Vaccine diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic on the example of the Republic of Serbia

The global COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in scale and scope. The COVID-19 vaccines have not only become an indispensable weapon in the fight against the pandemic but also served as a sign of the technological and scientific prestige of the countries that developed them. While the term "vaccine diplomacy" is not new, it may have become much more relevant in times of global pandemic. The aim of this research is to analyze the vaccine diplomacy of China, the EU, and Russia towards Serbia during the global COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, the study also presents Serbia's efforts to engage in its own vaccine diplomacy at the global level. The novelty of this research can be seen in a comparative analysis of the efforts of the "vaccine diplomacy" of the EU, China, and Russia towards Serbia. In addition, this research also presents the results of the survey data on Serbian citizens and their perceptions of foreign aid received during the pandemic. It can be concluded that the Chinese and Russian medical aid to Serbia were very well received by the Serbian government, government-aligned media, and the Serbian public. Concerning the aid of the European Union, it was neither significantly advertised by the media, nor was the Serbian public perception significantly changed in the favour of the EU. At the same time, the Serbian government engaged in vaccine diplomacy of its own, to strengthen the ties with Yugoslavia's former allies from the Non-Alignment Movement.

The Effect of Hacked Content on the Last Two Presidential Debates

In Chapter 11, Jamieson examines how the hacked content affected the last two presidential debates of the election, in which the moderators took excerpts of Clinton speeches from the emails released via WikiLeaks and deployed them out of context in their questions. One hacked excerpt was spun into a debate question directed at Clinton about whether it’s acceptable for a politician to be “two-faced”; her response and the subsequent framing by Trump, Russian trolls, and Trump-aligned media fueled the supposition that the Democratic nominee had different public and private stances. In the final debate, a line from another Russian-gotten speech was used to imply that Clinton wanted “open borders,” serving both to create an extended discussion of one of Trump’s central campaign appeals and to further the idea that Clinton’s statements in private diverged from those she made in public.

Regime legitimation, not nation-building: Media commemoration of the 1917 revolutions in Russia’s neo-authoritarian state

Scholars predicted that official Russian commemorations of the centenary of the 1917 revolutions would prioritise ‘reconciliation and accord’ between pro- and anti-communists. Such a frame might help construct a new post-Soviet Russian identity. Yet, in 2017, state-affiliated political and media actors gave accounts that contrasted with their previous narratives and with each other. Domestic state-aligned media were unprecedentedly negative about the revolutions’ events and enduring legacies, while Russia’s international broadcaster, Russia Today, emphasised the revolutions’ positive international legacies. We explain this paradox by arguing that regimes of commemoration are directly related to political systems: in neo-authoritarian regimes such as contemporary Russia, history is not used primarily for nation-building, but to build legitimacy for the ruling regime. Referencing similar practices in other neo-authoritarian regimes, we show how state-affiliated actors selectively co-opt interpretations of historical events that circulate in the global media ecology, to ‘arrest’ the ‘memory of the multitude’. Simultaneously, they reinforce core messages that legitimise the existing government.

Unpacking Fiji internet law narratives: Online safety or online regulation?

Commentary: It took approximately 6 seconds, with 27 votes against 14 on the 16 May 2018 at 5:03pm for the Fiji Parliament to pass the Online Safety Bill (Fijian Parliament, 2018b). Thereafter, the Bill came into force as the Online Safety Act, 2018 (Fijian Government, 2018), despite concerns about its impact on free speech. This commentary examines how the public was conditioned by certain prominent actors, such as the Attorney-General and Media Industry Development Authority (MIDA) chair, with support from government-aligned media. The Online Safety Bill had been touted as legislation designed to protect Fijians from harmful online activities (Doviverata, 2018; Nacei, 2018). However, the Bill’s implementation was preceded by a set of supportive media-facilitated narratives that seems almost too convenient. This commentary scrutinises the series of media facilitated narratives that justified the Online Safety Act. The discussion briefly examines the connection between the media, blogs and social media in Fiji. It then explores the media facilitated narratives to provide a brief critique of the Act as a so-called ‘Trojan Horse’ for safety while risking responsible political free speech. Finally, it seeks to answer whether it is about online ‘Safety’ alone, or ‘Regulation’ of online media.

The Impact of International Sanctions on Russia’s Media Economy

To punish Russia for the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, the United States and the European Union introduced a set of economic sanctions against Russian state companies and individuals closely affiliated with the Kremlin. The goal of this article is to look at the sanctions in relation to the process of the current consolidation of media assets and revenues in the hands of Russia’s biggest media empires, most of whom are close to the Kremlin. It questions whether the sanctions achieved the intended goal of undermining economic stability inside Russia or if, rather, they benefitted major state-aligned media corporations. The main conclusion drawn from the study is that the international sanctions have radically changed the structure of Russia’s media in a manner contrary to their intention. The sanctions unwittingly favored the biggest players to the detriment of the smaller, protecting state-aligned media and their financial incomes. In the climate of sanctions, media tycoons close to the Kremlin used their lobbying capacity in parliament to acquire advantages, primarily in terms of advertisement. Thus, smaller competitors were pushed out of the market and their shares were redistributed among a few major stakeholders.