Propaganda, Communication and Empire: Western Intervention in Afghanistan

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Friday, April 25, 2025 | 5:30pm to 7pm

Propaganda, Communication and Empire: Western Intervention in Afghanistan (Routledge, 2025) interrogates the mediatized politics of western intervention in Afghanistan, to gain a deeper understanding of the occupation within the broader transition toward a multipolar global order.

Accurate histories of western interventions and regional realities are often obscured or even eclipsed in the accounts of western mainstream media, which, if anything, tend to rue the withdrawals and lionize the suffering of returning troops. This volume investigates the state’s role in the dark underbelly of the shortsighted interventionist media narrative, as well as the dehumanizing portrayals of people living in the Afghanistan–Pakistan region.

Chapter themes:

  • Critically evaluates the narrative of the Global War on Terror, as well as the wars launched after 9/11 that destabilized the Middle East.
  • Contextualize developments in Afghanistan with a historical framework that will problematize linear narratives that are mobilized in support of interventions.
  • Re-present specific aspects of the geopolitical and humanitarian consequences that have eluded mainstream media workers, including journalists and Hollywood moviemakers.

Purchase Book: https://www.routledge.com/

Author Bio

Sumanth Inukonda is Associate Professor of Communication at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Prof. Inukonda does research in Social Stratification, Social Movements, Urban/Rural Sociology and Communication and Media. He has previously worked on a project with the Administrative Staff College of India & Water and Sanitation Program, South Asia. He is the author of Media, Nationalism and Globalization: The Telangana Movement and Indian Politics (Routledge, 2009), and a co-editor of Propaganda, Communication and Empire: Western intervention in Afghanistan (Routledge, 2025).


Oliver Boyd-Barrett is Professor Emeritus of the School of Media and Communication at Bowling Green State University, and California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author or editor of some twenty-five scholarly books, including Conflict Propaganda in Syria (2021), and a co-editor of Propaganda, Communication and Empire: Western intervention in Afghanistan (Routledge, 2025).


Lara Martin Lengel is Professor of Media and Communications at Bowling Green State University. Her thirty refereed journal articles address, among others, embodied activism, discursive cleansing of Indigenous groups, memory politics, and strategic and visual narratives of geopolitical conflicts.