This paper explores the ways in which leaked documents can be recruited to contribute to the counter-hegemonic aims of the shadow accounting project. Drawing on material published by Wikileaks as ...part of Cablegate, our case study focuses on private communication between US Embassy officials about Chevron Nigeria from 2002 to 2010. In analyzing these documents, we mobilize the ideas of both Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Jessop (1990), emphasizing the role discourse plays in the production and maintenance of hegemonic coalitions between powerful state and market actors, which are central to neoliberalism. Our analysis suggests that the sharing of discourse, much of which occurs in private, allows a hegemonic coalition to agree to a “’popular-national’ programme” (Jessop, 1990) that serves the interests of the coalition, while masquerading as collectively beneficial. In our case study, this private discourse provided the means through which the “moral and intellectual leadership” of the coalition could be embedded in a shared commitment to the maintenance of oil production in Nigeria, despite significant resistance from local communities. In choosing to use leaks to explore the state-capital nexus, we offer a shadow account of the discursive production of hegemony that reveals it to be an ongoing and active project. Importantly, we also show that the very act of creating and recreating hegemony through discourse produces moments of vulnerability and fragility that present counter-hegemonic opportunities. When leaks are mobilized to produce shadow accounts of the contradictions and tensions that exist between the state and capital, the “political frontier” can be restored in ways that re-politicize and radicalize democracy (Mouffe, 2018, p. 4).
Purpose
This study explores a hegemonic alliance and the role of relational forms of accounting and accountablity in the making of contemporary capitalism.
Design/methodology/approach
We use the ...WikiLeaks “Cablegate” documents to provide an account of the detailed machinations between interest groups (corporations and the state) that are constitutive of hegemonic activity.
Findings
Our analysis of the “Cablegate” documents shows that the US and Chevron were crafting a central role for Turkmenistan and its president on the global political stage as early as 2007, despite offical reporting beginning only in 2009. The documents exemplify how “accountability gaps” occlude the understanding of interdependence between capital and the state.
Research limitations/implications
The study contributes to a growing idea that official accounts offer a fictionalized narrative of corporations as existing independently, and thus expands the boundaries associated with studying multinational corporate activities to include their interdependencies with the modern state.
Social implications
The study traces how global capitalism extends into new territories through diplomatic channels, as a strategic initiative between powerful state and capital interests, arguing that the outcome is the empowerment of authoritarian states at the cost of democracy.
Originality/value
The study argues that previous accounting and accountability research has overlooked the larger picture of how capital and the state work together to secure a mutual hegemonic interest. We advocate for a more complete account of these activities that circumvents official, often restricted, views of global capitalism.
The metaphor of transparency is crucial to the relations between contemporary Italian poetry and digital culture. The essay highlights the influence of WikiLeaks on literature and contextualizes ...within poetry criticism the debate on the open access to sensitive data. Paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 investigate the dystopian implications of a transparent society as represented in poetry. Finally, the paper suggests to overcome the opposition between utopia and dystopia of transaprency, in order to point out the entanglement of different metaphors, outcomes and the history of glass as a catalyst for a specific European rhetorics.
For the past six years, the availability of WikiLeaks data—including the SIGACTS violent event data for Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the diplomatic cables—has posed an important challenge for ...international relations and conflict researchers. Despite the evident attractions of the vast trove of primary data involving US military and diplomatic interests, only a few peer-reviewed academic papers have been published. The reluctance to analyze WikiLeaked information is mostly due to self-censorship. Because of its character, we cannot reliably know why American academics engage in self-censoring, but worries about repercussions for career prospects or fear of prosecution are probable. Despite threats of legal consequences by governmental officials, none have occurred (to my knowledge). Academics who have publicly spurned analysis of WikiLeaks information have made two arguments, either a) that it is against US law to access the data and/or that it helps America’s enemies or b) that the materials in the leaks are not worthy of much attention since they are not earth-shattering or unexpected. Neither of these claims holds much validity.
This open access book is a rare example of the ethnographic study of investigative journalism. This book explores entrepreneurial attempts to combine traditional investigative journalism with ...alternative ways of organising this work. It transcends watershed investigative projects in favour of the ways in which new actors (citizens, technologists, bloggers and local reporters, among others) join experienced investigative journalists in experiments with the practices of watchdog journalism in the digital era. Cases include Bristol Cable, Bureau Local and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism, as well as Forbidden Stories. The book also includes two chapters on the impact of COVID-19 upon the development of cross-disciplinary work in a traditional newsroom and in the larger media ecosystems of both Norway and China. This is a timely book for journalism students, scholars and investigative reporters, who share a passion for this form of journalism.
One of the most modern currents of anarchism - crypto-anarchism - arose as a response to the global development of digital technologies and the Internet and operates exclusively within the framework ...of the “global web”. The paper attempts to study one of the most unusual branches of anarchist philosophy and its impact on the digital life and politics of several states. With the help of functional and comparative methods of political research, the author analyzes crypto-anarchism as part of the ideology of anarchism, the main goal of which is to find out how viable crypto-anarchism is as an independent movement. The article raises the question of whether the ideas of crypto-anarchism can be used to effectively address current socio-political problems. The theoretical basis of crypto-anarchism looks more and more relevant, as it affects the security of the individual on the Web and is aimed at fighting against widespread state control. Despite the fact that, as the study showed, cryptoanarchism as a movement does not have sufficient elaboration and influence on real politics, its deeper study can be useful for preparing political programs aimed at Internet users (which constitute around 62.5 % of the global population), as well as studying political models and their development paths using virtual simulations and virtual states (Liberland, Wirtland), which are characteristic of crypto-anarchism.
Practice theorists favor interviews and participant observations in their study. Using insights from anthropological works on bureaucratic texts, in this article we develop methodological tools to ...complement these interpretive methods of data collection. We suggest a way to trace practices by systematically looking through both the content of documents and their form. We probe this approach with an analysis of 408 diplomatic cables sent by the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in 2005–2009 and subsequently released by Wikileaks. We draw on these documents to tell two related stories about diplomatic practices: the first about epistemic practices and how the cables privilege certain voices and types of knowledge over others, and the second about diplomatic culture, where the cables serve as evidence of the powerful socialization processes that diplomats are subject to. This contributes to International Relations (IR) with a new approach for systematically analyzing written documents to uncover international practices.
With the intensifying demand for transparency in government has come a dramatic increase in the number of spectacular public leaks that carry dramatic public consequences. This essay reviews how ...transparency has been considered an ideal of democratic theory and critical media scholarship and offers several psychoanalytic tenets for reading public demands for transparency. The essay then analyses discourse by and about WikiLeaks to illustrate how Julian Assange's discourse results in a program of transparency that engages in destructive rituals of disavowal and exposure.
