Publications

This paper stems from three fundamental tenets: the first is to challenge the idea that the efforts made by the EU to reduce the democratic deficit by investing in communication strategies have been effective. The second is that populism feeds its political action and develops its narratives exploiting the adversaries’ weaknesses, turning them into its strongholds. The third is that recent political debates in the European countries have transformed the European Public Space into a militarised one. The paper will discuss how Europe could try to adopt a thorough strategic communication policy that considers the attempt to transform the European informative environment into one that is currently the target of military Inform and Influence actions by adversary entities.

Il Mulino

Although Brexit has been considered an unexpected ‘incident’ by the majority of observers, this paper challenges this idea. It thus considers the recent discussion on ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘selective exposure on social media’ Spohr (2017) to document how an increasing consumption of news and information through specific web platforms has effects on the ideological polarization of public opinion. These thus explain the genesis of this particular event. It will be shown how these dynamics have been considered by the Vote Leave campaign during the 2016 EU referendum in the UK. Exploiting echo chambers they were able to successfully crystallize a number of issues through a narrative that resonated with the British voters’ feelings transforming them into ‘issues’ that could be identified in a single concept: a populistic and creeping xenophobic fear discourse (Wodak 2015).

Dipartimento di Culture, Politica e Società - Università di Torino