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In his Chapter 9 “In the shadow of soldiers: Faceless victims in public media narrative,” Mohammed D. Cherkaoui examines the complexity of reporting civilian deaths in war zones beyond the classic statistical count of nameless victims and the increases or decreases of soldier deaths on both sides of the conflict. Despite the evolution of the modern media and the related mediatization shift in meaning-making, the question remains: why have not the mass media constructed a civilian framework of covering wars and moved beyond a military exceptionalism in journalism? Cherkaoui critically examines how most media organizations contribute indirectly to a collective romanticizing sentiment of war by putting the public in a hyper-mood of the uncertainty and mobilizing them to accept the sacrifice of soldiers and civilians on both sides. The “collateral damage” frame is trumpeted more and more in the televised news conferences and repetitive media packages around the clock. This chapter discusses the media framing of faceless civilians as a mere extension of the dangerous “Other.” Cherkaoui concludes that the jack-of-all-trade war reporter dilemma, dissemination of casualty agnosticism in public discourse, and the lack of a civilian body count are less problematic than the embedded journalist model if a we-civilians framework were to emerge across the globalizing broadcast media and internet-driven newspapers.
This book explores the issue of civilian devastation in modern warfare, focusing on the complex processes that effectively establish civilians’ identity in times of war.
Underpinning the physicality of war’s tumult are structural forces that create landscapes of civilian vulnerability. Such forces operate in four sectors of modern warfare: nationalistic ideology, state-sponsored militaries, global media, and international institutions. Each sector promotes its own constructions of civilian identity in relation to militant combatants: constructions that prove lethal to the civilian noncombatant who lacks political power and decision-making capacity with regards to their own survival.
Civilians and Modern War provides a critical overview of the plight of civilians in war, examining the political and normative underpinnings of the decisions, actions, policies, and practices of major sectors of war. The contributors seek to undermine the ‘tunnelling effect’ of the militaristic framework regarding the experiences of noncombatants.
This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, ethics, conflict resolution, and IR/Security Studies.
