Framing national interest how media discourses influence western policy agendas towards foreign armed conflicts

Abstract

To what extent and how do media discourses shape the sometimes erratic and often problematic responses of Western policymakers to armed conflicts around the globe? The thesis examines this question from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. It highlights the contingency of the Western gaze and the ability of non-governmental political elites to influence processes of foreign policymaking by shaping public discourse on the national interest. The thesis statistically analyses how much time and resources the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany spend on 20 of the most intense armed conflict between 1998 and 2010. Based on original data covering 42,000 newspaper articles and 4,200 foreign policy events, the thesis shows that a conflict’s place on the foreign policy agenda is systematically related to media discourses that suggest doing something about a specific conflict. The analysis demonstrates furthermore that much of the discursive patterns in media precede foreign policy activity, which indicates that the media do not just report on foreign policy developments, but also help to bring them about. In the second part, this thesis usesWestern reactions to the civil war in Darfur as a theory-developing case study to explore who is able to shape foreign policy discourse and how. It problematizes wide-spread conceptions of the elite, the media, and the public and develops an analytical framework that is based on discourse theoretical notions put forward by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj ˇ Ziˇzek. In contrast to the widespread top-down narratives in which governmental elites simply dictate a foreign policy consensus to media and public, this thesis argues that the dividing line is rarely between ‘the government’ and ‘the people.’ Rather, political conflict revolves around competing ideological positions that try to define the meaning of the national interest. Media discourses are a central forum for the hegemonic struggle between these positions and societal actors other than governmental officials can effectively intervene in this process.