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This forum focuses on the overlooked areas of the moment surrounding the nature and progression of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It brings together scholars of different disciplines, backgrounds, and locations to provide analyses of the Russian aggression from varying perspectives such as history, law, military studies, politics, and media and communications, to name a few, encouraging the authors to focus on intricacies to deliver a deeper analysis of the invasion. Each author offers a unique take on the analyses of the past and present. The forum has two aims. First, the collection raises the question "What did we miss?" and it aims to highlight the lack of attention by Western scholars to Russian perceptions of Western threats and the concerns of former Soviet countries regarding Russia's aggressive foreign policy. Second, the forum intends to start a conversation on different non-Western perspectives of thinking about the Russian invasion. The forum covers the events of the period from the beginning of the invasion up to July 2022, with some post-revision comments in the introduction and conclusion mentioning the events up to February 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Les éléments folkloriques ont été fréquemment utilisés comme outil de propagande dans le discours nazi en Allemagne pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans un environnement où les conditions économiques ou politiques du pays évoluent dans un sens particulièrement défavorable, les personnes au pouvoir ont la tendance à manipuler les valeurs nationales fondamentales du peuple, telles que la patrie, la nation, le pays, la langue, à travers une série de discours stéréotypés. À cette fin, elles ne se privent pas d'utiliser fréquemment les données du folklore qui n’est autre que le domaine où les valeurs nationales et les images sociales établies liées à ces concepts s'expriment de la manière la plus forte. Le discours nazi est l'un des exemples les plus connus d'une telle tentative de manipulation. Parallèlement auxdites tendances, le régime de Vichy, qui s'opposait aux mouvements modernistes, n'hésitait pas à recourir à la doxa (valeurs traditionnelles et sociales contenues dans le sens commun), à coopérer avec les nazis et, en utilisant des thèmes tels que le village, la paysannerie et la terre, considérés comme prioritaires par le peuple français, en particulier sur la base du mythe de la terre ou à essayer d'imposer ses propres valeurs idéologiques au public en créant une image de mouvement soi-disant révolutionnaire dans l'imaginaire social. En outre, l’objectif principal et visible du régime de Vichy était d'ouvrir les portes à un changement social dans lequel les valeurs nationales étaient mises en avant. Pour atteindre à son but, le régime de Vichy s'est concentré sur le matériel folklorique, les valeurs nationales chères à la société française, les légendes, les vieux mythes, les valeurs telles que la patrie et la nation, ainsi que le mythe de la terre, qui fera l'objet de cet article. Le peuple français, sorti vaincu de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, confronté à une grave crise économique et n'ayant pas encore suffisamment intériorisé les valeurs de la république, a été contraint de se plier aux impositions du régime de Vichy, qui s'est érigé en théoricien et même en réalisateur de la révolution nationale, pour faire de la révolution nationale une raison d'être. Si le régime de Vichy évite complètement de son discours le drame de l'occupation allemande en plaçant la terre et le folklore paysan au centre de son discours idéologique, il remplace en réalité les principes fondamentaux adoptés par la France tels que la liberté, l'égalité et la fraternité par les nouveaux principes nationaux de "travail, famille, patrie". En d'autres termes, en réinterprétant les valeurs que les Français, attachés à des structures, des modes de pensée et des valeurs traditionnelles, ont adoptées depuis des siècles, il en fait des outils de propagande. C'est ainsi que sont jetées les bases d'un discours de propagande largement alimenté par le folklore. Dans cette étude, nous examinerons comment le régime de Vichy a utilisé le folklore (régions, agriculture, paysannerie, poèmes, hymnes, musées, fêtes, etc.) comme outil de propagande en le transformant et en le manipulant, et nous analyserons principalement l'utilisation du mythe de la paysannerie et de la terre dans cette perspective. Pour ce faire, nous nous intéresserons d'un contenu qui constitue l'un des principaux éléments du discours folklorique plutôt que du folklore. À cette fin, nous aborderons les fonctions de ces éléments de base qui concrétisent le discours de propagande implicite mélangé au discours folklorique créé par le régime de Vichy, et nous évoquerons brièvement ses équivalents dans d'autres pays. Notre objectif est de déterminer comment un contenu folklorique manipulé détermine le sens commun. Notre hypothèse est donc brièvement la suivante : Le discours de propagande est l'un des moyens de créer une sorte de simulacre, comme le dit Baudrillard, en manipulant les valeurs établies du sens commun d'une société commune. Une telle approche nous permettra de voir de plus près l'une des fonctions possibles du folklore dans un phénomène de propagande. En conclusion, selon cette étude, le régime de Vichy a tenté de créer un effet de réalité artificielle dans l'imaginaire (voire le subconscient) des Français. Car son but était de supprimer le traumatisme de la guerre perdue, causé par une série de gouvernants dépourvus de vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Lasswell, propaganda has been considered one of three chief implements of warfare, along with military and economic pressure. Russia's invasion of Ukraine revives public and scholarly interest in war propaganda. The Russian political leader frames the war as an imperial war. The Ukrainian political leader frames it as a war of national liberation. The discursive battle thus complements the military combat. The outcome of the discursive combat depends on the effectiveness of propaganda deployed by the parties involved. Propaganda effectiveness