She asked both candidates to address the issue of pay inequality for women and how they would solve the inequalities that existed in the workplace. Romney answered with an anecdote about how had sought to establish a gender-balanced cabinet during his governorship in Massachusetts: And I said, ‘Well, gosh, can’t we – can’t we find some – some women that are also qualified? I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks,’ and they brought us whole binders full of women’. (On Demand News 2012) Although, taken on its own, the comment could have been understood as a genuine effort on his behalf to take real steps at addressing the gender gap, the online community thought otherwise. The online reaction to Romney’s quote was almost instantaneous. Image macros with Romney’s ‘binder’ response started to emerge

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Figure 10.4 Trap her, keep her Source: Binders Full of Women (2012c), http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/image/33746860218

Figure 10.5 No one puts Baby in a binder Source: Know Your Meme (2012c), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/419403-binders-full-of-women

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Figure 10.6 One does not simply. . . Source: Know Your Meme (2012b), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/419402-binders-full-of-women

and circulate through Twitter, with several novelty accounts still being active to this day: @RomneysBinder, @BinderofWomen, @Romneys_Binder and @RomneyBinders. The gaffe also launched the popular single-topic Tumblr blog, Binders Full of Women, a website that gained instant notoriety after being published by now Digg editor, Veronica De Souza. Her first Tumblr blog post, reproduced above in Figure 4, sparked a long series of images that took the ‘binders full of women’ moment and transformed it into a whole crowd-sourced, meme-generating project around the topic.2 Above are examples of other user-generated memes that were shared on Tumblr. Like the ‘Fired Big Bird’ memes, they were also created in reference to already existing pop culture memories. Figure 5 plays on the famous quote from the movie Dirty Dancing (Ardolino 1987) ‘No one puts Baby in a corner’, and Figure 6 references a line from the film adaptation of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Jackson 2001) and interestingly also becomes part of the already existing collection of ‘One Does Not Simply Walk into Mordor’ memes dedicated to remixing and creating parodies of the original movie line. Even when memes emerge from specific events, they possess a malleability that allows users to appropriate the concept as they see fit. This flexibility gives creators the agency to personalise communally understood concepts into forms that are tailored to one’s own tastes and points of reference. Veronica De Souza never claimed to have a political intention underlying the creation of the Tumblr blog, ‘I didn’t really make this for any political reason,’ she explained during an interview with CNN, ‘I just thought it was really funny’ (CNN Starting Point 2012). The thousands of memes on her site are therefore representative of, as Shifman argues, ‘emblems of a culture saturated with personal branding and strategic self-commodification . . . in an era marked by ‘network

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individualism,’ people use memes to simultaneously express both their uniqueness and their connectivity’ (2014, 30). The Tumblr blog features a variety of different types of memes; some like the examples above emphasise the absurdity of the phrase itself without necessarily engaging directly with the larger political question of equality. Others, however, take a much more openly political stance. Figure 7 is an example of a young woman dressed as a woman in a binder and the text outside directly engages with the question of women’s rights. Figure 8 is an image of actress Amy Poehler as her character Leslie Knope, on the television show Parks and Recreation, demanding that Romney not put her in a binder. The debate and internet buzz surrounding the binders meme also led to a more in-depth conversation regarding Romney’s claims, which were later revealed to be untrue in a story first published by David Bernstein from the Boston Phoenix (2012). The truth behind the story was that a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP in order to address the lack of women in senior

Figure 10.7 Young woman in a binder Source: Binders Full of Women (2012b), http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/post/34858150744/ my-binder-of-women-costume-all-of-the

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Figure 10.8 Don’t put me in a binder Source: Binders Full of Women (2012a), http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com/post/33987704459

leadership positions in the state government. In a study done for the Women and Politics Institute, Lawless and Fox (2012) outlined the consistent underrepresentation of women in the 112th Congress where, at the time, 84 per cent of its members were men. The under-representation of women in government also extended to lower levels of government, where for example, women represented only 8 per cent of the mayors of 100 of the largest cities in the country (Lawless and Fox 2012). Within a global context, the US ranked 82nd in percentage of women in national legislature at the time of the elections (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2015).3 MassGAP had researched and put together a binder full of women qualified for all different senior level administrative positions, which was presented to Romney after he had been elected. The story of him asking for such a study was actually false (Bernstein 2012). It would be potentially unfair to assume that the truth behind the event would not have been discovered had such a controversy not

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been created through the creation of memes. However, it would not be unfair to state that memes aided in the revelation of such a truth. Where normally such a comment might not have been distinguished from background audio noise, it was instead captured by the selective attention of an audience and used as way to produce, reproduce and share a message regarding the treatment of women in government. More importantly, the meme may have also had a role in changing voter turnout patterns that year. In a study done by Omero and McGuinness (2012, 1) for the Center for American Progress, they found that ‘women’s voices determined the outcome of the election’. According to exit poll data for the 2012 elections, 53 per cent of the voters were women and 55 per cent of that sum voted for President Barack Obama (New York Times 2012). The argument here of course is not that the meme itself changed electoral patterns, but that its creation and mobilisation through the online community did in fact make a difference in awareness and political participation. Horses and bayonets The third and final US presidential debate was held on 23 October 2012. Republican candidate Mitt Romney criticised President Barack Obama’s plan to reduce the size of naval forces, pointing out that the number of military ships had decreased since the beginning of World War I in 1917. He stated: Our navy is smaller now then at the any time since 1917. The navy said they need 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now at under 285 . . . we’re headed down to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me. (quoted by CNN Starting Point 2012) In response, Barack Obama quipped: You mention the navy, for example, and the fact that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets. We have these things called aircraft carriers and planes land on them. We have ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. It’s not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships, it’s ‘What are our priorities?’ (quoted by CNN Starting Point 2012) Within minutes of Obama’s response, as was the case during the two other debates, the internet spawned a whole slew of Twitter handles like @obamasbayonets, @HorsesBayonets and @HorsesBayonette, a handle which had originally been @ RomneyBinders, but switched names to keep up with the changing trends (Know Your Meme 2012a). While Twitter was experiencing a flurry of its own, two blogs were created on Tumblr: Horses Bayonets and Horses and Bayonets, both of which began to curate a collection of some of the most popular photo-manipulated

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Figures 10.9 and 10.10 Examples of ‘Horses and Bayonets’ Source: Know Your Meme (2012f), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/422705-horses-and-bayonets and Know Your Meme (2012g), http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/422959-horses-and-bayonet

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images, image macros and other similar memes across the web. This quick community response through Twitter handle name changes and Tumblr blog creations is a testament to the speed and flexibility of digital media and users themselves. Outdated topic-specific Twitter handles can therefore be reinvented to either reflect new trends or even be the new trend itself. Unlike the two other memes, the ‘Horses and Bayonets’ meme (see Figures 9 and 10 for examples) was not created from an accidental gaffe in speech from Mitt Romney. It was different in that was it developed as a scripted and planned response meant to be picked and used by the online community; and it was. The Obama campaign further capitalised on the occasion by purchasing the search term ‘bayonets’ on Twitter. Perhaps it was because this meme was created more from a scripted moment than a spontaneous gaffe that caused it to be the weakest of the three 2012 presidential debate memes. Though it was still clear that the public was keen on finding that ‘meme-able’ moment of the debate, it did not gain the same level of notoriety as did the others. A simple comparison of the number of total memes under each theme is a way to gauge the level of online user interest to engage with the meme by finding, editing or creating their own images and uploading them onto meme and viral phenomena collection website Know Your Meme. ‘Horses and Bayonets’ (Know Your Meme 2012c) has the least number of page views with 58,000 and a collection of 66 uploaded images. In comparison, ‘Fired Big Bird’ (Know Your Meme 2012d) has a current total of 402 uploaded images and the ‘Binders Full of Women’ (Know Your Meme 2012e) page has more than 189,000 views.

But does it all meme anything? The meme collections discussed above are actually just a part of a larger meme trend of 2012 US presidential campaign memes that began with the nominations in September 2012. The memes explored in this paper are specific examples of digital artefacts that can be, and have been, produced in response to real-time presidential debates. In many ways, their existence is a testament to the fast-paced actions that individuals and communities online can take in response to real-life events. They are also significant representations of how easily select content can be taken out of context and be simplified, but not simple. They are able to draw power from what Rintel (2012, 12) outlines as ‘combination of timeliness, timelessness, and seriality’. These features are especially true of the 2012 US presidential memes, which were created, consumed and spread during peak moments of political interest. Whether created for purely humorous reasons, to shed light on a serious political issue or both, they resonated with the public with varying levels of success. The memes created are not static. Once they pass through online creators and consumers, they become imbued with individuals’ own critiques and commentary. The content, as Jenkins et al. (2013, 213) point out, ‘does not remain fixed in borders but rather circulates . . . not the product of top-down design but rather the result of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces’.

