π Note: This academic blog assignment is given by Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, as part of Paper No. 204 — Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies (Code: 22409), Semester 03, Batch 2025–2027.
From the Battlefield to the Information Feed:
Deconstructing the Representation of War in the Age of Cyber Conflict
π Academic Details
| Name | : Sanjay M. Rathod |
| Roll No. | : 28 |
| Enrollment No. | : 5108250029 |
| Sem. | : 03 |
| Batch | : 2025–2027 |
| : sanjaymrathod13@gmail.com |
π Assignment Details
| Paper Name | : Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies |
| Paper No. | : 204 |
| Paper Code | : 22409 |
| Topic | : From the Battlefield to the Information Feed: Deconstructing the Representation of War in the Age of Cyber Conflict |
| Submitted To | : Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University |
| Submitted Date | : October 19, 2026 |
π The following information numbers are counted using QuillBot:
π BLOG OVERVIEW — SIX SECTIONS, ONE ARGUMENT
Introduction
War, Representation & Politics of Seeing
Theory
Said to Neo-Orientalism in the Digital Age
Literary Traditions
Owen, Orwell & Kubrick
Film Analysis
Haider vs The Kashmir Files
Case Study
Digital Propaganda & May 2025 Crisis
Conclusion
Algorithmic War & Media Literacy
π Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Keywords
- Research Question
- Hypothesis
- I. Introduction: War, Representation, and the Politics of Seeing
- II. Theoretical Framework: From Said to Neo-Orientalism in the Digital Age
- III. Literary and Cinematic Traditions of War Representation
- IV. The Information Feed as Battlefield: Digital Propaganda and the May 2025 Crisis
- V. Synthesis: From Owen to Operation Sindoor, the Unbroken History of War Propaganda
- VI. Conclusion: The Politics of Seeing in the Age of Algorithmic War
- Works Cited
Abstract
In this paper I examine how the representation of war has migrated from the trenches of the First World War to the algorithmic information feeds of the twenty-first century. Drawing on Edward Said's foundational critique of Orientalism and its later digital mutations, I argue that the May 2025 India–Pakistan crisis, documented by SIPRI as a cyber-kinetic hybrid conflict, marks the culmination of a long representational history in which the construction of the enemy as Other becomes the primary theatre of operations. I trace a continuous line from Wilfred Owen's anti-propaganda poetry, through Orwell's Ministry of Truth and Kubrick's satirical war room, to contemporary Indian cinema and the real-time digital propaganda that accompanied Operation Sindoor. By placing Haider (2014) and The Kashmir Files (2022) in dialogue, I show that these films embody two competing Orientalisms within Indian cultural consciousness: one self-reflexive and tragic, the other nationalist and declarative. Both, I contend, participate in the politics of seeing that Said identified as Orientalism's core mechanism. The paper concludes that when propaganda becomes indistinguishable from reality through generative AI and algorithmic amplification, literature and art lose their traditional capacity for counter-narrative, and critical media literacy emerges as the necessary twenty-first-century equivalent of Owen's poetic resistance.
Keywords:
Orientalism Neo-Orientalism Digital Propaganda Cyber-Kinetic Warfare Wilfred Owen Politics of Seeing Haider The Kashmir Files India–Pakistan 2025 Algorithmic Amplification Media Literacy Edward Said SIPRI Yearbook 2026
Research Question
In what ways does the May 2025 India–Pakistan crisis, understood as the first documented cyber-kinetic hybrid conflict, continue and transform the long history of Orientalist war representation that runs from Wilfred Owen's trenches through Orwell, Kubrick, and contemporary Indian cinema, and what forms of critical response remain possible when propaganda becomes algorithmically manufactured reality?
Hypothesis
I hypothesise that the representational strategies of the 2025 crisis do not constitute a rupture but rather the technological intensification of a continuous Orientalist logic first systematically analysed by Said. While Owen's poetry could still function as counter-propaganda by exposing the gap between official language and lived experience, generative AI and platform algorithms now close that gap, rendering traditional literary counter-strategies inadequate and necessitating a new pedagogy of critical media literacy.