is the propagation of war-related messages stated by political leaders through various media with no or few distortions. The effectiveness of propaganda is compared (1) across countries, with a particular focus on two belligerents, Russia and Ukraine, (2) in the function of the medium (mass media, digital media), and (iii) using two different methods (content analysis and survey research). Data were collected during the first year of the large-scale invasion (February 2022 to February 2023). Survey data allowed measuring the degree of the target audience's agreement with key propagated messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen the global growth of military-style reality television programming. These programmes, produced by militaries themselves or through collaboration with the entertainment sector, have proven to be an effective and increasingly powerful public relations conduit. Our article offers a theoretical treatment of reality television, both the aesthetic modes by which it invites the viewing subject as well as the political economy of its use in public relations. These dimensions are explored through two case studies. First, we focus on the genesis of military-style reality TV in the United States, where, after 9/11, the US military seized on the genre to pioneer and field-test various themes in response to public exigency as the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq drew on. Second, we analyse the German military as both a latecomer and innovator to these new public relations endeavours. By reading the generic and aesthetic strategies in both cases, we argue that the genre's public relations function goes beyond the immediate task of recruitment to cultivate civic participation in militaristic fantasies through a mediasphere rife with invitations to 'go soldier'. Military reality TV, we argue, represents the militarization of civic identity and the gradual displacement of values from deliberative to authoritarian, cosmopolitan to nationalistic and diplomatic to combative. Jeux éliminatoires : L'essor mondial de la télé-réalité militaire et la formation du citoyen sujet [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2019, Yuval Harari, an Israeli historian and bestselling author, appeared in the center of a media debate provoked by the discovery of considerable differences between the English text of his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and its Russian translation. A comparative study of the English and Russian texts of the book featured in this paper revealed five major issues which turned out to be sensitive for the Russian censorship, namely, homosexuality, liberalism, U.S.S.R.–U.S. "tug-of-war," Putin and Putin's Russia, and Putin's aggression against Ukraine and Georgia. It is in the presentation of these topics that Yuval Harari's English text suffered essential transformation and reduction in the Russian edition. The conducted analysis contributes to the long-lived debate about the author's and the translator's responsibility before their readers, and the boundaries, beyond which mutilation of the source text no longer allows regarding the resulting text as a translation. The author argues that the escalating information wars targeted at people's minds in the twenty-first century impose ever-increasing requirements to authors and translators of such books as Yuval Harari's 21 Lessons for the 21st Century in terms of intellectual integrity and professional ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the major features of recent Japanese cinema has been the growing number of films produced with the help of the Ministry of Defense. Academics who have addressed the issue tend to characterize the relationship between the military and producers as one of mutual dependence, stressing the overall "passivity" of the Japanese Self- Defense Forces in the creation process. Though accurate at a formal level, this argument does not fully explain the influence the JSDF has exerted over the film industry in recent years. Drawing on the concept of "multicentric world" theorized by sociologist James Burk, we argue in this article that the JSDF are, on the contrary, fully active and that their relationship with cinema has more to do with "veiled propaganda" than mere collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So-called "missionary" photographs are material objects shaped by multiple operations and different views. This article aims to study the photographic practices in the mission field, the collection of images owned by missionary organizations in France and the circulation of photographs between their multiple spaces of conservation and use. Based on the photographic collections of the Société des Missions évangéliques de Paris and the Oeuvres Pontificales Missionnaires , it attemps to define what photographs are in the missionary context and which functions they are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modus operandi of far-right political groups is crafted through strategic and systematic relationships between symbolic and material forms of violence. This article considers the discursive strategies currently deployed by rising far-right movements around the globe by examining the weaponization of language – the rapid acceleration of signifying practices that lay the essential cornerstones of material violence. Authoritarian governments weaponize language to amplify resentments, target scapegoats, and to legitimize injustice. The article provides an overview of the discursive strategies being used to expand and consolidate far-right politics. It focuses on four interlocking components of weaponized language: propaganda, disinformation, censorship, and mundane discourse. The article concludes by considering the unique intellectual space sociological studies of language offer for addressing the communicative and social chaos created by right-wing discursive tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The letters of the Almohad chancellery were transmitted to us for a part through chronicles written between the second half of the sixth/twelfth century and the end of the eighth/fourteenth century. However contemporary research has probably not