This volume interrogates the mediatized politics of western intervention in Afghanistan, to gain a deeper understanding of the occupation within the broader transition toward a multipolar global order.
Accurate histories of western interventions and regional realities are often obscured or even eclipsed in the accounts of western mainstream media, which, if anything, tend to rue the withdrawals and lionize the suffering of returning troops. This volume investigates the state’s role in the dark underbelly of the shortsighted interventionist media narrative, as well as the dehumanizing portrayals of people living in the Afghanistan–Pakistan region. In its opening section, the book critically evaluates the narrative of the Global War on Terror, as well as the wars launched after 9/11 that destabilized the Middle East. The chapters in the following section contextualize developments in Afghanistan with a historical framework that will problematize linear narratives that are mobilized in support of interventions. The chapters in the final section re-present specific aspects of the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences that have eluded mainstream media workers, including journalists and Hollywood moviemakers.
This book will be of interest to students of propaganda studies, media and communication studies, US foreign policy, and international relations.
1 Introduction Part I: Propaganda and Interventionism 2 Invading and Occupying Afghanistan and Iraq: The Geopolitics of Pretext 3 The ‘Great Game’ and the Long Arc of Imperialism 4 Narrative Consolidation of 9/11, 2001-2003 5 Framing ‘Peace’ and ‘Security’ for the War on Terror: From Okinawa to Afghanistan 6 Strategic Narratives and Interventionism Part II: Geopolitics and Imperialism 7 The Rise and Fall, and Rise of the Taliban 8 Counterinsurgents versus Counter-terrorists: The Role of the News Media in the 2009 U.S. Afghanistan Strategy Review 9 Women, Religious Minorities, and Humanitarian Interventions 10 The Troubled Search for a Post-Imperial Mission: Spain in Afghanistan Part III: Media and the Global War on Terror 11 Cross-Border Reporting by Pashtun Journalists on Taliban’s Afghanistan 12 The Afghan Girl Grows Up: (Re)Circulation of an Iconic Image 13 Hollywood’s Role in Laying the Groundwork for the Global War on Terror 14 Urbicide and Hollywood 15 Afghanistan to Ukraine and Beyond: An Afterword
Sumanth Inukonda is Associate Professor of Communication at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Media, Nationalism and Globalization: The Telangana Movement and Indian Politics (2020). Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus of the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University and at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author or editor of some 25 scholarly books, including, most recently, Conflict Propaganda in Syria (2021). Lara Martin Lengel is Professor of Media and Communications at Bowling Green State University, USA. Her 30 refereed journal articles address, among others, embodied activism, discursive cleansing of Indigenous groups, memory politics, and strategic and visual narratives of geopolitical conflict.
