American Empire: Media and International Insecurity

Abstract

This issue of MIA was conceived at about the time that the November 2003 issue on ‘The New “Others”: Media and Society Post-September 1’ was published. That issue, due to the normal journal lead times, was largely assembled before both the Bali bombing and the war in Iraq, and thus the editors, Liz Jacka and Lelia Green, were not able to give the kind of coverage to those events that they, and we, would have liked. So this issue, in which we include several articles which analyse aspects of the (continuing) Iraq war, is to some extent a sequel to the earlier one. However, editing that issue and observing the unfolding events surrounding the war and its aftermath also led us to begin to ruminate upon the intensification of US world hegemony, and to reflect on the apparent erosion of any counterforce to its continuing economic, military and cultural domination. This posed the question of whether the ‘9/11 thing’ had led to a change in the United States’ role in the world and whether, in fact, what we were confronting was an American empire, with the same kind of total power in the world of the twenty-first century that the Roman Empire wielded in the ancient world. This issue, then, seeks to illuminate the extension of the ‘American empire’ and the resulting deployment internationally of discourses of insecurity, which drive a greater and greater wedge between the ‘free world’ — as George W. Bush likes to call it — and the forces of darkness and barbarism.