Coverage of African Conflicts in the American Media: Filtering out the Logic of Plunder

Abstract

AbstractThrough an analysis of the Liberian Civil War I argue that elite media and foreign policy decision makers share a classical set of assumptions about conflicts in the developing world that I call Westphalian. This paradigm privileges the Eurocentric nation state and its notions of power, ideology, and violence while intentionally or not, falsely reinforcing the rigid separation of government from the private economic sphere. In the end, this Westphalian lens of power obscures the new faces of transnational conflict networks and the importance of economic sub-state actors in creating violence based purely on economic motivations and greed