Panel: The role of "the Enemy" in war propaganda
Deadline for abstracts: 10 December 2009

The importance of propaganda is evident to any observer of aggressive military regimes. To engage a nation into a war effort it is vital to establish a figure of "the Enemy" in the popular imagination. It is easy enough to recognise such images in the past, e.g. the German as "the Hun" as seen by the Americans of the First World War, or "the Bolshevist Jew" as the imagined conglomerate enemy of the Nazi regime in the second. But similar images are created by the media, government officials and representatives of fighting (terrorist) groups even today. The papers of this track discuss the role of enemy images and enemy-centred propaganda in many different settings, both past and present.

Topics for submissions to this panel (mini track) may include, but are not limited to:
* peace-time cases of imagined enemies, passed to mass audiences via print, celluloid or electronic media, as an overt or covert means of preparing for a war; in historical or present-day context
* war-time propaganda from, or in co-operation with, official sources: posters, films, broadcasts, flyers, bulletins, manufactured news, embedded journalism
* peace-time public discourse on enemy images in comparison to official propaganda released by a government during a war: a continuum or a take-off?
* gradual dampening of the sinister image of the enemy and re-introducing their more human qualities as a part of preparing for peace, to ease the future co-operation with the former enemy
* 'securitizing', or making something originally harmless into a security issue, particularly as a cold-war practice
* approaches on propaganda and enemy issues in different academic disciplines, including media studies, identity sociology, discourse analysis and semiotics