Popular Geopolitics and the Ideological use of Sports

Globalization has benefits despite solid objections to the policies and regimes on which it is based on or the ongoing challenges it poses to the nation-state, weakening its authority and driving into world affairs the sub- and transnational spaces. These benefits include access to information on various topics through various means, including mass media communication. On the one hand, the paper enlights the reader with the notion of popular geopolitics, demonstrating at the same time that we are not facing an entirely new phenomenon. On the other hand, it connects the attitude towards or during a major sporting event with the geopolitical context of that time to better understand world politics by the non-specialists in the field.

The image of geolocations in a virtual environment

The main framework of this interdisciplinary research interconnects the cyclic‎ process of space creation in a virtual environment, including the various perspectives‎ in social sciences. Combining media, communication, popular geopolitics,‎ PR and big data this paper introduces a model for testing and evaluating‎ the importance of transaction data on image analysis of geolocations in‎ tourism, as well as the importance of shown interest for different destinations.‎ The data is gathered through the Google Trends tool introduced by Google in‎ 2012 (information available from 2004 onwards). The first goal is to compare‎ trends in Google searches for Indonesia and Croatia and find potential geopolitical‎ patterns of interest. The second goal is to explain the causal effects on‎ potential peaks in trends and their reasons both in a positive and a negative‎ context. The main thesis is that the interest is primarily regionally focused,‎ comprised of predictable geopolitical patterns, with the exception of unexpected‎ events and crises with potential global implications which can provide‎ both a positive and a negative perception.‎

French Orientalism Representations of Ottoman in Caricatures in Le Petit Journal

This study attempts to answer a number of questions inspired by popular geopolitics literature on how the French newspaper, Le Petit Journal, depicted the Ottoman Empire (including the Sultan Abdulhamid II and the Turkish parliament) and reflected their views to their readers in their publications. And how the Ottoman 'other' was constructed by the journal in relation to France's political position during the Balkan Wars. The examination of the newspaper from 1908 to 1913 suggests that the journal's understanding of the Ottoman subject rests parallel to that of France, especially during the years of the Balkan Wars in Europe. This study also expresses that war-time knowledge production via quotidian channels inform the geographical imaginations of the masses in particular ways. In the end, the authors re-emphasize that knowledge production on the orient involves a whole set of image constructions as introduced in orientalism studies.

Norway Reimagined

In this article, I discuss the geopolitical underpinnings of Russophone fans’ response to the Norwegian hit teen series Skam [Shame]. Starting from the wide-spread distribution of Skam through informal horizontal networks, my article highlights the context specificity of fan participation in meaning-making around global television. Employing multimodal discourse analysis to the social media platform VKontakte, I examine how Russophone audiences of global television imagine the country of origin of their object of fandom, and how spatial imaginations embedded in this process contribute to popular geopolitics of Norden – that is, to geopolitical reasoning of narratives and representations of Nordic countries available through popular culture. My analysis shows how Norway and its positioning in the world provides an important symbolic resource for further discussions on identity and belonging. A close examination of mediated transnational cultural exchange through fan communities advances our understanding of the meaning of popular geopolitics in the age of global television.

Landscape, Geopolitics, and National Identity in the Norwegian Thrillers Occupied and Nobel

Focusing on the use of landscape in the Norwegian series Occupied (2015–2020) and Nobel (2016), this article examines the ways in which cityscapes and panoramas of the natural environment are employed as affective, as well as aesthetic tools for storytelling within a geopolitically inflected framework. Drawing on literature from popular geopolitics, geocriticism, and visual politics, my analysis interrogates the ways in which geopolitical codes and visions manifest via televisual fiction, reflecting a variety of insecurities associated with Norway's current position in world affairs, as well as contemporary challenges to Norwegian national identity. This article also discusses how these two series have adapted key geovisual elements of the what I deem the “near Nordic Noir” style to focus more explicitly on geopolitical questions, linking Occupied and Nobel to other geopolitically inflected series from Nordic Europe.