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‘Pocket-sized’ politics 169 Although not all memes necessarily sparked in-depth political conversations, the fact is that some did. ‘Fired Big Bird’ spawned conversations regarding the embedded divide between Republicans and Democrats in relation to publicly funded programs and Romney’s disconnection with the lower-income class (Blow 2012; Hines 2012; Kingsley 2012; McCarthy 2012). Although ‘Binders Full of Women’ was not started with a political message in mind, it quickly turned into a conversation about the under-representation of women in government and about women’s rights in general (Cardona 2012; Franke-Ruta 2012; Hess 2012; Hsu 2012; Meltzer 2012; Parker 2012b; Stern 2012). The news articles that emerged post-Obama’s ‘Horses and Bayonets’ utterance, however, were as much about Obama’s debate strategy as they were about the US army itself (Estes 2012; Foley 2012; Judkis 2012; Liptak 2012; Orr 2012; Stenovec 2012). Although it is hard to say for certain, how the meme comes to be does in some way influence its popularity and efficiency. Perhaps it was the perception of ‘Horses and Bayonets’ as a debate tactic and less of a spontaneous creation that limited its potential virality or perhaps it simply did not carry the same amount of political weight, thus making it suitable for laughs, but not for more. The difference in popularity is also representative of the active role the audience members take in making meaning of the environment around them, using, as Jenkins et al. (2013, 293) suggest, the ‘media text at their disposal to forge connections with each other’, but only those that make sense within their own world view. It should also be noted that the most popular memes that became trending topics were inherently anti-Republican in nature, bringing to question the issue of bias and the identity of the creators and consumers. A study on the role of technology in the 2012 US presidential campaign by Aaron Smith (2012) for the Pew Research Center found that six out of ten Americans used social networking sites (SNS). On average, over all social networking platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr), the most popular demographic was women between the ages of 18–29. What is also interesting to note is that the highest self-identified ideological grouping categorised itself as ‘moderate’ (36 per cent), with ‘conservative’ following at 24 per cent and ‘liberal’ at 18 per cent (Smith 2012). This almost even spread of ideological self-identification will inevitably have an impact on the memes that we see online. So perhaps the question then is not about representation at all, but instead about awareness. Although it is clear that one-time surveys are not representative of long-term trends, Smith (2012) found that 25 per cent of SNS users became more involved in a political or social issue after having read about it on a social networking site. The memes from this event were not just absorbed by a singular audience. They are not simply products of consumption. They are recommended to friends, who pass along the link to other friends and so it continues down the line. Consumption in this light does not stop at the acquisition of a product, it also means becoming part of a ‘cultural economy which rewards participation’ (Jenkins et al. 2013, 294). This is not to make the argument that increased participation means equal participation. The spread of media does not happen through an infinitely free space.

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There are rules and regulations that must be followed. As long as there remains a space to share, there is an equal chance for restrictions to be placed upon it as well. Companies can restrict the ways in which material is allowed to circulate, in the same way users can refuse to circulate content with which they do not agree (Jenkins et al. 2013). Furthermore, we take for granted the ease of internet access, especially in North America. The ‘digital divide’ (see, for example, Haythornwaite and Wellman 2002; Chadwick 2006) separates society into technological ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Even though global internet usage rates have increased over 700 per cent from 2000–2014, there remains a glaring disparity between access in developed and developing nations. In Canada and the United States, over 85 per cent of the populations have access to the internet. However, only 26.5 per cent of the entire population of the African continent can say the same (Internet World Stats 2014). Taking these numbers into account inevitably also means understanding that the ‘participatory culture’ is skewed towards the privileged. We therefore face an obligation to account for the ‘dystopian realities of a world where people have uneven access to the means of participation and where many are discouraged from even trying’ (Jenkins 2006, 124). The privilege inherent to online access extends beyond physical access to include the necessary knowledge and understanding of the norms of the online community itself. Referring specifically to crisis memes, Rintel (2012, 13) argues that, ‘the in-jokes and associated templating knowledge needed to both understand and create’ hold much more meaning for the internet and tech-savvy, than the millions of internet users who have no concept of meme history or billions who do not even know what they are. Ultimately, barriers will exist regardless of what level of analysis is taken. Schäfer (2011) argues that the term ‘participatory culture’ is actually a label used to describe an argument about community, empowerment and progress that exists within a cultural system of established structures and values with established gatekeepers. Even so, this chapter has sought to argue that, despite existing barriers and digital media norms, the internet can and does offer the space for individuals to voice and share their opinions; opinions that can, in fact, shape and direct conversations towards the political and social issues that are of importance to them, as seen through the examples of the 2012 US presidential debate memes. They can also exist as lasting reminders of the issues that were representative of a specific time; even if physical memories fade, digital memories online do not.

Notes 1 A ‘macro image’ is a general term used to describe captioned images that are usually composed of a picture and a witty message or catchphrase. Macro images are also used on discussion forums and image boards as means to convey feelings or reactions to other members of the community, similar to emoticons or the more contemporary emergence of emojis. Macro images are one of the more used and prevalent form of internet memes. 2 Image originally created by Brendan Tobin and submitted to Veronica De Souza’s Tumblr blog. 3 The ranking has since risen to 71st, as of June 2015 (Inter-Parliamentary Union 2015).

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‘Pocket-sized’ politics 173 Know Your Meme (2012a) ‘Image #411,902’, Cheezburger Network, available at http:// knowyourmeme.com/photos/411902-fired-big-bird-mitt-romney-hates-big-bird, accessed 14 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2012b) ‘Image #419,402’, Cheezburger Network, available at http:// knowyourmeme.com/photos/419402-binders-full-of-women, accessed 10 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2012c) ‘Image #419,403’, Cheezburger Network, available at http:// knowyourmeme.com/photos/419403-binders-full-of-women, accessed 10 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2012d) ‘U is for Unemployed’, Cheezburger Network, available at http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/412239-fired-big-bird-mitt-romney-hates-big-bird, accessed 12 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2012e) ‘We Kill Big Bird – Romney Joker’, Cheezburger Network, available at http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/412481-fired-big-bird-mitt-romneyhates-big-bird, 13 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2012f) ‘Image #422,705’, Cheezburger Network, available at http:// knowyourmeme.com/photos/422705-horses-and-bayonets, accessed 10 Jan 2015. Know Your Meme (2012g) ‘Irritated Aircraft Carrier’, Cheezburger Network, available at http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/422959-horses-and-bayonets, accessed 10 Jan 2015. Know Your Meme (2013) ‘Horses and bayonets’, Cheezburger Network, 11 August 2015, available at http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/horses-and-bayonets, accessed 14 January 2015. Know Your Meme (2014) ‘Binders full of women’, Cheezburger Network, 20 October 2014, available at http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/binders-full-of-women, accessed 15 January 2015. Kushin, M.J. and Yamamoto, M. (2010) ‘Did social media really matter? College students’ use of online media and political decision making in the 2008 election’, Mass Communication and Society, 13: 608–630. Lawless, J.L. and Fox, R.L. (2012) ‘Men rule: The continued underrepresentation of women in politics’, available at www.american.edu/spa/wpi/upload/2012-Men-RuleReport-web.pdf. Lessig, L. (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, New York, NY: Penguin. Levy, P. (2007) Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, Cambridge, MA.: Perseus Books. Lievrouw, L.A. (2011) Alternative and Activist New Media, Cambridge, UK: Polity. Liptak, K. (2012) ‘“Horses and bayonets” shows Obama’s debate strategy’, CNN, 23 October 2012, available at http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/22/why-horsesandbayonets-is-trending/, accessed 15 January 2015. McCarthy, T.P. (2012) ‘Mitt Romeny declares war on Big Bird’, The Nation, 8 October 2012, available at www.thenation.com/article/mitt-romney-declares-war-big-bird/, accessed 14 July 2015. Meltzer, T. (2012) ‘“Binders full of women”: Romney’s four words that alienated women voters’, The Guardian, 17 October 2012, available at www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/oct/17/binders-full-of-women-romneys-four-words, accessed 14 July 2015. The New York Times (2012) ‘President exit polls’, The New York Times, available at http:// elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/president/exit-polls, accessed 13 July 2015. O’Connell, M. (2012) ‘Presidential debate hits 32-year record in gross ratings’, The Hollywood Reporter, 4 October 2012, available at www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/obama-mittromney-presidential-debate-ratings-record-376575, accessed 14 January 2015.

