ECREA 2024 Pre-Conference
The Informational Influence of Autocracies Abroad
September 23, 2024, 8:30 am - 6:30 pm
This is the official website of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) pre-conference "The Informational Influence of Autocracies Abroad", organized by the European Research Council (ERC) consolidator project RUSINFORM as a one-day event on 23th of Septmeber 2024 in City Hotel Ljubliana. All further information about this event will be published here.
Program
08:30 – 09:00: Welcome and registration
09:00 – 09:15: Welcome note
- Florian Toepfl (University of Passau, Germany)
09:15 – 10:45 Panel I: Theories, Conceptualizations and (Counter-)Tactics
- Vera Tolz, Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester, UK), Russia and COVID-19: Modelling the Disinformation Lifecycle
- Christiern Santos Okholm (European University Institute, Italy), Conditions of Subversive Reach Comparing societal factors for Russian propaganda outlets
- Tommaso Valastro, Sergio Splendore (University of Milan, Italy), The political leaning of fact-checking: countering Italian disinformation on the war in Ukraine
- Roman Horbyk (Södertörn University, Sweden), Propaganda: What’s in a Name? Towards Clearing the Conceptual Quagmire around Information Influence, Persuasion and Strategic Communication
- Florian Toepfl, Arista Beseler, Julia Kling, Daria Kravets, Serge Poliakoff, Anna Ryzhova (University of Passau, Germany), The Kremlin’s Foreign Propaganda Network: Consequences of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine
10:45 – 11:15 Coffee break
11:15 – 12:30 Panel II: Social Networks as Intermediaries of Authoritarian Propaganda
- Aytalina Kulichkina (University of Vienna, Austria), Cross-border coordination: Analyzing multilingual Twitter communication during China’s COVID-19 Protests
- Jakob Bæk Kristensen, Frederik Møller Hansen, Eva Mayerhöffer (Roskilde University, Denmark), How Authoritarian Regimes can Influence Anti-system Counterpublics on Social Media Platforms in Foreign States
- Justin Chun-ting Ho, Fabio Votta (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), China’s Digital Propaganda on Meta
- Daria Dergacheva (University of Bremen, Germany), Governing Russian Disinformation: very large social media platforms policies in the context of Russian invasion and war in Ukraine
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break
13:30 – 14:45 Panel III: The Language of Authoritarian Propaganda
- Yuliya Krylova-Grek (Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine), Understanding Media Language. The extension of Pro-Russian narratives in Europe
- Radu-Mihai Meza, Alina Mogos (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania), Propaganda on Demand. Framing and Agenda Setting of Foreign Affairs in Czech, Polish and Romanian Sputnik News (2017-2022) – An Analysis of Headlines
- Oleksandra Kozlova, Michael Johann (University of Augsburg, Germany), Firehose of Falsehood on Telegram: How Russian Political Influencers Frame the War against Ukraine
- Olena Melnykova-Kurhanova (National Aviation University, Ukraine), The peculiarities of Russian propaganda spreading under the siege of Mariupol
14:45 – 16:00 Panel IV: Strategies of and Responses to Authoritarian Propaganda
- Ana Stojiljković, Sabina Mihelj (Loughborough University, UK), Between global influence and local appropriation: Understanding the impact of China’s COVID-19 diplomacy in Serbia
- Yingqi Huang, Carl Zhou (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Xin Zhou (Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany), Political Disillusionment in Xi’s Era: Comparing Chinese Youth Political Participation in White Paper Protest 2022
- Ruty Korotaev (University of Toronto, Canada), A Mediatized Diaspora: Analyzing the Russian Diasporic Experience in Latvia
- Maxim Alyukov (University of Manchester, UK), One person’s belief is another’s propaganda: Disinformation discourse and motivated reasoning in authoritarian Russia
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee break
16:30 – 17:45 Panel V: The Audiences of Propaganda
- Jānis Juzefovičs, Diāna Kalniņa (Riga Stradins University, Latvia), Transformations of news repertoires of Baltic Russian-speakers after the ban of Kremlin-aligned Russian news providers
- Dani Madrid-Morales (University of Sheffield, UK), Herman Wasserman (Stellenbosch University, South Africa), Assessing the persuasiveness of China’s external communication towards Africa
- Alexandra Brankova (Uppsala University, Sweden), The Role of Nationalist Actors in Authoritarian Propaganda: The Russian Imperial
Movement’s Media Ecology, Conservative Transnationalism, and Wartime Mobilization - Sophia Winkler (Zentrum für Osteuropa- und internationale Studien (ZOiS), Germany), Online Lives Between Russia and Germany: Transnational Scrolling and Spaces of Belonging
17:45 – 18:30 Final remarks and discussion
Glazunova, S., Bruns, A., Hurcombe, E., Montaña-Niño, S. X., Coulibaly, S., & Obeid, A. K. (2022). Soft power, sharp power? Exploring RT’s dual role in Russia’s diplomatic toolkit. Information, Communication & Society, 26(16), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155485
Lokot, T. (2023). Russia’s networked authoritarianism in Ukraine’s occupied territories during the full-scale invasion: Control and resilience. LSE Public Policy Review, 3(1), Article 1.https://doi.org/10.31389/lseppr.85
Miskimmon, A., O’Loughlin, B., & Roselle, L. (2014). Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. Routledge.
