Ben O'Loughlin

Can Kofi Annan Build Democratic Time?

by Ben O'Loughlin | 19 September, 2012 | Featured

Patient voters in Zimbabwe, from The Guardian 2008.Democracy sits in time. It is a looping circuit of accountability between leaders and led. Voters authorise leaders to act on certain problems. Through everyday experience and media reports those voters can track if the leaders are doing what they said they’d do. Another election comes around and voters can stick or twist, authorising another set of actions. The loop of democracy creates expectations about what everyone should be doing and when. Everyone knowing and following this temporality is a necessary condition for democracy to work....

Gender, Violence and Digital Emergence

by Ben O'Loughlin | 18 June, 2012 | Featured

One of the most unsettling findings of our media and radicalisation research was the way in which the suffering of certain individual women is turned into a cause by radical Islamic groups that leads to violence by men in those women’s names. The availability of digital media, combined with a certain doctrinal entrepreneurialism by those using religion to justify political violence, has resulted in the widespread dissemination of amateur video clips depicting a specific woman’s plight and calling for reprisals. If you want to understand the link between online propaganda and offline action,...

How the US is Slowly Cultivating the Conditions for a Renewed International Order

by Ben O'Loughlin | 1 June, 2012 | Featured

Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter’s talk in Parliament in London this week offered useful insights into how the Obama administration and foreign policy analysts around it are thinking about shaping international order. As Director of Policy Planning in that administration from 2009-11 she spoke from experience about the mechanisms being used to implement international change. While she touched on Syria, drone strikes and other newsworthy issues, her wide-ranging discussion was more important for the glimpses it gave of the theoretical assumptions underlying how US policymakers understand...

Has US political communication risen from the dead?

by Ben O'Loughlin | 4 April, 2012 | Featured

The 2012 International Studies Association (ISA) Annual Convention in San Diego this week was a good opportunity to test the state of US political communication. Studies of political communication in previous ISAs have been marked by an obsession with analyzing media content then extrapolating about how politics or IR works. The latest content analysis of the New York Times and Washington Post is presented as if this is a bellweather for public discourse. Comparing US elite press to the Guardian or even Le Monde is seen as a radical step, allowing for claims about “international” public...

Strategic narratives: An uncertain science

by Ben O'Loughlin | 17 January, 2012 | Featured

Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or have other discernible effects, we can say strategic narratives matter. The investment states have made in their international communications...

Be Concerned but not Informed: Radical Islamic Terrorism and Mainstream Media since 9/11

by Ben O'Loughlin | 20 September, 2011 | Various and Sundry

The website e-IR asked me to review how mainstream media have represented radical Islamist media in the past decade, and what this means for the spread of radical discourses more broadly. Here is my reply, and you can read the original at e-IR here. Mainstream media’s presentation of radical Islamic terrorism since 11 September 2001 is simply a continuation of how mainstream media have represented political violence for many decades. Moral panics about enemies within, journalists following agendas set by ministers, scandalised yet sensationalist coverage of violence, victims and perpetrators...

Conflict prevention and early warnings: closing the gap through communications?

by Ben O'Loughlin | 17 September, 2011 | Various and Sundry

The catastrophes of Rwanda and Bosnia led to a debate in the 1990s about the warning-response gap. Conflict prevention and early warning systems did not seem up to scratch. Third parties intervened too late, if at all. Spending was skewed towards mitigating the effects of conflicts, not on stopping them happen in the first place. The spread of satellite television brought conflicts into more immediate public vision. It was feared this created a CNN effect whereby policymakers were forced into military intervention for humanitarian causes to satisfy a more globally-aware public opinion. But...

Semantic polling: the next foreign policy tool

by Ben O'Loughlin | 26 August, 2011 | Various and Sundry

George Gallup - what have you started? The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can constantly monitor public opinion in countries in real-time. The digitization of social life around the world – uneven yes, but spreading – leaves ever-more traces of communications to be mined, analysed and acted upon. In a paper that Nick Anstead and I presented in Iceland this week, we called this...

Narrative Horror and the Downfall of Leaders #1: Rupert Murdoch

by Ben O'Loughlin | 13 July, 2011 | Various and Sundry

You have devoted your life to creating a great empire, one that stretches around the world and wields influence over politics and culture in a number of countries. Decades of criticism and conspiracy about the pernicious effects of your empire only testify to your importance. You have groomed your successors and shaped the climate they will work within. Biographers will not be able to knock the magnitude of your achievements. Your story is written. You are legendary, a mythical figure in your lifetime, hated, loved, known. So imagine the agony of losing this reputation in a single act and...

Stereotypes and suspicion: Nicer words won’t change anything

by Ben O'Loughlin | 8 July, 2011 | Various and Sundry

A new report was released yesterday, ‘Suspect Communities’, comparing how UK media and government have framed Irish and Muslim communities since the 1970s. The authors find that the ideas underpinning counter-terrorism measures and the way politicians, policymakers and the media discuss who might be responsible for bombings have not changed over four decades. The key finding is that ambiguity surrounding who is an ‘extremist’ or a ‘terrorist’ has led to hostile responses in everyday life - at work, in shops, on the street - from members of the public who think they are under threat from...

The Duck of Minerva

Ben O'Loughlin

Ben O'Loughlin

Recent Posts

Can Kofi Annan Build Democratic Time?

Has US political communication risen from the dead?

Strategic narratives: An uncertain science

Be Concerned but not Informed: Radical Islamic Terrorism and Mainstream Media since 9/11

Conflict prevention and early warnings: closing the gap through communications?

Semantic polling: the next foreign policy tool

Narrative Horror and the Downfall of Leaders #1: Rupert Murdoch

Stereotypes and suspicion: Nicer words won’t change anything

Meta