"Affective polarization has been a persistent feature of Afghanistan’s society and politics in the past decades. However, with the instantaneous collapse of the republic’s government and the return of the Taliban, the country has witnessed heightened affective polarization along ethnic and ideol
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ogical lines. Stemming from deep-rooted historical grievances, aggregated conflicts, and over a century of failed struggles for statebuilding and nation-building in Afghanistan, the surge in affective polarization is intricately linked with the elite’s behaviour and social media use. Outbidding strategies by elites result in more extreme positions. Coupled with the dissemination of hate and harmful messages, and divisive online content, this attracts wider attention and social support against a background of dwindling inter-group trust, state failure, and uncertainty over the political prospects. This article attempts to conceptualize the complex causal relations of affective polarization, elite behaviour, and social media platforms in Afghanistan’s fragmented social and political landscape." (Abstract)
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"This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associated with a missionary society. The book provides a visual panorama of all the world’s cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of material that had initially appeared in a variety of other cont
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exts, ranging from missionary periodicals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume’s editors wanted to convey: the extra-European world was portrayed as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents – in particular, missionaries – as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings based on photographs were often not as polemical as those based on drawings, simply because of the characteristics of photography as a medium. Complicating the critical reading of the images as simply missionary propaganda, I argue that a volume like the one examined here is best understood when placed within a transnational (or connected) history of visual practices." (Abstract)
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"This dissertation examines the United States’s elite news media’s hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience
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can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests? [...] There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations." (Abstract)
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"Dans les situations de crise, de troubles ou de guerre, la désinformation et la propagande ont toujours été utilisées pour mobiliser les foules et tromper l'ennemi. Mais, aujourd'hui, les médias sont devenus beaucoup plus sophistiqués qu'autrefois, et le bourrage de crâne a fait place à de
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véritables médias tueurs. En Afrique, au Moyen-Orient ou dans les républiques de l'ex-Union soviétique, des organes de presse sont directement utilisés pour lancer des appels à la haine et à la violence. Au Rwanda, la tristement célèbre Radio des Milles Collines a ainsi préparé et accompagné le génocide, n'hésitant pas à appeler à remplir les fosses encore à moitié vides. Les miliciens, une radio dans une main, une machette dans l'autre, ont été les auditeurs les plus fidèles de cette véritable machine de mort. Devant la montée de ces médias de la haine, Reporters sans frontières, une organisation de défense de la liberté de la presse dans le monde, a envoyé des journalistes dans une dizaine de pays (Rwanda, Burundi, Niger, ex-Yougoslavie, Roumanie, Crimée, Caucase, Israël-Palestine, Égypte), pour comprendre pourquoi et comment fonctionnent ces journaux et ces radios. Pour les dénoncer, et obtenir leur mise hors-la-loi. Ce lïvre devrait permettre au grand public de savoir qui sont les journalistes de ces médias, qui les contrôle, qui les finance et, surtout, quels ravages ils sont susceptibles de provoquer si rien n'est entrepris pour les combattre." (Description de la maison d'édition)
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