Tracing Linguistic Relations in Winning and Losing Sides of Explicit Opposing Groups

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out of all information provided in the conversation. Speakers share a common interest to discuss. It is expected that each speaker's reply includes duplicated forms of words from previous speakers. However, linguistic adaptation is observed and evolves in a more complex path than just transferring slightly modified versions of common concepts. A conversation aiming a benefit at the end shows an emergent cooperation inducing the adaptation. Not only cooperation, but also competition drives the adaptation or an opposite scenario and one can capture the dynamic process by tracking how the concepts are linguistically linked. To uncover salient complex dynamic events in verbal communications, we attempt to discover self-organized linguistic relations hidden in a conversation with explicitly stated winners and losers. We examine open access data of the United States Supreme Court. Our understanding is crucial in big data research to guide how transition states in opinion mining and decision-making should be modeled and how this required knowledge to guide the model should be pinpointed, by filtering large amount of data.Comment: Full paper, Proceedings of FLAIRS-2017 (30th Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society), Special Track, Artificial Intelligence for Big Social Data Analysi

The Power and Limits of Russia’s Strategic Narrative in Ukraine:The Role of Linkage

Governments project strategic narratives about international affairs, hoping thereby to shape the perceptions and behaviour of foreign audiences. If individuals encounter incompatible narratives projected by different states, how can their acceptance of one narrative over another be explained? I suggest that support for the strategic narrative of a foreign government is more likely when there is social and communicative linkage at the individual level, i.e., when an individual maintains personal and cultural connections to the foreign state through regular travel, media consumption, religious attendance, and conversations with friends or relatives. The role of linkage is demonstrated in Ukraine, where a “pro-Russian, anti-Western” narrative projected from Moscow has been competing against a “pro-Western, anti-Russian” narrative projected from Kyiv. Previous accounts of international persuasion have been framed in terms of a state’s resources producing advantageous “soft power.” However, I propose a shift in focus—from the resources states have to what individuals do to maintain social and communicative ties via which ideas cross borders. In a competitive discursive environment such linkage can in fact have mixed consequences for the states involved, as the Ukrainian case illustrates

A Tale of Two Paradigms: How Genealogical and Comparative Historical analysis can help reset the intractable debate over the causation of ideological violence

This study responds to the endemic lack of clarity and consensus afflicting academic and policy discussions on the causes of ideological violence and, by extension, the appropriate means for preventing/containing it. I trace, conceptualise, and problematise the long-standing debate between two deeply entrenched oppositional camps or ‘paradigms’ – heuristically dubbed the ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ paradigms of ideological violence, respectively – that propose competing explanations for the causation of ideological violence; the former considering it a product of irrational individual dysfunction, the latter viewing it as a rational (if often misguided) response to societal dysfunction. Further, I show that extant attempts at reconciling/synthesising these paradigms have, to date, proven problematic. I explore how and why these opposing paradigms emerged and why debate between them persists. I argue that they are shaped, perpetuated and marred by multiple extra-academic dynamics and naturalised assumptions and conclude that clarity and consensus is unlikely unless we can ‘reset’ the debate, making a conscious decision to ‘step back’ from our extant paradigms/assumptions and approach the phenomenon with fresh eyes. I propose and demonstrate two methodological approaches that – used in conjunction – can contribute towards this end. Firstly, I propose that – and demonstrate how - Genealogical Analysis can aid in this ‘stepping back’ by denaturalising our entrenched assumptions on the causes of ideological violence (i.e., our extant paradigms) by uncovering how and why those assumptions came to be held and reified. Secondly, I propose and demonstrate Comparative Historical Analysis’ utility as a tool that can aid in re-approaching the phenomena with fresh eyes by helping - gradually and collaboratively - to construct a new set of more methodologically-rigorous assumptions (i.e., a new paradigm) upon which extant research built upon either extant paradigm can be resituated, reinterpreted, de-limited, and synthesised, and further research can be premised

Flirting with disaster: explaining excessive public debt accumulation in Italy and Belgium

