#METOO AND US POLITICS: ANALYSING THE TWITTER CONVERSATION

Author(s): Vittoria Bernardini / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2021

The #MeToo movement has had a profound cultural impact on US society, and notably on US party politics. While many studies have addressed the #MeToo-related controversy arising from the Brett Kavanaugh nomination to Supreme Court Justice in 2018, the relationship between #MeToo and US politics before this event has remained understudied. This article, therefore, addresses this gap by looking at the role of politics at the beginning of the #MeToo movement. Focusing on the first six months of online activity on Twitter (October 2017 – April 2018), over 2 million tweets with the #MeToo hashtag are analyzed to identify the main activity patterns across the dataset and to gain insight on user behavior and participation in the conversation. Results point to the weaponization of #MeToo in the political context from its inception. It is suggested that #MeToo reflects the polarized political climate in the US and that it can be conceptualized as part of the wider “culture wars” (Hunter 1991) that characterize the public debate.

A Change or Continuation of the Status Quo in the Black Sea Region: The Case of Crimea’s Annexation

Author(s): Mustafa Gökcan Kösen,Sabri Deniz Tığlı / Language(s): English Issue: 01 (23)/2021

Although armed conflicts in the Middle East, which have engulfed the Mediterranean region since the outbreak of the uprisings in Arab countries, came to the fore, armed conflicts in the Black Sea region have the potential of initiating a wide range of crises. The crises in Moldova, Georgia, Kosovo, and Ukraine have already been on the agenda of policymakers. Several political changes have been introduced in the Black Sea region in order to cope with the changing security environment. Relations between Turkey and the Russian Federation have played a vital role. The annexation of Crimea has brought the question regarding the relations in the region into focus.

A háború ára. A jobboldali populizmus popkulturális reprezentációja

Author(s): Veronika Hermann / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 01/2021

In this paper I aim to present the complex relationship between the rise of populist political parties and anti-gender movements and their effect on popular culture. First I depict how populism became the foremost power technique in Europe and the United States in the past decade and why social sciences have difficulties to detect and define this slippery-slope phenomenon. Then I draw the outline of a possible connection between the 1970s conservative, anti-feminist organizations and the polarization of public speech. I intend to use this frame to analyze two popular television series from the last few years, The Handmaid’s Tale (2016) and Mrs. America (2020). By doing so I argue that members of real life anti-gender organizations have been committed to a future that presents itself as a theocracy in Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Like two sides of the same coin, a series based on real-life events and another based on a dystopia, the series show why it is important to be aware of populist and anti-gender movements.

A Victim Among Martyrs? Czech Victimhood Nationalism during the First World War

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Author(s): Maeva Carla Chargros / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

Victimhood nationalism has gained considerable attention in the past decade within nationalism studies. This theoretical article shows how recent research in the fields of international relations and victimology can help improve our understanding of Czech (Czechoslovak) nationalism. To do so, this study is using a selection of newspaper articles and unpublished archival materials from the period of the First World War, covering propaganda activities of Czechs (Masaryk, Beneš) and their allies or acquaintances in France, as well as those of Czech-Americans in the United States of America. By drawing on the definitions of victimhood nationalism within the context of the 20th century by Adam B. Lerner, and of Early Modern religious martyrdom by Brad S. Gregory, as well as on recent research conducted by Andrea Orzoff regarding the national identity of interwar Czechoslovakia, I highlight the importance and the singular aspect of the use of victimisation as a diplomatic and political strategy in the Czech case during the First World War.

Adapting political communication to technology. Case study: evolutionary aspects on social networks in Romania

Author(s): Mihaela Bărbieru / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

In recent years, studies on social networks have begun to become more and more numerous in the literature, with scientists showing a real interest in an influential analysis that they have on societies. Social networks are tools through which political candidates have the opportunity to distribute their political message during election campaigns, as well as outside them, to a growing audience. A very strong connection has been made between technology and communication, outside of which we, as individuals, can no longer exist, the virtual space managing to exploit communication in all its aspects. Online political communication, an easily accessible form of manifestation that attracts disinterested political groups, offers the possibility of avoiding information bottlenecks for citizens by changing content in real time, with low information costs, which means a real advantage for politicians.The importance of social networks in political communication is even greater as its role is the main channel of communication and occupies a special place in election campaign strategies. The present study aimes to analyze the phenomenon of social networks in terms of the benefits it offers to politics, through an online political communication with content transmitted in real time, without time limit and with low costs.

