Book review: Philipp Budka and Brigit Bräucher Theorising, Media and Conflict

Abstract

The recent wars in the West and Central Asia, as well as the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), have shown the role of media, especially new media, in conflicts. The world has witnessed these wars through mediating lenses – mobile phones, blogs posts, tweets, Facebook live streams, etc. – used by grassroots actions, manipulated by states or abused by terrorist organizations across the regions. The news of these wars arrives across borders before stationed or local journalists are ready to compile and convey fact-checked news. The sheer intensity of media in conflicts, media for conflicts and conflicting medias call on a fresh academic understanding of what is going on. Theorising Media and Conflict has brought about 14 chapters together to decentre the role of media in the media-driven world of contemporary conflicts. This edited volume proposes to revisit and refresh the debates on media and conflict through a ‘non-media-centric approach’ (p. 9). The editors upend the conventional and normative approaches limited to discourse, visual, content, reportage or policy analysis through anthropological analysis and ethnographically rooted methodologies. By way of telling ethnographic narratives and edited via a thorough theoretical inventory of current debates, the authors argue that a non-media-centric approach traces how the complexities of media technologies, sensory perceptions and social life are interrelated (p. 9). In other words, this volume encourages scholars and media researchers to think about how media becomes social and how it produces the social fabric of conflict. The editors have organized the book into six distinctive parts, which build up how they envision mediated conflict. They have broadened the notion of conflict beyond the limits of contentious clashes and push readers to see conflict through lived experiences and everyday encounters. They aptly show how articulations and representations of conflicts in the news or other media platforms differ from witnessing and experiencing conflict. The six parts are juxtaposed masterfully to embody the theoretical framework discussed in the introduction. The theoretical framework calls readers’ attention to the concept of mediation and, chapter by chapter, authors portray how media is mediated in conflicts and not broadcast from conflicts. In the Afterword, John Postill explains that mediation ‘provides . . . a powerful lens through which to observe the 1004012 MWC0010.1177/17506352211004012Media, War & ConflictBook review book-review2021