The sovereign debt-­‐crises that recently unfolded in Europe highlight how incompletely we understand why prosperous developed countries persistently accumulate debt even in the face of risk of fiscal turmoil. Scholarly research explored why countries run deficits, but it remains unexplained why countries fail to put their fiscal houses in order once public debt reaches potentially dangerous proportions. This thesis argues that the key to the problem of excessive debt accumulation is the lack of compromise among powerful socio-­‐economic groups within the polity about the distribution of the necessary fiscal sacrifices. As long as each group finds it expedient to resist spending cuts and tax increases that place part of the burden of consolidation on its members, stabilization is delayed and debt is allowed to grow. The readiness of groups to reach a compromise and accept a share of the fiscal pain is a function of the economic harm each suffers from the side-­‐effects of fiscal imbalances, such as high inflation or declining international competitiveness. Therefore, the insulation of socio-­‐ economic actors from such side-­‐effects delays stabilization. This perspective sheds new light on unintended consequences of EMU-­‐membership. This explanation is couched in a society-­‐centred analysis of policy making. The thesis identifies coalitions of societal interest to explain policy choices, along the lines laid down in Gourevitch’s Politics in Hard Times (1986) and it uses Alesina and Drazen’s (1991) war of attrition model of delayed stabilization to analyse the costs and benefits for socio-­‐economic groups of resisting fiscal pain. Using this approach, it provides theoretically guided historical analyses of Belgium’s and Italy’s experiences with excessive debt accumulation in the 1980s, consolidation in the 1990s and mixed results in the 2000s, demonstrating how the interests of societal groups shaped the politics of fiscal policy-­‐making and investigating the effect of the EMU accession on fiscal outcomes

Statuskonkurransens grammatikk : internasjonale hierarkier som innenlandsk praksis

A burgeoning body of research has documented that status-seeking abounds in world politics. Yet the status hierarchies to which states respond and compete within are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to empirically ascertain. It is seldom agreed upon where states rank, even within particular policy domains. This ambiguity has begotten considerable disagreement among scholars over the nature of international hierarchies and led to a proliferation of structural theories of international status. Rather than theorizing and investigating the purported effects of fuzzy international social structures, this dissertation posits that international status can be studied via the theories of international status (TIS) that governments and their opponents themselves produce and use to interpret their state’s status. Treating these theories as productive of the world they purport to describe, such a TIS approach foregrounds the interpretative agency of domestic groups to develop and maintain “hierarchies of their own making”, which need not be recognized internationally to become crucial for policy legitimation domestically. In order to study TIS systematically, this dissertation develops a new meta-linguistic framework for identifying and mapping the use of TIS within domestic politics. Inspired by the Copenhagen School, this Grammar of Status Competition framework defines status competition by its peculiar processual-relational logic rather than substantive indicators. This enables the analyst to avoid reifying the rules of the hierarchy prior to analysis, and illuminate contestation and change in the TIS that circulate and inform policy debates. Further, because TIS are manifested and observable in discourse, this approach avoids prior works’ reliance upon proxies for inferring international collective beliefs. The usefulness and transferability of this approach is demonstrated via three deliberately different case studies: how rival TIS were involved in the (de)legitimation of (1) Norwegian education reforms at the turn of the 21st century; (2) the United States various negotiating positions during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between 1969 and 1980, and (3) the prosecution of Britain’s war with the Boer between 1899-1902. Among, other insights, the dissertation provides plausible answers to three major puzzles in IR status research: why states compete for status when the international rewards seem ephemeral; how states can escape the zero sum game associated with quests for positional status; and how status scholars can overcome the methodological problem of disentangling status from other motivations. Finally, the dissertation argues that ambiguity around status is itself is a social good that international society would be prudent to cherish rather than strive to eliminate

Where is Europe?:Respacing, Replacing, and Reordering Europe

Selected Papers Presented at Euroculture Intensive Programme 2018

Where is Europe?:Respacing, Replacing, and Reordering Europe

Selected Papers Presented at Euroculture Intensive Programme 2018