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The Politics of Twitter: Emotions and the Power of Social Media
Abstract
Social media is becoming a key medium through which we communicate with each other: it is at the center of the very structures of our daily interactions. Yet this infiltration is not unique to interpersonal relations. Political leaders, governments, and states operate within this social media environment, wherein they continually address crises and institute damage control through platforms such as Twitter. A question arises here as to what the turn to Twitter means for conventional structures of power and different levels of communication. This article analyses the emotional dynamics of Twitter, illustrating how emotion is implicated in the power of this social media platform. I argue that Twitter can both represent emotions and provoke emotions, which can play an important role in the escalation or de-escalation of conflict. The emotional conditions Twitter facilitates are implicated in how shifts in temporality and functionality of communication have shaped political discourse so significantly.
... This perspective, although relevant to our increased understanding of social media in diplomacy, focuses on the power of emotion to cultivate identities. Growing attention to the digitalisation of diplomacy has also highlighted the emotional dynamics of online interactions both in relation to high stake signalling (Duncombe, 2019b) and in the transformation of face-to-face interactions through screen-based technologies . The latter inquiry into professional interactions assisted by digital technologies draws on Knorr Cetina's rethinking of Goffman's interactionism in the 'synthetic situation ' (2009). ...
... In this context, social media provide new stages on which to signal intention through emotional expressions. Digital interactions are thus more than adaptations or translations of previous offline activities, the socio-technical affordances of digital platforms condition the ways in which emotions are perceived and shared among users (Duncombe, 2019b). This also has implications for the way that diplomats are instructed to learn and maintain social media presence which requires understanding and 'ease' of social media use. ...
Social media are increasingly important tools in diplomacy. Diplomats are expected to use social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to communicate with each other and with both the domestic and international publics. This form of communication involves displaying positive emotions to generate attention in a competitive information environment. Emotions are essential to managing perceptions, conveying signals and safeguarding state reputations in traditional diplomacy. Commercial demands of online performance, however, activate new dimensions and challenges in the management of emotions in diplomacy. As digital disinformation and populist campaigns have transgressed the boundaries of domestic public debate, diplomats must also display emotional restraint to contain and counter such influence. This article analyses how diplomats perceive the demands of digital diplomacy and how emotions are engaged in their efforts to perform competently both online and offline. The study draws on fieldwork and interviews with 13 European diplomats as well as document analysis of handbooks and training material used to transfer ‘emotional communication skills’ to diplomats. The study findings suggest that the demands of digital diplomacy are challenging traditional enactments of ‘the good diplomat’. In addition to the tensions between outreach and countering communication practices, the emotional labour in digital diplomacy extends beyond what we see on social media. Diplomats perceive the expectations of constant performance online to at times conflict with their professional role offline.
... IR scholarship on the use of digital platforms for the purpose of political representation often focuses on the digital branding of states. Such research investigates the role of digital media in the recognition of state identity (Duncombe, 2019), the effects of digitalisation in the outreach of strategic narratives (Miskimmon et al, 2013) and the ways in which digital platforms empower representation practices at the front line of diplomacy (Cooper and Cornut, 2019). Leaders, states, governments and ministries of foreign affairs increasingly use social media to project their images, enabling them to manage their influence among domestic and global publics (Hedling, 2020). ...
... Here, we conduct an analysis of Sweden's feminist digital diplomacy and the ways in which FFP draws on the repackaging of state feminism. We treat digital diplomacy as a set of online communication practices on digital platforms that enable political storytelling (Duncombe, 2019). The concept of 'affordances' enables understandings and analyses of the possibilities for goal-oriented actions of users of social media platforms (Bucher and Helmond, 2018). ...
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits adaptation, alteration, reproduction and distribution for non-commercial use, without further permission provided the original work is attributed. The derivative works do not need to be licensed on the same terms. This article interrogates the digital storytelling of Sweden's feminist foreign policy. Drawing on scholarship on state feminism and digital diplomacy, it shows how digital platforms offer opportunities to reproduce narratives of state feminism through storytelling. We propose that digital diplomacy is used to advance feminist foreign policy through emotional sense-making that requires the telling of personal stories. The article provides a narrative analysis of the stories of women and girls that symbolise and embody feminist foreign policy, and the way in which they are communicated by the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The article concludes by noting that the digital storytelling of feminist foreign policy allows the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to communicate to a wider digital audience. These stories, however, run the risk of obscuring the feminist ambitions of feminist foreign policy by insufficiently considering the gendered injustices that undergird the global gender order and by bringing together seemingly incompatible stories of feminist exceptionalism and success.
... Moreover, political actors and interest groups can use social media to target specific audiences with tailored messages that are designed to appeal to their emotions and biases (Duncombe, 2019), further exacerbating the problem. This manipulation of public opinion can have serious consequences, including the spread of disinformation and the erosion of trust in democratic institutions (Chen & Xia, 2022). ...
In recent years, social media has emerged as a powerful force in contemporary global politics, transforming the way people engage with political actors and consume information about political events. While the potential benefits of social media are many, including increased citizen empowerment and democratic participation, its drawbacks cannot be ignored. The spread of misinformation, the erosion of trust in political institutions, and the manipulation of public opinion are among the challenges posed by social media. This article delves into the complex and multi-dimensional impacts of social media on global politics, emphasizing the need for critical examination and the development of policies that promote democratic values and civic participation. It highlights the significance of understanding how social media is used in both democratic and authoritarian societies. Authoritarian regimes exploit social media to control information, suppress dissent, and propagate their agendas. The article provides valuable insights into the opportunities and challenges of social media for democracy, human rights, and global security. Policymakers, academics, and citizens alike must engage in ongoing research to fully understand the implications of social media on contemporary global politics.
... It uses case scenarios related to studying conversational paradigms and investigating the underlying patterns of information-seeking and sharing behavior. For example, the Twitter dataset regarding COVID-19 has been used for topic detection and sentiment analysis (Kausar et al., 2021), classifying language-agnostic discourse of tweets (Liu et al., 2018), monitoring people's emotions (Mathur et al., 2020b), studying the dynamics of users' emotions (Duncombe, 2019), conversation analysis (Pérez-Dasilva et al., 2020), studying the evolution of public sentiment over time, (Garcia & Berton, 2021) and several other applications. ...
Monkeypox virus is closely related to variola (smallpox virus) and
Received Jan 30, 2023 Revised Feb 17, 2023 Accepted Feb 28, 2023
causes a smallpox-like disease. The increase in monkeypox cases has caused the general public to be involved in providing responses to seek and share information related to monkeypox on the internet, especially on social media platforms. This study aims to analyze a collection of 5000 tweets on August 5, 2022,
Keywords: for sentiment analysis using the NRC lexicon. Of the 5,000 tweets
Monkeypox NRC Lexicon Sentiment analysis Text mining RStudio
that have been extracted, it is obtained that the words that Twitter users often use are "health", "emergency", "public", "covid", and "declares". By using the classification using the NRC lexicon comparison, we found that the emotion type of fear was the most widely used emotion, which had a presentation of 19.73%, followed by anticipation emotion at 16.78%, sadness 14.77%, trust at 13.90%, anger 9.99%, shock 9.14%, disgust 8.12%, and happy 1288 7.90 %. The negative sentiment that often appears on Twitter is equal to 51.92%, and positive sentiment has a percentage of 48.08%. The negative sentiment words that appear most often are "emergency", "virus", "disease", "shit", and "risk". The positive sentiment words that appear most often are "public", "vaccine", "sex", "contact", and "united". The analytical method with the lexicon method is very well used in analyzing various emotions and sentiments on social media.
... Previous studies have shown that when messages are read, they can trigger emotions, even if they contain no emotional content per se (Duncombe 2019), or that the emotions generated upon reading the message are more determinant than the content itself (Berger and Milkman 2012;Weeks and Holbert 2013;Keib et al. 2018;Arce-García, et al. 2020). Other studies suggest a greater tendency to share news that generates negative emotions such as fear or anger (Segado-Boj et al. 2020). ...
The presence of environmental activist Greta Thunberg at the UN Climate Change Conference COP25 in 2019 prompted reactions on social media, which grew exponentially after she was named Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2019 and even more so after then-president of the United States Donald Trump tweeted his reaction to her accolade. An analysis of 1,395,054 tweets gathered between November and December 2019 through R, network theory techniques, machine learning and natural language processing showed how messages sparking hatred and intense emotions generate posts, mainly negative ones that subsequently serve as catalysts. The results also demonstrate the relevance of the bubble filter and echo chamber theories and the fact that hate springs from a range of sentiments depending on each participant group.
... More broadly, "Twitter use is arguably challenging the relational dynamics between states and their domestic and foreign publics and is implicated in the power and proliferation of nonstate actors in international relations" (Duncombe 2019: 410). Twitter puts distance between us, Duncombe (2019) argues, making it harder to be empathetic. Thus, engagement with issues relating to violence -as is the case concerning weapons -is unlike that of the offline world. ...
In this article, I examine social media output from three of the largest arms manufacturers (by profit): Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, all based in the United States. I ask: how, if at all, are women represented? What do these representations "do"? To do this, I examine all tweets over a three-month period and find that the Twitter content: normalises women within the company context, presents the companies as empowering and inspiring, and as places for individual women to succeed. Central to all three areas is intersectionality, with the companies depicting women of colour frequently, especially Black women. I argue that the social media output of arms manufacturers helps "make possible" the arms trade by presenting these companies as neoliberal, multicultural feminist beacons of social progress, rendering ambivalent criticisms about the suffering inflicted by their products.
... Over the past decade, public diplomacy has undergone a rapid process of digitalization as diplomats increasingly employ digital technologies to obtain foreign policy goals. Since 2008, diplomats have adopted myriad technologies including social media (Duncombe, 2019;Laeeq et al., 2021), virtual embassies (Metzgar, 2012) and big data analysis (Manor, 2019). Importantly, diplomats' initial adoption of digital technologies was closely associated with the practice of public diplomacy (Mazumdar, 2021), defined here narrowly as states' "direct communication with foreign peoples, with the aim of affecting their thinking and, ultimately, that of their governments" (Malone, 1985, p. 199). ...
