Reconceptualising War in Political Communication

The next speaker in this ECREA 2018 session is Gholam Khiabany, who points especially at the absence of significant debates about war and military intervention in political communication. War is not absent from media research, of course, but perhaps war should be considered as central in our reassessment of democracy itself.

Militarism and war is now a motor of historical development, and not just a consequence; revisiting political communication must include a reassessment of its role in democracy, and as a subject of political communication. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, should it not be central to the considerations of political communication?

Warlike metaphors are now common to political rhetoric, and the defence of pluralism and democracy is now often explicitly linked with the activities of the state’s soldiers in foreign countries. From this perspective, peace is the continuation of war by other means, and the fighting of wars in the Global South is justified by the desire to keep the peace in Western nations. Such wars, and the hardship they cause, are causing more deaths than the entirety of World War II, and continue to cost an immense amount of money every minute.

This is also linked to the irrational operation of capitalism, especially at an international level; bourgeois liberal theory tends to ignore these aspects as it focusses only on domestic labour relations and not at the exploitative dynamics of international capitalism.

Previous wars were at least followed by policies favourable to the working class and underprivileged communities, from universal suffrage to improved race relations, yet this is no longer the case: recent wars have resulted instead in policies that have further curtailed democratic rights and achievements, and instead installed an increasingly oppressive and undemocratic surveillance capitalism.