Marcus Schulzke
Biographic Data
| ID | 640386 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marcus Schulzke |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marcus |
| FAMILY NAME | Schulzke |
| SIGNATURE | SCHULZKE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Albany, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5998-138X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 157 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Digital Media and the Convergence of Geographic Cultures
The Politics of New Atheism
New atheism is best known as a literary and media phenomenon which has resulted in the widespread discussion of the anti-religious arguments of authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, yet it also has strongly political dimensions. This book analyses the political aspects of new atheism and offers an analysis that is informed by insights from political science and political theory. The authors locate new atheism withi…
Drones Along Borders: Border Security UAVs in the United States and the European Union
This article examines the complex security landscape that is unfolding as states deploy military drones for border security and non-state actors with sharply diverging motives develop their own drone surveillance capacities. We argue that border security drones have contrary political, policy, and ethical implications. First, the encroachment of military technologies into non-military security operations may have adverse security repercussions, b…
Still Unjust, Just in Different Ways: How Targeted Sanctions Fall Short of Just War Theory's Principles
Economic sanctions have faced substantial criticism for being blunt coercive instruments that inflict a broad array of harms upon innocent populations. In response to this, the targeted sanctions movement has sought to limit the form, function, and scope of sanctioning efforts to minimize their adverse effects on average citizens who have no direct role in influencing the objectionable policies sanctions' senders senders want changed. We seek to …
Drone Proliferation and the Challenge of Regulating Dual-Use Technologies
The controversy surrounding military drones has generated many proposals for restricting or prohibiting existing drones, additional autonomous variants that may be created in the future, and the sale of drones to certain markets. Moreover, there is broad interest in regulating military drones, with proposals coming not only from academics but also from NGOs and policymakers. I argue that these proposals generally fail to consider the dual-use cha…
Sheltering the president from blame: Drone strikes, media assessments and heterogeneous responsibility 2002–2014
This article presents the first systematic analysis of how location of drone strikes and the identification of civilian or terrorist casualties in newspaper reporting affect media assessments of operational outcomes and elite responsibility. Conducting a content analysis of several hundred newspaper articles, we evaluate the likelihood of these newspapers identifying the civilian casualties, the role those casualties play in media assessments of …
Drones and Support for the Use of Force
Politics of New Atheism
New atheism is best known as a literary and media phenomenon which has resulted in the widespread discussion of the anti-religious arguments of authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, yet it also has strongly political dimensions. This book analyses the political aspects of new atheism and offers an analysis that is informed by insights from political science and political theory. The authors locate new atheism withi…
The Politics of Attributing Blame for Cyberattacks and the Costs of Uncertainty
Attribution is one of the most serious challenges associated with cyberattacks. It is often difficult to determine who launched an attack and why, which hinders efforts to formulate appropriate responses. Although the attribution problem has been discussed extensively in research on cybersecurity, it is generally approached as a technical challenge for security professionals and politicians. I contend that it is vital to take the attribution prob…
Necessary and surplus militarisation: Rethinking civil-military interactions and their consequences
Recent scholarship on militarisation suggests that Western democracies are threatened by military influence spreading into civilian domains. I contend that this research has identified problematic forms of militarisation, but that more careful attention should be given to different manifestations of this phenomenon. I borrow Herbert Marcuse’s distinction between necessary and surplus repression to show that militarisation can be excusable or exce…
Military videogames and the future of ideological warfare
Military videogames play an important role in violent actors’ communication strategies, and while scholars have attempted to theorize their significance, too much attention is devoted to characterizing games as ideological distortions that must be unmasked to reveal a more authentic view of war. I offer an alternative perspective on these videogames and their political importance. Relying on a conception of ideology as an inescapable constitutive…
Schmitt’s Telluric Partisan in American Entertainment Media: Fantasies of Resistance and Territorial Defence
This article explores the political significance of the narratives of partisan warfare that appear in American popular culture. I draw on Carl Schmitt’s concept of the ‘telluric partisan’ – a figure that fights outside the normative boundaries of conventional war in defence of a homeland and the traditional identities that are rooted in it. These fantasies provide a sense of moral clarity, promote national unity, characterise enemy aggression, an…
Interpreting and Reinterpreting the Political Significance of Popular Media: The Importance of Seeing from a Range of Perspectives
