Anti-migrant, but not nationalist: Pursuing statist legitimacy through immigration discourse and policy

Author(s):  
Caress Schenk

Despite increasingly securitized anti-migrant policies in Russia, President Vladimir Putin has been extremely cautious in his rhetoric about international migrants, avoiding overtly ethno-nationalist frames. By repeatedly emphasizing the role of migrants in development and their potential for integration, Putin has charted out a statist agenda, outlining how immigration can contribute to the state’s goals. This chapter analyses a series of Putin’s speeches, asking whether he employs the rhetoric of three common migration myths: ‘migrants take our jobs’; ‘migrants are culturally incompatible with the host society’; and ‘migrants represent a security threat’. While these myths are partially consistent with public opinion, they are not actively employed by the Kremlin. These findings temper the notion of an ‘ethnic turn’ in Russian politics and are especially surprising, given the current populist swing experienced throughout much of the Western world.

Author(s):  
Olga Jastrzębska

Abstrakt: Polityka Rosji i jej obecnego prezydenta – Władimira Putina – wzbudza na świecie wiele kontrowersji, jednak z drugiej strony grupy wspierające działania państwa rosyjskiego, którego głównym celem jest odbudowa swojej silnej pozycji na arenie międzynarodowej nie są zjawiskiem rzadkim. Swoje poparcie dla działań Moskwy wyrażają poprzez środki masowego przekazu, m.in. przez internet. Niniejszy artykuł poświęcony będzie internetowym portalom, sprzyjającym polityce Moskwy, istniejącym w krajach Europy Środkowej – państw pogranicza Wschodu i Zachodu, przez długi czas będących częścią radzieckiej strefy wpływów, zaś obecnie integrujących się ze strukturami europejskimi. Praca postara się przedstawić najważniejsze treści prezentowane na tych stronach, stosunek do wzrastającego znaczenia Rosji w stosunkach międzynarodowych oraz prób odzyskania pozycji mocarstwa (m.in. odniesienie do konfliktu ukraińskiego) a także w jaki sposób te portale i ich aktywność wpływają na procesy społeczno-polityczne, istniejące w tych państwach i czy witryny te mogą być aktywnym instrumentem wykorzystywanym przez Rosję w procesie kształtowania i prowadzenia działań określanych mianem wojny informacyjnej. Abstract: The current politics of Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin is considered as very controversial, but from the other hand many groups support the actions, which are concerned on increasing the strong position of Russia at the international area. Their advocacy for its policy is showed by many means of transitions like Internet. The main focus of this article will be interested in internet portals, which promote the Russian politics which exist in Central European countries like Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia. Mentioned countries exist on sui generis borderland of East and West. They were for many years parts of Soviet sphere of influence and now try to arrange their position in West European structures. Article will try to answer which type of contents can be found on this websites, their attitude to expanding role of Russia in international relations and Moscow's attempts for recupering the superpower status (like opinion about Ukrainian conflict) and in which way these portals and their activities can influence social and political processes, which are conducted in these states. At least article will mention how described websites can be used as active instrument in the process of shaping and carrying on movements which can be called as information war.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 2759-2769
Author(s):  
Yolanda Ramírez Villacorta

Peru is recognized as a pluricultural and multilingual country, with more than 50 original ethnic groups (Andean-Amazonian), to which we would add Afro-Peruvians and international migrants. However, the country vision has been homogenous, around the European target and the Spanish cultural heritage, hiding cultural diversity. The relations between cultures have been asymmetric, expressed in discrimination, marginalization, exclusion, on the basis dominant-dominated opposition; majority-minority. Teachers have been trained in this vision of the country and have been oriented to transmit information from the Western world and European knowledge, without assessing ancestral knowledge of cultural groups existing in the country. Currently, we seek to change that paradigm and has incorporated the proposal of the intercultural approach for relations between cultures and also for education. The classrooms are now multicultural. The new national educational policy marks an unavoidable challenge: to create a new curricular model to train intercultural teachers, reinforcing in them didactics and competences, capable of valuing and recovering knowledge of cultural diversity, to fulfill the role of educating in interculturality and forming citizens intercultural in a double dimension: to respond to the country and to act in the context of globalization.


