Talk, January 7, 2017: Akil Awan: "Young and Radical: Accounting for the Nexus between Youth, Radicalism and Media Technologies"

This week’s PIR Research Seminar will feature Akil N. Awan from Royal Holloway’s History Department and Newpolcom.

Akil N. Awan is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, Political Violence and Terrorism at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Policy. His research interests are focused around the history of terrorism, radicalization, social movements, protest, and new media. He has served in an advisory capacity to the United Nations, UNDP, UK Home Office, the Foreign Office, the US State Dept., the US Defense Dept., the US Military, Council of Europe, NATO and the OSCE amongst others. His books include Radicalisation and Media: Terrorism and Connectivity in the New Media Ecology (with Andrew Hoskins & Ben O’Loughlin: 2011, Routledge), and Jihadism Transformed: al‐Qaeda and Islamic State’s Global Battle of Ideas (2016, Hurst/OUP). He is on Twitter: @Akil_N_Awan
 
The seminar takes place on Tuesday 17 January in room FW101 and runs from 5.15 to 6.30. All welcome!

O'Loughlin chapter in new book Image Operations

A new volume Image Operations is out, including a chapter from NewPolCom's Ben O'Loughlin entitled 'Images of the World, Images of Conflict'. The book features an outstanding group of scholars of visual politics, including W.J.T. Mitchell, Zeynep Gursel, Nicholas Mirzoeff and Timothy Lenoir. Edited by Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk, the book is published by Manchester University Press. Below is a summary of Ben's chapter. 

Images of the World, Images of Conflict - Ben O'Loughlin

In the short story Pascale's Sphere Borges wrote, “universal history is the history of a few metaphors.” The history of world politics certainly seems marked by a few recurring concepts and metaphors: the universal and the particular, the inside and the outside, the balance of power, and the ideal of symmetry and actuality of chaos. Across eras, these concepts have shaped the image of world politics held by leaders, citizens and scholars. Such concepts are abstract but become visualized through diplomacy, war and cartography and through the lived experience of world affairs. For critical scholars of International Relations, these concepts and the images they translate into are responsible for conflict, for they become concrete in the states, borders and security dilemmas that propel us from conflict to conflict. It follows that there is a relationship between “the image of world politics” and actual visual images of world politics; between abstract, conceptual understandings of the ontology and mechanics of International Relations and the horrific news and events we witness every day. Borges concludes his story, ‘Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.’ If so, we are doomed to variations on the same bleak events and the practice of international relations is ultimately tragic, as many of its founders believed. 

Amber Macintyre receives honorable mention at Political Studies Association Media and Politics Group conference

Amber Macintyre, a PhD student here at newpolcom, received an honorable mention for the James Thomas Memorial Prize, awarded by the Media and Politics Group of the Political Studies Association to the best paper presented by a PhD student at the Group's annual conference. The 2016 conference was held at the London School of Economics on December 12-13.  Amber's paper is titled "The culture of data: The help and hindrance of modern political philosophy".

Amber's research is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. In 2015, Royal Holloway was awarded over £1 million from the Trust to support a total of 15 PhD research projects on the theme of Freedom and the Rights of the Individual in the Digital Age.

Here is Amber's paper abstract:

The culture of data has provoked a sense of crisis since its initial popularisation in the 1960s. From the start, academics and civil rights groups, concerned with the impact of dataveillance on democratic rights, have called for urgent decisions to be made on ethical standards. Since then, data availability has grown in capacity and quality; individuals, organisations and government have greater dependence on technical expertise, resulting in a shift in power in the favour of data companies and data scientists. Despite this, and the ongoing criticism, ethical responsibilities have been neglected and a consistent code of ethics is yet to form.

In the last few years, and particularly after the Snowden revelations, more citizens are becoming concerned with the negative impacts of big data on democratic life while simultaneously becoming dependent on data for everyday living. The tension between technological progress and the need for an ethical code remains dichotomous and seemingly unsolvable. Foundational theories of modern political philosophy have both helped shape and explain democratic structures. In this research, these same theories are used to frame the analysis of big data literature so far. The findings are two-fold. Firstly, the seeming dichotomy between data practice and ethical concerns can be understood by considering theories of democracy. Secondly, new challenges of data doubles, machine learning and the ‘technocrats’ of data uncover drawbacks of these political theories.

