REVIEW: Bookshelf: Guide to best practice journalism in the future

IN THIS edition of Pacific Journalism Review we begin a new section, Bookshelf, where we ask our regular contributors to pick three books that have played an important part of their academic, professional and writing lives. We begin with this selection by retired journalism academic, blogger and regular contributor to these pages, LEE DUFFIELD. SuperMedia: Saving Journalism so it can Save the World, by Charlie Beckett. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. 2008. 216 pages. ISBN 9781405179249. The Paradox of Power for Journalists: back to the future of news, by Charlie Beckett. London, UK: London School of Economics, 2018. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2018/11/23/the-paradox-of-power-for-journalism-back-to-the-future-of-news-new-book/

The Paradox of Power in Conflict Dynamics

In recent decades the political state has been implicated in genocide, mass violence, political oppression, and targeted deprivations. Yet, in the field of conflict analysis, the meaning of state “power over” in conflict settings is under-theorized. In this article I probe the conceptual depths of state power to show that such power is neither singular nor simple. It’s neither ahistorical nor asocial. Beneath the surface of the state’s wide-ranging practices of governing its political subjects is a fundamental paradox that juxtaposes the state’s authority as the rightful authority over its subjects against the state’s vulnerability to potentially de-stabilizing threats to such authority. Critical to the meaning of state power, this paradox is revealed in an entanglement of contrary forces of state legitimation and its de-legitimation by threatening forces. Such an entanglement is illustrated in the state’s power to protect the nation from aggressors, to enact laws, and to manage its political subjects. The paradox implies that state power is fundamentally conflictual and, as a result, suited perfectly for analysis by scholar-practitioners in our field.