Trust and authority in the age of mediatised politics

This article examines the role of trust in the age of mediatised politics. Authority, we suggest, can be successfully enacted despite the disrupted nature of the public sphere if both rational and moral trust are utilised to formulate validity claims. Drawing from Maarten A. Hajer's theorisation of authority in contemporary politics, we develop a model of how political actors and institutions as well as the media employ both rational and moral trust performances to generate authority. Analysing a Finnish case of controversial investigative journalism on defence intelligence, we show how the media in network governance need to critically evaluate the authority performances of political actors while at the same time enacting their own authority performances to retain their position within the governing network and to manufacture trust among networked publics. This volatile position can lead to situations where the media compete for authority with traditional political institutions.

Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab

This paper extends the emphasis on contingency and context in Islamic ethical traditions into the distinctly modern context of late 19th century Khedival Egypt. I draw attention to the way Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s engagement with Islamic ethical traditions was shaped by his practice in addressing the broad social and political questions of his context to do with nation-building and political journalism. As a bureaucrat and state publicist, he took pre-modern Islamic ethical concepts into the emerging discursive field of the modern state and the public sphere in Egypt. Looking at a series of newspaper articles for the state newspaper, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya, I show how he articulated an ethics of citizenship by defining a modern civic notion of adab that he called “political adab.” He conceived of this adab as the answer to the problem of how a unified nation emerges from the condition of “freedom” by which journalists and the reading public at the time were conceptualizing the politics of the ʿUrābī revolution in late 1881. This was a “freedom” of the public sphere that allowed for free speech and the power of public opinion to shape governance. ‘Political adab’ would be the virtue or situational skill, internalized in each participant in the public sphere, that would regulate this freedom, ensuring that it produces unity rather than anarchy. I argue that adab here enshrined ʿAbduh’s holistic approach to nation-building; Egypt with political rights would be a nation in which the very idea of the nation is comprehensively embedded—through adab—in people’s lives, animating their “souls”. This was a politics conceived not as a self-standing domain, but as growing out of society, becoming thereby an authentic unity and self-regulating “life”. In developing this vision, ʿAbduh was amplifying pre-modern meanings of adab implying wide breadth of knowledge, good taste, and the virtues, labelled in the paper as ‘comprehensivness,’ ‘consensus’ and ‘habitus.’ Keywords: Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Adab, Freedom, Nation, Politics, Egypt

The analysis of the hashtag #Jokowi404NotFound on Twitter in protesting mural removal in the public sphere

The removal of mural looking like President Joko Widodo's face with the words 404 Not Found triggered a wide range of reactions from the public, including some on Twitter, who saw the action as an anti-critical form of government. As a result, the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound became a popular topic and was used over 11,000 times on August 14, 2021. The purpose of this study is to look at how people use the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound on Twitter to protest the removal of murals. In August 2021, this study takes a qualitative approach, collecting data in the form of observation of media texts on Twitter's public timeline. According to the findings of this study, the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound was used to protest the government's anti-critical decision to remove murals as a form of suppression of individual freedom. When the public interest is at stake and the movement is mobilized by Twitter activists with large social media followings, the hashtag activism movement has the potential to drive and influence government policy. Messages to the government are also conveyed using various styles of language.

Modern legal solutions in Estonia's judicial land registers as an example of effective use of IT instruments as well as IT and legal cooperation

In search of interesting legal solutions related to the modern and effective functioning of legal land registers, the author draws attention to IT solutions used in Estonia, which has been one of the most technologically advanced countries in Europe for over fifteen years. This solution can be treated as an exemplary solution in the search for an idea for the organizational and legal strategy of the next stages of informatization of court registers. The study briefly describes the history of the development of land e-registers, with particular emphasis on legislative and technical solutions that allow for the comprehensive digitization of the application process for entry, the use of digital documents and e-archives, with an emphasis on the elimination of the paper form of land and mortgage registers. In the further part of the study, reference was made to the e-Notariat and Immovable Portal solutions, using the X-Road as operating system, which helps to exchange, check and update data. These innovations in Estonian land register translate, among others, into for regular ex officio updating of entries including factual data on real estate and data included in the population register (e.g. change of the surname of the owner in a legal event such as a marriage). The summary of the analysis is the assessment which shows that Estonia is a very good model in searching for ideas to improve the functioning of land register in Poland, however, one should take into account the differences related to the level of technological advancement or the area of the state. The susceptibility to cyber-attacks, which also target e-Estonia, is not without significance, which follows computerization and Internet addiction in the public sphere. Therefore, the harmonious development of cybersecurity is also important. It is necessary to balance the proportions between following the registers with the expectations of society and the spirit of the times, and the security of public data.