This volume interrogates the mediatized politics of western intervention in Afghanistan, to gain a deeper understanding of the occupation within the broader transition toward a multipolar global order.

Accurate histories of western interventions and regional realities are often obscured or even eclipsed in the accounts of western mainstream media, which, if anything, tend to rue the withdrawals and lionize the suffering of returning troops. This volume investigates the state’s role in the dark underbelly of the shortsighted interventionist media narrative, as well as the dehumanizing portrayals of people living in the Afghanistan–Pakistan region. In its opening section, the book critically evaluates the narrative of the Global War on Terror, as well as the wars launched after 9/11 that destabilized the Middle East. The chapters in the following section contextualize developments in Afghanistan with a historical framework that will problematize linear narratives that are mobilized in support of interventions. The chapters in the final section re-present specific aspects of the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences that have eluded mainstream media workers, including journalists and Hollywood moviemakers.

This book will be of interest to students of propaganda studies, media and communication studies, US foreign policy, and international relations.

Sumanth Inukonda is Associate Professor of Communication at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York (CUNY). He is the author of Media, Nationalism and Globalization: The Telangana Movement and Indian Politics (2020).

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus of the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University and at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author or editor of some 25 scholarly books, including, most recently, Conflict Propaganda in Syria (2021).

Lara Martin Lengel is Professor of Media and Communications at Bowling Green State University, USA. Her 30 refereed journal articles address, among others, embodied activism, discursive cleansing of Indigenous groups, memory politics, and strategic and visual narratives of geopolitical conflict.