Using Social Media to Advocate LGBT Rights in Black Africa

The prevalence of draconian homophobic laws in Cameroon and Nigeria has systematically stultified sympathy for the LGBT communities and made pro-gay street activism a risky venture in these two countries. In view of this, a good number of gay rights activists have resorted to the social media as a suitable platform for a less risky advocacy. Using the social media has afforded them the opportunity to explore interactive, post-modern, and personified approaches to sensitizing and mobilizing their readership in favour of gay proselytism in Cameroon, Nigeria, and some other parts of Africa. Based on a content analysis of 200 blog posts and web/facebook pages generated by Cameroonian and Nigerian gay activists, this chapter measures the extent to which gay activists adopt a national/local perspective versus the level to which they adopt an international perspective in their online advocacy. The chapter equally examines the degree to which these citizen journalist/activists construct their advocacy discourse from the prism of a cultural war between the West and Africa.

Web Archiving as a Task of National and Local History Bibliography

The foreign experience of forming the majority of national web archives (in national libraries) and many accessible local history archives of public and university libraries has been analyzed due to the development of a model and methodology for electronic local history archives for Russian libraries.It is shown that the global activity on preserving network content is divided into national and regional segments and is national and local history in both contents. Its goals and structure fully fit into the classical forms and directions of national/local history bibliography, which turns out to be the key in all processes of selection and bibliographic processing of a new class of sources. For selection, all the criteria of connection with the country/region/territory, the place of production of the resource, its national language and content, characteristic of the national/local history bibliography; the selection itself is carried out by library specialists. The analysis has revealed the reasons why the preparation of the archived online content for use, regardless of the capabilities of automated technologies, in practice also requires the involvement of specialist in bibliography, the use of classical tools and methods of bibliographic description and indexing of content. The issue of choosing objects for archiving (sites, subdirectories, individual documents) is specially considered. The special significance, advantages and problems of treating individual documents are shown. The necessity of forming such web archiving strategies is substantiated, in which “starting points” are separate documents, and sites are evaluated and selected for productivity as their “containers”. Taking into account the global trends and the conditions of Russian libraries, a model of web archiving is proposed, the implementation of which, in the absence of a national repository and modern tools, will allow the beginning of accumulating some necessary experience and valuable network content.

Discontent over Congo’s state of siege will grow

Significance The attack is just the latest in a long series of massacres in the region but comes almost four months into a ‘state of siege’ established by President Felix Tshisekedi to put an end to armed violence in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Impacts The security situation in eastern DRC remains precarious and could deteriorate further. A failure to stabilise eastern DRC will weigh on Tshisekedi’s re-election prospects. Entrenched national, local and cross-border political tensions will provide fertile ground for continued armed-group evolution in the east.

TAX TREATMENT OF LAND RESOURCES

Land use is important for territorial cohesion, urban planning, agriculture, transport and nature conservation. This implies that land resources policies are implemented at different levels - national, local, sectoral, including and tax policy. This report examines the tax treatment of landed properties, and in particular of agricultural landed properties. The urgency of the issue stems from changes in tax laws and a large number of stakeholders, both in terms of direct and indirect taxes.

‘Hand-to-hand sports and the struggle for belonging’

This special issue on hand-to-hand sports aims to analyse how collective identities and forms of group and community belonging are defined, strengthened, built, imagined or even denied in the sportive and social contexts in which hand-to-hand combat or wrestling disciplines are practised. Considering the wide-ranging cross-cultural distribution of combat and wrestling practices in very different cultures and societies across the contemporary world, this issue intends to provide a (not-exhaustive) comparison of practices originating in highly heterogeneous geographical, social and cultural contexts. Indeed, comparisons focus on specific practices (combat and wrestling activities) and their relationship with belonging. The contributing scholars have studied and reflected on a particular style of wrestling or combat practice and its links to social belonging and identity, whether it be expressed on regional or national, local or global, social or ethnic, institutional or ‘counter-cultural’, symbolic or concrete levels.

