SUBMISSION FOR A HIGHER DEGREE BY PUBLICATION

‘GUN BABY GUN’ AND ‘THE PRICE OF PARADISE’

NARRATIVE REPORT

Iain Overton

August, 2022

This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy of the University of Portsmouth.

+++

1
2
 +++

Whilst registered as a candidate for the above degree, I have not been registered for any other research

award. The results and conclusions embodied in this thesis are the work of the named candidate and

have not been submitted for any other academic award.

+++

3
1. Introduction

The main submissions for this PhD by Publication are two books: Gun Baby Gun: a bloody journey into

the world of the gun1 and The Price of Paradise: how the suicide bomber shaped the modern age.2 The

books were published in English in 2015 by Canongate and in 2019 by Quercus respectively.3 This

supportive essay places these works within the contexts of academia and praxis.

The first book was an examination of the gun in contemporary culture. It charted its impact on a range of

communities and networks that proliferate around its use. Taking, in turn, those murdered and injured by

gun violence, then covering the suicidal, the mass-shooter, the criminal, soldier, policeman, sportsman,

hunter, smuggler, seller, lobbyist and manufacturer, the book showed how the gun’s presence has fuelled

global violence. It also examined how its presence is fuelled, in turn, by capitalistic production. The

second book was a history of the suicide bomber. It placed the 21st Century’s surge in suicide attacks

within a wider cultural and historical framing. Based on the revelation that, since the first suicide attack

killed the Tsar of Russia in 1881, 40% of all those ever killed by suicide bombers died in the seven years

prior to the book’s publication, the work framed the suicide bombers’ contemporary search for utopia

within repeated and global patterns of harm.

Both books reported on numerous conflict zones, either as part of the writing or as a reflection of previous

journalistic assignments. Notably, areas with high levels of armed violence were visited specifically for the

books’ research: Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, El Salvador, Mexico, Honduras, South Africa, Mozambique,

Liberia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the United States. Research trips to less violent places were also

undertaken, such as parts of the UK, Iceland and France. Previous reporting in Nagorno Karabakh,

Brazil, Japan, Papua New Guinea, Iraq, Ecuador, the Solomon Islands and Holland were also recounted.

4
The works were undertaken as part of two commercial book deals. 4 The works were written within my role

as the Executive Director of the London-based research charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) and

approved by my Charity’s Board of Directors. Both books, accordingly, were governed by UK Charity

rules, ones that require ‘public benefit’, impartiality and balance. 5 Despite not being academic works,

these books were an attempt to expand scholastic understanding of conflict by taking the two most

murderous weapons of the modern age and, through field- and desk-research, interviews and data-

analysis – methodological approaches explored below - chart the impact such weapons have had on

contemporary warfare. Both books were driven by central philosophical ideas: to understand violence

through the prism of weapons, and to analyse the cultural, economic, strategic and political elements of

those weapons’ origins, roles and influences.

Gun Baby Gun set out to do this through examining those worlds that intersect, in different ways, with the

gun’s use. It approached firearms from a selection of perspectives, seeking to understand the gun’s

influence through a panoply of communities. It was divided into four broad categories - pain, power,

pleasure and profit - and argued the gun’s intrinsic power was transformative and divisional:

“What I had seen was that the gun’s impact on lives – our lives – was divided into dozens of

different realities. That communities living with guns at their epicentres often lay far removed from

other communities with other guns. Gun lobbyists never got shot at, while gang members rarely

got to meet politicians. Gun makers focused on the minutiae of a barrel’s width, while doctors

frantically focused on stemming the blood from the imprecise holes caused by a bullet’s spin. This

divided world was the root of the gun’s hold.”6

The Price of Paradise took a more chronological approach. It attempted to understand salient features of

the bomber’s provenance, evolution, execution and impact – charting similarities and evolving patterns

over time and space, across decades. I imagined:

5
 “a long cord, made from all the flags of the countries ever affected by the suicide bomber’s blast.

It was a rope that started off as a single thread: Russian political assassins, denoted by the

brilliant yellow of the Russian imperial banner – the first suicide bombers. Then, after decades, I

had envisaged a thickening of the line. The military colours of Asia seen as the armies of the East

began using coordinated suicide attacks: first the Chinese, then the whites and reds of the Rising

Sun wrapped around the foreheads of Japanese kamikaze. The cord would thin again, until green

could be seen – the Iranian revolution of the Middle East. From there, the colours would begin to

spread…”7

In this way, I listed the many countries where suicide bombers have been and went on to describe how

this carnage stretched “onwards and onwards.” 8

In both books I laid out, for the readers’ benefit, some questions that I hoped to answer for them in the

ensuing texts. In Gun Baby Gun, I asked: “Who made those guns? How did those police pistols end up

being used in a killing? Who profited from the sales of those Uzis?”.9 In The Price of Paradise, I proposed

broader themes: “How did this weapon gain such a hold over us? How did it get to the point that

teenagers in Manchester or Paris are being targeted at concerts and football matches? How is it that we

now read, on a weekly basis, about suicide attacks killing dozens of civilians in this country or that? And

why are so many people willing to put on a bomber’s vest, convinced their murderous death would usher

in a brave new world?”10

6
From a scholastic point of view, however, I wanted to ask other, unstated research questions – both

directly and indirectly. Directly, in both books, I wanted to address fundamental concerns as to what part

weapons have in fuelling and perpetuating armed violence. Underpinning both books was a fundamental

quest to gain a deeper understanding of the driver, context, impact and consequence of specific weapon-

based violence. Indirectly, I wanted to examine how a journalist can report on these themes in ways that

are both engaging and empathetic. How can you penetrate the fog of war to report on guns and suicide

bombers? How can you maintain balance and nuance in the reporting on mass murder and atrocities?

How can you interrogate the dead’s motivations for violence?

To answer these, both books were underpinned by a methodological search for truth and understanding

through commonalities and differences – detective work in the aftermath of murderous, systemic violence.

Whilst that methodology was not explicitly articulated in the books, explaining its logic forms the basis of

this supportive essay. But before we look at the methodologies deployed, perhaps it is of use to situate

both books in their own fields of interest (academic and journalistic writing on guns and suicide bombers)

and in the wider field of journalism studies.

2. Existing research literatures

Gun Baby Gun attempted to offer a global perspective on an issue that has often been rooted in US-

centric perspectives. There have been numerous academic books on gun violence in the United States 11

and the debate often circulates around messages of gun violence laws and the right to bear arms, 12

liberty and legality 13 and concerns about armed violence’s impact on public health. 14 In the last two

decades there have also been attempts to situate US gun debates within both an age15 and a gender-

based framing.16 There were from the 1980s onwards also some approaches that take social history or

the manufacture of firearms as their primary focus, but – again – they are largely US focused17,

illuminated by debate around the Second Amendment. 18

7
The consideration of lived experiences with and around guns - people’s relationship to guns – is under-

powered in the academic and non-academic literature, especially from a global perspective. There are

some notable exceptions such as Cukier, Sidel, Master and Squires. 19 Global violence through the prism

of ethnicity or state conflict has also been comprehensively mapped. 20 Springwood et al. offered insight

through the prisms of gun experiences in Brazil, Palestine, North-East Africa and Japan (as well as the

United States), and such writings informed my own scholastic and journalistic approach. 21 Since the

publication of Gun Baby Gun, Wallace et al. have also offered excellent perspectives from the Global

South. Of note, though, the impetus for their book was because it was deemed that existing gun-research

“perspectives (were) restrictive, limited to the Global North or… singular (countries)”. 22

Diversity in analysing guns beyond the frontiers of the US is important. Carrington et al. have noted how

‘empire building has shifted from colonizing territories to colonizing knowledge. Hence the question of

whose voices, experiences and theories are reflected in discourse is more important now than ever

before’. 23 This structural imbalance of global knowledge to the favour of the North’s social sciences has

been expanded upon by Connell. 24 Reflecting this, it is perhaps unsurprising then that scholarly global

analyses of firearm harm are dominated by the US experience (given the US’ dominance in both English

language media output and in the production of firearms).25 But examinations of global South gun

violence and the relationship of victims and perpetrators to the weapons, through everyday experiences,

rooted within historical or sociocultural contexts is relatively rare, even in journalism.

Much of the non-academic literature on guns treats them in a non-critical way, and many of these books

are by hobbyists,26 advocates of self-defence27 and historians.28 There are some exceptions. Ion Grillo

has written an exemplary book of the impact of US guns on Mexican violence – the ‘iron river’ that flows

south of the border, as drugs come north.29 Chivers, a New York Times journalist, wrote The Gun, but it

was a biography of the AK47, not a look at the gun’s role within different communities. 30 Diamond’s Guns,

8
Germs and Steel placed small arms within a wider historical context but did not analyse them on an

experiential level. 31 Gun Baby Gun, however, is arguably one of the first books that sought to interrogate

the gun’s role in terms of global harm through multi-national and not exclusively US perspectives. In a

sense, Gun Baby Gun was not dissimilar to a school of popular non-fiction that examines global societal,

cultural and historical trends through the lens of consumables – for example, salt,32 cod33 and chocolate.34

In this case, however, it offered up a contrapuntal critique to these ‘commodities in motion’, reflecting how

firearms and their use by societies are rooted in a symbiotic and transformative relationship. 35

Looking at reporting on firearms through the lens of academic journalism studies, there have been

discussions on the ethics of reporting on gun permit data, 36 a systemic analysis of pro and anti-gun

control press releases,37 the media reporting of mass killings,38 and the role of public health reporting in

gun violence coverage – both causal and consequential. 39 A review of perspectives in news framings of

US gun violence reveals the academic focus is often with a perspective such as gender, mental health 40,

race or age.41 It is of note that reviews of gun violence through a prism of journalism studies is also

dominated by a focus on English-speaking, ‘Global North’ countries, with an emphasis on the United

States, though also including some Canadian42 or Australasian43 perspectives.

The Price of Paradise was, arguably, less novel both in academia and popular non-fiction than my first.

Extensive texts – notably Pape44, Bloom45, Oliver46 and Asad47 - have been written about the role of the

suicide bomber in nationalistic movements. This includes a focus of suicidal terror in Islamist violence, 48 in

their use by non-state actors,49 in the philosophies that underpin their violence, 50 and on female suicide

bombers.51 What The Price of Paradise attempted to do in a relatively novel way was to find

commonalities between the historic users of suicidal violence and “the causes of the contemporary

‘globalization of martyrdom’” (one lacking, for instance, in Robert Pape’s seminal text). 52 It also was

arguably the first to draw lines between the use of - and responses to - the suicide bomber in fuelling the

Russian Revolution, its place in the justification of the use of nuclear weaponry, and its place in the

origins of the global War on Terror.

9
From a journalism studies perspective, suicide bombings have also been looked at from a variety of

angles. There has been a significant amount of research on the media's reporting on suicide bombers

and the impact it has on public perceptions and understanding of the issue. Much dwells on the

responsibility to report on suicide bombings in a way that is accurate, fair, and balanced, and avoids

sensationalism or glorification of the act. Such work is imperative. As Lankford has noted – in terms of

both guns and suicide attacks – sensational media reports can create a "contagion effect" that contribute

to the phenomenon of copycat attacks. 53 In particular, media reporting on female suicide bombers has

been analysed in detail – including the mythical archetypes used to frame their deeds (trickster, warrior,

mother);54 the reported motivations of female bombers;55 the way that a reporter’s gender might influence

their reporting on suicide bombers; 56 concerns about Orientalism in reporting bias; 57 and the general way

female suicide bombers have been reported on in comparison to men. 58 More generally, and of special

interest to the books, are works on how journalism on terrorism is often subject to a cultural influences

“that moves the public mind back toward the dominant cultural order.” 59 These shifts “reify” dominant

political framings – for instance, the ‘War on Terror’ in western framing – and place those views as

“concrete and uncontested”. 60 The Price of Paradise sought to offer alternative framings to such dominant

narratives – veering away from, for instance, patriotic language to report on terrorism’s threat. 61 In

reporting on suicide bombers it sought to offer “differentiated coverage” that did not align Muslims as a

whole with violent Salafist-jihadists (a small minority).62

Other scholars posit that the coverage of suicide bombings creates a "media effect" that reinforces

stereotypes and misinformation about the motivations and backgrounds of the attackers; they urge that

such bombings be reported within a social and political context, contextualising the conditions that lead

individuals to engage in such acts. 63 How not to reinforce stereotypes and prejudice against Islam and

Muslims is another recurring theme in the journalism studies literature on terrorism. 64 Such concerns to

ensure that – when reporting on Salafist-jihadism – the journalist treads a line between reporting fairly on

suicide bombers as both an expression of a ‘global war on terror’ and as criminal attacks by a few

10
individuals was a lodestar in my writing.65 After all, prejudicial and chauvinistic reporting of Islam and

violence has been shown to have real-life political consequences. 66 The fear of inadvertently fuelling

adverse consequences in my works was a constant framing and led to a concerted focus on ethical

methodologies in my journalistic approach.