Author(s):  
Haidar Moukdad

Sample contributions by Arab contributors to a discussion forum were analyzed to study the role of the Web in promoting free speech and demystifying long held views of Arab public opinion. The findings of the study highlight the importance of the role played by the Web in promoting free speech among traditionally repressed populations, and provide insights that will help in correcting misconceptions about Arab public opinion.Un échantillonnage d’interventions par des participants arabes à un forum de discussion a été analysé afin d’étudier le rôle du Web dans le développement de la liberté de parole et la démystification des préjugés concernant l’opinion publique arabe. Les résultats de l’étude mettent en lumière l’importance du rôle joué par le Web dans le développement de la liberté de parole parmi les populations traditionnellement réprimées et offrent des idées qui aideront à corriger les idées préconçues concernant l’opinion publique arabe. 


Author(s):  
V. I. Denysenko

The failure to sign the Association Agreement with the EU in autumn 2013 has been investigated. The role of the Russian factor, which became decisive in the foreign policy reversal of the Yanukovych regime, has been revealed. The importance of Viktor Yanukovych’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 27, 2013, in the dramatic change of Ukraine’s international vector has been emphasized. On the basis of diplomats’ memoirs, the assumption about intimidation of the Ukrainian President by the Russian side has been substantiated. The timeline of the preparation of the 2013 Vilnius Summit, the position of EU structures and the attempts of the fourth President of Ukraine to win time to trade with the Russians have been reproduced. The thesis about the Donetsk clan’s attempts to prepare public opinion for a 180 degree turn in late October - early November 2013 has been presented. For this purpose, demonstration meetings were organized with representatives of Ukrainian business and trade unions, who called for revision of plans for European integration on their own initiative. The main role in manipulating public opinion rested on the government of Mykola Azarov and the Verkhovna Rada, which had a majority coalition led by the Party of Regions. Instead, Viktor Yanukovych continued his European integration rhetoric and reiterated to Western partners his own willingness to sign the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. On November 21, the real position of the ruling elite was made available to the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine. According to it, the process of preparation for the signing of the Association Agreement was suspended, the proposal was made for the trilateral Ukraine-EU-Russia negotiations, and the ministries were tasked with developing measures to maintain economic ties with the CIS countries. The decision was rejected by European partners and led to Yanukovych’s attempts to find other ways to thwart the signing of the Agreement. It has been proved that this role was played by Yanukovych’s requirements for financial assistance from the EU amounting to about 160 billion euros, which aimed to prevent the signing of the Association Agreement. Key words: Viktor Yanukovych, association of Ukraine with the EU, эYulia Tymoshenko, European integration, Pat Cox, Alexander Kwasniewski, Vladimir Putin.


Author(s):  
G. M. Ditchfield

Explanations of the abolition of the slave trade have been the subject of intense historical debate. Earlier accounts tended to play up the role of individual, heroic abolitionists and their religious, particularly evangelical, motivation. Eric Williams argued that the decline in profitability of the ‘Triangular trade’ was important in persuading people that the slave trade hindered, rather than helped, economic progress. More recent work has rehabilitated the role of some abolitionists but has set this alongside the importance of campaigning and petitioning in shifting public opinion. The role that the slaves themselves played in bringing attention to their plight is also now recognized. Consequently, the importance of abolitionism for a sense of Dissenting self-identity and as part of broader attempts to influence social reform needs to be reconsidered.


