Vol. 9 No. Especial (2022): Communication, propaganda and revolutionary movements in history
Coordinators: Alberto Pena Rodríguez (Universidade de Vigo), María Verónica de Haro de San Mateo (Universidad de Murcia) and Maria Érica de Oliveira Lima (Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brasil).
Planned communication, especially persuasive communication by means of different strategies and techniques at the service of political, social or cultural issuers, has played an important role in revolutionary processes throughout history, above all through its dissemination in the mass media in periods of crisis and/or social conflict.
The use of militant journalism and the media in the public sphere as instruments of political struggle through the dissemination of agitation messages in the service of causes that promote the change of the political or social model and its institutions in certain historical periods has been a constant in contemporary history. contemporary history. But the seductive capacity of revolutionary movements, both in their symbolic dimension and in their sensational quality for the media, has enhanced their capacity for media impact and persuasion.
Revolutionary movements, with or without the use of violence, have gone from legitimising themselves through actions in defence of social rights at certain junctures of political, economic, social or institutional crisis, through more or less pamphlet and/or street speeches, to an increasingly sophisticated strategy of propaganda dissemination that seeks to control the perception of public opinion through media representations that favour the revolutionary spirit and its social consensus.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, many organisations have succeeded, through propaganda campaigns and popular agitation, in promoting revolutionary processes that have brought about profound transformations, both locally, nationally and internationally. Cases such as the Russian revolution of 1917, the Cuban revolution of 1959, the student revolts of May 1968, the Zapatista revolution of 1994 or the Arab Spring of 2011 are paradigmatic examples of revolutionary processes that have marked contemporary history. During these revolutionary processes, social communication has played a transcendental role, creating icons of great symbolic power that have influenced the intergenerational collective imagination and have inspired, in some cases, current political activism.
The main objective of this monograph is to analyse, from an interdisciplinary approach and from different perspectives of the history of communication, the influence that the strategies, techniques and media have had on revolutionary movements in any historical context, especially throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, and their projection in today's society. It also aims to promote interest in historical phenomena that can serve as precedents or models of analysis that help to interpret current revolutionary facts and events with a critical retrospective vision.