Studies of popular culture have elucidated important insights about the extent to which politics is constructed by entertainment media. Nevertheless, I contend that when it comes to studies of security discourses in entertainment, researchers are too preoccupied with categorising texts as either ‘critical’ or ‘affirmative’, depending on whether they seem to support or challenge militarism. I argue that work on popular culture should be more atten…
Power and Resistance: Linking Gramsci and Foucault
This chapter provides a brief overview of the Michel Foucault's theory of power and of the work of several commentators who have argued that Foucault makes resistance either impossible or pointless. It examines whether an affirmative reading of Foucault's theory of power is possible. The chapter argues that while affirmative interpretations of Foucault are correct in maintaining that Foucault's theory of power can be read in ways that promote res…
Carl Schmitt and the mythological dimensions of partisan war
I offer a reading of Theory of the Partisan that focuses on Carl Schmitt’s discussion of the ideological dimensions of war. Schmitt indicates that partisans are heavily mythologized figures that are partially constructed by politicians, military strategists, and intellectuals in an effort to incite and control “people’s wars.” The myths are open to appropriation and modification by states, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. These actors engage i…
The Unintended Consequences of War: Self-Defense and Violence against Civilians in Ground Combat Operations
Although extensive research has been done on the causes of violence against civilians, it is usually directed at explaining why civilians are deliberately targeted or how militaries organize themselves in ways that lead soldiers to endanger civilians. As I show, many civilians are injured or killed by members of armed forces who strive to comply with the norms of war. Some attacks on civilians during ground combat operations in contemporary wars …
War by other means: Mobile gaming and the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict
The 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict inspired the creation of over a dozen games for mobile phones and tablets. These games, which allowed players to Bomb Gaza City, operate the Iron Dome missile defence system, and direct rockets into Israeli settlements, marked an important shift in the mediatisation of war in three ways. First, whereas propaganda is frequently described as a top-down process by which elites influence mass audiences, the mobile war ga…
Redefining the Friend-Enemy Distinction in the War on Terror
Introduction Carl Schmitt delivered the lectures that would become the basis for his Theory of the Partisan in 1962, at a time when guerrilla wars and terrorism were increasingly challenging the system of conventional warfare between states. In these lectures, Schmitt traces the history of partisan warfare over two centuries, commenting on how the concept was developed by military and revolutionary theorists and put into practice in armed conflic…
The Morality of Remote Warfare: Against the Asymmetry Objection to Remote Weaponry
Remote weapons, such as precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and drones, regularly play an important part in contemporary military operations, but they are extremely controversial on moral grounds. Although critics of these weapons have raised a number of objections against their use, many rely on some variation of the asymmetry thesis. This is the claim that it is immoral to wage war using weapons that allocate risk asymmetrically, allowing those w…
Visualizing War? Towards a Visual Analysis of Videogames and Social Media
Political scientists are increasingly engaged with the importance of the “visual turn,” asking questions about how we understand what we see and the social and political consequences of that seeing. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers is developing methods that can help us understand visual politics. Much of the literature has fallen into the familiar qualitative versus quantitative methodological binary, with a strong bias in favor…
Corrective justice for the civilian victims of war: Compensation and the right to life
The Social Benefits of Protecting Hate Speech and Exposing Sources of Prejudice
The Antinomies of Population-Centric Warfare: Cultural Respect and the Treatment of Women and Children in U.S. Counterinsurgency Operations
There is tension between three of the U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine's central goals: the restoration of security, democratization, and cultural respect. These goals are particularly difficult to reconcile when it comes to the treatment of women and children in contested areas. Those groups have unique security concerns that are margin-alized in the U.S. military's conceptions of security and they may be victims of violence that is tacitly permi…
Up in arms! Explaining why ethnic minority organizations form militias in transitioning and post-communist Eurasian countries
The decision by ethnic minority organizations (EMOs) to form militias is heavily influenced by the specific policies that governments adopt towards them. We theorize that, when a government makes an EMO illegal or subjects it to repression, those actions substantially increase the EMO s incentives to invest in creating an institutionalized capacity for violence. We test our theory via a quantitative analysis of militia formation using a sample po…
Kill Them All—Old and Young, Girls and Women and Little Children: An Examination of the Organizational Choice of Targeting Civilians
What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a diff…
The Virtual War on Terror: Counterterrorism Narratives in Video Games