π CORE ARGUMENT AT A GLANCE
⚔️ Orientalism — Not merely false knowledge, but a system of representation that creates the very reality it claims to describe.
π Owen → Orwell → Kubrick — A century-long counter-tradition of literary and cinematic resistance to official war representation.
π¬ Haider vs The Kashmir Files — Two competing Orientalisms: one self-reflexive and tragic, the other nationalist and declaratory.
π‘ 2025 Crisis — Algorithmic amplification & generative AI close the gap that Owen exploited, demanding a new critical media literacy.
I. Introduction: War, Representation, and the Politics of Seeing
War has never been only a matter of weapons and territory. From the moment the first official communiquΓ© left a general's headquarters, war has also been a matter of representation: of deciding who is seen, how they are seen, and what that seeing is allowed to mean. In this paper I take Edward Said's insight that Orientalism is fundamentally a "politics of seeing" and apply it to the long arc that runs from the propaganda systems of the First World War to the digital information environment of the May 2025 India–Pakistan crisis (Said, "Orientalism" 162–63). My central claim is that the crisis, recorded by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute as an unusually severe military confrontation that combined conventional force with cyber operations, constitutes the latest and most technologically sophisticated stage in this representational history (SIPRI Yearbook 2026 3).
Said's classic analysis demonstrated that Western knowledge of the Orient was never neutral description but an instrument of power that constructed the East as exotic, irrational, and threatening so that Western dominance could appear natural (Said, Orientalism 1–4). Later scholars have shown how this logic adapted to new media forms. Fatma Fattoumi and her colleagues argue that digital entertainment media now exercise a form of "digital epistemic power" that continues to disseminate fear and bias while impeding intergroup understanding (Fattoumi et al. 449–50). Muhammad Abdul Wahid traces the emergence of "neo-Orientalism" after 9/11, a mode of representation that intensified older stereotypes through films, news, and cultural production (Wahid 162–63). Maryam Khalid further refines the framework by showing how gender and race operate together in War on Terror discourses to produce specific masculinities and femininities of the Other (Khalid 15–17).
Against this theoretical background I place a literary and cinematic counter-tradition that begins with Wilfred Owen. Geraldine Boylan demonstrates that Owen understood propaganda as the force that prolonged the First World War by manufacturing patriotic consent and that his poetry deliberately worked to expose the hypocrisy of official language (Boylan 151–53). From Owen I move to Orwell's Ministry of Truth and Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, both of which satirise the institutional production of war's meaning. I then turn to two recent Indian films about Kashmir, Haider and The Kashmir Files, which, I argue, enact competing Orientalisms within the same national cultural field. Finally I examine the 2025 crisis itself, where generative AI imagery, algorithmic amplification, and real-time social media propaganda rendered the boundary between battlefield and information feed almost invisible (Makhortykh and BareikytΔ; Velchev).
The research gap I address is the absence of any single study that connects Owen's anti-propaganda poetry, Orwell's dystopian media control, Kubrick's satirical war room, the competing Kashmiri Orientalisms of contemporary Indian cinema, and the digital propaganda of Operation Sindoor within one continuous Orientalist framework. By closing that gap I hope to show that the politics of seeing has always been central to modern war and that the 2025 crisis simply makes that centrality impossible to ignore.
II. Theoretical Framework: From Said to Neo-Orientalism in the Digital Age
Said's Orientalism remains the indispensable starting point. He defined Orientalism as a style of thought based on an ontological and epistemological distinction between "the Orient" and "the Occident," a distinction that produced a whole archive of knowledge whose ultimate effect was political domination (Said, Orientalism 2–3). Crucially, Orientalism is not simply false knowledge; it is a system of representation that creates the very reality it claims to describe. The "politics of seeing" is therefore the politics of manufacturing the object of vision.
