Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Intercultural Communication as a Clash of Civilizations: Al-Jazeera and Qatar’s Soft Power: 19 (Possibilities)

Intercultural Communication as a Clash of Civilizations argues that Al-Jazeera is not an agent of globalization, as is widely argued, but a tool used by the Qatari government to advance its political as well as Islamist goals. This book also maps the Western tendency to reject the network outright despite Al-Jazeera's billion-dollar investments designed to gain entrance into Western markets; it shows empirically that this rejection is similarly rooted in religious, cultural and national motives. This book asserts that the main outcome of Al-Jazeera's activities is the promotion of religious and cultural conflicts. The network persistently portrays global events through the prism of conflicting religious and cultural values - propelling a clash of civilizations as per Samuel P. Huntington's well-known thesis. Review «By writing this empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated book, Tal Samuel-Azran has contributed to widening the terms of debate in global news flow. By linking Al-Jazeera with the discourse of soft power, the book also contributes to the much-needed conversation between scholars of international relations and international communication. Researchers and policy mandarins will find this book a valuable resource to make sense of the growing importance of soft power in public diplomacy and the primacy of communication in this process.» (From the foreword by Daya Thussu) About the Author Tal Samuel-Azran (PhD, University of Melbourne) is Associate Professor and the Head of the International Program at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. His research has been published in American Behavioral Scientist and Computers in Human Behavior, among others, and he is the author of Al-Jazeera and US War Coverage (Peter Lang, 2010).