Few studies to date have investigated diplomats’ use of
visuals on social media. This study asserts that diplomats
are now visual narrators as they use visuals to shape the
worldviews of social media users. Moreover, this study
asserts that ministries of foreign affairs (MFAs) have
institutionalized the process of visual narration as diplomats
create and disseminate visuals on a daily basis. To examine
diplomats’ visual narration, this study analyzed three social
media-based public diplomacy campaigns: one managed
by the British Foreign Office and two managed by the Israeli
and Lithuanian foreign ministries. Interviews with Israeli and
Lithuanian diplomats were used to identify campaign goals
and authorial intent. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and
an inability to interview British diplomats, the analysis of the
British Foreign Office campaign was based on secondary
material that outlined campaign goals and authorial intent.
Next, semiotic analysis was employed to unearth the
meaning that might arise from diplomats’ visuals. Notably,
this study is among the first to employ Roland Barthes’s
semiotic approach to visuals shared online by diplomats
who conduct public diplomacy. This study found that MFA
visuals were used to obtain offline policy goals. Moreover,
visuals enabled the delivery of elaborate messages despite
Twitter’s character limit. This study also found that visuals
served as ideological devices as they were used to promote a
certain worldview. Results thus validate the study’s assertion
that diplomats are visual narrators and highlight the need for
more academic research into this form of visual narration.
... Los líderes políticos, además, se han apropiado de estas redes no solamente para lograr fines políticos sino también -y cada vez con mayor frecuencia -para llevar al extremo los límites de la acción discursiva (Owen, 2017a, p. 1;2019, p. 1). Recientes trabajos constatan como el poder de Twitter no está limitado al "espacio en línea" de la plataforma sino, más bien, en su potencial empleo tanto para representar emociones como para provocarlas, lo que puede desempeñar un papel significativo en la escalada y desescalada del conflicto en la esfera política real y virtual (Duncombe, 2019). ...
El presente artículo tiene como objetivo reflexionar, con perspectiva de género, sobre el liderazgo político y el estilo comunicativo en Twitter (1078 tuits) durante la campaña electoral andaluza de 2018. Analizamos, a través de un análisis del contenido cuantitativo, las posibles brechas de género. Los datos recabados demuestran que las mujeres políticas esgrimen un estilo comunicativo particular y son más visibles en la red social, colocando temas femeninos en la agenda y esgrimiendo un estilo de liderazgo fuerte y personalista cercano a las organizaciones partidistas en sus territorios. Cabe seguir profundizando en comprobar si nuestro marco de análisis y conclusiones puede trasladarse o explicar dinámicas similares en otras realidades o si, por el contrario, variables institucionales o contextuales definen más consistentemente la comunicación política de los líderes. Palabras clave: campañas electorales; comunicación política; género; liderazgo político; Twitter
... Thus, comments on images, memes, videos and interactions such as likes and retweets, show the different ways in which subjects approach technology, often leading to an appropriation that achieves the resignification of the meaning of the political arena and the space/time in which the political debate develops along with its repercussions. This means that on rare occasions, the online participation translates into physical manifestations of political participation, such as organized protests (Duncombe, 2019). ...
This paper argues in favor of the manifestation of a liquid democracy on Twitter during the Colombian presidential election campaigns (2018-2022) through a qualitative analysis of over 2484 responses to the candidates' messages. Users appropriated the platform through the use of memes, fake news and hashtags (#) to attack or defend the politicians, ignoring any of their campaign proposals. A flowchart was created to illustrate the emergence of subjectivities that emerge during political discussions on the platform, such as saboteur/troll, or cyberactivists. Likewise, the profiles of the candidates were constructed under a marketing strategy appropriate to this new cyber-citizenship. The findings support a lack of political debate or discussion and a simulated political participation that does not guarantee the exercise of democracy
... Debates are strictly associated with argumentation. Their texture is made of speech acts that express the participants' opinions and attempt to affect other participants' views by offering reasons, triggering frames and eliciting emotions [3,4]. Debates can be finalised to deliberation, as in public assemblies, or more loosely directed to communicate and shape opinions on controversial subjects or issues. ...
We propose a framework to analyse partisan debates that involves extracting, classifying and exploring the latent argumentation structure and dynamics of online societal controversies. In this paper, the focus is placed on causal arguments, and the proposed framework is applied to the Twitter debate on the consequences of a hard Brexit scenario. Regular expressions based on causative verbs, structural topic modelling, and dynamic time warping techniques were used to identify partisan faction arguments, as well as their relations, and to infer agenda-setting dynamics. The results highlight that the arguments employed by partisan factions are mostly constructed around constellations of effect-classes based on polarised verb groups. These constellations show that the no-deal debate hinges on structurally balanced building blocks. Brexiteers focus more on arguments related to greenfield trading opportunities and increased autonomy, whereas Remainers argue more about what a no-deal Brexit could destroy, focusing on hard border issues, social tensions in Ireland and Scotland and other economy- and healthcare-related problems. More notably, inferred debate leadership dynamics show that, despite their different usage of terms and arguments, the two factions’ argumentation dynamics are strongly intertwined. Moreover, the identified periods in which agenda-setting roles change are linked to major events, such as extensions, elections and the Yellowhammer plan leak, and to new issues that emerged in relation to these events.
... This choice also reflects the predilection of people toward interactive over static information during a crisis. Among the social networking websites, we selected Twitter because of its international appeal in terms of political discourse and activities (Duncombe, 2019;Huszár et al., 2022;Kasmani et al., 2014;McGregor & Mourão, 2016;Webster & Albertson, 2022). Through the years, various studies have also explored the consumption of social media in various crises, from health pandemics to natural disasters (Civelek et al., 2016;Eriksson, 2018;Garcia, 2020;Lambert, 2020;Westerman et al., 2014). ...
With the aggravation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the rising involvement of foreign powers, it has become more substantial to identify whether an endorsement or condemnation of war efforts is the universal message. This goal is empowered by the clear literature on the vital linkage between public opinion and international relations. Thus, we investigated the sentiments and emotions of the international community on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. A total of 27,894 tweets posted within the first day in the #UkraineRussia hashtag were analyzed. Results show that "war", "people", "world", "putin”, and "peace" were some of the most frequently occurring words in the tweets. There were more negative sentiments than positive sentiments, and sadness was the most salient emotion. To date, this study is the first to examine the Russo-Ukrainian War and one of the few sentiment and emotion analyses for exploring Twitter data in the context of war.
... The results of this analysis are important for US politics as they are relevant to all US Senate and Congress members. Several studies showed that Twitter is an influential political tool to interact with the public on a mass scale to garner votes and organize political movements, even revolutions (such as Christensen 2011;Nulty et al. 2016;Ernst et al. 2017;Duncombe 2019;Gil de Zúñiga et al. 2020;and Vliet et al. 2020). In US politics, the importance of Twitter has increased significantly since the 2016 presidential elections (see Howard et al. 2017;Yaqub et al. 2017;Rizoiu et al. 2018;and Buccoliero et al. 2020). ...
While conservatives welcomed Musk's takeover of Twitter, liberals sounded the alarm bells. Based on official Twitter accounts belonging to 528 US Senate and Congress members (269 Democrats and 259 Republicans), I empirically analyze how the number of followers of these accounts changes following Twitter's acceptance of Elon Musk's offer on April 25. This study provides the first empirical analysis of changes in politician accounts on social media following this takeover agreement.
... Emotions, feelings, and affects are the attributes that engage users and generate economic profits for the platforms. Similarly, the generation and utilization of feelings and affects profoundly belong to political influencing on social media (Duncombe, 2019;Marquart et al., 2019;Papacharissi, 2015). For example, humor and comedy, as well as anger and frustration, are widely employed today for political purposes on social media platforms (see Bennett & Livingston, 2018;Gustafsson & Weinryb, 2019;Jenkins, 2018;Knuutila & Laaksonen, 2020;Laaksonen et al., 2021). ...
In this dissertation, I assess interaction in social media as a novel mode of political participation and ask how are party politics extended within the social media public sphere in Finland during the 2010s. In this research, I evaluate the formation of the social media political sphere by analyzing the party–political, demographic, and ideological standings from which the sphere is produced and accessed, and how these factors are reconstructing social structures and orders on social media platforms. This dissertation concentrates on the six largest parties in Finland, namely the Social Democratic Party, the Finns Party, the National Coalition Party, the Center Party, the Green League, and the Left Alliance. By combining theoretical perspectives from a variety of academic fields, such as sociology, political science, social psychology, and economic sociology, the dissertation attempts to produce nuanced understandings of social, ideological, and party-political origins of digital participation and other topical phenomena, such as political polarization and spread of hate speech, in the Finnish political context.
In addition to a theoretical introduction, the dissertation comprises five research articles that cross-expose the party-related political actions on social media platforms from different perspectives. Articles I and II form temporal and structural frames for understanding the evolution of the social media political sphere in Finland. In Article I, we investigate the current state of and recent changes in access to social media, as well as the utilization of social media platforms for various purposes by the Finnish population. The social mechanisms that guide the formation of the social structure of the social media sphere are evaluated in Article II. In the following articles, we provide a more nuanced understanding of the formation of the social media political sphere. In Article III, we evaluate the state of the social media political sphere by assessing social media participation among party supporter groups in the Finnish political field and contribute to the discussion on the effects of party supporters’ sociodemographic background and value-based premises on social media participation. In Articles IV and V, social media participation is understood as an explanatory mechanism associated with party supporters’ behavioral tendencies on social media and affective aspects of party members’ commitment to their parties.
The research contributes novel knowledge related to political participation in social media and the formation of the political sphere in Finland during the 2010s. In the dissertation, I propose that political discussions in social media could be understood as a political activity through which participants can modify the public opinion by raising ideological aims and desires within the public sphere. The research illuminates how social structures and ideological aims both accelerate and attenuate political activity in the social media political sphere. In addition, the research shows how social structures and ideological stances are reflected in the structures of social media networks. Results of the dissertation also indicate that the social media political sphere emphasizes the visibility of the new identity parties, namely the Finns Party, the Green League, and the Left Alliance. Accordingly, the results infer that political discussions related to post-material and neo-conservative issues are highlighted on social media, which is especially reflected in the pronounced activity of the new identity parties’ supporters and members within both the social media sphere and political parties.
... And guilt has been shown to mediate framing effects on support for Dutch-Indonesian reparations [18] and on perceptions of American racial inequality [28] among members of the dominant group. Those emotions do not stop when people go on social media [29]. Since discussions of white privilege create uncomfortable feelings among some people, these heightened race group-based emotions may cause individuals to avoid engaging in online discussions. ...
