Global Communication at the Crossroads
Political science. Communications governance. Geopolitics of communications. Technology. Actors. Visions.
Springer International Publishing
2024 | Book
Organized around five sections, the volume considers the geopolitics of emerging communication orders; the changing roles of actors and stakeholders; the challenge of embedding rights and values in regulatory arrangements; the intersection of technology and policy; and the need to rethink epistemologies and methodologies for researching this field.
Contributions from different disciplines and cultural backgrounds include provocative think pieces and longer analyses. All chapters are grounded in historically-aware understandings of contemporary transformations, while anticipating dynamics of our communication futures.
Padovani C., Wavre V., Hintz A., Iosifidis P., Goggin G. (eds.) (2018). Communications at the crossroads. Springer
Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-29616-1
2024 | Book chapter
Rerouting Geopolitics: Narratives and the Political Power of Communications
This think-piece provides an African lens on global communications developments in the context of new and dynamic geopolitical formations. Through this lens and in the context of the global crisis brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, the chapter reflects on the progress made towards achieving a more just world information order that would enable citizens of the world to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic and lockdowns that governments around the world have introduced to contain its spread. Using a conceptualisation based on narratives, this think-piece explores the intersections between geopolitics and communications. This chapter reflects on the dimensions that a novel research agenda should include to allow the rerouting of geopolitics. This is no easy task. More than 40 years after the publication of the MacBride Report, the vision of a New World Information Order (NWIO) with more balanced information flows, enabling people to exercise their rights, seems as far off as it did then. Information and power asymmetries are greater than ever with the intensifying global processes of digitalisation and datafication. Ownership and control of data and information is concentrated in a handful of global giant corporations concentrated predominantly in the United States and in China, under tight state control. Those with access to information through the Internet or who are unable to exercise their rights online are concentrated in the majority world. The humanitarian crises in countries of the global South are either fleetingly covered or ignored in global news and as the European theatre again takes centre stage. The infringements of their citizens’ human rights through Internet shutdowns and surveillance online are seldom condemned in global relations. Elections are underminded through online disinformation and disorder. Digital infrastructure investments are parts of grander geopolitical designs or trade wars in which they have no say or control.
Gillwald A. and Wavre V. (2024). Rerouting Geopolitics: Narratives and the Political Power of Communications, in Padovani C, Wavre V, Hintz A, Iosifidis P, Goggin G. (eds.), Communication at the crossroads, Springer
Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-29616-1_2
2024 | Book Chapter
Global communications at the crossroads
The current historical moment is characterised by a multitude of intersecting dynamics and challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated the vulnerability of the social, economic and political foundations of contemporary societies across the world; recurring wars and geopolitical tensions point to the fragility of international relations; and the looming ecological breakdown questions the very future of human civilisation. Yet while right-wing populism is shaking up politics in many countries, there is growing recognition that these challenges require cross-border collaboration as well as perspectives that complement established (mostly Western) vantage points, and new movements and alliances to forge links to address multiple questions of social (and global) justice. Promises of globalisation and global governance that seemed to hold only a couple of decades ago now sound increasingly hollow, but the re-emergence of nationalisms and isolationist policies do not provide many promising answers. We are at a crossroads with regard to the very future of human existence, but also in the ways our media and communication systems are organised and may develop in the coming years and decades. The respective roles of different actors in shaping our communicative environment are in flux, and their configurations and power relations will have huge implications for our future possibilities for generating and sharing knowledge and contributing our voices to the necessary debates around existential and communication challenges.
Padovani C., Wavre V., Hintz A., Iosifidis P., Goggin G. (2024). Introduction: Global communications at the crossroads, in Padovani C., Wavre V., Hintz A., Iosifidis P., Goggin G. (eds.), Communication at the crossroads, Springer
Link: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-29616-1_1