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The article analyzes the results from the national representative survey on the impact of the anti-democratic propaganda in the Bulgarian media on the public opinion. Three topics are discussed in detail. First, the support for the basic democratic values, trust in the institutions, and in the key foreign countries and world leaders; second, the level of penetration of the most common propaganda messages in the public attitudes and in the specific socio-demographic and electoral groups; the role of the fake news; third, the ability of these messages to influence the direction and the character of the key citizens’ political choices. Based on the analysis of the results, two main theses are argued. The more directly politically oriented a message is, the more it polarizes the society. It gathers its supporters, but in the same time it mobilizes its opponents. And vice versa, the more hidden and psychological a message is, the more it is effective, awakening profound fears and reaching the widest influence. The second finding concerns the fact that, regardless of the wide spread of the propaganda messages in the media, they have not changed the basic geopolitical choices of the Bulgarians - until and as long as they do not offer an acceptable alternative to this choice.
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On the basis of the empirical data from the collective study “Anti-DemocraticPropaganda in Bulgaria” and reframing a cluster of already existing post-Wittgensteinian theoretical approaches this text aims to outline the logics of propaganda on two levels: Its First Part has to describe some more general typological features of the propaganda usages of language (i.e. propaganda’s“general” practical logics) and its Second Part has to describe the particular conspiracy grammar and typical vocabulary of the recent populist, antiliberaland national-sovereigntist propaganda (from Putin through Orban to Trump), i.e. its specific practical logics. Here, in the First Part, in comparison with the scientific and everydaylife modes of speech, some more general features of the propaganda usages of language (common both for the commercial advertisement and for the politicalpropaganda) are outlined: - We can speak of propaganda if a strategic dissemination and repetition of stereotypified messages (clichés) is done; the strategic goal of such repetitive dissemination is to transform those clichés into meta-clichés: into a depth grammar that frames the articulations for a multitude of individuals. In this aspect propaganda resembles education but it also differs from scientifically informed education by other features: - Propaganda works in a regime of totalisation of the discourse, where the specific modalities of the separate messages lose their significance: the peculiar task of propaganda is to create an overgeneralized discursive horizon that enables the fusion of modalities and hence a free play of associations between messages. Being overgeneralized the propaganda discourses resemble the scientific discourses and differ from the everyday-life discourses; being freed from any strict sense (from any strict modalisation), propaganda differs from science and resembles the ordinary bullshitting (in Harry Frankfurt’s sense). Propaganda usually does not lie about the facts but it lies through modal extensions (or modal reductions) of the meanings of selected facts. - Propaganda works in a regime of metonymy: It deposits utterance overutterance in such a way that the modal differences between them disappear andinstead a metonymical chain appears: in the end it looks as if every utterance substitutes the other, as if they mean the same. This metonymical propagandaoperation is conditioned by the overgeneralized and fused discursive horizon but it also produces this very horizon: a circular productive relation takes place. Through metonymy propaganda simulates coherence but such coherence is alie because every modal concordance between the terms and the utterances is broken out in advance. Beyond the “general” logics of propaganda, another distinction has been made: between populist uses of language and propaganda uses that are parasitic in relation to populism and operate with the demarcation between “we, the people” and “they, the elites”. We agree with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffethat in the spontaneous populist movements “the people” comes into being as an empty signifier springing from metaphors and catachreses. The practical unfolding of the discourse however – with everyday-life metonymies from below or with strategic propaganda metonymies from above – inevitably fulfills the empty signifiers of populism with one or another specific meaning and transforms it into a half-empty signifier. It is a specific populist-propaganda operation to totalize such half-empty signifiers (as “the people” and “its enemies”) and to use them as propaganda epithets: as devices for discursive terror.
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The article uses the technology of web-scraping and social network analysisto track the use of keywords from the language of primarily East Europeananti-liberalism – tolerast, liberast, and sorosoid. A corpus of about 500 webpages containing at least one of the key words serves as empirical material for the analysis. The three keywords extracted from the net a large corpus of anti-liberal texts including a mixture of political and geopolitical topics intertwined with xenophobic, homophobic and plainly vulgar jargon. Word frequency and correlation analysis of the whole corpus and the construction of a bi-partite networkwith webpages and words revealed several thematic fields. The main sources of anti-liberal rhetoric using hate speech do not seem to quote or directly borrow from each other. Most of them maintain a multitopic profile and their relation to kindred spirit web pages can only be discovered through web search.
