International Journal of Communication has published a book review by Ben O’Loughlin of Strategic Conspiracy Narratives by Mari-Liis Madisson and Andreas Ventsel. The review is free to read. If you want to know how citizens in different countries create conspiracy narratives about George Soros whenever anything is in the news, this is a good book. If you want to know how conspiracy narratives are constructed and used politically in the first place, this is an even better book.
New article by O'Loughlin on the role of visuality in the Iran nuclear deal
Ben O’Loughlin has published a new article, The visual politics of the Iran deal: narrative, image and verification. The article is in Cambridge Review of International Affairs, co-authored with Alister Miskimmon. In it, the authors argue that leaders in Iran and the US made deliberate attempts to orchestrate a shared narrative that it would suit all sides to reach a deal for Iran to have nuclear power and the international community to monitor Iran’s facilities. However, there was much visual evidence of efforts by Iran or by those against Iran to paint Iran in a good or bad light, respectively. Why? For an actor in international relations to be trusted by others, there should be visual evidence that they are behaving as others would desire. To have a credible identity requires others to “see” your character, and international relations provides a lot of each character or country to see. Despite these difficulties, the authors illustrate how Iran, the US and other leading powers agreed a deal.
The article should stimulate readers to think about how narrative and visuality are linked, and how actors try to do this strategically to build a positive impression of themselves, or, sometimes, a negative impression of others. Foreign policy involves some careful communication.
Ben is grateful to the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, where much of this research was conducted in 2016 while Ben was Visiting Professor there.
O'Loughlin publishes new book Spaces of War, War of Spaces
Ben O’Loughlin and the rest of the editors of the Media, War & Conflict journal have published a new collection of brilliant essays about how media enable Spaces of War, War of Spaces. This comes out of the conference they held on this theme in Florence in 2018.
Click here to purchase. Use 35% online discount code: GLRTW5
Thanks to Bloomsbury for publishing the book and to Simon Norfolk for use of his photograph on our cover. Ben and the team will hold the next conference in Florence in May 2021, covid permitting.
O'Loughlin talk on EU-Ukraine-Russia relations at #virtualBISA
Ben O’Loughlin gave a paper on 10 July 2020 at the British International Studies Association (BISA) annual conference, held digitally due to Covid-19. He and Alister Miskimmon presented analysis of interviews in the Baltic states and Ukraine concerning whether the Baltics can act as a bridge between Ukraine and the EU. Ukrainian membership of the EU has been discussed in Kiev and Brussels. It is a theme to talk about. However, it looks far from happening. Nevertheless, elites interviewed in Baltic states are enthusiastic about bringing Ukraine westward. Miskimmon and O’Loughlin looked at some of the ways self-interest drives competing narratives of a happy resolution to this process. Ultimately, whatever bridges the Baltic states and Ukraine build, their data suggests the real question is how the EU and Russia manage their relationship.
This paper was part of ongoing research in the E-Youth project funded by the Jean Monnet group.
Is a cyber-attack a message? New chapter on communication and cyber-security
If you wanted to undermine Boris Johnson, would you make a speech about his weaknesses or stop Netflix and Amazon Prime working?
NPCU’s Ben O’Loughlin and recent PhD Alexi Drew have published a chapter in Bill Dutton’s new volume, A Research Agenda for Digital Politics. They explore how security acts — like taking down a country’s bank services — can serve as a direct tool of communication. This shows that strategic narratives often only count if they follow decisive action and attribution of responsibility.
This is Alexi’s first published book chapter! Congratulations!
In the book, experts from several fields consider how digital politics is working. It is a great collection by Bill and features many former NPCU staff and guests. If you need an overview of the big questions experts are raising now, take a look.
New article published by Dr Sofia Collignon "Harassment and Intimidation of Parliamentary Candidates in the United Kingdom" published at the Political Quarterly now open source
The use of political violence to attain political goals has long been a source of concern. Once thought to be exclusive to countries with high levels of general violence, recent evidence suggests that harassment and intimidation of political elites in the UK is more widespread than previously thought. Using data from the 2017 general election candidate survey, we find that four in every ten candidates experienced at least one type of harassment. Evidence suggests that women and young candidates are more likely to suffer from harassment and intimidation. We conclude by formulating an agenda for future research, focusing, in particular, on the perception of harassment and the effect of harassment on political careers.
The article can be accessed here free of charge: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-923X.12855
New O'Loughlin article published in Digital War journal - free to read
As part of its first issue, Digital War journal has published an article by NPCU’s Ben O’Loughlin, Towards a third image of war: post-digital war. Ben’s abstract is below and the article is free to read here. We hope you enjoy reading the article!
Abstract
To see war as post-digital is to see how digital innovations have already been integrated into how militaries, media and societies wage, resist and understand war. Digital war is already historical. The logics of digital technologies have been integrated into the logics of pre-existing, traditional media and into long-standing geopolitical and military logics that drive war. The field of war and media is stuck between two images: continued efforts to document non-digital war and its established questions concerning legitimacy, authority and war’s lessons, and startled claims of novelty, rupture and transformation so total that they inhibit efforts to explain how war is changing. Post-digital war offers a third image, but how to see post-digital war? I propose specific approaches to seeing that can allow us to address its scale, heterogeneity and locality as well as the ethics of human and posthuman behaviours; to see more but retain the ability to ask the most important, long-standing questions about why and how war occurs or does not. This is an unashamedly extensionist view of historical, technological and disciplinary change. Post-digital war may not be the term the field arrives at, but it indicates a third image and perspective that prevents war escaping explanation.
