Love is in the air: the political rhetoric of love in Obama and Putin’s leadership

When the Russian president divorced his wife in 2013, social media crowds coined plenty of the Internet memes to interpret the news. Anastasia Denisova, Doctoral Researcher at CAMRI, examined the framing of the story in traditional and new media and came to the surprising findings.

Older women are often described as being asexual and uninterested in sex or intimacy (McHugh & Interligi, 2015). Thus, most research examining older couples describes those couples as primarily enjoying companionate or compassionate love – a type of love reflecting care and concern for another person (Allen et al., 2018). Unlike companionate or compassionate love, passionate love refers to a “state of intense longing for union with another” (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993, p. 67). Relatively little is known about passionate love and older couples (Hatfield & Rapson, 1993); moreover, far less is known about passionate love among African American older couples. Using data collected from African American couples (332 couples aged 20 to 39 and 90 couples aged 40 to 79), Actor-Partner Interdependence Models were used. For both age groups, 20 to 39 and 40 to 79, husbands’ and wives’ reports of marital quality were significantly associated with each other at Time 1. Husbands’ and wives’ reports of passionate love (assessed at Time 2) were not significantly associated with each other – for either age group under study. Cross paths (partner effects) were not significant for either of the two age groups; wives’ marital quality (Time 1) did not significantly predict husbands’ passionate love (Time 2), nor did husbands’ marital quality (Time 1) predict wives passionate love (Time 2). It is important to note that the older and younger age groups exhibited a similar pattern of results, suggesting that passion and physical intimacy may operate in similar ways for both.