In Covering Islam Said extended this analysis to contemporary media, showing how Western news coverage after the Iranian Revolution and during subsequent crises systematically reduced Islam to a single threatening essence (Said, Covering Islam). The same reductive impulse, I argue, reappears in digital form. Wahid demonstrates that neo-Orientalism did not begin with 9/11 but was already taking shape in late-twentieth-century media portrayals; the attacks of 2001 merely accelerated and globalised an existing tendency (Wahid 163–65). Fattoumi and colleagues supply the concept of "digital epistemic power": the capacity of US-dominated digital entertainment industries to shape what can be known and felt about the Arab-Muslim world, thereby sustaining intergroup hostility even in the absence of formal colonial rule (Fattoumi et al. 450–52).
Figure 1. Continuity of the politics of seeing from classical Orientalism through media Orientalism to digital neo-Orientalism.
Khalid's work on gendered Orientalism is especially useful for analysing both cinema and contemporary propaganda. She shows that War on Terror discourses constructed the Middle Eastern or Muslim Other through interlocking racial and gender logics: the dangerous brown man, the oppressed brown woman, the civilising white soldier (Khalid 17–20). These same logics, as I will demonstrate later, structure the visual rhetoric of The Kashmir Files and the digital campaigns that accompanied the 2025 crisis.
Finally, Jared Ahmad's concept of "strategic self-Othering" complicates any simple East-West binary. Ahmad shows that the Islamic State deliberately weaponised Orientalist imagery of the "dangerous Orient" in order to terrorise Western audiences, thereby participating in its own Orientalising (Ahmad 2935–38). This insight is crucial for understanding how non-state and state actors alike can mobilise Orientalist codes for their own strategic ends, a dynamic visible on both sides of the 2025 India–Pakistan information war.
π️ THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AT A GLANCE
System of representation that manufactures the object of vision — a politics of seeing.
Wahid: post-9/11 intensification of older stereotypes through digital media & cultural production.
Fattoumi: US-dominated platforms sustain intergroup hostility without formal colonial rule.
Khalid: interlocking race & gender logics produce specific Others in War on Terror discourse.
Ahmad: non-state actors weaponise Orientalist codes — complicating the East-West binary.
III. Literary and Cinematic Traditions of War Representation
Wilfred Owen remains the foundational figure of literary counter-propaganda. Boylan shows that Owen believed the First World War was prolonged by the systematic stirring of patriotic emotion through censored and manipulated information. His poems repeatedly expose the gap between the elevated language of politicians and clergy and the physical and moral devastation of the trenches (Boylan 151–54). Owen's strategy was essentially diagnostic: by returning language to the body and to sensory experience, he made official representations appear false. That diagnostic power, I argue, is precisely what later technological developments have eroded.
George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four extrapolates the same insight into a total system. The Ministry of Truth does not merely censor; it continuously rewrites the historical record so that the Party's version of reality is the only one available. In the age of platform algorithms and generative AI, Orwell's nightmare has become infrastructural rather than merely institutional. The telescreen has been replaced by the personalised information feed that anticipates and shapes desire before the subject is fully aware of it.
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove occupies a different but complementary position. Through satire rather than tragedy, Kubrick exposes the absurdity of a war-planning apparatus that has become autonomous from human ethical judgement. The film's war room, with its glowing maps and calm discussions of megadeaths, prefigures the remote, screen-mediated character of contemporary cyber and drone warfare. Together, Owen, Orwell, and Kubrick establish a twentieth-century tradition of formal resistance to the official representation of war.
Figure 2. The representational arc from Owen's trenches to the algorithmic battlefield of 2025.
π THE COUNTER-PROPAGANDA TRADITION: OWEN → ORWELL → KUBRICK
Returns language to the body and sensory experience. Exposes the gap between official language and trench reality. Counter-strategy: diagnostic truth.