The language used in online discussions affects who participates in them and how they respond, which can influence perceptions of public opinion. This study examines how the term white privilege affects these dimensions of online communication. In two lab experiments, US residents were given a chance to respond to a post asking their opinions about renaming college buildings. Using the term white privilege in the question decreased the percentage of whites who supported renaming. In addition, those whites who remained supportive when white privilege was mentioned were less likely to create an online post, while opposing whites and non-whites showed no significant difference. The term also led to more low-quality posts among both whites and non-whites. The relationship between question language and the way participants framed their responses was mediated by their support or opposition for renaming buildings. This suggests that the effects of the term white privilege on the content of people’s responses is primarily affective. Overall, mention of white privilege seems to create internet discussions that are less constructive, more polarized, and less supportive of racially progressive policies. The findings have the potential to support meaningful online conversation and reduce online polarization.
... Como hecho característico y novedoso en la última década, el consumo de información política en redes sociales provoca una genuina respuesta emocional por parte de la ciudadanía, bien sean emociones positivas o negativas, influenciado por el tipo de red social utilizada; de hecho, representan y provocan emociones de forma simultánea, jugando un papel muy importante en la escalada o desescalada de los conflictos, en especial de los políticos (Duncombe, 2019). En este punto cobra especial relevancia la existencia de «cámaras de eco», es decir, la tendencia a seleccionar información que se adhiera al sistema de creencias, al igual que una tendencia a formar grupos polarizados en torno a los cuáles se genera un determinado entorno emocional. ...
Los medios de comunicación, y en los últimos años las redes sociales, son uno de los espacios centrales de confrontación política que generan un marco de interpretación de la democracia y de sus afectos. Su consumo afecta de forma directa a las actitudes de la ciudadanía, reforzando las creencias previas y dibujando no solamente un marco cognitivo, sino también emocional. Desde esta óptica, las emociones se construyen y circulan socialmente en el marco de la comunicación política. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo discutir en qué medida y en qué condiciones los medios de comunicación y las redes sociales determinan las emociones ciudadanas al respecto de los distintos partidos políticos en España. Con este cometido, se ha realizado un análisis descriptivo utilizando la Encuesta postelectoral para las elecciones generales de noviembre de 2019. Como principales resultados, se observa que la ciudadanía que consume información política en España a través de cualquier tipo de medio presenta un perfil emocional más activo, con mayor presencia de las emociones negativas que las positivas y con una mayor intensidad de aversión en la red. Además, los distintos soportes tienen características propias, entras las que destacan la activación del entusiasmo en la televisión hacia los partidos de izquierda y una generalización de las emociones negativas hacia todas las formaciones y candidatos en redes sociales, en especial Twitter.
... The natural structure of Twitter as a tool of political communication has attracted politicians to use this online space for communication with their counterparts, and to make political statements that may provoke strong positive or negative emotions among other users. This shows the power of Twitter to escalate or de-escalate, to move from online politics to offline politics (Duncombe, 2019). In the context of this study, if taken offline or to the streets, derogatory humor can cause harm and hatred of others. ...
This study examines the effects of humorous posts on Twitter during an uncertain time, such as the Coronavirus pandemic, which brought panic globally. In Kuwait, many Twitter users have posted humorous tweets about the Coronavirus to influence the public’s understanding of the pandemic and exert pressure on government to take measures to stop the spread of the disease. However, the impact of many of humorous tweets was indirect and negative, causing panic and division among social groups. An online survey was employed to examine the effects of humorous Twitter messages on understanding the pandemic, causing hatred toward others and augmenting a sense of negative emotion in society. The response of 1,031 to the survey indicated that humor increased negative emotional reactions and increased understanding of the pandemic. There was no link between Twitter humor and hatred of others. The influence of humor during times of uncertainty and crises is discussed.
... Thus, comments on images, memes, videos and interactions such as likes and retweets, show the different ways in which subjects approach technology, often leading to an appropriation that achieves the resignification of the meaning of the political arena and the space/time in which the political debate develops along with its repercussions. This means that on rare occasions, the online participation translates into physical manifestations of political participation, such as organized protests (Duncombe, 2019). ...
This paper argues in favor of the manifestation of a liquid democracy on Twitter during the Colombian presidential election campaigns (2018-2022) through a qualitative analysis of over 2484 responses to the candidates' messages. Users appropriated the platform through the use of memes, fake news and hashtags (#) to attack or defend the politicians, ignoring any of their campaign proposals. A flowchart was created to illustrate the emergence of subjectivities that emerge during political discussions on the platform, such as saboteur/troll, or cyberactivists. Likewise, the profiles of the candidates were constructed under a marketing strategy appropriate to this new cyber-citizenship. The findings support a lack of political debate or discussion and a simulated political participation that does not guarantee the exercise of democracy
... Participants can voice their support or disagreement in real-time updates via tweets. However, the "Twittersphere" is more than just a platform for expressing one's opinions; it is also a particularly conducive platform for dialogue and engagement during COVID-19 as participants can direct their comments to other individuals or groups, as well as reply to and respond to comments directed at them (Duncombe, 2019). Using Foucauldian Discourse to analyse the narratives and public vocabulary regarding power relations and knowledge production on Twitter, is one methodological approach. ...
Free speech is not a license for racists to spread propaganda. However, the outbreak of COVID-19 and its subsequent spread across the globe has left a shocking wave of disbelief resulting in an upsurge of xenophobia in the society. Racism is a system of dominance and power designed to uphold the racially privileged. This study delves into the consciousness of Twitter postings during the COVID-19 pandemic and deconstructs the power dynamics in the hashtags used. The study’s data was analysed using Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) to identify the representation within tweet sample sets. The study concludes that social interactions on Twitter constructs power dynamics and these shared values create a new form of power resistance and subjugated knowledge. This leads to a discussion of power between social media intertwined with the machine learning tools in social science and humanities studies. This study contributes to the academic debates about the public sphere and social media's role in constructing meaning in cultural and social change. It also suggests that Twitter develops policies to prohibit hate speech and impose regulations to ensure that online spaces remain civil, safe, and democratic.
... Tweets allow people to voice their support or displeasure in real-time updates by sending out a message to the entire world. More than just a forum for expressing one's opinions, the "Twittersphere" is an especially conducive forum for dialogue and engagement during Covid-19, as participants can direct their comments to other individuals or groups, as well as reply to and respond to comments directed at them [61]. Participants can also direct their comments to other individuals or groups, as well as reply to and respond to comments directed at them. ...
... Con la aparición de internet como elemento para el desarrollo de la campaña electoral, el recurso a la utilización de materiales con contenido negativa y/o humorístico ha ido en aumento (Duncombe, 2019), de nuevo siguiendo el modelo de Estados Unidos, en donde ambas cuestiones se vienen utilizando desde hace más de dos décadas (Kaid, McKinney y Tedesco, 2000;Tsichla et al., 2019). Más aún con la entrada en escena de los partidos políticos de derecha radical populista (Antón y Hernández-Carr, 2016; Kishishita, 2018;Prodobnick et al. 2019) y su habitual recurso a lo que algunos autores han denominado como "LOLitics" (Klein, 2019). ...
El siglo XXI ha denotado un refuerzo de las formaciones de derecha radical populista en Europa. Así, los comicios europeos de 2019 suponían un reto para las instituciones europeas ante el auge de estas formaciones en prácticamente todos los estados miembros. Este artículo tiene el objetivo de comprobar si los partidos de derecha radical populista siguen la tendencia comunicativa que la teoría establece para este tipo de formaciones y si, comparativamente con el resto de contendientes europeos, han marcado una diferencia en su estrategia comunicativa. Gracias a los datos del Project Platform Europe, se ha realizado un análisis de casi 10.000 materiales de campaña para poder concluir que, efectivamente, existen diferencias sutiles entre las formaciones de derecha populista y el resto de los partidos políticos que concurrieron a las elecciones europeas de mayo de 2019 y las pautas teóricas comunicativas se han cumplido a la perfección, lo que denota una americanización y polarización de la campaña electoral.
... With the rise of the modern era, our life faced a new way of communicating, a new way of social interaction [1]; which is the social media platforms. Willy-nilly if we accept it or not, SM became a phenomenon in our daily life; it became an essential part of our recent lifestyle. ...
Transnational political communication today is being reconfigured by digital technologies and global power transition. Authoritarian state actors such as China are increasingly active on global social media platforms such as Twitter to directly advance their preferred frames with foreign publics in Western democracies, most notably in what could be called Chinese Twiplomacy contesting narrative globally over contentious issues. This paper problematises such Twiplomacy from authoritarians to Western democracies as ‘networked transnational frame contestation’, arguing that the political and cultural distance between the sending and target countries, the networked affordance of social media, and the national prism of the target countries, all contribute importantly to the complexity of such frame contestation. Through a case study on China's Twiplomacy in contesting coronavirus narrative in the UK, this paper further provides empirical evidence on how ‘networked transnational frame contestation’ works between politically and culturally distant countries. Using a mixed-method approach combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, this study finds that China's emotion-evoking discursive strategy draws traction but the authoritarian nature of the highly centralised networkedness and that of its discursive strategy, together with the strong cultural discordance with British publics, lead to networked recontextualisation of its intended frames in Britain. British publics, heavily relying on British political elites and press for foreign affairs, invoke shared cultural reference to recontextualise Chinese frames into culturally resonant counterframes. This study proposes a paradigm of ‘networkedness within cascades’ to understand frame contestation between politically and culturally distant countries.
In this article, we examine whether former President Trump utilized Twitter to craft a narrative regarding international trade via his use of Twitter. We examine Trump's language choices in a corpus of his tweets to compare his tone in trade‐related tweets against his more general tweets during his presidency. We find that Trump's trade tweets contain language that is more cognitively complex, masculine, and honest, compared to his non‐trade‐focused tweets. This study illustrates Trump's ability to craft and maintain a narrative about trade based on exaggeration and manipulations, in line with populist leadership theory.
