Growing up as a third culture kid in Qatar, the only way I remember seeing the politics of Pakistan be played out was on the Pakistani news channels which my dad watched every night after he came back from work. All I remember is being young and watching these news channels where the rivalries between different political parties were being played out on talk shows and how different media channels would be trying to display a different narrative than the other. Although I was too young to understand much years later when I was 13, during the 2013 elections I saw the rivalry between Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) get played out to great heights. It was all anybody could focus on. Both parties were focused on belittling and blaming the other for political reasons. Thus began my interest in the topic of media and politics itself and it being attached to my country Pakistan. In my final reflection as I have mentioned how I came to decide on my topic, in addition I want to be able to mention my motivation for even choosing to do the Certificate of Media and Politics (CMAP) as well as the reasoning behind taking all the courses I took for the certificate and how they created an extremely well-rounded journey for me to have reached the point I am at now. I want to be able to tie together the knowledge I was able to gather from each of the courses I attended for this course and then also be able to create links to my topic and my understanding of the certificate to the extra-curricular activity I attended and why it was so influential to me and my work.
As I go into this reflective essay, the reason I even chose to do this certificate was to be able to understand the relationship between the two better and be able to apply that knowledge to the topic I chose to focus on. Thus, I will be going through every course in summary and picking out a single trend I saw continue through most of my courses and tie them together in how they were able to expand on my existing knowledge of media and politics. The first course I took in my journey to CMAP was the Northwestern course titled Politics in the Digital world taught by Professor Banu Akdenizli. The course was able to highlight an incredible amount of facts about the role of media, especially digital media, in politics and how several politicians around the world have used different strategies to maximize their use out of it. What was of great importance to me was the part where we studied the concept of media bias as that is what I am more or less focused on in my research and were able to dive into the concept of agendas and framing as well as the main players within a political campaign. So in one way this course was able to build on the aspect of political campaigning for me which is something I was going to look into for my research, there I was step one of gathering some knowledge and context accomplished. The course also highlighted on the use of digital media for propaganda and how political actors use it to sway public opinion as mentioned by Woolley and Howard in the article titled Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents where they say, “Autonomous programs are used as proxies for political actors hoping to sway public opinion through the spread of propaganda and misinformation.” (Woolley & Howard, 2016) an idea that I was surely familiar with within the context of Pakistani politics which was centered around propaganda and controlling the public opinion.
The next course I took was another Northwestern course titled Refugees in/from the Arab World taught by Professor Suzanne Hammad. This course gave a detailed look into the role of refugees as they face challenges and try seeking shelter in other states, away from their war-torn countries and not much hope of being able to return. The course did not focus on the reasoning of their migration or the roots of it but rather the stories of refugees from four different countries in the Arab region which are Palestine, Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Most importantly, my very first assignment in the course was to analyze famous media websites that have written articles on refugees and the war waging in their countries, thus analyzing how international media, specifically western media covers the stories of the refugees in the Arab world. In my best attempt to follow through with the prompt of the assignment I had found a New York Times article which detailed the war between Israel and Palestine and the US media has done before was trying to balance out the suffering on both sides and paint a picture for how both sides are to blame equally and are equally brutal to one another. This depicts why the western sentiment lies with Israel and why people are not able to see the real picture of what is going on with the conflict in Palestine. The article written by Patrick Kingsley and Vivian Yee titled Conflict Spirals Across Israel and the Palestinian Territories simply opens with the statement “Fighting between Israelis and Palestinians spiraled across several fronts on Saturday as Israel destroyed a high-rise building in Gaza housing the offices of two major international media outlets, thousands of Palestinians fled their homes, Hamas militants in Gaza fired more rocket barrages toward the Tel Aviv area, and protests broke out again in the occupied West Bank.” (Kingsley & Yee, 2021) and misleads the audience with the idea that the damage done by Israel is just as much as what Gaza does to them. Thus, this painted the picture for me how the media is monumental in controlling public opinion.