Ministry of Truth rewrites history continuously. The telescreen = the personalised information feed. Counter-strategy: dystopian exposure.
War-planning apparatus autonomous from ethics. War room prefigures cyber & drone warfare. Counter-strategy: satirical absurdity.
III.A. Film Comparative Analysis: Haider and The Kashmir Files as Competing Orientalisms
Within Indian cinema the Kashmir conflict has produced two especially revealing texts. Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider (2014), a free adaptation of Hamlet set in 1990s Kashmir, and Vivek Agnihotri's The Kashmir Files (2022) offer diametrically opposed politics of seeing. I read them through Khalid's gendered Orientalism and through the digital-media frameworks of Fattoumi and Wahid.
Haider applies Said's method rather than merely illustrating Orientalist content. The film shows both the Indian security apparatus and Kashmiri militants constructing each other as absolute Others. Its tragic structure, inherited from Shakespeare, refuses any simple moral binary. The audience is forced to inhabit multiple, mutually incompatible gazes. In this sense Haider is a self-reflexive Orientalism: it stages the very process of Othering and thereby criticises it from within.
The Kashmir Files, by contrast, enacts the Orientalist logic Said described. Through a rhetoric of documentary realism and graphic depiction of violence against Kashmiri Pandits, the film constructs Kashmiri Muslims as the barbaric, civilisational threat. Gendered imagery of violated women and murdered families functions exactly as Khalid describes in War on Terror discourse: the suffering of "our" women becomes evidence of the enemy's essential nature (Khalid 18–21). The film does not deconstruct the politics of seeing; it weaponises that politics for a nationalist narrative.
π¬ Haider (2014) vs The Kashmir Files (2022): Competing Orientalisms
| Aspect | π Haider (2014) | πΉ The Kashmir Files (2022) |
|---|---|---|
| Narrative Mode | Tragic / Shakespearean (Hamlet adaptation) | Nationalist / Documentary-style realism |
| Construction of Other | Self-reflexive: both sides construct each other as Other | Enacts Orientalism: Kashmiri Muslims as barbaric threat |
| Gendered Representation | Complex gender dynamics; ambiguous victimhood | Emphasizes Hindu victimhood; gendered violence as evidence |
| Politics of Seeing | Deconstructs the gaze; questions representation itself | Directs the gaze toward a fixed enemy image |
| Relation to Said | Applies Said methodologically | Performs the logic Said critiqued |
Table 1. Comparative Analysis of Haider (2014) and The Kashmir Files (2022)
Both films, therefore, participate in the politics of seeing. Neither is neutral. One internalises and criticises the Orientalist gaze; the other externalises and intensifies it. The 2025 crisis would later demonstrate how digital platforms can amplify the second mode with unprecedented speed and emotional force.
IV. The Information Feed as Battlefield: Digital Propaganda and the May 2025 Crisis
The SIPRI Yearbook 2026 records that interstate armed conflicts doubled from three in 2024 to six in 2025, one of which was the severe military crisis between India and Pakistan in May of that year (SIPRI Yearbook 2026 2–3). What distinguished this crisis was its hybrid character: conventional kinetic operations conducted simultaneously with intensive cyber activity and real-time information warfare. Andrey Velchev's analysis of media and technology in contemporary warfare provides the conceptual vocabulary for understanding this hybridity. He shows that mass media and digital platforms have become primary instruments for shaping public opinion, mobilising support, and demoralising the adversary (Velchev 171–74).
In the 2025 crisis, social media feeds functioned as a second front. Algorithmic amplification ensured that the most emotionally charged and visually striking content, much of it Orientalist in structure, reached the widest audiences. Makhortykh and BareikytΔ demonstrate that generative AI models trained on existing visual corpora tend to homogenise and sanitise the representation of war, producing a generic visuality that can be rapidly deployed for propaganda purposes (Makhortykh and BareikytΔ 1–3). When such imagery circulates at platform scale, the distinction between authentic documentation and manufactured evidence collapses.
