scholarly journals Cyber-jihad in the Western Balkans

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-58
Author(s):  
Eleni Kapsokoli
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Operational Planning ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Terrorist Organizations ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Islamic Terrorism ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Foreign Fighters

During the last two decades, the growing threat of Islamic terrorism has raised numerous security challenges for both states and non-state actors. Cyberspace is weaponized by actors who conduct malicious activities, in order to achieve their goals. Terrorist organizations reflect the darker side of cyberspace. Terrorists use cyberspace to collect data, raise funds, conduct propaganda, spread radical ideologies and hate speech as well as for the purposes of radicalization, recruitment and operational planning. Social media platforms provide a fertile ground to extend the radical ideologies, to spread terror and to connect with people who share the same views. ISIS is considered a pioneer in utilizing the benefits that cyberspace offers. The Western Balkans is a region where ISIS is recruiting foreign fighters and lone-wolves. The European Union is the driving force for the activation of Western Balkans in countering cyberterrorism and developing relevant strategies.

scholarly journals REGULATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-71
Author(s):  
Balázs Bartóki-Gönczy
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Service Provider ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
National Level ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
Private Regulation ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform

Social media platforms are mainly characterised by private regulation. However, their direct and indirect impact on society has become such (fake news, hate  speech, incitement to terrorism, data protection breaches, impact on the viability of professional journalism) that private regulatory mechanisms in place (often opaque and not transparent) seem to be inadequate. In the present paper, I would  first address the problem of the legal classification of these services (media service provider vs. intermediary service provider), since the answer to this question is a  prerequisite for any state intervention. I would then present the regulatory  initiatives (with a critical approach) at the EU and national level which might shape the future of ‘social media platform’ regulation. 

Playing Politics: How Sabarimala Played Out on TikTok

2021 ◽  
pp. 000276422198976
Author(s):  
Darsana Vijay ◽  
Alex Gekker
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Actor ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indian Context ◽  
Political Contention ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Potential Strategy

TikTok is commonly known as a playful, silly platform where teenagers share 15-second videos of crazy stunts or act out funny snippets from popular culture. In the past few years, it has experienced exponential growth and popularity, unseating Facebook as the most downloaded app. Interestingly, recent news coverage notes the emergence of TikTok as a political actor in the Indian context. They raise concerns over the abundance of divisive content, hate speech, and the lack of platform accountability in countering these issues. In this article, we analyze how politics is performed on TikTok and how the platform’s design shapes such expressions and their circulation. What does the playful architecture of TikTok mean to the nature of its political discourse and participation? To answer this, we review existing academic work on play, media, and political participation and then examine the case of Sabarimala through the double lens of ludic engagement and platform-specific features. The efficacy of play as a productive heuristic to study political contention on social media platforms is demonstrated. Finally, we turn to ludo-literacy as a potential strategy that can reveal the structures that order playful political participation and can initiate alternative modes of playing politics.

The Regional Path to Peaceful Change: What the Asian and European Experiences Tell Us

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-545
Author(s):  
Mark Beeson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
International System ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Eu

AbstractOne of the more striking, surprising, and optimism-inducing features of the contemporary international system has been the decline of interstate war. The key question for students of international relations and comparative politics is how this happy state of affairs came about. In short, was this a universal phenomenon or did some regions play a more important and pioneering role in bringing about peaceful change? As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay suggests that Western Europe generally and the European Union in particular played pivotal roles in transforming the international system and the behavior of policymakers. This helped to create the material and ideational conditions in which other parts of the world could replicate this experience, making war less likely and peaceful change more feasible. This argument is developed by comparing the experiences of the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their respective institutional offshoots. The essay uses this comparative historical analysis to assess both regions’ capacity to cope with new security challenges, particularly the declining confidence in institutionalized cooperation.

Unfolding the case of returnees: How the European Union and its member States are addressing the return of foreign fighters and their families

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Carlota Rigotti ◽  
Júlia Zomignani Barboza
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Perceived Threat ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Security Threat ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Member States ◽  
Foreign Fighters ◽  
Term Response

Abstract The return of foreign fighters and their families to the European Union has mostly been considered a security threat by member States, which consequently adopt repressive measures aimed at providing an immediate, short-term response to this perceived threat. In addition to this strong-arm approach, reintegration strategies have also been used to prevent returnees from falling back into terrorism and to break down barriers of hostility between citizens in the long term. Amidst these different strategies, this paper seeks to identify which methods are most desirable for handling returnees.

