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The Digital Silk Road: China's Quest to Wire the World and Win the Future

Jonathan E. Hillman

New York, NY: Harper Business (2021), xiv, 351 pp.

"China is wiring the world, and, in doing so, rewriting the global order. As things stand, the rest of the world still has a choice. But the battle for tomorrow will require America and its allies to take daring risks in uncertain political terrain. Unchecked, China will reshape global flows of data ... more

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Post-Mortem: Russian and Chinese Covid-19 Information Operations

Edward Lucas, Ben Dubow, James Lamond, Jake Morris, Corina Rebegea, Vera Zakem

Washington, DC: Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) (2021), 72 pp.

"Russia recycled previous narratives and exacerbated tensions in Western society while attempting some propaganda about Russian scientific prowess. Russia’s approach evolved little; it recycled previous narratives, spreading a broad range of COVID-19 disinformation. Evidence supports the theory th ... more

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The Performance of Participation in Russian Alternative Media: Discourse, Materiality and Affect in Grassroots Media Production in Contemporary Russia

Kirill Filimonov

Uppsala: Doctoral Thesis Uppsala Universitet (2021), 200 pp.

"This doctoral dissertation analyzes participation in alternative media, taking the reader to the Russia of the late 2010s. Bringing together discourse theory, media and communication studies and political theory, it approaches participation in media production through the lens of performativity. Th ... e conceptualization of participation as a performance helps explore the material, embodied and spatial enactments of discourses that sustain the fragile and unstable process of production. The data of this study comprise several months of participant observations, interviews with media producers, and textual analysis of media content. The research employs a case-study method and focuses on media that explicitly delegate their participants the right to co-decide on matters of content production and internal organizing process. The three cases under study are Russia’s oldest anarchist medium Avtonom, the student medium DOXA, and the web-based zine Discours. Data analysis integrates qualitative content analysis and a discourse-theoretical approach, informed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory alongside its subsequent developments within the Essex School. The study looks into the distribution of power in alternative media amidst an internal diversity, material constraints, and an antagonistic relationship with the state. The analysis constructs a model of participation, which shows its embeddedness into multiple and partially overlapping communities. A vibrant sociality and the potential for a further expansion of the media communities emerge as two of the key conditions of the participatory process. Furthermore, participation is supported by an ongoing performance of a multiplicity of identities, in which the more elitist articulations of journalism are intertwined with some empowering and counterhegemonic notions of media production, media producers, and the audience. Retaining a critical-explanatory focus, the dissertation explores the limits of power-sharing, such as the persistence of journalistic professionalism, the scarce resources of the media and vulnerability inflicted by the state. The static representation of the state as the major confronting force reveals the paradoxical nature of social antagonism: while mobilizing the limited resources, it also reduces participatory intensities and triggers a politics of trust that restricts access to media production. This dissertation offers a number of theoretical and empirical contributions to several fields. Some of its key insights relate to participation beyond institutional politics, the hybridity of mainstream and alternative media, the interconnection of discourse, materiality and affect, and an empirical applicability of discourse theory." (Abstract) more

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Myanmar’s Military Struggles to Control the Virtual Battlefield

Brussels: International Crisis Group (2021), 37 pp.

"Since the 1 February coup d’état in Myanmar, the online space has become a parallel battlefield on which the country’s military and its opponents try to rally supporters, share information and control the narrative around events unfolding in the country. This virtual struggle has been vitally ... more

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El periodismo en tiempos de dictadura: Las experiences de Prensa, Apertura y ANF

Harold Olmos Mercado, Fernando Salazar Paredes, Juan Carlos Salazar del Barrio

La Paz: Plural Editores (2021), 120 pp.

"Este libro no solo recuerda, como sus autores califican, «aventuras periodísticas» que se impulsaron en momentos difíciles y convulsionados en el país. Este libro es el retrato de una generación de valerosos y extraordinarios periodistas que ejercieron, de manera apasionada, este oficio en la ... more

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Finding China’s Edge: Engineering Influence Operations within the Limits of Social Media Platform Rules

Jakob Bund

Zürich: Center for Security Studies (CSS) (2021), 48 pp.

"To arrive at a careful evaluation of impact, this report concentrates on how the tactics of China’s influence operations have evolved during the first year of the pandemic. Looking at China’s key priority of information control, the first section conceptualizes the adaptation of influence opera ... more

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Ecological Civilisation Discourse in Xinhua’s African Newswires: Towards a Greener Agency?

Robert Boughen

African Journalism Studies, volume 42, issue 3 (2021), pp. 67-81

"How does Chinese central media represent Africa through its environmental news? This article argues that the way in which Chinese central media organisations have reported environmental issues across the African continent has altered from a reactive “charm defensive” towards the promotion of a ... more

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The Press-safety Paradox of Democracies: Regime-type Duration and Journalist Killings

Jonathan A. Solis

Foreign Policy Analysis, volume 17, issue 1, oraa007 (2021), [no pag.]

