Unmasking Deviance: The Visual Construction of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in English National Newspapers

This paper explores the visual representation of asylum seekers and refugees delineating how English newspaper imagery constructs such groups as deviant and dangerous. A qualitative visual analysis of nine of the major national newspapers demonstrates how mediated images of asylum seekers focus upon three distinct ‘visual scenarios’ in the discovery of deviance, which collectively demonstrate how the social portrayal of the criminal immigrant fuses the otherness of the stranger with the otherness of the deviant. First, the faceless and de-identified stranger enables the construction of a panoply of feared subjects. Second, stigma is implicitly illustrated, deviance obliquely intimated and ‘spoiled identities’ constructed. Third, the mask is removed, the asylum seeker is identified and their deviant status confirmed. Such a process is reinvented, repeated and reworked in news stories, with deviance becoming increasingly engrained and entrenched in the image of the asylum seeker. This paper details how the repetition of specific visual scenarios in newspaper reporting contribute to the construction of ‘noisy’ panics about asylum seekers and asylum seeking. Moreover, it argues that such imagery is key to the construction of asylum as an issue of security, which necessitates a policy approach that is exclusionary in nature.     

Selective Engagement with Islamist Terrorists: Exploring the Prospects

Despite claims to the contrary, governments have frequently talked to groups branded as terrorists in their efforts to find peaceful solutions to longstanding armed conflicts. The rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror has tended to portray an uncompromising and extreme, monolithic Islamist enemy with whom such accommodation is unthinkable. Therefore, it is not surprising that the potential for dialogue and negotiation with Islamist terrorist groups has been relatively neglected. This article examines the character of the contemporary Islamist threat and explores the prospects for selective engagement with terrorist groups that may not share Al Qaeda's global jihadist agenda.     

The Global Information Infrastructure Revisited

Ideally, the internet will eventually evolve into a global information infrastructure, which, by creating a global information marketplace, will narrow the poverty gap and eliminate many of the existing geographic barriers to prosperity and equality. On the other hand, there is a risk that the internet will concentrate economic activity among the richer countries and thus accentuate the existing divisions between North and South. Which of these scenarios is the more likely will depend to a large extent on whether developing countries are able to gain access to low-cost forms of information technology. Using numerous examples of such technology that already exist in the Third World, we conclude that there is in fact more scope for optimism regarding the Global Information Infrastructure than is commonly realised.     

The application of matrix organization concepts in managing pacification and rural development

For more than two decades matrix structures have been employed in both private and public organizations. One little known application of the matrix structure was undertaken during the Vietnam war to improve the pacification and rural development program after separate agencies working independently were found to be ineffective. Over a five-year period while the matrix organization was in being to interact with the South Vietnamese, much progress was made in pacification and rural development. While the final result of the Vietnam war negated all of the success attained in pacification and rural development, it is still worthwhile to look at the achievements of this matrix organization for lessons of the future.