Czechoslovakia failed to implement democracy and nationalism in an equal and fair manner to the Czechs and Slovaks. As Masaryk mirrored Czechoslovakia off of the United States and his close friend President Wilson, the founding Czechoslovakian documents created an unequal version of the basic democratic principles. The domestic geopolitical culture of nationalism and nationalism abroad influenced ethnic identification between the new borders for the Czechs and Slovaks. Without the shared social language of Czechoslovakian nationalism the Czechs and Slovaks did not unite politically, ethnically, or at all. This allowed for the Czechs to take over and create their idealist democracy, otherwise known as an ethnocracy.
Disinformation has long been a tactic used by the Russian government to achieve its goals. Today, Vladimir Putin aims to achieve several things: weaken the United States’ strength on the world stage, relieve Western sanctions on himself and his inner circle, and reassert dominant influence over Russia’s near abroad (the Baltics, Ukraine, etc.). This research analyzed disinformation in English, Spanish, and Russian; noting the dominant narratives and geopolitical goals Russia hoped to achieve by destabilizing democracy in each country/region.
Comic books and superhero films are often regarded as mere fiction, but oftentimes these mediums are used within the classroom in order to understand complicated topics in history such as war. But, this thesis looks at expanding this viewpoint to look at how comic books and their coinciding films, specifically Marvel's X-Men and Civil War, act as allegories to real world politics and social justice issues. This thesis examines the importance of the allegories found within comic books and their accompanying films, and how the allegories found in these works of literature and film are relevant in today's changing world. Specifically, this thesis will look towards explaining global politics found within these sources through its examination of social justice issues and international politics, and what this teaches us about our past, present, and even the future political realm.
This paper examines the issue of Russian disinformation in Estonia and how the country has built resilience against this threat. Drawing upon existing literature and a series of interviews conducted with Estonians of a variety of professional backgrounds, this work explores Estonia's whole-of-society approach to resilience and examines its incorporation of national security strategy, inter-institutional cooperation, and media literacy education. Ultimately, this paper argues that Estonia's efforts have been largely successful in enabling the country to strengthen its society against Russian disinformation and offers key takeaways for other countries such as the United States.
At first, this project intended to uncover a link between massacres of minority populations in the United States and the idea of Great Replacement Theory (GRT), sometimes known as White Genocide Theory, which originated in Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints. GRT is an offensive aimed at eliminating Black and Brown people and their cultures before they, according to the thought process of the theory, eliminate the white race and Western culture through mass immigration, insurgence and interracial breeding, which is depicted in vivid and disturbing detail in The Camp of the Saints. There exists a clear trail in which the theory spawned in French Catholic circles then was exported all throughout the Western powers during the second wave of globalization with particularly devastating impact in the United States. Raspail’s work coincides with a 1972 French hate law that was decried as authoritarian and overprotective of minorities by putting in strict standards to prevent hate speech but was accused of being too lenient about what is defamatory of whites and Catholics (2003, Bleich, pp. 56). Because of this interaction in the French legal system, this project seeks to find out if there is a correlation between GRT and the United States Supreme Court, the American cultural equivalent of the French legal system, by finding frequency of five key words associated with GRT within Supreme Court syllabi and opinions then performing general linear regression in search of statistical significance between the phrases and whether the court cases are associated with race, a variable purely independent of the five key words being monitored.