The Berlin Process. Bringing the Western Balkan Region Closer to the European Union

Südosteuropa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Christina Griessler
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Eu Enlargement ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
New Energy ◽  
Western Balkan Region ◽  
Slow Progress ◽  
Proactive Measures

AbstractFor the countries of the Western Balkans, the path to membership in the European Union (EU) has been particularly tortuous. Its slow progress has created frustration among applicant countries. In 2014 Germany, stepping into the political void that had formed, inaugurated what has come to be known as the Berlin Process, an initiative aimed at injecting new energy into the dormant EU enlargement process. The author examines the political activities initiated between 2014 and 2019, analysing the official documentation of the Berlin Process along with publications such as policy papers and media commentaries. She concludes that although meaningful and proactive measures have been taken, such efforts have not been successful in persuading or enabling the Western Balkan states to implement the political and economic reforms required for EU accession.

scholarly journals Emotionally Informed Hate Speech Detection: A Multi-target Perspective

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Chiril ◽  
Endang Wahyu Pamungkas ◽  
Farah Benamara ◽  
Véronique Moriceau ◽  
Viviana Patti
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Binary Classification ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Vulnerable Groups ◽  
Speech Detection ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Sentic Computing ◽  
Specific Manifestation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

AbstractHate Speech and harassment are widespread in online communication, due to users' freedom and anonymity and the lack of regulation provided by social media platforms. Hate speech is topically focused (misogyny, sexism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, etc.), and each specific manifestation of hate speech targets different vulnerable groups based on characteristics such as gender (misogyny, sexism), ethnicity, race, religion (xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia), sexual orientation (homophobia), and so on. Most automatic hate speech detection approaches cast the problem into a binary classification task without addressing either the topical focus or the target-oriented nature of hate speech. In this paper, we propose to tackle, for the first time, hate speech detection from a multi-target perspective. We leverage manually annotated datasets, to investigate the problem of transferring knowledge from different datasets with different topical focuses and targets. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we explore the ability of hate speech detection models to capture common properties from topic-generic datasets and transfer this knowledge to recognize specific manifestations of hate speech; (2) we experiment with the development of models to detect both topics (racism, xenophobia, sexism, misogyny) and hate speech targets, going beyond standard binary classification, to investigate how to detect hate speech at a finer level of granularity and how to transfer knowledge across different topics and targets; and (3) we study the impact of affective knowledge encoded in sentic computing resources (SenticNet, EmoSenticNet) and in semantically structured hate lexicons (HurtLex) in determining specific manifestations of hate speech. We experimented with different neural models including multitask approaches. Our study shows that: (1) training a model on a combination of several (training sets from several) topic-specific datasets is more effective than training a model on a topic-generic dataset; (2) the multi-task approach outperforms a single-task model when detecting both the hatefulness of a tweet and its topical focus in the context of a multi-label classification approach; and (3) the models incorporating EmoSenticNet emotions, the first level emotions of SenticNet, a blend of SenticNet and EmoSenticNet emotions or affective features based on Hurtlex, obtained the best results. Our results demonstrate that multi-target hate speech detection from existing datasets is feasible, which is a first step towards hate speech detection for a specific topic/target when dedicated annotated data are missing. Moreover, we prove that domain-independent affective knowledge, injected into our models, helps finer-grained hate speech detection.

scholarly journals Social Media Toxicity Classification Using Deep Learning: Real-World Application UK Brexit

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 1332
Author(s):  
Hong Fan ◽  
Wu Du ◽  
Abdelghani Dahou ◽  
Ahmed A. Ewees ◽  
Dalia Yousri ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Real World Application ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Public Dataset ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Harmful Side Effect

Social media has become an essential facet of modern society, wherein people share their opinions on a wide variety of topics. Social media is quickly becoming indispensable for a majority of people, and many cases of social media addiction have been documented. Social media platforms such as Twitter have demonstrated over the years the value they provide, such as connecting people from all over the world with different backgrounds. However, they have also shown harmful side effects that can have serious consequences. One such harmful side effect of social media is the immense toxicity that can be found in various discussions. The word toxic has become synonymous with online hate speech, internet trolling, and sometimes outrage culture. In this study, we build an efficient model to detect and classify toxicity in social media from user-generated content using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). The BERT pre-trained model and three of its variants has been fine-tuned on a well-known labeled toxic comment dataset, Kaggle public dataset (Toxic Comment Classification Challenge). Moreover, we test the proposed models with two datasets collected from Twitter from two different periods to detect toxicity in user-generated content (tweets) using hashtages belonging to the UK Brexit. The results showed that the proposed model can efficiently classify and analyze toxic tweets.