3. Journalistic methodologies

The key journalistic methods deployed in the books were: a defining of my objectives; a selection of the

appropriate research methods (through data and literature reviews, discourse and textual analysis, and

finding case studies); the collection of data (interviewing people, gathering records, investigating

corporations and historical events); and the development of observational narratives and non-fiction

storytelling.67

Overall, the methods deployed in both books began by straddling two epistemological tensions: between

positivism and interpretivism. Positivists, like Durkheim, argue for the use of quantitative methods to

research large-scale phenomena.68 This scientific approach to understanding the social world, seeks to

use a quantitative approach to measure and quantify social phenomena. Interpretivists, like Weber, argue

that qualitative methods are needed to understand the complexities of life. 69 This relies on subjective

interpretations of social phenomena, and emphasises the importance of understanding the meanings and

interpretations that individuals ascribe to the world. It sometimes felt like standing between the Scylla of

data and Charybdis of narrative. For me, Charmaz offered an insight to navigate between the two – a

‘grounded theory’ that led me first to collect and analyse data in order to develop a theoretical

understanding of the phenomena of gun cultures and suicide bombers. Only then did I seek to put flesh

on the bones through qualitative research. 70

11
For instance, The Price of Paradise was informed first and foremost by observations of the data from

Action on Armed Violence’s explosive violence monitor. 71 That monitor is governed by a methodology

adapted from an incident-based methodology used by the charity Landmine Action in 2009, which in turn

was based on the Robin Coupland and Nathan Taback model. 72 Data on suicide bombings was gathered

from English-language media reports and categorised under: the date, time, and location of the incident;

the number and circumstances of people killed and injured; the weapon type; the reported user and

target; the detonation method and whether displacement or damage to the location was reported. The

book was also informed by the now defunct Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism Suicide Attack

Database.73 For Gun Baby Gun, the main sources of data used were the UNODC, 74 US Centre for

Disease Control 75 and gunpolicy.org.

Such data was stark. There have been about 13,652 recorded suicide attacks in 55 countries since this

form of violence was first deployed in 1881. 76 Between 2011 and 2020, Improvised Explosive Devices

(IEDs) – of which suicide bombs are a subcategory – directly harmed at least 171,223 civilians. This

constituted 52% of all civilians killed or injured by explosive weapons globally in that decade. Of those

impacted by IEDs, 35% were from suicide bombers. This means it was the most injurious of all subtypes

of IEDs in that decade. 77 Gauging the death toll caused by gun violence proved more elusive:

“Global numbers are hard to come by, but estimates from international studies suggest that

between 526,0002 and 600,000 violent deaths happen annually. UN data on homicides show that

in areas of high levels of murders, the vast majority of these are with guns – often over 80 per

cent of them… Then there are the suicides. The World Health Organization has estimated that

800,000 people kill themselves each year. As one of the leading ways to end it is with a firearm, a

figure of 200,000 suicides by firearm a year also seems a reasonable estimate to make. This all

adds up to about half a million people dying every year from gunfire.” 78

12
From such data, though, emerged theories ‘grounded’ within it (and from my previous reporting). This was

an approach inspired by the classic grounded theory of Glaser and Strauss 79, and one where Charmaz

writes: ‘we construct our grounded theories through our past and present involvements and interactions

with people, perspectives and research practice’. 80 As she eloquently puts it: “a journey begins before the

travellers depart.”81

My departure - reporting on different communities surrounding guns or suicide bombers - was founded

upon a view of life as Whitmanian: large, containing multitudes and seen through many prisms. 82 As

Creswell has observed, knowledge captured through people’s experiences and studies in the field is

crucial to penetrating subjectivity. 83 Furthermore, empirical research is rooted in the philosophy that true

knowledge comes from practise and reflexion, either direct and unmediated, or through the lives of

other.84 Following this, Gubrium & Hoolstein’s ‘method talk’ provided a useful tool to for the epistemology

of my books.85 For instance, in exploring philosophical and lived viewpoints (e.g. pro-gun, anti-gun;

understanding the motivations of a jihadist and the response of their victims) necessitated alternative

framings to help construct analytical frameworks. Trying to inhabit, albeit briefly, the perspectives of

others permitted a deep and inclusive understanding of quantitative data and witnessed patterns of

harm.86 Qualitative methods have also been described as ‘a naturalistic, interpretative approach,

concerned with exploring phenomena “from the interior.”’ 87 My travels to conflict zones – at often extreme

personal risk – were an attempt to penetrate this interior.

This “field work” enabled a process of inductive reasoning, one that some scholars argue as critical to

understanding, creating meaningful explanations and mapping conceptual frameworks. 88 This was a

necessary element of qualitative research – enabling sense-making. In my books, it was a process of

inductive reasoning most clearly seen when I used specific examples, especially ones rooted in

interviews, to support a conclusion that trends or patterns exist in gun violence or suicidal terror. In these

interviews, I deployed what I hoped were the fundamental journalistic characteristics of good interviewing,

showing “curiosity, followed by charm, keen powers of observation, doggedness, flexibility and fairness.” 89

13
According to Spiller, effective interviewing skills are ‘not a natural occurrence, and need to be

developed’.90 Gun Baby Gun was arguably a demonstration of that development – tracking a journalistic

career of two decades alongside reporting on new, key interviews. Many of my interviews were what

Rubin and Rubin describe as ‘responsive’ – interviews that “emphasize the importance of working with

interviewees as partners rather than as objects of research.” 91 This was particularly the case in trying to

penetrate communities that were wary of journalists, or interviewing victims or relatives of victims of

armed violence where the subject matter required tact and humanity.

There were, however, limitations to data and interviews, and this posed methodological challenges and a

requirement for innovation. This exploration of more innovative methodological approaches to reporting

on war and conflict were first contemplated during an MPhil at the University of Cambridge in my

dissertation that investigated the story of the Crucified Soldier in World War I. 92 It began as a

methodology-in-development that not only accepted the benefits of grounded theory, of data-as-starting-

point, of ‘interior’ reporting and of responsive interviews, but also acknowledged the limitations of such

conventional journalistic techniques when confronted with the fogs of war.

To expand on this statement, the sections below detail my considered attempt in the books and in the

field of conflict journalism to circumvent the methodological limitations that conventional journalism offers

conflict reporters. Mine was an approach framed around Benjamin’s comments on Klee’s painting ‘Angel

of History' and it is one that I believe could help future reporting on armed violence.

4. Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus and conflict reporting

Klee called it the ‘Angelus Novus’, but it was renamed ‘The Angel of History’ by its first owner, Benjamin.93

The Swiss-German artist had created it in 1920; an ugly bird-like creature. It was an angel, but not the

fantastical visions of Christian cliché. Nor the cold, frightening angel the poet Rilke evoked in his Duino

Elegies. Rather, for Klee, his angels were “not the opposite to men, they are transitions and symbols of
14
the last mutation”.94 This angel had a major influence on the German philosopher. In the Angel’s fixed

stare and open mouth, Benjamin saw, through Judaeo-Christian lenses, history as an accumulation of

despair, where modernity took its form as terrible teleology:

“His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one

single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel

would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is

blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no

longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned,

while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.”95

The angel speaks to us of mortality. Not just of the dead, but our own limitations of witnessing and

interpreting memory and the past. Whereas the angel sees all facts, we who catalogue the wreckage

(war, violence, murder) are limited by the humanity that define us. The journalist, the historian, the victim

and the perpetrator can only witness a tiny reality of what has taken place, kept in check by prejudices,

experiences and interpretations.

Part of the process in writing the books was not just to acknowledge my own limitations and privileges –

and the limitations of data-led or interview-led reporting - but to seek ways to expand beyond them in

order to hold murderers to account, to uphold justice and to remember the dead. The dead were always

my starting point. Not least because when you look at conflict, you see the “facies hippocratica of history,

the past as a death's head, as a corpse”. 96

What was clear to me – from the data at least - was that suicide bombings and guns were the two

weapons behind the modern mountain of dead Benjamin’s angel fixates upon. This was no pile ordered in

15
hierarchies, where one death was less or more deserving than another. Nor was it a wreckage viewed

through the prisms of nationalism, gender, ethnicity or age. These were just the dead – those often-

forgotten as the winds of progress propel us away from their tragedies.97

Such statistics on the dead were of merit. They dictated an urgency in witnessing: I wrote about guns

because globally they took the most civilian lives every year; I wrote about suicide bombers because they

were, cumulatively, the most injurious subtype of contemporary explosive weapons. The causes for this

mountain of dead, though, was another matter; whether such deaths were avoidable was even more

complex. My two books were an attempt not just at quantifying but also at understanding; trying to identify

the causal factors of such violence, and what lessons might be learned from assuming the angel’s gaze.

Not to see a ‘chain of events’ but to seek deeper patterns – scattered across time and space – both within

human nature and as a consequence of certain weapon types; to understand the universal factors that

drive armed violence in an attempt to prevent them from repeating. A problem, though, lay in the

limitations of human perspective. Whereas the angel is all-seeing in Benjamin’s interpretation, the conflict

reporter has a significantly obscured vision. Overcoming which, as noted, raised substantial

methodological challenges.

5. The limits of conflict reporting

Much has been written about the so-called Fog of War – a miasma created by the chaos of violence and

the attempts by combatants to ‘own the narrative’ of facts, either through active (propaganda) and

passive (state-sanctioned opacity) means. Almost a century ago, WWI historians were describing how

"war is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it uncovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises

from fear and is fed by panic."98

The result of such fog is often “hot cognition” or “motivated reasoning”, where the confusion of conflict,

and the reporting of it, intertwines with emotional responses tied up with ethnic, regional or political
16
identities. This can lead people to believe the lies and exaggerations that always proliferate during

fighting.99 The conspiracy theory finds its natural habitat in the field of battle. Accepting this, and then

reflecting it in one’s reporting, is relatively rare in the world of conflict reporting. Discussions about

approach, impartiality, access, ethics are – of course – there, but they are often responsive to a particular

editorial legal issue or threat of complaint.

In my work and in this essay, I seek to be more self-reflexive about the epistemological challenges that

confront conflict correspondents. In Gun Baby Gun, it was there when I “wondered what this journey was

doing to me”;100 when in Sandy Hook, looking for fragments of the past horrors in the present, I realised:

“what had started as journalism had shifted into something darker, and I felt I had no place here”;101 I later

considered how the reporting had changed me, too: “I had seen guns transform situations, people,

ideologies and even me… wars don’t end just because you are not there.” 102 In The Price of Paradise, it

was there when I recognised the limitations of journalistic capacity: “the victims they leave behind are

silent, especially outside the West where their memory is often unrecorded and publicly unlamented”;103

when I contemplated my whiteness in a predominantly South-Asian neighbourhood of Savile Town; 104

and when I accepted that, “in trying to get to grips with the psyches of male and female suicide bombers...

I had hit the outer wall of understanding.”105

There were other methodological self-reflections not explicitly addressed in the books – namely how to

overcome the ‘fog’ of war. My examination of such forms the backbone of this essay. To do this, we must

first look at the problem: how this ‘fog’ penetrates most conflict reporting. Most pertinently, it is a fog that

limits our view of what the Angelus Novus can witness. Specifically, how the ‘pile of debris’ of the dead

goes unreported, limited by media capacity and interest. At AOAV, we looked at how many incidents of

explosive violence in Syria were reported in mainstream English media outlets. Al-Jazeera reported under

2% of the total number of explosive violence incidents found in other local or national media, the BBC

reported 2.3%, the Guardian covered 3.2%.106 In 2019, AOAV also looked at the levels of reporting of

explosive violence in Afghanistan. Despite there being at least 2,340 civilian casualties from explosive

17
weapons that year, a Google-search analysis showed that BBC News Online reported on just 378 deaths

or injuries, the Guardian on 333 civilian casualties. 107

This is just the dead. There is a significant under-reporting of the injured in global media reporting of

explosive violence. Between 2011 and 2018, reputable English language media recorded 309,044 people

harmed by explosive violence worldwide: 82,473 killed and 149,472 injured. In other words, for each

person killed, two people were reported injured. Given more than 800 people were injured in the

Manchester Arena bombing attack of 2017,108 this globally reported injury-death ratio is clearly too low. In

2017, civilian injuries also went entirely unrecorded in 54% of all reports on explosive attacks around the

world.109 In short, the injured often go unreported.

On top of the limitations in reporting on the dead and wounded comes something else – limitations of

access; falsehoods and propaganda; personal security issues; institutional and cultural biases; editorial

intervention; government restrictions on reporting; pre-watershed broadcast limitations on filming the

dead; poor casualty record keeping; national security restrictions on Freedom of Information requests;

and limited access to military sources. Combined they do not just reduce reporting on conflict, they make

it positively tunnel-visioned.

One cannot ignore, for instance, the restrictions on conflict reporting from a personal perspective – born

from fear or self-preservation. The time I refused to go to Mogadishu’s ‘sniper’s alley’; or when I was held

captive by Hezbollah, forced to abandon my questions to a survivor of a suicide attack.110 Such restraints

are fuelled by reporters being seen as legitimate targets; from direct violence to co-ordinated attempts to

silence their voices. UNESCO says 55 journalists were killed in 2021; 87 percent of all journalist killings

since 2006 remain unsolved. 111 As I reported in Ukraine, there are also “physical assaults on journalists,

then assaults on them digitally. The spreading of disinformation and pro-Russians controlling the

media.”112

18
There is also the reality that, as a reporter, you cannot be in all places at all times. The BBC’s foreign

correspondent Simpson compared his war reporting to that of a football spectator: "whenever the play

was down at my end, I had a superb view of it. But when it moved to the far end of the pitch, I only knew

what was happening when I heard the crowd roar."113 The UK’s Channel 4 News’ correspondent Hilsum

reiterated this: “In any war zone, you can’t tell the big picture when you are right in it. You can only know

what you’ve seen and what people around you have told you.” 114

For the journalist embedded with the institutions of the state, their view becomes even more limited.