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Omero, M. and McGuinness, T. (2012) ‘How women changed the outcome of the election’, available at https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/GenderGap-4.pdf, accessed 14 January 2015. On Demand News (2012) ‘Mitt Romney says ‘I had binders full of women’ during US presidential debate’, On Demand News, 17 October 2012, available at www.youtube. com/watch?v=OX_AN4w3da8, accessed 14 January 2015. Orr, J. (2012) ‘Barack Obama’s “horses and bayonets” comment becomes internet hit’, The Telegraph, 22 October 2012, available at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/uselection/9628566/Barack-Obamas-horses-and-bayonets-comment-becomes-internet-hit. html, accessed 11 July 2015. Papacharissi, Z. (2004) ‘Democracy online: Civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion’, New Media and Society, 4(1): 259–283. Parker, S. (2012a) ‘Big Bird will haunt Mitt Romney’, The Washington Post, 4 October 2012, available at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/10/04/bigbird-will-haunt-mitt-romney/, accessed 10 January 2015. Parker, S. (2012b) ‘Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women”’, The Washington Post, 17 October 2012, available at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/ wp/2012/10/17/mitt-romneys-binders-full-of-women/, accessed 14 July 2015. Politico (2012) ‘Presidential debate transcript, questions’, Politico, 16 October 2012, available at www.politico.com/news/stories/1012/82484_Page4.html, accessed 10 July 2015. Regalado, A. and Searcey, D. (2006) ‘Where did that video spoofing Gore’s film come from?’, The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 2006, available at www.wsj.com/articles/ SB115457177198425388, accessed 15 July 2015. Rintel, S. (2013) ‘Crisis Memes: The importance of templatability to internet culture and freedom of expression', Australasian Journal of Popular Culture, 2(2): 253–272. Schäfer, M.T. (2011) Bastard Culture! How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Sesame Street (2012) ‘Big Bird: My bed time is usually 7:45, but I was really tired yesterday and fell asleep at 7! Did I miss anything last night?’, @sesamestreet, Twitter, 4 October 2012, available at https://twitter.com/sesamestreet/status/253852653367468032, accessed 14 January 2015. Shifman, L. (2014) Memes in Digital Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York, NY: The Penguin Press. Smith, A. (2012) Digital Politics: Pew Research Findings on Technology and Campaign 2012, Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. Stenovec, T. (2012), ‘Obama’s “Horses And Bayonets” comment goes viral’, The Huffington Post, 22 October 2012, available at www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/horsesand-bayonets-debate-obama-video_n_2004038.html, accessed 11 July 2015. Stern, M. (2012) ‘Mitt Romney’s “Binders Full of Women” comment sets Internet ablaze’, The Daily Beast, 17 October 2012, available at www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/17/mitt-romney-s-binders-full-of-women-comment-sets-internet-ablaze. html, accessed 14 July 2015. Towner, T.L. and Dulio, D.A. (2011) ‘An experiment of campaign effects during the YouTube [2008 US presidential] election’, New Media and Society, 13(4): 626–644. van Zoonen, L. (2005) Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Wattal, S., Schuff, D., Mandviwalla, M. and Williams, C.B. (2010) ‘Web 2.0 and politics: The 2008 US presidential election and an e-politics research agenda’, Management Information Systems Quarterly, 34(4): 669–688.

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11 Collaging internet parody images An art-inspired methodology for studying laughter in world politics Saara Särmä I start from the assumption that internet parody images, including but not limited to memes, are a particularly fruitful genre when thinking about how we know contemporary world politics. This assumption arises from an observation that sometimes/often parody images are the first encounter with a specific (world) political event. For example, in 2011 the ‘pepper spray cop’ meme showed up on my social media feeds while the stories of the event behind it did not. Thus, I needed to actively search for further information to get an idea of what actually happened. If these kinds of parody images just roll past on the screens of our smartphones or computers, they may well remain the only contact we have to a particular world political event. Visual humour and parody can make something ‘take off’ and become a meme, and thus some fragments of political knowledge from the everyday world become emphasised temporarily more broadly while others are only noticed by a few. Consequently, I argue that how we know world politics in the everyday is increasingly fragmented because of the speed of circulation and seeming randomness of the digital artefacts we encounter every day. Despite the fragmentation of knowledge, the constellations of parodies and individual memes constitute a particular international and incite laughter, which I argue to be hegemonic in contemporary world politics. We don’t always necessarily notice what it is that we see when we scroll through the various social media platforms and other internet sites. Humour and parody may make us stop and look a little bit closer, or stop and laugh, but they do not necessarily make us pay attention. Seeing and looking and seeing and paying attention are different modalities, as are hearing and really listening; it is the ‘paying attention’ part that makes images particularly important to scholarship and research. When we don’t merely see, but rather look and take note of what we see, we enter a mode of analysis. Furthermore, the point of paying attention is also to persuade others to pay attention as well, in academia and beyond (Weber 2008, 42). Entering a mode of analysis by paying attention, we can also take a note of what we don’t see. Furthermore, in the contemporary moment, we are constantly surrounded by the visual or visual culture (see Eken, this volume), and perhaps it is not an overstatement to say that we are constantly bombarded by the visual. This surely has implications for how we know and do international relations (IR). We live in

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a world where we are constantly bombarded by the visual, so we need to consciously develop more skills to critically engage with the visuals we encounter in the everyday. In order to engage creatively with both the visuality and the seeming randomness and increasing fragmentation of contemporary everyday world political knowledge, I present an art-based digital methodology in this chapter. This methodology – collaging – has several aims. First, it allows me to experiment with art-making as part of a research process to get beyond language-based IR (which is the norm even when studying visuality). Second, it seeks to promote accessibility as it attempts to make academic discussion easier to approach for anyone through light-hearted visualisations, seeking not so much to explain but to involve (see Halberstam 2011, 15 on ‘low theory’). Similar to the early collagists, my use of everyday digital stuff1 as research material also aims for accessibility, both in that the stuff used in this work is accessible to anyone with an internet connection, and that what I produce from the stuff aims to be accessible to readers and viewers beyond academia. In this sense, the research attempts to speak back to the popular everyday representations of world politics when I present pieces of art as part of the research. Third, it (re)politicises the images and invites the reader/viewer to pay attention, critically, to these kinds of images in the everyday, for example what kind of international they constitute and what kind of laughter they incite. Finally, it constitutes an IR intervention that emphasises the possibilities of playfulness and creativity. In this sense, collaging is a method that aims to rupture; it is a method-as-act, instead of method-as-device (as Claudia Aradau and Jef Huysmans posit Enloe’s feminist curiosity, 2013, 16). My engagement and experimentation with art-inspired research methodology – junk feminist collaging – arises from the desire to counteract the hegemony and linearity in written text, increase voice and reflexivity in the research process, and expand the possibilities of multiple and diverse realities and understandings. The search for more embodied and alternative representational forms where meaning is understood to be a construction of what the text represents and what the reader/viewer brings to it, and the realisation that we live in an increasingly visual/nonlinear world. (Butler-Kisber 2008, 268) Collaging, in my formulation, offers a specific visual mode of paying attention that is based on juxtapositions and repetitions. I call my approach, junk feminist collaging, a mode of feminist curiosity (see, for example, Enloe 2004) which wants to challenge our ‘trained incapacities’ (Shapiro 2013) and promote transdisciplinarity or even indisciplinary thinking (see Shapiro 2012; Rancière 2008). Feminist curiosity ‘prompts one to pay attention to things that conventionally are treated as if they were either ‘natural’ or, even if acknowledged to be artificial, are imagined to be ‘trivial’, that is, imagined to be without explanatory significance’ (Enloe 2004, 220). The keyword for junk feminism in the above quote is trivial. I look for things that are conventionally seen as trivial in the formal study of world politics. Here, those things are laughter and everyday digital artefacts: internet parody images and memes.

