The Role of Images in Building the ‘Enemy’

The behavior towards other people depends on: a) the idea that we build of them; b) the interpretation of past and present actions: c) the expectation of future actions; and d) the socio-cultural contexts. The moment in which an individual or a group attributes to another individual or group the responsibility of his/her critical and/or suffering conditions, we create a situation in which we attribute a false blame to someone or a group defined as the “enemy”. The attribution of responsibility suggests solutions to social problems, while the rules that determine the explanations can both contain and increase the violence and/or control the social order. The idea of this paper is that the building of “the enemy” category which represent one of the most powered icon of modernity, is influenced by information and knowledge obtained from the media and especially through images that the media broadcasts. We do not rebuild the history of the “enemy”, but we want to analyze the different ways to attribute a judgment that allows the building of the “enemy” (real or not real).