Coverage of African conflicts in the American media: filtering out the logic of plunder

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Periodical article

Title:	Coverage of African conflicts in the American media: filtering out the logic of plunder
Author:	Cook, Christopher R.
Year:	2013
Periodical:	African and Asian Studies (ISSN 1569-2094)
Volume:	12
Issue:	4
Pages:	373-390
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Africa Liberia United States
Subjects:	civil wars mass media political economy
External link:	https://doi.org/10.1163/15692108-12341273
Abstract:	Through an analysis of news coverage of the Liberian Civil War in the New York Times and the Washington Post the author argues that elite media and foreign policy decision makers share a classical set of assumptions about conflicts in the developing world that he calls Westphalian. This paradigm privileges the Eurocentric nation state and its notions of power, ideology, and violence while intentionally or not, falsely reinforcing the rigid separation of government from the private economic sphere. In the end, this Westphalian lens of power obscures the new faces of transnational conflict networks and the importance of economic sub-State actors in creating violence based purely on economic motivations and greed. Bibliogr., sum. [Journal abstract]