This chapter presents a comprehensive overview of studies in the subfield of mediatisation of war and military. While its beginnings can be traced back to McLuhan and Baudrillard, the concept of “mediatised war” became standard in the mid-2000s and developed during the 2010s. Key theoretical currents are preoccupied with how the military adapts to transformations of news media and how virality and connectivity challenged the military media management through the diffused war and made it morph into the arrested war. Mediatisation also informs a conceptual backdrop in many empirical war and media studies (often published in Media, War and Conflict). These can be grouped under six categories: (1) representation of war; (2) new versus legacy media in war; (3) new and social media use in war; (4) artistic mediation of war; (5) history of war mediatisation; and (6) digital war, which is also treated as a field of its own (concentrated around the eponymous journal). Despite three key deficits – of conceptual consensus and development, of dialogue with adjacent fields, and of on-the-ground studies, the field appears dynamic and capable of generating highly productive concepts and models.

This article focuses on the transformation of Soviet Cold War propaganda into the contemporary Russian information operations, bringing together two distinct periods characterised with the rise of new and sophisticated techniques. By comparing propaganda instructions in KGB manuals and the practices of the propagandists behind the 2014–2020 Secondary Infektion campaign, we find out what of the “analogue” Cold War propaganda remains in the present-day computational propaganda and how exactly Soviet propaganda techniques evolved into the new mediascape. This highlights both strong continuities of methods and techniques and certain discontinuities. Our analysis also contributes to the understanding of the very concept of propaganda, singling out such aspects as covertness, negativity, and inauthenticity as especially ingrained features of the Russian style of propaganda that are also regrettably often overlooked in generic definitions.

Clubhouse is a social network allowing only real-time oral communication. While its 2020 worldwide launch went largely unnoticed in Eastern Europe, it took countries such as Ukraine and Russia by storm in February 2021. Users were enticed by the platform’s exclusivity (invita-tion only and limited to IOS users), unusual format, and compatibility with post-covid social life. For some time, Clubhouse was the dominant theme of discussions on other social media, mainstream news media organizations started launching daily talk shows in the app, and early adopters engaged in a plethora of participatory activities ranging from propagandist broadcasts to 24/7 rooms where bots would recite Russian classical poetry, from fervently seek-ing ways to monetise their participation to creating the somewhat unexpected genre of audial fakes. In this article we intend to analyse the turbulent arrival of the new app in Russia and Ukraine from the perspec-tives of media ecology and media archaeology. Focusing on the app’s mediality and remediation, the social media discourse about it and particular content in some of the notable rooms, we highlight the conjunction of social envi-ronment, the already existing and novel technological affordances, as well as users’ perceptions and expectations in the emergence of a new niche in the ecology of participa-tory media. Based on this, we will also try to outline some possible scenarios for the new platform in Eastern Europe’s dense mediascapes. We argue that the prompt rise of Club-house’s popularity was not thanks to its special authenticity, as some suggest, but rather because of the normalization of group long-distance conversations (e.g., via Zoom), coupled with the intentional monomedia poverty of affordances and clearly delimited boundary between the roles of broadcast-ers and listeners, which was perceived as liberating in a produsage-saturated environment. This actually limits the participatory media potential of content creators and influ-encers, increasing their power and reviving monological models of communication that suggest a passive audience.

One of the problems in the growing subfield of mediatization of war is evidence on how exactly civilian communication devices become integrated with warfare. In this article, I focus on patterns of use of mobile phones on the frontline in Eastern Ukraine. Based on qualitative in-depth interviews with Ukrainian servicemen and women, this article presents a typology for the frontline use of mobiles in the spirit of actor–network theory. The omnipresence of mobiles on the battlefield creates a set of unique participatory media practices. A variety of personal purposes, such as private communication and entertainment, are combined in the same device with wiretapping, fire targeting, minefield mapping and combat communication. Mobiles supplant old or unavailable equipment and fill gaps in military infrastructure, becoming weaponized and contributing to the hybridization of the military and the intimate, and of war and peace. These results imply the role of mobiles as a mediated extension of battlefield and question the very definition of what constitutes weapon as tool of combat.

We propose to consider “fake news” as a genre with its own conventions and narrative devices dependent on those of mainstream journalism. Departing from genre theory, “culture jamming” practice and Barnhurst and Nerone’s (2002) concept of journalist modernism rooted in Louis Althusser’s idea of form as the principal expression of ideology, we intend to highlight empirically how mainstream media storytelling is hacked, imitated and hijacked by “fake news” in the four countries that are known to have populist leaders and significant circulation of viral disinformation. Focused on empirical cases from Brazil under Bolsonaro, the Philippines under Duterte, Russia under Putin and Ukraine under Zelensky, this article draws significant comparisons between different cultures and traditions of journalist storytelling in the global peripheries concluding that while “fake news” can be subverting mainstream or integrating with it, even the most distant cases share the common basis of meta-mimesis, imitation of other texts. By way of distancing from the overpublicised cases of Donald Trump or Brexit, we also contribute to de-Westernizing media studies.

In this article, I examine the role of journalists during Euromaidan in November 2013–February 2014. The conceptualization of a specific case of power, the media power (found in works by Bolin, Couldry, Curran, Hjarvard, Mancini, Zelizer, and others) basically oscillates between two extremes – that of regarding the media as heteronomous of the political field and that of arguing that the media increasingly influence other fields through processes of mediatization. What is the role of journalists in power relations? Under which conditions is the power of journalists – and their agency – likely to grow? This article presents the results of a series of interviews with Ukrainian journalists who covered the events of Euromaidan in different capacities. Validated with other evidence, their narratives suggest a positive power dynamic for the Ukrainian journalists during the protest events.

The article focuses on the increasing adoption of media logic and the corresponding change of habitus in the field of academic history in Eastern Europe, with a particular focus on Ukraine. Departing from both mediatisation theory and memory studies, authors consider a range of relevant phenomena from across the region, before considering in more depth the case of LikBez, a grassroot initiative of Ukrainian historians, aimed at debunking historical myths spread both inside and outside Ukraine. The amalgamation of historical knowledge and multiple media platforms to convey it, it is argued, ushers in the era of mediatisation of history.