Dan Jackson, convenor of the PSA Media and Politics Group, congratulates Amber on her honorable mention.

Awan gives evidence to House of Lords Select Committee on Children and the Internet Inquiry

Dr Akil Awan has appeared in front of the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and was taking part into the government's inquiry Children and the Internet to give evidence on young people's political use of the Internet. Several other high-profile companies and individuals have spoken to the inquiry, including representatives from Google, Facebook, the BBC, Ofcom and Sky.

In a wide ranging discussion, Dr Awan spoke on the risks, challenges and opportunities that the Internet and in particular, immersion in social media and web 2.0 platforms posed to young people.  On the subject of online radicalisation, he suggested that "the idea of online radicalisation as being the most important issue facing us has largely been debunked in academia; there aren't any real cases of completely autonomous online radicalisation. Children live in real worlds. In online and offline worlds simultaneously, so it's a bit like pathologising the internet [to say it's responsible for radicalising children]."

However, he also recognised the role the Internet had played in enabling the growth of violent extremism by providing spaces online that cocooned audiences from alternative viewpoints. These echo chambers then allowed the circulation of extremist ideologies without being challenged or contested, and were conducive to the growth of political radicalism. He pointed to the recent US presidential election as an important example of the effectiveness of these sorts of spaces, pointing to the proliferation and circulation of patently false news on Facebook, which had contributed in part to the creation of a ‘post-factual’ politics.

When asked by the committee, what more the ICT industry could do to monitor and prevent access to extremist material, he argued that “there are a whole host of things we might do that are not necessarily about censoring content and online spaces, but rather about how young people engage with them. That is the key. We have to think about the role schools play in developing critical thinking and young people’s abilities, and teaching them methods and skills so that they can weigh evidence and contextualise the knowledge they receive, and engage with it in a much more sophisticated and nuanced way. That is fundamental. It involves digital literacy and media literacy, too.”

He also argued that schools had a role to play in other ways by teaching students history and politics, such as the Crusades or colonialism, in a much more nuanced and sophisticated way, so that when they encountered very tendentious, skewed and polarised views of the world or history online, they were equipped with the tools and their own internal resource to challenge and contest these ideas at in any way. It would almost be like providing some kind of inoculation against very poisonous messages.

He also suggested that “schools should do more to promote progressive and inclusive ideas of citizenship, belonging and civic identity. We tend to think that political socialisation begins when children turn 18, but it does not; it is a continuous process. If someone feels that the Iraq war was unjust and carried out for ulterior motives, you might not be able to change their mind cognitively but you might teach them how they might respond politically. Teach them that there are other ways. Teach them political socialisation and how they might be part of their community and the political process. That can be quite helpful. If you teach those sorts of things at school, you are dealing with some of the problems quite early on.”

When asked to assess the government’s counter-terrorism strategy, he suggested that the Prevent duty and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, had become unworkable and was now considered a toxic brand in the communities it desperately need to have on board for it to work. He also argued that the Prevent duty which creates a statutory duty for those in the public sector to spot the early signs of radicalisation had been quite problematic for all sorts of reasons, particularly for children. He said, “there has not been sufficient training of those in the public sector about how they might spot the signs of radicalisation, whatever that might mean. Just before I came, I printed off the Government’s vulnerability assessment framework, which is one of the things they use to identify the signs of radicalisation; I want to refer to four that relate to young people in particular. One is being at a transitional time of life; another is a need for identity, meaning and belonging; another is a desire for excitement and adventure; and another is a desire for political or moral change. There are others, but those things could apply not only to every student in this country but to every child on the planet. When there is such a broad swathe of risk factors, or things that might predispose you to recognise a radical, it becomes almost nonsensical. We have seen a number of referrals under Prevent, and they do not get followed through, because we are talking about false positives. And really what we are doing then, is looking at markers of religiosity, and often ethnic-based, which is one of the reasons why the National Union of Students has refused to implement Prevent.”

He further argued that “young people need to be allowed to explore ideas, particularly at university. There is now a statutory duty on university lecturers like myself to report anything that could tick some of those boxes, but universities are supposed to be safe spaces in which you can explore ideas, and make mistakes politically and ideologically. There is the famous adage that if you are not a radical when you are young you have no soul, and if you are still a radical when you are old you have no sense. That is part of our political socialisation. We go through that process as young people.”