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37% of online news users (and 51% of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering out spam (which is a growing problem) and then reading the relevant posts. A top trending story on Twitter will typically see multiple tweets per second, and keeping up with the rapid flow of incoming tweets is quite cumbersome and cognitively taxing. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming for someone who wants to get the pulse of the people affected by a news story. Furthermore, in certain scenarios people might want to look at more fine grained opinions. Currently, there is no elegant way to extract geographic and demographic impact of a news story. What is the public sentiment in Indonesia about the Arab Spring? How did the public opinion about the Wikileaks disclosures change as the story unfolded during the course of a year? It is very difficult and tedious to observe such patterns using the currently available news providers. This work attempts to solve these problems by proposing a news aggregator platform which pulls news stories from various sources and also aggregates public responses, reflections, opinions and sentiments associated with those stories. This data is presented in ways that are easily understandable so readers can make better sense of the stories unfolding across the globe. Such a news aggregator platform that gathers and display public opinion and sentiments about a story, must deal with various challenges – 1. Opinions are very subjective. Different people feel about a story in different ways. With such an enormous amount of diverse opinions and subjectivity, how can we possibly aggregate the responses into something that makes sense as a whole? ________________________________ Acknowledgements: Prof. Yardi, S. for the guidance Sethi, P. (2013). Public opinion aggregation by annotation and tagging of online news stories. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 891-894). doi:10.9776/13453 Copyright is held by the author. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 892 2. There isn’t really a unified web standard for expressing opinion (in textual form). Some people tweet in 140 characters, while others write elaborate blog posts. Some websites employ tags which a reader can use to define and classify their public opinion, while others rely on threaded comments and comment ranking systems. How can a platform be flexible enough to adapt to all these varied standards so that it can extract valuable data from various sources? Perhaps the platform can create a new standard of expression on the web which is flexible and comprehensive enough to be used to express diverse views about every news story in the world. 3. How to filter out spam while extracting public opinion? 4. Once the platform has access to the data it needs, how should it be displayed to the reader in a way that makes sense? What forms of visualizations, illustrations and graphical representations can be employed to give the reader a holistic view of how people feel about a story? 5. How can the platform determine and convey effects of geographical, demographic and temporal variations as the story unfolds? These are just a few out of possibly many issues which must be dealt with. Previous research on similar public opinion aggregation services has greatly focused on natural language processing, data mining and text categorization and clustering. Xiaojun (2010) proposed a framework for crawling the web for comments and applying various data mining algorithms on the data to extract relevant information. Diakopoulos and Shamma (2010) used tweets posted in conjunction with the live presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain to gauge public opinion. Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) studied the use of word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. This research proposes a solution – The Opinionated Reader, which relies on sentiment tags and annotations associated with a news story. The essential idea is to create a commenting, discussion and sharing plug-in which can be used by news websites and aggregators as a commenting solution for their news pages. Users wanting to share or comment on a news story through the plug-in are asked to tag the news story with sentiment tags and annotate the story with their reaction (happy/positive or sad/negative). These tags and annotations are stored, aggregated and linked to each news story. A mobile application provides the front-end interface for users to access the news stories and the aggregated sentiment associated with each story. The basic architecture is explained as follows: The Opinionated Reader – Mobile/Tablet App The app fetches news articles from various web sources, based on the interests and preferences configured by the user. In every news article, a portion of the screen real estate is reserved for Opinions which shows graphical visualizations and illustrations of the public opinion surrounding the news story. These visualizations include: A Sentiment Graph indicating the popular tags associated with the story (E.g.: “Shocking”, “Inspiring”, “Amusing” etc.). See Figure 1 for example visualization. A Positivity Graph which plots the level of positivity associated with the story on a time scale from when the news broke. See Figure 2 for example visualization. Figure 1. Example Sentiment Graph Figure 2. Example Positivity Graph iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 893 The user can choose to see these visualizations for a particular time period in the evolution history of the news story, or for a specific country. The app also facilitates people to tag and annotate news articles from within its interface. The Opinionated Reader – Commenting and Sharing Web Plug-in These days, a common way of adding discussion and commenting functionality to news websites is by using 3 rd party services (like DISQUS). The Opinionated Reader is a similar service which can be embedded into the news articles of various news websites to enable commenting and sharing. When someone wishes to comment on an article, the comment is directed through this plug-in, which allows the users to annotate the article with the sentiment tags and reactions along with their comments. The Opinionated Reader saves this information along with the commenter’s location and date of comment (See Figure 3). Figure 3. The Opinionated Reader Web Plug-in 'Add Comment' dialog mockup The Opinionated Reader – Back-end The Back-end maintains a database of news items extracted from RSS feeds of various news websites. Each news article is linked with the sentiment tags and reaction/positivity annotations extracted from the comments and annotations gathered by the commenting plug-in. This data is used by the mobile/tablet app to generate visualizations (Sentiment Graph and Positivity Graph). The back-end also performs data mining on the tags and annotations for geographies and tracks the opinions across time. The back end system responds to queries received from the mobile app with the news story and associated tags and annotations, which are then rendered by the mobile app for the user. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 894 Discussion and Conclusion This design idea is still in a nascent state and has long hours of research, brainstorming, designing and development to go before it can be realized into something tangible. Twitter has grown exponentially in importance as a news source and it would be vastly valuable to integrate Twitter with The Opinionated Reader. Possibilities include use of special hash tags and natural language processing of tweets to extract public sentiment. The current design supports only two reaction annotations – positive and negative. Not every news story fits this annotation paradigm. Further research about human reactions to news stories might unveil interesting insights which would help zero in on a more robust annotation rubric. Lastly, since this service is envisioned to be non-curated and non-moderated, the value served by the app depends on the users themselves. Greater adoption will lead to more annotations and tags, which translates into a more accurate public opinion as presented to the user.

Russia's foreign policy has been Western-oriented due to historical and cultural reasons. This paper argues that the US's attitude towards Russia and the increasing expansion of NATO to Eastern Europe leads Russians to feel insecure. Consequently, East Asia has become significant to Russia in coping with the West. Above all, China's rise is predominant in Russia's policy options. Nevertheless, Russia will finally encounter a dilemma that rapprochement with China may help improve China's relative position in world politics. In essence, Russia's anxieties toward China's rapid rise make Russia's rapprochement toward China skeptical and reserved. The new approach, taken by President Obama, shifting from unipolar into multipolar global politics, offers Putin a new arena to re-identify Russia itself in the Russia-China-US triangle. The US government's fierce criticism of the Russian government being undemocratic during the elections process, along with the Chinese government's full support of Putin will make the Russia-China-US triangle naturally tilted toward Russo-Chinese side during Putin's office of premiership or for a certain time if he is elected in the presidential election 2012.

