radio geopolitics, 2009

7/29/2019 Radio Geopolitics, 2009

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/radio-geopolitics-2009 1/19

Progress in Human Geography 33(1) (2009) pp. 10–27

© 2008 SAGE Publications DOI: 10.1177/0309132508090978

Radio geopolitics: broadcasting, listening

and the struggle for acoustic spacesAlasdair Pinkerton* and Klaus Dodds

Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London,Egham TW20 0EX, UK

Abstract: This paper considers some of the interdisciplinary scholarship on radio and sound

more generally for the purposes of considering how geopolitical scholarship might reconsider itspredominantly visual focus. The first part considers radio and its relationship to studies of propaganda,international diplomacy and even everyday life. Thereafter, attention is given to new themes suchas researching radio cultures, broadcasting infrastructure and technology and, finally, the affectiveimpacts of radio on audiences. The conclusion of this paper urges further critical consideration of radio, sound and broadcasting/listener engagement with the well-established geographical literatureon music.

Key words: audiences, communication, geopolitics, listening, radio.

I Introduction

We have some places. Just stay quiet andyou’ll be OK. We are returning to the airport.

We open this article, as does the 9/11 Com-mission Report (2004), with the wordsattributed to Mohammad Atta, the allegedringleader of the 19 hijackers responsiblefor the attacks on the Twin Towers of theWorld Trade Center, the Pentagon andthe crash of United 93 in a Pennsylvanianfield. This radio transmission made by the

hijackers on board American Airlines Flight11 was the first aural clue for federal airtraffic controllers seeking to comprehendthe unusual movements (and lack of radiocommunication) of a number of planes flyingover the eastern part of the United States.

Given the subsequent developments, these

words, as some journalists noted at the time,have an unquestionably ‘chilling quality’ notleast because the hijackers perished withnearly 3,000 other victims. Unable to see thehijackers or the other occupants of AmericanAirlines Flight 11, those on the ground werereliant on listening to the occasional com-munications by the hijackers. And then radiosilence as Flight 11 crashed into the TwinTowers at 0847 am.

Shortly after the impact of the second

plane into the Twin Towers, terrified on-lookers were shown, via television cover-age, exhibiting a range of responses fromstunned silence to crying, wailing and hold-ing highly animated conversations withfellow onlookers. To describe these attacks

*Author for correspondence: Email: [email protected]



12 Progress in Human Geography 33(1)

Afghanistan, companies such as HomelandSecurities Strategies Inc are developing newradio jamming technologies in the hope thatthey will be able to interfere with improvisedexplosive devices placed by the sides of high-ways and other strategic places. Finally, the

Department of State is funding, via the VoiceOf America (VOA), a plethora of new radiostations and local language broadcasting inthe hope that America’s ‘soft power’ will beable to persuade millions in the Global Southnot to support violence directed againstAmerican personnel and material interests.

While we have opened with some ob-servations about 9/11 and its aftermath, thisarticle’s more general purpose is to shift thecentre of gravity towards radio for the pur-

pose of broadening popular geographical/geopolitical horizons and encouraging furtherwork, which has tended to be dominatedby social and cultural geographical interestin music rather than radio broadcasting, orlistening more generally (see, for example,Smith, 1994; Leyshon et al., 1998; Jazeel,2005; Jones, 2005; Matless, 2005). If thetwentieth century was in part characterizedby the invention of the car and the movingimage, it was also the century of mechanic-ally reproduced sounds (Bull, 2004: 248;Whittington, 2007: 1; and other scholarssuch as Mattellart, 1996; Hugill, 1999). Thispaper is composed of three substantial partsand initially it considers radio within thepopular geopolitics literature for the purposeof explaining its importance especially in theGlobal South. Radio’s role in public diplomacydeserves particular mention here and the rolethis media technology has played in postwarinternational crises such as the 1956 SuezCrisis and the 1982 Falklands campaign.

There is of course a large literature on radiopropaganda during the interwar period andthe second world war, which will also benoted. Second, we consider some researchthemes that deserve further elaboration bygeographers such as ‘researching radio’ andthe sound archive, radio and broadcastinginfrastructure, and radio and its audiences.Finally, the paper connects up with the

established literature on music to consider thegeographical implications and consequencesof sound. While we specifically address radioand its geopolitical implications, we are mind-ful of a long-established body of literaturemore generally concerned with communica-

tions, technology and the role of states andempires (for example, Innis, 1950; Mattellart,1996; Hugill, 1999; Meinig, 2004).

II Popular geopolitics of radio: identity,propaganda and soft powerShortly after President Bush’s decision todeclare a War on Terror, the US State Depart-ment-funded Voice of America (VOA) wasgiven extra funding so that it could expandradio broadcasting in Arabic, Dari, Farsi and

Pashto. Created in February 1942, Voiceof America is the one of the largest state-funded broadcasters and rivals BBC WorldService and Radio Moscow in terms of itsbroadcasting coverage, language provisionand weekly audiences. In 2002 a Middle EastRadio Network was launched and one of the most significant developments was thelaunch of Radio Farda, which is designed tobroadcast news and music in English andFarsi to Iran and Central Asia. New invest-ment in radio broadcasting and public diplo-macy was judged to be critical in establishinga broader legitimacy for more violent formsof intervention. In his weekly radio address,President Bush announced on 15 September2001 that:

This is a conflict without battlefields orbeachheads, a conflict with opponents whobelieve they are invisible. Yet, they aremistaken. They will be exposed, and they willdiscover what others in the past have learned:those who make war against the United States

have chosen their own destruction. Victoryagainst terrorism will not take place in a singlebattle, but in a series of decisive actions againstterrorist organizations and those who harborand support them.

We are planning a broad and sustained cam-paign to secure our country and eradicate theevil of terrorism. And we are determined to seethis conflict through. Americans of every faithand background are committed to this goal.3



Alasdair Pinkerton and Klaus Dodds: Radio geopolitics 13

Radio broadcasting remains part of that‘broad and sustained campaign’ and this isthe case not only with regard to overseasbroadcasting but also domestically, notwith-standing the highly televised culture of theUnited States. It is important to recall that

the weekly radio address by the Presidenthas been a regular feature of American pub-lic life since the Franklin D. Roosevelt ad-ministration (1933–45), and there are manyother examples we could draw upon to high-light the iconic role of radio broadcastinginvolving European political leaders and dic-tators, such as Charles de Gaulle, WinstonChurchill, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolinias well as postcolonial leaders such as Nehruand his 1947 independence broadcast.

