CLAIMING GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR DISTANT SUFFERING IN MEDIA DISCOURSE: BOSNIA AND KOSOVO
Open Access
- Author:
- PARK, CHONGDAE
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- August 16, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Ronald V Bettig, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Dennis Karl Davis, Committee Member
Jeanne L Hall, Committee Member
Jeremy Packer, Committee Member
John Philip Christman, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Global Responsibility
Military Intervention
the Bosnian War
the Kosovo Conflict - Abstract:
- This dissertation explores the formation of global responsibility discourses used in promoting NATO’s military interventions in other sovereignties in the post-Cold War era in the mainstream US media. The study utilizes discourse analysis to examine the construction and articulation of global responsibility discourses surrounding the Bosnian War (1992-1995) and the Kosovo conflict (1998-1999). I approach the concept of global responsibility involving military interventions as one that can be assembled from the associated discourse. Accordingly, I have identified three major ways to discuss the global responsibility of “what we ought to do” at the national and global level: humanitarian responsibility, regional security responsibility, and the critiques of these two responsibilities. The case study of global responsibility discourses surrounding the Bosnian War and the Kosovo Conflict in the mainstream US media and their intertextuality offers an account of the roles of the US media in foreign policy concerning military intervention in the post-Cold War era. The construction and articulation of global responsibility discourses in the mainstream US media were closely related to the US government’s policy, and were formed within the framework of US national interest. The fact that the discourse on global responsibility functioned to facilitate US national interests and domestic responsibility not only means that the mainstream US media propagated the US government’s policy and agenda. The cases of military intervention also imply that there were more fundamental structure and patterns by which the mainstream US media approached the “humanitarian crises” in the post-Cold War era: namely, the “benevolent domination” and the subsequent construction of a “melodramatic national identity” and war narratives. Based on the presumption that the discourse of the mainstream US media was a primary site for the public for learning and experiencing the two crises, this research maintains that global responsibility discourses functioned to provide US and global citizens with common knowledge and an experience of the hegemonic notion of “humanitarian intervention” via mediated discourse. I argue that the construction and articulation of global responsibility discourses in the military interventions may have had dangerous ramifications for global democracy because the discourse of responsibility can potentially absorb the progressive energies created by the public’s awareness of responsibility on a global scale in order to reinforce the relations of domination.