Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the mediated politics of nation-state building: An applied thematic analysis of <i>al-Nida’</i> newspaper
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, al-Nida’ (The Call) newspaper was established as a propaganda tool to justify annexation and communicate with Kuwaiti citizens. This study conducts an archival analysis of 104 issues to examine how the Ba’athist regime framed its nation-state building efforts through media. This research applies Mylonas’s theoretical framework ( The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities , 2012) on assimilation, accommodation, and exclusion to examine how Ba’athist propaganda in al-Nida’ constructed and omitted nation-building strategies. Using Applied Thematic Analysis (ATA), six dominant themes emerged: historical claims, exclusion of the Kuwaiti ruling elite, sociopolitical integration, law and order, economic integration, and territorial claims. This study highlights the role of propaganda in wartime nation-state building, demonstrating how authoritarian regimes engineer national identity through media. By analyzing al-Nida’ , this research contributes to scholarship on nation-state legitimacy, wartime propaganda, and occupation narratives, offering insights into how war, propaganda, and state-building efforts intersect in nation-building projects.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".