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African voices and experiences have been erased from the canon of mainstream IR theory, and even in well-intentioned accounts that take the power dynamics between the developed and underdeveloped world into account. This is a product of a worldview that sees the European experience of modernity as a template for what the world should look like. Denying the experiences of slavery, colonialism and imperialism as pivotal in understanding international relations, as well as refusing to acknowledge the philosophical and intellectual contributions of African thinkers, and the agency of African actors, is detrimental to our understanding of the international, and to IR. There is a new generation of young intellectuals, including women from the Global South, who are rewiring the African experience and offering new theoretical insights.
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Polarisation is entrenched in political discourse. This polarization results from the process of diverse positioning, i.e., dividing discourse participants into several opposing groups. Political discourse and, through it, political reality are therefore constructed on oppositions of „us“ vs. „you“ and „us“ vs. „them“. The aim of this paper is to present the referential strategies involved in the construction of polarisation in British, American and Montenegrin broadcast political interviews. The results suggest that some political cultures are personality-driven, whereas other favour the collective.
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This study aims to highlight the way in which the use of social media in political communication generates a reconfiguration of the persuasive communication process of the political message. The main objective of the paper is to provide an understanding of the emerging role of social media in political participation, which is based on an empirical research of an exploratory nature, thus with inherent limits. The way in which the persuasive political message is adapted to the target audience under the conditions of social media use is investigated. More specifically, my research aims to answer the following questions: To what extent has the persuasive political message been transformed through the use of social media, as an expression of digitalization? To what extent have the ways of political communication changed with the use of social media (if they have changed)?
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Analysis of the three online news channels – Komsomolskaya Pravda (KP), Regnum, and TV Zvezda – revealed a range of approaches used in Russian information campaigns to construct a negative image of Ukraine. Although the three channels under scrutiny do not represent the entire spectrum of the Russian media, the study nevertheless shows how an anti-Ukrainian approach can take different stylistic forms and rely on various nuances. By using different channels with different approaches, Russia’s information warfare manages to cater for different audiences with different tastes and needs for media consumption.
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The case of MH17 is an example of what Uku Arold, Estonian expert in strategic communications, calls the Russian information operations ‘data deluge method’. Russia has used this method of information warfare in other cases to overwhelm people with controversial and/or conflicting information. The purpose is to disorientate the target audience.
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The following examples describe the anti-Ukrainian stance of Komsomolskaya Pravda.
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The German general, professor of political science, and progenitor of the Bundeswehr leadership concept of Innere Führung, Wolf Graf von Baudissin (1907−1993), reached a striking conclusion a result of his deliberations on the nature of war. He found that war is a spiritual activity by nature and the underlying reasons for war can be attributed to clashing worldview. In this conflict, the country or alliance of countries with the superior worldview will emerge victorious. Baudissin further proposed that the victor will be the western worldview. As bold as this assertion may be, the most surprising feature to emerge from his reflections is that Baudissin does not place any importance on armaments races or technological supremacy, but rather emphasized the mental dimensions of conflicts. Thus it is the smarter, and not the stronger who will win. In this war of worldviews, supremacy is achieved by adopting a correct leadership philosophy. Although Baudissin was reflecting on his own era, the developments that have occurred over the last decades confirm his theories with astonishing precision. It is therefore, possible to apply his findings to more recent conflicts as well. When considering that in the war between worldviews “only such armed forces will survive that are composed of free citizens and that operate in accordance with the democratic order of a state”.1 It becomes evident that a military organization must be aligned with traditional Western humanistic and democratic values of peace, freedom, and responsibility. It is only then can it achieve military superiority. A soldier is only as strong as the society that they defend. A society must be in harmony with its armed forces if a soldier is to be effective.
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On March 5, 2016, Jānis Sārts, director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia, told the Observer that Russia had a track record of funding extremist forces in Europe, and that he believed there is now evidence of Russia agitating in Germany against Merkel.