Eponyms are complicated, unique constructs named after people and places used in special-professional areas of science. One of those specific areas is politics/political discourse. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the political discourse of politicians (Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin) in the period from 2012 to 2017 to reveal the pragmatic potential and skillful use of eponyms used by the latter when they ran for presidency as a means of influence. Results show that eponyms are becoming powerful language tools of political discourse. At each stage of work, various methods were used to complete the analysis. Such methods include the diachronic method, definition analysis (descriptive method), and discourse analysis. Using different methods, especially discourse analysis, considerably facilitated the research process, enabling the identification of the pragmatic effects of eponyms. The main reasons that eponyms frequently appear in political discourse are the existence of new political eras, modern political events, and controversial political issues.

The study examines how the articulation of the values of tolerance and love is constructed linguistically, rhetorically, and politically in the speeches of Saudi Prince Mohammed bin Salman and US President Donald Trump. By adopting a Political Discourse Analysis framework integrating both Critical Discourse Analysis and a textual-contextual approach, the study investigates both leaders' linguistic and rhetorical strategies to mold narratives and shape public perception. By addressing speeches selected for their socio-political importance and thematic orientation on love and tolerance, the data is subjected to the textual examination of linguistic elements including lexicon, metaphors, and narrative structures that carry the effect of inclusivity and emotive attractiveness. The study delves in revealing persuasive techniques by scrutinizing the rhetorical strategies incorporating attraction to ethos, pathos, and logos. The CDA shows how these speeches either mirror or debate ideologues, social norms, power dynamics, and discrepancies between leaders’ stated values and subliminal messages. The study's findings classify the speeches into national unity, cultural identity, and global diplomacy themes. Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s discourse focuses on economic reforms, modernity, and international adaptations, while Trump’s speeches engage in patriotism incorporated with nationalistic assertions mirroring two distinct socio-political contexts. The study contributes to understanding the discursive strategies of political speeches in shaping public opinion and how language interacts constructively with power image, aesthetic values, and leadership narrative in contemporary international politics.

The purpose of this research is to determine the love perceptions of primary, secondary and high school students. The research was carried out within the scope of "phenomenology" design, one of the qualitative research designs. The case examined in this study is the students' perception of love. In this study, maximum diversity sampling, which is one of the from purposeful sampling methods, was preferred. In diversification, the variables of school level, school type, school success status, grade level and gender were used. The study group of the research selected purposefully which consists of 95 students studying at different grade levels in 3 primary schools, 3 secondary schools and 3 high schools. In the study, “word association technique”, one of the projection techniques, was used as data collection technique and word association form was used as data collection tool. The data were analyzed using concept analysis technique. It was observed that the concepts of "compassionate love" and "passionate love" are intensely related at every level. This situation indicated that the students had a perception of "passionate / romantic love" rather than unconditional love. It was also noticed that students generally had positive perceptions regarding "favor", "brotherhood", "sharing", "compassion", "mercy" and "tolerance".

In its broadest sense, presidential control encompasses all the actions, in both word and deed, whereby presidents "go it alone" to adopt policies in the absence of congressional will to do so, and sometimes directly contrary to it. This dissertation studies how President Obama used rhetorical and administrative tools of presidential control to address the "wicked problem" of climate change. The "administrative presidency" and the "rhetorical presidency" are familiar political science terms, but in the case of climate change policy, they appear to be moving policymaking in a new and perhaps profound direction, which this study refers to as "post-deliberative policymaking." Applying these two areas of scholarship together to the wicked problem of climate change creates a helpful window through which to study how President Obama utilized administrative and rhetorical strategies and tools during his presidency. In particular, the study examines how he rhetorically constructed and rationalized his use of the Environmental Protection Agency to implement federal climate change regulations via the federal Clean Power Plan. Among the insights revealed by this analysis are how President Obama, in an age of acute political partisanship and polarization, positioned the role of the bureaucracy, how he invoked executive power, and what his actions reveal and may portend about executive views of democratic institutions and norms. This dissertation analyzes President Obama's rhetoric through a study of his speeches from 2009 through 2015 that explicitly or implicitly reference climate change, greenhouse gases, and the Clean Power Plan, but also related topics, such as energy policy and climate agreements.

