Chouliaraki, Lilie (2016) Authoring the self: media, voice and testimony in soldiers memoirs. Media, War & Conflict, 8 (4). pp. 58-75. ISSN 1750-6352
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Abstract
In this article, the author focuses on the struggles over self-representation that soldiers have engaged in at two key historical moments of modern Western warfare: the First World War, the first major industrialised conflict of the 20th century (1914–1918); and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which marked the emergence of information warfare in the 21st century (2001–2014). The Western soldier’s self-representation, the author concludes, has shifted from a practice of observing the battlefield as a strange place and himself as an ‘other’ within it, to a practice of considering the ‘other’, here the Iraqi or Afghani local, as the self, someone who shares a Western sense of humanity. These antithetical self-representations, the author argues, point in turn to complex transformations in the technologies, moralities and cultures of warfare, throwing into relief uneasy tensions in the West’s 21st-century interventionist conflicts. In their attempt to move away from the massacres of the 20th-century wars, such conflicts are suspended between sharing humanity and misrecognising ‘others’, between liberating and conquering, between saving and taking lives.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://mwc.sagepub.com/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2016 The Author |
| Library of Congress subject classification: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) |
| Sets: | Departments > Media and Communications Research centres and groups > POLIS |
| Date Deposited: | 12 Apr 2016 14:30 |
| URL: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/66050/ |
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