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The ‘Antidemocratic propaganda in Bulgaria’ report managed to touch asensitive media nerve in the public discourse and raised a massive wave of reactions after its release in April, 2017. This article focuses on exactly these materials released on the Internet. In order to gather the needed information all articles were included in a detailed press clipping.This article has a double focus in describing the material related to the matter– quantitative and qualitative. The press clipping has revealed not only the number of reposts of articles and authors, but also the exact subjects that were mentioned and discussed in them. Most of those subjects were in direct connectionto the report – researchers and organizations.The press clipping has covered all kind of articles in connection to thereport – positive, negative and neutral. Therefore the article can account for awholesome view of the internet media reactions with exact numbers and ratios. Thus it manages to follow the origin and means of dissemination of materialson the Internet. Of particular interest is the other aspect of the description of the gatheredmaterials – the substantial analysis. It follows the logic of propaganda as it has been described in the report, on the grounds of the four pillars of populism – “The corrupt elites”, “The decline of Europe”, “USA – overlord” and “The riseof Russia”. Following these four major themes in all materials in the press clipping,the article describes the means of presenting and in most cases discreditingthe organizations and researchers involved in the making of the report. Butthe wave of negative reactions does not stop here and reaches as far as Europe/EU, USA and even liberalism itself.
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Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from printmedia and information websites to outline their perceptions of their professional world. The interviews were conducted between March and June, 2016, in the frames of the research on the anti-democratic propaganda in Bulgaria. Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a dif- ferentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to secur- ing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.
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In September 2015 in New York, member states of the United Nations adopted the document „Transforming our world: Agenda for Sustainable Development – 2030”, containing 17 goals for sustainable development. The Agenda sets common goals for all UN member states. Finland wants to become a leader in implementing Agenda 2030, referring to a long tradition of sustainable development. The state has created a model that arouses general interest. Its main distinguishing feature is society’s commitment to sustainable development. This procedure provides organizations and active citizens with the opportunity to independently strive to achieve the goals of sustainable development. It is a practical and rare tool for serving implementation of the Agenda 2030 at the national level.
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The development movements that emerged before the 1970s largely ignored the real and the potential contributions of women in the development process, and the situation which is seeing women as passive beneficiaries of development remained same both in the theory and policy area until the academic and the political interest that began in the 1970’s. The inclusion of women in the development process is closely related to the socialization of prosperity. It is one of the most important duties of the governments to ensure that all segments of the society participate equally and fairly in the development process and ensure that the high prosperity gained over time is optimal distributed to all segments of society. In this study, it is aimed to be revealed the importance given to women in the Turkey's development process. In this regard, the story of the inclusion of women in the development process from the historical perspective is addressed and the status of women in the Turkey's development process is analyzed depending on the policy approaches, within the context of five-year development plans. Although it is difficult to categorize clearly the relationship between policy approaches and development plans, it can be said that the first five development plans reflect a point of view of the Welfare Approach. The Sixth Development Plan bears the trace of both the Welfare Approach and the Women in Development Approach. The Seventh Development Plan reflects the perspective of the Equity Approach which is the original Women in Development Approach. The Eighth and the Ninth Development Plans considerably reflect the perspective of the Empowerment Approach. Finally, the Tenth Development Plan reflects the perspective of the Gender and Development Approach.
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In the communicological, sociological, and political-legal sense, modern society, civil society is understood as a communication community whose segments act freely and in which the individual freely acts, thinks and decides, requires a high degree of orderliness, but also an influence on consciousness, education. Therefore, journalism itself needs higher normative governance, not only formally and legally, but also in the sense of encouraging progress in culture and awareness. In this regard, a serious matter is the problem of balancing the rule of the media or the rule over the media, the rule of truth or lies, the government and laws or interests. Precisely within this context the significance of the norm should be perceived, and within the framework of science, the place and importance of journalistic ethics as a particular ethic.