Over the past decade, a great deal of research has been done to analyze the ways in which popular media, especially movies and television shows, construct fictional terrorist threats. However, little attention has been given to the extremely popular genre of counterterrorism video games and how they fit into the War on Terror media narrative. Counterterrorism video games reflect many of the themes of other media about terrorism, such as the demon…
Kill Them All—Old and Young, Girls and Women and Little Children: An Examination of the Organizational Choice of Targeting Civilians
What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a diff…
The Politics of Attributing Blame for Cyberattacks and the Costs of Uncertainty
Attribution is one of the most serious challenges associated with cyberattacks. It is often difficult to determine who launched an attack and why, which hinders efforts to formulate appropriate responses. Although the attribution problem has been discussed extensively in research on cybersecurity, it is generally approached as a technical challenge for security professionals and politicians. I contend that it is vital to take the attribution prob…
Visualizing War? Towards a Visual Analysis of Videogames and Social Media
Political scientists are increasingly engaged with the importance of the “visual turn,” asking questions about how we understand what we see and the social and political consequences of that seeing. One of the greatest challenges facing researchers is developing methods that can help us understand visual politics. Much of the literature has fallen into the familiar qualitative versus quantitative methodological binary, with a strong bias in favor…
Rethinking Military Gaming: America's Army and Its Critics
With the extensive use of military force by the U.S. government over the past decade, more scholarly attention has been directed at how mass culture is mobilized to support military objectives. Video games designed by the military or by civilians collaborating with military advisers are one of the major causes for concern, as these may provide ways of training players for military service or of building support for wars. This essay organizes prom…
Still Unjust, Just in Different Ways: How Targeted Sanctions Fall Short of Just War Theory's Principles
Economic sanctions have faced substantial criticism for being blunt coercive instruments that inflict a broad array of harms upon innocent populations. In response to this, the targeted sanctions movement has sought to limit the form, function, and scope of sanctioning efforts to minimize their adverse effects on average citizens who have no direct role in influencing the objectionable policies sanctions' senders senders want changed. We seek to …
The Morality of Remote Warfare: Against the Asymmetry Objection to Remote Weaponry
Remote weapons, such as precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and drones, regularly play an important part in contemporary military operations, but they are extremely controversial on moral grounds. Although critics of these weapons have raised a number of objections against their use, many rely on some variation of the asymmetry thesis. This is the claim that it is immoral to wage war using weapons that allocate risk asymmetrically, allowing those w…
Drones Along Borders: Border Security UAVs in the United States and the European Union
This article examines the complex security landscape that is unfolding as states deploy military drones for border security and non-state actors with sharply diverging motives develop their own drone surveillance capacities. We argue that border security drones have contrary political, policy, and ethical implications. First, the encroachment of military technologies into non-military security operations may have adverse security repercussions, b…
Interpreting and Reinterpreting the Political Significance of Popular Media: The Importance of Seeing from a Range of Perspectives
Studies of popular culture have elucidated important insights about the extent to which politics is constructed by entertainment media. Nevertheless, I contend that when it comes to studies of security discourses in entertainment, researchers are too preoccupied with categorising texts as either ‘critical’ or ‘affirmative’, depending on whether they seem to support or challenge militarism. I argue that work on popular culture should be more atten…
Simulating terrorism and insurgency: Video games in the war of ideas
This article analyses several video games created by Hezbollah and Afkar Media which simulate recent conflicts in Israel and Lebanon. These games are representative of an important new means of waging ideological warfare which is increasingly a part of the media strategies that states, violent non-state actors and media corporations employ in their efforts to persuade audiences. I argue that video games allow their developers to address players a…
Military videogames and the future of ideological warfare
Military videogames play an important role in violent actors’ communication strategies, and while scholars have attempted to theorize their significance, too much attention is devoted to characterizing games as ideological distortions that must be unmasked to reveal a more authentic view of war. I offer an alternative perspective on these videogames and their political importance. Relying on a conception of ideology as an inescapable constitutive…
The Critical Power of Virtual Dystopias
This article explores the capacity of video games and virtual worlds to function as critical utopias or dystopias. A theme of utopian thinking over the past century has been that utopian fantasies offer a critical perspective on the real world. I argue that video games and virtual worlds have generally failed to offer utopian fantasies that can perform a critical function because of their tendency of mirroring the real world, but I show that dyst…
Being a terrorist: Video game simulations of the other side of the War on Terror