America’s commitment to direct fundingtowards overseas radio broadcasting in thepost-9/11 era was motivated by a simple butimportant development. Since the 1960s,the widespread availability of the transistorradio has meant that many communities,without access to television and uninter-rupted power supplies, continue to dependon the radio for their news and other outputsuch as music. Major broadcasting organiza-tions such as VOA and BBC World Service,

as a consequence, have recognized that locallanguage broadcasting offers opportunitiesto reach and potentially influence audiencesin countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistanand Iran. Local language broadcasting hasoften, as a consequence, been highly sen-sitized to regional geopolitical change.One example from an earlier era involvesVOA radio broadcasting in Spanish andPortuguese to Latin America. In 1956, VOAbroadcasting to Latin America consisted of

one hour of daily programming and wasin English. Foreign language broadcastinghad been downgraded as VOA invested itsenergies in eastern European and southeastAsian language programming. By March1960, and in the aftermath of the 1959Cuban revolution, VOA Spanish languagebroadcasting was restored, and a year laterPortuguese language broadcasting resumed.

17% of total VOA foreign programming wasdirected towards Latin America and a newradio station was constructed in CentralAmerica (Fejes, 1986: 170–71).

While national governments in the GlobalSouth have sought in the past to ‘block’ trans-

missions from foreign broadcasters, radiotransmission – especially if broadcast frompowerful transmitters located around theworld – is extremely effective in transcendingnational boundaries. This does not mean,however, we should assume that such flowsof sound are automatically tied into influ-ence and the subsequent manipulation of political behaviour and collective identities.The record here, as we shall note, is mixed.In the case of recent endeavours by the

American government, any transmissionassociated with VOA is, for some listeners,treated with contempt and suspicion, be-cause of the contemporary military occupa-tion of Afghanistan and Iraq (Gregory, 2004).Colonial radio stations in the English, Frenchand Dutch speaking worlds were frequentlylinked to expressions of anticolonial agi-tation and national liberation movements.Moreover, as Katz and Weddell (1977: 8)noted, ‘many were prepared to accept train-

ing by expatriate broadcasters in order toprepare themselves for the day when lib-eration would come’. Such training wouldhave disastrous consequences in Rwandain April 1994 when so-called ‘hate radio’was instrumental in persuading thousandsto slaughter their fellow citizens. The ensu-ing genocide was later to encapsulate nofewer than 800,000 lives and the Inter-national Criminal Tribunal in Arusha indi-cted broadcasters associated with Radio

Television Libres des Mille Collines for theirrole in transmitting ‘hate propaganda’ (seePrunier, 1995; Thompson, 2007).

In other disciplines such as history andmedia studies, there has been a great dealof interest in radio propaganda, foreign lan-guage broadcasting and public diplomacy,which would complement a growing interestin popular geopolitics (see, for example,




Douglas, 1999; Horten, 2002). In the case of the latter, it is now entirely orthodox to claimthat popular representations of global geo-politics need to be investigated alongsideelite understandings. Indeed terms such as‘geopolitical culture’ have been deployed in

order to consider how film, cartoons, comicbooks and television contribute to expressionsof popular geopolitics and how and with whatconsequences audiences react to those media(Dodds, 2007). Recent research has demon-strated how certain kinds of emotional re-actions and investments may be provokedand mobilized by particular productionssuch as a film like Black Hawk Down (2001)or a comic character like Captain America(Dittmer, 2005; Carter and McCormack,

2006). Geographical scholars such as ChrisGibson and his co-workers have helped toensure that popular geopolitical scholars doconsider how music contributes to debatesabout contemporary communications, popu-lar culture and national identity (Gibson,1996; Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, 2000; Gibsonand Connell, 2003; but critically see Power,2001). Gibson’s researches into the music inAustralia has been particularly effective inhighlighting how indigenous communities

can express social identities and contest thehegemonic representations of Anglophoneand white Australia. There is surely muchmore work to be done on the popular geo-politics of music and Anglophone performersand bands such as Bob Dylan, Midnight Oiland Neil Young would feature, as would par-ticular musical genres, such as gangster rapand rock, which have critically reflected onconflicts from Vietnam to Iraq. Until recentlyonly one geopolitical scholar, Marcus Power,

had explored in any detail the geopoliticalconsequences of radio broadcasting, in thiscase with reference to colonial Mozambique(Power, 2001; cf. Pinkerton, 2007; 2008a).

The absence, therefore, of detailed con-sideration of radio is a major lacuna and de-serves to be remedied as the critical geopoliticsproject enters its third decade of existence.The task is not daunting in the sense that

other disciplines have been interested in radiobroadcasting and listening for quite someconsiderable time. With regards to makingconnections with popular geopolitics, wewould highlight several strands of this re-search as relevant. First, there has been exten-

sive interest in radio propaganda especiallysince the 1920s with many research papersand monographs devoted to Nazi Germany,Soviet Russia and other European states suchas Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom (forexample, Miller, 1941; Isola, 1995; Shirer,1999; Menduni, 2004). In his book Backing Hitler , Robert Gellately not only shows theimportance of radio to fascist German propa-ganda but also traces the penalties imposedon those citizens caught or exposed listening

to overseas broadcasting by the BBC andothers. Listening was a matter of life anddeath and this remains the case in many partsof the world (Gellately, 2002: 186–87).

If radio has been used for propagandapurposes, it has also been a medium that gov-ernments have sought to control, ‘to jam’and to limit access to other forms of broad-casting. The apparent ubiquity of radioshould not be overestimated as nationalgovernments have and continue to attempt

to engage in political suppression, prohibitforeign broadcasting, limit ownership of radio transmitters and create conditionswhere listening is far from mundane. Instead,radio listening in contemporary Iran andZimbabwe and the former Soviet Unioncould be a dangerous, frustrating and deadlyexperience. China continues to jam radiobroadcasting alongside the internet. Cubaremains particularly active in ‘blocking’ radiobroadcasting from exile groups in Miami

and the US government funded Radio Marti.Alternatively, others have pointed to theability of radio broadcasting, often in direcircumstances, to provide some comfort andsolace, as the British captive Terry Waiteacknowledged. Held for several years inBeirut, Waite and his fellow captives recordedtheir gratitude for BBC World Service broad-casting because it, in his words, ‘helped to




keep us alive both spiritually through thework of the religious departments andmentally through the varied cultural andnews programmes’ (Walker, 1992: 165). Indifferent ways, therefore, the geographiesof broadcasting and listening continue to

be highly contingent.Second, the radio studies literature has

long been preoccupied with domestic radioenvironments in the western world and keento decipher codes, conventions, formats andpractices of radio programming and recep-tion. Well-known works such as Radio broad-casting: an introduction to the sound medium have been important in shaping future scholar-ship with its focus on the American domesticradio scene and international broadcasting