Drawing on recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006), in this research, it was tried to follow this research route. The main intention was to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements-here rhetorical devices and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk- live 2008 US presidential debates- among two Republic vs. Democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'populism’, 'generalizations', and 'number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘metaphor’, ‘hyperbole’, ‘irony’, ‘euphemism’, etc. The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicated that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like repetition and metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'comparison’, 'populism' and 'future representation’ respectively.

This study is concerned with investigating the rhetorical tools and strategies used by Obama in his speech to the Americans about "chemical weapons" allegedly used in Syria. Here, it tries to answer the following questions: a. What are the rhetorical tools that Obama employed in his speech to the nation? b- What are the functions of rhetorical questions in his speech? c. How did he use rhetorical aspects in his speech? The study assumes that Obama used many rhetorical tools to influence public opinion about the reality of what happened in Syria. Furthermore,

This study aims to reveal the role of metaphors in political discourse, and the impact of metaphors on political discourse. To achieve the aims of the study, the following topics have been reviewed and analyzed: the notion of understanding how metaphors shape political discourse, analyzing the impact of metaphors on political decision-making, examining the cultural and historical context of political metaphors, identifying potential biases in political discourse, types of metaphors in discourse, politicians use of metaphors in political discourse, and reviewing previous studies conducted on metaphors in political discourse. The findings revealed that in political and presidential discourse, metaphors play a significant role in shaping public perception and opinion. Metaphors have the power to frame issues and shape narratives, influencing how people interpret and respond to political messages. Political leaders often use metaphors to communicate complex ideas and evoke emotional responses from their audiences. In addition, there are three important purposes for using metaphors in political contexts: (1) To simplify complex ideas. (2) To create emotional impact. (3) To enhance persuasive power.

One of the most famous and identifiable of Spinoza’s ideas is his amor Dei intellectualis (the intellectual love of God). It has been argued that this concept is somewhat alien to the main tenets of the Ethics, especially since it is reminiscent of more orthodox religious relations to God, and has a certain mystical (and so, nonrational) quality.In this paper, I will show that it is a consistent development of Spinoza’s interconnected and elaborate theories of knowledge and the affects. Spinoza discusses three kinds of love: passionate love, friendship and the intellectual love of God.The intellectual love of God is nothing but a necessary outcome of Spinoza’s rationalistic project as a whole. Moreover, by culminating his ethical theory with such a concept, Spinoza is placing himself in a rich tradition of thinkers who develop epistemological and ethical systems that put love (either as eros or philia) as the backbone of their philosophy. In order to illustrate the similarities between Spinoza’s philosophical use of love and that of his predecessors, I will address salient features of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, emphasizing the relationship between love and ethics, as well as the nature of the philosophical impulse.

