The battles fought in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have reignited questions about the changing nature of war. Significant attention has been paid to the ontology of war, with arguments both proposing war's disappearance (Goldstein 2011; Pinker 2012) and its increasing presence, especially in previously civilian and domestic spaces (Dillon and Reid 2009; Jabri 2010; Sylvester 2014). Over the same period, cultural and political debate about the motivations, scope and effects of the US and allied nations’ ‘war on terror’-related military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Cameroon (covert and overt) indicates intensifying public concern about what remains concealed in the reporting of these acts. The title of this volume, ‘Disappearing War’, seeks to capture these competing conceptions of what exactly is disappearing in this period, and to foreground our claim that what has been ‘disappeared’ in media representations of the war on terror requires further examination and critical reflection. What is clear is that existing debates often take place from the privileged position of being physically removed from the theatres of war and conflict, a position in which the experience of war is inherently mediated. This is easily overlooked at a time when the accelerations in media technologisation, including social media, seem to provide unprecedented and immediate forms of access. Indeed, at no other point in time have distant locations and peoples seemed so instantly accessible, via the click of a button. But every image or sound that is accessed in such a manner has been produced, framed or selected, and edited by someone else, a partial view that leaves something out of sight, and that may also distort or misrepresent.

Processes of selection and mediation characterise those forms that seem to offer the most immediate access to war and its consequences – news reporting and social media – but it is an equally pressing concern in the documentaries and fiction films that have sought to offer their own perspectives and histories of the war on terror. Films are a significant site of enquiry in this regard not just because cinema is a mass medium with the capacity to engage large numbers of people, but because film form permits rhetorical strategies of framing, selection, narrativisation, immersion and erasure to work on the viewer over longer durations.