Figure 3. The progressive intensification of representational control from traditional propaganda to algorithmic systems.
Ahmad's notion of strategic self-Othering is again relevant. Both Indian and Pakistani digital campaigns selectively activated Orientalist and reverse-Orientalist codes: the enemy as fanatical, the self as civilised victim or righteous defender. Fattoumi's concept of digital epistemic power helps explain why such campaigns proved effective: platforms designed primarily in the Global North, yet used intensively in South Asia, already embed representational biases that make certain narratives more legible and emotionally resonant than others (Fattoumi et al. 451–53).
The result is a situation Owen could not have imagined. In 1917 a poet could still hope that the truth of bodily experience might puncture official language. In 2025 the official language is no longer produced only by ministries; it is co-produced by millions of users, ranking algorithms, and generative models whose outputs are statistically optimised for engagement rather than accuracy. The gap that Owen exploited has been algorithmically closed.
π‘ THE INFORMATION FEED AS BATTLEFIELD — 2025 CRISIS
Conventional kinetic operations + intensive cyber activity + real-time information warfare.
Homogenises & sanitises war visuals — authentic documentation vs. manufactured evidence collapses.
Most emotionally charged Orientalist content reaches widest audiences at platform scale.
Both sides activate Orientalist codes: enemy as fanatical, self as civilised victim or righteous defender.
V. Synthesis: From Owen to Operation Sindoor, the Unbroken History of War Propaganda
What, then, is war in the cyber age? Samuel Zilincik and Isabelle Duyvesteyn caution against treating cyber operations as a wholly new form of warfare; they argue that cyber power is better understood as a continuation of older strategic practices under new technological conditions (Zilincik and Duyvesteyn 836–38). I extend their insight to the domain of representation. The 2025 crisis did not invent Orientalist war propaganda; it digitised, accelerated, and democratised it.
Wahid's neo-Orientalism and Fattoumi's digital epistemic power together describe the contemporary condition: colonial-era representational habits persist inside platforms whose architecture makes those habits more efficient and harder to contest. Makhortykh's findings on AI-generated war imagery raise an even sharper problem. When synthetic images of violence become statistically indistinguishable from documentary photographs, Owen's method of returning language to sensory truth loses its evidentiary ground. The counter-strategy that once depended on the authority of the body is now vulnerable to algorithmic forgery.
Yet the historical continuity also contains a residual hope. The fact that Orientalism can be named, historicised, and criticised means that it is not an inescapable fate. The same media systems that amplify propaganda can, in principle, amplify critical analysis. The difficulty is pedagogical and political rather than purely technological: who will teach the history of war representation from Owen to the present, and under what institutional conditions?
π SCHOLARS IN DIALOGUE
Orientalism as a politics of seeing — manufacturing the object of vision through representation.
Owen's poetry as diagnostic counter-propaganda — returning language to bodily truth.
Neo-Orientalism: colonial representational habits persist inside digital platform architecture.
Digital epistemic power: US platforms sustain intergroup hostility & make Orientalist narratives more legible.
AI-generated war imagery: synthetic violence indistinguishable from documentary — body's evidentiary authority lost.
Cyber warfare as continuation of older strategic practices — 2025 digitised, accelerated, democratised propaganda.
VI. Conclusion: The Politics of Seeing in the Age of Algorithmic War
I began with Said's claim that Orientalism is a politics of seeing. I have tried to show that this politics has remained continuous across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries while changing its technical means. Owen confronted it with poetry that restored the body to language. Orwell and Kubrick confronted it with dystopian and satirical forms that made the machinery of representation itself visible. Contemporary Indian cinema has produced both self-reflexive and declaratory Orientalisms. The 2025 India–Pakistan crisis demonstrated that the same politics can now operate at the speed of platforms and the scale of generative models.
