'Improper distance': towards a critical account of solidarity as irony

Silverstone's 'proper distance' is one of the most original and productive conceptualizations of a fundamental problem in the ethics of mediation: the humanization of vulnerable others. This is because 'proper distance' is not only a normative but also, importantly, an analytical concept. Whereas in its normative dimension, proper distance refers to the degree of proximity required for mediated relationships of care and responsibility to develop, in its analytical dimension, the metaphorical vocabulary of space becomes an important resource in evaluating how mediation produces 'humanity' through the positioning of mediated others along the axis of proximity-distance. My application of this analytical vocabulary to the mediation of humanitarianism enables me to create a typology of paradigms of solidarity, namely 'pity', 'irony' and 'agonism', highlighting the different ways in which their particular articulations of proximity-distance produce distinct conceptions of 'humanity' and, therefore, distinct proposals for solidarity towards vulnerable others. Focusing, specifically, on the critique of an emerging paradigm of solidarity as irony, I argue that, even though it appears as a promising response to pity and its misleading spatiality of universal proximity, irony celebrates consumerism as a reflexive distance-from-the self and is, therefore, unable to put forward a morally acceptable proposal of solidarity

Authoring the self: media, voice and testimony in soldiers memoirs

In this article, the author focuses on the struggles over self-representation that soldiers have engaged in at two key historical moments of modern Western warfare: the First World War, the first major industrialised conflict of the 20th century (1914–1918); and the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the so-called ‘War on Terror’, which marked the emergence of information warfare in the 21st century (2001–2014). The Western soldier’s self-representation, the author concludes, has shifted from a practice of observing the battlefield as a strange place and himself as an ‘other’ within it, to a practice of considering the ‘other’, here the Iraqi or Afghani local, as the self, someone who shares a Western sense of humanity. These antithetical self-representations, the author argues, point in turn to complex transformations in the technologies, moralities and cultures of warfare, throwing into relief uneasy tensions in the West’s 21st-century interventionist conflicts. In their attempt to move away from the massacres of the 20th-century wars, such conflicts are suspended between sharing humanity and misrecognising ‘others’, between liberating and conquering, between saving and taking lives

Digital witnessing in conflict zones: the politics of remediation

Digital witnessing, our engagement with death through local participants’ own recordings of the conflict zone, introduces a new kind of death spectacle in the West: mediatized death [Mortensen, M. (2015). Journalism and eyewitness images. London: Routledge.]. Whilst, like past spectacles, this one also invites its publics to witness death as a moral event that requires a response, mediatized death differs from past spectacles, in that it injects into the practice of witnessing an accentuated sense of doubt: how do we know this is authentic? And, what should we feel towards it? This is because, given the multiple actors filming in conflict zones, digital witnessing breaks with the professional monopoly of the journalist and becomes a complex site of struggle where competing spectacles of death, each with their own interest, vie for visibility. How the status of the death spectacle and our potential engagement with it change under the weight of this new epistemic instability is the focus of this article

Charity without compassion

When it comes to responding to human suffering, are we turning into a nation that clears its conscience with a cheque? A new book by LSE professor Lilie Chouliaraki discusses this theme

Victimhood: the affective politics of vulnerability

In this article, I enquire into the historical circumstances (past and present) under which vulnerability, an embodied and social condition of openness to violence, turns into victimhood, an act of affective communication that attaches the moral value accrued to the vulnerable to everyone who claims it. The 20th-century victimhood, I argue, emerged as a master-signifier of emotional capitalism through the two grand narratives of modernity, psychoanalysis and human rights, each of which tactically mobilizes affective claims to trauma or injury to bestow the moral value of the sufferer to any powerful claimant independent of the position of vulnerability they speak from. Turning to the 21st century, I place victimhood within the communicative context of post-recession and digital neoliberalism to show how the two amplify, accelerate and complicate the circulation of affective claims to suffering, rendering platformized pain a ‘new normal’ of our culture. In order to address the implications of this ‘new normal’ on the most vulnerable in society, I propose the distinction between ‘tactical’ and ‘systemic’ vulnerability as a heuristic frame that enables us to ask questions about who claims to be a victim, from which position and to which effects; and, in so doing, helps us to scrutinize the social contexts in which affective claims to victimhood are made and the power relations such claims reproduce or challenge

Power and resistance at Europe's digital border

Citizenship is often viewed as a great equaliser, but is this always the case? Eleanor Knott examines how citizenship can function both as a source of opportunity and as a vehicle for inequality

Voice and community in the 2015 refugee crisis: a content analysis of news coverage in eight European countries

Drawing on a Content Analysis of 1200 news articles on the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ across eight European countries, we address the question of whether and how refugees ‘speak' in the news. To this end, we categorized the language of these articles in terms of how they narrated the subjects, status and contexts of voice. Our analysis establishes three different linguistic practices through which the voice of refugees is managed in the news – what we call practices of ‘bordering’: bordering by silencing, by collectivization and by de-contextualization. In light of these findings, we reach two conclusions. First, the distribution of voice in European news follows a strict hierarchy – one that relies on specifically journalistic strategies of selection and ordering yet reflects and reproduces broader hierarchies of the European political spheres. Second, this hierarchy of voice leads to a triple misrecognition of refugees as political, social and historical actors, thereby keeping them firmly outside the remit of ‘our’ communities of belonging

The digital border: mobility beyond territorial and symbolic divides

In this article, we develop a definition of the digital border as an assemblage of mediations that articulates digital and other technologies with symbolic resources to draw boundaries of inside/outside both on the ground (territorial border) and in narrative (symbolic border). We subsequently sketch the contours of this assemblage through an emphasis on its dynamics of mediation, its dialectics of resistance and its trajectories of historicity and argue for the significance of this conceptualisation of the digital border in migration research

Migration - the crisis imaginary

On 14 June, hundreds of migrants died after the fishing vessel they were travelling in sank near the Greek town of Pylos. Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou argue the tragedy underlines how terms like “migration crisis” obscure the real victims of Europe’s migration policies