Author: Center for Intercultural Dialogue

Call for chapters for Televisual Dissidence in an Era of Information Warfare: Separatism, Terrorism and the Screen Media in Africa. Deadline for abstracts: 15 November 2024; full chapters will be due 15 March 2025.

Editors: Dr. Floribert Patrick C. Endong (University of Dschang, Cameroon), and Dr. Augustus Onchari Nyakundi (Chuka University, Kenya).

Since the independence period, the African continent has been home to various insurgent and separatist movements. Some of these violent movements include the Oromo Liberation Front (of Ethiopia), the Al-Shabaab militia (of Somalia and the Horn of Africa), the Islamic Salvation Army (of Algeria), the Casamence Liberation Movement (of Senegal), the Indigenous People of Biafra and the Boko Haram movements (of Nigeria), the Ambazonia Defence Forces and the Ambazonia Restoration Forces (of Anglophone Cameroon) and the FLEC guerrilla (of Angola) among many others. The movements mentioned above have through their military activities and their media-assisted propaganda constituted destabilising forces and threats to the cooperate existence of the nations in which they subsist. They have of recent entrenched the culture of using clandestine television stations and other screen media for separatist and/or terrorist purposes. African central governments’ efforts to counter the above mentioned clandestine screen media-based campaigns have led to a new and complex information warfare which, so far, has been understudied.

Previous research has mainly focused on separatist insurgents’ and terrorist groups’ use of the social media for terror, online extremism, or rebel diplomacy. No serious scholarly attention has been devoted particularly to television and the other screen media as a battlefield for both pro and anti-separatism forces. Meanwhile, television remains a key tool for both central states and insurgents’ efforts towards reaching and controlling the minds of local audiences in particular. According to Article 19, television is the most controlled medium in Africa. How have separatist insurgents and terrorist movements challenged this government control of television in Africa is still grossly understudied. Understanding the ramifications of this struggle to control the minds of local screen media audiences may enable better policy formulation in African states confronted by separatist and terrorist movements. In view of filling the gap mentioned above, the current volume seeks to examine how government institutions’ and separatist movements’ efforts towards controlling television and other screen media in African territories, is giving birth to new broadcasting policy and practices as well all as postmodern televisual cultures and aesthetics. Against this background, the present project focuses on engaging academics in various disciplines to interrogate television broadcasting and other screen media as a site of the information war opposing African governments and separatist groups since the independence period.