Nip, J., & Sun, C. (2022). Public diplomacy, propaganda, or what? China’s communication practices in the South China Sea dispute on Twitter. Journal of Public Diplomacy, 2(1), 43–68. https://doi.org/10.23045/jpd.2022.2.1.4
Pan, C., Isakhan, B., & Nwokora, Z. (2020). Othering as soft-power discursive practice: China Daily’s construction of Trump’s America in the 2016 presidential election. Politics, 40(1), 54–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395719843219
Costs
The pre-conference is free of charge.
Free coffee, snacks and lunch will be provided for attendees.
The pre-conference will be followed by an evening dinner (on a self-pay basis).
Additional Information:
The deadline for submissions has now passed, and letters of acceptance were sent out on 29 April, 2024
There is no pre-conference fee.
This is an offline event, so all accepted presenters will be required to present in person.
Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine has put the spotlight on the wide range of digital warfare tools that autocracies can use to influence public opinion abroad (see, e.g., Lokot, 2023). However, even before this war, authoritarian states such as Russia (e.g., Glazunova et al., 2022) and China (e.g., Pan et al., 2019) have sought to increase their soft power and exert foreign information influence by delivering their strategic narratives (Miskimmon et al., 2014) to foreign audiences.
This pre-conference aims to explore the past and present of authoritarian regimes' foreign propaganda, including the complex dynamics of its (co-)creators and disseminators, its content, strategies and audiences. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary techniques, the conference aims to generate a deep and nuanced understanding of what has often been referred to as authoritarian regimes' “public diplomacy” (with the latter concept being not unproblematic as such, particularly if it is used to describe practices that include deceptive, covert influence efforts, see e.g. Nip & Sun, 2022).
By organising this conference, we aim to provide a platform for lively scholarly discussion among researchers of the foreign propaganda of authoritarian regimes across the globe, including Russia, China, Iran, and Turkey. By bringing together this community of experts, we seek to facilitate the exchange of novel ideas and collaborative theorising on this timely topic. We welcome cutting-edge contributions on the following topics (among others):
- The production and dissemination of information sponsored by authoritarian regimes, including in news and social media
- Audiences’ use, reception, sense-making, and co-creation of propagandistic content
- Dissemination and flow of propagandistic content on social networking sites (SNS) and through algorithmic intermediaries
- Conceptual innovations that theorise the relations between commonly used concepts, including propaganda, public diplomacy, strategic narratives, and soft power
- Novel research methods for studying foreign propaganda, including the use of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
- Transnational repression of elites, including activists, journalists and academics
We plan to support Ukrainian scientists who wish to participate in the event and whose paper will be accepted. Information about the support will be provided in the near future.
The event is organised by the European Research Council (ERC) consolidator project RUSINFORM on "The Consequences of the Internet for Russia's Informational Influence Abroad" (2019-2025), conducted at the University of Passau, Germany. RUSINFORM has received 2 million euros in funding from the European Union to study Russia's influence on foreign audiences, on transmission channels such as social networking sites and search engines, as well as the St. Petersburg Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Prof. Dr. Florian Toepfl (chair), Serge Poliakoff (vice-chair), Julia Kling (vice-chair).