Empathy with the troops or the police forces that I reported alongside threatened my capacity for

impartiality. As one Vietnam war correspondent said: “if you are in the field with a unit where bad things

happen, you are seeing only what is around you. Nothing else. You have no idea how the war is going,

only how your war is going.”115 Reporting on those whom you also daily face death together with

invariably softens the reporter’s representation; a compassion for American combatants found in Herr’s

Dispatches116 or Junger’s War.117 One Observer journalist, when reporting with the British Forces during

the Falklands War, said all British journalists there were propagandists: “there wasn’t any need to put

pressure on anyone to write gung-ho copy because everyone was doing it without any stimulus from the

military.”118 The way journalists are influenced by their own tribe. Those they are embedded with or

reporting alongside with, and who they see daily, contrast strongly against the ‘Other’: the distant enemy

who can be entirely unmet in the journalists’ time in battle. Sometimes, as Pedelty noted in El Salvador,

conflict journalists don’t even leave their hotel or capital city.119

It is a bias that seeps into everything. Journalistic partiality dictates how the dead are reported upon:

hierarchies where some deaths are more focused on more than others.120 It is there in the tribalism of

nationalism in right-wing papers reporting on war (and some left-wing, depending on the conflict). It is

even there in claims of objectivity itself. Pedelty observed how attempts towards objectivity in the conflict

19
in El Salvador meant reporters sought to balance reporting on the violence by the right with reports of

violence by the left, as if both sides were equally at fault. This, despite the fact the Salvadoran military

was responsible for most civilian casualties. 121 It is there, too, in false memory – one enriched by bias.122

There are also hierarchies of status amongst reporters, with access often dictated by gatekeeping

structures. Such hierarchies either go unnoticed, are dismissed with cynicism, or become accepted as the

price of shared experiences. As Markham has written, conflict journalists “do not inhabit a discrete

symbolic world divorced from objective reality, and their news values, ethics and professional identities

are not arbitrary – though nor are they deontological. Instead, they are particular expressions of historical,

economic and social context whose practical universalisation can and should be challenged.” 123 In this

way, war journalism might be seen to be “in favour of official sources, a bias in favour of event over

process, and a bias in favour of ‘dualism’ in reporting conflict”.124

These expressions must also be framed within a context of the mass of information faced when

attempting to understand any war. “One of the problems we face is not the absence of truth, but its

overabundance,” Baggini wrote, “competing eternal truths underpin many conflicts and divisions.” 125 The

purposeful spreading of disinformation further hampers the search for truth (and the counter-

disinformation pushed out by opposing governments and journalists). When reporting from Ukraine, I

described “Russian and pro-Russian Ukrainian media, Russian-funded trolls, attacks on journalists and

the spread of disinformation worked in a complex relationship, and where physical violence seeped into

digital propaganda; where torture fed disinformation.” It was, a “toxic ecology of impunity,

dehumanisation, opportunity and lies.” 126 Nye has written that conflicts in the 21st Century will be less

about whose army wins than whose story wins. 127 The disinformation that marks the war in 2022 in

Ukraine, where the news narrative in Russia is markedly different from that in Western Europe, shows

how striking this is.128

20
State-sponsored lies are not the only challenges facing journalists seeking the truth. A mainstay of 21st

Century conflicts has been the violence of non-state actors. Given the rise of groups such as ISIS or

Mexican drug cartels, it is possible some turn personal grievances into ‘legitimate’ attacks, endowing their

killing with post-hoc meaning. It is, as Kalyvas has written, “the convergence between local motives and

supralocal that endows civil war with its intimate character and leads to joint violence that straddles the

divide between the political and the private, the collective and the individual.” 129 These add further layers

of complexity.

When reporters’ images and words are disseminated, their meaning transforms further. As Butler notes,

adapting Benjamin's argument about art in the age of mechanical reproduction, “the technical conditions

of reproduction and reproducibility themselves produce a critical shifting, if not a full deterioration of

context, in relation to the frames deployed by dominant media sources during times of war.” 130 Whilst

early conflict reporting was all too often staged because of the technological limitations of early

photographic equipment, today photographers have the capacity to manipulate images using digital

editing. Previous reporters had to rely entirely on word of mouth or letters received; today’s reporter can

be intimately connected on their phone to a conflict unfurling miles away, relayed in tweets and hashtags.

So, whereas the Angelus Novus’ view is consistent – capturing the wreckage evenly across time – the

reporter’s perspective has been radically altered by the very progress Benjamin ascribed to the winds that

push the angel into the future.

Even when the journalist tries to offer balance and insight, there arise fundamental limitations in their own

capacity for empathy. They are usually not forced to endure the conflict; they can retreat to the safety of

another country. Interviewing a refugee is very different from being one; as Solzhenitsyn wrote: “how can

you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?” 131 Truth is closely aligned to the limitations

of perspective. It was hard for me to alter my personal, epistemological relationship with other conflict

reporters, and perhaps I subconsciously emulated their cadence and style. It was equally hard to step

beyond my own privilege: “a straight, middle-class, middle-aged, male Caucasian, a Londoner, an

21
English-speaking, Christian-raised writer, a man whose work is based mainly on researching and

advocating non-violence…”132

The gulf between me and the subject matter was, as Kapuściński stressed, exacerbated by ‘Othering’,

where “all the archives and … fields of innumerable battles and the remains of ruins scattered

worldwide… (were) proof of man’s defeat — of the fact that he was unable or unwilling to come to an

understanding with Others.”133 To gain a better understanding of this ‘Other’, I frequently turned to the

Academy: “I sought higher help. It came in the form of an academic,”134 or “in a bid to know more, I

reached out to the world’s foremost expert...”135 Creating this dialogue became fundamental to my

practice-based research, but I did so with the knowledge that academia has its own limitations and

prejudices. As Foucault argued, truth neither exists outside power nor does it lack - in itself - power.

“Truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have

succeeded in liberating themselves,” he wrote.136 For him, truth was ‘a thing of this world’, where regimes

of knowledge and architectures of power govern what is permitted to be true and on what basis.

In war, this is usually the victor. In scholarship, it is influenced by funding grants, peer pressure and

zeitgeists. Both newsroom and academia are “linked in a circular relation with systems of power which

produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it.” 137 Recognising and

navigating these systems is an essential challenge for those that seek “the possibility of constituting a

new politics of truth.” 138 The way conflicts are reported on – how evidence is collected, treated,

publicised, received and appreciated – is done in a way that draws conflict journalism inherently into an

often-silent power dynamic both within the media and within the wider world of political engagement. Of

course, not everything is hidden or frustrated by the perspectives of power and privilege. A dead body is a

dead body; a bombed city, a bombed city; a suicide bomber’s carnage just that. These are not truths as

mere expressions of power. These are powerful, immutable facts and the Angelus Novus sees them as

we do: firm, inviolable realities upon which much can be anchored.

22
What is less clear are the motivations and consequences of such violence, and interpretations of such are

highly susceptible to bias. The anthropologist Malinowski said that to judge something, you have to be

there to witness ‘the imponderabilia of actual life’.139 But the conflicts I have seen showed me that merely

‘being there’ was insufficient to overcome bias; presence alone failed to penetrate the ‘fog of war’. To do

so required a more considered methodological approach that, I believe, is relatively novel in its

articulation (here) and its application (in the books) to a body of war reporting work.

6. Methodological approaches to ‘witnessing’

The historian Williams said that the past is chaos and that, to make sense of that chaos, we must put

questions to it.140 Not to seek out the victories of the past (to reinforce sentiments such as nationalism),

but to pick through its refuse like a scavenger angel, searching for the broken, the damaged and the

dead.141 In my own reporting, I was inspired by similar garbological methodologies as those offered up by

micro-historians. Scholars such as Bourdieu, whose rag-and-bone method questioned the inherent

conditions of power by eliding distanced objectivity with personal micro-history.142 Or anthropologists such

as Geertz who, in seeking to penetrate the unknowable or the unthinkable, examined the ‘webs of

significance’ humanity spins: “I take culture to be those webs… it is explication I am after, construing

social expression on their surface enigmatical.” 143

In conflict zones, such constructivist explication became my lodestar. There was no "truth" independent of

the observer. This is no ontological denial of the existence of the material world, but a realisation that

meaning in the world is constructed within webs of discourses. It led to questions such as: why is the right

to bear arms so emotive in the U.S.? What caused the 21st Century surge in suicide bombings? Why die

to create a utopia that you would never inhabit?

23
To answer these, I sought to isolate the elemental qualities of each instrument of violence (in the case of

the gun, its relationship to pain, power, pleasure and profit; in the case of the suicide bomber, its role in

utopian ideologies, strategic logic, the propaganda of the deed and the justification of its use against

civilians). Then, by detailing the human relationships that clustered around these elements, by describing

the communities and ideas – often symbolically – found within these clusters, and by noting the deep

structures behind which the gunman and the suicide bomber offered up their expressions, I set out not

just to see what was visible, but also to trace the invisible.

This was not revolutionary. Descartes long ago suggested the merits of examining webs and

constellations. “Those long chains composed of very simple and easy reasonings,’ he wrote, ‘had given

me occasion to suppose that all the things which come within the scope of human knowledge are

interconnected in the same way.”144 What was new, though, was the realisation that a detailed

methodology of conflict reporting was largely absent.145 An ad hoc analysis of perhaps the three most

influential works on war reporting found no reference to ‘methodology’ or ‘methodological approach’.146

When McLaughlin set out to discuss objectivity in his book The War Correspondent, he had to lean on

historical method to discuss objectivity (an ‘attitude of clarity’), citing Villar to do so. This, McLaughlin

wrote, “could just as well apply to journalism.” 147 He went on to consider the works of Carr and

Collingwood before contemplating the issue of objectivity in reporting on conflict, including ‘New

Journalism’, the ‘journalism of attachment’ and ‘honest’ versus ‘objective’ journalism. What was of note,

though, was that McLaughlin did not outline an essential methodological approach himself. Similar

analyses examine the outcome, not the process: conflict journalists contemplating their own

methodological approaches in war, but within an academic setting, appear sparse.

There are, of course, books that set out journalistic method. Lee Hunter’s manual for investigative

journalists is a stand-out example.148 His methodology, however, is focused on the ‘hows’, not a

contemplation of the ‘whys’. How to discover a subject and to create verifiable hypotheses; how to find

sources (data, human); how to verify, organise, compose, cross-check, structure, publish, promote and

24
defend the journalism. It is a manual of praxis, not a contemplation of why one process might be favoured

above another.

Such a focus on the end result seems a typical journalistic impulse. Unlike historians, conflict journalists

do not preface their works with a methodology – notions of impartiality and accuracy are implied not often

articulated. Instead, books on war journalism appear to fall into three main areas: analyses of the culture

and history of war correspondents; 149 biographies and auto-biographies of reporters;150 and wider

commentaries on the nature of war and media. 151 Underwood’s Chronicling Trauma dwells on war

reporters’ personal backgrounds, the perspective of marginalised groups, the moulding of the ‘ideal

image’ of the war correspondent, and the prevalence of addiction and depression in the community. 152 He

does not ask what method they applied to their work.

Conflict reporters also do not usually describe how they themselves undertook their reporting; the sense

is they merely report on what they have seen. Gellhorn saw her role as “to be eyes for their

conscience.”153 The BBC’s Simpson went further, describing a methodology of seeing “what is really

going on...the sort of underside of the whole thing, the submerged realities.”154 But most ‘skill’ is portrayed

as either organic or implicit.

My own books are not, though, ‘raw’ war reporting. They are more investigative, often deal with post-

conflict scenarios, rely on secondary sources and academic evidence to buttress their arguments. They

use language purposefully rich in concept and metaphor. These approaches are often beyond the

purview of a mainstream newspaper correspondent; my work was certainly inspired by the 1960s school

of ‘New Journalism’ such as the counterculture writings of Kapuściński, Thompson and Herr. A school

where, as McLaughlin lists, the “techniques of factual journalism (the use of the passive voice, the

chronicling of events, the use of interviews) are blended with those of fiction (the authorial point of view or

25
first-person narrative, the use of style and imagination).”155 But a challenge in writing these books came in

the question: how to blend these two schools without losing sight of the angel’s vision?

To answer this required me to seek method in different but similar disciplines. If war is fog and the past is

opaque, perhaps historical method could offer solutions. For me, the virtuosos of micro-history were

influential. The medieval historian Ginzburg, for instance, observed in his work on the persecution of

witchcraft and the Witches’ Sabbath in early-modern Europe, that it was only finding “a current of

previously ignored beliefs” in the past, that he could gain insight into “a deeply-rooted strata of basically

autonomous popular beliefs.”156 Where he found clues in the ‘discrepancies’ that existed between the

questions posed by the judges and the answers given by the accused - replies not so easily dismissed as

the words of the tortured - I saw a potentially original methodological possibility (in this field of writing) to

penetrate the fog of war.

Focusing on the minutiae, I thought, could offer up a gateway to the macro. As Levi wrote: “even the

apparently minutest action of, say, somebody going to buy a loaf of bread, actually encompasses the far

wider system of the whole world’s grain markets”.157 Such framing inspired a global school of historians

who focused on the deep analysis of sources found across manifold but connected contexts. 158 Ghobrial

was to compare local macro-historians with global macro-historians in this way: “where the first looks for

the world in a grain of sand, the second sifts through many beaches around the same ocean with a fine-

toothed comb.”159

This worldwide search for critical moments – global connections and constellations – that could offer up a

better perspective and a more nuanced interpretation, proved inspirational. Could this approach help

understand “a culture radically different from our own, in spite of the intervening filters”?160 Could the

irrational and atemporal phenomena of international conflict be studied in a rational, but not rationalistic

way, and by so doing avoid the bricolage of post-modernism?