sufficiently emphasized the fact that there were great differences between the letters quoted in the chronicles written by the Almohad subjects and the chronicles of the Marinid period. Indeed, the former are most often complete and serve to chant the story by forming whole chapters when later period sources cite them sparingly, when they do cite them. Their respective statutes differ: for the pro-Almohad sources the aim was to give the image of a power always victorious by making use of it to better mark the minds of a partisan lexicon which notably used saǧʿ ; to this end, the Almohad power brought in the organic intellectuals of the system, the ṭalaba , in order to read from the pulpit, or even to translate these letters to make them intelligible to the greatest number. However, they only play a subsidiary role in the chronicles of the Marinid and Nasrid periods, one of a document to a past that no longer exists, which serves as an addition to the narration. As such, they were most often truncated and could not constitute whole chapters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians generally consider resistance in Europe as a national phenomenon. This vision is certainly accurate, but forgets one important datum: the Allies have played a decisive part in European resistance, by recognizing (or not) governments in exile, by authorizing (or not) the free access to the BBC, and by using their secret services (mainly the Special Operations Executive, SOE, and the Office of Strategic Services, OSS). This article tries to show how this action has shaped resistance in Western Europe, and given to the Anglo-Americans a leading part in clandestine action--even if national powers, in one way or another, have resisted this hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian studios played a considerable part in animation. Which elements allowed this success ? How did they reach the excellence ? How did they reconcile artistic freedom with ideological pressure ? Soyuzmult Film benefited from considerable means both on the human and financial plan and developed a big variety of techniques. The productions of studios drew from immaterial heritage of Russia but aimed at universality to reach the widest public. The quality of the realizations which rested on the notion of author and style, the reflexivity and the intermediality, contributed in the success of Soyuzmultfilm. Nevertheless it is advisable to question this success, to highlight the ambiguity of the model, which develops a propaganda sometimes visible, sometimes discreet, according to period. The omnipresence of the theme of the dream appears as the symptom of a powerful censorship. A movie as 25th October, 1st day, of Youri Norstein, could constitute the emblem of a censored propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article analyzes the dictatorial regimes of the twentieth century, discussing both their homogenous and heterogeneous features. We begin with the premise that their origins were particularly varied, encompassing military coups, populist revolutions, mass movements in the postwar period and even in democracies legitimately accepted by the international community. Our hypothesis is that the degree of mass indoctrination and popular acceptance was highly diverse, not to mention the fact that a dictator's concentrated power is immense, as well as gradual, ranging from authoritarianism to tyranny. Despite their comprehensive military support, dictators had to utilize leadership and oratory skills as well as a strong dose of popular messianization. In subjecting a population to a single indisputable authority, a leader must make continual use of tools of popular acceptance in order to prevent future uprisings. Communism and fascism have been dealt with, however it is important to determine not only what separates them, but also what unites them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Mainstream news media play an important role in the political system. For instance, they can use their authoritative voices to give legitimacy to regimes. In contrast, the fringe press is easily identified by its often outrageous partisanship. Fringe media such as Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer and Rwanda's Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines usually have no credibility with non-partisan audiences. Analysis Mainstream media, because of their own credibility, can give credibility to criminal states. Analysis of the historical record shows that mainstream media escape prosecution in the rare cases where they are called to account for underpinning state criminality. Conclusions and implications This article discusses the prosecution of the fringe partisan press for acting as propagandists for criminal states, while more "credible" mainstream journalists escape prosecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moldovan society, that has many gaps, contradictions and divergences on the road to European integration, faces serious media challenges. The mass media play a central role in this process through the functions they perform. The research comes to demonstrate the thesis according to which an adequate information of the citizens on the European Union, necessary condition of the process of European integration, is disturbed by many destabilizing factors both objective and subjective. The concentration of the media, the political control, the proliferation of Russian televisions, the new media propagate harmful phenomena such as manipulation, propaganda and misinformation, aiming at compromising the European vector of development of the country. At the same time, a serious problem is the violation, for various reasons, of the ethical standards of the journalism, based on European values and practices. The European integration of the Republic of Moldova can be a successful process if they are ensured the freedom and pluralism of the media, based on a reformed legal framework and massive media support to prepare public opinion favorable to the integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of colour in cartography has received a great deal of attention for its capability to convey information in map-making ever since Jacques