The grand return of the troops

The aim of this paper is to fill the geographical gap in the literature about the militarization of COVID-19 through a comparative exploration of how the pandemic was handled in militarized ways in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Drawing from official government and military statements, media articles, and expert interviews with defense intellectuals, we examine two interconnected areas – that of discourse and that of military domestic assistance. By viewing the developments through the lens of militarization and military-society relations scholarship, we argue that rather than serving as a ‘portal’ for civilian resilience, the pandemic constituted an unprecedented ‘return of the troops’ to Visegrad states and societies in terms of its size, scope, and duration, thus strengthening the pressure for re-militarization in the region that has been recorded in the last decade. The paper presents a number of analytical findings: first, it identifies the emerging gap between right-wing populist rhetoric that relied on warspeak and the human-centered communication of the armed forces; second, it reveals that military domestic assistance functioned as a military ‘band aid’ on systemic vulnerabilities, as well as incidentally converged with illiberal patterns of governance; third, it shows how the pandemic aided re-militarizing pressures, resulting in a significant boost to the defense sector, a positive public opinion about the armed forces, and military-society relations.

Social Media in an Emergency: Use of Social Media in Rescuing Abducted School Girls in Nigeria

This paper examines the abduction of the schoolgirls in Chibok Local Government Area of Borno State, Nigeria in 2014. The paper examined how the abduction of the schoolgirls generated responses and support for the rescue of the abducted girls from people and organization from different parts of the globe. The Islamists terrorist organization operating in Borno State has attracted the attention of the world since 2009 when they started attacking government establishments and security installations northeast which later escalated to major cities in Northern Nigeria. Methodologically, the paper utilized secondary sources of data to analyze the phenomenon studied. The paper revealed that the development and innovations in information and communication technology which dismantled traditional and colonial boundaries enabled people to express support, solidarity and assist victims of conflict who resides millions of Kilometers away. This shows that Internet-based communications technology has reduced the distance of time and space that characterised traditional mass media. The campaign for the release of the schoolgirls on the social media platforms particularly Twitter and Facebook has tremendously contributed to the release of some of them. Furthermore, the girls freed from abduction have received proper attention: education and reintegration programmes which enable them to start post-abduction life. In this regard, social media has become a tool for supporting the government in moments of security challenges which the Bring Back Our Girls campaign attracted foreign and domestic assistance to Nigeria in the search of the abducted girls and the fight against the Islamist insurgents.

Object Recognition Pipeline

Object grasping in domestic environments using social robots has an enormous potential to help dependent people with a certain degree of disability. In this chapter, the authors make use of the well-known Pepper social robot to carry out such task. They provide an integrated solution using ROS to recognize and grasp simple objects. That system was deployed on an accelerator platform (Jetson TX1) to be able to perform object recognition in real time using RGB-D sensors attached to the robot. By using the system, the authors prove that the Pepper robot shows a great potential for such domestic assistance tasks.

Object Recognition Pipeline

Object grasping in domestic environments using social robots has an enormous potential to help dependent people with a certain degree of disability. In this chapter, the authors make use of the well-known Pepper social robot to carry out such task. They provide an integrated solution using ROS to recognize and grasp simple objects. That system was deployed on an accelerator platform (Jetson TX1) to be able to perform object recognition in real time using RGB-D sensors attached to the robot. By using the system, the authors prove that the Pepper robot shows a great potential for such domestic assistance tasks.