"Previous research finds that journalist killings are more likely to occur in democracies rather than non-democracies. While these results provide an important first step in exploring regime type's effect on journalist's safety, they assume no variation in how long countries have remained a regime t ... more

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Digital Media and Investigative Journalism in China

Nairui Xu

Media Asia, volume 48, issue 3 (2021), pp. 158-174

"Since 2014, “plot twist news” as a controversial news phenomenon has appeared extensively in Chinese digital communication. In the context of journalism, this refers to news facts provided in follow-up reporting that contradict the facts provided in the initial reporting. Based on interviews wi ... more

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EU Support for the Jordanian Media: A Mixed Bag of Successes and Failures

Simon Mangon

Noria Research (2021)

"This piece interrogates the challenges of advancing media reform initiatives within authoritarian contexts. Based on a case study of the EU-funded Support to Media in Jordan Project—launched in the wake of the Arab Spring—it reveals how the local mediation of internationally sponsored reform ef ... more

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The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet

James Griffiths

London: Zed Books (2021), xv, 423 pp.

"China's 'Great Firewall' has evolved into the most sophisticated system of online censorship in the world. As the Chinese internet grows and online businesses thrive, speech is controlled, dissent quashed, and attempts to organise outside the official Communist Party are quickly stamped out. Update ... more

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Simplifying Success: An Ecosystem Initiative for Improving the Financial Sustainability of Independent Digital News Media in Restricted Markets

Jason Lambert

Internews (2021), 24 pp.

"This report aims to progress the media development sector’s work towards the financial sustainability of independent news media. It proposes a new ecosystem-level framework for categorising media outlets, measuring their performance and making them more resilient to their obstacles in reaching an ... more

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Out of Sight, Not Out of Reach: The Global Scale and Scope of Transnational Repression

Nate Schenkhan, Isabel Linzer

Washington, DC: Freedom House (2021), 74 pp.

"This report is the product of an effort to understand the scale and scope of “transnational repression,” in which governments reach across national borders to silence dissent among their diaspora and exile communities. Freedom House assembled cases of transnational repression from public source ... more

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The Public Sphere in Russia Between Authoritarianism and Liberation

Tatiana Weiser, Greg Yudin (eds.)

Javnost: The Public, volume 27, issue 1 (2020), pp. 2-96

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Decentralization of Political Design in China

Jonathan Benney

Pacific Affairs: an International Review of Asia and the Pacific, volume 93, issue 4 (2020), pp. 709-734

"Political posters, banners, and similar objects are extremely common in China. This article uses political design from contemporary China, particularly emphasising the government’s Chinese Dream campaign, to analyze what at first appears to be a paradox. The subjects of the campaigns and the lang ... more

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Retweeting Through the Great Firewall: A Persistent and Undeterred Threat Actor

Jacob Wallis, Tom Uren, Elise Thomas, Albert Zhang, Samantha Hoffman, Lin Li, Alex Pascoe, Danielle Cave

International Cyber Policy Centre Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) (2020), 56 pp.

"This report analyses a persistent, large-scale influence campaign linked to Chinese state actors on Twitter and Facebook. This activity largely targeted Chinese-speaking audiences outside of the Chinese mainland (where Twitter is blocked) with the intention of influencing perceptions on key issues, ... more

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I Know What You Mean: Information Compensation in an Authoritarian Country

Jiangnan Zhu, Chengli Wang

International Journal of Press/Politics, volume 26, issue 3 (2020), pp. 587-608

"How do people address information deficiency caused by rigid control of information in authoritarian regimes? We argue that there exists an internally oriented information compensation approach through which people can glean extra information from official messages domestically. This approach does ... more

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Conveying Truth: Independent Media in Putin’s Russia

Ann Cooper

Politics and Public Policy Shorenstein Center on Media (2020), 39 pp.

"This study examines the evolution of independent Russian media, from the glasnost era to the pandemic. It describes some of the pandemic coverage and identifies several of the newsrooms that gave Russians reliable, accountability journalism throughout the early months of the crisis. It may seem obv ... more

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Chinese Independent Animation: Renegotiating Identity in Modern China

Wenhai Zhou

Cham: Palgrave Macmillan (2020), xii, 222 pp.

"This study of 'independent' animation opens up a quietly subversive and vibrant dimension of contemporary Chinese culture which, hitherto, has not received as much attention as dissident art or political activism. Scholarly interest in Chinese animation has increased over the last decade, with atte ... more

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Advocacy in restricted spaces: A toolkit for civil society organizations
Key Guidance

Inspiring Practice

Danya Greenfield

Lifeline Fund for Embattled CSOs; Freedom House (2020), 46 pp.

"There are many valuable resources on how to conduct advocacy that provide a detailed, step-by-step approach. These approaches include best practices for identifying stakeholders, developing a message, or planning a timeline. We will not go deeply into these topics, but we do want to provide an intr ... more

Advocacy in restricted spaces: A toolkit for civil society organizations Key Guidance Inspiring Practice

Advocacy in restricted spaces: A toolkit for civil society organizations
Key Guidance

Inspiring Practice