(Hillard, 1985). As a commercial medium,radio has survived and even prospered in‘tabloid culture’ America (Glynn, 2000). Itsenduring success owes in part to the fact thatradio can be listened (and engaged with moregenerally) in the car, at home, in the work-place and on the street (Hendy, 2000: 2).Moreover, the diversification of radio broad-casting (with the obvious exception of USNational Public Radio) has allowed for aseries of overlapping listening environments

to exist. These specialized listening popula-tions are in some cases further served andencouraged by the development of high-profile ‘shock-jock’ radio presenters such asHoward Stern who enjoy a highly definedlistening segment as defined by race, gender,educational attainment, political persuasionand age. Securing such segments is vitallyimportant for commercial radio stations be-cause of the strong connection with advert-ising and revenue generation.

As historians of American radio havenoted, the place of this medium in nationallife has long been contested and as such pre-dates some of the contemporary contro-versies associated with outspoken right-wingradio presenters (Barfield, 1986). In the 1920s,for instance, American jazz was banned onmost radio stations because it was judged byregulatory authorities to be both scandalous

and subversive. Some radio stations resistedthe ban and the music of Louis Armstrongand Bessie Smith was played in Chicago andNew York. According to Susan Douglas(1999), jazz was seen as threatening becauseit was equated with ‘jungle music’ and thus

would promote an erosion of the sonic-socialorder in the sense of promoting sexual aban-donment. While jazz was later aired moregenerally in the 1930s and 1940s, African-American musicians attracted large numbersof white listeners and indeed jazz was cre-dited with playing a part in building cross-community solidarities during the strugglefor civil rights in the 1955–65 period.

Such solidarities need to be set alongsidethe production and circulation of racist re-

presentations of African-Americans via theradio. Shows such as ‘Amos’n’ Andy’ werehugely important, if controversial, in devel-oping the radio serial drama and in this caseconcentrated on the changing social and eco-nomic fortunes of two African-Americanworkers (Douglas, 1999). While resisted andresented by many African-American listen-ers, radio was later to provide an importantpublic forum for the discussion of racial pol-itics in contemporary American life. By 1941,

nearly every family in the United Statesowned a receiver and radio created an auralpublic sphere for acknowledging, in pro-grammes such as federally funded ‘Freedom’sPeople’, the contribution African-Americancommunities have made to labour, music,sports, literature, military service and edu-cation (Savage, 1999: 70). The year 1943 wasa landmark in American radio history, asBarbara Savage noted, because fundingand broadcasting restrictions tightened in

response to concerns from African-Americancommunities about segregation and discrim-ination in American life. In postwar America,progressive dissent continued to appear onthe airwaves and radio’s place in the socialand cultural transformation of the UnitedStates is beginning to attract ever more cri-tical attention (see, for example, Hilmes andLoviglio, 2002).




Scholars such Paddy Scannell (1991),Andrew Crissell (1996), Martin Shinglerand Cindy Wierniga (1998) have consideredradio’s role in the social and cultural livesof many citizens, including Americans. AsScannell’s landmark edited volume showed,

radio’s ‘expressive dimensions of communi-cation, how things are said, why and forwhat possible effects’ was considered ingreat detail (Scannell, 1991: 11). There aretwo aspects to this apparent ubiquity. Onthe one hand, scholars have examined therole of radio in the making of ‘extraordinary’rituals and ceremonies in modern societysuch as the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II,the trial of Nazi war criminals and the roleof radio during the second world war. Radio

audiences were often significant, especiallyin countries where access to television waseither just becoming widespread or had yetto emerge. However, in a salutary studyof the role of radio in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, a team of scholarsfound that the coverage by Israeli state radiowas consistently overestimated in frequencyand duration by listeners. In fact, radio broad-casting was more sporadic than people re-called and many believed that the medium

must have featured more strongly in dailylife because of the sheer magnitude of thispublic event (Pinchevski et al., 2007: 18).On the other hand, the radio has played (andcontinues to play) a major role in the moremundane moments of everyday life. AsShingler and Wierniga (1998: ix) contend,‘For many of us, it is the first thing we hearin the morning and the last thing we hear be-fore we fall asleep’. Radio listening whetherin bed, while taking a shower or eating our

breakfast is part of the daily fabric of manypeople around the world. The capacity of radio to be so widespread and intrinsic to ourdaily lives has contributed to it being takenfor granted at the expense of other mediasuch as television.

In Britain, for example, few people inter-ested in the daily machination of domesticpolitics would fail to tune in and listen to

the morning news programme ‘Today’ onRadio 4. The so-called Andrew Gilliganaffair of May 2003, in the midst of concernsover Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destructioncapabilities, highlighted quite how importantradio broadcasting and listening reactions

could be. In this case a well-known Radio 4defence journalist (Gilligan) used his shortearly morning report to claim that a highlyplaced security source had told him thatthe Labour government had ‘sexed up’ itsdossier on Iraq’s military capabilities for thesole purpose of persuading parliamentari-ans and the public that the March 2003invasion of Iraq was necessary. The reactionto the broadcast was extraordinary and ledto the BBC being forced to apologize for the

report after the so-called Hutton Inquiryfound in favour of the Labour government(see also the Neil Report, 2004). It also,tragically, led to the suicide by Gilligan’ssource – Dr David Kelly. Alternatively, asFraser MacDonald has noted with regard tothe nightly weather broadcast on Radio 4,‘the cadences and rhythms of the UK shipping forecast have a soporific effect …a familiar and comforting register of seaareas and coastal stations that have come

to define the symbolic boundary of thenation’ (MacDonald, 2006: 628). What bothcases share in common is that listening toRadio 4 is an important daily ritual for manycitizens in the United Kingdom.

David Hendy’s (2000) Radio in the global age is arguably the most impressive inter-vention by a radio studies scholar because of his willingness to explore how radio broad-casting and listening is now a global phe-nomenon, even if there are significant local

and regional variations depending inter alia on the integration with internet technologies,commercialization, listener availability, pol-itical control and transnational connectionswith other broadcasters. As Hendy notes:

While being a local medium par excellence,radio is able to reach across large spaces,potentially threatening place-specific cultureswith its homogenized content, potentially




forging new delocalized communities of interest; it has a history in which nation-statesoften led the way in establishing services, butits oral code of communication allows it totie itself to communities of language, whichignore official borders; it betrays a commercialimperative to reach large, high-spending audi-

ences, but it also has a cost structure, whichcreates at least the possibility of a communitystation surviving on the tiniest of audiences.It is, in short, the most adaptable of ‘media’in finding its audience. (Hendy, 2000: 215)

In this way, radio is often imbued with an auraof accessibility and democratizing potential(listeners can be contributors and thus not just passive receivers) even if there is a longhistory of radio broadcasting being eithertightly regulated by states or restricted by

national authorities throughout the GlobalNorth and South.

Finally, within International Relationsand Political Science, there has been interestin radio as a form of ‘soft power’ and its rolein public diplomacy during and after thesecond world war. In his well-known work, Joseph Nye (2004a) has claimed that theBush administration has lost interest in cul-tural diplomacy and what he has called ‘softpower’. As he noted in an article in Foreign

Affairs:Skeptics of soft power (Secretary of StateDonald Rumsfeld professes not even tounderstand the term) claim that popularityis ephemeral and should not guide foreignpolicy. The United States, they assert, is strongenough to do as it wishes with or without theworld’s approval and should simply notaccept that others will envy and resent it.The world’s only superpower does not needpermanent allies; the issues should deter-mine the coalitions, not vice versa, according

to Rumsfeld. (Nye, 2004b: 16)

Given that Secretary of State Rumsfeld nolonger holds office, this sceptical view mayno longer be quite so prevalent in the faceof rising anti-Americanism and the mount-ing losses of US service personnel in Iraq.However, Nye detected an apparent dis-regard of the power of media including

radio to ‘persuade’ others about America’sinterventions in southwest and central Asia.As he noted, ‘During the Cold War, radiobroadcasts funded by Washington reachedhalf the Soviet population and 70 to 80% of the population in Eastern Europe every week;

on the eve of the September 11th attacks, amere 2% of Arabs listened to the Voice of America’ (Nye, 2004b: 18). The problem,however, with this kind of assertion is thatit is implicitly assumed that listening is some-how correlated with potential influence. Theother key difference between Cold War east-ern Europe and the contemporary Muslimworld is that the United States had not invadedand occupied an Eastern European state andsupported other countries such as Israel,

which many Arabic speaking communitiesbelieve disadvantages Palestinians. In otherwords, the question of legitimacy is likely tobe critical in determining potential influence.

Other studies on radio diplomacy and‘soft power’ have in the past been better atexamining radio broadcasting and statecontrols rather than listening audiences andpotential effectiveness. Hale (1975) andRawnsley (1996) both consider British broad-cast policies and particular international

crises and conflicts in the post-1945 era. Inthe case of Rawnsley, for example, his work considers radio broadcasting with regard tothe 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1956 HungarianUprising, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis andthe American engagement with Vietnam. Ineach case, British and American broadcastingwas examined and judged with regard to howit reported these particular crises and thekinds of political and broadcasting conflictsreports from the BBC and VOA engendered.

The earlier work by Hale considers threemodels of international radio broadcasting – the Nazi, the Communist and the BBC. Inconclusion, Hale contends that the BBCremains somewhat different to Nazi andCommunist broadcasters because it soughtsince the creation of the Empire Service in1927 to provide ‘reliable’ news and informa-tion even if that meant clashing with the




British government during the second worldwar. Hale (1975: ix–x) claimed that by theend of the conflict, a clear distinction existedbetween the overt and offensive propagandaof Nazi broadcasting compared to the BBC’sreputation for ‘reliable’ news broadcasting.

The American and Soviet broadcasters were judged to be single-minded in their deter-mination to pursue their national priorities asreflected by state-controlled radio stationssuch as Voice of America and Radio Moscowrespectively.

More recent research, however, wouldcall into question the claim regarding theBBC’s reputation for reliable and impartialbroadcasting. Although Hale (1975: 48) rec-ognized that this claim might be a ‘carefullycultivated myth’, he maintained that manylisteners continued to use the BBC WorldService in particular as a means to ‘check up on the news that they had heard fromother sources’ (1975: 48). While there issome validity to this claim that other newsorganizations do indeed use BBC reportingas a benchmark to judge particular newsitems, it completely underestimates howthe ‘reputation’ of the BBC itself has beenhistorically and geographically contested(Pinkerton, 2007). In Iran, for example, manyIranian listeners still complain to this daythat the BBC is unreliable and an agentof British imperialism because of its radioreports concerning the 1953 CIA-backedcoup against the Mosaddeq government.Elsewhere in south Asia, for instance, theBBC has enjoyed a chequered history of listening as it has been accused also of beingeither an agent of British imperialism and/orpro-Pakistani in its reporting of particularcrises. Alternatively, there are still manylisteners who tune into the BBC WorldService in both countries and value it for itsnews and current affairs reporting. Audiencefigures alongside listener letters and emailcomments sent to local BBC offices providesome invaluable insights into these particularlistening communities.

Voice of America and the BBC WorldService are funded by the State Departmentand the Foreign Office respectively. LikewiseRadio Moscow continues to be funded bythe Russian government. While editorialcontrol and content varies between these

three global broadcasters, former ForeignSecretary Robin Cook described the BBC’sas Britain’s ‘Voice around the World’ de-spite its claims to impartiality and editorialindependence. There is still a great deal of research to be done on the impact on listenersand listener communities, especially in theGlobal South. The reputations and impactof global broadcasters has been varied evenif each has the capacity to broadcast overlarge areas that far exceed their country’s

respective national boundaries. Moreover,as earlier studies did not readily acknow-ledge, listeners to the BBC, VOA and RadioMoscow also listen, read and watch othermedia such as television and newspapers. So,in the case of the 1956 Suez Crisis, readers of the Observer and the Guardian (which werecritical of the Anglo-French intervention)might have also listened to BBC World Ser-vice broadcasts because they believed themto be willing to be critical of official govern-

ment statements about the nature and long-term purpose of the intervention (Shaw,1996). As Roger Silverstone (1994) had noted,people have their own ‘media signatures’and researchers need to understand betterhow and with what consequences peopleaccess different forms of media.

III Media and popular geopolitics:new directionsThe neglect of radio by existing studies

of popular geopolitics is unfortunate butnot unsurprising given the preoccupationwith visual media and the visual tradition of geopolitics more generally. As Ó Tuathailargued in Critical geopolitics (1996), the intel-lectual tradition of geopolitics has long beenpreoccupied with the visual whether it be inthe form of the Olympian gaze or maps andother representations of global geopolitical




space. Critical geopolitical scholars havetended to focus their energies on visualmedia such as film, television and comicsand textual productions such as magazineslike the Reader’s Digest, which combine textand images (Sharp, 2000). This apparently

visual preoccupation needs to be treated withcaution, however. In one key respect, termssuch as ‘visual media’, as Mitchell (2005: 258)has warned us, are misleading. As he notes,there is no such thing as ‘visual media’ as allmedia including radio are ‘mixed media’ thatinvolve other senses such as touching, lookingand listening. One only has to consider howradio listening often involves looking at theradio transmitter to appreciate that it maywell be a case of simply acknowledging a

visual predominance. As a form of ‘mixedmedia’, radio and film (for instance) involve abraiding and nesting of these senses.

As noted earlier, we believe that thisneglect of radio is, if you forgive a visual pun,short-sighted. Three areas deserve furtherattention –researching radio, radio and broad-casting infrastructure, and listening. First,with regard to researching radio, we need toconsider how this intellectual field might befurther developed. While radio would appear

to have an ethereal quality, which might makeresearch appear at first glance problematic,it is not impossible to reconstruct the variedgeographies and geopolitics of broadcast-ing and listening. Radio, as Tamar Liebeshas noted, is capable of creating a series of ‘acoustic spaces’ through which listenersand communities can express their collectiveidentities. In her research, Liebes (2006)examined Israeli broadcasting and soughtto reconstruct how listeners were joined to-

gether through ethereal listening networks.Using personal accounts, novels and news-paper reports and articles within the Israelimedia, alongside interviews and oral testi-monies, she focused on how those radioreports had contributed to a sense of publicmemory and collective geohistory on the eveof Israeli independence. This task was madeall the harder in the sense that there were

no official recordings of the broadcasts andmany of the interviewees were being askedto remember associated events from over60 years ago. It is precisely because radio isoften not stored in the same manner as news-papers and other printed texts in archives

that led researchers to underestimate the sig-nificance of radio broadcasting and listening.As Liebes noted, ‘The ephemeral quality of the medium, and in Israel’s case, the gradualdisappearance of records and recordings, andthe (partly resultant) reliance of historians onprint, contribute to an incorrect recollectionof the salience of radio on moulding uniformpublic outlooks’ (Liebes, 2006: 70).

Her research raises some interestingquestions about researching radio and, for

instance, the relationship between acousticand textual sources in radio broadcastingand listening research. As Scannell andCardiff (1991) reflected:

There is an inescapable paradox at theheart of this project of which we have beenacutely aware of all along – our object of study no longer exists. The early pioneers of radio as an art form lamented the ‘ghastlyimpermanence’ of their medium. Radio, andlater television, developed first as live systemsof transmission and recording technologiescame later. Thus, although there are somerecordings of the more significant programmesbroadcast from the mid thirties onwards, thevast bulk of output perished in the momentof transmission. The fleeting, unrecordedcharacter of early radio seems obstinately toresist the possibility of historical reclamation.(Scannell and Cardiff, 1991: xiii)

In their research on radio, Scannell andCardiff draw upon radio’s textual presencein the form of minutes of BBC Management

Boards and departmental meetings held atthe BBC Written Archive Centre in Reading.There are also listener reports, press cuttingsand policy files, which can help reconstructthe broadcasting-listening context so vitalfor understanding the geopolitical and cul-tural significance of radio reporting especiallyduring moments of international crisis suchas the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war. However, as




Dolan (2003) has noted, there is an inherenttension between the aural and textual sourcesused by many radio scholars and the valuethat is placed on written documentation,which is often seen as a ‘poor substitute for avoice that cannot be heard’ (2003: 67).

Second, broadcasting infrastructure andtechnology needs to be better understoodby popular geopolitical writers whether it beassociated with radio, television, the internetor television (see Hugill, 1999). A great deal of existing discussion within popular geopoliticsshows little awareness either of the mediatechnologies and infrastructure necessary tobroadcast or of the values attached to thetechnologies themselves. Take radio listen-ing as an example. In the UK, if you want to

listen to BBC World Service then you areguaranteed FM quality listening throughoutthe day and night. Both of us can and do listento the radio via our digital televisions becausewe have access to it via the Freeview digitalplatform. Other listeners can access WorldService via digital radio broadcasting tech-nologies. The improved audibility and re-liability has brought new listeners to theBBC’s international services. However, otherlisteners in other parts of the world are less

fortunate when it comes to availability andaccessibility. Just as there is a digital divide,there is a radio listening schism. Listenersin India, for instance, are prevented fromaccessing BBC World Service on local FMbecause the Indian government prevents theBBC from rebroadcasting on these channels.As a consequence, the listening experienceis quite different and listeners in south Asiaoften comment that one has to listen to theBBC more ‘intently’ and ‘carefully’ than if

you were in the UK. Seasonal differencessuch as the monsoon can also interfere withbroadcasting quality of international radioservices. The inherent challenges of short-wave audibility appear to demand a morecommitted and careful form of listeningand this can generate different kind of audi-ence reactions and, as we shall note below,emotional investments with the medium,

especially if listeners gather collectively tolisten to particular reports and news items.

Infrastructural developments such asshort-wave and FM broadcasting availabilityneed to be better understood. The physicalinfrastructure of radio broadcasting is also

significant. The location of a radio transmitteris critically important in determining radiobroadcasting range and frequency. Givenradio’s capacity to transcend internationalborders, radio transmitters have becomefrequent objects of geopolitical discord. Insouth Asia, for example, the proposed loca-tion of a radio transmitter by the BBC andsubsequently VOA in the early 1960s gen-erated a substantial and highly emotive re-sponse in India as local political leaders and

newspaper editors complained that Americawas trying to increase political and culturalinfluence. At a time when India was a leadingmember of the Non-Aligned Movement, thiswas judged to be an unacceptable breach of this foreign policy disposition. The reactionin Pakistan was also highly charged – bothradio broadcasters were accused of tryingto influence domestic political sensibilities.Cartoonists for newspapers such as Dawn (Karachi) recorded the controversy visually

with at least one image (12 July 1963) de-picting two large loudspeakers belonging toVoice of America, located in north India,broadcasting anti-Pakistani and anti-Chinesepropaganda (Figure 1).

The geographies of broadcasting andtransmitting deserve greater attentionespecially in the Global South. In part, this issymptomatic of a broader malaise which con-cerns a tendency of popular geopolitics toconcentrate on the experiences of the Euro-

American world and ‘western’ outliers suchas Australia and New Zealand. This is not just an issue for Anglophone geopolit icalstudies but also for other intellectual fieldssuch as media studies. As Curran and Park (2000: 3) have warned, there is a real needto ‘de-westernize’ media studies because itleads to generalizations about the availabil-ity of media including radio, the nature of




listening and commercial relationships thathave no purchase in the Global South. WhileBBC short-wave services in Mandarin areroutinely jammed by the Chinese authorities,other places such as Ascension Island, Cyprus,Oman and a new transmitter in southernThailand (replacing the former transmitter inHong Kong) play a critical role in facilitatingglobal broadcasting. These transmitterstations have a considerable geopolitical im-portance as, for instance, Ascension is thekey nodal point for reaching Latin Americanand African audiences. It also hosted theBritish government’s propaganda stationRadio Atlantico del Sur, during the Falklandsconflict of 1982 (Figure 2). The island wasalso used in the 1970s by American forces tocarry out anti-Cuban operations in Angola.

Finally, as other scholars including geo-graphers have recently noted, our attentionshould now increasingly turn to understandingbetter the role of audiences and listeningpractices. As Stephen Barnard (2000) noted:

Thinking about one’s own use of a mass com-munication medium such as radio is a goodpoint of departure for a study of how the mediaoperate and wield the power they have. Untilyou appreciate your own viewing, listening orreading habits, trying to understand the habitsand predilections of audiences – and the waythe media perceives their audiences, respondto, adapt and cater for them – is almost im-possible. (Barnard, 2000: 1)

This means in part shifting the directionfrom further analyses of broadcasting stra-tegies and radio propaganda per se to better

Figure 1 US-Indian mouthpiece: VOA broadcasting anti-Pakistan and anti-Chinesepropaganda. Dawn (Karachi: 12/7/63)




Indo-Pakistani War, the independence of Bangladesh and the Indian Emergency inthe 1970s. On the one hand, there were thosewho viewed the BBC reporting as ‘trust-worthy’ and ‘reliable’ compared to local radiostations such as All India Radio and Radio

Pakistan, which were condemned as ‘propa-ganda mouth-pieces’ for the Indian andPakistani governments respectively. On theother hand, the BBC could also be condemnedfor being an unwelcome ‘colonial’ presence insouth Asia and intent on secretly pursuing aBritish government agenda designed to re-tain control over its former colonies. Evidencefor these mixed reactions comes in part fromlistener letters sent to the BBC World Serviceoffice in New Delhi and through interviewswith listeners, who often recalled vividlywhere they were and who they were withwhen they first heard BBC reports on aparticular crisis (Pinkerton, 2008a).

Audience share does not provide suffi-cient nuance in terms of judging listeninghabits and emotional investment. Take arecent example involving the BBC PashtoService, which is broadcast primarily toAfghan audiences. Before the October 2001assaults, 3.5 million were tuning in to hear asoap opera entitled ‘New Home, New Life’.It was the most popular programme in thecountry and such was its popularity that theTaliban regime was reluctant to impose aban on radio entertainment for fear of stimu-lating an insurrection. The BBC’s reputationwas enhanced and many listeners accord-ingly tuned into other programmes includingnews and current affairs. However, that didnot mean that the British military’s involve-ment in the country was any less contro-versial and that listeners were not perfectlycapable of enjoying some programmeswhile deriding others for being ‘propaganda’and ‘imperialist’ in nature. As listeners havedemonstrated in many parts of the world,especially with regards to international broad-casters, listening communities can alter intone and substance.

As radio scholars have noted, listening canalways be considered in a more social andcultural context. As Susan Douglas (1999)has claimed:

the way people listened to radio was pro-

foundly shaped by the era they began tolisten … In other words different generationslearned to listen and use the radio differently.So it’s not only what people listened to …that defined generations. Its how they listenedas well that shaped people’s memories,associations with others, their sense of whothey were and their place in history. (Douglas,1999: 6)

A focus on listening (and how we learn tolisten and different modes of listening de-pending on whether one is listening to news,the weather, music, sport and so on) is essen-tial in developing a critical appreciation of radio. We might, to paraphrase Douglas,also note that the ‘place of geography’ mat-ters because, as Keith Jones has noted withreference to music and factory work in themidst of the second world war, acts of listeningand singing were also shaped by geographicalfactors such as access to radio, proximity toloudspeakers, the segregated nature of theworkplace and the availability of colleaguesand friends (Jones, 2005). If this was trueof factory work in Britain during the secondworld war then it is certainly pertinent toacknowledge that listening in places such asIndia, Pakistan and Afghanistan was as muchinfluenced by prevailing weather patterns asit was by accessibility to the radio and thesegregated nature of communal listening.

IV Conclusions: towards a radio geopoliticsThis review of some of the literature asso-ciated with radio needs to be contextualizedwith regard to geography’s longer-standingengagement with music and sound. Over 10years ago, Susan Smith (1994) was one of thefirst to alert geographers to acoustic spacesand the connections between music and sonicgeographies. Over the following decade and




a half, others have followed and consideredin more detail the role of sound in creatingspaces, borders and power; sound as a form of memory and belonging; sound and everydaylife; sound’s capacity to stimulate movement,dance and performance; the institutions and

industries that market and sell aural cultureand the machines and technologies thatproduce, store and disseminate sound in theform of music and other forms of noise (see,for example, Bull, 2004). In short, a greatdeal of literature now exists on how and withwhat consequences sound is embedded inhistory, cultures, institutions, technologiesand of course geographies.

