War and Intervention in the Transnational Public Sphere

Cathleen Kantner is Professor of International Relations and European Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences of Stuttgart University, Germany.

• 1 Introduction: Transnational Political Communication and European Identity-Formation 2 The Theoretical Building Blocks: Transnational Identity Discourses on Wars and Humanitarian Military Interventions 3 Media and Media Analysis in Europe 4 Comparing Debates on Wars and Humanitarian Military Interventions across Nations 5 Reality and Identities ‘Under Construction’

Cathleen Kantner has offered a remarkably conceptually rich and empirically rigorous examination of sense and identity making in humanitarian interventions in the post-Cold War world. This book is a major contribution to the international relations constructivist corpus. Yet beyond this important contribution, Kantner’s book should be read by political communication scholars who are interested in war, media, and global affairs. Steven Livingston, The George Washington University, USA. Conventional wisdom has it that Europe does not constitute a community of communication with regard to wars and humanitarian interventions. Yet, Cathleen Kantner demonstrates that transnational European public spheres exist even with regard to war and peace. The book is based on the largest database on transnational communication so far and employs new methodological tools such as corpus-linguistic quantitative content analysis. A must-read for anybody interested in transnational communication! Thomas Risse, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.An excellent addition to comparative political communication. Kantner contributes significant theoretical concepts, methodological innovations and empirical evidence on debates in Europe and the U.S. on war and humanitarian intervention. The provocative analysis of "transnational political communication" and "European identity-formation," is very useful for any future research in these areas. Eytan Gilboa, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.