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This rejoinder responds to the eight comments to our report on ‘Enhancing Europe’s Global Power: A Scenario Exercise with Eight Proposals’. We address questions related to our definition of Europe, the notion of power, context and appropriateness of the scenario approach, the feasibility of enhancing European power, the rationale behind the proposed eight measures as well as the way ahead. Finally, we highlight green policies together with media and communication as promising candidates to increase European power.
Das vorliegende Szenario kombiniert zwei für die Sicherheitspolitik relevante Dimensionen: Der Kampf gegen Klimawandel und Terrorismus. Aufbauend auf den jüngsten Ereignissen in Südeuropa und Afghanistan entwerfen wir ein Szenario, in dem dramatische Geschehnisse erfolgreichen Bemühungen vorweggehen - erst der Schock weiterer Niederlagen an beiden Fronten (z.B. die Folgen eines verheerenden Waldbrandes rund um Athen) führt dazu, dass die internationale Gemeinschaft zu Handeln beginnt und letztlich ambitionierte Maßnahmen ergreift, um beiden Bedrohungen erfolgreich zu begegnen. Die entscheidenden Meilensteine dieses Szenarios werden dabei in Schlagzeilen und kurzen Nachrichten dargestellt. Zum Abschluss werden zwei Handlungsempfehlungen formuliert: Eine Förderung von Solarstrom-Pilotprojekten in Nordafrika und der Sahelzone sowie eine Evaluation bestehender Anti-Terror-Strategien vor dem Hintergrund holistischer Präventionskonzepte.
Combining earlier spatial typologies of places and communities with computer-mediated communication technologies, Hardegger developed the idea of the 4th space. Given that misinformation has become a crucial problem in many online environments over the course of the last few years, this article attempts to assess the implications of this development for the 4th space. This article begins with an analysis of people’s tendency to lie in different environments. Afterwards, properties of the 4th space are assessed that create opportunities for misinformation-based communities to emerge. Finally, open questions in relation to misinformation and the 4th space that deserve further attention are addressed.
This article investigates the role of privacy and transparency in the 4th Space and outlines their implications for the development and dissemination of conspiracy theories. We argue that privacy can be exploited by individuals and organizations to spread conspiracy theories online, while organizational transparency, intended to increase accountability and ultimately trust, can have the adverse effect and nurture conspiracy beliefs. Through the lens of the 4th Space concept, we offer suggestions on how to approach those challenges which emerge as a result of the complex entanglements of both actual and virtual world across time.
At least since the 2016 presidential elections in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom, misinformation has gained increasing prominence in the public discourse. Only four years later, the COVID-19 pandemic emerged and was accompanied by an “Infodemic”, misleading individuals about the origin of the virus, its severity, and the intentions of governments coping with the virus. Misinformation was itself deemed a considerable threat to public health. Although COVID-19 misinformation was widely circulating at that time, and continues to do so, a substantial share of individuals did not believe this misleading information. That begs the question, why do people fall for misinformation?
This question is at the heart of this dissertation project, which explores the role of social media, trust, and values in individuals’ susceptibility to false information. Through comparative research, the project investigates how these variables affect the reception of misinformation and attempts to combine multiple levels of analysis and consider different forms of misinformation.
The core of this dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which addresses the research question from a different but complementary perspective. Chapter 2 provides the conceptual basis for the subsequent empirical chapters. The chapter investigates how individual, group, and system-level variables contribute to social media’s role as a vector for misinformation. In the third chapter, I employ an experimental research design to assess whether superficial characteristics of different social media platforms affect users’ credibility judgements regarding manufactured news. Contrary to existing literature, the experiment’s results suggest that social media platforms do not differ in their effects on perceived credibility of news. The fourth chapter builds on data from a multinational research project that explored the role of values during the COVID-19 pandemic and their impact on individuals’ propensity to believe in COVID-19-related conspiracy theories. Through a comparative design, using samples from Germany and Poland, the chapter finds considerable differences in the pattern of influential values and trust concepts on the adoption of conspiracy beliefs.
Although the findings of this dissertation project come with limitations, the research nevertheless highlights the importance of comparative research designs in the study of misinformation. The dissertation concludes by discussing avenues for further research.
In the present context of intensifying competition between the major trading economies and potentially game‐changing technological developments, the European Union is generally seen as the weaker party. Lacking the ‘hard power’ derived from military capabilities, it has laid claim to a ‘soft power’ of normative influence externally, yet even that is only partially utilised. Nor has Europe been able to exercise the power to coerce – ‘sharp power’ – commensurate with its economic weight as a trading bloc equivalent in size and reach to the US or China, its most prominent global competitors. How can Europe strengthen its position, and in what fields? Through a scenario exercise, we develop eight policy proposals aimed at countering Europe´s vulnerabilities and enabling it to assert its sharp and soft power more effectively. Specifically, we consider the feasibility, means and scope for their realisation. Together, they provide a transformative agenda for the EU’s position in the world.
This foresight project focuses on a key question for the future of Germany’s foreign policy: Given changing geopolitical and economic relationships among major powers, what possible futures can be foreseen soft power approaches or external cultural policy (ECP) in terms of narratives, strategies, goals, policies, and programmatic activities? To address this question, we place Germany in a comparative framework of international relations that considers soft power approaches in the context of prevailing geopolitical and economic relations between the European Union, the United States of America, and the People’s Republic of China as well as other global players. In each case, we consider soft power approaches relative to hard and sharp power options. The time frame for the future scenarios is the year 2030, anticipating likely and potential developments and events from 2022 onward. The scenarios are based on a series of brainstorming and validation sessions, literature reviews, personal interviews, and an online survey fielded among experts and representatives of leading institutions. We identified two major drivers of future developments: the state of the world economy and the state of the world’s security situation. Exploring the interaction between these two drivers yielded four distinct scenarios.