You can watch the session in full here.

Memories, legacies and narratives: @newpolcom @ECREA2016Prague

The ECREA 6th European Communication Conference kicks off on 9 November in Prague, featuring keynotes from Peter Dahlgren, Sabina Mihelj, Joanna Zylinksa and Rasmum Kleis Nielsen. NewPolCom's Ben O'Loughlin is taking part in a panel on Saturday the 12th that brings together research on strategic narratives with historical research on memory in international politics. Panel details below. Do join if you are at ECREA!

Power and the contestation of the past: memories, legacies and strategic narratives in international perspective

Saturday 12 November 2016

11:00 – 12:30 Meeting Room 225

Panellists: Ben O’Loughlin (with Alister Miskimmon), Eric Sangar, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Aleksandra Krstic, and Judith Lohner.

With his seminal book on “The invention of tradition” the historian Eric Hobsbawm fundamentally changed the way in which scholars approach the past. Rather than being a sequence of objective events, history came to be understood as a social construction, emerging from narratives and interpretations generated by the stories told by people, official rituals of memorization and even the symbolic environment of artefacts and everyday objects. In the constructivist view, history is fluid, malleable and ambiguous and thus open to evaluative contestation and re-invention. Current conflicts and social transformations frequently trigger the search for meaning and explanation in historical events, thereby re-inventing how the past is understood. It can therefore be argued that the present shapes the past as much as the past shapes the course of present events.

Most of the existing research focuses on the role of collective memories in the formation of social and cultural identities. Less attention has been given to narratives of the past that utilize historical frames in order to achieve political goals. Moreover, we know very little about the role of frames of the past in international politics where different narratives intersect, compete and collide.

The papers of this panel aim to address these gaps by addressing the strategic role of history and collective memories in processes of power struggles and contested politics in the context of international relations and global developments. All studies presented in this panel focus on particular moments of rupture and discontinuity: Two papers (Krstic and Milojevic; Lohner, Banjac and Neverla) explore how the regime transition from authoritarianism to democracy is interpreted and contested in public discourses. Two other papers (Baden and Tenenboim-Weinblatt; Sangar) use sophisticated methodologies to investigate conflict discourses in different Western and non-Western contexts. And O’Loughlin and Miskimmon the role of strategic narratives in international negotiations. In all cases, the framing of the past played a crucial role in the dynamics and outcomes of the contestation. However, while there are clear indications that the mobilisation of the past perpetuates and intensifies conflict, there is evidence that the past can also serve as a force to broker consensus and reconciliation.

Another theme that runs through the five papers of this panel is the role of the media and journalism in constructing the past. In ongoing conflicts and social upheavals the media serve as a forum where narratives of the past are remediated and reinterpreted. Periods of social and political discontinuities therefore fundamentally challenge the position of journalism and journalists, forcing them to forge new professional identities between the legacies of the past and the changing realities of the present.

Taken together, this panel provides insights into the role of narratives of the past in contemporary conflicts and power struggles. The analysis of international conflicts and global ruptures helps to understand the ambivalent role of history frames as both a polarizing and a bridging force. Furthermore, the studies presented open up new avenues for future research in an emerging field.

Thanks to Katrin Voltmer and Davor Marco for organising this panel.

Ben will also be chair and discussant for the panel Performing Military Identities and Communities Through the Media. This features a fantastic line-up of researchers in the field of media and conflict: Katharine Millar, Sarah Maltby, Lisa Silvestri, Maria Hellman, and Katy Parry. Do join at 16:00 - 17:30 on Saturday 12th November at the venue Terrace 2.

Talk, November 9: Bart Cammaerts (LSE) on Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From "Watchdog" to "Attackdog"

Journalistic Representations of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Press: From “Watchdog” to ”Attackdog”

Dr Bart Cammaerts, London School of Economics and Political Science

Wednesday, 9 November

Windsor-0-05

4-5:30pm

We hope to see you there!

Vaccari publishes article on the implications of online political mobilization

A new article by Cristian Vaccari on how mobilization messages received via email and social media may affect political participation has just been published in the high-impact journal Political Communication.

