Toward an Anthropology of War Propaganda

Prior to the Rwandan genocide, the study of war propaganda had all but disappeared as a significant topic of interest for lawyers and social scientists. However, since the trials of war propagandists by international criminal tribunals, the study has been reignited. The reason is due to the manner in which legal actors discussed the effects of war propaganda and pronounced its criminality. They claimed that war propaganda constitutes incitement not only because it attempts to foment dangerously violent ideologies, but also because it actually causes mass violence. In defining war propaganda in this way, tribunals have shifted the crime of incitement from being inchoate to causal. This new precedent has led ethnographers to investigate the manner in which war propaganda has related to mass violence and to challenge the tribunal's purported causal link. Additionally, it has led legal researchers to generate novel theories about war propaganda that are conducive to the new precedent but would still benefit from the frameworks and methodologies of anthropology.