STUDYING THE HISTORY OF THE BALKANS / SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE: RESEARCH TASKS AND PROBLEM FORMULATION

2021 ◽  
pp. 7-21
Author(s):  
Sergei Romanenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Problem Formulation ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Interstate Relations ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
South Eastern ◽  
European Culture ◽  
South Eastern Europe ◽  
The Relationship

The new issue of the journal «Current Problems of Europe» opens with the problem-oriented article, dedicated to the analysis of the state of the Balkans / South-Eastern Europe region and its development in 2000-2020. The author gives a systemic description of the processes taking place in the intra-national and international intra-regional political, social and economic development of the countries of the region, and the problems generated by them. The changes are associated with a difficult transition phase, experienced by the states of the region, for the most part belonging to the post-socialist world (Bulgaria, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania). The exceptions are Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, however, these three states are also going through a difficult period in their history, associated with new problems both in interstate relations within this triangle, and in relations with NATO and the EU, as well as with Russia. The article discusses the specifics of translating the terms «people» and «national» into Russian, as well as the toponym Kosovo (Serb.) / Kosova (Alb.), and ethnonyms «Bošnjak» and «bosanac». The first part of the issue contains articles devoted to general problems of regional studies: the relationship between the terms Eastern Europe, Central Europe, South-Eastern Europe, Balkans, Western Balkans; comparative and political science subjects; the role of the European Union and China in the development of the region; the relationship of national Serbian, post-Yugoslavian and European culture and intellectual heritage as well. The second part of the issue examines the relations of the Balkan states with the states of Central and Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Romania, Belarus), as well as the specifics of their development in the post-socialist period. Thus, there is the possibility of a multilateral - historical, political and cultural, as well as comparative analysis of the development of this complex region, which is of great importance for international relations worldwide.

The involvement of Western Balkan terrorist-fighters in armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 151-173
Author(s):  
Filip Bryjka
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Recruitment Process ◽  
Docu Ments ◽  
War Zone ◽  
Critical Content ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Essential Contribution ◽  
Foreign Fighters

The primary purpose of this article is to explain the meaning and consequences of foreign fighters’ participation from Western Balkan countries (WB6) in armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq. In the first part, the issue of foreign fighters is discussed in historical terms. The author focuses on the examples of the Soviet inva-sion of Afghanistan and the ethno-religious conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the second part of the text, the definition framework of foreign fighters’ concept and its evolution towards foreign terrorist-fighters is dis-cussed. Then, a detailed analysis of the main problem is conducted, and several research questions are an-swered: 1) What is the scale of the phenomenon of Balkan volunteers (e.g., their number, the structure of origin, and others) in comparison to fighters from other regions? 2) What are their motivations and goals, and what are their recruitment process and ways of moving into the war zone? 3) What is the threat posed by returning fight-ers to the security of the Western Balkans, and how do individual states counteract this phenomenon? The au-thor uses mainly the following research methods: critical content analysis (literature, scientific articles, docu-ments, reports, press materials), and historical and comparative analysis. The author’s visits to this country in 2018-2020 constituted an essential contribution to the part concerning the case of Kosovo.

Brexit and the Myth of Grandeur

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alma-Pierre Bonnet
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Metaphor Analysis ◽  
European Project ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Critical Metaphor Analysis ◽  
Political Ground

The decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union came as a shock to many. A key player during the referendum campaign was the Vote Leave organisation which managed to convince people that they would be better off outside the European project. Their success was made all the easier as Euroscepticism had been running deep in the country for decades. It is on this fertile ground that Vote Leavers drew to persuade people of the necessity to leave. Using critical metaphor analysis, this paper examines the way Vote Leavers won the argument by developing three political myths, which, once combined, conjured up the notion of British grandeur. Drawing on Jonathan Charteris-Black’s seminal works on the relation between metaphors and the creation of political myths in political rhetoric, this paper posits that the Brexit debate was not won solely on political ground and that the manipulative power of metaphors may have also been a key element. This might explain the current political deadlock, as political solutions might not provide the answers to the questions raised during the campaign.

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