Empire, the Media, and Peace: A Corpus- and AI-Assisted Analysis of Stances on Peace in Polish, Romanian, and English Coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War
摘要
This chapter provides a quantitative analysis of the discourse of peace in Polish, Romanian, and English media coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. It uses a multilingual corpus of online news items covering the first 2 years of the war, and artificial intelligence (AI) to perform text classification on three subsets of the data. The results show that despite the support for peace on Ukrainian terms that the media generally projects, a more pragmatic and concessions-based approach to ending the conflict is popular in all the examined media landscapes. The prevalence of this stance on peace is explained with the help of Hardt and Negri’s totalizing concept of Empire, a new form of global sovereignty characterized, among other things, by a perpetual state of war as well as a general drive towards peace. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine is interpreted here as a paradoxical disruption of war-making typical to this new stage of history, with a concessions-oriented peace agreement as a more tenable solution to the war.