Some of the most theoretically significant moments of video games set in the War on Terror occur in the rare instances when these games allow players to assume a terrorist’s point of view. This perspectival shift raises the possibility that games might offer a humanizing look at the enemies in the War on Terror and that they might give players greater insight into terrorists’ motives and ideologies. This article examines three popular video games…
The Dalig and Vadan Exercise: Teaching Students about Strategy and the Challenges of Friction and Fog
For classes which contain a discussion of strategy, war, political violence, terrorism, insurgency, peace operations, or ethno-nationalist conflict to name a few, students must have an effective, foundational understanding of the complexities of using military force. To that end, we have developed an operational “battlefield” exercise, the Dalig–Vadan Exercise (DVE), which allows an entire class of students to get a sense of the dynamics and comp…
The Politics of New Atheism
This article discusses the political implications of the new atheism movement that has been popularized by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. New atheism is largely defined by its political goals, yet it has received relatively little attention from political theorists. To the extent that scholars have commented on new atheists' political thought, they have generally misinterpreted it and presented it as being …
Creating an Enemy: Social Militarization in the War on Terror
One of the most prominent effects of social militarization is hostility toward anyone of the same nationality as the enemy. This is common in conventional wars, but has become even more pronounced in the War on Terror, as the enemy is hidden in the civilian population. Western fear of Muslims was common before this war, but has escalated since. Muslims are portrayed as a monolithic group that is intrinsically hostile to the west. The war narrativ…
Drone Proliferation and the Challenge of Regulating Dual-Use Technologies
The controversy surrounding military drones has generated many proposals for restricting or prohibiting existing drones, additional autonomous variants that may be created in the future, and the sale of drones to certain markets. Moreover, there is broad interest in regulating military drones, with proposals coming not only from academics but also from NGOs and policymakers. I argue that these proposals generally fail to consider the dual-use cha…
How Games Support Associational Life: Using Tocqueville to Understand the Connection
One of the greatest problems in contemporary social science is the decline of participation in political and civil spheres. Video games and digital worlds are promising new modes of association capable of connecting people in a way that passive forms of mass communication are unable to. This essay shows the strength of video games as a medium for associational life by turning to the thought of one of the preeminent philosophers of collective acti…
Carl Schmitt and the mythological dimensions of partisan war
I offer a reading of Theory of the Partisan that focuses on Carl Schmitt’s discussion of the ideological dimensions of war. Schmitt indicates that partisans are heavily mythologized figures that are partially constructed by politicians, military strategists, and intellectuals in an effort to incite and control “people’s wars.” The myths are open to appropriation and modification by states, intellectuals, and revolutionaries. These actors engage i…
War by other means: Mobile gaming and the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict
The 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict inspired the creation of over a dozen games for mobile phones and tablets. These games, which allowed players to Bomb Gaza City, operate the Iron Dome missile defence system, and direct rockets into Israeli settlements, marked an important shift in the mediatisation of war in three ways. First, whereas propaganda is frequently described as a top-down process by which elites influence mass audiences, the mobile war ga…
Why Do Some Organizations Kill While Others Do Not: An Examination of Middle Eastern Organizations
This study addresses the question of why organizations choose to use violence as a strategy using the Political Organizations Dataset (POD) data set, which includes both violent and nonviolent organizations from the Middle East. Our findings show that religious ideology and social service provisions have less influence on this decision than the existing literature suggests. They also reveal that organizations that advocate the exclusion of women …
The Virtual Culture Industry: Work and Play in Virtual Worlds
This essay uses Horkheimer and Adorno's work on the culture industry to analyze virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games. While artificial worlds have enormous potential to facilitate communication, transcend spatial boundaries, promote free expression, and protect marginalized groups, the utopian promise of these worlds is undermined by their mirroring of real-world market systems, the exploitation of labor, and blurrin…
Compensating Civilians during War: A Place for Individuals in International Law
Although civilian immunity is among the most widely agreed-upon norms of war, civilians are often attacked in contemporary conflicts. To some extent, the harm may be mitigated by programs to compensate the victims of wars. This article explores the three legal statutes and two forms of direct payment that the United States uses to compensate civilians harmed in wars and argues that although these are improvements in the treatment of civilians, th…
Campaigning in the Digital World: Obama's Use of Dynamic Advertisements
In 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first politician to advertise in video games, but this was overlooked by political scientists and received little media coverage. Obama's decision marked a major turning point in campaign strategy because he used the new technology of dynamic advertising to target voters in specific states and only in the month before Election Day. He was able to speak directly to young voters for a small cost compared to…