Based on unique survey data collected as part of a large comparative project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, Dr Vaccari found that citizens who receive messages via email or social media inviting them to vote for a party or candidate are substantially more likely to engage in a variety of political activities besides voting, even after controlling for most known covariates of political participation and even after pre-processing the data to take into account self-selection biases in who receives online mobilization messages, and recalls receiving them.

The full abstract of the article, available here, reads as follows:

This study analyzes the relationship between online voter mobilization and political engagement in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom during the 2014 European election campaign. Internet surveys of samples representatives of these countries’ populations with Internet access show that respondents who received an invitation to vote for a party or candidate via e-mail or social media engaged in a significantly higher number of political activities than those who did not. Moreover, the relationship between mobilization and engagement was stronger among those who followed the campaign less attentively, as well as in countries where overall levels of engagement with the campaign were lower (Germany and the United Kingdom) than where they were higher (Italy). These findings indicate that online mobilization may contribute to closing gaps in political engagement at both individual and aggregate levels, and thus suggest that digital media may contribute to reviving democratic citizenship.

The article is part of a special issue on "Digital Politics: Mobilization, Engagement, and Participation", co-edited by Karolina Koc-Michalska and Darren Lilleker.

Strategic narratives in The Conversation

Laura Roselle, co-author of Strategic Narratives with Ben O'Loughlin and Alister Miskimmon, has published a short article in The Conversation explaining why Americans and Russians see the world differently. This was prompted by US Secretary of State John Kerry's recent remark that he lives in a "parallel universe" to his Russian counterparts. Laura uses strategic narrative theory to explain why this is the case. This is of huge importance, since it explains why the US and Russia cannot agree how to deal with the crisis in Syria. 

Laura, Ben and Alister will published a new volume on strategic narratives in 2017. 

Beyond Borders and Boundaries in Political Communication Research

As part of a series of regional events funded by the Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Association’s (MeCCSA) Postgraduate Network, PhD candidates in the New Political Communication Unit will be hosting a half-day workshop discussing and debating the methodological challenges faced by researchers in the field of political communication.

Following on from previous regional events funded by the MeCCSA PGN on the theme of ‘Boundaries and Borders’, this event explores existing boundaries and borders within the growing field of political communication and poses the following questions:

·         What problems do we face as researchers?

·         What is being done currently to overcome these problems?

·         What can be done in the future to ensure our research remains relevant and robust?

The first half of the workshop comprises a masterclass with presentations from Gordon Cameron, Press Officer and Senior Researcher at the Greater London Authority, and Dr Jinghan Zeng, Lecturer in International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. Mr Cameron and Dr Zeng will discuss their approaches to research in this field from both a professional and an academic perspective. The second half of the workshop will be led by presentations from current PhD candidates in the New Political Communication Unit: Declan McDowell-Naylor; Ellen Watts; and Amber Macintyre. A Q&A  session and discussion with this panel will take place, chaired by one of the event’s organisers.

The event runs from 14:00-18:00 on Wednesday 12th October. Tea and coffee will be provided and a wine reception will be held after the event in the Political and International Relations Department.

All members of staff and postgraduate students are welcome, please email Claudia.ferreira.2015@live.rhul.ac.uk to indicate your interest as numbers are limited.

Speaker Biographies

Gordon Cameron has been working in politics for the past 7 years.  After completing his Politics BA from Carleton University, he started working in politics by providing volunteer online communications support for different local candidates and charities in Ottawa, Canada. Following several years of working in the Canadian government he joined the New Political Communications MSc programme at Royal Holloway in 2010.

Since 2011 he has been working for the Greater London Authority and is now a Senior Researcher / Press Officer for the Conservative Group. Over that time he has led several City Hall projects such as improving mobile connectivity on the Tube, holding a Met Crime museum exhibition, improving flexible ticketing on London Transport, reducing the cost of drunkenness to London’s health services, and promoting tourism with technology.

Currently Gordon is working in the opposition group to the Mayor of London scrutinising the new administration’s delivery of campaign pledges.

Dr Jinghan Zeng is Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is also an Associate Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He holds degrees from the University of Warwick (PhD, May 2012- April 2014) and the University of Pittsburgh (MA, 2009-2011).