Bertin's famous Sémiologie Graphique (published 1967). Since most studies on the use of colour in cartography clearly highlight the communicative power of colour in cartography, it is interesting and surprising that the use of colour to convey messages beyond the declared one is not taken into consideration into these works. The possible attempt of cartographers to imply nationalistic propaganda by their use of colour and its analysis is left to books on cartographic propaganda, to studies on historical atlases, or to articles on thematic maps. To merge these two topics, an analysis of South Tyrolean-themed maps taken from the most important German and Italian historical atlases based on psychological, symbolic, and optical theories is given. The analysed atlases were been published between the end of the processes of national unification and the aftermath of the Second World War, the period in which the South Tyrol was most disputed between German and Italian nationalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some large Castilian monasteries, the late medieval period entailed an important process of economic and social recession which contrasts with the expansion period experienced during the early medieval centuries. In the fifteenth century the situation is aggravated for monasteries in rural areas due to the consolidation and growth of the cities. In that situation, some abbots tried to revitalize their communities by improving their infrastructures and trying to awaken the interest of pilgrims and visitors. In the following paragraphs we will see the essential role that advertising writing and more specifically the epigraphic Renovationes played in this propagandistic task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late twelfth century we can observe important changes in the propaganda of the crusades to the Holy Land. The popes and the preachers started to stress that the Holy Land should be defended and, after the disasters of 1187, should be reconquered because of its importance personally for God. Six arguments of the crusade propaganda which were invented or became widespread at that time can be mentioned here. Among them there is one that we can call the “vassal argument”, by means of which the papacy and the preachers pointed out that God should be defended when his beloved land is attacked by heathens because he is the Lord and the listeners are his vassals. It seems that the idea was created by the crusade preachers at the end of the twelfth century and then came to be used by the papacy as well, from Innocent III onwards. In the thirteenth century it was extensively enriched by such preachers as Jacques de Vitry and Humbert of Romans who made the vassal argument more illustrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The school textbook is an essential vector of instruction and socialization, it is the bearer of knowledge, but also of norms and values. The purpose of this article is to go beyond the pedagogical issues of the textbook, to highlight its political, ideological and sociological implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade of the fifteenth century the image of Ferdinand the Catholic acquired a European dimension, defined by his relations with the Papacy, his projects of expansion in the Mediterranean, and the dispute with France over the Kingdom of Naples. The present study reconstructs the trajectory of this political icon, which is not always upward, making use of the opinions of chroniclers, the rhetorical production and the propaganda literature that was generated during these years which were marked by international tension and prophetic expectancy: a period of convulsion, and at the same time decisive in the symbolic establishment of the monarchy of the Catholic Kings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durant la Première Guerre Mondiale, la presse parisienne de l'arrière évoque abondamment le génocide des Arméniens, tant pour dénoncer les massacres que pour alimenter un discours propagandiste visant à la mobilisation de guerre de la société civile. Les journaux voient en l'Allemagne l'instigatrice du génocide, plaçant la souffrance arménienne dans la continuité des exactions commises à l'encontre des Belges. Certains journaux parisiens se servent également du génocide des Arméniens pour opposer musulmans et chrétiens dans un discours aux accents de guerre de religion tandis que la presse de droite fait occasionnellement preuve de xénophobie à l'encontre des réfugiés et des victimes. La situation s'inverse même à la fin du conflit; le génocide des Arméniens étant dénoncé comme « bourrage de crâne » dans le but de promouvoir le rapprochement Franco-Turc. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Mettre le Tibet dans la grande famille chinoise est la stratégie politique de PCC depuis 1951. Fascinés par cette idéologie, se comportent comme les sauveur, les Chinois s'installent au Tibet. Née du but politique d'occuper une terre étrangère et difficilement domptée, et œuvrant au service de l'idéalisme colonial, la littérature chinoise coloniale au Tibet enregistre principalement la souffrance de la vie quotidienne et, les difficultés psychologiques des colons chinois. Cependant, elle sert aussi comme un outil de révélation du sentiment personnel opposant l'héroïsme fanatique du PCC, surtout sous la plume des écrivains de la seconde génération. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Les deux films consacrés à Mao sortis en 2009 et 2011 marquent, du simple fait de leur échelle, un nouveau sommet dans la symbiose entre production commerciale et propagande. Bien qu'ils ne soient pas les premiers à recycler la propagande comme divertissement, voire à coopter des éléments parodiques dans le discours officiel, cet article développe la thése qu'à l'aune des récents discours politiques, ils contribuent à la définition d'une nouvelle « culture socialiste grand public » dont Hu Jintao a fait un objectif de politique culturelle. Ce faisant, its redéfinissent en méme temps la figure de Mao et le rôle historique du PCC afin de créer un consensus populaire sur l'organisation politique actuelle de la Chine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]