Cosmopolitans and communitarians: A typology of football fans between national and European influences

The past 25 years have seen an unprecedented Europeanisation of the structures and governance in football across the continent. A European (and global) transfer market for players and managers has become the norm and a pan-European league system has been established that regularly exposes supporters to transnational competitions and players from all over Europe. At the same time, manifold typologies of football fans have been established, distinguishing groups of fans based on, for example, fan intensity, fan behaviour or their attitudes towards different actors in the field. The attitudes towards Europe and the self-identification of these fans within Europeanised football have not played a role in any of these typologies so far. This paper steps into that void and develops a typology of football fans in (Western) Europe that takes their attitudes towards Europeanisation as a point of departure. Based on data from an online survey among fans of first league clubs in England, France, Austria and Germany, two dimensions are identified as key categories: the intensity of fandom, and fans’ attitudes towards Europeanisation – which here manifests as a divide between the national/local belonging versus appreciating diversity and transnational spaces/developments or more succinctly, a divide between cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. Our analysis uncovers the existence of four types of fans: occasional cosmopolitans, occasional communitarians, frequent cosmopolitans and frequent communitarians.

Wspólnota przez świętowanie. Nauryz we współczesnym Kazachstanie

The author aims to capture the significance of the celebration of Nauryz, the ancient celebration of spring, family, and local community. She describes various forms of celebrating Nauryz on the official, national, local, and family level in Kazakhstan. She emphasizes that the renewed tradition of celebrating Nauryz is part of a process deliberately adopted by the Kazakh authorities in the post-Soviet period in order to build a community from a state of many ethnicities. She states that all the ways of celebrating Nauryz appeal to the original motivation of sustaining, restoring, and strengthening the community. This leads to the formation of communitas (in Victor Turner’s sense), which is conducive to forming the inhabitants of modern Kazakhstan into a multi-ethnic community.

INTERVENSI YUDISIAL DALAM ISU HUBUNGAN PUSAT–DAERAH: STUDI TERHADAP PRAKTIK MAHKAMAH KONSTITUSI

The legal issue to be discussed in this article is the involvement of the Constitutional Court in adjudicating issues concerning the relationship between national – local government in general, and the distribution of power to the local government in particular. To be more specific, this article will criticise by delivering a casenote over the Constitutional Court decisions, i.e. Decision Number 87/PUU-XIII/2015, Decision Number 137/PUU-XIII/2015, Decision Number 30/PUU-XIV/2016 and Decision Number 56/PUU-XIV/2016. The casenote will notify the need to a deeper conceptual understanding of the differences between unitary State and federalism principles and its implication in giving prescriptions. This is a response to the Constitutional Court’s judicial opinion which tends weightier to federalism, instead of unitary State principle. According to this situation, it is recommended that the Constitutional Court should not review the constitutionality of laws which contain the legal issues concerning the relationship between national – local government in general, and the distribution of power to the local government in particular. This article uses conceptual and comparative approaches.

The Students’ Perception towards Code-Switching and Code-Mixing in Sociolinguistic: A Case at an English Education Major

This qualitative study will investigate English Education students’ opinion towards code-switching and code-mixing; both in everyday and classroom use. In this study, it will employ an open-ended (short-answered questionnaire) with 13 questions that mainly focus students of English Education class of 2016-2018. The populations were chosen because the students of 2016-2018 have attended Sociolinguistic Course during semester 3. Moreover, to gather the population, the researcher spread the link of questionnaire written in Google Form by personally contacting several people via Whats App. Based on the findings obtained from the questionnaire, it can be inferred that the 20 respondents mainly spoke 3 languages (national: Indonesian, local: Javanese, foreign: English). Furthermore, it can be concluded that 11 respondents find code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages acceptable to be used in everyday life and classroom situation. On the contrary, 3 respondents also see code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages annoying and disturbing to be implemented in daily communication. Meanwhile, 6 respondents perceive code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages as neutral to be executed in everyday and classroom situation. Keywords: Sociolinguistic; Code-Switching; Code-Mixing; English Education Students

Political parallelism in Iceland

My main objective in this article is to examine the importance of political parallelism in Iceland through establishing the extent to which political parallelism is perceived to char-acterise political communication in Iceland by politicians and voters. Political parallelism is one of the defining elements of Hallin and Mancini's typology of media systems. Based on candidate surveys from five elections and a voter survey, indexes of perceived political parallelism are configured for politicians and voters. The analysis suggests a high degree of perceived political parallelism and that the perceptions are reflected in partisan ideological views of individual media outlets. The same – or at least similar – perceptions about political parallelism in the media system seem to penetrate the system irrespective of age and at the national, local, and individual level of politics. However, voters and candidates of social democratic and liberal internationally oriented parties perceive a significantly lower degree of parallelism than others.