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Accessing the silly digital archive: data collection It is impossible to collect a systematic and coherent ‘data-set’ of digital artefacts such as internet parody images and memes, because these things always shift and move. Internet parodies – images, videos and texts – circulate at incredible speeds and yet do so sporadically; they might circulate initially at the moment of their creation and re-circulate at any time. The context or re-circulation might be similar or different, when it is different, of course a parody image then may gain a totally different meaning. Some parody images, for example, disappear altogether from the digital sphere after a while for one reason or another (or finding them takes effort and skills that not all everyday users of the internet have). This requires a methodological approach that is both flexible and suitable for the artefacts. Relatedly, as Roland Bleiker argues (2015, 877), ‘[t]he world of visual politics is, indeed, so complex that there is only one logical conclusion: to recognise that there is no one method, no matter how thorough or systematic, that can provide us with authentic insights into what images are or how they function.’ He goes on to argue for a pluralistic methodological framework while recognising the many practical problems a scholar may face when attempting to undertake such research. In this section, I describe some of the practical solutions I have come up with for accessing the silly archive of internet parody images and memes in my research, using examples from an earlier research process. One day in the summer of 2008, I came across websites full of parody images making fun of Iran’s failed missile test and consequent botched Photoshop job (see Särmä 2012, 2014). While I saved many links and images on my computer, I did not realise at the time how significant this would be for my research, and I was not very systematic. I grouped similar images together and analysed them thematically in a seminar paper that same year, but did not pursue this line of research further. Almost three years later, a very familiar missile parody image appeared in a completely different context, related to parliamentary elections in Finland. It was totally divorced from the earlier event and Iran; instead it was now used to make fun of the cultural policy of a right wing party. I realised I should attempt to locate the origins of the images I had just saved on my computer, for citational purposes and for possibly tracking down permissions to use the images in academic publications. This proved easier said than done. Some of the images I simply could not find anymore, some of the links that I had saved no longer worked, and many of the sites where I had found the images either did not attribute authorship, or they contained a collection of images linking back to anonymous sites and sources. Eventually, I learned to use Google’s reverse image search and through it was able to locate some missing information. However, this is, of course, very time consuming, and often yields unsatisfactory results in terms of being able to actually include images in publications, as publishers are not willing to include images without permissions, which are often impossible to obtain. Using an art-based methodology, in which art-making is an essential part of the research process, solves some of these practical issues for me. However, collaging is much more than just a technical solution to copyright issues, as I will discuss in further detail below.

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For collecting the digital stuff, I have used a method I call reverse snowballing. This means in practice that I have done Google image searches with various relevant keywords and that I have collected images by following links from one page to another; quite ‘normal’ web-surfing, in other words. The ‘reverse’ in ‘reverse snowballing’ refers to the way that the metaphorical snowball has rolled towards me. Instead of the metaphorical snowball rolling away from me and gathering more informants/interviewees along the way, the snowballs roll towards me and add to the collection of stuff. This happens indirectly or directly; in some cases, my social media contacts have shared links and they show up on my newsfeeds (and they have therefore indirectly added to my collection of stuff), while others have directly shared links to my timeline/wall or in a private message. Through the reverse snowballing method, material keeps on piling up, especially when political topics live on and shift and change. Google’s customisation and personalisation of search results influences what we see, learn and know about world events (see also Kaempf in this volume). This personalisation of internet content in our everyday creates personal bubbles where we ultimately will have no control over what remains unseen and outside of the search results. We each might be getting at least a slightly different perspective, depending on the media we use and follow and the intensity of our use of media. The size and type of networks we are part of also affects the perspective(s) we might be encountering. Google does not reveal the algorithms it uses, but the most popular items come up top in the searches and in the autofill search function.2 Furthermore, when I am logged on to Google and do a search I get different results than when using an anonymous browser. Results may also vary according to my physical location: in Tampere, Finland I get different results than in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. The customisation and personalisation may reinforce the existing power structures, if the search results are largely based on popularity. They may also reinforce polarisation between different groups of people who have differing ideological stances, if it is hard to find information and viewpoints outside of your own bubble. This adds to the fragmentation of knowledge in our everyday encounters with the world and international politics, and has implications for the research material that we acquire online.

Everyday world political encounters: the internet as a silly archive In all their banality, internet parody images and memes that we encounter online every day directly tap into mass culturally shared assumptions (as do other pop culture artefacts). Thus, as Judith Halberstam (2011, 60) argues about Spongebob Squarepants and other ‘seemingly banal pop culture text[s]’, internet parody images and memes, too, are ‘more likely to reveal the key terms and conditions of the dominant than an earnest and “knowing” text’. The internet parodies and memes are digital artefacts that can be both sites of analysis, but also sources of theorising, in a ‘low theory’ sense. IR as an academic discipline generally has a strong preference for ‘high theory’, ‘high politics’ and ‘high data’, and scholars

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Collaging internet parody images 179 engaging with popular culture have argued for the need to bring in ‘low data’ to get a better picture of ‘high politics’ (see also Weldes 2006). The hierarchies of knowing in IR (and elsewhere in academia), which set up and maintain the ‘high’ in high politics, data and theory, closely relate to an understanding of what is serious and what and who should be taken seriously. In a field concerned with life and death issues, focus on the trivial may feel even dangerous – a distraction from ‘the real issues’. However, when seriousness is defined in narrow terms, many insights may remain unseen and questions unasked (see Rowley 2015, 363, Enloe 2013, 7). It may be this desire to be taken seriously that makes IR scholars shy away from the study of digital artefacts. If the accolade of ‘serious enough’ can be withheld from those daring to study gender (Enloe 2013, 5), surely those studying something that is seen as enjoyable or a light relief in the everyday are at great risk of being dismissed as certainly not serious enough. Using low theory and popular knowledge resists the usual hierarchies of knowing and disrupts the power that goes into the maintenance of those hierarchies. Moving back and forth between ‘high and low culture, high and low theory, popular culture and esoteric knowledge’ aims to ‘push through the divisions between life and art, practice and theory, thinking and doing, and into the more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing’ (Halberstam 2011, 21). Low theory can be created by accessing cultural archives, or what Halberstam names ‘silly archives’. Silly archives is a concept inspired by Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘the counterpolitics of the silly object’ (Berlant 1997, 12; see also Halberstam 2011, 20) which, in turn, is ‘a mode of criticism and conceptualisation that reads waste materials of everyday communication’ (Berlant 1997, 12). The very popularity of the internet and social media and their presence in the everyday makes this silly archive worth paying attention to. Parody images and memes, along with other popular culture artefacts, are part of the ways in which people make sense of world politics. It is not only that ‘[t]he very improvisatory ephemerality of the archive makes it worth reading’ (Berlant 1997, 12), but crucially that the ordinariness and the obviousness of digital artefacts, such as memes, require critical attention. Sometimes things are so obvious that they are completely undramatic until we critically engage with them, for example, through junk feminist collaging. The silly archive of memes and other parody images can reveal a lot about how world politics are constituted in the everyday as a particularly Western sphere. By consuming Western pop culture, we have learned to laugh at particular things and laugh in particular ways. Western, and more specifically American, pop culture stuff dominates the international today. Texts, images and references that originate in the West are (re)produced and (re)circulated in the funny internet stuff, such as memes. Consequently, the international that is constituted via memes, is a particular international – a Western international – and one into which the viewers and producers become acculturated (Brennan 2015). Thus, even if a meme, or an internet parody is not Western-made, if it references Western pop culture, the effects are the same.

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For example, memes and other humorous internet stuff in the case of the ‘nuclear wannabes’ – Iran and North Korea – travel to wider circles than their immediate surroundings at the time of their creation (see Särmä 2014). Because these parodies represent a Western international, the laughter they incite can be seen as hegemonic laughter. Laughter is never far from the questions of unequal power relations and domination (Carty and Musharbash 2008, 214). In contemporary world politics, dominated by the West, spectacles of laughter at various others (for example, Iran and North Korea) invite the viewers to join in. The moments of hegemonic laughter, similarly to Western spectacles of compassion (see Aaltola 2009), attempt to create a common sociality, the human polity. However, at the same time it also demarcates the boundaries of the human polity and excludes those being laughed at from its sphere. In other words, laughter includes and excludes at the same time. Hegemonic laughter reverberates through various political bodies and in the age of the internet, the speed of circulation is so incredible that a meme can spread throughout the globe instantaneously, and simultaneously engage viewers all around the world. In that particular moment, then, because memes recirculate mainly Western pop culture references (see Brennan 2015), they invite the viewer to join in the hegemonic laughter and attempt to create a sense of belonging in the Western international that masks itself as the human polity.