In recent years, episodes of diplomatic “impoliteness” have attracted growing attention among international relations (IR) scholars. Whether in the form of sharp-edged humor, insults, or other face-undermining behavior, scholars are increasingly examining episodes where the expected civility of diplomacy breaks down and impoliteness becomes weaponized as a tool of statecraft. While sympathetic to these approaches, I argue that the deployment of impoliteness cannot be understood in isolation from the powerful asymmetries that shape global politics. To show why, I advance a theory of mockery in international politics with an emphasis of a specific kind: backstage mockery. Building on the work of Goffman, I conceptualize mocking displays as acts of ridicule that undermine an actor's positive public image or “face” based on two contextual factors: (1) perceptions of transgression and (2) relative status. In hierarchical settings, lower-status members are often unable to openly criticize the transgressions of their social superiors because of the threat of retaliation. Covert or “backstage” mockery offers an outlet for weaker members to express their concerns and build solidarity with other members, while at the same time indirectly signaling those with higher status about problems. To illustrate the significance of backstage mockery, I discuss Canada–US relations and the 2019 viral video of NATO leaders appearing to privately mock US President Donald Trump.
How do interactions in the cyber domain affect states’ ontological security and how do states respond to these challenges? These are pertinent questions given the increasing influence of cyber technologies on daily life, politics, and International Relations. Over the years, state actors have faced challenges in various spheres, including security, politics, economics, and culture. However, nowadays, cyber technologies enable the emergence of effective, efficient, and powerful alternatives to the current state-system practices. This creates fundamental challenges to states’ sense of self, identity, and home, calling into question states’ dominant and ingrained narratives regarding their roles in the international arena. I suggest that the scholarship of ontological security, although rarely used in this context, provides intriguing analytical tools to explore these questions. This scholarship focuses on the actors’ ability to maintain their sense of self, allowing researchers to explore how interactions in the cyber domain challenge states’ routines, narratives, and sense of home. Furthermore, using the scholarship of ontological security to study cyber technologies can also account for states’ responses, illuminating puzzling behavior that cannot be explained fully through other perspectives.
This paper contributes to debates on the growing appeal of right-wing populism by combining a focus on visuality, narratives, and emotions. We argue that right-wing populists’ claims extend to establishing alternative emotion norms that collectivize feelings and their expression, and are conveyed in visual narratives. The emotional range covered by these norms transcends emotions usually associated with right-wing populism such as fear or humiliation. By employing seemingly inoffensive modes of presentation, emotional responses including indignation, compassion, and schadenfreude can be used as narrative bait for hitherto uninterested audiences. Following from that, emotion norms, such as exclusive forms of sympathy and humor, can be established. We illustrate our argument in three short case studies from Austria, France, and Italy. The conceptual and methodological insights are particularly relevant for those interested in the power of emotions, different modes of visual storytelling in world politics, and the performative effects of right-wing populist practices and narratives in politics.
Since visuality in the (self-)representation of politicians and other influential figures has become an important part of political storytelling, we propose to use visual narrative analysis (VNA) as a systematic approach for its better understanding. VNA is particularly suited for this performative strand of interpretive analysis, as it does not study images in isolation but in the broader context of political narratives. By analysing different layers of communication (images, narratives, competing narratives) VNA enables us to identify internal contradictions that undermine political efforts of self-representation in contexts of global governance (e.g. multilateral diplomacy) and render them unstable and contestable. By analysing competing (self-)representations at a G7 meeting in 2018, we show how VNA can be applied fruitfully to the study of international politics and, second, how VNA can explain some of the reasons why one image became iconic (Angela Merkel as female leader of the liberal world), i.e. appealed to a wider audience, and others (focusing on Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump) did not. While our article is primarily a demonstration of the methodological benefits of VNA for various research contexts in world politics, it also contributes to conceptual debates on the combination of visuality, narratives and emotions in changing practices of political storytelling.
Social media is currently taking on a role as a mobilizing, organizing, and communication tool for social protest movements. Social media platforms facilitate content creation, an emotional and motivational exchange to support and oppose protest activities. Social media can increase protest participation, such as hashtags through Twitter. A negative emotional sentiment triggers the hashtag to become a trending topic in Indonesia. It started with the Environment and Forestry minister’s tweet about development and deforestation, making the public react by raising the hashtag #mositidakpercaya. This study explores the vote of no confidence and the correlation of narrative in the hashtag using a qualitative research method with Q-DAS NVivo 12 Plus analysis. The research data source was obtained from Twitter by capturing the hashtag #mositidakpercaya with supporting data from online media, journal literature, and books. The findings showed that miscommunication and the failure to understand the discussed context were conveyed.
While many conservation scientists trace their interest in the subject to experiences with nature, today social media is a powerful tool to reach younger generations. In this study, we sought to understand the role of social media in Generation Z’s awareness of conservation issues and if social media spurs any pro-environmental behavior change related to conservation amongst Generation Z. We surveyed students at Arizona State University to better understand how they become aware of conservation issues. Findings indicate that while students became aware of conservation issues in many ways, online sources—especially social media and online news sources—are prominent for many. Our results suggest the strong potential of social media for communicating science and conservation issues to young people. We encourage scientists to leverage social media to engage young people because it is a straightforward and high-impact avenue for science communication and public engagement.
This article suggests a new approach for looking at emotions. In the framework that is developed, emotions are practices that are performed in context and not only felt or had. On the theoretical side, three concepts inspired by Bourdieu's work are introduced: hexis, emotional sense, and emotional performance. On the methodological side, this framework is used to make sense of emojis in digital exchanges. Emojis are the literal display of an emotion “on paper”—or rather, on screen—and constitute a simplified way to read the emotional communication between individuals. They are not epiphenomenal. Given the widespread use of instant messaging applications, they are an accessible and effective means for individuals to perform emotions. In turn, this framework opens up the possibility to analyze better how and why mundane emotions matter in international politics. How diplomats use emojis on WhatsApp during negotiations at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva serves as an illustration. Often perceived as guided by rational calculations, diplomats also master informal and interpersonal skills to persuade, negotiate, and build connections. This fundamental social dimension of diplomatic work puts their (online) emotional practices at the center of their performances.
In an Internet-enabled era, we are citizens in a vast array of different online spaces, and the behaviours afforded to these spaces are becoming increasingly complex. Within the study of computer-mediated communication (CMC), there is an implicit assumption that behaviour occurring in CMC is equivalent to that depicted in the communicated message. However, we note that this is not always the case. The purpose of this critical review is to elucidate different typologies of “online behaviour” based on our proposed Online Behaviour Taxonomy. Within this, we propose three types of “online behaviour” which are largely distinguishable based on where the behaviour itself originates (online or offline) and how this interacts with internet-enabled technologies. These are: online-exclusive, online-mediated and online-recorded behaviour. Specifically, we assert that the source of behaviour (i.e. whether it occurs online or offline) is currently not explicitly referenced in CMC theory, yet acts as a key indicator to dissect the ambiguity of ‘online behaviour’ as a generalised concept. This is arguably a critical factor associated with user experiences and effects of CMC. We situate this discussion in the wider context of CMC; specifically how factors such as audience effects are differentially relevant to these three types of behaviour. Finally, we outline the emerging conceptual contributions and practical directions which we assert may be influenced by our proposed Online Behaviour Taxonomy.
This article theorizes how public performances matter in international negotiations. Studies of international negotiations are predominantly focused on power-political instruments in use around the negotiating table. I argue that public communication cannot be dismissed as cheap talk but that it plays a constitutive role in and on international negotiations. Contributing to the international relations (IR) literature on negotiations, the article suggests an orientation toward an increasingly important aspect of international negotiations in a hypermediated world political context, namely public performances that challenge the distinction between domestic signaling and claim-making toward negotiating parties. Hypermediated negotiations mean that much of what goes on in IR is spread to large audiences in new and emerging digital sites in near real time. Actors use public performances to define and legitimize their desired visions for negotiating outcomes. As public performances, these are power-political instruments in and of themselves, part of the array of tactics that states turn to when competing for influence in international negotiations. The theorization is illustrated with an example from the UK–EU Brexit negotiations. The illustration is a qualitative Twitter analysis that shows the performative toolbox in use, as well as the importance of public performances themselves in the endgame of the Brexit negotiations.
La participación política y el desarrollo de los valores son procesos
que se van construyendo desde los primeros años de vida, en cuya for�mación influyen las personas cercanas al niño, los patrones culturales y los ejemplos familiares. Todo ello dará como resultado una orientación ciudadana participativa, consiente y congruente, lo cual permitirá el tener ciudadanos que aporten participen y construyan un mejor país.
Se construye la aproximación teórica de este trabajo de investigación mediante los preceptos, teorías y supuestos que distintos autores han aportado con respecto a los valores humanos, los valores tradicionales y modernos; la participación política juvenil convencional y no conven�cional; así como distintos trabajos que sobre participación y formación política han desarrollado diversos estudiosos en México y otros países
The international community is too often focused on responding to the latest cyber-attack instead of addressing the reality of pervasive and persistent cyber conflict. From ransomware against the city government of Baltimore to state-sponsored campaigns targeting electrical grids in Ukraine and the U.S., we seem to have relatively little bandwidth left over to ask what we can hope for in terms of 'peace' on the Internet, and how to get there. It's also important to identify the long-term implications for such pervasive cyber insecurity across the public and private sectors, and how they can be curtailed. This edited volume analyzes the history and evolution of cyber peace and reviews recent international efforts aimed at promoting it, providing recommendations for students, practitioners and policymakers seeking an understanding of the complexity of international law and international relations involved in cyber peace. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Twitter as a micro-blog becomes a channel for political communication as well as an online platform for political debates regarding political issues and expressing support for or rebuffing political groups and parties. The properties of twitter that allows tweeting with 280 characters, enforce politicians to write down tweets carefully and choose terms and words skillfully in a way that convey messages to their supporters and fans adding to those whom following them on twitter. Like politicians throughout the world, Iraqi and Kurdistan regions’ politicians are using twitter to tweet daily activities and their stands towards internal and outer situations with the three languages of Kurdish, Arabic and English. Survey method is used in this study for surveying within two month tweets of four high rank politicians in Iraq and Kurdistan region including Barham Salih Iraqi president, Mustafa Al-kadhimi Iraqi Prime Minister, Nechirvan Barzani Iraqi Kurdistan region president and Masrour Barzani Kurdistan regional government prime minister. According to the study, despite a huge amount of replays on the politicians’ tweets, there is not any political debates occurred between the Iraqi and Kurdistan regional officials and their followers on twitter. In other word, using twitter by officials lack on interactivity and the directions of messages take one side. In addition, news and information posted by officials on twitter are a mixture of texts, photos and videos as well as due to limitation of tweets in terms of size, part of tweets are shorten-linked to other social media such Facebook and Youtube.
