Ben O'Loughlin | Royal Holloway, University of London (original) (raw)

Books by Ben O'Loughlin

Forging the World brings together leading scholars in International Relations (IR) and Communicat... more Forging the World brings together leading scholars in International Relations (IR) and Communication Studies to investigate how, when, and why strategic narratives shape the structure, politics, and policies of the global system. Put simply, strategic narratives are tools that political actors employ to promote their interests, values, and aspirations for the international order by managing expectations and altering the discursive environment. These narratives define “who we are” and “what kind of world order we want.”

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats... more Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening.

This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations.

The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpred... more The trinity of government, military and publics has been drawn together into immediate and unpredictable relationships in a "new media ecology" that has ushered in new asymmetries in the waging of war and terror. To help us understand these new relationships, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin here provide a timely, comprehensive and highly readable survey of the field of war and media.

War is diffused through a complex mesh of our everyday media. Paradoxically, this both facilitates and contains the presence and power of enemies near and far. The conventions of so-called traditional warfare have been splintered by the availability and connectivity of the principal locus of war today: the electronic and digital media. Hoskins and O'Loughlin identify and illuminate the conditions of what they term "diffused war" and the new challenges it raises for the actors who wage and counter warfare, for their agents and mechanisms of the new media and for mass publics.

This book offers an invaluable review of the key literature and presents a fresh approach to the understanding of the dynamic relationships between war and media. It will be welcomed by a broad range of students taking courses on war and media and related modules, especially in media, communication and cultural studies, politics and international relations, sociology, journalism, and security studies.

This book examines the circulation and effects of radical discourse by analysing the role of mass... more This book examines the circulation and effects of radical discourse by analysing the role of mass media coverage in promoting or hindering radicalisation and acts of political violence.

There is a new environment of conflict in the post-9/11 age, in which there appears to be emerging threats to security and stability in the shape of individuals and groups holding or espousing radical views about religion, ideology, often represented in the media as oppositional to Western values. This book asks what, if anything is new about these radicalising discourses, how and why they relate to political acts of violence and terror, and what the role of the mass media is in promoting or hindering them.

This includes exploring how the acts themselves and explanations for them on the web are picked up and represented in mainstream television news media or Big Media, through the journalistic and editorial uses of words, phrases, graphics, images, and videos. It analyses how interpretations of the term 'radicalisation' are shaped by news representations through investigating audience responses, understandings and misunderstandings. Transnational in scope, this book seeks to contribute to an understanding of the connectivity and relationships that make up the new media ecology, especially those that appear to transcend the local and the global, accelerate the dissemination of radicalising discourses, and amplify media/public fears of political violence.

This book will be of interest to students of security studies, media studies, terrorism studies, political science and sociology.

Television is a medium of terror. Stories and images of mostly distant violence and bloodshed are... more Television is a medium of terror. Stories and images of mostly distant violence and bloodshed are streamed continuously into our homes, penetrating our senses of personal and collective safety. And yet the journalism of terror is also the journalism of security. Television, as it delivers daily the spectre of endless terror and violence, also rescues us from the brink of chaos. The unimaginable is rendered familiar and terror is harnessed in the frames, rituals, and routines of the major medium of our age. Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate the power of the entanglement of television and terror in both the spinning and the containing of the discourses of insecurity that mark our mediatized experience of the twenty-first century.

Papers by Ben O'Loughlin

Media, Culture & Society, 2015

ABSTRACT Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, ... more ABSTRACT Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power - scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening. This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order - the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflICT - the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations.

The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2015

Media, War & Conflict, 2013

Information Systems Frontiers, 2011

Hoskins, A., O'Loughlin, B., Prentice, S, Rayson, P., Taylor, PJ, Boudeau, C., and Carrigan,... more Hoskins, A., O'Loughlin, B., Prentice, S, Rayson, P., Taylor, PJ, Boudeau, C., and Carrigan, M. (2009) Developing our understanding of the language of extremism and its potential for predicting risk. Other. Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. ... Full text not currently available from Enlighten. ... Hoskins, A., O'Loughlin, B., Prentice, S, Rayson, P., Taylor, PJ, Boudeau, C., and Carrigan, M.