26
The challenge is that, when it comes to analysing conflict, the fog of war becomes so thick it reduces any

response to silence. As I wrote when visiting the scene of a mass shooting in Norway, in an attempt to

see universals in the tragedy of a singular event, “I had been to a few places around the world which had

been marked by guns, just as Breivik’s guns had done here… That same awkward quietude, that feeling

that any question you ask is tinged and mawkish, an absence of any easy explanation for what happened

– these things were always a feature. So it was here… silence was the only thing left.” 161

How can the journalist navigate this silence? And how to avoid in that silence, as Benjamin wrote, poking

“about in the past as if rummaging in a storeroom of examples and analogies” with “no inkling of how

much in a given moment depends on the present being made present?”162 Were the standard tools of

journalistic inquiry – witnessing, interviewing, collecting evidence and analysing data – sufficient to break

the walls of this quietness? And were these tools sufficient to write a book on suicide bombers who,

owing to the very act that formed the central subject matter of that book, are dead? I felt standard

journalistic practice could only capture part of the picture, leaving the angel’s vision still far from us.

In his dense notes on Frazer's ‘Golden Bough’, however, Wittgenstein put forward a thesis that seems to

offer a way forward. In it, he juxtaposed two ways of investigating something. One approach, he argued,

was synoptic and achronic. The other was based on a hypothesis of a chronological development. When

the complexities of a particular thing frustrate a synoptic and achronic analysis, he concluded, the

alternative was a linear hypothesis. To Wittgenstein, finding ‘all-encompassing representation’ was not

simply an alternative way of presenting data, it was implicitly superior to historical exposition; less

arbitrary and immune to undemonstrated, developmental hypotheses:

“Just as one might illustrate an inner relation between a circle and an ellipse by gradually

transforming an ellipse into a circle,” he wrote, “but not to claim that a given ellipse in fact,
27
 historically, emerged from a circle (developmental hypothesis), rather only to sharpen our eye for

a formal connection.”163

I found meaning in such method. It was like contemplating the space where the ink ends in a Japanese

Ensō - the sacred circle of Zen Buddhism. This incomplete ring, hand-drawn in a single stroke, is said to

symbolise the universe. Importantly, it contains Mu (a void). I saw in the Mu the incomplete arc that

Wittgenstein alluded to, where the historian or journalist, confronted with the silence of an event (war, a

fractured memory, a dead witness), has to find ways to complete that circle (“transforming an ellipse into

a circle”).

For me, the way towards truth was actively searching for the Mu or the silence in order to explain the

things that eluded easy explication. As Darnton points out: “when we run into something that seems

unthinkable to us, we may have hit upon a valid point of entry into an alien mentality. And once we have

puzzled through to the native’s point of view, we should be able to roam about in his symbolic world.” 164

When you look at suicide attacks or gun violence, beyond the horror and the silence, you quickly find

potent symbolism that defies simple interpretation. These are the pathways, so to speak, that bridge the

gaps in the circle.

In guns, you see the often-illogical fetishization of weaponry; the framing of killings in hard-to-grasp quasi-

religious rituals; and arms-trade ephemera loaded with arcane symbolism. In suicide bombings, you note

similar deep layers of complex and seemingly impenetrable motif and imagery; dense theological

justifications focused around martyrs; iconographies loaded with borrowed cultural references. These

discursive phenomena were all invested with clouded meaning – and a central theme of my books was to

unpick the meaning in such images.165 In the midst of the violence, I looked for, as Gilloch said of

Benjamin, cultural “tesserae, ruins, traces, building blocks, fragments.”166

28
To me, perhaps the most loaded of these images were the zombie and the virgin. To paraphrase

Benjamin, these were icons that flashed out at me in the cultures of violence in which I found them. In

Gun Baby Gun, “it struck me that the Nazi zombie was somehow significant in my journey into the world

of the gun. That it was, in a way, the perfect lobbyist in this world – indestructible evil personified. It was,

at least, the perfect reason to own a gun – combating the zombie apocalypse.”167 In The Price of

Paradise, the promised virgins of the afterlife stood out – a motif born from a “mixture of sexual

frustration, youth, a lack of a partner, the belief that death is not the end, the glorification of the martyr,

and the complex interplay of sexual politics” that was found in many suicide bombers’ fantasies.168

Given war splinters the world into fragments, could it be that war – in the end - becomes legible only in

those shards? Could tracing the fragmented trails of meaning revealed through those illogical symbols of

zombies and virgins lead us to ‘close the circle’? Were the zombie and virgin Ansatzpunkte - ‘starting

points’ – from which bigger themes can be ‘inductively reconstructed’? 169 Of course, it is difficult to

rationalise the gun community’s fetishization of zombies, or the Salafist-jihadists’ belief they will find

virgins in paradise. To some journalists, these beliefs are noted and not explained – a failure of sense-

making that has many causes (such as a lack of education amongst journalists in human psychology,

politics or history).170 But silence about zombies and paradisical virgins was not, to me, an acceptable

moral answer when reporting on war.

The zombie and the virgin are fragile emblems. They offer themselves up, as Benjamin might have

described, as images that flash “up at the moment of (their) recognizability”.171 They are “irretrievable

image(s) of the past which threaten to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended

in that image.”172 Contextualising the presence of the virgin and the zombie was answering the call to

search for perspicuous relationships. There are, of course, limitations to witnessing journalistic inquiry as

a seeking out of circles that need to be closed. Ginzburg warned that “the occurrence of a phenomenon

cannot be taken as an index of its historical relevance.” 173 Heidegger observed the paradoxes inherent in

such a circle: without understanding the whole, you cannot understand its parts; without understanding

29
those parts, you cannot understand the whole. But Heidegger also saw the circle as ‘virtuous’ not

‘vicious’. Recognising a circularity in itself was a moment of truth.174 His proposal was not to get around

the circle, but to break into it: an ‘unconcealment’ (aletheia) that, in a way, revealed the whole world.175

Panofsky also recognised that the circle always has the potential to be expanded: "every discovery of an

unknown historical fact, and every new interpretation of a known one, will either "fit in" with the prevalent

general conception, and thereby corroborate and enrich it, or else it will entail a subtle, or even a

fundamental change in the prevalent general conception, and thereby throw new light on all that has been

known before."176

Aucoin’s analysis of Kapuściński’s journalism saw this approach in praxis. Where Kapuściński did not

seek absolute truths or dictate a moral course, he admitted his storytelling “necessarily will be flawed,

incomplete”.177 Aucoin said “his assertions of truth are based on incomplete information.” 178 Kapuściński’s

work has been challenged for its veracity and praised for its magical realism, 179 but he was honest in

admitting it was “missing or misplaced a few pictures”;180 he saw the past as a ‘fragment of a film’; 181

worlds without a plurality of views were “monothematic”, “limited to one thought”. 182 I accepted these

limitations in my own reporting. “Understanding and unpicking all that has happened since is hard,” I

wrote of the devastation of the 9/11 attacks;183 on polls into perceptions of Islam in British life highlighted,

I saw “the limitations of bias and poor questioning in surveys”; 184 I accepted the limitations of my own

perspective where “the violence that gripped that land was hidden from me”. 185 The circle could not

always be completed.

Wittgenstein was similarly wary of this. He accepted coincidences might seem prescient, but they are just

coincidences; emotional responses the products of specific forms of socialisation. Instead, Wittgenstein

saw completing the circle as a way towards ‘sharpening…the eye’. 186 It was, as Palmié notes, “what

Wittgenstein… calls “aspect seeing” or “aspect change.” 187 Wittgenstein, in this way, was ahead of the

30
rejection of a “Western” theory-of-knowledge in favour of pluralistic tenets or “perspectivism””.188 He

recognised that moment when our perception of the ‘duck rabbit’ oscillates between two modalities,

showing us how to “see things differently”.189 So, knowing the war correspondent, imbibed with inherent

prejudice, is frequently blinded to a different perspective, what if - like Wittgenstein - they are able to gain

through the prism of an aberrant element (an übersichtliche Darstellung) a different view? Could virgins in

paradise or gun-range zombies be catalysts, enabling us to see conflict in a new light?

Such an approach was admired in Ginzburg’s contemplation of the miller in The Cheese and the Worms.

Menocchio was so different from us that an “analytical reconstruction of this difference was necessary, in

order to reconstruct the physiognomy, partly obscured, of his culture.” 190 This use of the ‘obscured micro’

to reveal wider patterns was there in Burke’s attempt to catalogue the elusive history of pain: “a ‘messy’

process, involving a vast number of different, even contradictory language games, cognitive processes,

affective practices, and motivations.” 191 It was there in Sontag’s contemplation of Bataille’s photograph of

a Chinese prisoner undergoing "the death of a hundred cuts"; a view of suffering “rooted in religious

thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation, a view that could not be more alien to a

modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime”. 192 It

was there, too, in Darnton’s examination of the Great Cat Massacre, where our own inability to

understand a medieval joke “is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of

preindustrial Europe.” 193

“The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists

have found that the best points of entry in an attempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it

seems to be most opaque,” Darnton wrote. “When you realize that you are not getting something—a joke,

a proverb, a ceremony—that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a

foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.” 194

31
This approach gave me confidence to examine zombies and virgins more deeply, looking for the ‘aspect

changes’, showing how such icons helped reveal concepts hitherto alien and impenetrable. When

Benjamin wrote that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars - no more present in the world than

constellations actually exist in the heavens but, like constellations, enabling us to perceive the

relationships between objects – I took it as a call to focus on those hard-to-grasp stars in order to create

more meaningful constellations, more comprehensive hermeneutic arcs.195

Benjamin also argued that “where thinking suddenly comes to a stop in a constellation saturated with

tensions, it gives that constellation a shock, by which thinking is crystallised as a monad. The historical

materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad.” 196 The recognition of

the monad “blasts a specific life out of the era.”197 The images of the paradisical virgin and the Nazi

zombie were – to me – exactly those moments where logic came to a halt, in what Butler describes as

“difficult and interruptive scene of multiple temporalities.”198 Moments where, in their shocking alienness,

they offered a link between present and past. And, as Benjamin wrote, if we see the world – especially

conflict zones – as “deciphered in the monad, and recomposed in the mosaic or montage” – perhaps

deciphering the virgin and the suicide bomber offered up a monadic key.199

In short, the virgin and the zombie signposted the way of the elliptical arced towards a fuller

understanding. The zombie spoke of America’s cultural framing of fear; the logic in late capitalism’s need

to create permanently renewed market opportunities; and a lingering memory of despotic violence

inflicted on long-dead European refugees. The suicide bomber’s virgins opened up a gateway to the

tensions sometimes created by polygamous religions and the relationship between single men and

violence; the promises offered up by clearly-articulated spiritual utopias; and the underlying benefits

struck within the social contract between martyrs and the communities they die for. To some conflict

correspondents, such explications might seem too much: war was less complicated than that. But not to

me. I sought constellations in chaos, a pathway illuminated by dense cultural stars, and I used those stars

to find meaning in violence.

32
 7. Application and assessment of methodologies in submitted works

In the search for such meaning, both books employed a journalistic method guided by ethical guidelines

and professional standards, namely the BBC's Editorial Values and Standards and the Society of

Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. 200 These guidelines emphasise principles such as accuracy,

objectivity, fairness, minimisation of harm, and independence. Such guiding principles are highlighted in

scholarly works, such as Kovach and Rosenstiel's examination of journalism ethics and the importance of

balanced reporting,201 Christians et al.'s discussion of the ethical implications of news narratives, 202

Sylvie's focus on journalistic principles, 203 and Philips writings on the need for transparency. 204

Additionally, McNair explores the media's role in democracy and the importance of timeliness and

relevance, 205 McBride & Rosenstiel examine current ethical issues in journalism such as fake news and

transparency,206 and Calcutt & Hammond investigate the relationship between journalists and the public

in impact, relevance, and context. 207 Such readings – both applied and theory – not only informed the

evaluative criteria of my approach, but also offered framings to inform my decision and interpretive

judgements of the methodology reflected upon above. Such criteria can loosely be defined as: accuracy,

objectivity, relevance, presentation and impact. These will be examined in turn.

In the framing of accuracy, the reliability and credibility of sources has been shown to be best achieved

through utilising credible source material, such as academic journals, government reports, and reputable

news articles. Porlezza has pointed out the ‘informal’ ways that most journalists apply accuracy to their

work – namely “source triangulation, analysis of primary data sources or official documents, semi-

participant observation”. 208 These were the primary epistemological approaches to both books. Of note,

Gun Baby Gun had, in total, some 713 endnotes, and The Price of Paradise had 1,235. Given this

narrative essay also has 269 citations, the combined body of work has been built upon over 2,200

references and endnotes.

33
Such research was underpinned by consistent double-checking, a use of reputable experts, a balancing

of perspectives, an avoidance of sensationalism, a coherent use of reliable data and a process of

transparency with regard to sources and quoted interviews. In Gun Baby Gun, I noted this process in the

writing: “I contacted one of America’s leading experts on suicide – Paul Appelbaum, a professor of

psychiatry at Columbia University – to find out more”;209 “certainly, talking to experts and gang members

around the city, I had found that the truce between the gangs was not working – that the number being

killed was more than publicly stated”;210 “experts have confided in me, in a way where even things that

were not secret were phrased as being such, that the age of the Merchants of Death has ended”. Equally,

in The Price of Paradise: “I reached out to the world’s foremost expert on female suicide bombers”; 211

“having met many counterterrorism experts in researching this book, I understand why such red alerts are

issued, and yet no bombing happens”; 212 “one chemical industry expert told me that the British

government had approached him, asking for help.”213 These are just the examples of me spelling out to

the reader the acknowledgement of expertise – the book’s citations prove the hundreds of other, unstated

engagements.