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A number of systematic reviews on multimodal pedagogies in English language classrooms were conducted from the 1990s to early 2010s. However, there is no recent review examining the thematic issues related to multimodal pedagogies in the English language classroom. This systematic review addresses this gap by examining research articles published from 2010 to 2021 on multimodal pedagogies in the primary and secondary English language classrooms. A qualitative thematic analysis of 98 articles gathered from the search uncovered five common themes including engagement with multimodal texts from students' lifeworld, the use of critical, creative and culturally responsive multimodal pedagogies , explicit teaching of multimodal literacy, affect in multimodal learning, and concerns over multimodal assessment. The article discusses these themes in relation to the thematic findings of existing review studies with the same focus of multimodality in the English language classroom, and proposes directions for future research .
This research analyses three fundamental questions to determine how, when and by whom emotions are used in campaign materials (political propaganda). Focusing on the 2019 European elections we carry out a three-phase analysis. Firstly, we check the use of rational content against content that appeals to voters’ emotions. Secondly, we observe which of these emo tions are channelled towards the use of negative strategies and, therefore, identifying who is the object of this attack. And lastly, we determine which party families make the most use of humorous content since this resource is believed to be part of an appeal to voter’s feelings and, therefore, it is essential to know if there are differences between political groups. Considering this analytical strategy, the structure of the work begins with the contextualisation of the 2019 European elections to focus, later, on highlighting the importance of electoral campaigns as a given time when communicative activity intensifies. Once the importance of electoral campaigns has been defined the article analyses how campaign materials, in a general context of political propaganda, are one of the most powerful tools. In this sense, the analytical strategy of political parties’ campaign materials can be said to focus on the use of emotions. Data from the European Elections Monitoring Center (EEMC) has been used not only for theoretical contextualization, but throughout the whole paper.
This article examines how affective narratives of the COVID-19 pandemic on Chinese social media reinforce and challenge established scripts of national identity, political legitimacy, and international geopolitical imaginary. Taking theoretical insights from the scholarship on trauma, disaster nationalism, and politics of emotions, I structure the analysis of social media posts from state media and private accounts around three emotional registers: grief as a crucial site of control and contestation during the initial stage of the outbreak; gandong (being moved in a positive way) associated with stories of heroic sacrifices, national unity, and mundane ‘heart-warming’ moments; and enmity in narratives of power struggles and ideological competition between China and ‘the West’, especially the United States. While state media has sought to transform the crisis into resources for strengthening national belonging and regime legitimacy through a digital reworking of the long-standing repertoire of disaster nationalism, alternative articulations of grief, rage, and vernacular memory that refuse to be incorporated into the ‘correct collective memory’ of a nationalised tragedy have persisted in digital space. Furthermore, the article explicates the ways in which popular narratives affectively reinscribe dominant ideas about the (inter)national community: such as the historical imagination of a continuous nationhood rising from disasters and humiliation, positive energy, and a dichotomous view of the international order characterised by Western hegemony and Chinese victimhood. The geopolitical narratives of the pandemic build on and exacerbate binary oppositions between China and ‘the West’ in the global imaginary, which are co-constructed through discursive practices on both sides in mutually reinforcing ways. The lens of emotion allows us to attend to the resonances and dissonances between official and popular narrativisations of the disaster without assuming a one-way determinate relationship between the two.
This essay outlines the contribution that Australia-based scholars have made to aesthetic politics: the exploration of creative and interdisciplinary approaches to International Relations. The struggle to legitimise aesthetic insights is indicative of a larger challenge: how academic disciplines discipline thought in ways that constrains innovative scholarly contributions and their potential to address concrete political problems. The essay advances an argument in favour of seeing beyond the discipline of International Relations. The international is not some higher-order realm that is separate from the rest of the social and political world. The most pressing challenges, from terrorism to climate change, are too complex to be understood as uniquely international phenomena. They implicate the local as much as the global, the psychological as much as the institutional and the relational as much as the structural. Finding practical and policy-relevant solutions to complex transnational problems requires insights from fields as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, literature, demography art and economics, to name just a few. Needed, then, is greater acceptance and support for creative approaches that can understand and address political challenges from multiple parallel perspectives and without having to adhere to preconceived disciplinary conventions.
Prior research has documented involvement of government and civil society actors in governance processes, but has largely neglected a key player: corporate business interests. Combining insights from social-ecological systems, organizational systems theory, theories of governance and power, interest group rule-making participation, and non-state alternative environmental governance, we examine corporate involvement and power in environmental governance systems. Drawing on a sample of Twitter messages about fuel economy standards, posted between 2012 and 2020, we offer a sector-level discourse analysis of corporate power and its interaction with the sociopolitical environment. The results suggest that business interests are gaining increasing power in the participation arena of U.S. fuel economy governance processes. The results likewise indicate corporations’ response to a changing political landscape in the U.S. Taken together, our analysis advances current scholarship on power dynamics in governance processes and on empirical assessment of power, offering implications for governance system design and implementation.
During the 2016 US presidential election, we witnessed a polarized population and an election outcome that defied the predictions of many media sources. In this study, we conducted a follow-up on political view migration through tracking Twitter users’ account activity. The study was conducted by following a set of Twitter users over a four year period. Each year, Twitter user activities were collected and analyzed by our novel cross-account data mining algorithm. This algorithm through multiple iterations computes a numerical political score for each user based on their connection to other users and hashtags. We identified a set of seed users and hashtags using prominent political figures and movements to bootstrap the algorithm. The political score distribution demonstrates a divided population on political views. We also observed that users are more moderate in years close to elections (2017 and 2020) compared to years of none election (2018 and 2019). There is an overall migration trend from conservatives to progressives during the four years. This change in scores across the four year time frame suggests a unique political cycle exclusive to Donald Trump’s unprecedented presidential term. Our results in a broad sense portray the potential capabilities of a data collection and scoring algorithm that detected a noticeable political migration and describes the broad social characteristics of certain politically aligned users on social media platforms.
The recent ‘emotion turn’ in international theory is widely viewed as a cutting-edge development which pushes the field in fundamentally new directions. Challenging this narrative, this essay returns to the historical works of Walter Lippmann to show how thinking about emotions has been central to international theory for far longer than currently appreciated. Deeply troubled by his experience with propaganda during the First World War, Lippmann spent the next several decades thinking about the relationship between emotion, mass politics, and the challenges of foreign policy in the modern world. The result was a sophisticated account of the role of emotional stereotypes and symbols in mobilizing democratic publics to international action. I argue that a return to Lippmann's ideas offers two advantages. First, it shows his thinking on emotion and mass politics formed an important influence for key disciplinary figures like Angell, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Waltz. Second, it shows why the relationship between emotion and democracy should be understood as a vital concern for international theory. Vacillating between scepticism and hope, Lippmann's view of democracy highlights a series of challenges in modern mass politics – disinformation, the unintended consequences of emotional symbols, and responsibility for the public's emotional excesses – which bear directly on democracies' ability to engage the world.
This paper interrogates the coherence and evolution of emotions circulating on Twitter in a specific context: the social and political outburst of October 2019 in Chile. Starting from the important literature that addresses the relationship between social movements, emotions and social networks, the paper asks about the particularities that this phenomenon in a country where the penetration and use of social networks is intense. By means of a sentiment analysis technique, more than 1,444,344 tweets published during a seven-week period are processed, putting particular interest in the description of the topics and emotions dumped in these messages. In the discussion we estimate how the exercise dialogues with results found in other similar situations, while in the conclusions we ponder its relevance for the analysis of emotions in situations of social conflict.
Recognition, or the lack of it, is a central concern in International Relations. However, how states cope with international misrecognition has so far not been thoroughly explored in International Relations scholarship. To address this, the article presents a theoretical framework for understanding international misrecognition by drawing on discursive and psychoanalytical theories of collective identity formation and humour studies. The article conceptualises international misrecognition as a gap between the dominant narrative of a national Self and the way in which this national Self is reflected in the ‘mirror’ of the international Other. We argue that humour offers an important way of coping with misrecognition by ridiculing and thereby downplaying international criticism. The significance for international relations is illustrated through an analysis of the public diplomacy campaign ‘Presenting Israel’, which, through parodying video clips, mobilised ordinary Israeli citizens to engage in peer-to-peer public diplomacy when travelling abroad. Public diplomacy campaigns are commonly seen by scholars and practitioners as attempts to improve the nation’s image and smoothen or normalise international Self–Other relations. However, after analysing the discursive and visual components of the campaign — which parodied how European media portrayed Israel as primitive, violent and exotic — this article observes that in the context of international misrecognition, such coping attempts can actually contribute to further international estrangement.
In the 2016 US presidential election campaign, social media platforms were increasingly used as direct sources of news, bypassing the editorial media. With the candidates’ millions of followers, Twitter has become a platform for mass communication and the candidate’s main online information channel. Likewise, social media has provided a platform for debating and critiquing the mainstream media by the campaigns and their networks. This article discusses the Twitter strategies of the democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and republican candidate Donald Trump during their US 2016 presidential election campaigns. While the Clinton campaign’s strategy confirms theories regarding the professionalisation of election campaigns, the Trump campaign’s more amateurish yet authentic style in social media points towards de-professionalisation and even amateurism as a counter-trend in political communication.
This essay explores the changing character of public discourse in the Age of Twitter. Adopting the perspective of media ecology, the essay highlights how Twitter privileges discourse that is simple, impulsive, and uncivil. This effect is demonstrated through a case study of Donald J. Trump's Twitter feed. The essay concludes with a brief reflection on the end times: a post-truth, post-news, President Trump, Twitter-world.
Emotion entrainment, which is generally defined as the synchronous convergence of human emotions, performs many important social functions. However, what the specific mechanisms of emotion entrainment are beyond in-person interactions, and how human emotions evolve under different entrainment patterns in large-scale social communities, are still unknown. In this paper, we aim to examine the massive emotion entrainment patterns and understand the underlying mechanisms in the context of social media. As modeling emotion dynamics on a large scale is often challenging, we elaborate a pragmatic framework to characterize and quantify the entrainment phenomenon. By applying this framework on the datasets from two large-scale social media platforms, we find that the emotions of online users entrain through social networks. We further uncover that online users often form their relations via dual entrainment, while maintain it through single entrainment. Remarkably, the emotions of online users are more convergent in nonreciprocal entrainment. Building on these findings, we develop an entrainment augmented model for emotion prediction. Experimental results suggest that entrainment patterns inform emotion proximity in dyads, and encoding their associations promotes emotion prediction. This work can further help us to understand the underlying dynamic process of large-scale online interactions and make more reasonable decisions regarding emergency situations, epidemic diseases, and political campaigns in cyberspace.