Author(s):  
Catherine E. De Vries

The European Union (EU) is facing one of the rockiest periods in its existence. At no time in its history has it looked so economically fragile, so insecure about how to protect its borders, so divided over how to tackle the crisis of legitimacy facing its institutions, and so under assault by Eurosceptic parties. The unprecedented levels of integration in recent decades have led to increased public contestation, yet at the same the EU is more reliant on public support for its continued legitimacy than ever before. This book examines the role of public opinion in the European integration process. It develops a novel theory of public opinion that stresses the deep interconnectedness between people’s views about European and national politics. It suggests that public opinion cannot simply be characterized as either Eurosceptic or not, but rather that it consists of different types. This is important because these types coincide with fundamentally different views about the way the EU should be reformed and which policy priorities should be pursued. These types also have very different consequences for behaviour in elections and referendums. Euroscepticism is such a diverse phenomenon because the Eurozone crisis has exacerbated the structural imbalances within the EU. As the economic and political fates of member states have diverged, people’s experiences with and evaluations of the EU and national political systems have also grown further apart. The heterogeneity in public preferences that this book has uncovered makes a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing Euroscepticism unlikely to be successful.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147892992110001
Author(s):  
Diego Garzia ◽  
Frederico Ferreira da Silva

Recent developments in Western societies have motivated a growing consideration of the role of negativity in public opinion and political behavior research. In this article, we review the scant (and largely disconnected) scientific literature on negativity and political behavior, merging contributions from social psychology, public opinion, and electoral research, with a view on developing an integrated theoretical framework for the study of negative voting in contemporary democracies. We highlight that the tendency toward negative voting is driven by three partly overlapping components, namely, (1) an instrumental–rational component characterized by retrospective performance evaluations and rationalization mechanisms, (2) an ideological component grounded on long-lasting political identities, and (3) an affective component, motivated by (negative) attitudes toward parties and candidates. By blueprinting the systematic relationships between negative voting and each of these components in turn, and suggesting multiple research paths, this article aims to stimulate future studies on negative voting in multi-party parliamentary systems to motivate a better understanding of the implications of negativity in voting behavior in contemporary democracies.


Author(s):  
Yong Li ◽  
Xiaojun Yang ◽  
Min Zuo ◽  
Qingyu Jin ◽  
Haisheng Li ◽  
...  

The real-time and dissemination characteristics of network information make net-mediated public opinion become more and more important food safety early warning resources, but the data of petabyte (PB) scale growth also bring great difficulties to the research and judgment of network public opinion, especially how to extract the event role of network public opinion from these data and analyze the sentiment tendency of public opinion comment. First, this article takes the public opinion of food safety network as the research point, and a BLSTM-CRF model for automatically marking the role of event is proposed by combining BLSTM and conditional random field organically. Second, the Attention mechanism based on vocabulary in the field of food safety is introduced, the distance-related sequence semantic features are extracted by BLSTM, and the emotional classification of sequence semantic features is realized by using CNN. A kind of Att-BLSTM-CNN model for the analysis of public opinion and emotional tendency in the field of food safety is proposed. Finally, based on the time series, this article combines the role extraction of food safety events and the analysis of emotional tendency and constructs a net-mediated public opinion early warning model in the field of food safety according to the heat of the event and the emotional intensity of the public to food safety public opinion events.


Author(s):  
Michael Tomz ◽  
Jessica L P Weeks

Abstract How do military alliances affect public support for war to defend victims of aggression? We offer the first experimental evidence on this fundamental question. Our experiments revealed that alliance commitments greatly increased the American public's willingness to intervene abroad. Alliances shaped public opinion by increasing public fears about the reputational costs of nonintervention and by heightening the perceived moral obligation to intervene out of concerns for fairness and loyalty. Finally, although alliances swayed public opinion across a wide range of circumstances, they made the biggest difference when the costs of intervention were high, the stakes of intervention were low, and the country needing aid was not a democracy. Thus, alliances can create pressure for war even when honoring the commitment would be extremely inconvenient, which could help explain why democratic allies tend to be so reliable. These findings shed new light on the consequences of alliances and other international legal commitments, the role of morality in foreign policy, and ongoing debates about domestic audience costs.


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