The next criterion for review was that of objectivity. As Maras has observed, the concept of objectivity in

journalism has limitations, given the difficulties in achieve full impartiality and balance in reporting. 214

This was very much the case in books on mass shootings and suicide attacks, where there are inherent

emotional, ethical and storytelling limitations in relying solely on facts and objective data. Especially

given the invariably complex and nuanced stories surround such events. In both books, I addressed the

limitations of objectivity, and accepted my own personal, cultural and structural biases. I did this either

through the prism of my own limitations: “I have to consider deeply the person I am writing about here:

likely a black, semi-literate, adolescent, Muslim female who is about to commit a truly violent act.”215 Or

through the prism of Western media bias – “such things are important in Western news agendas,

because prejudices and priorities dictate the amount of airtime a story is given – what has been called a

‘hierarchical news structure on death’.” 216

34
To address these issues, in both books and as stated above, I tried to present multiple perspectives and

viewpoints in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the issue. In Gun Baby Gun, I

interviewed child killers in El Salvador 217 with the same focus as I interviewed people who had lost their

children to violence. 218 I met smugglers219 and UN experts whose life is bent on stopping arms

smuggling;220 I encountered, as I wrote: “dozens of different realities. That communities living with guns at

their epicentres … far removed from other communities with other guns”. 221 The same was seen in The

Price of Paradise: “a search that ... led me around the world: to interview failed suicide bombers, to sit

with still-grieving families, to listen to victims racked with pain.”222

I was clear in my ambition towards objectivity: “to walk in the same footsteps of men and women walking

their last steps to ‘martyrdom’; to listen to those who would wage holy war; and to speak to those who

would stop them. It has found me visiting memorials and sites of massacres, radical mosques and

belligerent militaries – all the while trying to remember how this violent epoch of the suicide bomber was

born and what can be done – what must be done – to stop it.” 223

Next of concern was the journalistic lodestar of relevance. In news reporting, this might be loosely judged,

as Rosen has pointed out, on originality, timeliness, responsiveness to audiences and access to the story

being reported upon. 224 In addition, Meijer has noted that imparting something new, gaining recognition

for the report and – overall - adding to mutual understanding all hold value in journalism. 225 As argued

above, both books offer up original elements both within news agenda and within the academy. There

were, also, specific ‘exclusives’. For instance, I noted that Itaf in The Price of Paradise was a woman who

“would have been the first Palestinian suicide bomber; the first one to attack Israel within its borders; the

first female suicide bomber in the Middle East; and the first Sunni suicide bomber.” 226 In Gun Baby Gun,

my examination of Cerberus Capital Management was arguably one of the most detailed and extensive

analysis of the corporation to date. 227

35
In regards to timeliness, the issues of gun violence in 2015 was – and still is – a ‘hot topic’ item. That year

there were international news headlines such as “11 myths about the future of gun control, debunked

after the Charleston shooting”; 228 “The gun-control debate, explained in 5 questions”; 229 and “'God Isn't

Fixing This' Argument Divides Even More In Gun Debate” 230. In 2019, when the suicide bomber book was

published, headlines on that subject also dominated: “Suicide bombings rise in aftermath of drone

strikes”;231or “The Birthplace of the Suicide Belt.' Sri Lanka's Deadly History of Suicide Bombings”. 232 To

this end – as noted above – the books were situated in data that stressed the rise of harm from both

weapons and the need for solutions to address such harm. They were timely publications in an age of

terror.

The next criteria for journalistic merit is that of presentation. The works constitute what Ricketson called

“book-length journalism”.233 This is an amalgam Weber’s “literature of fact”; 234 Sims’ “literary

journalism”235; the “Nonfiction Novel”;236 and narrative journalism.237 Kormelink and Costera Meijer have

even claimed such long-form storytelling is the future of journalism. 238 Furthermore, Baym contends that

"public affairs narratives" in long-form TV dramas, which blend news and narrative, have the potential to

engage viewers in exploring socio-political issues.239

The books were deeply influenced by theories of narrative journalism, with an emphasis on the use of

storytelling techniques, such as plot, character, and theme, to create a narrative that brings the story to

life and makes it more engaging for readers. 240 For instance, the hero's journey, a narrative pattern

identified by Joseph Campbell, is often used as a framework for analysing stories in literature, film, and

other forms of media. 241 In the context of journalism, the hero's journey can be used as an inspirational

structure, as well as the role of the journalist as a "hero" figure who goes on a journey to uncover and

report the truth. However, such a journey needs to be steeped in an ethical framework - including the

need to be aware of constructivist bias, balancing objectivity and subjectivity, and being aware potential

36
effects of storytelling choices. 242 Based on these observations, the books were presented in a way that

was designed to be ‘readable’ and informative.

Finally, there is the notion of impact of the story. To ensure greatest impact, I presented my books at the

United Nations, at Chatham House, at Sandhurst, in the Houses of Parliament, in Harvard and King’s

College and on the BBC. I wrote a series of complementary pieces, too, in national and international

press, as well as gaining recognition for being an ‘expert’ (and, amusingly, “one of journalism's nice

guys”).243 The overriding reviews of both books in newspapers were positive: a peer-review of the quality

and integrity of the journalism. GQ said Gun Baby Gun was “gripping… enlightening”; The Spectator said

it was “relentlessly engrossing”; 244 and the FT said it was “thoughtful… contains moments of great

poignancy”.245 Professor Alpers, head of gunpolicy.org, called it “the best book ever written on the

subject”.246 The Price of Paradise was also well received critically. Lamb in The Sunday Times called it “a

must-read book on the most frightening phenomenon of the modern age”; 247 Beaumont in The Observer

said it was “provocative and timely”; 248 Loyd in the New Statesman described it as “outstanding… the

author takes confident control over this huge, dense and dark subject”; 249 Gerges in The Evening

Standard said it was “an informative book on a timely topic”;250 the i said it went “further than most to

understand the motivations of the modern-day suicide bomber.”251

Overall, however, the standard journalistic criteria of accuracy, objectivity, relevance, presentation and

impact were, as this paper has argued, insufficient when tasked with reporting on the enormity of tragedy

in the fog of war. What was needed were alternative viewpoints, framed against the profound challenges

in reducing any conflict to a single narrative. In this way, I argue the conflict reporter must become

Benjamin’s angel, surrounded by the whirlwind of terrible images and events that represent the

unforgiving past. It’s a position captured by T.S.Eliot:

37
 “The past experience revived in the meaning

Is not the experience of one life only

But of many generations—not forgetting

Something that is probably quite ineffable:

The backward look behind the assurance

Of recorded history, the backward half-look

Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.” 252

Contemplating this backward look demands, as Benjamin demanded, a mindfulness. 253 To be mindful of

the complexity of the situation and to avoid simplifying or reducing it to a single narrative. To be aware of

the multiple perspectives of war. Benjamin called such numerous perspectives ‘monads’ that lead to

constellations; Geertz called them “webs of significance;”254 Darnton referred to them as

“unthinkable…points of entry;”255 Wittgenstein called them “ellipses”.256 But all spoke of ways to find

pathways through opacity. To capture more of the all-encompassing vision of the Angelus Novus and, in

so doing (as Foucault urged us to) “throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a

different way.”257

To me, such framings – as I have argued - offered a pathway towards understanding. Rubin sums it up:

“the Bildung of the historian is achieved not only by way of an anointment with the dust of the archives,

but through the mobilization of an informed subjectivity, human and intellectual capacities for

categorization, system building and empathy. Bringing to the traces of the past wishes, pain, hope and

desire is… a necessary part of human reflection and learning about the past.” 258

There are, of course, dangers in over-stating the micro-historical approach. If you begin inquiry with the

experience of the individual suicide bomber – for instance - as the basic analytic unit and, from this,

extrapolate large macroscopic social behaviour, you are on dangerous ground. But my case studies of

38
virgins and zombies were just stars in a wider constellation. In the gun book, the zombie was bracketed

by the experiences of doctors and soldiers, police officers and gun-sellers. In the suicide bomber book,

the virgin was part of wider narratives that encompassed failed bombers, weapon disposal experts,

academics with expertise on extremism and official military sources. But an allegorical prompting or

dense philological reading of these specific “past witnesses of the present” enabled me to reveal “secret

affinities” when presented beside other complementary, carefully-researched evidence.

It was not just virgins and zombies; I used this methodology repeatedly. For instance, in describing

Russian Revolutionaries, I described the tourist baubles on sale outside the church that commemorated

where the first ever suicide bomber struck. “The living history that revealed the cultural foundations of the

People’s Will seemed present in these stalls,” I wrote, describing how the Matryoshka dolls were linked to

the sufferings of 19th Century peasants; how a copy of Das Kapital was a ‘marker from history’

representing the rise of Communism; and how Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ indicated the

discontent in the middle-classes when faced with the great disparities of wealth and poverty in 19th

Century Russia.

In Gun Baby Gun, I similarly used the Leeds Armoury to begin my journey into understanding the world of

guns, surrounded by “row after row of every type of firearm imaginable. There they were, oiled and fierce

on the floor. There, neat and polished on racks. Hung on wall brackets, put away on shelves, slid deep

into recessed drawers. It was like Borges’s infamous library, but here were guns not books – over 14,000

in steel and wood and brass.”259

The gun and the suicide bomber were themselves central monads that framed both books – black stars

from which I traced constellations of understanding far from their origins. And throughout both books, I

searched for deeper meaning in an array of objects and icons: when I walked through the memorial

39
museum to 9/11 in New York, visited the Shot Show in Las Vegas, attended an anti-terror training camp

in Israel, or traversed the aisles of a Parisian Arms Trade Show.

The conceptual richness and metaphorizing in the way I described these places are not something found

in a typical news report – a limitation enforced either by word-count or purview. But my books stepped

beyond the normal role of journalism and approached something akin to the travel-writer, philosopher, or

academic. Such language gave me the chance, like Benjamin’s rag and bone man, to rationally pick

through the psycho-geography of the spaces I visited to collect and juxtapose “apparently disparate ideas

and concepts for the purpose of mutual illumination.”260 What I was really doing was looking for cultural

Ansatzpunkte everywhere: stars in the darkness of violence.

8. Conclusion

Though such approaches I hope to have shown how, as noted at the beginning of this report, you can

penetrate the fog of conflict to report on such conflict. I have argued that this process, if bracketed by

standard journalistic ethics and practice, helps maintain balance and nuance in the face of mass murder

and atrocities; how, through searching for Ansatzpunkte, the war correspondent can step a little closer

towards interrogating the dead’s motivations for violence; and how both books were dedicated to

examining those motivations.

To penetrate the fog of war I created networks of contacts - soldiers, civilians, police, criminals, lobbyists,

murders, doctors, smugglers – to gain insights into the situation on the ground. I verified my sources

through independent means, such as social media review, primary source examination, corroboratory

interviews and company accounts records. I was wary of propaganda and disinformation, aware of how it

is misused to shape public perception of the events. I sought out multiple perspectives, including those of

40
different ethnic, religious, and political groups, to gain a more complete understanding of the situation.

And I contextualised events politically, socially and economically, aware of the motivations of the different

parties involved.

To maintain balance and nuance in the face of such violence was, of course, challenging – emotionally

and mentally. But approaching tragedy through a measured and analytical perspective, focusing on facts

and evidence rather than emotions or personal opinions, I found pathways to understanding. Through a

patchwork of relevant voices, rather than a reliance on a single source or narrative, I found nuance and

complexity; and through compassion and empathy, I respected the innocent dead and honoured their

memories.

In interrogating the dead’s motivations for violence, my work formed a form of archaeology of loss.

Picking through the refuse of war – interviews, reviews of letters, examinations of social media posts – to

provide an insight into their thoughts, beliefs, and goals, and through psychological, psycho-geographical

and data analysis of individual's and group’s environment and background, I found meaning in the silence

of death.

In the end, I conceived war as the world splintered into fragments, which only the Angelus Novus can see

in its entirety. For us to even attempt to understand it, we can only do so through the fragments by which

it is represented. Sometimes those fragments present themselves as data, testimony, lived experience

and memory. Sometimes as the burnt, cultural embers that manifest in obscure ways. To me, the motifs

of the zombie and the virgin were as much the burnt fragments of a world on fire as were the numbered

dead that began my books. I argue that this constellatory attempt to chart violence’s arc through such

cultural and data monads was a main-stay of my books. Such an attempt led towards greater

understanding and that this, in turn, lends itself better towards preventing the tragic past from repeating

itself.

41
Arguably, conflict journalism trades on war. My books, however, might be considered to be part of

something approaching peace journalism. It is a form of reporting described as “against dominance of all

kinds” but seeks “to view the conflict within its complete map with its historical and cultural roots, and to

approach all sides with empathy reflecting the suffering of all parties”.261 My submissions, in this way,

form part of a relatively novel approach towards reporting on violence.262 Of course, peace is a utopian

ideal. As I wrote stood under the Statue of Liberty: “It was possibly the safest public space in the world. I

looked around at this artificial vision of freedom and breathed out slowly. What the world might be if we

had no guns at all, I thought.”263

This utopian framing – either my addressing it or the suicide bombers’ desire for it – bracketed my books.

