The edited volume will explore the manifestations of affective semiosis (meaning-making) at the socio-cultural and discursive levels. Cultural context, emotional reactions, and affective semiosis play a crucial role in shaping how issues related to identity and security are articulated in both domestic and foreign policy, as well as in the ways solutions to these challenges are sought. By adapting the concept of affective semiosis for the analysis of discursive structures, this volume offers an innovative and effective approach to identifying the triggers of emotional reactions in discourse and examining their impact on the construction of political identities, fear scenarios, misinformation campaigns, polarization, and other dynamics within networked societies.
Makarychev, Andrey. (2024). The political life of post-industrial objects: aesthetic re-signification in the Russophone Estonia. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1–16.
Abstract. The article discusses how material legacies of the past are conceptualized as cultural and artistic objects, and in this capacity inscribed into the contemporary Estonian political debates on security, identity, and borders. One section focuses on the city of Narva where the compound of the Kreenholm factory is located. Another part looks at industrial objects in smaller towns where the Soviet material heritage is intermingled with the EU-promoted environmental agenda, including the Green Deal project and the idea of just transition. research based on the methodology of visual analysis includes two specific groups of visual artefacts that are illustrative of linkages between locations, cultural meanings and their political reverberations.
Andrey Makarychev Sergei Medvedev (2024). Biopower in Putin’s Russia. From Taking Care to Taking Lives. CEU Press
In this book, Makarychev and Medvedev examine the importance of biopolitics in fueling Russia’s confrontation with the West. In their view, the development of Putin’s illiberal authoritarianism was largely triggered by what they call a biopolitical turn. This shift is exemplified by the use of an increasing number of regulatory mechanisms to discipline and constrain the human body. Such political practices concern issues of sexuality, reproductive behavior, adoption, fertility, family planning, public hygiene, and demography. This turn created a new disciplinary framework for the population and the elite. Bans and restrictions of a biopolitical nature, became one of the main tools for articulating the rules of belonging in the political community and drawing its political boundaries. Biopolitical discourses have taken up the core of the Russian identity formation, which contrasts a positive “conservative Russia” with a supposedly vicious “liberal West.”
Andreas Ventsel (2024). Semiotic approach of strategic narrative: the news discourse of Russia’s coronavirus aid to Italy. Semiotica 256, 71–101
Abstract: Crucial components of strategic communication include the audience, which plays a decisive role in how any conflict plays out. Strategic narratives are seen as means by which political actors attempt to construct a shared meaning of international politics to shape the behaviour of domestic and international actors. The article analyzes the news discourse of the Russian media sources RT, Pervyj Kanal, and NTV on Russia’s coronavirus aid to Italy in spring 2020. In the context of media coverage, some methodological questions arise: How should the intentional structuring of narratives, targeting of audiences, and the manipulative intentions of the strategic actor be studied? For this purpose, the article combines strategic narrative theory with Umberto Eco’s concepts of the Model Reader and the Model Author. Analysing the aims and intentionality of the strategic narratives, we postulate the Model Reader as an analytical category that organizes the study of the audience’s interpretation process. The function of the Model Reader is to actualize the codes and intertextual references that the author has strategically planned in the news message, in order to achieve the geopolitical aims of the strategic narratives in question. The analysis of constructing the Model Reader and the Model Author of strategic narratives is complemented by Greimas’ semiotic theory of the narrative and the composition principles of Lotman’s discrete/non-discrete texts.
Igor Kopõtin & Vladimir Sazonov (2023)The Russian Military’s Use of History to Create a Post-Soviet Identity: The Development of Conceptual Understandings from the 1990s to the Mid-2000s . The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 36:4, 410-434
Abstract. The current article aims to show the development of Russian perceptions of the use of military history as a tool for ideology in Russia from the 1990s to the mid-2000s. Russian military history has been instrumentalized following the example of authoritarian/totalitarian countries of the past to mobilize the population for war against the image of the enemy — the West. The role of the history of war was used in Russia for the patriotic education of the armed forces and Russian people. With Putin’s rise to power, the General Staff of the Russian army received spiritual and material support and from that time they became more involved in using military history as a tool of influence in shaping public opinion.
