Media Pressure on Foreign Policy The Evolving Theoretical Framework

Media pressure is often implicated in changes to security policies. It is at once hailed as a check on the abuse of power and then reviled for underminding the roles and responsibilities of democratic institutions. But we are still left to wonder what media pressureis. This question is explicitly answered here, and in doing so it shows how the never-ending conversation between the media and executive creates social imperatives to which the executives "must" respond or else threaten their needed moral positions required to lead or act in international affairs.

Derek Miller is Senior Researcher and Program Manager at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva. His work focuses on building a systematic and rigorous process for the timely provision of culturally-specific security-building knowledge for agencies who are designing interventions to help communities in crises. He has a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Geneva, a D.E.S. from the Graduate Institute for International Studies in Geneva, an MA in national security studies from Georgetown University, and is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. He has studied at St. Catherine's College and Linacre College, both at Oxford, as well as Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He has a particular interest in cultural research into security and is dedicated to bridging what he sees as a gap between international relations theory and its actual practice.