Anti-war Activism in the Information Age
About the Project
This project runs from January 2006 to December 2007 and involves a team of three researchers. As well as a number of journal articles and conference papers, we reported our research results to invited activists and academics at a workshop in November 2007, and are writing a book - provisionally titled Anti-War Activism: New Media and Protest in the Information Age.
The project’s core interest is in ways in which many political issues and mobilisations appear to be shifting away from organised parties towards looser social movements such as environmental and human rights campaigns on which often quite diverse people come together around shared or even single issues. Think, for example, of the Make Poverty History campaign during 2005-6 that brought many different people together on a shared concern for reducing world poverty. Make Poverty History also expressed something that interests us very much in this project: it engaged a massive symbolic campaign in which a huge range of new (and old) media were put to use. Thus it involved text message exhortations, music concerts simultaneously distributed round the world, large sales of wrist bands, all tied in with large demonstrations, lobbying and the involvement of celebrities. It is this combination of novel forms of engagement and a heightened use of new technologies that especially interests us in this project.
We focus on the anti-war movement (or, if one prefers, the peace movement) because it has been especially prominent in recent years, notably with regard to the Iraq invasion and subsequent conflict. It has also managed to mobilise enormous numbers of protesters as well as bringing together widely different types of people.
We use the term ‘internet activism’ to signal as a special concern ways in which information and communications technologies are integrated into these ‘new politics’, whether it be e-mail used for protesting, web sites to increase the effectiveness of information to supporters, or hacking with a political bent. We want to look more closely at how these new technologies are integrated into - and possibly shape - today’s forms of political engagement.
Another reason we are especially interested in anti-war groups is because of the changing information environment that surrounds war today. Not so long ago, when a nation such as Britain engaged in war, then the information to ordinary citizens through media would have been severely limited. Nowadays, however, while what has been called perception management is evident from politicians and military forces, there is also much more pervasive and burgeoning information available about wars. This comes from all sorts of places, from reporters in the field as well as from protest groups around the world. It comes in the ‘old’ media of course (though it adopts new technologies such as satellite and video phones), but also through internet sources and e-mail communications. Together this makes for a much more complicated information environment than before, one that is much more intensive and extensive for audiences who are practically more removed from the effects of war then ever, yet able to see and learn about it on TV and computer screens in very vivid ways. At the same time public opinion - whether it supports the military or not - is of huge significance in war, so ‘symbolic struggles’ between those who support war and those who oppose it are of major consequence.
Together these factors explain what this project is about: new forms of political activity, the anti-war movement, the harnessing of new media, and a changing information environment.