Seminar review: Xymena Kurowska on Russia’s trolling complex; between neurtrollization and trickstery
“It is very difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there.”
Written by Kate Gordon, MSc Media, Power & Public Affairs student 2019-20
Anyone who spends his or her fair share of time on the internet will likely recognize the word trolling; an act of making unsolicited and often controversial comments with the intent of provoking an emotional reaction in hopes of inciting an argument or fight. Trolling is common behavior frequently seen in Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and elsewhere online, and is usually performed by private individuals for comedic purposes, personal amusement, and thrill of the schadenfreude. But what happens when an authoritarian government appropriates trolling as a tactic for suppressing civil engagement and activism?
In her work, Xymena Kurowska looks at how the Russian government co-opted trolling as a means to deter and delegitimize societal civic engagement. It does this through the process of what Kurowska calls neutrollization, a kind of political trolling that involves corruption through (normative) chaos. Neutrollization is the idea of neutralization-by-trolling; a process by which an authoritarian government uses technology in order to neutralize the potential for citizens to mobilize politically and renders that mobilization ridiculous if and when it finally occurs. Neutrollization operates through a mechanism of overidentification, by which the people or organizations engaging with this method ensure that the system is taken more literally than it takes itself, meaning the political system becomes something of a parody or mockery. When the atmosphere for political discussion takes on too farcical a tone, citizens feel ill-equipped or are simply unwilling to engage in political discourse because the troll has already successfully corrupted the dialogue. The process of neutrollization renders civilians unable to present the regime as a threat to societal security because their actions will essentially be mocked and ridiculed, thus delegitimizing their arguments.
Though the regime of the Russian government is strong domestically, the Russian regime is heavily stigmatized internationally. In order to circumvent this stigmatization in international politics, the Russians employ the second tactic discussed in Kurowska’s work: trickstery. To act as a trickster is performative, and a morally as well as ontologically ambiguous method of handling international stigmatization. Russian trickstery largely derives from the national tradition of parody and again makes use of the concept of overidentification. Kurowska’s example for this case involves the instances in which Russia portrays itself as a lead champion of global norms, thereby both embracing and ridiculing global basic principles, imploding the normative coordinates of the international system. According to Kurowska, Russian trickstery is also noticeably demonstrated in their concept of stiob, a genre of parody from Soviet times but now a genre connected to the idea of containing liberal Western hegemony. Russia uses stiob and overidentification to hold a mirror to liberal society in the West and expose the hypocrisy that lies between the ideals that liberal nations espouse versus the actual courses of action those nations pursue.
Through the use of overidentification and trickstery, the Russian government attempts to make liberal norms an object of travesty. For example, when the West refused Georgia's requests for assistance in 2008, leading to the deaths of its citizens, not only did Russia present this as legitimizing its subsequent decision to intervene, but Russia could politely criticize Georgia for not upholding its citizens’ human rights even when it was Russia that was pursuing military aggression against them. Because overidentification makes a mockery of established norms, even norms that are legitimately invoked and endorsed by their ontological status have their legitimacy questioned and undermined. By delegitimizing the Western order, Russian trickstery demonstrates both the idea that the liberal script is not the only script that is operational and what it sees as the underlying hypocrisy of the liberal script. By employing trickstery and stiob in international diplomacy, the Russian government is able to both navigate its international stigma and attempt to weaken Western hegemony.
After her presentation, Kurowska was asked who exactly is fooled or neutralized by neutrollization and trickstery. She answered that it is very likely that no one is actually fooled. Civil society actors are aware that the Russian government is using these tactics to discourage and prevent political mobilization, but the efforts have been so successful that there is nothing those actors can really do about it. In essence, at least on this battleground, civil society actors have lost. It is an important win domestically for Russia’s government; digitally empowered individuals could be a threat and could expose vulnerability in a regime. Through the process of neutrollization, the Russian government seems to have largely fortified a potentially vulnerable area, at least for now.
Western governments are also very likely aware of the use of trickstery in Russian diplomacy. Russia, in turn, is aware that the West is aware of its trickstery, but the Russians feel that the West does not understand quite how progressive and quite how subversive of a strategy it actually is. And, of course, the Russians will not actually confirm the existence of trickstery, as an admission of its existence would take away an important weapon in their fight against international political stigma. As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu said (and Kurowska translated): “It is very difficult to look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there. All the more stupid to look for it if this cat is clever, brave, and polite.”
Dr. Xymena Kurowska presented her paper to the Department of Politics and International Relations on 12 February 2020.
Media, War & Conflict conference in Florence - register now
Registration has now opened for the Spaces of War: Corporeal War conference on 21-22 May 2020 and all the details are available here: http://www.warandmedia.org/Spaces/registration/
Please note that registration closes on the 27th March 2020. If those accepted are no longer able to participate please inform the conference organisers as soon as possible, and by 27th March at the very latest.
Once registration has closed the organisers will be in touch regarding the programme and information for speakers. In the meantime, if you have any questions please direct them to s.maltby@sussex.ac.uk
The conference is organised by NPCU’s Ben O’Loughlin along with Sarah Maltby, Katy Parry and Laura Roselle.
Xymena Kurowska talk, Wed 12th Feb: Russia's Trolling Complex
On Wednesday 12th March we welcome Dr. Xymema Kurowska from Central European University & Aberystwyth University to present a paper, Russia’s trolling complex: between domestic neutrollization and international trickery. This is based on a recent article she published in Security Dialogue, which you can read here.
Time: 1pm-2pm, Wednesday 12th February
Place: McCrae 0-34
All welcome