Digital Witnessing in War Journalism: The Case of Post-Arab Spring Conflicts

Abstract

The prominence of citizen voice in contemporary war and conflict reporting has been both hailed as a democratic turn that gives visibility to hitherto powerless audiences and deplored as a demotic turn that sensationalises the news and marginalises deeper understandings of conflict. Rather than taking sides in this debate, I privilege an analytical approach that conceptualises war and conflict reporting as a securitisation of news—a discursive practice by which citizen voice is used to construe conflict as a humanitarian emergency, in line with contemporary conceptions of Western warfare, and to legitimise forms of action. I subsequently look into BBC’s convergent reporting on two post-Arab Spring conflicts, Libya and Syria, so as to explore precisely how citizen voice participates in securitising the news and which discourses of action it articulates.

Notes

¹ “Scenes at King’s Lynn, Norfolk,” The Times History of the World, p. 7. Retrieved from http://archive.org/stream/timeshistoryofwa07londuoft/timeshistoryofwa07londuoft_djvu.txt http://archive.org/stream/timeshistoryofwa07londuoft/timeshistoryofwa07londuoft_djvu.txt.

² In the First World War, for instance, the British justification of the war strategically moved from the German violation of the international law of neutrality, in the invasion of Belgium, to the German atrocities against Belgian women and children, which rallied people around a humanitarian cause. This “representation of German atrocities,” as Gullace (1997) argues, “provided British propagandists with a vivid and evocative set of images that could be used to explain the arcane language of international law to a democratic public increasingly empowered to support or reject its enforcement” (p. 716).

³ In the war of Yugoslavia, for instance, this was a deliberation between the responsibility to protect civilians and the responsibility to defend Western interests, as national and international actors sought to both respond to “the media reports of Serbian atrocities” and simultaneously “legitimize the deployment of a large peacekeeping force working under rather dangerous conditions” (Hansen, 2006, p. 125). Unlike the First World War, where suffering civilians were simply used as news propaganda for British interests, but were not part of the raison d’ etre of that conflict, the politics of pity in Yugoslavia, the first “humanitarian war” (Roberts, 1999), renders security an inherent part of the construal of the conflict itself and the driving force behind its course of action (airborne intervention).

⁴ Available at www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sgsm13454.doc.html

⁵ Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-13724765 (Syria) and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/9416095.stm (Libya).

⁶ There are, inevitably, clear differences in the mode of witnessing between these categories of examples. Whilst, for instance, ordinary witnessing is characterised by a militant ethos of defiance, as in “Gaddafi fails to control #Libya,” professional witnessing reflects a more balanced reporting ethos, either by conveying people’s testimonies in direct reported speech (“watching neighbours dying …”) or, by reporting events-as-they-happen (“tanks rolling in,” “casualties started arriving.”).

⁷ In Libya, following Gaddafi’s aerial raids against his population, the UNSC authorised a military intervention on humanitarian grounds (UNSC Mandate, March 1, 2011; http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm). In Syria, by contrast, the undecipherable and, eventually, extremely risky political identity of the rebel forces, combined with the positioning of the country in the international arena and the risks for a spill-over of unrest across the Middle East, rendered the option of intervention so far untenable (Thakur, 2013).