Search results for " international relations"
showing 10 items of 626 documents
Something Mightier: Marginalization, Occult Imaginations and the Youth Conflict in the Oil-Rich Niger Delta
2011
This contribution examines the role of occult imaginations in the struggle against perceived socio-economic marginalization by youth militias from the Ijaw ethnic group in the oil-rich Niger Delta region of Nigeria. It argues that the asymmetric power between the federal government/transnational oil corporations (TNOCs) and the militias may have privileged the invocation of the supernatural as a critical agency of strength and courage by the youth militias. The conflict in the region embodies a cultural revision which has been necessitated by both the uncertainty of the oil environment and the prevailing narratives of social injustice. Hence the Egbesu deity, seen historically as embodying…
Folk theories of algorithmic operations during Internet use: A mixed methods study
2021
We used the folk theory perspective to investigate Internet users’ understanding of algorithms during their Internet use. Empirically, we conducted a mixed-method study. First, we carried out semi-...
Glimmering utopias: 50 years of African film
2010
The history of African film began in the 1960s with the independence of the colonies. Despite all kinds of political and economic difficulties, numerous films have been made since then, featuring wide-ranging processes of consolidation, differentiation and transformation which were characteristic of post-colonial sub-Saharan Africa. However, these feature films should not merely be viewed as back references to specifically African problems. The glimmering fictions are imagination spaces. They preserve ideas about how the post-colonial circumstances should be approached. Seen from this perspective, the history of African film may be studied as a history of African utopias. Die Geschichte des…
Explaining the Electoral Failure of Extreme-Right Parties in Estonia and Latvia
2009
Extreme-right political parties have achieved significant electoral success in Europe in recent years. This paper considers why this electoral success has not been replicated in contemporary Estonia and Latvia. The paper begins with a discussion of the necessary background conditions for the success of extreme-right movements, finding that they do largely exist in Estonia and Latvia. The paper then moves on to map the rising levels of extreme-right mobilisation among both titular and Russian-speaking parts of the population. We examine two hypotheses to explain the electoral failure of extreme-right parties: (1) The institutional hypothesis argues that the party and electoral laws check ext…
Struggle and banality of belonging to Europe. Cultural Europeanization from the perspective of the Central and East European citizens
2023
The European Union (EU) has developed cultural policy initiatives that seek to promote cultural Europeanization with the purpose of constructing European identity narratives and facilitating citizens’ sense of belonging to Europe and the EU. The article focuses on the citizens’ perspective to cultural Europeanization through ethnographic research on one central action in the EU cultural policy, European Heritage Label (EHL). We analyse the interviews conducted in selected EHL sites with Central and East European (CEE) citizens who were visiting the sites as well as with cultural heritage practitioners working at three EHL sites located in CEE countries. We ask how the practitioners and the …
Tri-Marium as the ‘emancipation’ of East-Central Europe: framing European counter-narratives in Poland
2021
The historical notion of Inter-Marium captured Poland’s centuriesold concept of integrating, in a form of confederation, the new states that appeared on the map between the Baltic and Black Seas after 1918. Reincarnated as the contemporary narrative of Tri-Marium, this notion is gaining new momentum and has been most visible in Poland, the largest state of the European Union’s Eastern semi-periphery. This article examines Inter-Marium as one of the most clearly articulated counter-narratives to the mainstream European integration project. Drawing on original research rooted primarily in critical discourse analysis, the article uses framing as an interpretative tool. It analyses the narrativ…
Book Review: When Things Fell Apart. State Failure in Late-Century Africa
2009
Review of the monograph: Robert H. Bates: When Things Fell Apart. State Failure in Late-Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, Paperback ISBN 9780521715256; Hardback ISBN 9780521887359; 216 pages
Social media as a place to see and be seen : Exploring factors affecting job attainment via social media
2023
Job seekers can utilize social media platforms to actively search for job opportunities and also receive unsolicited job offers from recruiters and employers. Using data from a representative sample of Finnish social media users, this article studies both aspects of social media job attainment by analyzing how much individuals successfully apply for jobs and get recruited to positions through social media. Results show that the prevalence of successfully applying to jobs through social media does not differ statistically between socio-economic groups, but the prevalence of getting recruited to jobs through social media is greater within higher socio-economic groups. LinkedIn users are more …
Narrativity and intertextuality in the making of a shared European memory
2016
The latest wave of European integration process, cultural Europeanization, includes complex processes, such as the attempts to create a shared European memory that would transcend national interpretations of the past. The cultural Europeanization can be perceived as a narrative operation: in it the EU, Europe, and Europeanness are given meanings and made sense of through narrativization. The article investigates the EU’s attempts to create a shared European memory by analyzing the exhibition narrative of the Parlamentarium, the visitors’ center of the European Parliament. The analysis indicates how the construction of an official shared European memory is operationalized through textual and…
Designing Deliberation Systems
2010
In a liberal democracy, the evolution of political agendas and formation of policy involves deliberation: serious consideration of political issues. Modern day political participation is dependent on widespread deliberation supported by information and communication technologies, which also offer the potential to revitalize and transform citizen engagement in democracy. Although the majority of web 2.0 systems enable these discourses to some extent, government institutions commission and manage specialized deliberation systems (information systems designed to support participative discourse) intended to promote citizen engagement. The most common examples of these are political discussio…