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Fenomen izgradnje nacije na području Dubrovnika i Dalmacije zasigurno predstavlja vrlo zanimljivo povijesno ali i političko-pravno pitanje XIX stoljeća. Malo je onih koji su o pitanju izgradnje nacije pisali odričući se vlastitog nacionalno-ideološkog prtljaga. Koliko je moguće trezveno, objektivno i kroz prizmu tadašnjeg vremena ponuditi odgovore na pitanja o izgradnji nacionalne svijesti? Kako u današnjem kontekstu, zanemarujući ne tako davne sukobe – rat, kulturocid i krvništvo – govoriti o izgradnji nacije? Kako u današnjem kontekstu nekome pojasniti da su u XIX stoljeću postojali Hrvati pravoslavci ili Srbi katolici – istinski borci protiv klerikalizma i kleronacionalizma? Kako govoriti o duboko ukorijenjenoj vjerskoj toleranciji na našim područjima i njezinu krahu tijekom XX stoljeća? […]
More...Part One. Populism and Propaganda: Dangerous Liaisons and Family Resemblance
On the basis of empirical data from the collective study on Anti- Democratic Propaganda in Bulgaria. News Websites and Print Media: 2013 – 2016 and reframing a cluster of already existing post-Wittgensteinian theoretical approaches, this text aims to outline the logics of propaganda on two levels, describing, in Part One, some more general typological features of the propaganda uses of language (i.e. propaganda’s ‘general’ practical logics) and, in Part Two, the particular conspiratorial grammar and typical vocabulary of the recent populist, anti-liberal and national-sovereignist propaganda (from Putin through Orbán to Trump), i.e. its specific practical logics. Here, in Part One, based on a comparison with the scientific and every- day-life modes of speech, some more general features of the propaganda uses of language (common both to commercial advertising and to political propaganda) are outlined: - We can speak of propaganda if there is strategic dissemination and repetition of stereotypified messages (cliches); the strategic goal of such repetitive dissemination is to transform those clichés into meta-clichés: into a depth grammar that frames articulations for a multitude of individuals. In this aspect propaganda resembles education but it also differs from scientifically informed education by other features: - Propaganda works in a regime of totalization of discourse, where the specific modalities of the separate messages lose their significance: the peculiar task of propaganda is to create an overgeneralized discursive horizon that enables the fusion of modalities and hence a free play of associations between messages. Being overgeneralized, propaganda discourses resemble scientific discourses and differ from everyday-life discourses; being freed from any strict sense (from any strict modalization), propaganda differs from science and resembles ordinary bullshitting (in Harry Frankfurt’s sense). Propaganda usually does not lie about the facts but it lies through modal extensions (or modal reductions) of the meanings of selected facts. - Propaganda works in a regime of metonymy: it layers utterances upon one another in such a way that the modal differences between them disappear and, instead, a metonymical chain appears: ultimately, it looks as if every utterance substitutes the other, as if their meanings are the same. This metonymical propaganda operation is conditioned by the overgeneralized and fused discursive horizon but it also produces this very horizon: there is a circular productive relationship between them. Through metonymy, propaganda simulates coherence but such coherence is false because every modal concordance between the terms and the utterances is disrupted in advance.Beyond the ‘general’ logics of propaganda, another distinction has been made: between populist uses of language and propaganda uses that are parasitic in relation to populism and operate with the opposition between ‘we, the people’ and ‘they, the elites’. We agree with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe that in the spontaneous populist movements ‘the people’ comes into being as an empty signifier springing from metaphors and catachreses. The practical unfolding of the relevant discourse, however – with everyday-life metonymies from below or with strategic propaganda metonymies from above – inevitably fills the empty signifiers of populism with one or other specific meaning and transforms them into half-empty signifiers. In a specific populist-propaganda operation, such half-empty signifiers (as ‘the people’ and ‘its enemies’) are totalized and used as propaganda epithets: as devices for discursive terror.
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Organizational and economic approaches and problems of improvement of social inclusion of ATO participants and their families in Ukraine under socio-economic instability are studied. Methodology of productive involvement of this population group based on its socio-economic status and psychological peculiarities is developed. Level of implementatio of the developed legal and regulatory framework for rehabilitation and social protection of ATO participants and their families as the basis for achieving a decent level of their life and civic activation is evaluated. Current priorities of improving the activities of government and public structures, associated sectors of economy on optimizing the principles and forms of social inclusion of this category of population are determined.
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The article explored the potential of radio broadcasting in a coverage of the military conflict in Ukraine. It is determined that the most specific for Ukrainian broadcast is an entertaining, social and psychological, arts and cultural, patriotic (ideological and agitational), historical, information and analytics projects, demonstrating that the potentialit of radio broadcasting make such radio programmes closer to the broadcast listener not only at home, but and in the trenches or in the adaptation after the combat area service. The author notes the lack of attention of radio companies to the topics of anti-terrorist operation (ATO), and focuses on the potential of radio broadcasting for the social adaptation of service members and people affected by military conflict in eastern Ukraine and Crimea in the postwar period.
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The article analyzes spatial indicators of changing trends in political and geographical subjectivity of Crimea. Linguistic and religious contradictions outlined Crimea among other regions of Ukraine. Limitation of linguistic diversity in Crimea, disregard towards complex contradictions between split Orthodox Christianity and politicized Islam made Crimea create background for separation from Ukrainian project of framing Russophobic state on the territory of modern Ukraine.
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This paper is devoted to a particularly important scientific problem: it isa sociological attempt to conceptualize the social continuity and social incommensurability between propaganda as a classic instrument of power used by totalitarian regimes and propaganda as an immanent functional moment of the postcommunist public sphere. Hence its central task is to trace those focal points of significant difference/repetition at which their discursive (non) coincidences converge and diverge, and which constitute the unified, complete and indivisible ideological agenda of anti-democratic propaganda. Although the latter does not have an organizing potential, innovative methods of government and an alternative political model, it intensely accumulates power by discrediting civil society and creating a cynical social macro-environment – a key prerequisite for ‘modulating’ public opinion with the aim of reconsidering Bulgaria’s membership in the EU and NATO.
