In the science fiction film Children of Men (2006), set in a future dystopian Britain, a propaganda film plays on a TV screen on a train. Images of disasters and atrocities around the world appear in a rapid-fire parody of TV news headlines. The news consists entirely of bad things happening to other people in other places. The apocalyptic montage climaxes as Big Ben chimes over the headline ‘Only Britain soldiers on’.

In today's world, atrocity images circulate with apparent ease and instantaneity via 24-hour TV news, the Internet and mobile phone cameras. Yet mainstream news remains strictly regulated, by considerations of not only what is ‘acceptable’ for public viewing but also what is ‘newsworthy’ and friendly to government interests. Though terrorism at home and abroad frequently makes the headlines, mainstream Western news media often present atrocities overseas as unfortunate but inevitable, directly emanating from the region's troubled history or geography. News reports provide brief, remote glimpses seemingly disconnected from their viewers, and therefore easily accepted as background to their lives, highlighting the disparity between those who watch and those who suffer. Through decisions of selection, prioritisation, inclusion and exclusion, the news helps to shape an ‘imagined picture’ of the world (Calhoun 2010: 33).

This book is a comparative study of 21st-century cinematic images of atrocity. It asserts that cinema can counter the desensitising impact of such news images. It finds its immediate historical and political context in the post-9/11 climate, when global terrorism has become a universal fear and concern. But rather than the terrorism of groups such as Al-Qaeda, which is promoted as the prime threat to human life by Western governments and news media, its focus is the cinematic treatment of state terror, which routinely destroys many more lives through the arms trade, aerial bombardment, enforced disappearance, torture, genocide and population displacements, resulting in an unstable, asymmetric world that this book interprets not as a natural division (the West versus ‘the rest’) but as a legacy of colonial histories maintained by present-day politics.

National security is frequently offered as a justification for state terror, but this conceals other agendas at work, namely promoting the interests of elites which, for Western democracies, are intertwined with ensuring the free flow of capital in order to maintain their power and influence in the world.