Moscow—When the Soviet Union collapsed, many observers expected its fearsome intelligence apparatus to wither as well. Instead, the post-Soviet era has seen the emergence of an even more influential collection of intelligence organizations that grew out of the two premier Soviet agencies: the KGB, which combined domestic and foreign political intelligence, and the gru, which handled military intelligence. The prominent—even dominant—role of intelligence within contemporary Russia's political system is a sign of the Kremlin's growing ambitions. But it also reflects a profound fear of being outmaneuvered by the West in Russia's traditional sphere of influence, which now comprises 10 more or less independent nations that once belonged to the Soviet Union. Within that vast territory—and in the areas that directly border it—an intense and largely invisible battle for control is being fought every day.This struggle has put the Kremlin's intelligence agencies in direct competition with Western intelligence services, with all parties retaining some old habits left over from the Cold War. At the same time, the unique status and financial resources provided to Russia's secret services in the early 2000s by then-President Vladimir Putin makes them even more unpredictable than their predecessor, the KGB, which was a powerful organization, but came under the firm control of the political structure. The Communist Party presided over every KGB section, department, and division. By contrast, over the last decade in Russia, the resurgent secret services have become a new elite, enjoying expanded responsibilities and immunity from public oversight or parliamentary control. Today's Russian secret services are impenetrable to outsiders. While the KGB played by the Cold War's rules, its inheritors are given a freer hand to make decisions on their own.Surprisingly, though, the biggest beneficiaries of the elevation of Russian intelligence have been the authoritarian regimes that filled the vacuum after the breakup of the Soviet Union—the dictators of Central Asia, who have used Russian security forces to facilitate the abduction, even rendition, of their own opposition forces. In an unexpected reversal, Russia has become a hunting ground for the security services of many of the world's most vicious rulers.Today, there are three principal Russian intelligence services. The svr, or Foreign Intelligence Service, operates largely in Western Europe and the United States. The gru, the old military intelligence service under the Soviet Union, remains intact, with virtually the same global portfolio. The fsb, or Federal Security Service, the most direct successor to the old KGB, operates principally in the former Soviet Republics, sometimes still referred to as the Commonwealth of Independent States (cis), the loose confederation that was established to succeed the USSR after it collapsed. The fsb is also active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which border the former Soviet sphere. Of course, these delineations are not set in stone, and there is persistent overlap and competition between these organizations, as agents of both the fsb and svr are often found falling all over each other.When the Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, the leaders of the former Soviet republics were very slow to create completely independent states. Initially, they even agreed to maintain the united armed forces of the cis, giving Moscow a chance to retain its influence. Intelligence cooperation was a natural outgrowth of this dependency, and the Kremlin was happy to help the still-unproven leaders of these new states bolster their security structures. These relations were formalized in April 1992, when the svr signed an agreement with its counterparts in the cis, agreeing not to spy on each other.But the relationship proved to be very much a one-way street. The svr effectively assumed the posture of “Big Brother,” making visits to cis capitals to attend multilateral meetings or bilateral talks, where they were sometimes received by heads of state.Not all cis members were equally happy at finding themselves once again under the direct scrutiny of the Kremlin. Throughout the 1990s, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan remained firm allies, allowing Russian military bases to remain on their soil and continuing to cooperate on intelligence. But Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine drifted in NATO's direction, in part because Russia supported separatist movements in each of those nations. Lastly, the governments of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, long suspicious of ethnic Russians who had migrated during Soviet times, signaled their independence by purging Russians from the ranks of their security services.During this time, Russia's other security agency, the fsb, was also eager to establish its own special relations with security services in the cis. This effort was aided in no small part by the rise of Putin, a veteran of the KGB's First Directorate, which dealt with foreign intelligence activities. By the late 1990s, with Putin's profile growing, the fsb had found its way into the “near-abroad,” as the former outlying Soviet republics are now called. It justified its expanded reach by pointing to a shared regional struggle against illegal drug trafficking and terrorism.That explanation was nothing more than a pretext for a power grab—but it more than sufficed. By 2000, the fsb was becoming the dominant intelligence player in what had been the Soviet Union. That year, Russia backed the establishment of a cis Antiterrorist Center, headquartered in Moscow with a Central Asian branch in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Though the center was conceived as a supranational structure, it was effectively under full fsb control—headed by the service's first deputy director—and supervised “collective” anti-terrorist exercises in Central Asia every April. The Antiterrorist Center's mandate was to create a database for intelligence sharing among the security services of all member countries. But the idea of pooling intelligence information was abandoned when members learned that the database would be located in Moscow. Some cis states simply did not buy the notion that Russia had a sincere desire to help with counter-terrorism efforts on their soil. Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan refused to send representatives to the center at all. They saw it, quite correctly, as a not very subtle Russian foot in their door. Still, the fsb's timing was good. Under the umbrella of anti-terrorism, it soon had much more credible justification for its regional expansion.In the early 2000s, it became evident that the political status quo in many of the post-Soviet republics was under threat. One after another, the old regimes that had been established in the early 1990s fell like dominoes in a series of popular uprisings known as the “color revolutions”: the Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004), and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan (2005). These regime changes were neither predicted nor prevented by Moscow. The Kremlin and the fsb viewed these events as Western concoctions, modeled after the toppling of Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. As these events unfolded, the Kremlin became increasingly paranoid that Russia and its political allies in the region would be next. Russia's sphere of influence, it seemed, had to be watched more carefully.As the Kremlin turned increasingly to the fsb, it began to emerge as the single