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Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe is a study of the uses of systemic propaganda in U.S. foreign policy. Moving beyond traditional understandings of propaganda, Branding Democracy analyzes the expanding and ubiquitous uses of domestic public persuasion under a neoliberal regime and an informational mode of development and its migration to the arena of foreign policy. A highly mobile and flexible corporate-dominated new informational economy is the foundation of intensified Western marketing and promotional culture across spatial and temporal divides, enabling transnational interests to integrate territories previously beyond their reach. U.S. «democracy promotion» and interventions in the Eastern European «color revolutions» in the early twenty-first century serve as studies of neoliberal state interests in action. Branding Democracy will be of interest to students of U.S. and European politics, political economy, foreign policy, political communication, American studies, and culture studies.
About the author
The Author: Gerald Sussman is Professor of Urban Studies and Communications at Portland State University, where he teaches graduate courses in political economy, development, urban studies, and media and information technology studies. He is the author or editor of four previous books, the latest being Global Electioneering: Campaign Consulting, Communications, and Corporate Financing. He is currently at work on a new edited volume, The Propaganda Society, which rethinks the meaning and reach of propaganda within an intensified promotional culture. Professor Sussman serves on a number of academic journal editorial boards as well as the community advisory board of Portland, Oregon¿s public broadcasting station, KOPB.
Report
«Gerald Sussman's 'Branding Democracy' offers a crucial analysis of the ways in which citizens are under assault from an army trying to control our minds. With a sophisticated understanding of modern propaganda, Sussman looks at the way our government sells empire through 'democracy promotion'. If real democracy is to emerge in this world, we must take Sussman's analysis to heart.» (Robert Jensen, School of Journalism, University of Texas at Austin; Author of 'Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream' (Peter Lang, 2002))