From our point of view, the special issueon sonic geographies in the journal Social

and Cultural Geography (2005) is richly sug-gestive in terms of how we might furtherpursue a sonic geopolitics. First, followingDavid Matless’s (2005) paper on ‘Sonic geo-graphy in a nature region’, we might considerthe acoustic ecologies and how a sonic envir-onment is defined, valued, experienced andcommunicated. One example that illustratesthat potential well is the impact on theFalkland Islands community in April 1982, fol-lowing the landing of the Argentine invasiontask force. After a short bout of resistance,the Islands were taken over and the radiostation was ordered to broadcast instructionsof Islanders about the situation confrontingthem. In the period between the landing andthe takeover, the station manager Patrick Watts received countless phone calls fromIslanders passing on details about the militarytask force and using their phones and two-way radios to communicate with the radiostation (Pinkerton, 2008b). In a communityscattered over a number of islands and with-out access to television, the radio was the keymedium in people’s lives. It enabled news tobe broadcast, music to be played and gossip tobe exchanged. Many Islanders later recordedthat the takeover of the radio station bythe Argentine military authorities was themost traumatic event of the occupation, in

a conflict which was later to be mercifullylight on civilians compared to later conflictsin the 1990s and beyond. When the localbroadcasting station became ‘Argentine’,listeners relied on BBC World Service forfurther news about the military situation

affecting the Falklands (Pinkerton, 2007).Second, using the work of Nick Megoran

(2006) on the politics of remembrancefollowing the 11 September 2001 attacks,popular geopolitics should consider howprayers, readings, songs and sermons co-joinin complex ways to produce commemor-ative encounters in, for instance, St Paul’sCathedral in London. Listening, as SusanSmith (2000: 634) has noted, is much morethan simply overhearing sounds, it involvesa performance, which helps listeners decipher,classify and interpret sound. How do certainsonic experiences then become connected togeopolitical cultures and affect? If the com-bination of music, silence, praying and cryinghave the power to move embodied subjects,then this deserves more detailed consider-ation because expressions of American geo-political power in Afghanistan and Iraq oweas much to strategic planning as they do to anaffective response seeking not only to punishthose who planned the attacks but also toseek a form of uplifting denouement for acountry and its populace hurt, humiliated andtraumatized by 11 September 2001. Whatis lacking from important interventions byscholars such as Ó Tuathail (2003), for ex-ample, is a clearly stated commitment to de-velop audio-ethnographies so necessary tobetter our understanding of listening prac-tices. The embodied habits that MichaelBillig (1995) mentions, such as saluting theflag, need to be co-joined with other prac-tices such as singing and listening to nationalanthems. Likewise, it should be noted thatreligious chanting and exhortation in theform of ‘God is great’ is also central to theembodied habits of Islamic radicals.

Third, we might further contemplate theunequal geopolitics of sound and consider




how some countries such as the UnitedStates, Britain and Russia have a greatercapacity than others to intrude on sonicenvironments. For instance, the BBC WorldService, as noted earlier, while often valuedby many listeners around the world also has

been a deeply resented presence in the soniclives of listeners in Iran, India and Pakistan.During the post-cold-war era, these globalbroadcasters continue to use their network of transmitters to produce and disseminatenews, music and commentary to listeningcommunities around the world. Listenersand other broadcasters are not simply sonicsponges as, in many parts of the world, theseoverseas sources are just one radio sourceand popular geopolitical scholarship needsto understand better how listeners combinedifferent radio sources and other analogueand digital media to produce individual andcollective media signatures.

Finally, other scholars have pointed tothe need to consider the place of ‘affect’ andthe manner in which radio alongside othermediated communication can be registeredat the level of the physical body. Affect, asBrian Massumi (1987) has noted, is not thesame as emotion and feeling. Emotions aresocial, feelings are personal and affects arepre-personal. In the case of the latter, it isthe most abstract in the sense that it refersto a moment of unformed and unstructuredpotential. Affect adds intensity and helpsdetermine the relationship between thebody, the environment and others. New re-search in media studies is, as a consequence,calling into question the notion of ‘mediaeffects’ and instead considers affectiveresonance. Radio scholars such as JohnTebbutt (2006: 859) have analysed the roleof commercial radio in Australia, and ‘theaudience body is a site of a multiplicity of potential responses and the media the siteof a range of possible provocations. Theirencounters give rise to “affective states”.Here we are not dealing with “messages” butrather moods, perceptions’. So if music has a

capacity to ‘move’ then the cultural effects of radio (the tone of a voice, background musicand so on) deserve further considerationespecially with regard to the micro-bodilygeographies of listening.

V CodaOn 31 October 1938, the New York Times reported how listeners to a radio productionof ‘The War of the Worlds’ feared that NewYork and its environs were being subjectedto a Martian attack. ‘Shaken’ and ‘agitated’residents left their houses and fled to parksand other open spaces in an attempt to es-cape a suspected and imminent gas attack.Local police and emergency support ser-vices were overwhelmed. In the aftermath,it was apparent that few listeners had dis-tinguished the fictional nature of the pro-gramme and were persuaded by its veracityin part because of the manner in which it wasdelivered – as a news bulletin format.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alan Ingram, AlecMurphy, Marcus Power, Francis Robinsonand James Sidaway for their helpful com-ments on an earlier draft. The referees offeredmany helpful comments. Alasdair Pinkertongratefully acknowledges the support of theEconomic and Social Research Council andthe British Academy in the form of a doctoralstudentship and a Postdoctoral Fellowshiprespectively, and Klaus Dodds acknowledgesthe support of the Leverhulme Trust in theform of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2005).

Notes1. One significant difference between 2001 and the

time of writing this article (ie, September 2007) isthat mobile phone technology has shifted so thatit is now common for users to be able to use theirphones to photograph and video. Survivors, withinthe Twin Towers and elsewhere, might havecreated a very different audiovisual archive.

2. http://www.911digitalarchive.org/ (last accessed18 April 2008).

3. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010915.html (last accessed 18 April 2008).




4. ‘London Bridge’ was the name given to the BBC’sdirect programming to Britain’s South Atlanticcolonies (including the Falkland Islands) during1944. The programme evolved into the ‘Calling theFalklands’ programme, which rose to prominenceduring the 1982 conflict with Argentina.

ReferencesBarfield, R. 1986: Listening to radio 1920–50. Newport,

CT: Praeger.Barnard S. 2000: Studying radio. London: Arnold.Billig, M. 1995: Banal nationalism. London: Sage.Bull, M. 2004: Automobility and the power of sound.

Theory, Culture and Society 21, 243–59.Carter, S. and McCormack, D. 2006: Film, geopolitics

and the affective logics of intervention. Pol itical

Geography 25, 228–45.Cohen, E. and Willis, C. 2004: One nation under

radio: digital and public memory after September11th. New Media and Society 6, 591–610.

Crissell, A. 1996: Understanding radio. London:Routledge.Croft, S. 2006: Culture, crisis and America’s War on

Terror . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Curran, J. and Park, M. 2000: De-westernizing media

studies. London: Routledge.Debrix, F. 2007: Tabloid terror: war, culture and geo-

politics. London: Routledge.Dittmer, J. 2005: Captain America’s empire: reflections

of identity, popular culture and post 9/11 geopolitics. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, 626–45.