most powerful Russian secret service, especially in the former cis regions. Although the svr had promised not to spy within the territories, the fsb had never signed any such agreement and felt free of any obligation. As a result, in late 1999, the fsb was granted permission to establish a new directorate to focus on Russia's nearest neighbors. The newly formed Directorate of Operative Information (ukoi) was established inside the Department of Analysis, Forecasting, and Strategic Planning. The structure of the directorate was established along geographical lines and its officers were granted the right to travel abroad—or at least to the “near-abroad.” ukoi was headed by Major General Vyacheslav Ushakov, a member of an influential group of intelligence veterans who had served together in the fsb's regional departments in St. Petersburg and neighboring Karelia. The group included Putin himself, as well as then- fsb director Nikolai Patrushev.On June 30, 2003, an amendment to the “Law on the Organs of the Federal Security Service” was adopted, stipulating that the fsb would contain a special body dealing with such foreign intelligence. In 2004, the directorate was re-named the Department of Operative Information (doi), and its chief, Ushakov, was promoted to deputy director of the fsb. Ushakov was replaced as head of the unit by Sergei Beseda, a general who had become influential and well-connected while serving in the fsb section supervising the Administration of the President.While the operations of this department are cloaked in the deepest secrecy, some of its key officials are believed to have traveled to the former Soviet republics during political turning points. In May 2005, the head of the fsb, Patrushev, claimed before the Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, to have helped unmask a plot against the regime in Belarus. According to Patrushev, international NGOs, mostly based in the West, had met in the Slovak capital of Bratislava in late 2004 at the time of Ukraine's Orange Revolution “to plan the downfall of the regime of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko.” Surprisingly, Belarus's own KGB never expressed any outrage at this open intervention by the fsb into its internal affairs. Indeed, the day after Patrushev's statement, the Belarussian KGB confirmed it, suggesting that it was perfectly content to have the Russian intelligence service operating so closely in matters relating to Belarus's national security. A few days later, the heads of the security services of the cis countries gathered in Astana, Kazakhstan. Patrushev warned his counterparts about the dangers of the “color revolutions.”But the fsb's involvement in the near-abroad has not always gone smoothly, and at times has even backfired. In 2004, the leadership of the fsb's intelligence department reportedly visited Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia whose independence had yet to be recognized by Russia. The fsb officers met with Raul Khadjimba, a pro-Moscow candidate running for president of Abkhazia. It was one thing for the Russian Foreign Ministry to support an Abkhazian candidate; quite another for him to receive a visit from generals in the fsb. But Khadjimba lost the election. His victorious opponent made it known that he was not happy with the fsb's presence. As a result, fsb agents ceased to operate with a free hand in Abkhazia, seriously undermining the fsb's position in Georgia and contributing to its failure to predict the Georgian move into South Ossetia four years later, which led to full-scale war between Russia and Georgia.Beginning in the mid-1990s, Russia had become a safe haven for political opponents of Central Asian regimes. Using old but still valid Soviet passports, and taking advantage of suddenly porous borders, the flow of people into Russia included key political opponents of these regimes. In response, the secret services of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan began reaching into Russia to grab people who might cause trouble for the autocratic and corrupt regimes running those countries. In most cases, Russia's secret services turned a blind eye on the Central Asian secret services' activities on Russian soil.But the system of abductions was provisional and imperfect. It lacked some important elements: a coordination center, immunity for the secret agents involved in abductions, and legal grounds for transferring the captives. These kinds of activities appeared to be at odds with post-communist Russian law, which officially maintains an established procedure for formal extraditions, overseen by the general prosecutor. A new system, designed to avoid legal extradition entirely, was soon developed by Central Asian security organizations with the connivance of the fsb.The broader system was embedded in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (sco), founded in 2001 by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The stated purpose of the sco was the joint struggle against the “three evils” of terrorism, separatism, and extremism. In 2004, a special anti-terrorism organization was created within the sco and named the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure. (The English acronym, RATS, seems particularly appropriate.) rats became the mechanism of choice for carrying out abductions across national boundaries and outside standard judicial procedures—operations quite similar to the American CIA's practice of extraordinary rendition.To improve rats's ability to detain suspects in the six participating states, it was necessary to guarantee absolute protection to the officers executing the operations. The sco's Convention on Privileges and Immunities, ratified by Russia in 2005, gave representatives of the organization the equivalent of diplomatic status. They are not subject to criminal liability for any actions committed in the course of their duty, and they are immune from arrest and detention. The same unlimited immunity applies to rats “experts”—secret service officers from any member country who are attached to rats for the duration of their mission. Experts are shielded from arrest during and after their business trips. Even their luggage cannot be searched.The regime in Uzbekistan has been especially enthusiastic in its embrace of rats. Islam Karimov, the country's autocratic ruler, has long fought a brutal counterinsurgency campaign against Islamist opposition groups, led by the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and Hizb ut-Tahrir. Members of these groups had been among those who found refuge across the border in Russia. rats provided an effective way for Karimov to eliminate them.