LAUSR

Two decades of ‘terror’ crises have seen politicians, legal professionals and scholars struggle to cope with atrocities organised around some joke. From the alt-right smirk of the Christchurch killer at his televised court arraignment to the ‘Danish cartoons’ and the targeting of the satirical Charlie Hebdo magazine in France, a series of funny-not-so-funny international ‘incidents’ prompt us to ponder the cartoon nature of politics. Our investigation into cartooning, contextualised as part of ongoing war efforts, reveals a cultural-economic project that peddles weapons for conflicts against caricatured Muslim adversaries. To illustrate this point, we examine copycat cartoon tropes and conclude that while international cartoon politics is nothing new, cartoon contests and terrorist show-trials indicate an ever-greater reification hand-in-glove with the arms trade.