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After conquering large swathes of northern Iraq, the Islamic State undertook an aggressive genocidal campaign against the Yezidi people in which they not only executed and enslaved thousands of innocent civilians, but also damaged or destroyed several key Yezidi temples and shrines. Drawing on a small sample of in-depth semi-structured interviews with Yezidi men and women from two regions conquered by the Islamic State, this article documents the effect this wave of persecution has had on these Yezidi individuals. It finds that the attacks by the Islamic State on Yezidis and their heritage sites have caused considerable suffering among the community, in part because of their inability to practise their intangible religious rituals and customs. However, the Yezidi people have also demonstrated remarkable resistance and resilience to the Islamic State genocide in terms of returning to their ancient homelands, reconstructing their heritage sites and the re-emergence of their intangible religious heritage practices. The article concludes by noting that the new insights gleaned from these interviews are a step towards better understanding the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage in the wake of conflict, genocide and mass heritage destruction.

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The relationship between Chinese soft power and Chinese media has been a focus of a growing body of literature. Challenging a resource-based conception of soft power and a transmission view of communication that inform much of the debate, this article adopts a discursive approach to soft power and media communication. It argues that their relationship is not just a matter of resource transmission, but one of discursive construction, which begs the questions of what mediated discursive practices are at play in soft power construction and how. Addressing these oft-neglected questions, we identify a typology of three soft-power discursive practices: charm offensive, Othering offensive, and defensive denial. Focusing on the little-understood practice of Othering offensive, we illustrate its presence in Chinese media through a critical discourse analysis of China Daily’s framing of Donald Trump and the United States, and argue that the Othering offensive in Chinese media that portrays Trump’s America as a dysfunctional and declining Other serves to construct a Chinese self as more responsible, dynamic, and attractive. Adding a missing discursive dimension to the study of soft power and the media, this study has both scholarly and practical implications for analysing a nation’s soft power strategy.

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This article assesses the link between the state and the media in their coverage of foreign policy decisions. It holds up to empirical scrutiny the claim that genuine press criticism can only occur within the bounds of political-elite debate. Taking the Australian government’s 2014 decision to fight the Islamic State as its case study, it explores areas of consensus and dissensus between political discourse and the media. Conducting a qualitative analysis of three media frames used by major newspapers, it tests the “indexing hypothesis” and concludes that some press coverage went beyond the parameters of political-elite debate. This finding of independent criticism has implications beyond the present case study, as it helps us better understand the role of the media in democracies—specifically, holding governments to account when sending their nations to war.