Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of Mass Media. Walter C. Soderlund, E. Donald Briggs, Kai Hildebrandt, and Abdel Salam Sidahmed. Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2008. 380 pp.
In Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of Mass Media, Walter C. Soderlund and his colleagues in political science and communication at the University of Windsor—E. Donald Briggs, Kai Hildebrandt, and Abdel Salam Sidahmed — systematically analyze ten humanitarian crises, most in Africa, that occurred during the 1990s. The authors, political science and communication professors at the University of Windsor in Canada, provide unique insight into mass media’s role in supporting intervention during human crises.
While acknowledging that the end of the Cold War helped resolve a few ongoing conflicts, Soderlund and his colleagues assert that it also gave rise to new ones. Similarly, their comparative information from quantitative and qualitative research findings also raises new questions concerning the influence of the news media on foreign policy decision making.
Reading this book, you sense that effective change in the way the global community intervenes in humanitarian crises to help people of color will continue to be slow in coming. Witness the slow response to the recent Pakistan floods, China’s landslides, and other natural catastrophes of 2010.
The book too tightly packs condensed historical accounts into twelve chapters that explore the foreign policy of the United Nations and its major members. Interwoven among the case studies are discussions of policy motives and contradictions that former colonial powers and the Western powers face when deciding whether to respond to crises. The book highlights the struggles of poor and developing countries as they strive for self-governance in the post-Cold War environment. Moreover, the story emerges of how the old concept of state sovereignty was challenged in the move toward global humanitarian intervention.
Soderlund and his colleagues summarize “the adoption of the responsibility to protect” norm approved by the United Nations in the fall of 2005. In essence, this standard asserts that the international community no longer has the justification to avoid becoming involved in crises where “basic human rights come under attack.” Moreover, U.N. members who remain on the sidelines now can face the allegation of being complicit in the violence.
The authors argue that readers should be aware of the historical context of their quantitative research. Their study focused on two areas: (a) volume of newspaper and television coverage, and (b) evaluating crisis framing found in newspaper coverage, specifically the New York Times. Chapter 1 provides a thorough introduction of the study and research methods.
Scholars examined five independent variables for each crisis: (1) crisis severity, (2) perceived risk, (3) involvement of national interest, (4) mass media alert- ing, and (5) mass media framing. By comparing the effects of these variables both quantitatively and qualitatively, the authors establish credible rank orders. Helpful tables show the relationship between international response, crisis severity, and volume of media coverage.
The authors review well-known theories about the general role of mass media in political decision making, i.e., gatekeeping, agenda setting, parameter setting, and indexing. The literature review highlights the role of mass media in pushing decision makers to intervene — the so-called CNN effect. The studies present mixed, contradictory, and confusing results. As the authors concede, “the findings concerning the influence of media on foreign policy decision-making remain inconclusive.”
Chapter 2 starts with Soderlund’s discussion of Liberia in 1990, and its shocking fall from twenty years of stability into political and social violence. He traces the roots of the crisis, the events precipitating the upheaval, and the intervention. Readers get a glimpse into international intervention taking place without the United States. Both the Bush and Clinton administrations avoided direct military involvement, providing humanitarian aid instead. In this case, the Cold War strategic interest of preventing the spread of Communism had dissipated, with a manifest impact on the kind and scope of U.S. response.
In chapter 3, readers see the classic example of failed intervention in what became the largest humanitarian military intervention in modern history, in Somalia in 1992. While Mogadishu was in chaos with public demonstrations, riots, looting, arrest, and repression, the United Nations failed to call for a peacekeeping mission because of initial U.S. opposition. With sustained heavy media coverage of the U.N.’s difficulties in delivering food assistance, President George H.W. Bush deployed troops for security. Fourteen months later, U.S. Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, and TV news reports showed corpses of American solders dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, resulting in a change in U.S. policy for intervention.
The remaining chapters bring readers up close and personal to crises in Sudan, Rwanda, Haiti, Burundi, Congo, Sierra Leone, Angola, and East Timor. Each case study illustrates the cultural complexities in governments and U.N. members assessing strategic value. Bottom-line, the book is a study of foreign policy decision making under the microscope of news coverage.
Humanitarian Crises and Intervention: Reassessing the Impact of Mass Media is a valuable reference book for scholars researching the intersection of international relations, mass communication, and diversity studies.
QUEENIE A. BYARS
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill