YOUTH AND INDIGENISATION IN THE ZIMBABWEAN PRINT MEDIA

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-53
Author(s):  
Washington Mushore

The main purpose of the indigenisation policy in Zimbabwe, according to Masunungure and Koga (2013), was to empower the historically disadvantaged groups in Zimbabwe after the nationalist government had recognised that the inherited colonial systems were unsustainable and a sure recipe for future social and political instability. Although the indigenisation policy was a very noble idea, there was no consensus – especially at the political level – on how empowerment was going to be achieved. The ruling party (ZANU-PF) saw empowerment as being best achieved through the compulsory takeover of foreign-owned businesses in order to benefit the indigenous blacks, and the main opposition party (MDC-T) perceived empowerment as the creation of more jobs for the multitudes of unemployed Zimbabweans, especially the youth. This article, however, argues that the use of nationalistic language, such as ‘the black majority’, in political discourse by politicians in most cases obscures who the real beneficiaries are or will be. In view of the above, the aim of this study is to critically explore, with the aid of framing theory, how the Zimbabwean print media have reported on the issue of youth and indigenisation in stories purposively sampled from The Herald, The Zimbabwean and The Standard newspapers.

Author(s):  
Nilay Yavuz ◽  
Naci Karkın ◽  
İsmet Parlak ◽  
Özlem Özdeşim Subay

Along with the growing use of twitter as a tool of political interaction, recently, there has also been an attention in the academia to understand and explain how and why politicians use twitter, and what its impact on the political outcomes are. On the other hand, there has been little analysis about the content of the tweets that politicians from different parties posted during major political events. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the discourse strategies that the top-level politicians of the party in power and of the main opposition party in Turkey used in their tweets during Gezi Park events in the summer of 2013. Findings from a hand-coded content analysis based on Van Dijk's framework (2006) indicate that while the most frequently used strategy was actor descriptions and categorization for both parties' politicians, burden strategy and lexicalization / metaphor strategy were used significantly more by the main opposition party politicians compared to the politicians of the party in power.


Subject Electoral manipulation in Africa Significance In many emerging African democracies, authoritarian leaders who democratised only reluctantly have found new ways to manipulate elections to remain in power. Vote buying is a common strategy but so are more ‘hidden’ forms of manipulation such as gerrymandering or biasing the electoral roll in favour of ruling party supporters. Combined with the legitimate advantages of incumbency, this has contributed to a decline in opposition victories in African elections: to just above 10% in recent years from 35% in the early 1990s. Impacts Electoral manipulation undermines public support for the political system and is correlated with political instability and violence. The absence of meaningful political competition in many states means that elections do not promote more accountable or effective government. On average, authoritarian governments that hold elections can be expected to be more stable than those that do not.


Significance A month previously, the ECOWAS had reiterated its displeasure over the lack of progress in resolving the ongoing political impasse and issued an ultimatum to political actors to implement the 2016 Conakry Agreement or face sanctions. The UN has also threatened to initiate punitive measures if the political situation deteriorates further between President Jose Mario Vaz and his ruling party, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). Impacts Given the risk of a military coup, ECOWAS is likely to retain some of its troops until after the 2018 legislative election. A court action by two banks against the government could endanger IMF loans and donors' budgetary support. Ongoing political instability could lead to increased activities by organised criminal and terrorist networks.


2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-22
Author(s):  
Carlos Eduardo Pérez Crespo

Peru has a long history of democracy’s breakdowns where the construction of political discourse has been very important to legitimize authoritarian measures. Therefore, this article analyzes Alberto Fujimori’s discourse in the last Peruvian coup d’état in 1992. Owing to the fact that authoritarian discourse could become legitimate once again in a future political or economic crisis in Peru, this research concludes that the Peruvian government should consider the real importance of the issue of political order in contemporary politics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-228
Author(s):  
Roman Privalov

USSR-2061 is a Russian futuristic online project that imagines a new USSR a century after Gagarin’s journey into space. This article connects the project to Soviet space utopianism and the nostalgia that followed it, while seeing USSR-2061 and its artefacts in the light of utopian studies. In particular, the project’s hesitation with regard to utopianism and its thirst for realism are situated within a classical utopian problem of how to achieve real, not only imaginary, transformations. Such realism generally coincides with Levitas’ (2013) framework of utopia as a method, and, as the analysis shows, it hinders the construction of “an image of a future” at which the project aims. Instead, the resulting narratives and visions commonly overlap with the official Russian political discourse that makes use of Soviet nostalgia, or fall into retrofuturistic replications of commonly satirized Soviet discourses. However, a different way of constructing utopia is also present in USSR-2061, even if it is never highlighted. To make utopia possible in anti-utopian times, one might need to rethink its place of possibility or topos. Theoretically, such an alternative is presented in connection to Latour’s (2017) Terrestrial, a place with agency that in utopian terms presupposes a transgression of the boundary between the real and imaginary, the political and cultural. In the same line, the paper argues that USSR-2061 might attempt the construction of a new utopia through rethinking space. This might be fostered through the inclusion of cosmist ideas such as those of Vladimir Vernadsky and Alexander Chizhevsky, whose intersections with Latourian framework have previously been observed.


Author(s):  
Gerda Wielander

This chapter analyzes the appearance of happiness in public and political discourse in China in the wider context of socialist modernization underpinned by Chinese socialist views of the psyche. It examines the link between the spiritual and the political and argues that the current emphasis on happiness needs to be understood as a continued effort on the part of the CCP to instil the “correct spirit” in China’s population. The author argues that in this process Lu Xun’s Ah Q has turned from a symbol of feudal decay into a role model for China’s citizens. The chapter draws on a range of conceptual frameworks from cultural studies, psychology, sociology and anthropology in its analysis of the tension between individual and collective happiness and the strategies adopted by the CCP, as ruling party, to address it. Examples from a debate on happiness held in the journal Zhongguo Qingnian中國青年‎ in the 1950s and 1960s are juxtaposed with contemporary sources to illustrate the continuity and differences in the Chinese socialist debates on happiness over the decades.


Decyzje ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (34) ◽  
pp. 49-65
Author(s):  
Uğurcan Evci ◽  
◽  
Marek Kamiński ◽  

Before the parliamentary elections in 2018, the ruling party in Turkey, AKP, introduced a new apparentement provision in the electoral law, which allowed parties to make electoral alliances in order to meet the electoral threshold. We claim that this was an ex post mistake. AKP’s electoral engineering was motivated by their fear that its coalition partner, MHP, would not exceed the 10% threshold. While MHP actually met the threshold in the election, the opposition party, İP, failed to do so. Thanks to the new law, the votes for İP were not wasted, as would have happened under the old law. AKP less than 50% of seats and it consequently lost the parliamentary majority. Under the old electoral law, AKP would have won the majority. We use four alternative scenarios in order to estimate the seats and evaluate the political consequences of the unsuccessful electoral manipulation


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.


2018 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 140-155
Author(s):  
Dmitry A. Badalyan

“Zemsky Sobor” was one of the key concepts in Russian political discourse in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. It can be traced to the notion well-known already since the 17th century. Still in the course of further evolution it received various mew meaning and connotations in the discourse of different political trends. The author of the article examines various stages of this concept configuring in the works of the Decembrists, especially Slavophiles, and then in the political projects and publications of the socialists, liberals and “aristocratic” opposition.


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