“In the early 2000s, natives from Uzbekistan living in the Volga region and considered to be members of Hizb ut-Tahrir by Uzbek secret services started to disappear,” says Yelena Ryabinina, director for the Rights for Refugees Program at the Human Rights Institute, a nongovernmental organization based in Moscow. Ryabinina has spent many days in court, defending refugees from Central Asia against illegal deportation. Many of those deported were later found in Uzbek prisons.In 2004, Alisher Usmanov, a teacher at an Islamic school in the Tatarstan region of Russia, was detained by Russian police and sentenced to several months in prison for illegal possession of ammunition. Usmanov had been wanted by Uzbekistan since 1998 for what the Uzbek government claimed was an “attempt to undermine the constitutional regime of the country.” But Usmanov had been granted Russian citizenship, and thus could not be extradited, since Russia, like many other countries, refuses to extradite its citizens. On July 24, 2005, he was due to be released. Instead, he simply disappeared, claims his wife, Aisha. “When we came to the prison, we were simply told that Alisher was released at 5:00 AM and went off with the people who met him,” Aisha says.It was later determined that he had been abducted directly from prison by the fsb and its Uzbek counterpart. Usmanov was delivered to the airport and flown to Uzbekistan. In November 2005 he was convicted of “undermining the constitutional system,” participation in a criminal organization and falsifying documents, and sentenced to an eight-year prison term in Uzbekistan.Perhaps no party has benefited more from the rats program than the Karimov regime, to whom Russia has supplied a steady stream of dissidents, refugees, and alleged terrorists. Reflecting the centrality of Uzbekistan to the program, the rats headquarters was moved from Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. And in 2005, Russia placed the Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir party, which is legal in Europe and the United States, on its national list of terrorist organizations, at the request of Uzbekistan. “The international terrorist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have made attempts to spread their activity to Russia,” fsb director Patrushev later declared. Uzbekistan's enemies are now officially considered a threat to Russian national security—another political gift for Karimov.In fact, to a surprising degree, it appears that the other countries involved in rats—especially Uzbekistan and China—have benefited far more from the program than Russia. Russia routinely ships back individuals sought by other countries but apparently receives none of those it seeks from them. According to information from Yelena Ryabinina, in 2007 Russia began to deport Chinese members of Falun Gong, a movement banned in China in 1999 for being “opposed to the Communist Party of China and the central government, that preaches idealism, theism, and feudal superstition,” according to the Chinese government. Publicly available fsb reports indicate that in the past decade, there were very few detentions of Russians in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, or China, and not a single suspect in a terrorism or extremism case has been extradited to Russia from Uzbekistan. It seems like little recompense for facilitating activities that could expose Russia to international condemnation.What, then, does Russia gain from rats? The payoff, from the Kremlin's point of view, is a higher profile for the sco, which Russia sees as a counterbalance to the NATO and U.S. presence in the region. In the 1990s, the sco—then known as the Shanghai Five—was a marginal group. Now, its meetings are attended by the presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India and Mongolia. The sco's growing profile has inspired the Kremlin to think that Russia might once again play a crucial role in the region—an impossible dream without the support of Uzbekistan and China. For the Kremlin, allowing Central Asian states to hunt down their dissidents on Russian soil seems to be an acceptable price in exchange for the chance to lead a strong regional which Russia has to since the of the Soviet June a carrying Russian was off by a and a about from the Russian in the of the One of the was and later that The other four were On June a group of Russian from and free all in Russia within the would be On June the released a one being and another as well as the body of a The day Russia confirmed that the four were June Vladimir Putin Russia's secret services to and the for and Russian in Patrushev, the fsb stated that the special services would to eliminate the terrorists. that any terrorist who has committed a not avoid the he is not a It is in the of what we In other is what the Russian secret services' of few months later, American forces the lead alleged known as turned him over to But the gave Vladimir Putin an to new allowing new and more operations from their such operations have become a of the and of nations that have sometimes provided safe for Russia's it was in reports as an to the Russia's of carrying out had been under for some The had spent months a that would the fsb to on foreign soil. According to a deputy of the Security at the Duma, the first of the was to the in of three months before the of the in a after Putin's for in both of foreign by intelligence of appeared to be the first after the were because of his to become an Abkhazian war during the of had a of who the battle on the during the he was one of the who Russian and foreign on the in in some point after 2000, to to of a group in the region. On he was in the center of the of in of a by two who for him in a later the was found The police established that the had been across the border at the a few days to the at the the but because did not of all those into the the of the were impossible to The turned to the Russian border but Moscow that the Russians such a never the the same time, a of of in The was effectively out during its war with Russia, and is now by a Russian intelligence agencies and still any they suspect of In early the of Refugees in Azerbaijan an to the United for that the for refugees in Azerbaijan had particularly as a of to the of who came to this country in of refuge and The referred to of the case of who went in in November In his body was found in the of In deputy of the of the of in Azerbaijan, was in the A as he was out of his and a series of of in In a former was on a in the of months later, on former Islam was also in in of his and received three to his head and on the The Russian which has to Russian special operations alleged that was wanted by Russian for terrorist in the of and and in the of in the early known as another was in on were apparently not to support for the but also to the of the countries where these of the The has In the 1990s and early 2000s, had on their and a to operate in But in the relations between Russia and Azerbaijan had and in Russia's Ministry the of an agreement with agencies that actions by Russian intelligence and free across the we first this information in the Moscow in no was made by Russia or refugees had found in mostly in and Russian secret services had long of support to the in did not and in signed a with the of included a from the American in Moscow to in of a visit to Moscow by the director of the on November In the the leadership of the Russian secret services as most influential opponents of the Russia. Russian intelligence a Cold which sees the U.S. and its allies on undermining they have made public to that to themselves of that KGB the Russian secret services remain in the the same the West that of Cold At the same time, the of intelligence officials to the even when with Soviet it for Russian leaders to at any independent of information provided by the secret services. this has in and in Kremlin at and especially when dealing with Russia's or terrorism in the the fsb makes paranoid claims about the involvement of Western intelligence services in the activities of Islamist the ability of those services to help Moscow and extradite who have Russia. As a result, Putin's secret services have seriously Russia's A Russian hand is now every time a Kremlin opponent is in to a mostly threat of Western intelligence former Soviet Russia's secret services to the Kremlin's who an equally of an In response, the Kremlin seeks to all of the secret services in the of their a vicious one that effectively even that the fsb and svr more and brutal

