Screening Bosnia: Geopolitics, Gender and Nationalism in Film and Television Images of the 1992-95 War

by Stephen Harper

The Bosnian war of 1992-1995 was one of the most brutal conflicts to have erupted since the Second World War. But although the war occurred in what many have called 'Europe's backyard' and received significant media coverage in the West, relatively little scholarly attention has been devoted to media representations of the conflict. Stephen Harper analyses how the political contexts and historical events of the war have been represented, arguing that the Western media have--both during the war and afterwards--tended to present a one-sided, pro-Western view of the conflict.

Examining images of the war across a variety of media forms such as films, television documentaries and news media, Harper focuses on the representation of some of the war's major themes--including humanitarian intervention, the roles of NATO and the UN, genocide, rape and ethnic cleansing--and considers the role of popular media texts in reflecting and reinforcing Western geopolitical hegemony.

184 pages, Hardcover

First published June 2, 2016

About the author

Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Portsmouth, UK. His research interests span political and social issues in British television, critical theory and cultural geopolitics. He has written academic articles on a wide range of subjects including British television drama and documentary, dramatic representations of war and media representations of mental distress. He is also the author of Madness, Power and the Media (Palgrave, 2009) and Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (Zer0 Books, 2012).