Search Results (34)

This article examines the eschatological dimension of the sermons of François Le Picart (1504–1556), a prominent Parisian preacher and a precursor who established the codes that enabled the gradual maturation of a theophanic tension of violence in which human beings were destined to become its instruments. Through a close reading of his sermon collections, this study analyzes how Le Picart interwove Pauline soteriology, divine love, repentance, and apocalyptic imagery to construct a moral and affective pedagogy. His eschatological language—linking love with fear and salvation with punishment—transformed anxiety about the end times into a form of spiritual yet emotional collective mobilization. By associating divine justice with anti-heretical rhetoric, Le Picart’s preaching turned theology into an instrument for defending both faith and social order. This article situates his sermons within the broader Catholic renewal of sixteenth-century France, highlighting the imagery and rhetoric of eschatology as key components of early modern anti-Protestant propaganda prior to the religious wars. Full article

‘Deepfakes’ and other forms of digital communications disinformation are now on the virtual frontlines of many armed conflicts. Military commanders can potentially gain significant tactical advantages by misleading enemy forces, opposing governments, and civilian populations into believing X when Y is the true state of affairs. Distinct from military propaganda, deliberate deceptions and subterfuge have long been part of warfare. However, a powerful claim is advanced that deepfakes such as announcing surrender, truce declarations, or similar messages that place soldiers and civilians at greater risk are international humanitarian law (IHL) violations, notably under the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1977 Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions. This four-section critical discussion considers whether, or to what extent, deepfakes are IHL compliant. Selected examples taken from the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war are highlighted to illustrate the potentially grave dangers that deepfakes represent for innocent civilian populations. IHL reform recommendations are made that would reduce deepfake harm—if such reforms are embraced by the international community (an admittedly doubtful prospect). Full article

This qualitative interpretive case study investigates how Zimbabwe’s independent daily newspaper, the Daily News, reported on the 31 March 2025, anti-President Emmerson Mnangagwa protests organized by war veterans. Established in 1999, the Daily News is regarded as Zimbabwe’s alternative media, but of late, the newspaper’s editorial disposition has shown symptoms associated with capture, necessitating this study. The other privately owned daily newspaper, NewsDay, has maintained its anti-government editorial stance, while the state-controlled newspapers under the Zimbabwe Newspapers Group (Zimpapers) are ZANU-PF propaganda mouthpieces. In the context of this study, “independent” means free from state interference in the media’s editorial operations. Steeped in media capture and alternative media topographies, this study also investigates whether the Daily News aligns with its alternative media stance in its reports. Further, it sought to establish if the Daily News reports were symptomatic of media capture. Findings, which were subjected to a framing analysis, suggest that the Daily News’ reports were symptomatic of capture by pro-regime forces. This eroded the diversity of opinion in a country yearning for democracy. Full article

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has profoundly altered the global geopolitical landscape. Owing to its geographical proximity, the conflict has had a considerable impact on Europe. Marked by the professionalisation and democratisation of technology, it has underscored the growing significance of hybrid warfare, in which disinformation and propaganda serve as additional instruments of war. Within this context, the aim of this article is to examine the characteristics of false information related to the war between Russia and Ukraine in four European countries between 2022 and 2023. To this end, a content analysis of 297 hoaxes was conducted across eight fact-checking platforms, complemented by ten in-depth interviews with specialised professionals. The findings indicate that disinformation is characterised by viral audiovisual hoaxes, particularly on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), with a notable surge in disinformation flows at the onset of the invasion. In the early months, misleading content predominantly consisted of decontextualised images of the conflict, whereas a year later, the focus shifted to narratives concerning international support and alliances. The primary objective of this disinformation is to polarise public opinion against a perceived common enemy. The conclusions provide a broader and more nuanced understanding of wartime disinformation within the European context. Full article

