"This edited collection draws upon interdisciplinary research to explore new dimensions in the politics of image and aid. While development communication and public diplomacy are established research fields, there is little scholarship that seeks to understand how the two areas relate to one another
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. However, international development doctrine in the US, UK and elsewhere increasingly suggests that they are integrated-or at the very least should be-at the level of national strategy. This timely volume considers a variety of cases in diverse regions, drawing upon a combination of theoretical and conceptual lenses that combine a focus on both aid and image. The result is a text that seeks to establish a new body of knowledge on how contemporary debates into public diplomacy, soft power and the national image are fundamentally changing not just the communication of aid, but its wider strategies, modalities and practices." (Publisher description)
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"Commercial Nationalism intervenes in discussions of the fate of nationalism and national identity by exploring the relationship between state appropriation of marketing and branding strategies on the one hand, and, on the other, the commercial mobilization of nationalist discourses. The book's uniq
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ue contribution is to consider an emerging formation characterized by the following complementary (and related) developments: the ways in which states come increasingly to rely on commercial techniques for self-promotion, diplomacy, and internal national mobilization, and also the ways in which new and legacy forms of commercial media rely on the mobilization emerging configurations of nationalism for the purpose of selling, gaining ratings, and otherwise profiting. We see this formation as a unique reconfiguration of the formation of nationalism associated with the contemporary context. Often these processes are approached separately: what is the economic role of nationalism and how do media participate in the formation of national identity?" (Publisher description)
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"Outside the West, religion is an ever more prominent force in social and political movements of both reform and retrenchment. Across these contexts, no issue in religion is of as much concern as fundamentalism - or rather the fundamentalisms within various traditions - which are seen to be fomentin
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g religious, social, ethnic, and political tension and conflict. The contributions to this volume represent the first effort to look at ‘fundamentalisms’ and the ‘media’ together and address the resulting relations and interactions from critical perspectives of history, technology, geography, and practice." (Publisher description)
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