No abstract

Stripped of Myanmarese citizenship in 1982 and persecuted for three decades, stateless Rohingya have long found precarious refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. This study explores the framing of the Rohingya in Bangladesh’s largest circulating English language newspaper The Daily Star, to examine how one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers of record framed refugee migration into the country. Analysing two distinct random samples of news stories published on The Daily Star website between 1 December 2011– 31 November 2012 and 1 August 2017–31 October 2017, this article argues that The Daily Star’s press identity, defined though a nationalist frame, failed to successfully deliver human rights-based journalism though a globalist Fourth Estate imperative.

This non-traditional research article argues that the refugee and asylum-seeker protests in Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point between April 2, 2020 and April 14, 2021 can be viewed against a backdrop of Australian colonialism—where successive Australian governments have used former colonies in Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea as offshore detention facilities—as a dumping ground for asylum-seekers. Within the same context this article argues that the men’s removal to the Kangaroo Point Alternative Place of Detention is a continuation of this colonial policy of incarcerating ‘undesirables’ on occupied land, in this case on Meanjin—Jagera land identified by the colonial name of Brisbane. This extension of Australian sub-imperial and neo-colonial dominion and the imagining of its boundaries is viewed though the theoretical prism of a polymorphic border, a border that shifts and morphs depending on who attempts to cross it. In a departure from orthodox research practice, this article will use visual storytelling drawn from photojournalism praxis alongside more traditional text-based research prose.  In doing so, it will use photo-journalistic artifacts and the visual politics that surround them, as core dialogical components in the presentation of the article as opposed to using them as mere illustrations or props.

This article focuses on the media frames of legitimization presented by the Islamist militant group the Islamic State (IS) in their English-language magazine Dabiq to justify their occupation and expansion in Iraq and Syria between June 2014 and July 2017. It argues that, similar to any other militant group, IS faced challenges in establishing, sustaining and projecting legitimacy of both the organization and its militant actions. Focusing on IS narrative frames of legitimacy in Dabiq, this article looks at how the group constructed frame hierarchies that built upon widely accepted higher-order meta-frames of Islamic belief and Westphalian devolution of state power, to lever support for lower-order frames that are of strategic advantage to IS. The author agues such narratives of legitimacy were vital in IS’s attempt to undermine the authority of the sovereign states they occupied, and were necessary to challenge the monopoly of state violence in order to legitimize its own use of strategic violence both inside the self-proclaimed caliphate and in its expansion.

Australia's World War I veterans, particularly the Anzacs of Gallipoli, are a quintessential part of Australia's cultural imagining. Mythologised by the war correspondents of the time, refined and embellished by generations of politicians and myth makers and stripped of their shortcomings and human foibles through repeated renditions, the diggers of the 'Great War' continue to define duty and courage in contemporary Australian society. This article focuses on contemporary media coverage of two controversial wars -Afghanistan and Iraq -and how the news media tasked with recording those wars subscribed willingly to the politically charged 'digger' trope, which effectively served both to shield soldiers from any political fallout and to perpetuate the myth itself.