Dr Massoumeh Torfeh, Research Associate at the Centre for Global Media and Communications, explores the question Trump’s strategy in relation to Iran in the article linked below for TRT World: TRT Article link Featured image credit: “Kerman, bazaar” by hermien_amsterdam is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Dr. Dounia Mahlouly, SOAS Centre for Global Media and Communications, has been awarded £75,000 to lead a new six-month research project, investigating British Council’s ‘Strengthening Resilience’ communication activities. The project, on which Dr. Dina Matar will act as advisor, will provide analysis of the experience of British Council’s Strengthening Resilience (SR) programme in promoting youth empowerment and state-civil society relations through media-based capacity building. It will explore the potential, limitations
In recent years, debates on global and national security have to a large extent relied on reviving the political terminology introduced by the post-9/11 War on Terror. Discourses underpinning the American-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War and media coverage of the 2015-2017 terrorist attacks in Europe have further established the normative, limiting and often-biased language of ‘Counter-terrorism’. Along with general concerns over misinformation, the threat of ‘terrorist’ propaganda is
I am glad to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech published in the International Journal of Communication. This is the outcome of a five-year collaboration with colleagues across the world committed to advancing a more comparative perspective to ongoing debates on online hate speech and violent online political extremism — and most notably collaboration with Professor Sahana Udupa at the Digital Dignity Project, at LMU
Rajeshwari (RJ) Shastri, MA Global Media and Postnational Communication, explores Bollywoodization of Indian weddings. 2018 was the year of ‘big, fat Indian weddings’, from Bollywood-sweethearts Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh’s destination wedding in Italy, to actor Priyanka Chopra and musician Nick Jonas’s ‘intimate’ wedding with only 200 closest friends and family, which naturally included the Indian Prime Minister. However, the year ended with the biggest Indian wedding: oil-and-telecom conglomerate,
For somebody who has been following digital politics globally for more than a decade now, it is sometimes uncanny how hateful, violent and misleading communication – or at least the public and political controversies and moral panics around them – now dominates the global political landscape. Digital media, it seems, is imagined in mostly terms of the dangers it poses: violent extremist propaganda run amok; democratic processes corrupted by disinformation
Mohamed Taha, SOAS PhD candidate, discusses future prospects of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after Morsi. “The death of Egypt’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, in a Cairo court on June 17, on the same day he was elected six years previously, closed a chapter in Egyptian history. Morsi was the first president of Egypt to be elected in popular, representative and multiparty elections. But his burial in a graveyard alongside previous
There is a disturbing trend in India. Post last month’s re-election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister and the return of his right wing Hindu national Party, BJP, to power, the attacks on journalists critical of the administration have increased with a terrifying intensity. A vernacular language journalist was arrested at the beginning ofJune on the flimsy charge of defamation because he shared negative comments of the Chief Minister
How can we understand strategic communication in conflict? The Syrian conflict in context Dina Matar It is impossible to find a single cause-and-effect argument relating to the Syrian conflict, and this applies to the role of media in conflict – a key concern of political communication scholarship. The conflict, now in its eighth year, has been described as the most socially mediated war due to the excessive use by diverse
Louis Plottel (MA Migration and Diaspora Studies) discusses the use of social media in the West Papuan liberation movement. In the early morning of December 1, 2018, twenty Indonesian construction workers disappeared from their barracks in the Nduga regency of West Papua. The twenty men were held overnight then killed the following morning by their captors, a collection of local residents opposed to the highway which the men had been
