International Relations

C04(a) - Contemporary Case Studies in Conflict

Date: Jun 12 | Time: 01:45pm to 03:15pm | Location:

Chair/Président/Présidente : John Shola (Landmark University)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Surulola Eke (University of Manitoba)

Deliberately Targeting Journalists Is a War Crime, and Becoming Common: Case studies in Ukraine and Gaza: Kelly Bjorklund (University of Cincinnati)
Abstract: During the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more than 50 media workers have been killed (CPJ, 2023). The rules that are supposed to protect journalists during armed conflicts are being eroded, and it is becoming more commonplace for journalists to be targeted during war. After his colleague was killed on November 2, TV correspondent Salman al-Bashir reported live from Nasser Hospital in Gaza. After removing his PRESS flak jacket and helmet, he said “We can’t take it anymore, we are exhausted…We’re going to get killed, it’s just a matter of when. There’s no protection…These PPEs don’t protect us. Nothing protects journalists. We lose lives, one by one… Mohammed Abu Hatab was here, half an hour ago.” Along with targeting civilians, hospitals, schools, orphanages, residential buildings, communications centres, and places of worship, the Russian state has been accused by the National Union of Journalists (2023) of Ukraine and others of deliberately targeting journalists. In conflicts such as these, journalists risk their lives to report the truth and reveal war crimes committed by both sides. But when journalists themselves are targeted, these war crimes almost always go unpunished. My research examines the effect of these violations of international law and codified norms. It is essential – for us all – that the protections afforded to journalists under international law are scrupulously upheld, and that those responsible for their deaths face the consequences. Our research aims to understand what the effects of these changing norms are, and what can be done to further protect journalists in conflict zones. Kelly Bjorklund (she, her, hers) Assistant Professor, University of Cincinnati Lecturer, University of Colorado Boulder Senior Writer and Editor, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty PhD Candidate, Staffordshire University

Gaza Cosmopolitanism and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism: Chris Barker (The American University in Cairo)
Abstract: During the 2023 Gaza humanitarian crisis, ontological and master narratives - about which group was right or wrong, good or evil - quickly took over traditional “public narratives” about the origins and operations of states and institutions (Patterson and Monroe 1998). As is often the case, these narratives were initially created and have now been redeployed to legitimate retaliatory violence against those characterized as “human animals,” “barbarians,” or “savages.” This language is merely an indication of a broader conceptual paradox of liberal internationalism, where the internationalism of the world system is structured by concepts such as civilization and progress that were developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The basic conceptualization and categories of the language of civilization have a very long provenance. As scholars such as Jeanne Morefield and Brett Bowden argue, this language was created in the mid-18th century with both descriptive and hierarchically evaluative prongs present from the creation. Civilizational discourse was then developed through the exercise of imperial power in the British second empire. This substructure remains perhaps the dominant conceptual language of liberal internationalism today, especially in crisis situations. It may seem surprising to theorize a Gazan cosmopolitanism – after all, are not all of the claims made about Gaza, whether liberatory or in favor of occupation, made on behalf of competing national groups? Moreover, the spectacle of collective punishment in Gazans may not indicate an enthusiasm for Kantian perpetual peace, but instead suggest a sharpening of existing national, ideological, racial, and religious lines of demarcation. However, we might decline to answer Kant’s question from the “Conflict of the Faculties” about whether national or global sentiment supports an incipient, cosmopolitanism republicanism, and instead note that a more radical inclusion of the subject of cosmopolitan connections is needed in liberal and international relations theory and practice. This inclusion of the cosmopolitan subject would clarify the civilizational substructure of liberal internationalism and potentially show the place where a more radical cosmopolitan regard for persons and peoples is possible. Thus, we may find new resources for wriggling out of dehumanizing practices. This more radical cosmopolitanism needs a critical method, and this paper canvases some possibilities, including Edward Said’s exilic disposition and Jeanne Morefield’s adaptation of it in her recent work on Said. Recent scholarship has revisited Foucault’s transhistorical cynicism, which Foucault left as a pregnant direction for further research at the end of the 1984 lectures. The paper considers affirmative biopolitics and an affirmative, proletarian cosmopolitanism from below as justifications for a turn from internationalism to cosmopolitanism. Finally, I suggest another possibility: a transhistorical zetetic cosmopolitanism adapted from Foucault’s Socratism. Whereas an exilic disposition is unsettled, defining itself in terms of what it is not, Foucault’s affirmative and zetetic cosmopolitanism defines itself by its method of searching, examining, and testing. And where biopolitics and proletarianism may require more metaphysics and dutiful mobilization than a cosmopolitan world politics can support, a zetetic and examining approach may offer a path between unsettledness and over-rigor. Upon reflecting on the similarities between Foucault and Edward Said, far from suggesting that the exilic disposition of Said lacks a method as opposed to Foucault’s configurations of truth, power, and subjectivity, it seems more likely that the exilic figure shares this zetetic cosmopolitanism. The consequence of this disposition for liberal internationalism is examining and testing the imperial and hierarchical civilizational language that allows liberals to immunize themselves in the face of the suffering of distant and different peoples, while permitting locality and difference to operate without reducing politics to a world-state or a proletarian humanity.

Terrorism News on Television and in Newspapers: Similarities and Differences.: Aaron Hoffman (Simon Fraser University), Kelly Grounds (Government of Canada)
Abstract: The conventional wisdom in terrorism research is that television news programs present terrorism news in more frightening terms than newspapers do. The trouble is that this assertion is untested and similar claims about differences between television and newspaper presentations of crime have not been clearly borne out. In this paper, we examine similarities and differences in the television and newspaper coverage of four terrorism crises: The Pulse Night Club shooting, the Manchester and Christchurch attacks, and the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. Our results confirm that presentations about these attacks differ across these media, but in unexpected ways. The results do not clearly suggest that television news presentations are more intimidating than similar presentations in newspapers.