We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time—in 1941–1942 and in 2009—the government staged an extensive exhibition in the United States. Each time, the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case, the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted—against governmental intentions and policies at the time—the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands for sovereignty. In doing so, art challenged not only legal and political norms but also an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Rancière called the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, is thinkable and unthinkable, and thus, can and cannot be debated in politics.
Existing work linking empathy with social behavior has focused overwhelmingly on empathy for the negative emotions of others. But recent research suggests that feeling along with others’ negative emotions is a capacity distinct from feeling along with others’ positive emotions. In Study 1, we demonstrate the separability of positive and negative empathy by showing that although both relate to some of the same foundational empathic processes, each has a number of distinct correlates. In Study 2 we take an experimental approach and show that encouraging participants to empathize with the positive versus negative emotions of a suffering yet hopeful social group results in distinct patterns of vicarious emotion. Finally, Study 3 shows that although both positive empathy and negative empathy are associated to a similar degree with helping behavior directed toward others in need, positive—but not negative—empathy is related to “everyday” prosocial behaviors aimed specifically at increasing others’ positive emotions (e.g., random acts of kindness). Together, these results provide what to our knowledge is the first demonstration of the causal potency of positive and negative empathy as well as the first evidence that positive and negative empathy relate to different types of social behaviors.
This essay briefly surveys the development of the respective debates and then offers a path forward. The key challenge, we argue, is to theorize the processes through which individual emotions become collective and political. We further suggest that this is done best by exploring insights from two seemingly incompatible scholarly tendencies: macro theoretical approaches that develop generalizable propositions about political emotions and, in contrast, micro approaches that investigate how specific emotions function in specific circumstances. Applying this framework we then identify four realms that are central to appreciating the political significance of emotions: (1) the importance of definitions; (2) the role of the body; (3) questions of representation; and (4) the intertwining of emotions and power. Taken together, these building blocks reveal how emotions permeate world politics in complex and interwoven ways and also, once taken seriously, challenge many entrenched assumptions of international relations scholarship.
Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.
This paper analyzes the formation and subsequent securitization of the digital protest movement Anonymous, highlighting the emergence of social antagonists from communication itself. In contrast to existing approaches that implicitly or explicitly conceptualize Othering (and securitization) as unidirectional process between (active) sender and (passive) receiver, an approach that is based on communication gives the “threat” a voice of its own. The concept proposed in this paper focuses on “designations” as communicating rules and attributes with regard to a government object. It delineates how designations give rise to the visibility of political entities and agency in the first place. Applying this framework, we can better understand the movement's path from a bunch of anonymous individuals to the collectivity “Anonymous,” posing a threat to certain bases of the state's ontological existence, its prerogative to secrecy, and challenging its claim to unrestrained surveillance. At the same time, the state's bases are implicated and reproduced in the way this conflict is constructed. The conflict not only (re)produces and makes visible “the state” as a social entity, but also changes or at least challenges the self-same entity's agency and legitimacy. Such a relational approach allows insights into conflict formation as dynamic social process.
This book explores the politics of officially expressed emotion on the international stage, looking at the ways in which state actors strategically deploy emotional behavior to shape the perceptions of others. Examining diverse instances of emotional behavior, the book reveals that official emotional displays are not simply cheap talk but rather play an important role in the strategies and interactions of state actors. Emotional diplomacy is more than rhetoric; as the book demonstrates, its implications extend to the provision of economic and military aid, great-power cooperation, and even the use of armed force. The book provides the theoretical tools necessary for understanding the nature and significance of state-level emotional behavior and offers new observations of how states seek reconciliation, strategically respond to unforeseen crises, and demonstrate resolve in the face of perceived provocations. It investigates three specific strands of emotional diplomacy: those rooted in anger, sympathy, and guilt. The book provides new insights into the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the post-9/11 reactions of China and Russia, and relations between West Germany and Israel after World War II. The book's arguments can be extended to further cases ranging from Sino-Japanese relations to diplomatic interactions in Latin America. The book offers a unique take on the intersection of strategic action and emotional display, offering a means for making sense of why states appear to behave emotionally.
In Emotional Diplomacy, Todd H. Hall explores the politics of officially expressed emotion on the international stage, looking at the ways in which state actors strategically deploy emotional behavior to shape the perceptions of others. Examining diverse instances of emotional behavior, Hall reveals that official emotional displays are not simply cheap talk but rather play an important role in the strategies and interactions of state actors. Emotional diplomacy is more than rhetoric; as this book demonstrates, its implications extend to the provision of economic and military aid, great-power cooperation, and even the use of armed force.
Emotional Diplomacy provides the theoretical tools necessary for understanding the nature and significance of state-level emotional behavior and offers new observations of how states seek reconciliation, strategically respond to unforeseen crises, and demonstrate resolve in the face of perceived provocations. Hall investigates three specific strands of emotional diplomacy: those rooted in anger, sympathy, and guilt. Presenting original research drawing on interviews and sources in five different languages, Hall provides new insights into the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, the post-9/11 reactions of China and Russia, and relations between West Germany and Israel after World War II. He also demonstrates how his arguments can be extended to further cases ranging from Sino-Japanese relations to diplomatic interactions in Latin America. Emotional Diplomacy offers a unique take on the intersection of strategic action and emotional display, offering a means for making sense of why states appear to behave emotionally.
By paying attention to love, this article offers a grammatical reading of International Relations’ founding grammar of inside/outside as an ethics of encounter. The decision to focus on love is, I suggest, to contend with the possibility that IR may express a lethal politics and ethics. I seek to substantiate this claim through an unsettling reading of neo-Jamesian contributions to the emotional turn. I conclude that the discipline’s founding grammar is an ‘avoidance of love’ and offer a reminder that an alternative way of loving is possible.
The concept of Central Europe emerges from the tension between the aspiration for a Western identity and the failure to achieve it. This article analyzes The Glass Room, a novel by the British author Simon Mawer set in Brno, Czech Republic, as an artefact that sheds light on the affective dimension of this tension, as captured in the way the book speaks to the Central European desire for “Westernness.” Adopting a Lacanian perspective, I argue that The Glass Room functions as a geopolitical fantasy, bringing its Czech audiences the promise that the desired Western identity is within reach. However, this promise can never be fulfilled, since the substance of “Westernness” is too elusive to ever be possessed and is always dependent on the recognition of a Western audience. This oscillation between desire and its disappointment leads to the self-defeating politics of superiority/inferiority, which is so often seen in the region. The article makes a broader contribution by showing how desire sustains and reproduces particular conceptions of space and what role pop-culture plays in this process. In this argument, the reproduction of a geopolitical imagination depends on its ability to capture subjects’ desire for a full and stable identity.
As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.
International relations scholars are increasingly paying attention to “the emotional” as a way to understand global politics. What is often missing from these conversations is feminist knowledge on affect, and also discussions about methodology. By presenting a feminist methodological approach to the affective-discursive to analyze the politics of emotion, this paper aims to fill this gap. It starts by discussing feminist critiques of the “affective turn.” Then, a methodological framework of gender, discourse, and affect as a structure that “goes-without-saying” is presented. Hemmings’ concept of affective dissonance is used as a tool guiding a feminist curiosity, useful to zoom in on the political puzzle of what emotion (in its broadest sense) does. The third section draws on two examples of being emotional about violent “Woman” to illustrate how moments of affective dissonance spark a feminist curiosity about gender, agency, and political violence. In conclusion, the paper argues that feminist knowledge on affect offers a way to re-tune, reset, and reimagine research on the politics of emotion. By prioritizing affect as methodology, feminist knowledge should be valuable for critical endeavors interested in changing the status quo, no matter if the political puzzle is about gender or not.
In light of the events of 2011, Real-Time Diplomacy examines how diplomacy has evolved as media have gradually reduced the time available to policy makers. It analyzes the workings of real-time diplomacy and the opportunities for media-centered diplomacy programs that bypass governments and directly engage foreign citizens.
Work on affect has made significant contributions to how international relations (IR) scholars understand the high politics of international affairs, capturing political reactions to the horrific, the spectacular, and the exceptional. However, the turn to affect has been less inclined to offer comprehensive insight into the importance of emotion in banal or everyday international politics. The theory of ontological security can offer such insight as it attends to experiences of the everyday, particularly through the discursive production of identity. Identity might be disrupted at moments of spectacular or exceptional events that call it into question but is equally made and remade in the discursive production of everyday life. This research focuses on the latter, analyzing the reproduction of the international in the everyday through the vehicle of British soap operas Coronation Street and Emmerdale, both of which introduced storylines about migrant workers in the late 2000s. British soaps are designed to be culturally proximate and incorporate didactic messages. Analysis of soaps offers a layered and intersectional view of emotional reactions to international migration at the level of an abstracted individual and the level of the nation-as-viewer.
The growth of social media—and, in particular, Twitter and Facebook—has led scholars to study its effects on mass behavior and protest. But leaders are also active on social media. They use their accounts to communicate with domestic and international audiences. By the end of 2014, more than 76 percent of world leaders had an active presence on social media. What explains variation in their adoption and use of social media? We look at several different potential hypotheses: higher income per capita and internet penetration (modernization), social pressure, level of democratization, and geographic spread of adoption (diffusion). We find strong support that (1) increased political pressure from social unrest and (2) higher levels of democratization correlate with leader adoption of social media platforms. Although our findings are correlational, they reveal that institutional and political pressures are related to social media adoption and the political communication of world leaders.
While Western reactions to ISIS are commonly situated in a ‘politics of fear’, there has been surprisingly little reflection on what role fear plays in disciplinary arguments central to International Relations (IR). I argue this absence of reflection can explained by a shared doxa over fear’s mobilising potential in the politics of security. This doxa can be traced to a 19th Century strand of social theorising concerned with mass movements – crowds – which were envisioned as emotionally volatile and prone to manipulation. While subsequent social theorists were skeptical of how these claims reduced crowds to panic politics, scholarship in IR has uncritically reproduced them to argue fear remains a reliable pathway for expanding and intensifying the politics of security. Critical of this reasoning, I argue it leads to a dystopian vision of the politics of fear which obscures a more open and indeterminate politics of emotion.
