1st Edition
Propaganda and Public Relations in Military Recruitment Promoting Military Service in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
This book represents the first international investigation of military recruitment advertising, public relations and propaganda. Comprised of eleven case studies that explore mobilisation work in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe, it covers more than a hundred years of recent history, with chapters on the First and Second World Wars, the Cold War, and the present day.
The book explores such promotion in countries both large and small, and in times of both war and peace, with readers gaining an insight into the different strategies and tactics used to motivate men, women and occasionally even children to serve and fight in many parts of the world. Readers will also learn about the crucial but little-known role of commercial advertising, public relations and media professionals in the production and distribution of recruitment promotion. This book, the first of its kind to be published, will explore that role, and in the process address two questions that are central to studies of media and conflict: how do militaries encourage civilians to join up, and are they successful in doing so?
It is a multi-disciplinary project intended for a diverse academic audience, including postgraduate students exploring aspects of war, propaganda and public opinion, and researchers working across the domains of history, communications studies, conflict studies, psychology, and philosophy.
Introduction 1. Your Country(ies) Need You: The Case for a Global Analysis of Military Recruitment Promotion. 2. Your Media Need You! How Recruiters Use Advertising, Public Relations and Propaganda Part I: Recruitment in an Era of Total War 3. Why Africans in British Empire Territories Joined the Colours, 1914-1918. 4. National Aspirations against War Fatigue: Uses and Mechanisms of Mobilising Propaganda in World War I Greece. 5. Winning the battle to lose the war: The Call to Arms recruiting campaign in Australia 1916. 6. It takes a good woman to sell a good war: The use of women in World War One US propaganda posters. 7. 'A Place for Everyone, and Everyone Must Find the Right Place': Recruitment to British Civil Defence, 1937-44. Part II: Recruitment at a Time of Cold War 8. ‘It’s Like a Good School, Only Better’: Recruiting Boys to the British Armed Forces under the First Attlee Government, 1946-50. 9. Eastern Europe’s Reluctant Soldiers: Recruitment to the Armies of the Warsaw Pact, 1956-1991. 10. ‘The Army Just Sees Green’: Utopian Meritocracy, Diversity, and United States Army Recruitment in the 1970s. Part III: Recruitment in the Digital Age 11. Canadian Military Public Affairs and Recruitment in an Age of Social Media Platforms. 12. ‘Life is Wonderful because of the Military’: People’s Liberation Army Recruitment Campaigns in Contemporary China. 13. The Caliphate Wants You! Conflating Islam and Islamist Ideology in Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Recruitment Propaganda and Western Media Reporting. Conclusion 14. Narratives of Service, Sacrifice and Security: Reflecting on the Global Legacy of Military Recruitment Campaigns
Biography
Brendan Maartens is Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He has published on various aspects of military recruitment promotion in Britain and Ireland, and has also written about the development of modern media management techniques. At the broadest level, he is interested in how governments and armed forces ‘sell’ themselves to ordinary citizens, and what role private enterprise (and advertising agencies and public relations firms in particular) play in such selling.
Thomas Bivins is the John L. Hulteng Chair in Media Ethics and the head of the Graduate Certificate Program in Communication Ethics in the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon. Before entering academia, he spent six years as a broadcast specialist in armed forces radio and television and has worked in advertising and corporate public relations and as a graphic designer and editorial cartoonist. He is the author of numerous research articles on media ethics and several college texts.
