The Information Campaigns for Releasing Political Prisoners –How Do They Rhetoric?

• In Event: The Importance of Historical Precedent in Modern Politics

Abstract

In the year 2015, the US government attracted attention to women who are political prisoners around the world via a campaign named FreeThe20. The campaign aimed to tell governments to stop putting women in prison out of unjust causes. Except for the women prisoners in North Korea, all the other 19 prisoners were free shortly. Information campaigns have been widely applied by international human rights organizations to advocate for protecting human rights, while FreeThe20 was the pioneer of sovereign state government calling attention to the release of political prisoners. Either international human rights organizations or state governments are dedicated to ameliorating human rights practices all over the globe via information campaigns. Therefore, this article mainly concentrates on the following research questions: How do information campaigns work on releasing political prisoners? What are the differences between international human rights organizations’ campaigns and those of state governments? By addressing these questions, this article uses text analysis to disaggregate information campaigns on releasing political prisoners from both international human rights organizations and state governments. LIWC will be conducted to look in depth at the rhetorical features and thus explain the different paths for both sides to make campaigns take effect.

Author

• Jiahe Mi, University of Massachusetts, Lowell