Collaging as a visual methodology A brief history of collage is often written to start with early 1900s cubists, Picasso and Braque who used ‘ready mades’ and found objects as composite pieces of their work (see, for example, Sylvester 2009, 176–178). These collagists celebrated common materials that were typically understood to be beneath fine art. In other words, they continued to make art while rejecting the previous traditions that seemed to have become irrelevant. The Dadaists continued collaging as a mode of art-making that opposed the canons of social order. They celebrated humour, serendipity, freedom and the unconscious. While Dadaists may have emphasised destruction, the Surrealist movement that followed used the fluidity and freedom to celebrate being alive and the marvelousness of the everyday. Pop Art, a later art movement, also featured many collages (see, for example, French 1969, 79; Atkinson et al. 2005, 9; Sylvester 2009, 176–178; Whiteley 2010, 37–39). This history is often presented in terms of the big names of collagists, who are mainly men. However, the history (or her story?) can be found to stretch back much further, to well before the early 1900s: Collage has a long, vital history as folk art [ . . . ] In Europe, Asia, and the Americans, all kinds of everyday materials were transformed into mementos and decorations: pictures made of matchsticks, straw, butterfly wings, or feathers; portrait silhouettes cut carefully from paper and framed; fancy paper Valentines garnished with bits of lace and cutout papers; and pressed floral arrangements. (Atkinson et al. 2005, 9)

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Collaging internet parody images 181 This other and longer history is important to note, in order to gently deconstruct, once again, our notions of what counts as art and what counts as art history and how we construct the division between high and low theory and data, the worthy and the trivial. Everyday forms of collaging continue today in scrapbooking, cardmaking and other everyday forms of cutting things and gluing them on a surface. Photoshopping is also often a collage-like remaking process, where unexpected elements are put together in juxtaposition (see Shepherd, this volume). Making collages as part of a research process is one way of making sense of the somewhat nonsensical and random collection of digital material. Because the circulation of stuff on the internet is incredibly fast, any kind of attempt to collect a set of materials necessarily remains random. Thus, collaging methodology engages creatively with the internet as a specific modality of knowledge. In order to deal with qualitatively different, quite random and fragmented materials, I have developed an approach that enables the flow of creativity. This art-based collage methodology offers both the conceptual and technical means to deal with the fragmentation and randomness. By making the collages and presenting them as a part of my work, I have also wanted to retain a playful attitude to sense-making and to scholarly work, for both myself and the reader/viewer. Collage methodology functions as a way to counter and disrupt the representational demands of conventional academic writing; in other words, it aims to challenge what we think counts as ‘research’. The actual visual collages are not mere illustrations nor are they research material in the usual sense; they are both of these and something more. The art pieces are pop culture products or artefacts while simultaneously functioning methodologically as vehicles for further thought, both for me as the researcher and for the reader/viewer. Collaging works as a mode of further thinking, which is both aesthetic and conceptual. I make aesthetic judgments when composing the collages and this in turn emphasises or de-emphasises certain elements that have arisen in my previous analysis. Repetition and the resulting exaggeration highlight some things or themes over others in particular pieces of art, and can also point me towards identifying new themes and making new connections. With the collages, which are full of everyday internet stuff familiar to those of us who spend time online, I want to invite even non-academic reader/viewers into the discussion. Thus, one of my goals is to make the academic discussions more lively and accessible, and, much like the ‘fathers’ of collage, to question political and social agendas of their/our time (see Butler-Kisber and Poldma 2010, 3). In other words, collage methodology produces pop culture artefacts while simultaneously studying them. My hope is that the artwork can function as invitations or easy entry points for those not so familiar with academic theorising. Visual art forms are powerful in that they evoke sensory and emotional responses. These embodied responses, such as laughter, can incite meaning-making in the viewer in very concrete ways. Collage emphasises and gives room to relations arising from juxtapostions. Instead of single coherent notions, differences and shadowy and playful mutualities draw our attention to multiple directions at once (see Butler-Kisber 2008, 268). Collaging allows me to use the internet parody

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images in a way that does not simple reproduce them as illustrations and objects of analysis, which would merely reproduce the hegemonic laughter for the reader/ viewer; rather, the collages work as critical interventions inviting the viewer to think about that laughter. Collage as a methodology contains multiple layers that are usually intertwined; there are four main levels, however, that can be analytically separated from each other. Theoretical collaging allows for a discussion to emerge between different schools of thought despite and through disciplinary barriers, and thus the camp structure that seems to be a defining feature of the discipline of IR currently can be overcome in a fruitful manner (see also Sylvester 2009, 2007). Collage can also be conceptualised as a writing style which emphasises creativity and oscillation between various styles and modes of written expression (see also Kynsilehto 2011; Puumala 2012). Thematic collaging is a methodological experiment which brings together seemingly separate topics and maps their ‘shadowy mutualities’ (see also Sylvester 2009). Finally, visual collaging is a method for examining unusual research material such as internet parody imagery, whereby the parody imagery are seen as collages and used as raw material for collage work. Collage methodology, especially visual collaging, can be seen as a form of critical visual research methodology, as defined by Gillian Rose. It has three criteria: taking images seriously and looking at them carefully; thinking about the social conditions and effects of visual objects; and reflexivity, in other words, the researcher considering her own way of looking and the position from which she looks at the images (Rose 2007, 12). Furthermore, collage methodology demands active participation from the viewer/reader. A collage ‘can mediate understanding in new and interesting ways for both the creator and the viewer because of its partial, embodied, multivocal, and nonlinear representational potential’ (ButlerKisber 2008, 265). Lynn Butler-Kisber (2008, 265) defines collage as ‘the process of cutting and sticking found images and image fragments from popular print/ magazines onto cardstock’. The images and image fragments might as well be digital ones found on the internet, and the gluing and cutting can happen physically as well as electronically. Visual collaging is a circular methodology. For example, in my doctoral dissertation (Särmä 2014), I started out by collecting parody images and audiovisual parodies found on the internet, the former including conventional editorial cartoons, screen captures and collage-like Photoshopped images, with the latter mainly constituting videos on YouTube (see also earlier analysis in Särmä 2012). During the initial writing stages, I used the editorial cartoons, screen captures and Photoshopped images as illustrations of the points made in the texts, but they also served as vehicles for further thinking (see Rose 2007, 237). Collage is a specific visual medium, among various visual forms of engagement and exploration. The further thinking enabled and prompted by the collection of images, then, has been reworked and visualised into the collages I made for the empirical chapters of the dissertation. And again, the collages themselves work as vehicles for even further thinking . . .

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thinking and making in parallel is most important, as one aids the other. That the thinking should be immediately related to the maker of the collage is vital. This necessity for individual thought is what makes art so finite. This form of thinking is as adventurous as any other form of explorations, and the terrain is larger. (French 1969, 10) The further thinking inspired by the initial analysis resulted in some keywords, such as missile envy, that arose both from the material and my theoretical/scholarly background (IR feminisms). Missile envy is an early feminist concept that was used to explain the superpower nuclear arms race in the 1980s. Helen Caldicott (1986) coined the term ‘missile envy’ during the Cold War, an idea that holds that the acquirement of nuclear weapons, and parading of missiles – underlined by the idea that bigger is better when it comes to both size of the bombs themselves and the size of the arsenal – were attempts to establish masculine prowess in the global arena. The interesting thing for me was that a lot of the digital parody images related to Iranian nuclear aspirations seemed to evoke this concept. Parody functions in reference to already existing imagery, and in this case, the representation of missiles as phallic symbols is well established. The obviousness of these connections draws upon a cultural reservoir of meanings attached to nuclear weapons and proliferation and again reproduces them. While feminist scholars never picked up the concept of missile envy as a serious explanatory device because it is too reductionist (see Cohn 1987), it clearly lives on in the popular imagination, which becomes clear when one accesses the silly archive of digital parody images. To explore this theme in a collage form, I did a Google image search with the keywords ‘missile envy’. Choosing the images from the search result is a highly intuitive process; I choose those images that seem to pop out or speak to me for one reason or another. There might be colours, shapes or forms that appeal to me in the images I end up choosing. There are often an excess of images chosen and once I start composing the collage, I pick and choose from those, again intuitively. I make aesthetic judgements at that point, what seems to make a whole that works together. Making art is not dissimilar to other research processes; we just don’t usually conceptualise research processes in terms of intuitive and aesthetic processes. There is a demand to present the research process as logical and, because emotions and rationality are seen as binary opposites and mutually exclusive, the emotionality and intuitive nature of any research process is left undiscussed (for a notable exception, see Sylvester 2011). In one way, then, by using this intervention of junk feminist collaging into the discipline of IR, I want to challenge the ways in which we commonly understand what a research process is and stop pretending it is something wholly logical and only rational. The collages I make are mixed-media collages, which means that they combine acrylic painting with paper cutouts that are images (whole or parts of) printed out from the materials I’ve gathered through reverse snowballing and Google image searches. The first collagists, such as Picasso, have been said to use scraps, and literal junk, glued on the pieces to disrupt the purity of painted surface (see, for

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Figure 11.1 Missile Envy, 2013, by Saara Särmä

example, Sylvester 2009, 176–178). The spirit of junk feminist collaging as an approach is similar as it aims to disrupt the purity of IR (which seems to be desired even if it doesn’t necessarily exist, or hasn’t ever existed). I insist on using print outs of digital scraps (memes and other parody images) as sources for art and scholarly work, low data that hardly registers on our radars as something that we as scholars should pay attention to beyond being amused by it on one’s coffee break. When it comes to the actual collages I make, I use a painted surface (acrylics) as colouring and as a means to tie the scraps together. The technique of painting I prefer is to use quite a thick coat of paint to create some texture onto the painted surface and to emphasise the colours. Choosing the colours is an intuitive process; I choose the colour that seems to make sense aesthetically, but the colour palette available always limits the choice. I have come to prefer colours that are usually associated with femininity (pinks, purples and other pastel colours), yet in shades that are often bright and quite bold. In doing so, I am reclaiming that which is usually seen as lower in status by its association with the feminine. When a collage is successful as a piece of art, it adds something to the research narrative that would not be possible to put into words. There is an emotional and intuitive mode which the reader/viewer can access through the collages. Collages

