SHAPING AN ANTARCTIC IDENTITY IN ARGENTINA AND CHILE

Since the end of the 19th century, both Argentina and Chile have woven Antarctica—the white continent—into the conception of their national territories and identities, establishing a tradition that continues today. To understand the process through which these identities have been constructed, this article examines the strategic communications of the countries involved in the dispute over territories south of 60° south latitude. Early negotiations were incidental and reactive, but as the situation evolved internationally the two South American countries became entangled in their strategies to incorporate portions of Antarctica into their national territories, employing diplomatic interchange, symbolic actions, and the projection of an Antarctic identity by means of public discourse, educational curriculum, and maps. Furthermore, they promoted the idea of an ‘American Antarctica’ as a way of linking Antarctica with the South American continent in an effort to obtain international recognition for their territorial claims. Both countries were successful in instilling a domestic ‘national Antarctic consciousness’, but failed to gather international support. Although their strategic communications regarding Antarctica were successful in terms of the original objective of integrating the idea into their respective national identities, resorting to territoriality seems to have limited their ability to adapt to new conditions, such as those established by the Antarctic Treaty in 1959.

DISINFORMATION’S SOCIETAL IMPACT: BRITAIN, COVID, AND BEYOND

Disinformation is widely perceived as a profound threat to democracies. The result is an explosion of research on disinformation’s spread and the countermeasures taken against it. Most research has focused on false content spread online. Yet little research has demonstrated the societal impact of disinformation on areas such as trust and social cohesion. Policy responses are mainly based on disinformation’s presumed impact rather than on its actual impact. This paper advances disinformation research by asking how we can assess its impact more productively, and how research could better inform policy responses to disinformation. It uses examples from Britain between the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign and the 2019 General Election, including some preliminary commentary on disinformation during the initial months of the COVID-19 outbreak. First it considers the limitations of existing disinformation research, and how it could address impact more effectively. It then considers how policy responses have been self-limiting by framing the solution as simply reducing the general amount of disinformation online and/or ‘inoculating’ citizens. Instead we argue for an event or issue-specific focus. This culturally-specific, sociological approach considers different forms of disinformation, the hybrid media systems through which they spread, and the complex offline and online social networks through which impact may occur.

UNDERSTANDING ‘FAKE NEWS’: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE

False information that appears similar to trustworthy media content, or what is commonly referred to as ‘fake news’, is pervasive in both traditional and digital strategic communication channels. This paper presents a comprehensive bibliographic analysis of published academic articles related to ‘fake news’ and the related concepts of truthiness, post-factuality, and deepfakes. Using the Web of Science database and VOSViewer software, papers published on these topics were extracted and analysed to identify and visualise key trends, influential authors, and journals focusing on these topics. Articles in our dataset tend to cite authors, papers, and journals that are also within the dataset, suggesting that the conversation surrounding ‘fake news’ is still relatively centralised. Based on our findings, this paper develops a conceptual ‘fake news’ framework—derived from variations of the intention to deceive and/or harm—classifying ‘fake news’ into four subtypes: mis-information, dis-information, mal-information, and non-information. We conclude that most existing studies of ‘fake news’ investigate mis-information and dis-information, thus we suggest further study of mal-information and non-information. This paper helps scholars, practitioners, and global policy makers who wish to understand the current state of the academic conversation related to ‘fake news’, and to determine important areas for further research.

UNDER THE SECURITY UMBRELLA: JAPAN’S WEAK STORYTELLING TO THE WORLD

A Review Essay by Nancy Snow Japan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power Sheila A. Smith. Harvard University Press, 2019. National Identity and Japanese Revisionism: Abe Shinzo’s Vision of a Beautiful Japan and Its Limits Michal Kolmaš. Routledge, 2019. Peak Japan: The End of Great Ambitions Brad Glosserman. Georgetown University Press, 2019. Keywords—US-Japan relations, US-Japan Security Alliance, strategic communication, strategic communications, national identity

COMMUNICATING THREAT IN AN ERA OF SPEED AND FETISHISED TECHNOLOGY

A Review Essay by Karen Allen Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War Paul Scharre. WW Norton & Company, 2019. Future War—Preparing for the New Global Battlefield Robert Latiff. Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. Keywords—strategic communications, strategic communication, technology, big data, cyberspace, international relations, future warfare

AI ETHICS: A STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS CHALLENGE

A Review Essay by Alex Lawrence-Archer AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon (eds). Oxford University Press, 2020. Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All Robert Elliot Smith. Bloomsbury Business, 2019. Keywords—strategic communication, strategic communications, AI, artificial intelligence, applied ethics, data science, machine learning

A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME? STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS IN ISRAEL

The term strategic communications is missing from the Israeli academic and professional discourse. Instead, there are three different conceptual approaches to state communication in Israel—hasbara, public diplomacy, and cognitive campaign. Analysing the history of the development and employment of these three concepts, this article makes two contributions important for the field of strategic communications. First, it analyses how Israel has found itself with various approaches; why it does not have one comprehensive framework; and whether any of the three approaches can be considered the equivalent of ‘Israeli strategic communications’. Second, based on the case of Israel, it establishes the need for states to have an exhaustive conceptual framework to conduct strategic communications and the consequences of the absence of such a framework.