Not a search for paradise in itself: I had no appetite for such grand conclusions (not, as Benjamin put it, to

“take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions”).264 Rather, I sought two things: justice and reasoned

empathy. The search for the former was driven by Benjamin’s own cry: “only that historian will have the

gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe

from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” But, unlike Benjamin – for

whom despair led him to take his own life – I felt something was missing from his view of the Angelus

Novus. That with empathy the angel’s vision did not have to be so unrelentingly bleak.

This hope was born from witnessing death and violence in over two dozen conflict zones and from

coming painfully close to seeing what the Angel of History has seen. A personal journey where I sought –

in a way – to give comfort to Benjamin’s angel. By capturing the past, by highlighting how the loss of

human life matters, I set out – as Butler urged – to show the value of life itself.265 I wanted to help the

angel stay a little; to attempt to make whole what has been smashed; to show possibility where Benjamin

saw none.

42
In the books and in my post-publication lobbying, I sought to explain the past and, in so doing, create

change. This form of engagement might be held by some as eroding the impartial principles of journalism,

but to me it is in the spirit of a form of journalism that sets out to “expose untruths on all sides and

uncover all cover-ups”.266 This was a form of what could loosely be termed ‘peace journalism’, but one

that sought not just to warn against the rise of bellicosity and jingoistic nationalism, but also to record

what war does to individuals, communities and countries. Leveraging empathy, it constitutes a human

rights reporting that warns against the justification of war by politicians who have not witnessed its horror.

Empathy is a controversial thing to write about in academia. In the context of Benjamin, though, empathy

deserves to be discussed, because my books explicitly call for us to seek out connections and

understanding in the face of violence. As Gellhorn wrote, “memory and imagination, not nuclear weapons,

are the great deterrents.”267 It is, as I concluded in The Price of Paradise, empathy that has the power to

reverse the winds blowing us from paradise: “the routes that lead to any suicide bombing are always an

accumulation of unseen slights and offences, and so the road away from it can be, too. We can carve an

alternative passage – all of us – when we talk about non-violence because that is not just a way to peace,

but also a path to love.”268

This understanding is not the same as Bell’s ‘Journalism of Attachment’ 269: it seeks to contextualise as

well as humanise. It accepts that hidden power plays are at work and it is filled with scepticism; it accepts

the limitations of my own gender, ethnicity and class (academic writing on micro-history and conflict

journalism desperately need an injection of diversity, too); it accepts there are moral boundaries –

attacking civilians is a war crime, shooting schoolchildren is horrific. But it refuses absolutism and permits

empathy with the ‘Other’ – always present in war – to ensure that a more complete picture of the conflict

is captured. Empathy is the lodestar that permits the circle to be closed; helps sharpen the eye to the

‘duck-rabbit’; reveals the Ansatzpunkte; and, in the end, makes the dead speak.

43
Without such empathy, the Angelus Novus is, to me, a vision of unmitigated horror. Infused with it, and

witnessed through the micro-stories I gathered, the angel might be reinterpreted - there to offer us a

gateway to understanding and, perhaps, to resolution.

There are – of course – limits to my books’ capacity for change, just as Kapuściński accepted limits to his

own reporting. But those books, like this essay, constitute an articulated attempt towards a theory that,

unlike the horrors that blow the angel from paradise, might become recognisable as becoming true

progress.

1
Iain Overton, Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun (London: Canongate Books, 2015).

2
Iain Overton, The Price of Paradise (London: Hachette, 2019).

3
Gun Baby Gun was translated into French, Norwegian, Dutch and Mandarin; The Price of Paradise into Dutch and Romanian.

4
Secured via an agent at Greene & Heaton.

5
Charity Commission of England and Wales, Campaigning and political activity guidance for charities (Accessed 24 July 2022).

<https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/speaking-out-guidance-on-campaigning-and-political-activity-by-charities-

cc9/speaking-out-guidance-on-campaigning-and-political-activity-by-charities>

6
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 311.

7
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 427.

8
Ibid, p. 428.

9
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 7.

10
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 2.

44
11
For instance: Philip J. Cook, and Jens Ludwig, Gun violence: The real costs (Oxford: Oxford University Press on Demand, 2000);

and Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick. Reducing gun violence in America (Blackstone Audio Incorporated, 2013); and

Alexander DeConde, Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control (NH: UPNE, 2003).

12
John R. Lott, More guns, less crime: Understanding crime and gun control laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

13
S, Melzer, Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War, New York, (NY: New York University Press, 2009); D. Webster and J.

Vernick, Reducing Gun Violence in America: Informing Policy with Evidence and Analysis, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2003).

14
F. Zimring, Is Gun Control Likely to Reduce Violent Killings? (University of Chicago Law Review, 35, 1968), pp. 721–37; F.

Zimring, The Medium Is the Message: Firearm Calibre as a Determinant of Death from Assault, (Journal of Legal Studies 35, 1972),

pp 21–37; D. Hemenway, Private Guns, Public Health, (The University of Michigan Press, 2006); C. Jamieson, Gun Violence

Research: History of the Federal Funding Freeze, (American Psychological Association, February edition, 2003);

J. Knoll G. Annas, Mass Shootings and Mental Illness. (American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016)

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099.

15
J. Butters, J. E., Sheptycki, J., Brochu, S., & P. Erikson, Guns and sub-lethal violence: A comparative study of at-risk youth in two

Canadian cities (International Criminal Justice Review, 4, 2011), pp. 402–426.

16
J. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America (Canada: Hill and Wang, 1994); L. Browder, Her

Best Shot: Women and Guns in America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); R. King, Arming Desire: The

Sexual Force of Guns in the United States), in Open Fire: Understanding Global Gun Cultures (Oxford: Oxford International

Publishers Ltd., 2007); J. Carlson, From Gun Politics to Self-Defense Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate,

(Violence Against Women 20 (3): 2014), pp. 369–77.

17
William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000. (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1982); Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1989).; Philip J. Cook, and Jens Ludwig, Gun violence: The real costs (Oxford: Oxford University Press on

Demand, 2000); Daniel W. Webster and Jon S. Vernick. Reducing gun violence in America (Blackstone Audio Incorporated, 2013);

and Alexander DeConde, Gun Violence in America: The Struggle for Control (NH: UPNE, 2003).

18
Gary Kleck, Point Black: Guns and Violence in America, (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1991); David B. Kopel, The Samurai, The

Mountie, and The Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books,

1992); David Kopel (ed.), Guns: Who Should Have Them? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995); Markus T. Funk, Gun Control

in America: A History of Discrimination against the Poor and Minorities. In Guns in America, ed. Jan E. Dizard, Robert Merrill Muth,

and Stephen P. Andrews, Jr., (New York: New York University Press, 1999) pp. 390–402.; Lee Nisbet (ed.), (The Gun Control

Debate: You Decide, (2nd edn. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001); J Burbick, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American45
Democracy (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2006); J Anderson, An Anthropology of American Gun Culture; The Productive Tension

Between Ideology and Embodiment, (Groundings Ancients 3, 2015), pp. 18–35.

19
Wendy Cukier and Victor W. Sidel. The global gun epidemic: from Saturday night specials to AK-47s. (Greenwood Publishing

Group, 2006); Jonathan Master, US gun policy: Global comparisons, (Council on Foreign Relations 14, 2017).

20
Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C. G. M. Robben (eds), Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival,

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Pressm, 1995); Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology

Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995); Phulippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect:

Selling Crack in El Barrio. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Anna Simons, The Company They Keep: Life Inside the

U.S. Army Special Forces (New York: The Free Press, 1997); Mariane Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the

Everyday in Sierra Leone (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2001); Goran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds), Meanings of

Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Alexander Laban Hinton (ed.), Genocide: An Anthropological Reader

(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000); Jeffrey Sluka (ed.), Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror, (

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.; Anderson, Myrdene (ed.) (2004). Cultural Shaping of Violence: Victimization,

Escalation, Response. Ashland, OH: Purdue University Press, 2000).

21
Charles Fruehling Springwood (ed.), Open fire: Understanding global gun cultures, (Berg, 2007).

22
Wendell C. Wallace, Guns, Gun Violence and Gun Homicides: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Global South and Beyond

(Springer International Publishing AG, 2021), p. 5.

23
Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., & Sozzo, M. (2018). Criminology, Southern theory and cognitive justice. In K. Carrington, R.

Hogg, J. Scott, & M. Sozzo (Eds.), The Palgrave handbook of criminology and the Global South (pp. 3–17). Palgrave Macmillan.

24
Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in the social sciences. Allen & Unwin.

25
Jonathan Master, US gun policy: Global comparisons, (Council on Foreign Relations 14, 2017).

26
Robert L. Wilson, The History and Art of the American Gun: The Art of American Arms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015).

27
Carl Bakal, The Right to Bear Arms (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966).

28
Joseph McKenna, The Gun Makers of Birmingham, 1660-1960 (McFarland, 2021); Richard C. Rattenbury, A Legacy in Arms:

American Firearm Manufacture, Design, and Artistry, 1800–1900, 10, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Jonathan

A. Grant, Rulers, guns, and money: the global arms trade in the age of imperialism (Harvard University Press, 2007).

29
Ioan Grillo, Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

30
Christopher John Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).

46
31
Jared Diamond, Guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years (New York: Random House, 2013).
32
Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001).

33
Mark Kurlansky, Cod: a Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, (New York: Vintage Canada, 2011).

34
Michael Coe and Sophie Coe, The True History of Chocolate, (London: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 2006).

35
Robert Young, 'Lecture: Global Circulation', King's College, London (YouTube, 5 July 2010)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk_Z9YhXi7s&t=680s (Accessed 24 July, 2022)

36
Craig, D., Ketterer, S., & Yousuf, M. (2017). To Post or Not to Post: Online Discussion of Gun Permit Mapping and the

Development of Ethical Standards in Data Journalism. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 94(1), 168–188.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699016684796

37
Steidley, T. and Colen, C.G. (2017), Framing the Gun Control Debate: Press Releases and Framing Strategies of the National

Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign*. Social Science Quarterly, 98: 608-627. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12323

38
Duwe, G. (2000). Body-Count Journalism: The Presentation of Mass Murder in the News Media. Homicide Studies, 4(4), 364–

399; Jashinsky, Jared Michael, Brianna Magnusson, Carl Hanson, and Michael Barnes. "Media agenda setting regarding gun

violence before and after a mass shooting." Frontiers in public health 4 (2017): 291.

39
Dorfman, Lori, Esther Thorson, and Jane Ellen Stevens. "Reporting on violence: bringing a public health perspective into the

newsroom." Health Education & Behavior 28, no. 4 (2001): 402-419; Bushman, Brad J., and Craig A. Anderson. "Media violence

and the American public: Scientific facts versus media misinformation." American Psychologist 56, no. 6-7 (2001): 477.

40
McGinty, E.E., Webster, D.W., Jarlenski, M. and Barry, C.L., 2014. News media framing of serious mental illness and gun

violence in the United States, 1997-2012. American journal of public health, 104(3), pp.406-413.

41
Tourni, Isidora ; Guo, Lei ; Daryanto, Taufiq Husada ; Zhafransyah, Fabian ; Halim, Edward Edberg ; Jalal, Mona ; Chen, Boqi ;

Lai, Sha ; Hu, Hengchang ; Betke, Margrit ; et al , Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Lead Images in U.S. Gun Violence

Coverage, January 2021 , Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in

Natural Language Processing. November 2021, pages 4037-4050, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.); Parham-Payne, Wanda.

"The role of the media in the disparate response to gun violence in America." Journal of Black Studies 45, no. 8 (2014): 752-768;

Hilaire, B., Campbell, L.O., Kelchner, V.P., Laguardia, E.D. and Howard, C., 2022. Not Another School Shooting: Media, Race, and

Gun Violence in K-12 Schools. Education and Urban Society, p.00131245221092739; Leonard, David J. "Illegible black death,

legible white pain: Denied media, mourning, and mobilization in an era of “post-racial” gun violence." Cultural Studies↔ Critical

Methodologies 17, no. 2 (2017): 101-109.

William O’Grady, Patrick F. Parnaby, and Justin Schikschneit. "Guns, gangs, and the underclass: A constructionist analysis of gun
42

violence in a Toronto high school." Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 52, no. 1 (2010): 55-77.

47
43
S. Every-Palmer, R. Cunningham, M. Jenkins, and E. Bell, 2021. The Christchurch mosque shooting, the media, and subsequent

gun control reform in New Zealand: a descriptive analysis, (Psychiatry, psychology and law, 28(2)), pp.274-285.

44
Pape, Robert A. "Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism." In The theory and practice of Islamic terrorism, pp. 129-

132. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008. ; Robert Pape, Dying to win: The strategic logic of suicide terrorism (New York: Random

House Trade Paperbacks, 2006).; Pape, Robert A., and James K. Feldman. Cutting the fuse: The explosion of global suicide

terrorism and how to stop it. University of Chicago Press, 2010.

45
Bloom, Mia. "Female suicide bombers: a global trend." Daedalus 136, no. 1 (2007): 94-102.

46
Oliver, Anne Marie, and Paul F. Steinberg. The road to martyrs' square: A journey into the world of the suicide bomber. Oxford

University Press, 2006.

47
Asad, Talal. On suicide bombing. Columbia University Press, 2007.

48
Farhad Khosrokhavar and David Macey, Suicide bombers: Allah's new martyrs (London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2015).

49
Mohammed M. Hafez, Suicide bombers in Iraq: The strategy and ideology of martyrdom (Washington D.C.: US Institute of Peace

Press, 2007).

50
Anat Berko, The path to paradise: The inner world of suicide bombers and their dispatchers, (trans.) Elizabeth Yuval (Westport:

Praeger Security International, 2007); Adam Lankford, ‘The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage

Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive Killers’, Behavioural and Braiin Sciences, 37 (2013).