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Collaging internet parody images 185 convince (or not) at a different level than do academic arguments. However, collage-making is not only about making good or successful art; rather it is about playing around with the images. Emphasising the art-ness of collages can be alienating to some and can feel like one needs great skill and training to collage. I would argue to the contrary, that it does not require one to feel like an artist in order to start collaging, particularly in the digital realm. Collage-making can be used, for example, in IR classrooms to get students engaged in doing something creative in order for them to see things differently. As Brian French (1969) encouraged, [t]he technical process is within anybody’s scope: the materials used are cheap and they are to be found in most households. If collage is defined as the selection, arrangement and adhesion of ready-made materials to a surface, its scope is almost limitless. There is therefore very little to stand between you and the fluent visual interpretation of your thoughts. (French 1969, 9) We can take IR students, or ourselves, to a museum to look at pieces of art as heuristic tools to start thinking about what is missing in IR and what we are missing in our analysis (see Sylvester 2009, 181). Alternatively, we can send students to gather material, digital and other, and ask them to construct collages, alone or in groups and see what possibilities open up for seeing the international and IR differently.

From art-making to political interventions If I had to place my own collages in a specific art tradition, they would come closest to Pop Art. They consist of repetition and exaggeration, ironic and humorous juxtapositions and bright colours. ‘Pop is a buzzword. It is cheerful, ironic and critical, quick to respond to the slogans of the mass media, whose stories make history, whose aesthetics shape the paintings and our image of the era, and whose clichéd ‘models’ determine our behaviour’ (Osterworld 1991, 6). My collages are playful, and they respond to questions of knowledge production in the internet era by bringing forth digital images that anyone can be produce and circulate. As a result of experimenting with collage-making as part of a research process and playing with print-outs of digital images, I’ve learned skills of not only how to view of digital parodies and to problematise the laughter they incite but also how to use the silly archive of the internet for ‘low theorising’ and in political interventions. I concur with Halberstam’s statement: I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies. (Halberstam 2011, 21)

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Collaging is a way of engaging with our increasingly fragmented ways of knowing about the world political in creative and empathic ways, without forcing it into coherent wholes that would lose the initial fragmented nature of the worldly encounters in the everyday. ‘A collage reworks and remakes a reality. It is not a fantasy about remaking reality but the actuality of remaking ‘it’ visually, materially, and concretely’ (Sylvester 2009, 21). This experimental way of doing research may bring forth connections that otherwise remain unseen and unheard of and thus result in better understandings of the world political. The micro-level of everyday engagements with the world political can reveal the familiar, that which is often so obvious it goes unnoticed. The familiarity and obviousness can surprise us and, through the everydayness, we can create a fuller or a different picture than that which we get by focusing only on the macro-level. Through collaging I have remade the reality of ‘doing IR’ and stretched the boundaries of what counts as IR research. Furthermore, collage-making and playing with digital images and paying attention to humour and what we laugh at has led me to see possibilities of visual political interventions elsewhere. This has led to the now famous ‘Congrats, you have an all male panel!’ project,3 which makes humorously visible the continued dominance of white men in academia and other expert fields, something that has been obvious to feminists for decades. This humorous visual intervention has managed to politicise the way in which expertise seems to ‘stick to’ the bodies of white middle-aged (and older) men (on stickiness, see Ahmed 2004) and has had an impact beyond the mere momentary relief laughter can provide in the everyday. In response to the project, institutions and individuals have taken action to avoid all-male panel situations, and it has prompted conversations about diversity (or lack thereof) in academia. However, precisely because the silly digital archive is fragmented and ‘stuff’ spreads sporadically, these kinds of political disruptions may only be temporary. One needs to constantly come up with something new in order to sustain the critical discussions longer than a few weeks or months. The possibilities of visual political interventions and learning through playing with images rather than just talking or writing about images (see also Newbury 2011, 652) offer refreshing viewpoints to IR and global politics.

Notes 1 See Shepherd (2013) who uses ‘stuff’ to describe various materials used in classroom to examine and teach about international relations. The digital stuff that I have used includes YouTube videos, memes, other internet parody images such as Photoshopped parodies and conventional editorial cartoons. I use the word stuff, rather than ‘research material’, to emphasise its everydayness and to emphasise that its collection is by no means systematic, rather the nature of the stuff is quite random, as many of our encounters on the internet tend to be. The ‘junk’ in the ‘junk feminist collage’ approach in this sense implies crap and scrap, random digital everyday stuff, which is brought under investigation creatively. Presenting everyday stuff or junk as part of art effectively collapses the separation between art and things, or art and stuff (Taylor 1992). Similarly, junk feminist collaging employs digital everyday stuff to interrupt notions of appropriate and worthy research material.

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Consequently, it challenges the divisions between ‘low and high data’ (see Weldes 2006) and low and high politics and IR’s reliance on the latter of these pairings. 2 For example UN Women has used autofill in their campaign to illustrate what the world thinks women should and can do: www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/ women-should-ads. 3 http://allmalepanels.tumblr.com/.

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Rancière, J. (2008) ‘Jacques Rancière and indisciplinarity: An interview’, Art & Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 2(1): 1–10. Rose, G. (2007) Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials, London: Sage Publications. Rowley, C. (2015) ‘Popular culture and the politics of the visual’, 309–325 in Shepherd, L.J. (ed.) Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations, Abingdon: Routledge. Särmä, S. (2012) ‘Feminist interdisciplinarity and gendered parodies of nuclear Iran’, 151–170 in Aalto, P., Harle, V. and Moisio, S. (eds) Global and Regional Problems: Towards an Interdisciplinary Study, Aldershot: Ashgate. Särmä, S. (2014) Junk Feminism and Nuclear Wannabes – Collaging Parodies of Iran and North Korea, Tampere: Tampere University Press. Also available electronically at http:// urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978–951–44–9535–9. Shapiro, M.J. (2012) Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn, Abingdon: Routledge. Shapiro, M.J. (2013) Seminar and lecture in Helsinki, May 21–22, 2013. Shepherd, L.J. (2013) ‘Introduction: Critical approaches to security in contemporary global politics’, 1–8 in Shepherd, L.J. (ed.) Critical Approaches to Security: An Introduction to Theories and Methods, Abingdon: Routledge. Sylvester, C. (2007) ‘Whither the international at the end of IR’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 35(3): 551–573. Sylvester, C. (2009) Art/Museums: International Relations Where We Least Expect It, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Sylvester, C. (ed.)(2011) ‘The Forum: Emotion and the feminist IR researcher’, International Studies Review, 13(4): 687–708. Taylor, M.P. (1992) Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, S. (2008) ‘Visual images in research’, 41–53 in Knowles, J.G. and Cole, A.L. (eds) Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples, and Issues, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Weldes, J. (2006) ‘High politics and low data: Globalization discourses and popular culture’, 176–186 in Yanow, D. (ed.) Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and Interpretative Turn. Armonk, NY: Sharpe, Inc. Whiteley, G. (2010) Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash, London: I.B. Tauris.