The contestability of the concept of populism and the variability of its application have given rise to long-lasting discussions about what populist features in discourse are and how these can be empirically determined and tested. This chapter offers a cognitive socio-linguistic approach to evaluating how populist framing in political (diplomatic) discourse can be facilitated through the use of Self and Other metaphors. Its specific aims involve the identification of metaphors in the context of political identity construction and their populist use vis-a-vis the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation in the political speeches delivered by Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, two leaders representing opposite leadership styles and ideologies. To achieve the above aims, Arcimavicienė examined the interrelated speeches delivered by President Obama and President Putin in the time span of two years (2014–2015) in the analytical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis by applying Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure (2007). This analysis demonstrated that their metaphor use contributes to the framing of these leaders’ populism through the metaphorical extension of the core concept of ‘the people’ onto the concept of ‘the nations,’ and, more importantly, that the discursive strategies of legitimisation and delegitimisation can be used in parallel but with different metaphoric intensity and ideological purposes.

Russian power and its projection has been a key concern for international interactions since the birth of the modern state system. The downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Eastern Ukrainian territory on 17 July 2014 brought the ire of the international community upon President Vladimir Putin’s Russian government.1 British Prime Minister David Cameron likened Russia’s actions, which include supplying the ethnic Russian separatists fighting the Ukrainian government as well as annexing the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014, with the early warning signs that sparked both world wars of the 20th century. “In a way, this is what we see today in Europe. Ukraine is a country recognized by the United Nations, a country which has and should have every right to determine its own future…it has the right not to have its territorial integrity impugned by Russia.”2 United States President Barack Obama, referring to the separatists whom he acknowledged were being supported by Russia, called the tragedy “an outrage of unspeakable proportions.”3