LibGuides: Misinformation: Dehumanization

Dehumanization in Media Sources and Information Sources

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Dehumanization in media and information sources

Dehumanization is the process of objectifying a person or people through the use of language and/or images, characterizing individuals or members of a group as not human. Historically, dehumanization has been part of propaganda strategies that seek to create justification for inter-group violence. Dehumanizing portrayals create or reinforce an in-group/out-group dynamic, in which the reader or viewer is subtly or overtly encouraged to empathize with an in-group, and to feel contempt for the out-group. Readers/viewers may be led to perceive the out-group as deserving of violence, neglect, or other mistreatment. While this contempt may prepare individuals to participate in violence, it is most effective in conditioning ingroup members to tolerate the suffering of the outgroup without moral outcry.

Jackson and Gaernter (2010) showed that American participants who perceived enemies as less than human were more supportive of continued US military presence. In the context of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, Maoz and McCauley (2008) found that Israelis who dehumanized Palestinians were more supportive of harsh policies such as forced population transfers, and Leidner, Castano, and Ginges (2013) showed that dehumanization of enemies by both sides was associated with greater support for retribution and violent actions rather than peace deals…Dehumanization of enemies is linked not only to support for violent acts but also to diminished empathy for the targets of those acts. (Haslam, 2019)

In scholarship and non-fiction media, inflammatory and dehumanizing rhetoric can be particularly harmful because these are forms of information that are widely believed to provide accurate and fact-checked representations of world events. Several major events in the 20th and early 21st century serve to show that dehumanizing rhetoric in the media has often accompanied mass atrocity. However, there are varying points of view about whether and how much dehumanizing media can be named as a catalyst to communal violence. Recent scholarship examines the idea that dehumanization may be the outcome or a consequence of mass violence, rather than the cause.

Sources to further explore dehumanization

Bain, P., Vaes, J., & Leyens, J. P. (Eds.). (2014). Humanness and dehumanization. London, England: Psychology Press.

Haslam, N. (2019). The many roles of dehumanization in genocide. Confronting humanity at its worst: Social psychological perspectives on genocide, 199-139.

Lang, J. (2020). The limited importance of dehumanization in collective violence. Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 17-20.

Leyens, J.-P., Cortes, B., Demoulin, S., Vaes, J., Gaunt, R., & Paladino, P. (2007). Infrahumanization: The wall of group differences. Social Issues and Policy Review, 1, 139–172.

Munch-Jurisic, D. M. (2022). Perpetrator disgust: The moral limits of gut feelings. Oxford University Press.

Smith, D. L. (2011). Less than human: Why we demean, enslave, and exterminate others. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press

Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.

1991-1995: War in the Former Yugoslavia and the Genocide of Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks)

The recent history of the former Yugoslavia provides important examples of how dehumanization in the media, politics, and practice of daily life fuels violent conflict and genocide. A brief history of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian genocide as detailed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) explains that in 1991, Slovenia and then Croatia demanded independence from Yugoslavia. While Slovenia’s break from the Yugoslav Federation resulted in a ten-day conflict with the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), Croatia’s subsequent split from the Federation had a much longer and much more violent history than in Slovenia: Croatia’s succession resulted in a four year war with Serbia that killed an estimated 40,000 people (cite). The Bosnian war (1992-1995) killed an estimated 36,700 civilians according to the ICTY, and culminated on July 11, 1995 with the genocide at Srebrenica, when Bosnian Serb forces killed approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) boys and men.

As Edina Bećirević details in Genocide on the Drina River (2014), former president of Serbia Slobodan Milošević’s propaganda apparatus was constructed around inspiring fear of Croats and Bosnians among Serbs while denouncing any Serbs who questioned or protested ultranationalism (Bećirević 2014:38). She defines propaganda as “the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognition, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandists” and details the six fundamentals of effective propaganda used by Milošević and other leaders. These include “keep it simple, project your own intentions onto others, use the news to your advantage, repeat your message endlessly, rely on myths and history, and create a national consensus.” In Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (2003), Kemal Kurspahic describes how Milošević silenced independent media, attacked media freedom laws, and focused propaganda on what his regime termed “foreign enemies” who criticized his totalizing media control. As Lara Nettlefield and Sarah Wagner argue in Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (2014), the Srebrenica genocide was “the tragically logical extension of Bosnian Serb and Serb nationalist campaigns to overtake territory and resources in Eastern Bosnia…and to expel their non-Serb populations.” (Nettlefield and Wright 2013:9-10).