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Index

Note: Page numbers with f indicate figures. aesthetics, military social media sites and 52–3 Affleck, B. 103 Ai Wei Wei 156 Alberto, U. 94 Alexander, W. 17f ‘Al Gore’s Penguin Army’ (YouTube video) 156 algorithms 27; Google 178; impact on Ferguson, Missouri protests/civil unrest 57; power of 60 alien term 91 ‘Alliance of Youth Movements’ 24 al-Omari, A. A. A. 43 Al Otaibi, A. A. 39–41, 40f ‘America’s Army’ 24 Andiola, E. 94 Aniston, J. 105 ‘Anonymous’ 23 Anthony, D. 123 Anzaldúa, G. 93 Apple 56 Applied Research Center 91 Arizona Employers for Immigration Reform 94 arms industry: international relations and 68; social media and 71–3; videos on YouTube 72, 74–5, 75f art-making, experimenting with 176 Ashanti Ambassadors 129 ‘Ask Angy’ (NYSYLC) 90 astroturfing 155–6 Atlantic Council 123 Australia, independent television stations in 20 ‘Baghdad blogger’ 23 Baghdad Burning (blog) 32, 43, 44

Banham, C. 57 Barker, R. 16, 18, 21 Barlow, J. P. 3 Barthes, R. 4, 35–6 Battlefield 4 ‘Fishing in Baku’ analysis 145–9; chain of command 145–6; friends and foes, encounters with 146f, 147–8, 147f; immortality theme 148–9; red mist 148 Battle of Wagram (Alexander) 16–17, 17f Beck (television series) 122 Behnke, A. 53 Berlant, L. 179 Bernstein, D. 164 Biden, J. 158 ‘Binders Full of Women’ memes 161–6, 162–3f, 164–5f, 169 Bin Laden, O. 160, 160f Black Skin, White Mask (Fanon) 92 Bleiker, R. 35, 52, 84, 102, 177 Bogost, I. 124, 125, 129, 130 Bomb Gaza 125 Boston Phoenix 164 Bravo, L. 94 British Armed Forces, social media and 55 Brown, M. 57 Buffy the Vampire Slayer (television series) 122 Buus, S. 122 Buzzfeed 5, 51, 86 Caldicott, H. 183 Call of Duty 123 Captain America: The Winter Soldier 143 Carlson, M. 38 Carver, T. 5 celebrity diplomacy 104

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190

Index

celebrity humanitarianism 101–14; cosmopolitan agendas and 104–5; Jolie case study 105–14 (see also Jolie Pitt, A.); overview of 101–2; popular culture/ international politics and 102–4 Cellerier, J. 17 censorship, social media and 56–7 Center for American Progress 85, 166 China, ‘Great Firewall’ of 6 Christensen, C. 53–4 citizen journalists, digital new media technology use by 23 clean war 76 clicktivism 4 Clinton, B. 5 Clinton, H. 5 Clooney, G. 103 cloud passports 3 CNN 19, 24 collaging: definition of 182; history of 180–1; levels of 182; thematic 182; theoretical 182; visual 182; as writing style 182 collaging internet parody images 175–86; data collection for 177–8; knowing in IR and 178–80; levels of 182; methodology of 180–5; overview of 175–6; in political interventions 185–6; purposes for 176 Colorlines.com 92 Columbia Law School 24 coming out, undocumented immigrants and 85–6 communicative freedom 3 Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement 89 Congo Jones 124 ‘contract’ between news media outlets and readers 37 cosmopolitanism 110–11 cosmopolitan obligation, digital celebrity politics and 104–5 critical geopolitics, visual culture and 138–40 cropping 38 Darfur is Dying 121, 129–32 Dawkins, R. 156–7 Dawn of the Dead 122 DCI Group 156 deception, authenticity of digital representations and 39–42 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A’ (Barlow) 3

dehumanising terms, undocumented immigrants’ refusal of 91–2 Deibert, R. 26 De León, J. 90 ‘Democracy Now!’ 23 Department of Defense, US 55, 55f, 56, 58–9 Der Derian, J. 53, 71, 141 Derechos Herencia app 94 De Souza, V. 163 Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act 86, 88–9 Diary of a Dreamer (Ledesma) 86 Dibbell, J. 129, 132 digital celebrity politics, cosmopolitan obligation and 104–5 digital diplomacy 3 digital divide 6, 170 digital footprints 3–4 digital manipulation 38–9 digital new media technology 22–5; Balkanisation of global media landscape and 22–3; types and uses for 23–5 digital representations, authenticity of 32–44; deception and 39–42; as form of evidence 34–9; international relations and 33–4; overview of 32–3; researching global politics and 42–4 digital social media, military use of 51; see also military social media sites digital surrogate warfare 24 digital world politics: disadvantages of 3–4; introduction to 3–6; mediation of (see world politics, mediation of); researching 42–4 Dirty Dancing 163 DREAM Act see Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act DREAMers 86–7, 88 Dreamersadrift.com 86 DREAM Movement 88 Drennan, J. 123 ‘Drop the I-Word Campaign’ 91–2, 95 e-diplomacy 3 Education Not Deportation Program 94 Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) 93 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) 3 11 Reasons Why Our New Aircraft Carriers Are Totally Awesome (MoD) 51 Elizabeth II, Queen 113 Endgame: Syria 121, 124, 125–9 Export Administration Regulations (EAR) 70

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Index Facebook 39, 51, 53, 55, 158; activist celebrities and 103; algorithmic logic of 27; British Army’s, page 61–2; censorship on 56–7; Israel Defense Force and 58; military, pages by popularity 59–60, 60f; participatory culture and 154; Shakira’s, page 59; undocumented immigrants’ hackathon 86; United States Marine Corps, page 59; US Army posts on 58, 59; US Army’s, page 61; world politics and, mediation of 23–4 Fairfax 20 feminist curiosity, junk feminist collaging as 176 Fenton, K. 161 ‘50-Cent Party’ 156 ‘Fired Big Bird’ meme 159–60f, 159–61, 169 first-person shooter (FPS) video games 137, 138, 142–3 Flickr 24 FLIR see forward-looking infrared Force More Powerful, A 126 foreign policy, gaming and 123–5 forward-looking infrared (FLIR) 77 4chan 157 fourth estate 19, 21 Francis, Pope 113 Frost-Arnold, K. 44 F-35 Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter 77 gaming, foreign policy and 123–5 Gay Girl in Damascus (blog) 32, 43, 44 gender: ‘Binders Full of Women’ memes and 161–6; junk feminist collaging 176; knowledge about, and security practices 34; serious enough accolade and 179; sexual violence activism and 111–14 gender identity 85–6, 90–1 geo-poetic disturbance 93 geopolitics 138 global power relationships, undocumented immigrants in US and 83–4 Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict 103–4, 108, 110 good, natural and necessary (GNN) concept 69, 70, 74, 78–9 Google 23, 24, 27, 56, 60, 158 Gore, A. 156 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) 56 ‘Great Firewall’ of China 6

191

Grundman, S. 123 Guidance 129 Hague, W. 109–10, 112–13, 114 Hansen, L. 102, 107 Harry Potter 122 Harry Potter and International Relations (Neumann and Nexon) 121–2 Hartford Courant 38 hegemonic laughter 180 helmet-cam combat videos 137, 138, 144 heteropolarity 14, 15, 22 Higgins, E. 57 ‘Hola Soy German’ (YouTube channel) 154 Hollis, M. 33 ‘Horses and Bayonets’ meme 166–8, 167f, 169 House Resolution 155 92 Howcast 24 Huffington Post 27 ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) 94 idea, etymology of 138–9 Imagine 2050 88 IMAX theaters 16 Imgur 157 Immigration Reform and Control Act 86 inclusion effect 74–6 Inconvenient Truth, An (Gore) 156 infotainment 21 Instagram 55, 92, 154 intentionality, complexity of 39–42 international affairs, gaming and 123–5 International Center for Nonviolent Conflict 126 International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 133 international politics, celebrity humanitarianism and 102–4 international relations 5; arms industry and 68, 71–3; digital social media and 51 (see also military social media sites); social media as 70–1; undocumented immigrants and, in global politics context 83 International Relations (IR) 33; collaging and 176, 178–80; knowing in 178–9; legitimate scholarship definition by 34; producing knowledge in 34, 43 International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) 70 internet memes see memes In the Land of Blood and Honey (film) 109

192

Index

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‘Invisible Children, Inc.’ 23 ‘irl’ (‘in real life’) 44 Israel Defense Force (IDF) media unit 58 James, V. 89 Jenkins, H. 153–4, 168, 169 Jolie Pitt, A. 101–14; see also celebrity humanitarianism; cosmopolitanism and 110–11; gender/Western privilege and 111–14; global mothering and 106–7; Hague professional relationship with 109–10; humanitarianism representation analysis of 107–8; media stories of 105–7; sexual violence activism by 108–14 junk feminist collaging 176 Kabul Kaboom 124 Kim Jong-un 6 knowledge: digital images as source of 34–9; in IR, collaging internet parody images and 178–80; objective, in IR 84–5; producing, in international relations 34 ‘Kony 2012’ 23 Latin America, independent television stations in 20 Ledesma, A. 86 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) 85–6 Ling, L. H. M. 84 ‘Listening Post, The’ 24 Lockheed Martin 77 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 163 Los Angeles Times 32, 34–5, 37–8 ‘Lourdes’ 90 MacArthur Foundation 153 MacMaster, T. 43, 44 marginalised stories, undocumented immigrants and 87–91 MassGAP 164–5 mediatised war, in digital age 52–4; aesthetics and 52–3; content and 52; described 52 Meme Election 158 memes: ‘Binders Full of Women’ 161–6, 162–3f, 164–5f; crisis 170; criteria for 157; defined 36, 156, 157; ‘Fired Big Bird’ 159–60f, 159–61; history of 156–7; ‘Horses and Bayonets’ 166–8, 167f; ‘pepper spray cop’ 175; as pocket-sized