Andreas Ventsel, Mari-Liis Madisson, Mihhail Lotman (2023) Varjatud märgid ja salaühingud: vandenõuteooriate tähendusmaailm. Vaba Akadeemia Raamatukogu. Postimehe Kirjastus
“Varjatud märgid ja salaühingud: vandenõuteooriate tähendusmaailm” (Hidden Symbols and Secret Societies: The World of Meaning of Conspiracy Theories) is the first academic monograph in Estonian, aimed at the local reader, that addresses conspiracy theories. The book explores how the meaning-making of conspiracy theories has adapted to screen media and social media interaction. It also discusses how the mysterious atmosphere characteristic of conspiracy theories and their “contagious” associations have been used in strategic communication, including inter-state information influence activities and marketing. An added value to the book is that each chapter concludes with a case study, a significant part of which concerns Estonian material.
Andreas Ventsel, Sten Hansson, Merit Rickberg, Mari-Liis Madisson (2023). Building Resilience Against Hostile Information Influence Activities: How a New Media Literacy Learning Platform Was Developed for the Estonian Defence Forces. Armed Forces & Society, xx−xx [forthcoming]
Modern societies are characterised by unprecedently broad and fast diffusion of various forms of false and harmful information. Military personnel’s motivation to defend their country may be harmed by their exposure to disinformation. Therefore, specific education and training programmes should be devised for the military to systematically improve (social) media literacy and build resilience against information influence activities. In this article, we put forward a useful methodological approach to designing such programmes based on a case study: the process of developing a media literacy learning platform tailored to the needs of the Estonian defence forces in 2021. The approach is grounded in data on (a) the current needs and skills of the learners, (b) the kinds of influence activities that the learners may encounter, and (c) the learning design principles that would enhance their learning experience, such as learning through play and a dialogue through feedback.
Sten Hansson, Mari-Liis Madisson & Andreas Ventsel (2023) Discourses of blame in strategic narratives: the case of Russia’s 5G stories, European Security, 32:1, 62-84
Governments spread strategic narratives via media to influence foreign audiences and policy makers. A frequent but understudied feature of strategic narratives is the discursive construction of blame. In this article, we use the coverage of the adoption of 5G cellular technology in Russian state-funded news portals as an example to show how to interpret blame narratives about international security issues. We combine methods and insights from the discourse-analytic studies of blame and the research into the uses of strategic narratives in international relations to reveal how various articulations of blame are used to (de)legitimise particular actors and actions, sow discord, and foster alliances. Our analysis sheds new light on blame discourses that are more sophisticated and indirect than straightforward accusations and may serve multiple strategic goals at once. It also contributes to scholarship on Russia’s strategic communication about China as well as the United States and its allies.
Selg, Peeter; Ventsel, Andreas (2023). Cultural semiotics as the foundation of political semiotics. Social Semiotics, 32, 671−688
This paper relies on the cultural semiotics of Lotman which webring to bear on political theory in order to develop a methodological framework that we have referred to as “political semiotics” in our previous work during the past decade. In our first section, we synthesize the core categories of the Essex school (Laclau, Mouffe, and others) of political analysis and the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics. In the next section, we move further to putting forth a concrete methodological framework for analyzing social/ political reality by relating theories of power, governance, and democracy to the Jakobsonian model of communication. We call this method “political form analysis”. The guiding idea of the latter is that it is not the content (i. e. substance) of communication, but rather the form (hierarchical relations of the aspects of communication) is the crucial focus of political analysis. In the final section, we illustrate our approach by explaining the constitution of the COVID-19 crisis and their governance in Taiwan. The country has had enormous success in containing the crisis during its first waves, but has also been surprisingly unsuccessful in the third phase (starting in the spring of 2021).
Madisson, Mari-Liis; Ventsel, Andreas (2023). COVID-19-related Conspiracy Theories in the Baltic States. In: Peter Knight; Michael Butter (Ed.). Covid Conspiracy Theories in Global Perspective. 185−199. Routledge.
This chapter focuses on the COVID conspiracy theories that have been circulating in the Baltic States in 2020 and 2021. We introduce five main topics that are related to corona conspiracy theories: the origin of the virus, the connections of the contagion with 5G, the false pandemic, anti-virus measures, and dangerous vaccines. We highlight which global conspiracy texts have gone viral in the Baltic states and outline the local COVID conspiracy theories that have gained popularity as well. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the media landscape of the Baltic corona conspiracy theories. We describe the main actors and (social) media channels that create and circulate such theories. We also briefly conceptualize the phenomenon of phobophobia – the abstract concern with the devastating impacts of the collective feeling of fear – that characterizes the majority of corona conspiracy theories.
