Showing papers by "Gearóid Ó Tuathail published in 2018"
TL;DR: Koschut et al. as discussed by the authors presented two research articles that use social media to study the impact of the Euromaidan protests in 2014 on European and global politics.
Abstract: The capacity of shock events to transform international politics has long been appreciated (Wark 1994). From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 to the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001, violent spectacles that shock the conscience of the international community have often proved to be critical turning points in global politics (Sewell 2005). Shocking events, of course, can also fail to have much long-term impact while some truly shocking events – Stalinist terror, Soviet famines, the Holocaust – may not be widely known until much later. Furthermore, the production of incidents as eventful media spectacles is dependent upon access and freedom to report, the technological capacities of communication networks, and prevailing power structures across global media ecologies. What people believe, in processing shocking events, also varies greatly. At the present moment, the tumultuous events within Ukraine in 2014 appear as a critical conjuncture in European and global affairs (Sakwa 2017). Four eventful processes, three of which involved considerable losses of human lives, are particularly salient: the Euromaidan protests that began on 21st November 2013, descended in violence, and climaxed with the toppling of Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych on 22 February; the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, a move triumphantly proclaimed by Vladimir Putin on 18 March; the simultaneous de-stabilization of southeast Ukraine, an eventful process that triggered war in the Donbas and violent clashes elsewhere such as those in Odesa on 2 May that resulted in the deaths of 48 people; and the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by a BUK anti-aircraft missile system that killed 297 individuals, most from places far beyond Ukraine. Each of these events provided shocking images that circulated across the globe on television screens, newspapers and news magazines. Each event lives on in the form of documentaries, memoirs, memorials, anniversary events and trade books. How social science studies shock events, and the affective economy of global politics more broadly, is an evolving field (Koschut 2017). In this special section of Geopolitics we present two research articles that use social