President John F Kennedy faced an impending crisis upon taking office in January 1961. The revolutionary threat of Cuba held the potential to spread to several neighboring countries. This crisis was the product of decades of neglect from successive US presidents, that ultimately invited the USSR into the region and fell to Kennedy during his first year as President. Kennedy sought to recast the image of the US in the hemisphere to inoculate against the example of Cuba. The cornerstone of this plan was the Alliance for Progress, a substantial program of economic assistance from the US to Latin America. However, that program has widely been criticized as a failure. Rather than reflect on the economic and social limitations of the Alliance for Progress, this paper will evaluate the diplomatic impact of Kennedy’s approach in forming the anti-Cuban coalition in the first year of his presidency. Kennedy successfully changed the Latin American attitude towards the US prior to the releasing of any substantial economic aid. Therefore, this paper will argue that “The Kennedy Plan” was a diplomatic success that reduced the threat of Castro’s Cuba in the context of the Cold War. Full article

This study examines the increasing Muslim presence in Western Europe, driven by migration, fertility rates, and religious conversion according to recent demographic research. Triggering events such as the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and the 7/7 London bombings in 2005, marked as milestones, worsened by the global media and propaganda, have significantly fueled Islamophobia across the region. Countries in Western Europe, like Spain, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, are selected focus areas to reflect social change and overlapping responses to the shifts. This study investigates the connection between rising anti-immigrant sentiment toward Muslims and the media’s role in shaping Islamophobia by negatively depicting Islam as a religion of war or terror. By analyzing the European Islamophobia Reports from 2015 to 2023, this study examines how Muslims are portrayed both as immigrants and through their symbolic societal presence. The study critically analyzes anti-Islam propaganda and the life experiences of Muslim communities by implementing qualitative methods through a literature review. The findings of this study reveal a paradox between Europe’s advocacy for diversity and the realities shaped by political and global dynamics, which hinder efforts toward inclusion. These insights could inform media policies to promote more balanced representations of Muslims and guide societal initiatives aimed at reducing prejudice and fostering greater inclusivity in Western Europe. Full article

The death of Russian dissident Alexey Navalny in a far-northern colony after three years of imprisonment was declared a martyrdom by the Russian opposition, reflecting the sentiments of a part of Russian society. This unexpected reference to martyr narrative by a largely secular and anti-clerical opposition has set a significant precedent when religious discourse is instrumentalized not only by official propaganda but also by its critics. The authors posit that the construction of a martyr narrative is deeply political, being a part of contemporary ideological war. This article argues that Alexey Navalny’s death and its subsequent sacralization by opposition figures represent a significant moment in contemporary Russian politics. By adopting religious narratives and symbols, the opposition not only mobilizes support but also challenges the regime’s monopoly on ideological and religious discourse. However, this strategic use of martyrdom carries inherent contradictions, reflecting the opposition’s ambivalent relationship with religion and the Russian Orthodox Church. Full article

The American Civil War has been commemorated with a great variety of monuments, memorials, and markers. These monuments were erected for a variety of reasons, beginning with memorialization of the fallen and later to honor aging veterans, commemoration of significant anniversaries associated with the conflict, memorialization of sites of conflict, and celebration of the actions of military leaders. Sources reveal that during both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, many monuments were erected as part of an organized propaganda campaign to terrorize African American communities and distort the past by promoting a “Lost Cause” narrative. Through subsequent decades, to this day, complex and emotional narratives have surrounded interpretive legacies of the Civil War. Instruments of commemoration, through both physical and digital intervention approaches, can be provocative and instructive, as the country deals with a slavery legacy and the commemorated objects and spaces surrounding Confederate inheritances. Today, all of these potential factors and outcomes, with internationally relevance, are surrounded by swirls of social and political contention and controversy, including the remembering/forgetting dichotomies of cultural heritage. In this article, drawing from the testimony of scholars and artists, I address the conceptual landscape of approaches to the presentation and evolving participatory narratives of Confederate monuments that range from absolute expungement and removal to more restrained ideas such as in situ re-contextualization, removal to museums, and preservation-in-place. I stress not so much the academic debate but how the American public is informed about and reacts to the various issues related to Confederate memorialization. My main point, where my premise stands out in the literature, is that, for the sake of posterity, and our ability to connect and engage with a tangible in situ artifact, not all Confederate statues should be taken down. Some of them, or remnants of them, should be preserved as sites of conscience and reflection, with their social and political meanings ongoing and yet to be determined in the future. The modern dilemma turns on the question: In today’s new era of social justice, are these monuments primarily symbols of oppression, or can we see them, in select cases, alternatively as sites of conscience and reflection encompassing more inclusive conversations about commemoration? What we conserve and assign as the ultimate public value of these monuments rests with how we answer this question. Full article

This article explores the pervasive influence of conspiracy theories, specifically the New World Order (NWO) and Golden Billion theories, within the context of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine. These theories form key narrative frameworks in Russian state media and global conspiracy communities, shaping perceptions of geopolitical events. This study dissects four pivotal episodes within the Russia–Ukraine conflict to illustrate how conspiracy theories shape public perception and policy direction, further entrenching ideological divides. In the first episode of the 2022 full-scale invasion, narratives of the Golden Billion were utilised to justify the attack, presenting Russia as a bastion against the Western elite’s plans to dominate the global economy and resources. The second episode examines the attack on Mariupol in 2022, framed by Russian propaganda as a necessary act to thwart the supposed expansion of NATO and the EU, underpinned by the NWO agenda aiming to dilute Russian influence in Eastern Europe. The third episode analyses the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage in 2022, interpreted by some conspiracy theorists as an act by the NWO to destabilise Europe’s energy security, thus consolidating control over energy routes and resources. The fourth episode delves into the 2024 Moscow terrorist attacks, which were seen by some as either a false flag operation conducted by Western powers or as a legitimate repercussion of Western encroachment orchestrated to weaken Russia’s resolve and international standing. Each episode is contextualised within a broader conspiratorial framework, highlighting the dualistic nature of the NWO and Golden Billion theories that paint the conflict not merely as territorial disputes but as a clash between fundamentally opposing worldviews and global orders. This narrative analysis not only underscores the role of conspiracy theories in shaping geopolitical discourse but also demonstrates their utility in mobilising domestic support, framing international criticism, and justifying military actions. Our findings suggest that these conspiratorial narratives provide a resilient, albeit misleading, lens through which supporters of the Kremlin’s policies can rationalise the war, attributing complex sociopolitical dynamics to the malevolent machinations of a global elite. This study contributes to understanding how modern conflicts are interpreted through ancient conspiratorial lenses, impacting national and international policy and public opinion. Full article

Inflaming public opinion about narcotics was the collective goal of anti-narcotics organizers who emerged from the battlefields of the war on alcohol. The most famous was Richmond P. Hobson, who used newspapers, radio, pamphlets, speaking tours, and networking with civic organizations to agitate for reform. This article draws on archival and newly accessible electronic sources to draw a picture of Hobson’s anti-narcotics propagandizing and put it in historical context. Full article

This essay adopts a stylistic approach to delineate the various—and varying—pragmatic effects inherent in the use and interactions of pronouns in Ford’s war prose. Ford’s singular use of pronouns is shown to be instrumental in his practice of literary impressionism. In particular, the omnipresent second person is granted a variety of referents that coexist along a “continuum of reference” (as defined by Bettina Kluge), from a “you” that is speaker-oriented to one that is addressee-oriented. Sorlin’s intersection of Kluge’s continuum with a gradient from personalisation to generalisation (2022) is illuminating when examining the manifold significance of Ford’s use of the second person, as it brings to light its ethical impact. Ford’s war essays shift from the general to the particular and from the collective to the individual in a manner that opposes propaganda rhetorics. Furthermore, the gradient established by Sandrine Sorlin to account for the pragmatic effect of “you” also proves remarkably useful when applied to the pronoun “one”. Scrutinising the interplay between these various pronouns allows us to investigate the multifarious relationships that Ford establishes in his war essays between the persona, the reader, those he often called “my men”, and the collective ethos of wartime Britain. Full article

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 ignited propaganda efforts from the U.S. executive branch of government and the U.S. media, as the country tried to position itself towards the war not just in the eyes of its citizens but of the entire world as part of its geopolitical power position. A comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis of official U.S. communications and U.S. partisan media coverage in the first week of the invasion aims to uncover how the U.S. government set the agenda and framed the events, and to what extent the media copied or diverged from this agenda-setting and framing. The results suggest a narrow focus and distinct framing on the part of the U.S. government, partly taken over by partisan media. The latter also touched on other topics that fit media logic and provided some counter-frames in line with their ideological positions, yet overall confirmed the dominant framing of the war as unjust, unprovoked and premeditated, as Putin’s choice, and the position of the U.S. as the leader of the free world and defender of democracy. Full article

Utilizing social media data is imperative in comprehending critical insights on the Russia–Ukraine cyber conflict due to their unparalleled capacity to provide real-time information dissemination, thereby enabling the timely tracking and analysis of cyber incidents. The vast array of user-generated content on these platforms, ranging from eyewitness accounts to multimedia evidence, serves as invaluable resources for corroborating and contextualizing cyber attacks, facilitating the attribution of malicious actors. Furthermore, social media data afford unique access to public sentiment, the propagation of propaganda, and emerging narratives, offering profound insights into the effectiveness of information operations and shaping counter-messaging strategies. However, there have been hardly any studies reported on the Russia–Ukraine cyber war harnessing social media analytics. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the crucial role of social-media-based cyber intelligence in understanding Russia’s cyber threats during the ongoing Russo–Ukrainian conflict. This paper introduces an innovative multidimensional cyber intelligence framework and utilizes Twitter data to generate cyber intelligence reports. By leveraging advanced monitoring tools and NLP algorithms, like language detection, translation, sentiment analysis, term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), Porter stemming, n-grams, and others, this study automatically generated cyber intelligence for Russia and Ukraine. Using 37,386 tweets originating from 30,706 users in 54 languages from 13 October 2022 to 6 April 2023, this paper reported the first detailed multilingual analysis on the Russia–Ukraine cyber crisis in four cyber dimensions (geopolitical and socioeconomic; targeted victim; psychological and societal; and national priority and concerns). It also highlights challenges faced in harnessing reliable social-media-based cyber intelligence. Full article

The question of heroism and heroic virtue belongs among the most discussed topics in history. It emerges as a recurring theme, mainly in the context of an imminent military danger provoking horror and fear which an individual must resist. This is precisely why heroism was a subject of Nazi propaganda in the past, when it was associated with an irrational willingness to sacrifice one’s own life for any value. In the context of the current war turmoil and tenebrous scenarios regarding the future of the humanity, this article poses the following question: what exactly is heroic virtue? In particular, it focuses on the image of heroism presented by Josef Pieper, who followed the line of thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. He wanted to demonstrate how the courage to face injustice, in spite of imminent danger, develops into heroism when the power of hope is mobilised within individuals. This refers not only to the natural hope associated with our common expectations, but also a mystical hope that helps a hero maintain justice even when face-to-face with the predominance of evil until the end. The article concludes by proposing several motives that might be considered in the process of education to heroic virtue. Full article

During the French Wars of Religion, both the Huguenot and the radical Catholic factions started by stressing their devotion to the Valois monarchy, for reasons both pragmatic and ideological. Both were hoping for the support of the Crown in achieving their goals—the Huguenots to convert France to the Reformation, the radical Catholics to eradicate the Protestantism from the kingdom—and their propaganda made use of numerous Biblical references in order to urge the kings of France to pursue such policy goals. However, Biblical precedents could be a two-edged sword: once hope for royal support was replaced by disappointment and even resentment, the nature of the Biblical models and comparisons changed as well. From appeals to emulate the righteous kings from the Bible, like David, Solomon or Josiah, the propagandists moved to warnings and even threats, by presenting the kings of France with the fate of, this time, wicked rulers like Ahab or Herod, who were grievously punished by God for their transgressions. This paper aims to analyze the recurrences of such examples in the Catholic propaganda during the French Wars of Religion, until the death of Henry III in 1589, and their significance in the political discourse of that age. Full article