Damčević, Katarina. (2023). “Ready for the Homeland” in Croatian media: Commemorations, victory, and foundation. Sign Systems Studies, 51(1), 36-72. https://doi.org/10.12697/SSS.2023.51.1.02
This article analyses the media discourse surrounding the WWII fascist salute Za dom spremni (ZDS) in the aftermath of two national commemorations that took place in Croatia in spring 2020: Jasenovac and Operation Flash (Bljesak). In spring 2020 Zoran Milanović, the newly elected President of Croatia, adamantly criticized the presence of the salute, associated with the collaborationist Ustaša regime, at the two commemorations, calling for its removal and ban. This led to heated reactions from war veterans and politicians who considered Milanović’s actions unacceptable and offensive towards the memory and legacy of the 1990s war, which triggered a wider debate regarding Croatia’s post-war national identity. The object of the analysis is the discourse surrounding the salute as it emerges in opinion pieces published in weekly and daily newspapers in April, May, and June 2020. With the salute becoming an increasingly prominent part of negotiating national identity and tailoring political agendas, investigating how it is justified, disapproved or otherwise challenged in the media is an aspect that deserves more attention. Relying on insights from discourse studies, the article sheds light on various statements that (de)legitimize the salute and consequently particular actors and actions associated with it. With the help of semiotics of culture wider signification tendencies and dominant discourse(s) upon which the national selfdescription has been built are identified. The article contributes to scholarship on hate speech and contested symbols in the post-Yugoslav space and their (mis)uses in societies struggling with traumatic legacies.
Dissertationes
Rickberg, Merit (2023). Towards complexity thinking with Juri Lotman: modelling cultural dynamics in educational systems. Supervisors: Peeter Torop & Silvi Salupere
Societies tend to put a lot of hope and pressure on education to serve as a ground for tackling global challenges and initiating change towards societal goals. Despite the attempts to plan, manage and measure these multilevel processes they can still lead to unforeseen results. One way to account for such indeterminacy is to model education as a complex system. Complexity research provides a framework for making sense of nonlinear interactions between the parts of a system that result in unpredictable outcomes. While all complex systems can be described by some common principles, there are also profound differences in how these systems behave depending on whether we observe complexity in physical systems or in culture. The thesis proposes that Juri Lotman’s semiotic theory offers a valuable perspective for elaborating the particularity of culture as a complex system. The complexity thinking approach stemming from Lotman’s ideas allows to maintain the static–dynamic dimension of cultural processes in paradoxical tension and, through that, has the potential to address both linear developments as well as unexpected bifurcations and view them as mutually conditional. The dissertation explicates how Lotmanian complexity framework enables to model the relation between cultural dynamics and the structural organisation of culture and can thus provide a valuable insight for the field of education where the question regarding the capacity of various models to initiate the desired change is of critical importance.
Damčević, Katarina. (2023). Semiotics of hate speech and contested symbols: the “Za dom spremni” Ustaša salute in contemporary Croatia. University of Tartu. Supervisors: Andreas Ventsel & Mari-Liis Madisson
This dissertation studies the meaning-making patterns surrounding hate speech and contested symbols in Croatia by focusing on Za dom spremni (“Ready for the Homeland”), the salute used by the fascist Ustaša movement during World War Two. I rely predominantly on cultural semiotics, which allows me to approach the salute as a particular model or interpretational frame of social reality, as well as analyze dominant meaning-making hierarchies associated with it. Za dom spremni was the official salute of the Independent State of Croatia, a puppet state of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy that existed from 1941 to 1945. The ruling Ustaša regime used the salute in documents and declarations that were a part of the genocidal policies that resulted in the mass murder of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and antifascists of all nationalities in concentration camps, prisons, and other execution sites. While the salute was banned in socialist Yugoslavia, it resurfaced during the Croatian War of Independence (1991-1995) along with a broader rehabilitation of the Ustaša movement. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the 1990s war, the salute was appropriated by right-wing politicians and groups as a symbol of that conflict, and is often used to reinforce a one-sided version of the past and the post-war national identity, as well as to mobilize voters and advance political agendas. This dissertation focuses on three particular cases of how the salute was used for these purposes.