The battle for the battle of the narratives: NPCU presentation at Lund University on #CVE

A NewPolCom research team will present a paper at a workshop later this month in Sweden, Managing Societal Threats in the Digital Age: The Case of Propaganda and Violent Extremism. The workshop is hosted by the Department for Strategic Communication at Lund University on 28-29 October 2016. Organised by Lund's James Pamment and Corneliu Bjola of Oxford University, the workshop involves speakers from NATO and the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy as well as academics. The NewPolCom team will question the current approach to narrative battles and argue that any efforts at persuasion should be based on a different set of assumptions.

The battle for the battle of the narratives: Sidestepping the double fetish of digital and CVE

Akil Awan, Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin

CVE is hot; digital CVE is hotter still. As the US replaces the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications with another new CVE hub, the Global Engagement Center, other Western governments follow suit in building teams charged with countering the narratives thought to radicalise individuals and groups into violence. Officials seek to “contest the space” and, while most evidence points to the role of offline social dynamics in leading individuals to violence, the space is often taken as digital. To fetishise is to imbue an object with special, even magical qualities, ignoring its banal reality. The banal reality is that all media are new media once, whether cave paintings or digital. The banal reality is that CVE was COIN a decade ago and previous acronyms in the decades before that. This double-fetish comes at a cost: the “battle of the narratives” becomes conceptualised and practiced as the quantitative online dominance of “our” content over “theirs”. Rather than admitting how intractably difficult persuasion is, and rather than responding to the real-world concerns of those persuadable by radical narratives – political disenfranchisement, socio-economic depravation, personal identity crises, and xenophobia – the mass takedown of pro-IS accounts on Twitter in 2015 is instead considered a mark of progress. NATO explores simply stopping information from Russia reaching Baltic states in the name of “Stratcom defence” rather than exploring why Russia might be attractive and its narrative persuasive. The enemy is extremism and extremism must be stopped.

This paper makes three moves against this framing. First, we argue this is a radically unrealistic account of communication and persuasion that ignores decades of research on radicalisation and a century of research on media effects. It is radical because it is almost wilfully counterproductive. Second, we ask what move is being made by this act of double fetishization. We find the bureaucratic, target-driven goals of governments can explain this grasping for a tangible, quantifiable mark of progress and the amnesia towards prior COIN and other campaigns. Third, we propose a model of narrative contestation through which governments can address real-world concerns. Our strategic narrative framework that identifies alignment across narratives of the international system, narratives of identity, and narratives of specific problems, can help explain why a certain problem-definition or even worldview becomes meaningful to those open to radicalisation and violence.

Vaccari publishes article on accidental exposure to political news on social media in New Media & Society

Cristian Vaccari has published a new article, coauthored with Augusto Valeriani (University of Bologna), on the relationship between accidental exposure to political news on social media and political participation. The article is part of a special issue on Civic political engagement and social change in the new digital age, guest edited by Karolina Koc-Michalska, Darren G Lilleker, and Thierry Vedel.

In the article, Valeriani and Vaccari show that accidental exposure to political news on social media is quite widespread among internet users in Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, and that such accidental exposure, in turn, is strongly and positively correlated with online political engagement. Moreover, the correlation is relatively stronger among individuals who are less interested in politics than among those who are more interested in politics. As a result, accidental exposure to political news on social media can have positive implications for democracy, as it both increases online political engagement across the board and closes the engagement gap between citizens who are more interested in politics and those who are less interested.

The article is based on survey data collected as part of WebPolEU, a three-year comparative research project on social media and political engagement funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, of which Vaccari is the Principal Investigator.

O'Loughlin Senior Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna

Ben O'Loughlin has won a prestigious Senior Fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna. He will be working there September-December 2016. Previous Senior Fellows include philosopher Nancy Cartwright, historian Hayden White and political scientist Michael Laver. Ben will be based in the Department of Language, Literature and Modern Culture. 

On 15 November 2016 Ben will deliver a public lecture at the Institute entitled Europe in Crisis: Words, Images, Media.

Thanks are due to Federica Ferrari for hosting Ben's Fellowship and Barbara Cimatti for all her help behind the scenes.

Vaccari, Chadwick, and O'Loughlin's "Dual Screening the Political" Wins the Walter Lippmann Award

Cristian Vaccari, Andrew Chadwick, and Ben O'Loughlin's article "Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement" (Journal of Communication 65 (6), pp. 1041–1061) has been recognized at this year's American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting held in Philadelphia.

The study was given the 2016 APSA Political Communication Section's Walter Lippmann Award for the Best Article in the Field of Political Communication.

The study finds that “lean-forward” dual screening practices, such as commenting live on social media as a political debate unfolds, and engaging with conversations via Twitter hashtags, have the strongest and most consistent positive associations with political engagement.

Join @newpolcom at #ecprconf16 Prague: Cyber-Security, Theorizing perceptions, + WhatsApp...ening

Adam Drew, Ben O'Loughlin and Cristian Vaccari will each present papers at the ECPR Annual Convention at Charles University, Prague this week.

Adam will present a paper, Mutually Assured Disconnection, on the panel Global Internet Governance. Adam will argue that while norms exist that have so far prevented major powers launching devastating cyber attacks on one another, this development has taken place not from a position of mutual understanding and cooperation, but from one of mutual and balanced fear.

Time: 08/09/2016 15:50

Location: Building: Faculty of Arts Floor: 3 Room: FA325

Ben will take part in a panel on Theorizing Perceptions, comparing how different theories of international political communication (strategic narrative, image theory, normative power) explain communication's role in power and influence in current world affairs. The panel features original public opinion research to identify how news publics in different parts of Africa are responding to a world order of rising powers like Iran, China and Turkey.

