Scholarly attention regarding the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has mainly concentrated on so-called Russian propaganda, directed both towards Russian-speaking populations and the international public, but less attention has been paid to the management of information from Ukraine. In this chapter is proposed that the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has engaged an entirely new set of actors engaged in the management of information, most notably from PR and nation branding activities, as well as journalists, oligarchs and various individuals with an interest in Ukraine’s international image. These new actors bring with them competences, ideologies and practices from their field of origin which impact on the practice and expressive character of information warfare. In this chapter we analyse three domains of communication used by Ukraine to address external audiences; the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre (UCMC), the English language news channel Ukraine Today and the fact checking website StopFake. With a focus on both individuals as well as the institutions they represent, this chapter explores the way in which actors in Ukraine have attempted to shape the content of the messages communicated.
Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds on research on the developments in post-Soviet Ukraine, and we analyse, firstly, the transformative and disruptive relations related to the so-called Euromaidan Revolution, and secondly, how these events can be placed in a wider narrative of three Ukrainian revolutions. Our analysis concludes that narrative analysis can help explain the ways in which these events are understood by broader international audiences.
This article re-evaluates some of the previous assumptions made related to the communication practices and information management in Ukraine since before the Euromaidan revolution in 2013. We highlight two points where previous knowledge about nation branding and nation building must be rethought in light of the latest developments Firstly, nation branding is no longer exclusively an activity that is directed to an audience of foreign investors and tourists, but also toward the international field of politics. Simultaneously, it is also clearly directed toward a domestic audience-the citizens of Ukraine. Secondly, this means that there may no longer be any sharp distinction between nation building and nation branding-at least not in times of an ongoing armed conflict.
Nation branding is a dynamic and rapidly developing practice and a subprocess under the wider process of mediatization for promoting or readjusting images of a nation-state for tourists or investors. Especially young nation states have a felt need to build new images of themselves in the eyes of the surrounding world, but since these nation states also have a short history of sovereignty, they simultaneously need to build the social solidarity and community inwards, to form the basis needed for the building of a nation. This article takes its departure in this tension and addresses three themes – agency, audience and identity – that we consider needs further theorizing due to the fact that the practice is yet trying to find its form. These themes are discussed in relation to the branding efforts in the new Eastern European state of Ukraine over the past decade. It is concluded that the nation branding campaigns are today orchestrated also by domestic PR agencies (to the contrary of the previous dominance of British agencies), that the domestic audience is taken into consideration in other ways than in previous branding campaigns, and that the questions of identity construction is more complex than what is previously accounted for. The Ukrainian case thus illustrates the mediatization of national symbols in contemporary society.
In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.
The recurring interest in the “nation” among media scholars is not least due to a slim book published in 1983, entitled Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The author, Benedict Anderson, argued that the media are not just tools for spreading the ideas of nationalism or representing national identity. In Anderson’s book, the connection is more fundamental: it is thanks to media forms and technologies that nations can be “thought” at all. The book is important in media studies, both because it explains the relationship between nationalism and media, and because it has opened our eyes to other types of “imagined communities”, based on different media technologies and shared patterns of communication.
Ett projekt som inleddes som en studie i nation branding i Ukraina kom efter Majdanrevolten 2013-14 att övergå i en undersökning av hur ukrainska myndigheter och medier hanterar information i konflikten mellan Ukraina och Ryssland. Ryssland antas ha en mäktig propagandaapparat, men hur agerar Ukraina i informationskriget mot Ryssland?
This is an anthropological study of journalists and their work. The setting is a north Indian city, and we shall meet reporters on their beats, searching for stories to print in Hindi dailies. By focusing on a profession that describes but is simultaneously inscribed in contemporary Indian society, the book attempts to discuss a professional practice in relation to processes of cultural globalisation, modernity and political imagination.
This article concerns journalism as an object of anthropological study. It raises questions about how we should study an occupation that is so familiar in most places of the world. For example, how should we conceptualize newspaper journalism both as a globally diffused media form and as localized cultural practice? Furthermore, I discuss the relationship between the anthropologist and the journalist as two professionals that are equally engaged in producing representations and interpretations of culture and society. The study is based on fieldwork among Hindi-language journalists in Lucknow, India, as well as my own previous experience of local journalism in Sweden.
In post-liberalised India, the vast population is regarded as an enormous resource to be exploited as labourers, consumers or for their knowledge. A feature of the new media economy is that newspapers, mobile phones and TV shows are not exclusively produced for the better-off among an urban middle class and, furthermore, that the mass media are increasingly making use of ‘common people’ and their lives in a multitude of places as media content. The subject of this article is whether or not this obsession with the population should be urging us to rethink the Indian media landscape in analytical terms. ‘A public’, Michael Warner argues, is a reflexive relation among strangers, constituted by attention. If the Indian population is now addressed in various new ways, is it time to reconsider the old ‘truth’ that India is an unfit case for discussions about publics?
The Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been held in the Indian city of Jaipur for the past ten years. The event has grown spectacularly and has provided an arena for encounters between literary worlds. It has also become a focus of debate and friction within the sphere of Indian writing. This article is based on fieldwork at the JLF 2017.
In this article, I reflect on several instances of symbolic communication that has been taking place in the shadow of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine. The article should be read as some afterthoughts from a research project that was completed just before the Russian full-scale invasion. It builds mainly on material from intermittent fieldwork among PR consultants and government officials in Ukraine, with particular interest in meaning management. The theme that conjoins rather scattered examples is a concern with the colonial legacy in a country at war.
An in-depth look at Ukraine's attempts to shape how it is perceived by the rest of the world.
During times of crisis, competing narratives are often advanced to define what is happening, and the stakes of information management by nations are high. In this timely book, Göran Bolin and Per Ståhlberg examine the fraught intersection of state politics, corporate business, and civil activism to understand the dynamics and importance of meaning management in Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork inside the country, the authors discuss the forms, agents, and platforms within the complex political and communicative situation and how each articulated and acted upon perceptions of the propaganda threat.
Bolin and Ståhlberg focus their analysis on the period between 2013 and 2022, when political tensions, commercial dynamics, and new communication technologies bred novel forms of information management. As they show, entities from governments and governmental administration to commercial actors, entrepreneurs, and activists formed new alliances in order to claim a stake in information policy. Bolin and Ståhlberg also explore how the various agents engaged in information management and strove to manage meaning in communication practice; the communicative tools they took advantage of; and the subsequent consequences for narrative constructions.