AFGHANISTAN AS A STATEMENT OF DISCONTINUATION OF INTERESTS AND GOALS OF THE US NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY

Author(s): Božidar Forca,Siniša Dostić,Zoran Ć. Keković / Language(s): English Issue: 33/2021

In August 2021, the US military engagement in Afghanistan ended, after almost 20 years of conflict with the Taliban and terrorist organizations, with the engagement of allies, primarily NATO member countries. Given the participants in the war, the consequences of the war, as well as the inability to predict further events, the world is flooded with a multitude of analyzes, reactions, predictions and other observations of that war. These reviews come from officials of many countries and international organizations, as well as from scientific institutions and analysts to social networks and other media spaces. This article is a view of American participation in the war in Afghanistan through a key document – the national security strategy, ie the national interests established in it. In that sense, 17 strategies of the USA, adopted in the period 1987-2021, were subjected to research. year, certainly heavier documents from 2001, when the direct US military engagement in Afghanistan began. The basic hypothesis of the research is: “US engagement in Afghanistan was supposed to confirm American dominance in the world after the Cold War, as one of the vital national interests established in all national security strategies, but it did not have clear goals.”

Aktywność obywatelska jako zadanie i wyzwanie rozwojowe – znaczenie okresu dzieciństwa i adolescencji

Author(s): Beata Krzywosz-Rynkiewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 3/2019

Civic participation has significant meaning for building internal resources of the individuals and is an important development task for them. In this article, which has theoretical and overview character, we present current knowledge of childhood and adolescence experience on civic behaviors in adulthood. We will deep-dive into the phenomenon of citizenship and it’s psychological perspective. Later on, we present current studies on psychological determinants of citizenship activity of young people including their personality resources, relationship with their surroundings and institutions, as well as demography and socio-economic status. At the end we focus on early experience influence on citizenship activity in adulthood. In the summary section we describe threads for future researches on citizenship of children and youngsters.

ANALYSIS OF THE INTEGRITY INDEX FOR PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN THE ALBANIAN DEVELOPING REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY

Author(s): Andon Kume / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This research aimed to analyze the Albanian parliamentary elections held in 2013, 2017, and 2021 in order to evaluate the process of development of representative democracy in Albania, one of the post-communist countries of the Western Balkans. The analysis was based on assessing the dynamics of the Electoral Integrity Index (PEI) as a quantitative indicator that reflects the level of fulfillment of international standards for democratic elections. The PEI was evaluated using the average perception values for 11 indicators reflecting the election process. Based on the value of the PEI2013 (54.1 scores), PEI2017 (53.3 scores), and PEI2021 (57.7 scores), the parliamentary elections in Albania were considered as processes that do not exceed the ‘moderate’ level. The non-significant difference between 2013, 2017, and 2021 PEI (p>0.05) demonstrated low progress in developing democratic performances in Albanian society.

Are anti-immigrant attitudes the Holy Grail of populists?

A comparative analysis of attitudes towards immigrants, values, and political populism in Europe.

Author(s): Vera Messing,Bence Ságvári / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2021

In this paper we aim to discuss attitudes towards immigrants in a European context and analyse drivers of anti-immigrant attitudes such as the feeling of control, basic human values, political orientation and preferences related to right-wing populism. Based on data from the European Social Survey, we first describe how attitudes of people in Europe changed throughout a period of almost two decades (between 2002 and 2018). We will show that although attitudes are influenced by a number of demographic and subjective features of individuals, on the macro-level they seem to be surprisingly stable, yet hide significant cross-country differences. Then, we zoom in to the three most significant elements influencing attitudes towards immigrants: the feeling of control, basic human values, and political orientation. Applying a multi-level model we test the validity of three theories about factors informing attitudes towards immigrants—competition theory, locus of control, and the role of basic human values—and include time (pre- and post-2015 refugee-crisis periods) into the analysis. In the discussion we link ESS data to recent research on populism in Europe that categorizes populist parties across the continent, and establish that the degree to which anti-migrant feelings are linked to support for political populism varies significantly across European countries. We show that right-wing populist parties gather and feed that part of the population which is very negative towards migrants and migration in general, and this process is also driven by the significance awarded the value of security vis-à-vis humanitarianism.

Automatic Identification of Political Ideology in Online News Articles

Author(s): Vikki Fiore / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

The following research discusses text analysis approaches to automatically categorize news articles based on their political ideology. In this case, ideology is defined as a writer expressing either a liberal or a conservative point of view. This classification is done at both the document and the phrase level, as previous research has indicated that doing so increases classifier performance over using a "bag of words" approach. Linguistic features related to lexical richness are extracted from the articles via Python, and features related to emotions and values are extracted via the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. The machine learning software Weka is then used to apply various classification algorithms on the numeric features. Additionally, Amazon Mechanical Turk is used to measure human accuracy and inter-rater agreement on identifying the ideology of the same texts. In all, the trained classifiers perform well above the baseline and outperform the human annotators on the same tasks.

