This book has been dedicated to an in-depth examination of ‘knowing war’ in the post-9/11 world. Specifically, it has used cinema as a case study through which to map those people, images and experiences that are erased from US and European cultural representations of military action connected to the ‘war on terror’, and to reflect on the effects of these erasures on our understanding of war and its consequences. Against the backdrop of the ongoing academic discussion over the changing nature and alleged ‘disappearance’ of war, the authors featured in this volume, academics and practitioners working on the intersection of war, politics and fi lm, made a particular effort to suspend their judgement on what war is in order to identify what is moved out of sight and the consequences of these absences for the manifestation of our individual and collective realities of war.

The findings of this investigation are sobering: at a time when the accelerations in media technologisation seem to provide unprecedented and immediate forms of access to distant locations, conflicts and affected communities in places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, the result of such access is not necessarily a more objective, better informed audience. Orientalist imaginings, far from disappearing, persist, and not in the form of weighty reports written by the likes of Gertrude Bell, but in new, readily available visual manifestations on television, cinema and mobile screens; featuring not sandcastles and exotic harems, but veiled women and inscrutable men stepping out of the shadows of dilapidated buildings in war-torn towns, potentially plotting suicide missions. Modern technology not only provides these neo-orientalist manifestations with an unprecedented presence in everyday lives in the Western world, but it is deeply intertwined with the all too familiar ‘us versus them’, ‘clash of civilisations’ rhetoric of the war on terror, both reflecting and reinforcing a reality borne of shock and fear when the New York twin towers collapsed. Much in the way the political rhetoric left no room for the ordinary others between ‘us’ and ‘them’, cultural representations of the war on terror frequently erase the ordinary Arab, the ordinary Muslim man, woman or child and their quotidian ways of living.