About the book: The issue of security – what it means and how it can be achieved - is one of the ... more About the book: The issue of security – what it means and how it can be achieved - is one of the defining questions of the early 21st century. It is a question that has come to affect more and more intimate elements of people's lives, impacting on relationships between states, between individuals and the state, but also between individuals as they interact in their everyday lives. This is the starting point of this interdisciplinary collection, which aims to both unpack and engage with current debates in the global fight against terrorism by focusing on the question of what security and insecurity do, can and should mean politically. Considering a wide range of social and political forums in a range of countries, the chapters in this book open up a serious debate about what community and citizenship mean in the present securitized context, in order to sharpen our appreciation of the political and social consequences of the range of understandings that are currently under negotia...

Parliamentary Affairs, 2012

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2009

This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and s... more This article presents research from a three-year study of shifting understandings of threat and security in Britain following the 2003 Iraq War. We develop the case for a more integrated and nuanced approach to studying the relationship between policymakers, media practitioners and media publics given the increasing importance of these relationships to international relations (IR) matters of concern. Our analysis demonstrates the &amp;amp;amp;#x27;push&amp;amp;amp;#x27;and &amp;amp;amp;#x27;pull&amp;amp;amp;#x27;factors that explain why certain individuals and groups arrive at certain ...

Ethnopolitics, 2010

In the past decade, it is through the nexus of media, security and multiculturalism that politica... more In the past decade, it is through the nexus of media, security and multiculturalism that political tensions have been most acutely felt and played out, especially in Western societies and cultures. Regrettably, social scientific understanding and evidence of this particular nexus have been lacking, with usually untested claims and generalizations regularly being made about the relationship between the putative power of media, the emergence of new security dilemmas and the proclaimed demise of multiculturalism. In this context, we are ...

Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to u... more Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to understand power and communication in international affairs. Analyses of soft power overwhelmingly focus on soft power 'assets' or capabilities and how to wield them, not how influence does or does not take place. It has become a catch-all term that has lost explanatory power, just as hard power once did. The authors argue that the concept of strategic narrative gives us intellectual purchase on the complexities of international politics today, especially in regard to how influence works in a new media environment. They believe that the study of media and war would benefit from more attention being paid to strategic narratives.

This book will be of interest to students of security studies, media studies, terrorism studies, political science and sociology.

Media, Culture & Society, 2015

The International Journal of Press/Politics, 2015

Media, War & Conflict, 2013

Information Systems Frontiers, 2011

Parliamentary Affairs, 2012

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2009

Ethnopolitics, 2010

The ‘Tweeting the Olympics’ project (the subject of this special section of Participations)must b... more The ‘Tweeting the Olympics’ project (the subject of this special section of Participations)must be understood in the context of efforts by host states, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and other actors involved in the Games to cultivate and communicate a set of meanings to audiences about both the Olympics events and the nations taking part. Olympic Games are not only sporting competitions; they are also exercises in the management of relations between states and publics, at home and overseas, in order to augment the attractiveness and influence or the soft power of the states involved. Soft power is most successful when it goes unnoticed according to its chief proponent Joseph Nye. If so, how can we possibly know whether soft power works? This article reviews the state of the field in thinking about public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and soft power in the period of this project (2012-14), focusing particularly on how the audiences of soft power projects, like the London and Sochi Games, were conceived and addressed. One of the key questions this project addresses is whether international broadcasters such as the BBCWS and RT used social media during the Games to promote a cosmopolitan dialogue with global audiences and/or merely to integrate social media so as to project and shape national soft power. We argue first that the contested nature of the Olympic Games calls into question received theories of soft power, public and cultural diplomacy. Second,strategic national narratives during the Olympics faced additional challenges, particularly
due to the tensions between the national and the international character of the Games. Third, the new media ecology and shift to a network paradigm further threatens the asymmetric power relations of the broadcasting paradigm forcing broadcasters to reassess their engagement with what was formerly known as ‘the audience’ and the targets of soft power.

