Much has been written in the last decade on using film as a pedagogical tool in the classroom and specifically in the teaching and learning of international relations (IR). Instructors assert that film has numerous beneficial effects in terms of student interest, engagement, conceptual understanding, and class performance. This article builds upon the existing literature and fills a gap by presenting and analyzing the empirical findings of recent classroom research on the usefulness of five films for student engagement, understanding, and interpretation of various IR topics (IR theory, media and war, and human rights). The data and their analysis reveal that film can potentially be a powerful and dramatic medium to aid student learning of IR, but the results are mixed. Students' written work also demonstrates that film's value can be overrated and that film can be superficial and confusing. This research sheds light on how we can better use film in the international studies classroom beyond its entertainment and illustrative value.
This article investigates the practice of post 9/11 US image warfare through an analysis of three sets of enemy capture and killing: Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden. Specifically, the article examines these images in terms of their potential to support, complicate, and/or undermine the strategic narratives of the Bush and Obama administrations as they relate to the Iraq War and the killing of Osama bin Laden, respectively. Today’s new media ecology complicates the relationship between images and strategic narratives. The analysis finds that the capture and death images of the Hussein family primarily served to reinforce the Bush administration strategic system narratives of American dominance and hegemony, the illegitimacy and oppression of the Hussein regime, and of ‘justice’; however, the images can also be interpreted as complicating and potentially undermining these same narratives. The absence of Osama bin Laden death images supported the Obama administration’s counter strategic narratives that focused more on an American identity of restraint and rule of law. The ‘situation room’ photo that became the representative image of the Bin Laden killing also reinforced given strategic narratives by providing a more innocuous and legitimate way, albeit still violent, to communicate a story of American military power and justice.
Nationalism has been one of the domestic constraints to progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, especially in the Balkans that are dealing with multiple postwar transition realities. Ethno-nationalist challenges, often influenced by religion, have been significant in Bosnia-Herzegovina given weak state identity and democracy, competing institutionalized ethno-national identities, and slow Europeanization. Through the lenses of gendered nationalism, the societal security dilemma, and political homophobia, this article analyzes how the politics and discourse of LGBT rights during the past decade in Bosnia reveal tensions between competing and multiple identities and narratives—European, multiethnic, ethno-nationalist, and religious—using the violent response to the 2008 Queer Sarajevo Festival as a key illustration. However, in the past decade, LGBT rights have progressed and antigay backlash to LGBT visibility (in addition to stronger external leverage and other factors) has resulted in stronger activism and change. The public discourse and response to the announcement of Bosnia’s first Pride Parade represents another turning point in LGBT visibility that seems to reveal that ethno-nationalist challenges may be lessening as LGBT rights norms gain strength.
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