51
Debra D. Zedalis, Female suicide bombers (The Minerva Group, Inc., 2004); and Mia Bloom, Female suicide bombers: a global

trend, 136(1) (Daedalus, 2007), pp. 94-102; and Karen Jacques and Paul J. Taylor, ‘Male and female suicide bombers: Different

sexes, different reasons?’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 31(4) (2008), pp. 304-326; and Julie V. G. Rajan, Women suicide

bombers: Narratives of violence ( Routledge, 2011).

52
Assaf Moghadam, ‘Suicide terrorism, occupation, and the globalization of martyrdom: A critique of Dying to Win’, Studies in

Conflict & Terrorism, 29(8), (2006), pp. 707-729.

53
Lankford, Adam. “The Myth of Martyrdom: What Really Drives Suicide Bombers, Rampage Shooters, and Other Self-Destructive

Killers”: New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.; Lankford, Adam, and Sara Tomek. "Mass killings in the United States from 2006 to

2013: social contagion or random clusters?." Suicide and Life‐threatening Behavior 48, no. 4 (2018): 459-467.

54
Berkowitz, Dan. "Suicide bombers as women warriors: Making news through mythical archetypes." Journalism & mass

communication quarterly 82, no. 3 (2005): 607-622.

55
Berkowitz, Dan. "Suicide bombers as women warriors: Making news through mythical archetypes." Journalism & mass

communication quarterly 82, no. 3 (2005): 607-622; Lester, David. "Female suicide bombers: clues from journalists." Suicidology
48
online 2 (2011): 62-66;
56
Kirk, Matthew D. "Gendering journalistic voices for gendered political violence? Agential representations of Palestinian female

suicide bombers in UK broadcast news media." Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook 19, no. 1 (2021): 43-58.

57
Brunner, Claudia. "Occidentalism meets the female suicide bomber: A critical reflection on recent terrorism debates; A review

essay." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 4 (2007): 957-971.

58
Brunner 1, C. (2005). Female suicide bombers–male suicide bombing? Looking for gender in reporting the suicide bombings of

the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Global society, 19(1), 29-48; La, Hien, and Selena Pickett. "Framing Boko Haram’s female suicide

bombers in mass media: an analysis of news articles post Chibok abduction." Critical Studies on Terrorism 12, no. 3 (2019): 512-

532.

59
Nossek, H. and Berkowitz, D., 2006. Telling “our” story through news of terrorism: Mythical newswork as journalistic practice in

crisis. Journalism Studies, 7(5), pp.691-707.

60
Lewis, Seth C., and Stephen D. Reese. "What is the war on terror? Framing through the eyes of journalists." Journalism & Mass

Communication Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2009): 85-102.

61
Elliott, D., 2004. Terrorism, global journalism, and the myth of the nation state. Journal of mass media ethics, 19(1), pp.29-45.

62
von Sikorski, C., Schmuck, D., Matthes, J., Klobasa, C., Knupfer, H. and Saumer, M., 2021. Do journalists differentiate betwe en

Muslims and Islamist terrorists? A content analysis of terrorism news coverage. Journalism, 2022, Vol.23 (6), 1171-1193; Ahmed S

and Matthes J (2017) Media representation of Muslims and Islam from 2000 to 2015: A meta-analysis. International Communication

Gazette 79: 219–244.

63
Pedahzur, Ami. Suicide terrorism. Polity, 2005.

64
Das E, Bushman BJ, Bezemer MD, et al. (2009) How terrorism news reports increase prejudice against outgroups: A terror

management account. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45: 453–459.

65
Gerhards, Jürgen & Schäfer, Mike. (2013). International terrorism, domestic coverage? How terrorist attacks are presented in the

news of CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, and ARD. International Communication Gazette. 76. 3-26.

66
Matthes J, Schmuck D and von Sikorski C (2019) Terror, terror, everywhere? How terrorism news shape support for anti-Muslim

policies as a function of perceived threat severity and controllability. Political Psychology 40: 935–951.

67
Snape, D. & Spencer, L. (2003) The Foundations of Qualitative Research, p. 3. In Ritchie, J., & Lewis, J. (Eds.). (2003).

Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science Students and Researchers. (pp.1-23) SAGE.

68
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A study in sociology, (Routledge, 2005).

69
Max Weber, Methodology of Social Sciences (Routledge, 2017).

49
70
Kathy Charmaz, Constructing grounded theory, (Sage, 2014).
71
https://aoav.org.uk/explosiveviolence/

72
N. Taback, & R. Coupland, Towards collation and modelling of the global cost of armed violence on civilians, (Medicine, Conflict &

Survival, 21(1), 2005), pp.19-27.

73
https://cpost.uchicago.edu/research/suicide_attacks/database_on_suicide_attacks/

74
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/global-study-on-homicide.html

75
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm

76
This is a calculation based on four suicide attacks recorded in Tsarist Russia, at least seven in China in pre-WWII conflicts, 7,465

in Japan during WWII, 5,430 global attacks recorded between 1974 and 2016 by the Chicago Suicide Attack Database, and 746

recorded by AOAV between 2017 and 2021. See: Gerald Thomas, Suicide Tactics: The Kamikaze During World War II (Air Group 4,

2021). <http://www.airgroup4.com/kamikaze.htm>; ‘Suicide Attack Database’, Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST),

<https://cpost.uchicago.edu/research/suicide_attacks/dsat_online/>; ‘Explosive Violence Monitoring Project’, AOAV,

<http://www.explosiveviolencedata.com/filters>.

77
Iain Overton, ‘A decade of explosive violence harm’, Action on Armed Violence (London, 2021), <https://aoav.org.uk/wp-

content/uploads/2021/05/A-Decade-of-Explosive-Violence-Harm.pdf> p. 42 (these figures are as reported in English language

media).

78
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, pp. 24 – 25.

79
Barney Glaser & Anselm L. Strauss, The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research, (Routledge, 2017).

80
Kathy Charmaz, Constructing grounded theory, (Sage, 2014), p.17.

81
Ibid, p.1.

82
J.W. Creswell & J.D. Creswell, Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, (Sage Publications,

2017), p.19.

83
Ibid, p.20.

84
S. Davies, Empiricism and History, (Macmillan International Higher Education, 2003).

85
Gubrium, J. and Holstein, J. (1997) The New Language of Qualitative Method. Oxford University Press, Oxford, Chapter 1.

86
Travers, M. (2001) Qualitative Research through Case Studies. London: Sage Publications, p. 9.

87
Ritchie, J., Lewis, J., Nicholls, C.M. and Ormston, R., Eds. (2013) Qualitative Research Practice: A Guide for Social Science

Students and Researchers. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.

50
88
A. Tashakkori & C. Teddlie, (eds.), Handbook of mixed methods in social and behavioural research, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

2003).

89
Sally Adams, Interviewing for journalists, (Routledge, 2012), p. 5.

90
P. Spiller, Dispute Resolution in New Zealand, (Australia: Oxford University Press, P., (2002).

91
Rubin, HJ. & Rubin, I.S. (2012). Qualitative Interviewing: The art of hearing data (3 rd ed.). LA: Sage Publications, p. xv

92
Iain Overton, British Soldiers and German ‘Crimes’: Perceptions and Responses, 1914-1915, Dissertation for MPhil in

International Relations, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (July, 1998: Unpublished); that MPhil was later developed into a

television documentary which was transmitted in 2002 as part of UK Channel 4's Secret History series - see Evans, Suzanne,

Mothers of Heroes, Mothers of Martyrs: World War I and the Politics of Grief, (McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2007), p. 58.

93
Leon Wieseltier in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1986).

94
Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1954), p. 357.

95
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp.

255-263.

96
Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 227.

97
As Auden says: “even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course” – see Hugh Wystan Auden, ‘Musee des beaux arts’ in

Academic Medicine-Philadelphia, 69 (1994). pp. 462-462.

98
Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in war-time: Containing an assortment of lies circulated throughout the nations during the Great War

(London: G. Allen & Unwin Limited, 1928), p. 26.

99
Henry E. Hale, Oxana Shevel, and Olga Onuch, ‘Believing facts in the fog of war: identity, media and hot cognition in Ukraine’s

2014 Odesa tragedy’, Geopolitics, 23(4), (2018), pp. 851-881.

100
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 198.

101
Ibid, p.286.

102
Ibid, p. 312.

103
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 320.

104
Ibid, p. 265.

105
Ibid p. 313.

51
106
Lydia Day and Murray Jones and Iain Overton, ‘Press significantly under-reported explosive violence in Syria, AOAV study

shows’, Action on Armed Violence (London, 2020).

107
Iain Overton, ’Out of sight: British press ignores the continuing horror in Afghanistan’, Action on Armed Violence, (15 August

2019), <https://aoav.org.uk/2019/out-of-sight-british-press-ignores-the-continuing-horror-in-afghanistan/>.

108
‘Manchester Arena attack: Bomb 'injured more than 800', BBC, (16 May 2018).

<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-44129386>.

109
Iain Overton and Jenny Dathan, ‘The challenges of conflict reporting – when injuries from explosive weapons don’t make the

news’, Action on Armed Violence, (29 July 2019). <https://aoav.org.uk/2019/the-challenges-of-conflict-reporting-when-injuries-from-

explosive-weapons-dont-make-the-news/>.

110
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 79.

111
Louis Westendarp, ‘UNESCO says 55 journalists were killed in 2021’, Politico, (6 January, 2022),

<https://www.politico.eu/article/55-journalists-killed-2021-

unesco/#:~:text=New%20data%20shows%2087%20percent,killings%20since%202006%20remain%20unsolved.&text=According%

20to%20UNESCO%2C%2055%20journalists,in%202021%20around%20the%20world>.

112
Iain Overton, ‘Putin’s Hybrid War on Truth in Ukraine’, Byline Times, (28 June, 2021),

<https://bylinetimes.com/2021/06/28/putins-hybrid-war-on-truth-in-ukraine-is-a-threat-to-us-all/ > (Accessed: February 2022).

113
John Simpson, From the House of War: John Simpson in the Gulf (London: Arrow, 1991).

114
Ros Atkins, Twitter (Mar 2, 2022, 09:14 PM).

<https://twitter.com/BBCRosAtkins/status/1499131006737125377?s=20&t=SKX7t7LxyAA2LLySUb48gA>.

115
Howard Tumber, ‘Prisoners of news values?: journalists, professionalism, and identification in times of war’, Reporting war

(Routledge, 2000), p. 196.

116
Michael Herr, Dispatches, (New York: Everyman's Library, 2009).

117
Sebastian Junger, War (London: Hachette, 2010).

118
David E. Morrison and Howard Tumber, Journalists at War (London: Sage, 1988), p. 98.

119
I have never been part of this so-called ‘wolf pack’, and usually go to either ‘forgotten wars’ where there are no news-journalists

present, or go after the first surge of reporting has faded.

52
120
Roy Greenslade, ‘A Hierarchy of Death’, The Guardian, (19 April, 2007),

<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/apr/19/thirtytwodieinamericanuniv>.

121
John Syrett, Review of War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents, by Mark Pedelty, Canadian Journal of Latin American and

Caribbean Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes, vol. 22, no. 44 (1997), pp. 199.

122
Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Free Brian Williams’, Pushkin (7 June, 2018), <https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/free-brian-

williams>.

123
Tim Markham, The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, authenticity and morality (Manchester: Manchester University Press,

2013), p. 153.

124
Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, Peace Journalism (Stroud: Hawthorn Press, 2015), p. 212.

125
Julian Baggini, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World (London: Quercus Publishing, 2017), p. 19.

126
Iain Overton, ‘The Politics of Torture and the Erosion of Truth’, Byline Times (26 May, 2021),

<https://bylinetimes.com/2021/05/26/the-politics-of-torture-and-the-erosion-of-truth/> (Accessed Feb 2022).

127
Joseph Nye, quoted by Peter Pomerantsev, ‘Introduction’, in Laura Jackson et al., ‘Beyond Propaganda, Information at War:

From China’s Three Warfares to NATO’s Narratives’, Legatum Institute (2015).

128
Simona Kralova and Sandro Vetsko, ‘Ukraine: Watching the war on Russian TV - a whole different story’, BBC, (2 March, 2022),

<https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-60571737>.

129
Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See in particular ch. 11,

‘Cleavage and Agency’, p. 387.

130
Butler, Frames of War, p. 9.

131
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, (trans.) Ralph Parker, (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 19.

132
Overton, The Price of Paradise, pp. 311-312.

133
Ryszard Kapuściński, The Other, (London: Verso Books, 2018).

134
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 289 – 290.

135
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 312.

136
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p.

131.

137
Ibid, p. 133. 53
138
Ibid.

139
Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of

Melanesian New Guinea, Studies in Economics and Political Science, no. 65, (London, Routledge, 1978), p. 14.

140
Huw Jones, ‘Gwyn Alf Williams: The Greatest Historian in History’, YouTube, (Feb 14, 2011), <https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=1AuTnRtKpwg> (Accessed January 2021).

141
Michael Reid Busk, ‘Rag-and-Bone Angel: The Angelus Novus in Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime’, Journal of Modern Literature,

37(4) (2014), pp.1-15.

142
Pierre Bourdieu, The Weight of the World: Social suffering in Contemporary Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 1 -2.

143
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.

144
René Descartes, The Discourse on Method (1637), p. 19.

145
A notable exception is Ayca Demet Atay, ‘A Discussion on the Methodology of Peace Journalism’, The Turkish Online Journal of

Design Art and Communication, 7(4) (2017), pp. 556-565.

