Collaborative Research: Political Violence as Communication

民间恐怖主义是一种“政治戏剧”的形式，在某种意义上，民间团体利用暴力场面来恐吓特定的目标，并吸引潜在的支持者。作为“行动宣传”，恐怖主义本质上是一种心理战，因此严重依赖现代大众媒体来传达其象征性信息。不幸的是，很少有比较或跨国研究探索恐怖主义、大众媒体和民主之间的联系，而现有的研究则受到理论缺乏、不同类型政治暴力的定义模糊以及对如何收集政治暴力数据的担忧的影响。本项目引入创新来帮助纠正这些问题。具体来说，我们将社会运动和传播理论纳入社会生态学框架，并提出了关于媒体在各种形式的政治暴力中的作用的假设。同时，我们引入了一种精炼的政治暴力类型以及新媒体变量，以部分纠正困扰当前研究的一些问题。在方法方面，我们将对ITERATE数据库以及为世界上大多数地区提供适当信息的其他数据源使用集合时间序列分析。年代的国家。使用ITERATE的一些初步结果表明：1)媒体效应的净影响，民主对政治暴力的影响很小；2)民主与西方媒体的存在相互作用，鼓励跨国恐怖主义；但是，当暴力行为者以政府为目标（即游击战）时，情况并非如此。这项研究将有助于我们从三个方面理解政治暴力。首先，它将为理解政治暴力提供一个新的理论框架，提出更新鲜、更细致的假设（例如，大众媒体应该鼓励恐怖主义，但不鼓励正在进行的游击战/内战/国际战争）。其次，它将展示各种形式的政治暴力(如严格定义恐怖主义？（如对平民的袭击）会对研究结果产生重大影响。第三，由于大多数关于政治暴力的数据来自媒体报道，因此媒体报道与政治暴力之间存在自然（或人为）的相关性。为了纠正这一点，该项目引入了一种相对简单的技术，将媒体的人工制品与媒体对政治暴力的真正影响分开。虽然许多学者和政策制定者怀疑大众媒体和民主化是恐怖主义和其他形式暴力的中心，但对于它们的独特或综合影响却没有达成一致意见。该项目引入的研究创新将改进过去的研究，随着这些关系变得更加清晰，最终回答有关民主和大众媒体如何引发或阻止政治暴力的问题，使我们超越激烈的辩论。更广泛地说，莎士比亚有先见之明，他说“整个世界是一个舞台”。现代大众传媒使其成为现实，但媒体对其他社会、政治和经济现象的影响却没有得到很好的理解。本项目将展示至少一种在全球范围内研究媒体影响的方法，并且该框架可以容纳对许多其他媒体驱动现象的调查，例如全球商业周期、民主化浪潮、跨国抗议/动员、所谓“世界政体”的传播（偶尔收缩）以及许多其他形式的跨国社会变革。

Collaborative ProposalsSES-0854121Edward CrenshawCraig JenkinsOhio State UniversitySES-0854256Kristopher RobisonNorthern Illinois UniversityCivil terrorism is a form of "political theater" in the sense that civilian groups use violent spectacle to intimidate specific targets and appeal to potential supporters. As "propaganda by deed," terrorism is essentially a form of psychological warfare, and is therefore heavily reliant on the modern mass media to convey its symbolic messages. Unfortunately, little comparative or cross-national research has explored the nexus between terrorism, the mass media, and democracy, and what exists has suffered from theoretical anemia, definitional ambiguities over the different types of political violence, and concerns about how data on political violence are collected.This project introduces innovations to help correct these problems. Specifically, nesting social movements and diffusion theories within a social ecology framework, we draw hypotheses concerning the media's role in various forms of political violence. At the same time, we introduce a refined typology of political violence as well as new media variables to partially correct some of the problems plaguing current research. In terms of methodology, we will use pooled time-series analysis on the ITERATE database as well as other data sources that provide appropriate information for most of the world?s nations. Some preliminary results using ITERATE suggest that 1) net of media effects, democracy has very little influence on political violence; 2) democracy interacts with the presence of the Western press to encourage transnational terrorism; but 3) this is not the case when violent actors target government (i.e., guerilla war). This research will contribute to our understanding of political violence in three ways. First, it will provide a new theoretical framework for understanding political violence that suggests fresher, more nuanced hypotheses (e.g., the mass media should encourage terrorism but discourage ongoing guerilla/civil/international warfare). Second, it will demonstrate how refined definitions of various forms of political violence (such as strictly defining ?terrorism? as attacks on civilians) can have a major impact on research findings. Third, as most data on political violence are taken from media accounts, there is a natural (or artifactual) correlation between media reportage and political violence. To correct this, the project introduces a relatively simple technique for disentangling media artifacts from the true influence of media on political violence. While many scholars and policy-makers suspect that the mass media and democratization are central to the staging of terrorism and other forms of violence, there is no agreement on their distinctive or combined effects. The research innovations introduced by this project will improve on past research and, as these relationships become clearer, finally answer questions about how democracy and the mass media invite or discourage political violence, moving us beyond heated debate. More broadly, Shakespeare has proven prescient when he said that "all the world's a stage." The modern mass media have made it so, but the influence of media on other sociological, political and economic phenomena is not well-understood. This project will demonstrate at least one way to study media effects on a global scale, and the framework can accommodate the investigation of many other media-driven phenomena such as global business cycles, waves of democratization, transnational protest/mobilization, the spread (and occasional contraction) of so-called "world polity", and many other forms of transnational social change.