His research and teaching interests lie in the field of Chinese politics and research methodology, with more specific interests in the study of China's authoritarian system, elite politics of contemporary China, and Chinese foreign policy. Jinghan is the author of The Chinese Communist Party's Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (Palgrave, 2015). His academic papers have appeared in International Affairs, Contemporary Politics, Journal of Contemporary China, and Journal of Chinese Political Science. Before his academic career, he worked for the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs in New York City.

Declan McDowell-Naylor is a doctoral researcher based in the Department of Politics and International Relations, at Royal Holloway, University of London. His PhD project explores how issues of democracy and citizenship arise in the design and development of the ‘Internet of Things’. In particular, he focus on the processes of public engagement with the aim to challenge conventional understandings about democracy and the way in which citizens can engage with digital technology.

Ellen Watts is a PhD candidate in the New Political Communication Unit, co-supervised by Andrew Chadwick and Ben O'Loughlin. Ellen's research explores the interventions of celebrities in the political field, and citizen engagement with celebrity-led campaigns. At this workshop, she will discuss the challenges of studying online communities in an ethical way, in relation to a developing case study of 'Our Shared Shelf', a feminist book club and discussion forum founded by actor and UN Women Ambassador Emma Watson.

Amber Macintyre is currently undertaking research for a PhD on the culture of data within membership organisations. The research will focus on the unspoken contract the organisation forms with their members and how this impacts their use of data. This includes questions on how individuals in the organisation view the agency of their audience, perceive their role as experts and if they rely on the authority of big data. The research was inspired by her previous work on digital activism at Amnesty International and the tension between the risks and capabilities of digital technologies.

The battle for the battle of the narratives: NPCU presentation at Lund University on #CVE

A NewPolCom research team will present a paper at a workshop later this month in Sweden, Managing Societal Threats in the Digital Age: The Case of Propaganda and Violent Extremism. The workshop is hosted by the Department for Strategic Communication at Lund University on 28-29 October 2016. Organised by Lund's James Pamment and Corneliu Bjola of Oxford University, the workshop involves speakers from NATO and the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy as well as academics. The NewPolCom team will question the current approach to narrative battles and argue that any efforts at persuasion should be based on a different set of assumptions.

The battle for the battle of the narratives: Sidestepping the double fetish of digital and CVE

Akil Awan, Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin

CVE is hot; digital CVE is hotter still. As the US replaces the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications with another new CVE hub, the Global Engagement Center, other Western governments follow suit in building teams charged with countering the narratives thought to radicalise individuals and groups into violence. Officials seek to “contest the space” and, while most evidence points to the role of offline social dynamics in leading individuals to violence, the space is often taken as digital. To fetishise is to imbue an object with special, even magical qualities, ignoring its banal reality. The banal reality is that all media are new media once, whether cave paintings or digital. The banal reality is that CVE was COIN a decade ago and previous acronyms in the decades before that. This double-fetish comes at a cost: the “battle of the narratives” becomes conceptualised and practiced as the quantitative online dominance of “our” content over “theirs”. Rather than admitting how intractably difficult persuasion is, and rather than responding to the real-world concerns of those persuadable by radical narratives – political disenfranchisement, socio-economic depravation, personal identity crises, and xenophobia – the mass takedown of pro-IS accounts on Twitter in 2015 is instead considered a mark of progress. NATO explores simply stopping information from Russia reaching Baltic states in the name of “Stratcom defence” rather than exploring why Russia might be attractive and its narrative persuasive. The enemy is extremism and extremism must be stopped.

This paper makes three moves against this framing. First, we argue this is a radically unrealistic account of communication and persuasion that ignores decades of research on radicalisation and a century of research on media effects. It is radical because it is almost wilfully counterproductive. Second, we ask what move is being made by this act of double fetishization. We find the bureaucratic, target-driven goals of governments can explain this grasping for a tangible, quantifiable mark of progress and the amnesia towards prior COIN and other campaigns. Third, we propose a model of narrative contestation through which governments can address real-world concerns. Our strategic narrative framework that identifies alignment across narratives of the international system, narratives of identity, and narratives of specific problems, can help explain why a certain problem-definition or even worldview becomes meaningful to those open to radicalisation and violence.