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Europska unija kao kompleksna nadnacionalna organizacija – nastala, dakako, u europskom kontekstu – zajednica je različitih kultura, jezika i nacija. Premda proklamira nadnacionalni identitet, Europska unija ne odustaje od nacionalnog pa čak niti od regionalnog identiteta, što dokazuju i neki regionalni jezici koji imaju status službenih jezika u regijama zemalja članica, a koji se odlukom Vijeća ministara 2005. godine počinju koristiti i u europskim institucijama (primjerice baskijski, katalonski i galicijski). Europska je stvarnost uistinu kompleksna s obzirom na svoju jezičnu, historiografsku, kulturnu i političku raznolikost, tj. na pluralizam identiteta, multikulturalizam i multilingvizam.
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No one is able to elude the media, ignore them, or, indeed, protect themselves from their impact. Should we accept McLuhan’s assertion that, aside from mass media, we are all also influenced by games, numbers, clocks, films, etc; then it becomes apparent why the effects of the media, or the so called media reality, form the fulcrum of researchers’ interest in communication studies. Effect of mass media and communications on the society and the degree of that influence, have been the subjects of great debate among communication scholars with decades. The article elaborates different theorists who focus their debate on the modality through which it would be possible to empirically gauge the impact and effects of mass media on public opinion and on the beliefs and behaviour of media consumers. Its focus on the effects of the media on the citizens that cause a weakness in society and illnesses within the democratic process, such as political apathy, alienation, cynicism, destruction, confusion, illusions, and even fear. Using the secondary analysis, the article particularises some claim that the media and, first and foremost, television, privatize people and alienate them from each other and in this way, with the help of the media, a society is created in which people are frightened, disoriented, alienated, and isolated.
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In the aftermath of World War I, the science of sociology started investigating propaganda, focusing its research on persuasion and the effects it has on the public in altering their views. Sometime later, as a consequence of Goebbels’s propaganda machinery, it became a “dirty” word to describe how reality was manufactured by that machinery over the course of World War II. After the war, the term military -propaganda was replaced with the words -communication, -persuasion, and -information, which were intended to encompass the development of new communication technologies while softening the negative impression that the “dirty” word propaganda was giving out. Propaganda is a form of communication aiming to elicit a reaction to suit the objectives of the propaganda maker, whereas persuasion is most often presented as an interactive process in which both sides (the persuader and the persuadee) win. This is the key difference that theoreticians emphasize when defining the two models and when analyzing the causes for the auditorium altering its opinion. Propaganda in journalism is being explored as a process to manage news, as well as distort and spin information, by highlighting only positive aspects to the public. In political science, propaganda is considered a constituent part of the ideologies that political actors espouse, while also being analyzed in the context of the influence it can have on public opinion and mass culture. Latest trends deal with the ideological grounds of propaganda and how these ideological signifiers form part of the hypotheses that media agendas put forward (Burnett, 1989: 127–137).
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The accelerated development of the information society from the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century had a direct impact on the media and media communication. Traditional media (press, radio, television) and one-way communication with the audience are increasingly being replaced by new, digital media, by a platform that enables the interactivity of audience in communication. The Internet as a new medium and a platform for new media communication has offered a new way of communicating with an audience that is no longer a passive recipient of information but an active participant in the process. The interactivity of audience through new media forms of expression (portals, social networks, blogs, vlogs) is a basic feature of modern communication. This paper aims at analysing, through defining the Internet as a new medium, new media forms of communication that have involved the audience in the interactive exchange of information and opinions, and thus completely and irreversibly changed the organisation and functioning of the media. The paper primarily examines new forms of media communication conditioned by a new media, digital-platform based environment. The analysis shows that new media communication has opened the space for an audience to become an active participant in public communication, thus directly affecting certain spheres of social life. At any moment, every individual can be a media content producer and interactive participant in new media communication.
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