When Nationalism Encounters the COVID-19 Pandemic: Understanding Chinese Nationalism From Media Use and Media Trust

COVID-19, as a major public health crisis, has triggered nationalism to different degrees all around the world. This study utilises an online survey to explore the relationships between media use, media trust, and nationalism in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the level of nationalism was still considerably high in China at the time of the pandemic and that the role of the media in nation-state building enterprises remains significant. It becomes more pervasive after the news media's adoption of digitalisation. Our study argues that contemporary China's expression of nationalism is socially constructed by media and rooted in its Chinese Confucian culture. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is increasingly designing the news media and manages social media. It has already successfully constructed a sense of nationalism to facilitate its own interests in response to the national crisis. This has led nationalism being embodied in the media's constructed social reality.

Transboundary crises and political development: why war is not necessary for European state-building

Kelemen and McNamara (2022) have reinvigorated the debate on European state-building. Adopting a 'bellicist' perspective, they argue that the European Union is 'incomplete, uneven, and dysfunctional' due to the historical lack of an existential military threat. We take issue with this claim. War, in our view, is not a necessary condition for European political development, and 'transboundary crisis' acts as its modern-day functional equivalent. Whether a polity can uphold its provision of public goods in the face of such crises, and whether it does so more effectively than its competitors on the 'market for governance', decisively affects its further development. European integration, too, has progressed substantively in response to recent non-military threats. We demonstrate this on the Euro and Covid-19 crises, in which the EU has engaged in incremental and issue-specific capacity-building aimed at preserving and consolidating the regulatory state rather than approximating the Westphalian nation-state. The resulting capacity-building shores up the EU's crisis prevention and crisis management capacities, without overcoming its fundamental regulatory nature. It is misleading to dismiss the resulting political development from a bellicist perspective that takes the nation-state as its implicit point of comparison.

Health policies during COVID 19 pandemic in Kosovo

Public policy in democratic societies aims to create public value by providing quality public services, regulations and state-organized activities with the ultimate goal of creating a better service towards its citizens. Since policy failure has always been a concern for various scientists and researchers, this paper aims to contribute to improving the quality and efficiency of public policies by providing expertise to state institutions to ensure effectiveness, transparency, inclusiveness and accountability of the entire process.The health system is one of the main pillars of public policy of every country today, and this is especially noticeable after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the world, a problem which radically changed public policies and how are they percept. Kosovo as a new state faces various political and state-building challenges. The functioning of the health system is one of those challenges, which bared the main responsibility in dealing with pandemic.Therefore, the main focus of this paper will be to analyze the public policies introduced by health institutions and government bodies as response to the COVID 19 pandemic. In this regard we will try to answer some questions which are going to be raised within the paper such as how satisfied were the citizens with health policies in Kosovo, the readiness of the institutions and the professional staff engaged, knowledge and use of best practices.In order to obtain the information needed to justify the main objectives of the thesis, beside the content analysis and comparative methods, we are going to conduct a survey with officials and various institutional experts that were engaged in planning and implementation of the policies in time of Covid19 pandemic, as well as with people from private sector and that of civil society.