Tabloid Terror ─ War, Culture and Geopolitics

This book analyzes the methods, effects, and mechanisms by which international relations reach the US citizen. Deftly dissecting the interrelationships of national identity formation, corporate ‘news and opinion’ dissemination, and the quasi-academic apparatus of war justification - focusing on the Bush administration's exploitation of the fear and insecurity caused by 9/11 and how this has manifested itself in the US media (especially the tabloid populist media). Debrix explains how all serve to defend and produce state power and develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are both organized by, and supportive of, a strong centralized US government. The field of International Relations sorely needs such analytics, in so far as it explains how people in their everyday lives relate to transnational issues.
Tabloid Terror critically covers a wide variety of US popular culture from the Internet to Fox News; analyzes diverse authors as Julia Kristeva, J.G. Ballard and Robert Kaplan and takes into account renowned international relations interlocutors as Don Imus, Bill O’Reilly, and Tommy Franks.

François Debrix is Associate Professor of International Relations at Florida International University in Miami, USA.

Introduction: From Images of Terror to Tabloid Geopolitics 1. Cyberterror and Media-Induced Fears: The Tabloid Production of Emergency Culture 2. Tabloid Realism and the Reconstruction of American Security Culture before 9/11 3. Discourses of War, Geographies of Abjection: American Intellectuals of Statecraft and the Avenging of 9/11 4. The United States and the War Machine: Proliferating Insecurity, Terror, and Agony after the Invasion of Iraq 5. The Sublime Spectatorship of the Iraq War: America’s Tabloid Aesthetics of Violence and the Erasure of the Event. Conclusion: Tabloid Terror and Precarious Lives