Political discourse in football coverage : the cases of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana

Football coverage in newspapers is both an arena for and a mirror of political discourse within a society. The paper argues that discourses within football coverage referring to political issues reflect dominant – and, possibly, contesting – “truths”, which themselves are linked to power relations and political struggles within a given society. The comparison of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, two neighbouring countries in very different conditions (particularly with regard to their historical trajectories and the degree of societal consensus), and more particularly, the comparison of dominant discourses on the topics of patriotism, peace and good governance related to the World Cup qualification of both national teams supports the hypothesis of a strong context-relatedness of a politically loaded “football language”. For instance, whereas in Ghana patriotism is, when football comes in, quickly merged with pan-africanism, the Ivorian team renewed the heated political debate about “Ivorianess” by putting forward a notion of inclusive patriotism.Die Fußball-Berichterstattung in Zeitungen stellt eine Arena, aber auch einen Spiegel der politischen Diskurse innerhalb von Gesellschaften dar. Der vorliegende Text argumentiert, dass Sportberichte dominante, aber auch Gegen-“Wahrheiten” reflektieren, die in Verbindung zu Herrschaftsbeziehungen und politischen Auseinandersetzungen in einer bestimmten Gesellschaft stehen. Der Vergleich von Côte d’Ivoire und Ghana, Nachbarstaaten in sehr unterschiedlichem aktuellen Kontext (im Hinblick auf den Verlauf der jüngeren Geschichte und in der Ausprägung von gesellschaftlichem Konsens), und im besonderen der Vergleich von prägenden Diskursen zu den Themen Patriotismus, Frieden und Good Governance in der Berichterstattung über Qualifikation zur sowie Leistung bei der Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft 2006 durch beide Nationalmannschaften stützt die Hypothese einer starken Kontextgebundenheit der politisch aufgeladenen „Fußballsprache“. Während in Ghana beispielsweise Patriotismus schnell mit „Panafrikanismus“ gepaart wird, sobald von Fußball die Rede ist, hat das ivorische Team die politisch hitzig geführte Debatte über die „Ivoirité“ weiterentwickelt, indem eine inklusivere Form des Patriotismus breite Unterstützung findet

The Production of Insecurity by African Security Forces: Insights from Liberia and the Central African Republic

Little attention has been paid to the factual effect of the state’s security forces on the security of African citizens. Reports about security forces’ contribution to widespread insecurity are frequent: the protectors become violators and their appearance causes fear, not security. In many African crisis countries the realization of better security forces appears to be an elusive goal, either because violent conflicts are not definitively settled and therefore do not allow for decent reform or because a lack of capacity as a result of material constraints is not easy to remedy. The self-help mechanisms used to compensate for the lack of state-sponsored security need more attention. However, it has to be acknowledged that the ideal of a neutral and effective force loyal to the state is shared by a great majority of the population. This contribution compares the experiences of Liberia and the Central African Republic, two extreme cases of strong and weak international involvement, respectively, in post-conflict security-sector reform.Liberia, Central African Republic, security, armed forces, security-sector reform

Not Always in the People’s Interest: Power-sharing Arrangements in African Peace Agreements

Peace agreements form a crucial element of strategies to bring security from outside: they involve third-party mediators during the negotiation stage and often peacekeeping troops to guarantee the agreement at an implementation stage. Peace roundtables usually involve top politicians and military leaders, who negotiate, sign, and/or benefit from the agreement. What is usually and conspicuously absent from peace negotiations is broad-based participation by those who should benefit in the first place: citizens. More specifically, the local level of security provision and insecurity production is rarely taken into account. This paper reviews parts of the academic debate on power sharing and war termination, touching on some key findings by the main researchers working on the topic. The ambivalent African experience with Arend Lijphart’s four main ingredients of consociational democracy (grand coalition, minority veto, proportional representation, group autonomy) is summarized. Recent major African peace agreements (1999-2007) are analyzed, and their power-sharing content detailed. Most agreements contain some—though varying— power-sharing devices. Most striking is the variation regarding the important question of who is sharing power with whom. Obviously, only those present at the negotiation table can really count on being included in major ways. Finally, three country cases are analyzed over a longer time period: Côte d’Ivoire (2002-2007), Liberia (1994-2003), and Central African Republic (1996-2007). The conclusion focuses on the factors of failure of peace agreements that place a heavy emphasis on power sharing.Power sharing, peace agreements, consociational democracy, Central African Republic, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia

Reshaping Political Space? The Impact of the Armed Insurgency in the Central African Republic on Political Parties and Representation