Boris Dubin – neobjavljeni intervju

Author(s): Maria Subina,Boris Dubin / Language(s): Serbian

Ovog proleća je Marija Šubina za jedno drugo izdanje razgovarala sa Borisom Dubinom, poznatim sociologom, prevodiocem, pesnikom, našim stalnim autorom i drugom redakcije, jednim od onih retkih ljudi čiji stavovi za današnju obrazovanu manjinu nesumljivo predstavljaju moralni autoritet. Razgovor tada nije bio objavljen, a danas, posle nepunih šest meseci, mi vidimo da njegov sadržaj nije izgubio ni trunku od svoje aktuelnosti.

BOURDIEU’S THEORIZATION OF SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE ANALYSIS OF SOUTH-EAST EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

Author(s): Mirko Petrić,Inga Tomić-Koludrović / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

This article discusses the significance of social capital in Bourdieu-inspired analyses of contemporary South-East European societies. We first recapitulate Bourdieu’s theorization of social capital, emphasizing that it allows different operationalizations expressly because of its rather abstract theoretical character. Following that, we explain what is meant by “South-East European societies” and that their inequality-generating mechanisms are largely based on social closure. In the central part of the article, we comment on some attempts at operationalization of social capital in the SEE region. While we also discuss two cases of eclectically mixing Lin’s operationalization with Bourdieusian concepts, at the center of our attention is the elaboration of Bourdieu’s theorization of social capital put forward by the Serbian sociologist Predrag Cvetičanin. The relevance of his concepts of “social capital of solidarity” and “social capital of informal connections” for the study of class relations in post-socialist societies in South-East Europe highlights the advantages of a consistent application of the Bourdieusian framework in a contemporary (post-Bourdieusian) context.

CÂTEVA CONSIDERAȚII DESPRE CULTURA (IN)TOLERANȚEI ÎN ROMÂNIA INTERBELICĂ

Author(s): Mihaela Gligor / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2021

The effervescence of the interwar period also contains the sad story of a brilliant young generation, but lost – intellectually – in the destructive passion of politics. Their search for philosophical, spiritual and political renewal inclined them to fascist doctrines, while their concentration on ethnic, nationalist, Romanian Orthodoxy led them to the legionary movement and anti-Semitism. The present paper offers an overview on the delicate issue of anti-Semitism in interwar Romania and exemplifies it with several successful stories of individuals who managed to escape, just in time, the terror of history.

Co się stało z Polską?

Author(s): Ireneusz Krzemiński / Language(s): Polish Issue: 2/2021

In this article the author attempts to describe the social and political reasons of the authoritarian shift in Poland under the Law & Justice (PiS) coalition government. The nationalist and catholic ideology is at the root of dismantling the institutions of the state of law. Unfulfilled economic and social aspirations of large segments of the society were the real reason for the approval of the populist and antidemocratic actions of L&J government. Secondly, the disastrous presidential and parliamentary campaigns of the Civic Platform in 2015 opened the door to power for L&J. There were several self-organized spontaneous protests against antidemocratic policies of the L&J government, but the followers of the governing party have been and still are big enough in number thanks to the support of the Catholic Church hierarchy for the government. Polarization of the Polish society has never been bigger, but prodemocratic attitudes have also been growing recently. Strong prodemocratic local governments and the unanimous support of the majority of the population for the Ukrainian refugees are among the factors of hope for the democratic shift in the Polish electorate, but the opposition parties must undertake a more united and determined action.

Coercion and Disunity as Tremors in African Nationhood Foundation: Armah and Kourouma’s Fault Line Criticisms

Author(s): Anthony Njoku / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Africa of the twenty first century is plagued by a horde of social and economic misfortunes traceable to both political and historical evolutions which have taken the people back to the beginning of everything African. Two of them, important events, are the foundation of African nationhood which has led to heated debates; and disunity which is partly inherent and instinctual and partly the outcome of the former. Sequel to this, the present paper provides answers to questions such as: how did the African nationhood evolve? What role did disunity play both in the formative and later stages of African nationhood? It goes about this quest by studying the impact of the Berlin Conference of 1884 on Africa and that of wars on Africa’s Ancient empires. It is a qualitative research based on the works of Ayi Kwei Armah and Ahmadou Kourouma and review of criticism of external influence on the constitution of the African nationhood and its consequential role in the post-independence dilemma. In the end, the paper concludes that the foundation of African nationhood is faulty as a result of imposition and coupled with lack of unity among African ethnicities which constitutes a source of malaise. Armah and Kourouma might have x-rayed historical facts to the best of their abilities, yet there is element of tribal sentiment that characterizes their accounts, and which also to a nextent is aporetic.

COGNITIVE HUMINT TOOL FOR COGNITIVE ENVIRONMENT

Author(s): Lucian Munteanu / Language(s): English Issue: 16/2021

Understanding human behavior is imperative for the success of HUMINT in military deployments, no matter if this refers to the enemy, friendly or own troops behavior. Whoever has the power to influence human behavior – besides the ethic responsibility for such actions that is not the subject of this article – is able to efficaciously achieve the desired objectives. Nowadays, the human behavior in general, is part of an extended human network enabled by social media, households, Internet of Things and Internet of Everything, all together forming the “actors” within the cognitive environment. Like many other “military tools”, HUMINT needs to be able – to a certain extent – to shape the hearts and minds, particularly the human source ones. The old model of winning the hearts and minds, generally applied in counter insurgency operations and not only, was instinctively applied in HUMINT domain with positive results. Nevertheless, the complexity of the cognitive environment, where the dexterous influencers are playing the “molding games”, necessitates a methodological and scientific approach that requires to firstly analyze our own behavior and then to influence others. A Cognitive HUMINT Tool enables the understanding of how the heart and mind can determine the actions, or vice-versa, and would create the premises for shaping the human sources.

Conspiracy Theory as a Working Method of Political Propaganda

Author(s): Štefan Ižák / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The paper Conspiracy theory as a working method of political propaganda deals with using of conspiracy theories by the specific (pro-Kremlin) kind of propaganda to spread certain ideological content. In the paper, the conspiracy theory The European Union organizes migration to Islamize Europe is analyzed. In the paper the internal logic of this conspiracy theory is revealed. The main objective of the paper is to analyze the argumentation strategies of this conspiracy theory and find out what kind of binarities analyzed conspiracy theory uses to legitimize its construction of reality. For the text analysis, a discourse analysis is chosen. This method allows me to analyze key discursive patterns characteristic for the set of collected news. The empirical part composed by the analysis of the research material follows the theoretical part of the paper, where the concept of conspiracy theory as the type of the discursive construction of reality and as a part of the political propaganda is presented. Results of research show that analyzed conspiracy theory disseminates concrete ideological views in favor of Eurosceptical, populist forces.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF DONALD TRUMP’S POLITICAL SPEECH VIA TWITTER

Author(s): Shaalan Najem Abdullah Shammari / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Although social media was used in the 2008 presidential campaign, it became increasingly important in the 2016 election. Presidents have had to adopt and adapt to new technology in the past as well, and this has had a long-term effect on political discourse. Politicians now have new tools for communicating with the public, thanks to the internet and social media. An important goal of this paper is to examine how political speech has evolved over time, particularly in light of social media's role in political campaigning, and how Donald Trump used social media as a means of political communications. A discourse-historical approach of critical discourse analysis (CDA), has been applied in this study to carry out the analysis that would determine Trump's speech techniques. The results of this study demonstrate how President Trump's used language to influence his audience. Overall, this research paper will focus on Trump’s discourse strategies and how he employed them to create positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.

Cultural Identity as Security and a Philosophy of Development for Africa: Reflections on Amilcar Cabral

Author(s): Philip Ogo Ujomu,Felix Olatunji / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

The paper looks at the problem of national and human security in many parts of Africa today, seen in the inability of most governments to guarantee the adequate protection, peace and well-being of the citizens due in part to foreign dominating ideas. Cabral in his cultural and political thought offered philosophical insights and applied culture to the analysis of security for modern Africa. His theory of security is build upon the struggle for liberation from the colonial ordinance and his philosophy of identity is based on a combination of theory and praxis in the pursuit of reality. This requires the unearthing of the deep cultural roots and causes of things. This harmonization of interests is not just between men and men, but also between men and nature. The question is; what principles and values can best facilitate the crucial sense of security in most African societies?

Da li elektronsko glasanje može uticati na povećanje izborne izlaznosti u Republici Srbiji?

Author(s): Savo N. Simić / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 19/2020

The research question refers to the consideration of whether the existing system of required physical voting is consistently outdated, in example whether electronic voting can be added to it or replaced by electronic voting as a more promising model that would overcome existing systemic shortcomings and/or increase efficiency, voter turnout and voter confidence in the electoral process. The methodology will include an institutional approach in determining the analysis of the existing voting system, its current implications for political participation and the principles necessary for the voter to exercise his or her right. In this regard, the analysis of the content will be used for recommendations and documents of international bodies and organizations that determine the standards of indirect democracy and the act of voting as its indispensable element. With a comparative approach, we determine the advantages/ flaws of both mentioned voting systems, which leads us to the conclusion whether electronic voting would respond to the consequences of low electoral turnout in the Republic of Serbia.