Do National and International Media Cover the Same Event Differently? The Online Media Framing of Irreecha Festival Tragedy

This article examines how media framed the deadly stampede that killed several dozen people gathered to celebrate a festival in Ethiopia. News articles published by 14 national media (N=21) and 116 international media (N=117) on October 2 and 3, 2016 were collected and comparative content analysis was carried out between April and May 2017. Conflict, attribution of responsibility and political consequences frames dominated the coverage. The differences observed in the use of conflict, responsibility and morality frames by national and international media were statistically significant. The differences in the appearance of political consequences and human-interest frames in national and international media were not statistically significant. In terms of coverage pattern, the themes of headlines of almost all the news articles published on the first day after the incident focused on deaths of people whereas the second day headlines diverged to deaths, mourning, unrest that followed, and other issues as the media found additional facts to organise strong and compelling frames to influence the audience. Based on the findings, this article generalises that national and international media cover the same disaster from different perspectives—national media promote national interest whereas international media emphasise conflict.     

The Al Qaeda Brand: The Strategic Use of the “Terrorist” Label

Al Qaeda leaders have consistently praised the Chechen insurgents as an exemplary front of global jihad. Ayman al-Zawahiri recently applauded the steadfastness of the Chechen rebels and indicated that their resolve for jihad is worthy of emulation. Ever since the world found out about a war going on in the Muslim republic in the North Caucasus, Al Qaeda leadership has attempted to represent the Chechen struggle as one of its own battlefields. In turn, the Russian government has tried to justify its policies in the North Caucasus through demonstrating to the world that the Kremlin is fighting nothing less than Osama bin Laden’s agents in Chechnya. The North Caucasus insurgents in turn have embraced some of Al Qaeda’s narratives. While such narratives have proliferated, the factual evidence to show the direct links between the North Caucasus insurgents and Al Qaeda is still lacking. The article examines how terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda use framing for strategic ends. The evidence discussed here suggests that Al Qaeda, the North Caucasus insurgents, and the Russian government have adopted similar narratives. However, the lack of evidence to back up such narratives indicates the differences in reasons driving the convergence of the narratives.     

Self-protection in Greece: sticking with groups,communicating, protesting,and fighting

Despite the international community’s responsibility to protect (R2P) mandate, we are years away from effective international enforcement mechanisms. It is therefore important that we better understand and seek to support local capacities for self-protection. Migrants and refugees in Greece have shown us four central ways they cope with insecure environments. They stick together in groups, communicate warnings of danger, protest when conditions are threatening, and fight when all else fails. This practical note offers three recommendations on how to support the capacity of displaced people to protect themselves.     

The Political Significance of Social Media Activity and Social Networks

This paper examines panel data from two waves of the Youth Participatory Politics Survey, a nationally representative sample of young people in the United States. It employs a cross-lagged design to investigate the extent to which common forms of online activity create pathways to online and offline forms of political activity. Specifically, we examine the influence of Friendship-Driven (FD) and Interest-Driven (ID) online activity on online participatory politics and on offline forms of political action. Our findings reveal that FD and ID activity relate to political engagement, but in different ways. In addition, we find that the size of young people’s social networks interacts with both FD and ID online activity to promote political activity. This indicates that having exposure to “weak-ties” (resulting from large social networks) promote higher levels of political engagement. These findings demonstrate the need to specify the kinds of online activities in which youth are engaged and, more broadly, the political significance of social media and social networks     

Changing your political mind: The impact of a metaphor on citizens’ representations and preferences for federalism

Federalism is often presented through metaphors, but little is known about the impact of such metaphors. Two experiments were conducted in Belgium presenting federalism as Tetris – with control and treatment groups – in order to grasp the influence of this metaphor. The first experiment reveals that being exposed to text with the Tetris metaphor influences respondents’ representations of federalism towards a more institutional representation and towards more regional autonomy. The second experiment confirms the importance of the text, and more specifically of the metaphor, if political knowledge is taken into account. Respondents with a lower level of political knowledge are those who are influenced by the metaphor, whereas respondents with a higher level are not. Therefore, framing the future of Belgian federalism using the metaphor of Tetris does matter: it affects both individuals’ representations of the federalization process and, consequently, their preferences vis-à-vis the institutional future of the country.     

Let’s Intervene! But Only If They’re Like Us: The Effects of Group Dynamics and Emotion on the Willingness to Support Humanitarian Intervention

International relations (IR) studies on humanitarian intervention have debated both the nature and strength of intervention norms. This article contributes to this debate by exploring under what conditions individuals are willing to support military humanitarian intervention (MHI) and the psychological factors that influence whether, and the degree to which individuals support MHI. Taking a psychological approach, we hypothesized that individuals’ decision to support MHI is influenced by in-group favoritism and emotional responses to in-group suffering. We tested our theory with two experiments, each of which recruited roughly 200 American participants. Both experiments centered on the ongoing Syrian civil war and assessed Americans’ willingness to support intervention to protect different civilian groups. The results suggested that support for intervention was widespread, but not a majority view in most cases. The findings also suggested that participants exhibited slightly higher rates of support for intervention when those suffering were Christian, as opposed to Muslim. Furthermore, we found that the dynamics of support for intervention changed when chemical weapons were introduced into the scenario, which reframed the the crisis as a national security issue. Overall, our results suggest that individuals’ decisions to act upon norms can be influenced by the context of a crisis and individual level psychological factors, which have been under explored in IR scholarship on norms.     

Advances and Opportunities in the Study of Political Communication,Foreign Policy,and Public Opinion

We review contemporary research at the intersection of political communication and foreign policy, highlighting four themes: 1) new, more realistic and psychologically-nuanced approaches that account for limited information and issue framing; 2) the question of whether the flow of communication between the state and the public is best conceived as a closed system, or one that is open to outside influences such as foreign elites; 3) how variations in political or governmental structures, patterns of media access or ownership, and other institutional factors can alter the relationships between foreign policy and communication processes; and 4) whether or not it is useful to distinguish between foreign and domestic policymaking when analyzing the role of political communication. We also suggest avenues for further research in each section and conclude by summarizing these opportunities for continued theoretical development.     

The Theory of International Media Diffusion: Political Socialization and International Media in Transitional Democracies

Despite the long-standing normative assumption that, for individuals in transitional states, exposure to Western media cultivates stronger attachments to Western political and economic values, the evidence presented here suggests otherwise. Using mass public survey data from the mid-1990s in five Central and Eastern European countries, this article demonstrates a general lack of support for international media’s positive contributions to individuals’ democratic attitudes and preferences for market economies. This finding is particularly unexpected because the countries under investigation represent ideal cases based on their proximity to Western democracies and international (Western) media sources’ capacities for extensive transnational media penetration into the region. Yet this failure to find persuasive evidence of the influence of international media diffusion on the development of Western political values sharpens our understanding of the process of political socialization in democratizing countries by eliminating an assumed source and is thus relevant to students of democratization, international development, and mass media.

Tourism,Development, and Media

Tourism has long figured in municipal and state-wide plans for economic development and revitalization. Such plans often articulate themes subsequently used to organize tours, advertising campaigns, and merchandising. In the 1990s, some residents of Roswell, New Mexico, tried to build tourism using typical southwestern themes. Others capitalized on Roswell’s unique association with an alleged crash of an extraterrestrial craft. Early support from the New Mexico Tourism Department (NMTD) facilitated the success of Roswell’s UFO-based tourism. In 2007, NMTD launched its own alien-based advertising campaign promoting New Mexico as a tourist destination.