146
Phillip Knightley, The first casualty: the war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth maker from the Crimea to Vietnam

(London: Deutsch, 1975); Janet Harris and Kevin Williams, Reporting war and conflict (London: Routledge, 2018); Greg McLaughlin,

The War Correspondent (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

147
Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 37.

148
Mark Lee Hunter, Story-Based Inquiry: A manual for investigative journalists, (Unesco, 2011).

149
Phillip Knightley, The first casualty: The war correspondent as hero and myth-maker from the Crimea to Iraq (JHU Press, 2004);

McLaughlin. The War Correspondent; and Nathaniel Lande. Dispatches from the front: A history of the American war correspondent

(USA: Oxford University Press, 1998); Harris and Williams. Reporting War and Conflict; and Simon Cottle, Richard Sambrook, and

Nick Mosdell. Reporting Dangerously: Journalist Killings, Intimidation and Security. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

150
Caroline Moorehead, Martha Gellhorn: A Life (Random House, 2011); Lindsey Hilsum, In Extremis: The Life of War

Correspondent Marie Colvin (Random House, 2018); Kate Adie, The Kindness of Strangers, (Hachette, 2019); and Aidan Hartley.

The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands. (Grove Atlantic, 2016).

151
Markham, The Politics of War Reporting; and Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War Reporting. (Polity, 2009); Tim Allen

and Jean Seaton (eds), The Media of Conflict: War Reporting and Representations of Ethnic Violence (Zed Books, 1999); Stuart

Allan and Barbie Zelizer (eds), Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. Routledge, 2004; and Mari Armoudian, Reporting from the

Danger Zone: Frontline Journalists, Their jobs, and an Increasingly Perilous Future (Routledge, 2016); and Daniel Bennett, Digital

Media and Reporting Conflict: Blogging and the BBC’s Coverage of War and Terrorism, (Routledge, 2013). 54
152
Doug Underwood, Chronicling Trauma: Journalists and Writers on Violence and Loss (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

153
Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 11-14.

154
Greg McLaughlin, The War Correspondent (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 21.

155
Ibid, p. 40.

156
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, (trans.)John and Anne Tedeschi

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. xix.

157
Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (PA: University Park, 1992), p. 96.

158
This comes notably from the French and Italian schools, but other examples include: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Three Ways to Be

Alien, (Massachusetts: Brandeis University Press, 2011); John-Paul A Ghobrial, ‘The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of

Global Microhistory’, Past and Present, 222(1) (2014); Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2012); Amy Stanley, ‘Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1600–1900’,

American Historical Review, cxxi, 2 (April 2016).

159
John Paul A. Ghobrial, ‘Seeing the World like a Micro-Historian’, Past & Present, 242, (2019), p. 16.

160
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2013), Preface to the Italian Edition p. viii.

161
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 84.

162
Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena,’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 4, (trans.) Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland,

(Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 405.

163
Wittgenstein, The Mythology in our Language, p. 14.

164
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Basic Books, 2009), p. 410.

165
Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory?: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2013), p. 31.

166
Gilloch, Walter Benjamin.

167
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, pp. 259-260.

168
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 299.

169
Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Latitude, Slaves and the Bible’, Critical Inquiry, 31(3) (2005), p. 666.

170
Alexandra Kitty, When Journalism Was a Thing (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books). Perhaps their silence on these

uncomfortable aberrations echoes the Wittgensteinian cliché “whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent – see Ludwig

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1922), p. 23.
55
171
Benjamin, Paralipomena, p. 390.

172
Ibid, p. 391.

173
Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, p. 164.

174
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (trans.) Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 18.

175
Ibid, p 33.

176
Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 9-10.

177
James L. Aucoin, Epistemic Responsibility and Narrative Theory: The Literary Journalism of Ryszard Kapuściński, Journalism,

Vol. 2, No. 1 (April, 2001), pp. 16.

178
Ibid.

179
Jack Shafer, The Lies of Ryszard Kapuściński Or, if you prefer, the “magical realism” of the now-departed master, Slate (Jan 25,

2007), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/01/the-lies-of-ryszard-kapuscinski-or-if-you-prefer-the-magical-realism-of-the-now-

departed-master.html (Accessed 22 July, 2022).

180
Kapuściński, Ryszard. Shah of Shahs, (trans.) William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska‐Brand, Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1982,

p. 20.

181
Ibid, p. 87.

182
Ibid, p. 96.

183
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 169.

184
Ibid, p. 268

185
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 26.

186
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (trans.) GEM Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967).

187
Stephan Palmié, ‘Translation is Not Explanation Remarks on the Intellectual History and Context of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on

Frazer’, p. 23.

188
Ibid.

189
Ibid., p. 15. For the original quotation, see Ludwig Wittgenstein. Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, v. II. (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, 1980) p. 70.

190
Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms, p. xii.
56
191
Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: from prayer to painkillers (2017), p. 301.
192
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 99.

193
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, Introduction.

194
Ibid.

195
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (trans.) John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977); Walter Benjamin, The

Arcades Project, (trans.) Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp.

462–463.

196
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, (trans.) Edmund Jephcott and Howard

Eiland (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 396.

197
Ibid.

198
Judith Butler, Frames of War (New York: Verso Books, 2009), p. 134.

199
Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin: critical constellations (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), p. 238.

200
https://journalistsresource.org/home/code-of-ethics/

201
Kovach, Bill, and Tom Rosenstiel. The Elements of Journalism, Revised and Updated 4th Edition: What Newspeople Should

Know and the Public Should Expect. Crown Publishing Group (NY), 2021.

202
Christians, Clifford G., Mark Fackler, Kathy Brittain Richardson, and Peggy J. Kreshel. Media ethics: Cases and moral reasoning.

Routledge, 2020.

203
George, Sylvie. "The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect." Journalism and

Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 4 (2001): 851.

204
Phillips, Angela. "Transparency and the new ethics of journalism." In The future of journalism, pp. 307-316. Routledge, 2013.

205
McNair, B., 2012. Journalism and democracy: An evaluation of the political public sphere. Routledge.

206
McBride, Kelly, and Tom Rosenstiel, eds. The new ethics of journalism: Principles for the 21st century. CQ Press, 2013.

207
Calcutt, Andrew, and Philip Hammond. Journalism studies: A critical introduction. Routledge, 2011.

208
C. Porlezza, C., Accuracy in Journalism, (Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Communication, Oxford University Press 2019).

209
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 62.

210
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 100.

211
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 311.
57
212
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 398.
213
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 420.

214
Steven Maras, Objectivity in journalism (John Wiley & Sons, 2013).

215
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 311.

216
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 74-5.

217
Ibid, p. 97

218
Ibid, p. 151.

219
Ibid, p. 259.

220
Ibid, p. 254.

221
Ibid, p. 311.

222
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 2.

223
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 2 -3.

224
Jay Rosen, What are journalists for? (Yale University Press, 1999).

225
Irene Costera Meijer, "What is valuable journalism? Three key experiences and their challenges for journalism scholars and

practitioners." Digital journalism 10, no. 2 (2022): 230-252.

226
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 139.

227
Overton, Gun Baby Gun, pp. 304 – 309.

228
Dan Roberts and Sabrina Siddiqui, "Charleston Shooting in South Carolina Sparks Calls for Gun Control Reform," The Guardian,

June 20, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/20/charleston-south-carolina-shooting-gun-control-reform-myths.

229
Amber Phillips, "How to Argue About Gun Control," The Washington Post, October 8, 2015,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/08/how-to-argue-about-gun-control/.

230
Jessica Taylor, "God Isn't Fixing This: Argument Divides Even More In Gun Debate," NPR, December 3, 2015,

https://www.npr.org/2015/12/03/458312256/god-isnt-fixing-this-argument-divides-even-more-in-gun-debate.

231
Lucy Fisher, "Suicide Bombings Rise in Aftermath of Drone Strikes," The Times, March 19, 2019,

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/suicide-bombings-rise-in-aftermath-of-drone-strikes-qcwc6r6k6.

232
Amy Gunia, "Sri Lanka: The Birthplace of Suicide Bombings." (Time, 17 Apr. 2019), time.com/5575956/sri-lanka-history-suicide-

bombings-birthplace-invented/.
58
233
Ricketson, Matthew. "The practice of book-length journalism: Reframing the debate." In Media, Democracy and Change:

Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Conference. 2010.

234
Weber, Ronald. The literature of fact: Literary nonfiction in American writing. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1980.

235
Sims, Norman, and Mark Kramer. Literary journalism: A new collection of the best American nonfiction. Ballantine books, 1995.

236
A genre named on the dust jacket of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: Truman Capote, In cold blood. (Modern Library, 2013).

237
Van Krieken, Kobie, and José Sanders. "What is narrative journalism? A systematic review and an empirical agenda." Journalism

22, no. 6 (2021): 1393-1412.

238
T Groot Kormelink & I Costera Meijer, Truthful or engaging? Surpassing the dilemma of reality versus storytelling in journalism,

(Digital Journalism 3, 2015), pp. 158–174.

239
G. Baym, Journalism and the hybrid condition: Long-form television drama at the intersections of news and narrative, (Journalism

18, 2017), pp. 11–26.

240
Fishman, Mark. Manufacturing the news. University of texas Press, 1988.; Kramer, Mark. "Narrative journalism comes of

age." Nieman Reports 54, no. 3 (2000): 5; Schudson, Michael. "The politics of narrative form: The emergence of news conventions

in print and television." Daedalus (1982): 97-112; Mindich, David TZ. Just the facts: How" objectivity" came to define American

journalism. NYU Press, 2000; Dunford, M., & Jenkins, T. (Eds.). (2017). Digital storytelling: Form and content. London: Palgrave

Macmillan.

241
Campbell, Joseph. The hero with a thousand faces. New World Library, 2008.

242
Dunford, Mark. "Voice and representation in participatory media." PhD diss., University of Brighton, 2016.

243
Greenslade, Roy, Why Iain Overton, Gun Culture Expert, Is One of Journalism's Nice Guys, ( The Guardian, 5 June 2015),

https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/jun/05/why-iain-overton-gun-culture-expert-is-one-of-journalisms-nice-guys.

244
Michael Moorcock, ‘Gunning for Freedom’, The Spectator, 327(9739), (2015), pp. 39-41.

245
Jamie Waters, ‘Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun’, by Iain Overton’, The Financial Times, (1 May

2015), <https://www.ft.com/content/4df28c98-ee5c-11e4-98f9-00144feab7de>

246
‘Gun Baby Gun – AOAV Director of Investigation’s book published’, Action on Armed Violence, (16 April 2015),

<https://aoav.org.uk/2015/aoav-director-of-investigations-book-gun-baby-gun-published>

247
Christina Lamb, ‘The Price of Paradise by Iain Overton review — The Origins of the Suicide Bomber’, The Sunday Times, (March

31 2019), <https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-price-of-paradise-by-iain-overton-review-the-origins-of-the-suicide-bomber-

q2kjb688b> (accessed in December 2021).

59
248
Peter Beaumont, ‘The Price of Paradise: How the Suicide Bomber Shaped the Modern Age by Iain Overton – review’, The

Guardian, (Apr 22 2019), <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/22/price-of-paradise-how-suicide-bomber-shaped-modern-

age-iain-overton-review> (accessed in December 2021).

249
Anthony Loyd, ‘Dead men walking: why terrorists embraced suicide bombing’, The Spectator, (May 1, 2019),

<https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2019/05/dead-men-walking-why-terrorists-embraced-suicide-bombing> (accessed in

December 2021).

250
Fawaz Gerges, ‘Why suicide bombers became the go-to weapon for terrorists’,The Evening Standard, (April 4, 2019),

<https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/books/the-price-of-paradise-how-the-suicide-bomber-shaped-the-modern-age-by-iain-overton-

review-a4109531.html> (accessed in December 2021).

251
Robert Verkaik, ‘The martyrdom mindset: What leads people to decide to become suicide terrorists?’, inews.co.uk, (October 8,

2020),

<https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/suicide-bombers-terrorism-motivation-mindset-286066> (accessed in December 2021).

252
Thomas S. Eliot, Four Quartets, (San Diego: Harvest, 1971.

253
Shelton Gunaratne, Mark Pearson, and Sugath Senarath, Mindful Journalism and News Ethics in the Digital Era, (Taylor &

Francis, 2015).

254
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.

255
Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, p. 410.

256
Wittgenstein, The mythology in our language, p. 14.

257
Michel Foucault, Ethics; Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume One (London: Allen

Lane, 1997), p. 325.

258
Miri Rubin, ‘What is Cultural History Now?’, What is History Now? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 81.

259
Iain Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 10.

260
Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 235.

261
Ayça Demet Atay, ‘A Discussion on the Methodology of Peace Journalism’, The Turkish Online Journal of Design Art and

Communication, 7(4) (2017), p. 557.

262
Lynch and McGoldrick, Peace Journalism.

263
Iain Overton, Gun Baby Gun, p. 312.
60
264
Susan Sontag, ‘Introduction’ in Walter Benjamin, One- Way Street and Other Writings, (trans.) Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley

Shorter (London: Verso, 1985), p. 48.

265
Judith Butler, Frames of War, (New York: Verso Books, 2009), p. 14.

266
Galtung, J. ‘Peace Journalism as an Ethical Challenge’, Global Media Journal: Mediterranean Edition, 1(2), (2006), pp. 1-5.

267
Martha Gellhorn, The Face of War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), p. 18.

268
Overton, The Price of Paradise, p. 436.

269
Martin Bell, The journalism of attachment, Media ethics, (Routledge, 2002), pp. 15-22.

61