Drone Footage and Peace Journalism: The Example of the Second Karabakh War

Abstract

Drones, with their ever-increasing use in recent warfare, are capable of transmitting high-quality images, which might then be exploited for propaganda purposes by the opposing forces in a war. In this article, the release of drone footages by the Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan during the 44-day war in Karabakh against the Armenian forces in 2020 is analyzed, and the Turkish media’s approach to this matter is evaluated. It was observed that 45% of the videos uploaded to the Ministry’s Facebook and YouTube accounts were taken by drones. These videos frequently mentioned by the international media not only circulated on the internet but also were used by the Turkish media, often without being edited. The increasing use of such footages from battlefields also poses new questions in terms of peace journalism. This paper claims that drone footages that are promoted to provide visual journalistic evidence and unlimited access to battlefields have intrinsic war-oriented characteristics. When used as directly shared by the military, such raw footages serve an elite and propaganda-oriented attitude and shut the viewer into a closed space and time, dividing the world into “us” and “them” while contributing to the perception of “them” being the target.