This paper analyzes the declining importance of political parties in the Central African Republic (CAR). It argues that the problematic attitude of elites who are fluctuating between violent and peaceful behavior in order to further their own careers is jeopardizing both peace and democracy. The author hypothesizes that both political parties and rebel movements are failing to adequately represent (ethnoregional) interests, but that parties are suffering more in the course of the enduring war and the peace process. Patterns of elite behavior are presented as the main explanation for the resulting crisis of representation, with international actors’ preference for inclusionary power-sharing deals seen as the main aggravating factor.Central African Republic, peace process, political parties, rebel movements,representation

Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis

This paper proposes a new experimental paradigm to explore the discriminability of languages, a question which is crucial to the child born in a bilingual environment. This paradigm employs the speech resynthesis technique, enabling the experimenter to preserve or degrade acoustic cues such as phonotactics, syllabic rhythm or intonation from natural utterances. English and Japanese sentences were resynthesized, preserving broad phonotactics, rhythm and intonation (Condition 1), rhythm and intonation (Condition 2), intonation only (Condition 3), or rhythm only (Condition 4). The findings support the notion that syllabic rhythm is a necessary and sufficient cue for French adult subjects to discriminate English from Japanese sentences. The results are consistent with previous research using low-pass filtered speech, as well as with phonological theories predicting rhythmic differences between languages. Thus, the new methodology proposed appears to be well-suited to study language discrimination. Applications for other domains of psycholinguistic research and for automatic language identification are considered

On the Linearity of Semantic Change: Investigating Meaning Variation via Dynamic Graph Models

We consider two graph models of semantic change. The first is a time-series model that relates embedding vectors from one time period to embedding vectors of previous time periods. In the second, we construct one graph for each word: nodes in this graph correspond to time points and edge weights to the similarity of the word's meaning across two time points. We apply our two models to corpora across three different languages. We find that semantic change is linear in two senses. Firstly, today's embedding vectors (= meaning) of words can be derived as linear combinations of embedding vectors of their neighbors in previous time periods. Secondly, self-similarity of words decays linearly in time. We consider both findings as new laws/hypotheses of semantic change.Comment: Published at ACL 2016, Berlin (short papers

Major Flaws in Conflict Prevention Policies towards Africa. The Conceptual Deficits of International Actors’ Approaches and How to Overcome Them

Current thinking on African conflicts suffers from misinterpretations (oversimplification, lack of focus, lack of conceptual clarity, state-centrism and lack of vision). The paper analyses a variety of the dominant explanations of major international actors and donors, showing how these frequently do not distinguish with sufficient clarity between the ‘root causes’ of a conflict, its aggravating factors and its triggers. Specifically, a correct assessment of conflict prolonging (or sustaining) factors is of vital importance in Africa’s lingering confrontations. Broader approaches (e.g. “structural stability”) offer a better analytical framework than familiar one-dimensional explanations. Moreover, for explaining and dealing with violent conflicts a shift of attention from the nation-state towards the local and sub-regional level is needed.Sub-Saharan Africa, Conflict Prevention, Conflict Factors, Root causes, Conflict Prolonging Factors, Escalation Patterns, Peace Order, Structural Stability

Language classification from bilingual word embedding graphs

We study the role of the second language in bilingual word embeddings in monolingual semantic evaluation tasks. We find strongly and weakly positive correlations between down-stream task performance and second language similarity to the target language. Additionally, we show how bilingual word embeddings can be employed for the task of semantic language classification and that joint semantic spaces vary in meaningful ways across second languages. Our results support the hypothesis that semantic language similarity is influenced by both structural similarity as well as geography/contact.Comment: To be published at Coling 201

The psychological reality of rhythm classes: Perceptual studies

Linguists have traditionally classified languages into three rhythm classes, namely stress-timed, syllable-timed and mora-timed languages. However, this classification has remained controversial for various reasons: the search for reliable acoustic cues to the different rhythm types has long remained elusive; some languages are claimed to belong to none of the three classes; and few perceptual studies has bolstered the notion. We have previously proposed an acoustic/phonetic model of the different types of linguistic rhythm, and of their categorisation as such by listeners. Here, we present perceptual experiments that directly test the notion of rhythm classes, our model's predictions, and the question of intermediate languages. Language discrimination experiments were run using a speech resynthesis technique to ensure that only rhythmic cues were available to the subjects. Languages investigated were English, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan and Polish. Our results are consistent with the idea that English and Dutch are stress-timed, Spanish and Catalan are syllable-timed, but Polish seems to be different from any other language studied and thus may constitute a new rhythm class. We propose that perceptual studies tapping the ability to discriminate languages' rhythm are the proper way to generate more empirical data relevant to rhythm typology

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants’ capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition