Why EU promotion is at odds with successful crisis management: public relations, news coverage, and the Aceh Monitoring Mission. EU Centre in Singapore Working Paper No. 10, September 2012

The EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and its accompanying Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) missions can be tools used to increase the international profile of the European Union. Nevertheless, CSDP missions garner little news coverage. This article argues that the very nature of the missions themselves makes them poor vehicles for EU promotion for political, institutional, and logistical reasons. By definition, they are conducted in the middle of crises, making news coverage politically sensitive. The very act of reporting could undermine the mission. Institutionally, all CSDP missions are intergovernmental, making press statements slow, overly bureaucratic, and of little interest to journalists. Logistically, the missions are often located in remote, undeveloped parts of the world, making it difficult and expensive for European and international journalists to cover. Moreover, these regions in crisis seldom have a thriving, local free press. Using the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM) as a case study, the author concludes that although a mission may do good, CSDP missions cannot fulfil the political function of raising the profile of the EU.

Ethnography’s Contribution to Newspaper Analysis: Claims-Making Revisited. CES Papers - Open Forum #12, 2012

Newspaper data are a popular data source for studies across the social sciences. This paper empirically examines the widespread criticisms that this data is hampered by selection, description and researcher bias. It does so by taking one of the most authoritative European comparative research projects ‘Mobilisation on Ethnic Relations, Citizenship and Immigration’ (MERCI) as its case study given that the resulting publications have inspired many researches on both sides of the Atlantic to apply the so-called ‘claims-making’ method (e.g. Koopmans, Statham, Giugni and Passy 2005). Drawing on the author’s familiarity with the Dutch part of the data set and field specific expertise, this paper qualitatively re-analyses the claims recorded for Surinamese, Turkish and Kurdish migrants in the Netherlands and reviews the conclusions for migrant transnationalism and integration in particular. It reveals how an ethnographic approach can tackle description bias and researcher unreliability and brings selection bias into full view. While offering concrete suggestions for incorporating ethnography into newspaper analysis, it also exposes the limits of these methods for the study of cross-border activities such as migrant transnationalism.