War Propaganda and Support for Mass Violence: An Ethnographic Account

Saturday, February 16, 2013
Auditorium/Exhibit Hall C (Hynes Convention Center)
Jordan N. Kiper , Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Richard Sosis , Department of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT
Over the past decade, there has been a great deal of interest among legal theorists and social scientists concerning the effects of war propaganda. Here, the results of a three-month ethnographic study in Serbia during 2012 are used to discuss the effects of war propaganda among Serbian communities and combatants during the break-up of Yugoslavia. The ethnographic data are also used to test recent legal theories of war propaganda against competing theories of group violence from the social sciences. Specifically, data from questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with Serbian legal prosecutors, Serbian journalists, and Serbian veterans are used to qualify Susan Benesch’s six-pronged legal test of war propaganda (2008, 2012) and to support both Anthony Oberschall’s information processing model of mass persuasion (2010, 2012) and William Swann’s identity fusion theory (2009, 2011, 2012). These results not only contribute to the dialogue among legal theorists and social scientists about the influence of war propaganda on violent behavior, but also to the dialogue among policy makers about monitoring war propaganda in potentially violent communities.