FIGURE 1 - uploaded by Babak Bahador
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Frame % after key events in the Iraq war buildup and first-year timeline. The events on the x axis marking the beginning points for each interevent period. Thus the levels at each event indicate the period following the event. Because the regional threat frame was rarely mentioned, it is excluded.
Source publication
President George W. Bush and his administration presented a variety of justifications for the 2003 Iraq war. Academic literature and journalism about the communication campaign emphasized two reasons: Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction program and links to terrorism. Drawing on the first systematic content analysis of the administration's o...
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Citations
... Trump echoes that statement nearly 60 years later, asserting nearly the exact same thing: a wish for a nuclear-free world, but rooted in the reality of a world marked by proliferation rather than arms limitation. Bush frames much of America's defense activities as a bulwark against the dangers of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, a finding also discussed by Bahador, et al. (2018). ...
In this analysis of public speeches from four American presidents from the Republican Party, the ways in which those presidents discuss and position American defense activities and stances are examined to track the progression from the 1960s to the present. Presidents chosen were from one party who also presided over a period of protracted armed conflict or cold war. The addresses analyzed comprised public addresses to congress or the American people. The analysis groups recurring frames for each president. Some frames were more salient for certain presidents than for others. Other frames were common and consistently pervaded the presidents' remarks to congress and the public. America's struggle against a faceless enemy, American military might as a guarantor of peace, and the importance of the United States' commitments to its international partners were all prevailing frames which emerged in the analysis.
The democratic peace program arguably constitutes one of the most successful empirical research programs in the discipline. Its main empirical finding motivated extensive theorizing (e.g., challengers, as well as distinct theoretical enterprises), sparked further debate about how to conceptualize and operationalize democracy, and shifted the foreign policy discourse, particularly in the United States. Lost in these successes, however, is a critical unanswered question: how much interstate peace can the democratic peace potentially explain? We explore these limits (i.e., scope, or empirical coverage) in this study. We first identify the peaceful dyadic relationships—namely those that never go to war across long historical periods. We next classify these dyads as democratic (i.e., both members are democracies) or nondemocratic. The empirical analysis then examines this democracy–peace relationship across three time periods, three distinct samples (which address potential false positives), two definitions of “peace,” and two thresholds for democracy. Regardless of how we approach the data, only 4–26 percent of all peaceful dyads qualify as “democratic.” Because we control for the obvious trivial explanation (insufficient capabilities due to distance), some other (set of) factor(s) must account for the majority of interstate peace. We close with a discussion about where future research might search for these factors, as well as the larger policy implications of the study.
This dissertation examines cultural and literary responses to dementia in narratives dealing with the personal and historical memory of trauma and violence. Rather than use dementia to signify a crisis of forgetting or the erasure of history, the authors in this study deploy dementia as a formal and ethical resource; they offer revisionary narratives that recuperate negative discourses surrounding aging and cognitive impairment, as well as enable readers’ reflections on issues across geopolitical borders, historical contexts, and different marginalized life experiences. Bringing a disability studies analytic to the examination of the politics and narrative aesthetics of dementia, "Entangled Stories" argues for a nuanced understanding of how dementia operates formally and thematically in contemporary writing as a site in which the intimate and global collide. Each chapter centers on authors’ concomitant personal encounters with dementia and their explorations of the historical memory of major 20th- and 21st-century catastrophes. As such, I probe into the corresponding tropes and metaphors of dementia appearing strategically alongside the representation of those events. Chapter 1 interrogates the discourse of environmental disaster and memory loss in Ruth Ozeki’s narration of the aftermath of Fukushima. Chapter 2 examines the contemporaneous rhetorics of the “War on Alzheimer’s” and the War on Terror in Susan M. Schultz’s experimental writing. Chapter 3 focuses on two authors’ graphic renditions of dementia and traumatic history: Dana Walrath challenges dementia as a popular metaphor for political amnesia and denial in the context of the Armenian Genocide, while Stuart Campbell visualizes the interrelations of dementia and the social traumas of World War II. Chapter 4 turns to the popular fictions of Emma Healey and Jo Walton, which take up the trope of dementia’s “alternative realities” to narrate histories of gendered postwar violence and aging differently. Together, these chapters reveal how dementia operates as a heuristic for understanding the past and connecting to others differently, thus reimagining life with dementia as one of agency and social value. For readers of these texts, the subject of dementia becomes an opportunity for thinking about transformative approaches to care, community, and conceptions of what it means to be human in time and history. Traversing the intergenerational memory of injustices surrounding environmental degradation, war, occupation, and genocide, the works featured in "Entangled Stories" generate discussions relevant to fields of literary studies bordering trauma theory, memory studies, and postcolonialism. This dissertation’s focus on Alzheimer’s and senile dementia also emphasizes age is an important intersectional identity category, bringing disability studies into conversation with work in feminist aging studies, dementia studies, and the medical humanities. The interdisciplinary nature of this project attests to how contemporary re-imaginings of dementia go beyond personal stories of loss and the pathological discourse of plaques and tangles—they are imbricated in broader representational concerns over how to remember and respond to extreme events and political conflict. Through writing about intimate encounters with dementia, these authors grapple with the increasing fear of Alzheimer’s and dementia in the 21st century—a fear bolstered by the post-9/11 injunction to “never forget.” Indeed, one of the tensions authors negotiate is the need to protect historical memory—as a form of enlightenment and intervention to preclude future tragedies—and the necessity of holding space for personal forgetting and caring for/about the experiences of aging, dementia, and embodied difference more broadly.
In examining the Global War on Terror, the effects of presidential rhetoric on the framing of terrorism has been well documented. However, little previous work links terrorism and its status as an “othered” phenomenon to differential legal prosecution in a post-9/11 era. Using the Prosecution Project data set, we compared “othered” individuals, as defined by a Muslim, Arab/Middle Eastern, and/or foreign-born status, to “non-othered” individuals charged with terroristic felonies. Furthermore, we subdivided the dataset into three analytical time blocks: the George W. Bush administration immediately post-9/11, the latter half of the Bush administration, and the Obama administration. For the first and third time blocks, we found that “othered” individuals were prosecuted significantly more frequently than “non-othered” individuals. These findings call into question the effect of presidential rhetoric and the national framing of terrorism on the legal prosecution of “othered” individuals.