2015 EU Refugee Crisis

Refugees traveling into the European Union countries from North African and West Asian countries have been subjected to dehumanizing rhetoric for decades. One peak of the “EU refugee crisis” took place in 2015 as European countries closed their borders in response to the highest number of refugees since World War Two. 1 million Syrians sought asylum in Europe, joining millions of others fleeing war, inter-ethnic conflict, resource grabs, and climate change in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Eritrea, and the Balkans. These asylum seekers were met with various forms of deterrence, deportation, and punishment, including fatal violence from security forces. Ships heading to Italy and Greece from Sub-Saharan and North Africa were attacked by coast guards, or forced to use unsafe routes to avoid detection, resulting in mass drownings. In the worst incident at least 800 people perished with a ship that drowned near Italy’s Lampedusa Island. People traveling from Bosnia and Herzegovenia were met with torture by Croatian forces attempting to secure the EU border. Media rhetoric helped to justify the official policy of the EU border control agencies by criminalizing the refugees as “illegal,” and using racialized language that emphasizes the other-ness of people of Arab and African origin, as well as other ethnic minorities. Researchers have found that language used to describe people seeking asylum leaned toward objectification, using metaphors such as “wave” of “migrants” which compare displaced humans to a non-human natural event. Similarly, media portrayals tended to use visuals of large groups of unidentifiable people, which may have had the impact of increasing disregard by the public and lawmakers. In contrast, when photojournalist Nilufer Demir circulated an image of the body of 2 year old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi stranded on a Turkish beach on social media, a widespread sympathetic response by the public led to response from world leaders and the Canadian government easing restrictions to support his family’s asylum case.

For more information

Azevedo, R. T., De Beukelaer, S., Jones, I., Safra, L., & Tsakiris, M. (2019). When the lens is too wide: the visual dehumanization of refugees and its political consequences. Retrieved form https://warburg. blogs. sas. ac. uk/2019/11/14/biasproject-visual-dehumanization-refugees.

Holmes, S. M., & Castañeda, H. (2016). Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. American ethnologist, 43(1), 12-24.

Isakjee, A., Davies, T., Obradović‐Wochnik, J., & Augustová, K. (2020). Liberal violence and the racial borders of the European Union. Antipode, 52(6), 1751-1773.

Walia, H. (2021). Border and rule: Global migration, capitalism, and the rise of racist nationalism. Haymarket Books.

“Abounaddara. The Right to the Image” exhibition at the New School, 2015. Photo by Marc Tatti

Counters to dehumanization and misinformation in the media

In his essay, “One Image Right Can Sweep Away Another,” (published in the collection, Chronicles of Consensual Times) Jacques Rancière argues that genocides and “ethnic cleansings” deny a primary ‘right to the image,’ emphasizing their violent totalizing denial of rights. The anonymous Syrian film collective Abounaddara is an example of artistic refusal of the denial of the ‘right to the image,’ expressed in their short and feature films and in their manifestos and editorials. In their essay, “A Right To The Image For All: Concept Paper for a Coming Revolution,” the collective defines the ‘right to the image’ as part of “a holistic reading of the existing corpus of international human rights law as codified by binding international treaties…the right to the image is a bundle of rights… what we get when seek the concrete meaning of the fundamental human rights included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) as they relate to the images of individual and groups.” As creators of counternarratives and an artistic politics of resistance, the collective argues that the right to the image is not a single right, such as the right to privacy, but rather “a bundle of rights,” including the right to self-determination, the right to privacy and the right to freedom of opinion and expression. The creation of counter-hegemonic narratives is vital to countering dehumanization through offering imaginative and prefigurative alternatives, whether in the form of artistic projects, social media campaigns, pedagogical approaches, or other new forms of written and visual expression.

Misinformation