Dodds, K. 2007: Geopolitics: a very short introduction.

Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dolan, J. 2003: The voice that cannot be heard: radiobroadcasting and the ‘archive’. Radio Journal 1,63–72.

Douglas, S. 1999: Listening in: radio and the American

imagination. New York: Random House.Dunbar-Hall, P. and Gibson, C. 2000: Singing about

nations within nations: geopolitics and identity inAustralian indigenous rock music. Popular Music and

Society 24(2), 45–74.Fejes, F. 1986: Imperialism, media and the good neighbor .

Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers.Fox, J. 2004: Images of wartime radio. In Connelly, M.

and Welch, D., editors, War and the media, London:

I.B. Tauris.Gellately, R. 2002: Backing Hitler . Oxford: Oxford

University Press.Gibson, C. 1998: ‘We sing our home, we dance our

land’: indigenous self-determination and contem-porary geopolitics in Australian popular music. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 16,163–84.

Gibson, C. an d Connell, J. 2003: Soundtracks.London: Routledge.

Glynn, K. 2000: Tabloid culture. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press.

Graham, S. 2007: War and the cit.y New Left Review 44, 121–32.

Gregory, D. 2004: The colonial present. Oxford:Blackwell.

Hale, J. 1975: Rad io power: propaganda and inter-

national broadcasting. London: Paul Eleck Press.Hendy, D. 2000: Radio in the global age. Cambridge:Polity Press.

Hillard, R., editor 1985: Radio broadcasting. London:Longman.

Hilmes, M. and Loviglio, J., editors 2002: Radio reader:

essays in the cultural history of radio . Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Horten, G. 2002: Radio goes to war: the cultural politics

of propaganda during world war II . Berkeley, CA:University of California Press.

Hugill, P. 1999: Global communications since 1844:

geopoli tics and technology. Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press.

Innis, H. 1950: Empire and communications. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Isola, G. 1995: Italian radio: history and historiography. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 15,393–99.

Jazeel, T. 2005: The world is sound? Geography,musicology and British-Asian soundscapes. Area 37,233–41.

Jones, K. 2005: Music in factories: a twentieth centurytechnique for control of the productive self. Social

and Cultural Geography 6, 723–44.Katz, E. and Weddell, G. 1977: Broadcasting in the

third world . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leyshon, A., Matless, D. and Revill, G., editors1998: The place of music. London: Guildford Press.Liebes, T. 2006: Acoustic space: the role of radio in

Israeli collective memory. Jewish History 20, 60–90.MacDonald, F. 2006: The last outpost of empire:

Rockall and the cold war. Journal of Histor ical

Geography 32, 627–47.Massumi, B. 1987: Notes on the translation and

acknowledgements. In Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., A thousand plateaus, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Matless, D. 2005: Sonic geography in a nature region.Social and Cultural Geography 6, 745–67.

Mattellart, A. 1996: The invention of communications.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Megoran, N. 2006: God on our side? The Churchof England and the geopolitics of mourning 9/11.Geopolitics 11, 516–79.

Meinig, D. 2004: The shaping of America: a geographical

perspective on 500 years of history, global America,

1915 – 20 00 , Vo lu me 4. New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press.

Menduni, G. 2004: ‘An unheard story? The challengefor radio studies in Italy. Radio Journal 2, 15–26.




Miller, C. 1941: Radio and propaganda. Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 213,69–74.

Mitchell, W.J.T. 2005: There is no visual media. Journal of Visual Culture 4, 257–66.

Neil Report2004: http://www.bbc.co.uk/info/policies/pdf/neil_report.pdf (last accessed 18 April 2008).

Nye, J. 2004a: Soft power. New York: Public Affairs Ltd. — 2004b: The decline of America’s soft power. Foreign

Affairs 83(3), 16–20.Ó Tuathail, G. 1996: Critical geopolitics. London:

Routledge. — 2003: ‘Just out looking for a fight’: American affect

and the invasion of Iraq. Antipode 35, 856–70.Pinchevski, A., Liebes, T. and Herman, O. 2007:

Eichmann on the air: radio and the making of anhistoric trial. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and

Television 27, 1–25.Pinkerton, A. 2007: Radio Geopolitics: the BBC World

Service and Britain’s ‘Voice around the World’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London.

— 2008a: Radio and the Raj: broadcasting in BritishIndia (1920–1940). Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18, 167–91.

— 2008b: Strangers in the night: the Falklands Conflictas a radio war. Twentieth Century British History, inpress.

Power, M. 2001: Acqui Lorenco Marques! Radio colon-ization and cultural identity in colonial Mozambique. Journal of Historical Geography 26, 605–28.

Prunier, G. 1995: The Rwandan crisis. New York:Columbia University Press.

Rawnsley, G. 1996: Radio diplomacy and propaganda:

BBC and VOA in international pol iti cs, 1956 – 64.

London: Macmillan.

Savage, B. 1999: Broad cas ting fre edom: radio , war

and the politics of race 1938 – 1948. Chapel Hill, NC:University of North Carolina Press.

Scannell, P., editor 1991: Broadcast talk. London:Sage.

Scannell, P. and Cardiff, D. 1991: A social history of

British broadcasting. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sharp, J. 2000: Condensing the cold war . Minneapolis,MN: University of Minnesota Press.Shaw, T. 1996: Eden, Suez and the mass media. London:

I.B. Tauris.Shingler, M. and Wierniga, C. 1998: On air: methods

and meaning of radio. London: Arnold.Shirer, W. 1999: This is Berlin. New York: Overlook

Hardcover.Sidaway, J. 2001: Iraq/Yugoslavia: banal geopolitics.

Antipode 33, 601–609. — 2003: Banal geopolitics resumed. Antipode 35,

645–51.Silverstone, R. 1994: Television and everyday life.

London: Routledge.Smith, S. 1994: Soundscape. Area 26, 232–40.

— 2000: Performing the (sound)world. Environment and

Planning D: Society and Space 18, 615–37.Tebbutt, J. 2006: Imaginative demographics: the

emergence of a radio talkback audience in Australia. Media, Culture and Society 28, 857–82.

Thompson, A. 2007: Media and the Rwanda genocide.London: Pluto Press.

Walker, A. 1992: A sk yf ul of fr ee do m. London:Broadside Books.

Whittington, W. 2007: Sound design and science

fiction. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

radio geopolitics, 2009

Documents