After Broadcast War and Diffused War comes Arrested War, the latest paradigm of war and media. Ea... more After Broadcast War and Diffused War comes Arrested War, the latest paradigm of war and media. Each paradigm coincides with a discrete phase of mediatization. This article explains how war and media operated during each phase, describing the key characteristics of war, the form and nature of the prevailing media ecology, and how power was exercised by and distributed within government, military, and media elites. Following the sense of flux and uncertainty during the second phase of mediatization, when digital content and non-linear communication dynamics generated Diffused War, Arrested War is characterized by the appropriation and control of previously chaotic dynamics by mainstream media and, at a slower pace, government and military policy-makers. We use the ongoing Ukraine crisis to examine Arrested War in operation. In setting out a new paradigm of war and media, we also reflect on the difficulties of periodizing and historicizing these themes and ask what theoretical and conceptual tools are likely to be needed to understand and explain Arrested War.

Participations, May 29, 2015

Victory by Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen in the 400 metre individual medley at the London Olympic Gam... more Victory by Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen in the 400 metre individual medley at the London Olympic Games provoked instant and controversial reactions. BBC presenter Clare Balding immediately linked Shiwen to doping. If ‘trolling’ online is the deliberate upsetting of audiences to trigger debate and reflection, was Balding trolling? Her comments triggered trajectories of affective engagement across social and mainstream media, in Britain and internationally, which fed back into BBC coverage. We trace the ‘event arc’ of controversy, finding complex tensions between broadcasters, journalists, celebrities and Twitter users as they compete to control the event’s framing. Continued controversy and attention – ‘remediated trolling’ – benefited these secondary actors. While framing influence appears more dispersed in a hybrid, transnational media ecology, we argue that prominent journalists have learnt to harness the interaction of television, newspapers and social media. These ‘stars’ gain additional prominence through event arcs. Consequently, they must take responsibility for controversies and affective engagement. Trolling brings ratings, but is it ethical?

Retour page d&#x27;accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d&#x27;a... more Retour page d&#x27;accueil Chercher, sur, Tous les supports. Retour page d&#x27;accueil, Plus de 1.626.000 de titres à notre catalogue ! Notice. ...

In De Graaf, Dimitriu and Ringsmose, eds. Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion, and War (Routledg... more In De Graaf, Dimitriu and Ringsmose, eds. Strategic Narratives, Public Opinion, and War (Routledge: 2015)

Despite possessing overwhelming military capabilities, war presents Great Powers with complex problems. The study of communication is central to understanding the challenges Great Powers face in conflict. This chapter illustrates how Great Powers are constrained by strategic narratives even as they attempt to address challenges through the projection of strategic narratives.

This article takes a strategic narrative approach to explaining the current and likely future con... more This article takes a strategic narrative approach to explaining the current and likely future contestation between Russia and the West. We argue that Russia projects a strategic narrative that seeks to reinforce Russia's global prestige and authority , whilst promoting multilateral legal and institutional constraints on the other more powerful actors, as a means to ensure Russia stays among the top ranking great powers. To illustrate this we analyze Russia's identity narratives, international system narratives and issue narratives present in policy documents and speeches by key players since 2000. This enables the identification of remarkably consistency in Russia's narratives and potential points of convergence with Western powers around commitment to international law and systemic shifts to an increasingly multipolar order. However, we explain why the different meanings attributed to these phenomena generate contestation rather than alignment about past, present and future global power relations. We argue that Russia's historical-facing narratives and weakened material circumstances have the potential to hamper its adaptation to rapid systemic change, and to make attempts to forge closer cooperation with third parties challenging.

Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to u... more Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to understand power and communication in international affairs. Analyses of soft power
overwhelmingly focus on soft power ‘assets’ or capabilities and how to wield them, not how influence does or does not take place. It has become a catch-all term that has lost explanatory
power, just as hard power once did. The authors argue that the concept of strategic narrative gives us intellectual purchase on the complexities of international politics today, especially in
regard to how influence works in a new media environment. They believe that the study of media and war would benefit from more attention being paid to strategic narratives.