The militant group known as the Islamic State has become notorious for its public displays of violence. Through slick high-definition videos showing beheadings, immolations and other forms of choreographed executions, the Islamic State has repeatedly captured the imagination of a global public and provoked vehement reactions. This article examines the Islamic State’s public displays of violence. Contrary to the public constitution of the Islamic State’s violence as an exceptional evil, the article argues that the group’s staging of killings and mutilations is not an unprecedented phenomenon, but a contemporary version of a distinct type of political violence that has been mobilized by various political agents throughout centuries. However, what is new and significant about the Islamic State’s choreographed executions is the public visibility of the acts and the global spectacle that the group has created. Thus, if the Islamic State is introducing a new dynamic in global politics, it is not a new form of violence or brutality, but rather a transformation of how spectacles of violence unfold on the global stage. Subsequently, the article highlights three dimensions of the Islamic State’s public displays of violence that have facilitated the creation of the global spectacle: the Islamic State’s technological skills and professional use of media (technology); the Islamic State’s mobilization of acts of violence that transgress prevailing sensibilities (transgression); and the violent acts’ function as not only a form of terror, but also an integral element of a state project and a visual manifestation of an alternative political order (politics).
Ontological security research in International Relations (IR) generally argues that agents pursue both physical security and a secure sense of self. However, insofar as this work focuses on agents’ stabilising routines, this article asks what may be gained by shifting the focus to the wider settings within which this occurs. What analytical purchase may be gained by re-focusing the study of ontological security not strictly on subjects, but on agents’ broader affective environments? Drawing together insights from philosophy, cultural studies, and geography, the article contends that ‘circulations of affect’ can reinforce agents’ sense of security within cognitively unstable environments that are typically viewed as inducing insecurity. In this sense, tracing transpersonal circulations of affect positions ontological security within the broader social processes out of which security-seeking subjects are formed. The empirical purchase of these concepts is illustrated through an analysis of articulations of security and subjectivity in the Arab Spring uprisings.
While emotions are widely regarded as integral to the “behavioral approach” to International Relations (IR), a host of fundamental problems have delayed the integration of affective influences into traditional models of IR. We aim to integrate affect by focusing on commitment problems, a body of work that contains strong theoretical predictions about how individual decision makers will and should act. Across two lab experiments, we use a novel experimental protocol that includes a psychophysiological measure of emotional arousal (skin conductance reactivity) to study how individuals react to changes in bargaining power. While we find support for one key pillar of IR theory—individuals do reject offers when they expect the opponent's power to increase—we also find that physiological arousal tampers with individuals’ ability to think strategically in the manner predicted by canonical models. Our follow-up experiment mimics the elements of institutional solutions to commitment problems and finds support for their efficacy on the individual level. Our novel findings suggest that when individuals face large power shifts, emotional arousal short-circuits their ability to “think forward and induct backwards,” suggesting that emotionally aroused individuals are less prone to commitment problems.
Both camps made extensive use of social media during the referendum, both to mobilise existing supporters and to convert new ones. However, the three main groups—Stronger In, Vote Leave and Leave.EU—each took differing strategies within this. Drawing on tweets published by the groups, the article compares the use of different positive and negative frames, as well as the thematic content. While reinforcing other work that shows differentials in focus on specific themes—economics for Stronger In, politics and immigration for the Leave groups—the analysis also highlights the use on both sides of ‘sticks’ (capitalisation on the other side’s errors) and ‘stones’ (new issues and framings that the group brings to the debate). If the latter constituted the pre-game plan, then the former became a substantial part of the practical application during the campaign, a development reinforced by the nature of the medium itself.
The “alt-right” base is an anonymous army of trolls, a new generation of internet racists who have pushed a nihilistic movement into the public eye with a mix of shock tactics, targeted harassment, outright calls to violence, and a savvy understanding of social media. Yes, the “alt-right” is a reactionary, ethno-nationalist formation that has been fueled and empowered by the rise of Donald Trump. But it is also a movement wracked with internal contradictions, plagued by division, and birthed of an older internet culture that preceded it and continues to inform its tactics, language, and organizational structure. Understanding the role of the “alt-right” in the current political moment means spending less time looking for ideological coherence and more on understanding how it exercises its power.
Social media is increasingly used as a means of communication between states. Diplomats and political leaders are ever more relying on Twitter in their daily practice to communicate with their counterparts. These exchanges occur in view of a global audience, providing an added level of scrutiny that is unique to this form of communication. Twitter arguably challenges traditional notions of diplomacy according to which it is conducted through formal channels of communication and informal face-to-face social engagement. Yet we must ask how instrumental social media is as a tool for signalling intentions, and whether this medium can be an effective platform for dialogue and trust development when traditional face-to-face diplomacy is limited. Social media posts by state representatives reflect and frame state identity and how a state wishes to be recognized by others. If we are attuned to these dynamics, shifts in representational patterns communicated through social media during high-level negotiations allow realizations of political possibilities for change. Key here is the surprising nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 that analysts and policy-makers have struggled to explain. I argue that the role of Twitter as a key part of negotiation strategy is a crucial demonstration of how social media can shape the struggle for recognition, and thereby legitimize political possibilities for change. Understanding the increasingly prominent and powerful, yet largely unknown, variable of social media as a tool of diplomatic practice provides insight into the recurrent question of how diplomats affect change beyond upholding the status quo in the international order.
Emotions underpin how political communities are formed and function. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in times of trauma. The emotions associated with suffering caused by war, terrorism, natural disasters, fam- ine and poverty can play a pivotal role in shaping communities and orien- tating their politics. But until recently the political roles of emotions have received only scant attention.
This book contributes to burgeoning literatures on emotions and inter- national relations by investigating how “affective communities” emerge after trauma. Drawing on several case studies and an unusually broad set of interdisciplinary sources, the book examines the role played by rep- resentations – from media images to historical narratives and political speeches. Representations of traumatic events are crucial, the book argues, because they generate socially embedded emotional meanings, which, in turn, enable direct victims and distant witnesses to share the injury – as well as the associated loss – in a manner that af rms a particular notion of collective identity. While ensuing political orders often re-establish old patterns, traumatic events can also generate new “emotional cultures” that genuinely transform national and transnational communities.
What drives candidates to “go negative” and against which opponents? Using a unique dataset consisting of all inter-candidate tweets by the 17 Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries, we assess predictors of negative affect online. Twitter is a free platform, and candidates therefore face no resource limitations when using it; this makes Twitter a wellspring of information about campaign messaging, given a level playing-field. Moreover, Twitter’s 140-character limit acts as a liberating constraint, leading candidates to issue sound bites ready for potential distribution not only online, but also through conventional media, as tweets become news. We find tweet negativity and overall rate of tweeting increases as the campaign season progresses. Unsurprisingly, the front-runner and eventual nominee, Donald Trump, sends and receives the most negative tweets and is more likely than his opponents to strike out against even those opponents who are polling poorly. However, candidates overwhelmingly “punch upwards” against those ahead of them in the polls, and this pattern goes beyond attacks against those near the top. Sixty of 136 dyads are characterized by lopsided negativity in one direction and only one of these 60 involves a clearly higher status candidate on the offensive.
The extrajudicial killing of Osama bin Laden (OBL) on 2 May 2011 was greeted with jubilation in the United States. The dominant interpretation of the event – expressed in US media, by US political elites, and on the streets of US cities – was that justice had been served on the perpetrator of the 9/11 atrocity and thereby a great historical wrong had been righted. This article argues that the ‘justice’ deployed was a proxy for revenge, understood as the infliction of harm on those who had inflicted harm on the avenger. The argument is situated in a broader discussion of the emotional topography on which acts of state revenge are politically premised. The bin Laden case is used to explore some issues raised by the growing literature on emotions in politics and International Relations including, most importantly, how emotions are collectivised and made public.
Empathy is invoked by President Barack Obama throughout his political memoirs and speeches as both central to his politics and vital to the creation of a more unified, just and socially responsible America. As Obama tells readers of The Audacity of Hope, ‘I find myself returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle — “How would that make you feel?” … It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit’ (2006a: 67). Cultivating ‘a stronger sense of empathy’, Obama argues, would ‘tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society’, both inside and outside the nation (67–8). This link between empathy and social justice has been long discussed within feminist and anti-racist social theory. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty argue, for example, that in a contemporary world order structured by transnational capital, ‘engagement based on empathy’ is integral to processes of fostering ‘social justice’ and ‘building solidarity across otherwise debilitating social, economic and psychic boundaries’ (1997: xlii). Writing more recently, Breda Gray contends that critical empathetic engagement ‘can bring emotion, ethics and politics together to facilitate contextually-sensitive, contingent and, hopefully, politically effective feminist solidarities’ (2011: 207).
This paper examines the agency of Arab urban spaces in shaping local policing arrangements in Israel using a recent experiment with Combined Municipal Policing (CMP) in the city of Nazareth as a case study. Departing from prevailing analytical approaches to the study of local governance in Arab urban localities in Israel, it adopts a distributive notion of agency that addresses both the role of (uneven) arrangements of power in producing Arab-only urban spaces, as well as the role of (uneven) material assemblages and infrastructures of power—road networks, in particular—in generating, and frustrating, local policing arrangements within them. Building on a critique of ethnocratic theory as it relates to Arab-only localities in particular, it argues that changes in local policing arrangements should not be viewed simply as a sophistication of prevailing mechanisms of control, but rather as an interactional consequence of a more complex spatial regime of power that reveals the latent, unintended, and immanent political potency of the (Arab) city to talk to, with, and back to power.
How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for each side from international audiences on social media. I employ a Bayesian structural vector autoregression to measure how Israel’s and Hamas’s actions respond to shifts in international public support. The main finding is that shifts in public support reduce conflict intensity, particularly for Israel. This effect is greater than the effect of the key international actors—United States, Egypt, and United Nations. The results provide an important insight into how information technology is changing the role of international audiences in conflict.
This article posits empirical and political reasons for recent ‘micro-moves’ in several contemporary debates, and seeks to further develop them in future International Relations studies. As evidenced by growing trends in studies of practices, emotions and the everyday, there is continuing broad dissatisfaction with grand or structural theory’s value without ‘going down’ to ‘lower levels’ of analysis where structures are enacted and contested. We suggest that empirics of the last 15 years — including the war on terror and the Arab Spring — have pushed scholars into increasingly micropolitical positions and analytical frameworks. Drawing upon insights from Gilles Deleuze, William Connolly and Henri Lefebvre, among others, we argue that attention to three issues — affect, space and time — hold promise to further develop micropolitical perspectives on and in International Relations, particularly on issues of power, identity and change. The article offers empirical illustrations of the analytical purchase of these concepts via discussion of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring uprisings.
