However, anti-imperialism also assumed a special form and prominent place in the Non-Aligned Movement. This still active global association of countries was established in 1961 as an alternative to the Cold War blocs of the…
Rosanne Hooper on conspiracy theories in Venezuela
This chapter uses Ernesto Laclau’s definition of ‘populism’ as a political logic, rather than a movement attached to a specific political ideology or social base (Laclau 2005: 5). According to this definition, there are two…
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Kiril Avramov, Vasily Gatov and Ilya Yablokov, pledging devotion
While the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was the first where digital technology played a significant role (and contestants had dedicated teams for this purpose), it was the very first major political event in which digitally…
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Michael Butter on the stigmatization of conspiracy theories since 1960s
Many scholars have drawn on this argument and have suggested that, ironically, exactly at the time when [in his essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard] Hofstadter was making this claim, conspiracy theories were…
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Claus Oberhauser on A. Barruel’s idea of the origins of liberté & egalité
[In his Mémoires pour sérvir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme, Augustin] Barruel traced the core ideas of the French Revolution back to the Manichaean concepts of ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’. He regarded Mani as a paternal father…
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Stef Aupers on conspiracy theories as oppositional readings
The key assumption in audience research as proposed by Stuart Hall is then that there is no inherent (ideological) meaning in a media text since consumers read, decode, reconstruct and, ultimately, produce meaning in different…
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Ute Caumanns and Andreas Önnerfors on the primary depiction of conspiracy
In our age of global interconnectivity, the horizontal network has replaced the vertical pyramid as the primary depiction of conspiracy. – ‘Conspiracy theories and visual culture’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), p. 452
Timoty Melley on conspiracy & paranoia in American post-war narrative
Many notable writers of this [post-Kennedy] era embraced what Thomas Pynchon [Gravity’s rainbow (1973) New York: Viking, pp. 25, 638] called ‘creative paranoia’ and ‘operational paranoia’ as a reasonable form of social engagement in the…
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Ben Carver on conspiracy theories in nineteenth-century British writing
Luc Boltanski notices the contemporaneity, in the late nineteenth century, of detective fiction with the first instances of ‘paranoia’ as a psychiatric condition defined by Emil Kraepelin in 1899 and observes that ‘[t]he investigator in…
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Andrew McKenzie-McHarg & Claus Oberhauser on the effect that the print culture had on conspiracy theories
In fact, a frequent claim prevalent in the scholarship identifies the eighteenth century as the century that gave birth to conspiracy theory, or conspiracism, in a form that is recognisable to us today [Wood, G.S.…