A Shot Not Taken: Teaching About the Ethics of Political Violence
The American military has been engaged in combat operations first conventional and then counterinsurgent for more than 8 years and the issue of political violence from a variety of different directions is an important issue to address in the college classroom. In this paper, we focus on the pedagogy of the ethics of political violence of jus in bello (the ethics of activity within war). We present an overview of three different ethical perspectiv…
Robots as Weapons in Just Wars
Judicial Review in Context: A Response to Counter-majoritarian and Epistemic Critiques
How Games Support Associational Life: Using Tocqueville to Understand the Connection
One of the greatest problems in contemporary social science is the decline of participation in political and civil spheres. Video games and digital worlds are promising new modes of association capable of connecting people in a way that passive forms of mass communication are unable to. This essay shows the strength of video games as a medium for associational life by turning to the thought of one of the preeminent philosophers of collective acti…
Campaigning in the Digital World: Obama's Use of Dynamic Advertisements
In 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first politician to advertise in video games, but this was overlooked by political scientists and received little media coverage. Obama's decision marked a major turning point in campaign strategy because he used the new technology of dynamic advertising to target voters in specific states and only in the month before Election Day. He was able to speak directly to young voters for a small cost compared to…
A Shot Not Taken: Teaching About the Ethics of Political Violence
The American military has been engaged in combat operations first conventional and then counterinsurgent for more than 8 years and the issue of political violence from a variety of different directions is an important issue to address in the college classroom. In this paper, we focus on the pedagogy of the ethics of political violence of jus in bello (the ethics of activity within war). We present an overview of three different ethical perspectiv…
Democratic leaders and war: Simultaneously managing external conflicts and domestic politics
Despite strong empirical evidence for democratic peace theory, the historical record indicates that democracies have been involved in many wars. This article conducts a critical examination of how democratic polities become entangled in international conflict. The examination focuses on how democratic leaders manage domestic politics and public opinion at each stage of the conflict (i.e. disputes, crises, wars and settlement). The study explores …
Contentious Language: South Park and the Transformation of Meaning
Disputes over language and meaning are central themes in South Park. The show pushes the boundaries of acceptable communication and challenges censorship. This article explores the show's treatment of language. It focuses on one episode, “The F Word,” to illustrate how the show uses sophisticated strategies of contesting meaning
Creating an Enemy: Social Militarization in the War on Terror
One of the most prominent effects of social militarization is hostility toward anyone of the same nationality as the enemy. This is common in conventional wars, but has become even more pronounced in the War on Terror, as the enemy is hidden in the civilian population. Western fear of Muslims was common before this war, but has escalated since. Muslims are portrayed as a monolithic group that is intrinsically hostile to the west. The war narrativ…
The Ephemeral Borders of Revolutionary Spaces
From the Paris Commune to the Red Shirt uprising in Bangkok, revolutionaries lacking the power to overthrow their states or depose unpopular politicians have captured parts of major cities and formed their own temporary enclaves of resistance. These groups create intraurban borders by building barricades, arming themselves, and fighting to protect their space. The borders, while temporary and usually ineffective, are powerful symbols as they sepa…
Autonomous Weapons and Distributed Responsibility
Being a terrorist: Video game simulations of the other side of the War on Terror
Some of the most theoretically significant moments of video games set in the War on Terror occur in the rare instances when these games allow players to assume a terrorist’s point of view. This perspectival shift raises the possibility that games might offer a humanizing look at the enemies in the War on Terror and that they might give players greater insight into terrorists’ motives and ideologies. This article examines three popular video games…
New atheism and moral theory
Over the past decade, New Atheists have campaigned against the influence of religion in public life and favored a more enlightened understanding of the world – one based on the methods and theories of the natural sciences. Although the leaders of this movement refuse to give religion, even moderate religion, any place in determining moral conduct, they offer few alternatives. Most define moral responsibility by referring to facts about human biol…
Compensating Civilians during War: A Place for Individuals in International Law
Although civilian immunity is among the most widely agreed-upon norms of war, civilians are often attacked in contemporary conflicts. To some extent, the harm may be mitigated by programs to compensate the victims of wars. This article explores the three legal statutes and two forms of direct payment that the United States uses to compensate civilians harmed in wars and argues that although these are improvements in the treatment of civilians, th…
The Dalig and Vadan Exercise: Teaching Students about Strategy and the Challenges of Friction and Fog
For classes which contain a discussion of strategy, war, political violence, terrorism, insurgency, peace operations, or ethno-nationalist conflict to name a few, students must have an effective, foundational understanding of the complexities of using military force. To that end, we have developed an operational “battlefield” exercise, the Dalig–Vadan Exercise (DVE), which allows an entire class of students to get a sense of the dynamics and comp…
The contingent morality of war: Establishing a diachronic model of jus ad bellum
According to most accounts of just war theory, jus ad bellum is concerned with the morality of initiating war. This gives jus ad bellum a temporal dimension, making it a set of principles that are applied to judge belligerents’ actions at the outset of a war, but that cannot be revisited after a war begins. I challenge this synchronic conception of jus ad bellum by arguing that the considerations the principles of jus ad bellum are meant to judge…
The Virtual War on Terror: Counterterrorism Narratives in Video Games
Over the past decade, a great deal of research has been done to analyze the ways in which popular media, especially movies and television shows, construct fictional terrorist threats. However, little attention has been given to the extremely popular genre of counterterrorism video games and how they fit into the War on Terror media narrative. Counterterrorism video games reflect many of the themes of other media about terrorism, such as the demon…
The Politics of New Atheism
This article discusses the political implications of the new atheism movement that has been popularized by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. New atheism is largely defined by its political goals, yet it has received relatively little attention from political theorists. To the extent that scholars have commented on new atheists' political thought, they have generally misinterpreted it and presented it as being …
Rethinking Military Gaming: America's Army and Its Critics
With the extensive use of military force by the U.S. government over the past decade, more scholarly attention has been directed at how mass culture is mobilized to support military objectives. Video games designed by the military or by civilians collaborating with military advisers are one of the major causes for concern, as these may provide ways of training players for military service or of building support for wars. This essay organizes prom…
Simulating Philosophy: Interpreting Video Games as Executable Thought Experiments
Culture And The Court: The Judiciary As An Arbiter Of Cultural Disputes In The USA
The law has enormous cultural significance; it creates many of the roles and statuses that structure people's lives, represents a society's values, establishes rights of cultural expression, and places restrictions on these rights. The cultural dimensions of the law are especially important for marginalized groups, as the law can act as a barrier to political and social inclusion or offer protection from discrimination. This essay argues that cul…
Why Do Some Organizations Kill While Others Do Not: An Examination of Middle Eastern Organizations
This study addresses the question of why organizations choose to use violence as a strategy using the Political Organizations Dataset (POD) data set, which includes both violent and nonviolent organizations from the Middle East. Our findings show that religious ideology and social service provisions have less influence on this decision than the existing literature suggests. They also reveal that organizations that advocate the exclusion of women …
The Prospects of Global English as an Inclusive Language
English is increasingly a global language, as it is the world's most popular second language and the primary language of international communication. The emergence of English as a global language raises many potential normative challenges, such as the risks that it will erode minority cultures and that it will give core English-speaking countries an unfair advantage over nonnative speakers. I argue that global English can be made more inclusive f…
Simulating terrorism and insurgency: Video games in the war of ideas
This article analyses several video games created by Hezbollah and Afkar Media which simulate recent conflicts in Israel and Lebanon. These games are representative of an important new means of waging ideological warfare which is increasingly a part of the media strategies that states, violent non-state actors and media corporations employ in their efforts to persuade audiences. I argue that video games allow their developers to address players a…
The Virtual Culture Industry: Work and Play in Virtual Worlds
This essay uses Horkheimer and Adorno's work on the culture industry to analyze virtual worlds and massively multiplayer online role-playing games. While artificial worlds have enormous potential to facilitate communication, transcend spatial boundaries, promote free expression, and protect marginalized groups, the utopian promise of these worlds is undermined by their mirroring of real-world market systems, the exploitation of labor, and blurrin…
The Critical Power of Virtual Dystopias
This article explores the capacity of video games and virtual worlds to function as critical utopias or dystopias. A theme of utopian thinking over the past century has been that utopian fantasies offer a critical perspective on the real world. I argue that video games and virtual worlds have generally failed to offer utopian fantasies that can perform a critical function because of their tendency of mirroring the real world, but I show that dyst…
Political science (44 works) · Sociology (41 works) · Law (38 works) · Law (35 works) · Politics (27 works) · Computer Science (18 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · War, Ethics, and Justification (12 works)