media 153; 2012 US presidential campaign 157–68 Microsoft 56 milblogs 23–4, 53 militainment 72, 73; clean war in 76; international relations on YouTube and 79 militarisation: described 68; mapping 73–6; national security and 69–70; values of 68 militarisation, marketing 68–79; arms industry and 71–3; clean war and 76; GNN concept and 78–9; mapping 73–6; national security and 69–70; overview of 68–9; social media as IR and 70–1; ‘support the troops’ trope and 78; technofetishism and 77–8; YouTube international relations and 79 military-industrial-media-entertainment (‘MIME’) complex 141 military social media sites 51–63; context of 54–7; mediatised war and 52–4; overview of 51–2; production and circulation of 57–9; reception to 59–62 Ministry of Defence (MoD) 51; doctrine publications of 57–8; strategic communication concept of 55–6 ‘Minute Man Project’ 23 missile envy 183, 184f MoD see Ministry of Defence (MoD) Modern Warfare 3 144 Morales, D. 94 Multiple Worlds 84, 85 multipolar media landscape, world politics and 18–22 Murdoch, R. 20 Music Television (MTV) 24, 129, 132 Mythologies (Barthes) 4 national security, militarisation and 69–70 National Security Agency (NSA) 56 new media, described 71 News Corporation 20 New Statesman 156 New York State Youth Leadership Council (NYSYLC) 90 New York Times, The 27, 91–2, 107 notice, defined 137 Obama, B. 5, 158, 160f, 166–8 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement 23 Ochoa, R. 88 ocularcentrism 139

Index

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old media, structural nature of 15–18; see also panorama; sender/receiver separation and 18 oligopolisation 20–1 O’Reilly Factor, The 92 out4citizenship.org 85 panorama 15–18; Battle of Wagram 16–17, 17f; etymology of 15; old media platform comparisons to 17–18; politics of war link to 15–17 Panorama (Barker) 16f participatory culture 170; characteristics of 154; detractors of 155–6; in digital age 153–6; forms of 154; rise of, in contemporary society 153–4; Web 2.0 and 156 participatory democracy 155 Penn, S. 105 ‘pepper spray cop’ meme 175 ‘Pew Die Pie’ (YouTube channel) 154 Pew Research Center 169 photograph as artefact of truth principle 38 photographic paradox 35 Photoshopping 32, 36–7, 36f; collaging and 182 Picasso, as collagist 183 Pinterest 55 Pitt, B. 105 Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management (PRISM) 56 playing war and genocide, ethics of 132–4 Pocket DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) 93–4 pocket-sized media/politics 153; see also memes Poehler, A. 164 (re)politicise images, collaging and 176 politics of the digital 6 popular culture: artefacts, research programs and 32; celebrity humanitarianism and 102–4; study of 4; world politics through, studying 4–5 Powell, C. 139–40 press photography, authority/authenticity of 35 Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative 109 PRISM (Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization and Management) 56 protestors, digital new media technology use by 23 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) 159

193

Race Forward 91 Raytheon 70 Reddit 154, 157, 158, 159 Respecto-Respecto 94 Reuters 41 reverse snowballing 178 Riverbend 32, 43, 44 Romney, M. 158, 159–68, 160f; see also 2012 US presidential campaign memes Rose, G. 182 Rush, B. 92 Ryan, P. 158 Salam Pax 23 Salgado, J. 85–6 SAM Simulator 124 San Francisco Chronicle 91 savedarfur.org 23 Schmidt, E. 27 Selfish Gene (Dawkins) 157 September 12 125 Sesame Street 159, 160, 161 sexual violence activism, Jolie Pitt and 108–14; see also celebrity humanitarianism; cosmopolitanism and 110–11; eradication of 108–9; gender and 111–14; Hague relationship and 109–10; Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative and 109; Western privilege and 111–14 Shifman, L. 157, 163–4 shopped, defined 36; see also Photoshopping silly archives 179–80 Six Days in Fallujah 124–5 67 Sueños 87–8 Skype 56 slacktivism 4 Smith, S. 33 SocialBakers 59 social media; see also military social media sites: aesthetics and military sites for 52–3; arms industry and 71–3; censorship and state relationships 56–7; digital, military use of 51; guidelines for using 56; international relations and 51; as IR and 70–1; Ministry of Defence and 55–6; for strategic communication 51; undocumented immigrants in US and (see undocumented immigrants in US, social media and); US Department of Defense and 55, 55f, 58 somatic war 144 Stahl, R. 72, 73, 77, 78

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194

Index

Star Trek 122 state actors 5 state relationships, social media and 56–7 state sovereignty, undocumented immigrants and 92–5 state/state-owned media, relationship between 19 storytelling, undocumented immigrants and 84–91; coming out 85–6; DREAMers 86–7; marginalised stories 87–91 strategic communication 55; digital social media for 51 ‘support the troops’ trope 78 survival poetry 93 Sylvester, C. 33, 149 Syria, playing war in 125–9 Tactical Iraqi 123 technofetishism 77–8 Telecommunications Act 3 terrorist organisations, digital new media technology use by 23 Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Drezner) 122 Time Warner 20 To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (Weldes) 122 Transborder Immigrant Tool 93 Tribune News Corporation 35 trilemma of democracy 155 Tumblr 5, 85, 92, 157; see also 2012 US presidential campaign memes 2012 US presidential campaign memes: ‘Binders Full of Women’ 161–6, 162–3f, 164–5f; ‘Fired Big Bird’ 159–60f, 159–61; ‘horses and bayonets’ 166–8, 167f Twitter 24, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60; activist celebrities and 103; Al Otaibi hoax and 39–41; illegal term use on 92; Israel Defense Force and 58; participatory culture and 154; 2012 US presidential campaign and 157, 158 Twitter accounts; see also 2012 US presidential campaign memes: @ americanbadu 41; @billclinton 5; @ DomenicPowell 88; @DreamAct 88; @EndIsolation 89; @Ksramirez3 88; name changes to 166–8, 167f; @ nilogardezi 86; novelty Mitt Romney 163; @POTUS 5; @redhotdesi 88; @ SoldierUK 56; @TrojanTopher 88; @ TwitterGovernment 158

Undoculife app 86–7 undocumented immigrants in US, social media and 83–96; see also storytelling, undocumented immigrants and; dehumanising terms and 91–2; global power relationships and 83–4; overview of 83–4; state sovereignty and 92–5; storytelling and 84–91 undocumented immigrants in US, types of 83 Undocumented Migration Project 90 undocuqueer activists 85 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 106, 107, 110–11, 113 United States, independent television stations in 20 US Department of Defense, social media and 55, 55f, 56, 58–9 US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 94 ‘US Multi-National Force - Iraq’ (YouTube channel) 53–4 U.S. Soldier Survives Taliban Machine Gun Fire during Firefight 144 United We Dream 94 Vimeo 23 visual culture, critical geopolitics and 138–40 visuality 139 visual methodology, collaging internet parody images as 180–5 visual narratives of war-making 142–5 Walski, B. 32, 34–5, 37–8, 39 war and genocide in digital entertainment 121–34; Darfur is Dying example of 129–32; Endgame: Syria example of 125–9; ethics of playing 132–4; foreign policy and 123–5; international affairs and 123–5; overview of 121–3 war-making, digital experiences of 137–50; Battlefield 4 ‘Fishing in Baku’ analysis 145–9; critical geopolitics and 138–40; narratives of 142–5; overview of 137–8; un-scene effects of war and 149–50; video games and 140–2; visual culture and 138–40 ‘War on Terror’ 140–1 Washington Post 27, 56 Web 2.0: defined 63; ‘golden era’ of participation 156; information and, generate and transmit 18; participatory culture and 156; technologies 60–1;

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Index virtuous, clean war representations on 53–4 Weldes, J. 122–3 Western privilege, sexual violence activism and 111–14 Westphalia World 84–5 ‘what-goes-without-saying’ 4 Wikileaks 23 Women’s Hour 112 world politics, mediation of 14–28; compromises and limits to 25–8; digital new media technology and 22–5; multipolar media landscape and 18–22; old media and 15–18; overview of 14–15 World War Z 122

195

Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 92 writing style, collaging as 182 Yahoo 56 Yahoo! News 27 YouTube 23, 24, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60; arms industry videos on 72, 74–5, 75f; helmet-cam recordings 144; international relations of 79; ‘read/write’ culture and 154; 2012 US presidential campaign and 157–8 ‘YouTube Spotlight’ (YouTube channel) 154 Zapatistas, digital new media technology use by 23 Zuckerberg, M. 27, 57, 86