GUEST EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION The media gendering of war and conflict Dafna Lemish This issue was born out of a merger of intellectual as well as personal drive to try and make sense of the gendered way wars and conflicts worldwide are being presented to us via the media, national and transnational alike. Many of us on the editorial board of Feminist Media Studies agreed that there is no other issue more pressing and urgent for inquiry. Violent conflicts taking place currently in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, to name but a few, as well as events such as the September 11, 2001 attacks on the USA, the bombings of Madrid and London transportation systems, and suicide bombers in Israel, have all been at the center of world media attention. The sad truth is that war and conflict are an everyday reality for many women, men, and children all over the globe. UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security states that, “Most of the victims of armed conflicts are civilians, especially women and children, who become refugees in their own countries.” The Security Council’s decision also affirms the significance of women’s ongoing contributions to “the prevention of conflicts and in their peaceful solutions,” and calls for their “equal participation and full involvement in every effort towards peace and security.” Despite acknowledgement by the UN, world media portrayals of war and conflict remain heavily dominated by patriarchal and colonial logic. It is mostly men who perpetrate the violence, organize a violent response, and present the media stories about it. With very few exceptions, women are cast mostly in the role of passive victims. No wonder then, that the few women who appeared recently on the global screens in relation to current conflicts (e.g., Jessica Lynch who was rescued by the US military from captivity and Lynndie England who was involved with the tortures in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq) flared so much of our public as well as scholarly imagination. Many women’s movements seek to be included in the public discourse and to offer alternative perspectives on issues of war and peace that challenge the dominant social order connecting patriarchy and political violence and relegating women still to the private sphere. However, voices that might begin to challenge the dominant hegemonic militarized masculinity (to echo Carol Cohn’s words 1987) are mostly perceived as irrelevant or illegitimate to the central debates surrounding violent conflicts, and therefore are excluded. In my own country, Israel, for example, content analyses of media, suggest that women’s voices are especially ignored when they develop a rival approach to the crisis; or even worse, when their criticism is represented as a form of a double treachery—both to the collective nation under threat, as well as to the social order within it, as is the case with “Women in Black.” Several women’s peace movements in Israel have been trying to break the spiral of silence through discursive processes of reframing perceptions of the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict itself as well as its possible solutions. Thus, the “Four Mothers” movement was accused of “subversively” recruiting the power of motherhood to promote Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2005 ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/05/030275-280 q 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14680770500271628