The question Owen implicitly asked, whether literature and art can still counter propaganda, therefore receives a conditional answer. Traditional literary counter-strategies remain valuable as historical memory and as models of critical attention, but they are no longer sufficient when the very distinction between representation and reality is under algorithmic pressure. What is required is a form of critical media literacy that treats the history of war propaganda, from the First World War to Operation Sindoor, as a necessary civic curriculum.
In the Indian context this means that universities and schools should teach not only the facts of successive conflicts but the successive systems of representation that made those conflicts intelligible and emotionally compelling to their publics. Students should learn to recognise Orientalist and neo-Orientalist patterns whether they appear in a 1917 recruiting poster, a 1964 Kubrick frame, a 2014 or 2022 Kashmir film, or a 2025 viral AI-generated image. Only such literacy can restore a measure of agency to the politics of seeing.
I do not claim that media literacy will end war or dissolve intergroup hostility. I claim only that without it the democratic public sphere loses the capacity to distinguish between the construction of the enemy and the existence of the enemy. That capacity, however fragile, remains the minimal condition for any politics that aspires to be more than the endless reproduction of Otherness.
Critical media literacy — not merely literary counter-strategy — is the twenty-first century's answer to Owen's poetic resistance: a civic pedagogy that recognises the politics of seeing from the First World War trench to the algorithmic battlefield of Operation Sindoor.
π FIVE NODES, ONE CONTINUOUS ARGUMENT
Said
Orientalism = politics of seeing; manufacturing the object of vision
Owen / Orwell / Kubrick
Literary & satirical resistance — the diagnostic counter-tradition
Indian Cinema
Haider (self-reflexive) vs Kashmir Files (declaratory Orientalism)
2025 Crisis
Algorithms & generative AI close the gap Owen exploited
Media Literacy
New civic curriculum — the necessary twenty-first-century resistance
π Works Cited
Ahmad, Jared. "Picturing the 'Hordes of Hated Barbarians': Islamic State Propaganda, (Self)Orientalism, and Strategic Self-Othering." International Journal of Communication, vol. 16, 2022, pp. 2935–57. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19134.
Al-Kassimi, Khaled, et al. Media Representation and Public Perception of War. IGI Global, 2026.
Boylan, Geraldine M. "Wilfred Owen's Response to Propaganda, Patriotism and the Language of War." Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, no. 38, 1999, pp. 151–64. http://riull.ull.es/xmlui/handle/915/30485.
Fattoumi, Fatma, Ghofran Channouf, and Ghada Channouf. "Orientalism in US Digital Entertainment Media and Anti-Americanism in the Arab World: An Integrative Review." Annals of the International Communication Association, vol. 47, no. 4, 2023, pp. 449–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2023.2239779.
Khalid, Maryam. "Gender, Orientalism and Representations of the 'Other' in the War on Terror." Global Change, Peace & Security, vol. 23, no. 1, 2011, pp. 15–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/14781158.2011.540092.
Makhortykh, Mykola, and MiglΔ BareikytΔ. "Generic Visuality of War? How Image-Generative AI Models (Mis)represent Russia's War against Ukraine." arXiv, 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06570.
Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Revised ed., Vintage, 1997.
Said, Edward W. "Orientalism." The Georgia Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1977, pp. 162–206. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41397448.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 1979.
SIPRI. SIPRI Yearbook 2026: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security. Summary. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2026. https://www.sipriyearbook.org.
Velchev, Andrey. "The Role of Media and Technology in Contemporary Warfare." Journal of Information Policy, vol. 15, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.15.2025.0007.
Wahid, Muhammad Abdul. "From Orientalism to Neo-Orientalism: Medial Representations of Islam and the Muslim World." Textual Practice, vol. 39, no. 2, 2025, pp. 162–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2023.2288112.
Zilincik, Samuel, and Isabelle Duyvesteyn. "Strategic Studies and Cyber Warfare." Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 2023, pp. 836–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2023.2174106.
This blog is a formatted academic assignment on Orientalism, War Representation, and Digital Propaganda | MKBU — Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English
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