The next two courses I took were Media Law and Ethics with Professor Craig Lamay and Art, Media and Cultural Politics with Professor Eleni Polymenopoulou. With both courses trying to explain the role of journalists and the limits and bounds of being able to express within the media in different states from a legal perspective, I was able to attain a great amount of knowledge. A common theme between these two courses has been the mention of freedom of expression. So after learning about the use of media within political campaigning and then about the power of media in controlling the public opinion, the next step was to understand the importance of freedom of expression in media but also understand laws that surround media because it gives reasoning for the way journalists and media channels function as well. Media Law and Ethics was significant in introducing the very topic of freedom of expression as mentioned by Thomas Emerson in the reading titled Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment where it says “In the traditional theory, freedom of expression is not only an individual but a social good. It is, to begin with, the best process for advancing knowledge and discovering truth.” (Emerson, 1962) although it mentioned the definition of freedom of expression in simply a traditional idea and not how it is taken in modern times, how it functions in our day to day lives and how different countries allow freedom of expression in comparison to the west. This is where the other course comes in with giving more perspective of freedom of expression within the region we are, the Arab world. The course highlights not just the risk of trying to report sensitive information for journalists in certain countries but also how several local laws go against international laws that hold freedom of expression in high regard. An example we studied was from Matt Duffy’s article titled Arab Media Regulations: Identifying Restraints on Freedom of the Press in the Laws of Six Arabian Peninsula Countries where it says “The GCC constitutions contain a number of provisions that fall outside international norms regarding legitimate restrictions on freedom of expression (as defined earlier in the ICCPR). These restrictions include the licensing of journalism outlets and journalists, a ban on criticism against rulers and public officials, prohibitions on content that can harm the national economy, a mandate on truth in reporting, and other overly broad prohibitions.” (Duffy, 2014) where Duffy highlights that even though the ICCPR mentions the importance of free media and free speech for journalists, countries like the GCC are still against it if it hurts the public image. The pieces were fitting together, I now knew not just the importance of freedom of expression but also how states controlled it and the consequences of it. All that was left now was to learn the politics behind it all through the lens of international law.
The final two courses I opted to take were both law based courses: Public International LAw and Warfare/Lawfare: The Law of Armed Conflict, both taught by Professor Noha Aboueldahab. I had learned what I felt like I needed to about the aspect of media for my CMAP but what was missing was the political part in detail from the perspective of law and especially mentioning the “global south” which includes Pakistan, the focus of my research. The courses did a great job of highlighting the third world approach as well as the colonial legacies that follow many of the international law that automatically overlook the third world countries and isolate them from international law and thus international politics too. The Public International Law course especially dedicated a week's worth of time to analyze the Third World Approach to International Law (TWAIL) which was able to lay focus on how several lawyers and academics that international law has failed to be inclusive towards third world countries and isolate them too often. Chimney mentions the clear discrimination in the article titled Third World Approach to International Law: A Manifesto which states “Today, international law prescribes rules that deliberately ignore the phenomena of uneven development in favor of prescribing uniform global standards.” (Chimni, 2006) which points out that for the so-called sake of “uniform global standard” international law has ignored the very fact that it’s impossible to do so realistically when the world is not uniform in its distribution of wealth and power. Finally, Nesiah also talks about colonialist legacies reflecting in the current international laws and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the article titled Human shields/Human Crosshairs: Colonial Legacies and Contemporary Wars which states “The ICRC was a European organization, invested in Europe’s presentation of its role in the world in civilizational terms, and the notion that “mercy and compassion were uniquely Christian values.”9 The colonialist ethos shaped the ICRC well into the 20th Century.” (Nesiah, 2016) where Nesiah clearly highlights the very problem with these so-called international laws which are ignorant of the countries that were previously colonized, so to say that we live in a “decolonized” world is humorous when we see colonial legacies still being practiced on an international stage and yet we choose to ignore it.
And there I was, having started this journey with a very minimal amount of knowledge on the topic of the third world suffering on the international stage in terms of legality and the concept of media and the freedom it holds. So through every course I took a step closer to collecting and building my context to be able to understand my own research topic better.
Step 1: Political campaigns, the main players and the role of media within it.
Step 2: The power of media in controlling and swaying the public opinion
Step 3: Freedom of expression for journalists and how it affects their reporting
Step 4: The third world and the international law as well as the colonial legacies that follow it
Final Step? Putting together all of this knowledge and writing my research.
References
Chimni, B. S. (2006). Third world approaches to international law: A Manifesto. International Community Law Review, 8(1), 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1163/187197306779173220
Duffy, M. J. (1970, January 1). Arab media regulations: Identifying restraints on freedom of the press in the laws of six Arabian peninsula countries. Berkeley Law. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1126396
Emerson, T. I. (1963). Toward a general theory of the First Amendment. The Yale Law Journal, 72(5), 877. https://doi.org/10.2307/794655
Kingsley, P., & Yee, V. (2021, May 15). Conflict spirals across Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The New York Times. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/world/middleeast/israel-palestinian-conflict-gaza.html
Nesiah, V. (2016). Human Shields/human crosshairs: Colonial Legacies and contemporary wars. AJIL Unbound, 110, 323–328. https://doi.org/10.1017/aju.2016.6
Woolley, S. C., & Howard, P. N. (2016). Political Communication, Computational Propaganda, and Autonomous Agents. International Journal of Communication. Retrieved March 24, 2023, from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/6298/1809