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The article is devoted to the health and lives losses resulted from the armed conflict in Ukraine. It shows the real and potential consequences for the social health and determination of major (priority) activity directions and tasks for public health management, with the aim of their minimisation or prevention.
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In the article the problems of implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages are let on. In particular, it admits that during the years of its independence Ukraine didn’t provide any system language policy and became a hostage of the signing of the Charter, as it undertook the responsibility to support and develop regional languages without any enactment of the law about the state language. As a result of political manipulations the provision of the functioning of Ukrainian language by the state was not made on a proper level. The latent language conflicts became a formal reason for the events in the Crimea and on the East of Ukraine and were used to invade the Ukrainian territories.
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Russian propaganda co-opts Western grassroots criticism of liberalism and globalization, recasting both left and right populism in nationalist terms. Vice versa, local actors borrow the Russian propaganda package and use it for their populist purposes. This is the general finding of an analysis of Bulgarian media discourse in 2013–2016, which proceeded in three steps: semantic analysis of the vocabulary of anti-liberal and anti-democratic propaganda and extraction of specific keywords and catch phrases; frequency analysis of the uses of these words and phrases in 3,080 online media outlets for the four-year period under study; content analysis of a sample of 3,305 publications from eight typologically different media outlets.The analysis identified four simplistic and interrelated anti-liberal and anti-democratic theses:1. The US and NATO are a global hegemon/puppet-master which is pull- ing the strings both of Brussels and of national governments; 2. Europe is dying because of its cultural decline (‘liberasty’) under the blows of the migrant invasion unleashed by the US, and because of the lame-duck, puppet European bureaucracy (‘Eurocracy’). In the final analysis, Europe is dying because it is united: the EU is a construction which serves the interests of the US and of global corporations, and it is an enemy of the European peoples; 3. Russia is rising. Although it is a victim of Western aggression, Russia is a guardian of its age-old sovereignty and of traditional values, and it is actually the true saviour of Europe; 4. Bulgaria’s liberal elites are venal: civic movements, human rights organizations, independent media outlets, pro-Western politicians and parties are represented as an indistinguishable whole, and all of them are ‘foreign agents’ – puppets of foreign interests. The populist-propaganda discursive front developing in the Bulgarian public sphere since 2013 is distinctly ‘pro-Russian’, although the data show that it is not always directly inspired by Russia. The content analysis identified three different rationales for using those cliches.
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This paper analyzes the results of a nationally representative survey on the influence of anti-democratic propaganda on Bulgarian public opinion. Three topics are discussed in detail. First, the levels of public support for basic democratic values, and of public trust in institutions, key foreign countries and world leaders; second, the level of penetration of the most widespread propaganda messages in public attitudes and in specific socio-demographic and electoral groups, and the role of fake news; third, the ability of these messages to influence the direction and character of Bulgarian citizens’ key political choices. Based on the analysis of the results, two main theses are argued. First, the more overtly geopolitically oriented the messages are, the more they polarize society; the explicitly geopolitical propaganda theses are winning supporters but, at the same time, the respective counter-theses are also gaining traction. Conversely, the more covertly politically and psychologically oriented the messages are, the more they feed on and intensify people’s fears and disappointments, and win supporters without resistance. But, second, however widespread the propaganda messages are in Bulgarian media, for the time being they have not man- aged to change the key geopolitical pro-European and pro-liberal choices of the Bulgarians – until and as long as they do not offer an acceptable alternative to this choice.
More...The Emergence of the Citizen-Investigator in the Context of a Politics Centred around the Rule of Law and the Fight against Corruption
The thesis of this article is that it is difficult to distinguish the logic of conspiracy in some of its manifestations from the logic of the judiciary. The author attempts to show that the difference between conspiracy and judicial power is a consequence of the positioning of the respective logic in locations that are discursively granted the right to evaluate something as true. Undoubtedly, the discourse of judicial power is one of the leading political perspectives in Bulgaria nowadays since politics are centred around the rule of law and the fight against corruption. In order to unfold her main thesis, the author attempts a reconstruction of the anticorruption discourse based on the works of Ivan Krastev and Nadège Ragaru. She demonstrates its development on a global scale and its entry in post-communist Bulgaria. What she finds particularly interesting in Ragaru’s observation is that the anticorruption fight relies on civil society, and in that sense, constructs a ‘civil society’ which, within the framework of this judicial discourse, begins to duplicate the practices of the investigator.
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