Webster Geneva IR Publishes on Urban Warfare, Security Forum

The tenth volume of the Webster University Press publications was launched at the annual Humanitarian Conference hosted by the Webster Geneva campus last week. The 251-page volume was the edited proceedings of the Security Forum 2012 conference, on the theme of “Information Warfare.”

Vautravers and Kukorelly
Geneva IR faculty Vautravers and Kukorelly published on the changing paradigm of information control.
Thirteen authors – many of them Webster faculty, students and alumni – contributed chapters to the volume. Among them are Erika Josephson, a successful news producer who has traveled back to the USA after her studies in Geneva and Beijing, and Rebekah Jorgensen, head of the MA in Media/Communications at Webster Geneva, who discussed the evolution of the global media industry.

Xavier Colin and Gaëtan Vaney, two well-known Swiss journalists, talked about the evolution of their profession, given the increased speed and the need for live coverage and pictures; they also advocated for the maintenance of war correspondents and reporters in the field. Patrick Amey, from the University of Geneva, showed how armed conflicts were covered in the 1990s, with different angles and the resulting changes in public perception.

After cyber defense has become a mainstream topic, information and data security have overshadowed it, through the Snowden/NSA revelations which have dominated the news over the past year.

Information control and dominance was a theme addressed by two International Relations professors: Alexandre Vautravers and Pál Kukorelly. In their article, on “Information Control: From Orwell to Kafka,” they demonstrate, in a historical perspective, that we have changed paradigm: from a centrally- or state-controlled censorship and propaganda, to a system in which each of our daily activities, tasks, practices, betray and therefore influence our behavior.