Time 10/09/2016 09:00

Location Building: Faculty of Law Floor: 2 Room: FL214

Cristian's paper is titled, WhatsApp...ening to political discussion in Europe? Instant messaging services and political engagement in Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. Co-authored with Augusto Valeriani, the paper features research from Cristian's ongoing comparative study of digital democracy in European countries. This is on a great-looking panel chaired on Digital Intermediaries and Political Communication chaired by Rasmus Kleis Nielsen.

Time: 08/09/2016 09:00

Place: Building: Faculty of Arts Floor: 3. Room: FA325

We hope to see you at these panels.

Newpolcom at UACES this week: The EU's Strategic Narrative on China

Alister Miskimmon and Ben O'Loughlin will present new analysis this week at the UACES 46th annual conference being held at Queen Mary in London. In their paper, The EU's Struggle for a Strategic Narrative (on China), they identify the problems crisis-strewn Europe has projecting a coherent narrative through EU institutions. However, they argue that China's One Belt, One Road initiative offers the kind of hybrid governance organisation that European leaders understand. By finding alignments with China's new infrastructure programmes across the historic Silk Road territories of Eurasia, the EU may be able to articulate a world order not based simply on sovereign states, and attach itself to a constructive project for the future at a time when it seems mired in the present. Disagreements with China over the value of human rights and market forces mean the EU will need to temper its identity narrative of being a 'normative power' for others to emulate. However, this pragmatic turn has already been happening. It is time for the EU to turn to a 'building block' narrative in order to reconstruct itself and play its role in the construction of the new 21st Century multipolar order.

Time: 15:10 - 16:40, Tuesday 6 September 2016

Place: Queen's Building, Panel 615, Queen Mary, University of London (map)

Other presenters: Michèle Knodt, Ole Elgström, and Natalia Chaban.

This paper is part of a panel, EU Global Perceptions, featuring presentations from the Jean Monnet project C3EU: Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy.

newpolcom at #APSA2016

The diversity of current newpolcom research is being highlighted at this year’s American Political Science Association Annual Meeting in Philadelphia next week.

First up is the APSA Political Communication Section Annual Preconference hosted by Temple University on Wednesday August 31. Among the wide range of panels is a session on Media and Political Engagement featuring Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani’s research on instant messaging services and political engagement in Italy, the UK, and Germany, plus a roundtable on Theory and Theory Building chaired by Regina Lawrence and featuring Geoffrey Baym, Andrew Chadwick, Daniel Kreiss, and Dannagal Young.

On Friday September 2 At the main APSA conference, Andrew Chadwick, Ben O’Loughlin, and Cristian Vaccari will be presenting the latest findings on the 2015 UK leaders’ debates from their newpolcom dual screening project, on the panel How We Use the News Now (PCC, 112-B, 2.00-3.30pm). They will also be presented with their Best Article Award at the Political Communication Section Business Meeting. The award is for their first dual screening paper: Vaccari, C., Chadwick, A., and O’Loughlin, B. (2015). Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement. Journal of Communication 65 (6), pp. 1041–1061.

Cristian Vaccari’s work on online voter contacting is featured in a panel on Social Media and Electoral Campaigns on Saturday September 3 (Marriott, Salon KL, 2.00-3.30pm).

Andrew Chadwick is convener of a Saturday roundtable discussion on The Past, Present, and Future of Digital Politics Research (Marriott, Salon KL, 4.00-5.30pm). The session will feature Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Leticia Bode, Shelley Boulianne, David Karpf, Daniel Kreiss, and Chris Wells.

And on Sunday September 4 Nick Anstead and Andrew Chadwick will present their paper Primary Definers Online: Social Media and Think Tank Authority in the UK to the panel Digital Adaptations: Institutions and Behavior in the Digital Age (PCC, 104-A, 10.00-11.30am). 

Geopolitics publish new Szostek article on Russia's strategic narrative

NewPolCom's Dr. Joanna Szostek has published a new article in Geopolitics entitled, Defence and Promotion of Desired State Identity in Russia’s Strategic Narrative. Please find an abstract of the article below and a link to the full article here.

Abstract

This article examines how the Russian state promotes and protects its preferred self-identity, using the conceptual framework of ‘strategic narrative’. Nation-branding practices, including state-funded ‘mega-projects’ like the Sochi Olympics, have contributed to the narrative by characterising Russia as a welcoming, attractive destination. However, a more salient feature of Russia’s strategic narrative is intense ‘anti-Western’ and ‘anti-American’ political and media discourse, formulated to defend against rival, threatening narratives projected from other countries. Through analysis of official statements and state television content, this article demonstrates how determination to protect ‘great power’ and ‘European’ identities underlay Russia’s strategic narrative in 2014. It considers responses which the narrative has prompted, arguing that desired results in domestic reception have been achieved at the expense of unsatisfactory results internationally. Heavy-handed attacks on the identities of other states boost collective self-esteem among Russian citizens, but they fail to produce – and arguably obstruct – desired responses among foreign audiences.

Joanna is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow at Royal Holloway. Check out her project site Stratnarra.

Cristian Vaccari speaking at international symposium on social media and politics in Stockholm on June 20

Newpolcom's Dr Cristian Vaccari is speaking at next week's international symposium "Re/Constructing Politics through Social & Online Media: Research Agendas & Problem-Oriented Analyses" on June 20 in Stockholm .

The two-day international symposium brings together leading international experts working on politics and communication in the context of social & online media. The symposium is interdisciplinary in nature and gathers scholars following various theoretical and methodological standpoints within a variety of social sciences incl. political communication, media studies, political science or political sociology. 

Dr. Vaccari will present research conducted with Newpolcom's Professors Andrew Chadwick and Ben O'Loughlin on dual screening during the 2015 general election ITV leaders' debate.

The full symposium program can be found here.