Professor Steele puts forth some bold and intriguing propositions about the vulnerability of powerful nation-states to what he calls 'counter-power.' -Mlada Bukovansky, Smith College Defacing Power investigates how nation-states create self-images in part through aesthetics and how these images can be manipulated to challenge those states' power. Although states have long employed media, such as radio, television, and film, for their own image-making purposes, counterpower agents have also seized upon new telecommunications technologies. Most recently, the Internet has emerged as contested territory where states and other actors wage a battle of words and images. Moving beyond theory, Brent Steele illustrates his provocative argument about the vulnerability of power with examples from recent history: the My Lai Massacre and the Tet Offensive, September 11 and the al-Qaeda communiqués, the atrocities at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, and the U.S. response to the Asian tsunami of December 2004. He demonstrates how a nation-state-even one as powerful as the United States-comes to feel threatened not only by other nation-states or terrorist organizations but also by unexpected events that challenge its self-constructed image of security. At the same time, Steele shows that as each generation uses available media to create and re-create a national identity, technological innovations allow for the shifting, upheaval, and expansion of the cultural structure of a nation. Brent J. Steele is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Kansas.
Can one use emotion at anything other than the individual level of analysis? Emotion happens in biological bodies, not in the space between them, and this implies that group emotion is nothing but a collection of individuals experiencing the same emotion. This article contends that group-level emotion is powerful, pervasive, and irreducible to individuals. People do not merely associate with groups (or states), they can become those groups through shared culture, interaction, contagion, and common group interest. Bodies produce emotion that identities experience: group-level emotion can be stronger than, and different from, emotion experienced as an individual; group members share, validate, and police each others' feelings; and these feelings structure relations within and between groups in international politics. Emotion goes with identity.
Emotions are a ubiquitous intersubjective element of world politics. Yet, passions are often treated as fleeting, private, reactive, and not amenable to systematic analysis. Institutionalization links the private and individual to the collective and political. Passions may become enduring through institutionalization, and thus, as much as characterizing private reactions to external phenomena, emotions structure the social world. To illustrate this argument, I describe how fear and empathy may be institutionalized, discuss the relationship between these emotions, and suggest how empathy may be both a mirror and potential antidote to individual and institutionalized fear.
The concept of soft power occupies a prominent place in International Relations, foreign policy, and security studies. Primarily developed by Joseph S. Nye, the concept is typically drawn upon to emphasize the more intangible dimensions of power in a field long dominated by overtly material (i.e. military) power. Recently, some scholars have reframed soft power - specifically the key notion of attraction - as a narrative and linguistic process. This literature, however, has downplayed some of the other deep-seated underpinnings of soft power, which this article argues lie in the dynamics of affect. Building upon the International Relations affect and aesthetics literatures, this article develops the concept of soft power as rooted in the political dynamics of emotion and introduces the concept of affective investment. The attraction of soft power stems not only from its cultural influence or narrative construction, but more fundamentally from audiences' affective investments in the images of identity that it produces. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of the construction of American attraction in the war on terror.
This book analyses digital diplomacy as a form of change management in international politics. The recent spread of digital initiatives in foreign ministries is often argued to be nothing less than a revolution in the practice of diplomacy. In some respects this revolution is long overdue. Digital technology has changed the ways firms conduct business, individuals conduct social relations, and states conduct governance internally, but states are only just realizing its potential to change the ways all aspects of interstate interactions are conducted. In particular, the adoption of digital diplomacy (i.e., the use of social media for diplomatic purposes) has been implicated in changing practices of how diplomats engage in information management, public diplomacy, strategy planning, international negotiations or even crisis management. Despite these significant changes and the promise that digital diplomacy offers, little is known, from an analytical perspective, about how digital diplomacy works. This volume, the first of its kind, brings together established scholars and experienced policy-makers to bridge this analytical gap. The objective of the book is to theorize what digital diplomacy is, assess its relationship to traditional forms of diplomacy, examine the latent power dynamics inherent in digital diplomacy, and assess the conditions under which digital diplomacy informs, regulates, or constrains foreign policy. Organized around a common theme of investigating digital diplomacy as a form of change management in the international system, it combines diverse theoretical, empirical, and policy-oriented chapters centered on international change. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomatic studies, public diplomacy, foreign policy, social media and international relations. © 2015 selection and editorial material, Corneliu Bjola and Marcus Holmes; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
This article examines the role of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS's) beheading videos in the United Kingdom and the United States. These videos are highly illustrative demonstrations of the importance of visual imagery and visual media in contemporary warfare. By functioning as evidence in a political discourse constituting ISIS as an imminent, exceptional threat to the West, the videos have played an important role in the re-framing of the conflict in Iraq and Syria from a humanitarian crisis requiring a humanitarian response to a national security issue requiring a military response and intensified counterterrorism efforts. However, this article seeks to problematize the role and status of ISIS's beheadings in American and British security discourses by highlighting the depoliticizing aspects of reducing a complicated conflict to a fragmented visual icon. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for further attention to how the visibility of war, and the constitution of boundaries between which acts of violence are rendered visible and which are not, shape the political terrain in which decisions about war and peace are produced and legitimized.
Twitter is used by a substantial minority of the populations of many countries to share short messages, sometimes including images. Nevertheless, despite some research into specific images, such as selfies, and a few news stories about specific tweeted photographs, little is known about the types of images that are routinely shared. In response, this article reports a content analysis of random samples of 800 images tweeted from the UK or USA during a week at the end of 2014. Although most images were photographs, a substantial minority were hybrid or layered image forms: phone screenshots, collages, captioned pictures, and pictures of text messages. About half were primarily of one or more people, including 10% that were selfies, but a wide variety of other things were also pictured. Some of the images were for advertising or to share a joke but in most cases the purpose of the tweet seemed to be to share the minutiae of daily lives, performing the function of chat or gossip, sometimes in innovative ways.
This article starts from the premise that empathy is an inherent part of social and political life but that this is not sufficiently theorised in International Relations (IR). Building on the burgeoning debates on emotions in world politics, it argues that the study of empathy should be developed more rigorously by establishing an interdisciplinary and critical framework for understanding the experiences and processes of empathy in IR. The central contribution of the article is twofold: firstly, it highlights limitations of the dominant perspective on empathy in IR, and secondly, it argues that a range of meanings may be attributed to empathy when examined within the sociopolitical conditions of particular contexts. Drawing on research on the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the article identifies and articulates two such alternative interpretations: empathy as non-violent resistance and as a strategy of normalisation.Naomi Head is currently Lecturer in Politics at the University of Glasgow where she teaches and writes on conflict transformation, empathy, International Relations, and critical theory. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute of Conflict, Cooperation and Security at the University of Birmingham, and is the author of Justifying Violence: Communicative Ethics and the Use of Force in Kosovo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012).
Despite a growing interest in the role of emotions in world politics, the relationship between emotion and securitization remains unclear. This article shows that persistent, if sporadic, references to fear and emotion in securitization studies remain largely untheorized and fall outside conventional linguistic and sociological ontologies. The tendency to discuss emotion but deny it ontological status has left securitization theory incoherent. This article offers a theoretical reconstruction of securitization where emotion, specifically collective fears, serve as the locus of an audience’s judgment for the practice of securitization. Yet rather than simply accepting that fear facilitates securitizing moves, the article draws on appraisal theory from psychology to argue that collective fear appraisals are often fragile cultural constructs. The generation of these emotional appraisals is often constrained by the limited symbolic resources of the local security imaginary and how agents contest and employ these resources. When the capacity to generate collective fears is constrained, so too is the practice of securitization. An empirical discussion of threat images in US foreign policy is used to explore these constraints. The tendency for securitizing moves to be interpreted as comic underscores the precariousness of social practices seeking to elicit particular collective emotions.
Whereas the role of social media in political activism has received much attention in recent years, the role of social media images remains largely understudied. Given the potential of emotional and efficacy-related visual content for motivating activism, this exploratory content analysis examined the content of Twitter images of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. The analysis of 581 images revealed more efficacy-eliciting (crowds, protest activities, national and religious symbols) than emotionally arousing (violent) content, especially posted by Egyptian users. However, emotionally arousing content decreased, whereas efficacy-eliciting content increased at times of instability. Furthermore, popularity of images was more associated with user information than the content itself. Images posted by activists and users outside Egypt received the most attention. The findings are discussed in terms of possible explanations for the content patterns and their potential impact on Twitter audience, as well as their contributions toward establishing a theory of user-generated content during political movements.
Recent studies investigated the effect of e-campaigning on the electoral performance. However, little attention has been paid to the content of e-campaigning. Given that political parties broadcast minute-by-minute the campaign messages on social media, this comprehensive and unmediated information can be useful to evaluate the impact of different electoral strategies. Accordingly, this article examines the electoral campaign for the 2013 Italian general election to assess the effectiveness of positive and negative campaigning messages, measured through content analysis of information published on the official Twitter accounts of Italian parties. We evaluate their impact on the share of unsolicited voting intentions expressed on Twitter, measured through an innovative technique of sentiment analysis. Our results show that negative campaign has positive effects and its impact is stronger when the attacker is meanwhile under attack. Conversely, we only find a circumstantial effect of positive campaign related to clientelistic and distributive appeals.
This introductory article explores the multiple synergies between international practice theory and diplomatic studies. The timing for this cross-fertilizing exchange could not be better, as the study of diplomacy enters a phase of theorization while practice scholars look to confront the approach to new empirical and analytical challenges. The article first defines diplomacy as a historically and culturally contingent bundle of practices that are analytically alike in their claim to represent a given polity to the outside world. Then the key analytical wagers that practice theory makes are introduced, and debates currently raging in the discipline are briefly reviewed. Next, it is suggested what a practice theory of diplomacy may look like, discussing a variety of existing works through their common objective to explain the constitution of world politics in and through practice. Finally, a few research avenues to foster the dialogue between diplomatic studies and practice theory are outlined, centered on the nexuses of transformation and reproduction, rationality and know-how, and the technical vs. social dimensions of practices -diplomatic or otherwise.