The Limits of Foreign Authority

Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert

This chapter shows how foreign officials, like the High Representative and a range of Bosnian political elites, used mass publicity to legitimize and authorize their state-building actions and delegitimize those of their opponents. It investigates how Wolfgang Petritsch used the media to engage domestic politicians in attempts to guide their behavior toward foreign state-building goals, even as they sought to shape his actions to serve their own goals. In doing so, the chapter identifies political innovations as well as important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. In discursively stabilizing the ambivalence of his position, Petritsch relied upon and reproduced an image of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina as caught in a transitory temporality, a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. Operating according to a logic of ambivalence afforded Petritsch a calculated flexibility to tack back and forth between various positions of legitimacy and authority.

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Danijela Majstorović ◽  
Zoran Vučkovac

This paper investigates politico-media discourses of the international community revolving for the last few decades around the process of Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina from its Dayton inception until 2015. We first explain the contours of the BiH context and then use a critical discourse analysis to assess the data collected between 1997 and 2015 drawn from a variety of textual resources such as mainstream newspapers, online media, and international community websites to explain the main trends of the Europeanization discourse in the country. Grounding our analysis within the postcolonial theory and post-communist studies, we critically examine the post-1996 peace and state building as well as Europeanization processes in BiH with respect to signs of postcolonial condition including perpetual transition and a state of exception.


2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gilbert

AbstractThis article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Allen

Immediately prior to the events of 9/11, the United Nations (UN) officially recognized the proliferating climate of anti- Muslim and anti-Islamic prejudice, discrimination, and hatred –Islamophobia – as being as equally repellent and unwanted as anti-Semitism and other global discriminatory phenomena. The 9/11 tragedy, however, somewhat overshadowed this recognition, resulting in the continued proliferation of anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic sentiment and expression. This study explores how and why Islamophobia was manifested following 9/11, contextualizes how elite voices across British and European societies have considered Islamophobia to be fair and justified. In considering the wider findings of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s monitoring of Islamophobia, this study explores how “visual identifiers” have underpinned changes in attitude and reactions to Muslims across the fifteen European Union (EU) member nations at a largely pan-European level. The second section develops these ideas, analyzing three of the report’s primary themes – Muslim visuality, political landscapes (incorporating institutional political elites as well as grassroots politics), and the media – each one approached from the perspective of the United Kingdom. This study concludes by suggesting that 9/11 has made Islamophobia more acceptable, which has enabled its expressions, inferences, and manifestations to locate a newer and possibly more prevalent societal resonance and acceptability. Ultimately, this new development goes some way to justifying Islamophobia and negating the UN’s recognition of this problem.


Author(s):  
Patrícia Rossini ◽  
Jennifer Stromer-Galley ◽  
Ania Korsunska

Abstract While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on several themes, including castigating them for malicious gatekeeping, for being out of touch with the views of the public, and for being a bully. Only Trump routinely attacks the news media for trafficking in falsehoods and for colluding with other interests to attack his candidacy. Our findings highlight the ways that candidates instrumentalize the news media for their own rhetorical purposes; further constructing the news media as harmful to democracy.


Author(s):  
Helena Karlovic ◽  
Damir Franjic ◽  
Jurica Arapovic

PURPOSE: The aim of this study is to determine the factors influencing the decrease of the vaccination rate among children with nonprogressive neurodevelopmental disorders in Bosnia and Herzegovina. METHODS: This study included 149 parents of children with nonprogressive neurodevelopmental disorders. The children were rehabilitated at the University Clinical Hospital Mostar, from October 2017 to February 2019. RESULTS: The vaccination rate of children with nonprogressive neurodevelopmental disorders was 34.9%(P <  0.001). Based on the results of this study, physicians were the most common source of information on vaccines and vaccination procedures for parents (70.3%), whereas the media was rarely used as the source of the information (33%) (P <  0.001). Of the cases, 58.4%accepted the opinion of the pediatrician (P = 0.041). The vaccination of children was postponed on the physician’s recommendation in 87.6%of the cases (P <  0.001). Among healthcare professionals, neuropediatricians or neurophysiatrists (P = 0.023), together with pediatricians (P <  0.001), most often suggested postponing the vaccination. CONCLUSION: Overall, this study showed that the majority of children with nonprogressive neurodevelopmental disorders were unvaccinated. The majority of the parents trusted the physicians’ opinion on vaccination. Neuropediatricians and neurophysiatrists most often postponed the regular vaccination of children.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Dwyer ◽  
Olivier Arifon

Based on literature review and interviews with journalists, we argue that the BRICS countries are constructing a collective vision, guided by logics of recognition and of transformation. The production of discourse reaches its high point during the BRICS leaders’ summits. To go beyond analysis of the discourse revealed in the media, this article examines projects, thereby aiming to qualify and label the justificatory discourses, in order to develop an understanding of intentions. The BRICS countries have become a reference point as the press increasingly makes comparisons between these countries. The notion of recognition, present in the political elites, also appears as a part of the public imagination and in the press. The leaders too seek transformation. The first official multilateral institution founded by the BRICS countries was the New Development Bank. Current efforts indicate the development of common scientific and technological research initiatives and official support for the establishment of an innovative BRICS Network University. Initiatives will appear as these countries try to consolidate their position.


2017 ◽  
pp. 127-145
Author(s):  
Stefaan Walgrave ◽  
Julie Sevenans ◽  
Alon Zoizner ◽  
Matthew Ayling
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolis Dambrauskas

Building on the latest scholarship in the nationalism-economy nexus studies, the article examines how nationalism inhabits other ideologies in the economic realm. Firstly, the article presents the latest strands in the nationalism-economy nexus research, namely compatibility between economy and nationalism understood as ideology. Then, using Foucault’s concept of governmentality, the article shows how the two phenomena are compatible on the theoretical level. Going further, the article connects the latest nationalism-economy nexus scholarship with existing literature on national neoliberalism in the post-socialist Baltic states. The article argues that national neoliberalism in the Baltics provides an example of what the compatibility of nationalism and economy may look like in practice. The Baltic states’ Soviet experience encouraged their elites to undertake radical neoliberal reforms, in which the processes of nation-state and market economy building overlapped. The states were built to create the markets which would in turn guarantee the prosperity of their respective nations. The article juxtaposes different, yet related scholarships and provides a basic theoretical toolkit that could facilitate potential inquiries into the nationalism-economy nexus in Lithuania and abroad.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-85
Author(s):  
Suada A. Dzogovic ◽  
◽  
Vehbi Miftari ◽  

The topic of this article presents communication challenges and the role of the media in constructing an image of migrants and refugees as “the others” in our societies today. The article analyses the migrant situation in South-Eastern Europe, specifically in migration crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina that has been going on since 2018. The aim is to present the basic aspects of this issue and offer answers to key questions - who are migrants and refugees, what’s their own identity, from which countries do they come, how do they cross the border, where do they go, what is the state’s attitude towards them, what forms and channels of communication the state and other stakeholders use toward them, who cares for them, what do they preserve from their national, cultural and/or language identities and how do they construct self-identity and confront with the “hosting identities”, who donates funds for migration management and how they are managed? Also, a special focus of the research will be on the human rights of migrants and refugees in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is the subject of various discussions - both within the country itself and among various humanitarian, governmental and non-governmental international organizations in the EU and beyond.


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