This article deals with the relationship between concepts, heroes and emotions. To that purpose it propounds an explicative mechanism through the comparative analysis of the use of heroes in Spanish politics in the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. The spread of some political concepts was facilitated by their association with heroes of the past, which not only provide legitimacy but also a strong emotional burden in terms of the values they represented. The proposed methodology is applied to the examination of political uses of two historical figures: Padilla and Pelayo. Resumen El presente artículo examina la relación entre conceptos, héroes y emociones. Para ello propone un mecanismo que se sirve del análisis comparado del uso de héroes en la política española de finales del siglo XVIII y de la primera mitad del XIX. La difusión de ciertos conceptos políticos se vio facilitada por su asociación con héroes del pasado que no solo aportaban legitimidad y prestigio sino también una fuerte carga emocional dado los valores que estos héroes representaban. Las consideraciones metodológicas se aplican al análisis de los usos políticos de dos personajes históricos: Padilla y Pelayo. Palabras clave Emociones, héroes nacionales, historia intelectual, siglo XIX. Introducción El recurso a héroes nacionales mitificados, históricos o ficticios, pero considerados como figuras reales por la mayoría de la población, es una herramienta ampliamente utilizada en los discursos políticos con la finalidad de obtener consenso y apoyo. Un típico ejemplo en el que se puede apreciar esta práctica, es el de la movilización nacional, tema que ha generado un gran número de estudios 1 que han 1

This article evaluates potential uses of geographical information systems (GIS) technology and virtual globes, such as Google Earth, for stimulating more effective responses to emerging threats of genocide and mass atrocities. The essay discusses two projects that utilise commercial satellite imagery to document the destruction of villages and deter future attacks in the Darfur region of Sudan: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Crisis in Darfur and Amnesty International USA's Eyes on Darfur. It argues that GIS technology has great potential as an instrument for building public awareness about contemporary threats of genocide and mass atrocities. However, the essay concludes that GIS-based early warning systems may have the greatest value not for public advocacy movements, but rather for policy practitioners charged with designing and implementing responses to emerging threats. Such technology also has the potential to help endangered populations in conflict zones to organise timely and effective defensive action against threats of atrocities.

This thematic issue addresses how strategic narratives affect international order. Strategic narratives are conceived of as stories with a political purpose or narratives used by political actors to affect the behavior of others. The articles in this issue address two significant areas important to the study of international relations: how strategic narratives support or undermine alliances, and how they affect norm formation and contestation. Within a post-Cold War world and in the midst of a changing media environment, strategic narratives affect how the world and its complex issues are understood. This special issue speaks to the difficulties associated with creating creative and committed international cooperation by noting how strategic narratives are working to shape the Post-Cold War international context.

This essay analyzes President Barack Obama's communication strategies in his speeches and presidential statements concerning threats of mass atrocities in Libya, Syria, and Iraq from 2011 through 2015. It examines how he has used three rhetorical "frames" to explain events in these countries and to advocate specific U.S. policy responses: the "legalistic" (or "liberal internationalist"), the "moralistic," and the "security" frame. Obama utilized primarily the legalistic frame to justify U.S. military intervention in Libya in 2011, and he relied mainly on the security frame (focusing on terrorist threats against U.S. nationals) to justify the deployment of U.S. military forces against ISIL in Iraq and Syria in 2014−2015. Obama's rhetorical framing of the violence perpetrated by the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad since 2011 has been less consistent. Hardly ever in these speeches did Obama suggest that mass atrocities per se constituted a threat to U.S. national security-despite the declaration in Obama's 2011 Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities that "preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest" of the United States. Utilizing an approach to linguistic analysis developed by Roman Jakobson, the paper shows how Obama has employed rhetorical devices that emphasize the boundaries between the "in-group" of the American national community and the "outgroups" in other countries who are threatened by mass atrocities. Because members of an in-group are typically depicted as warranting greater concern than members of out-groups, Obama's assignment of victimized communities to out-group status has effectively justified inaction by the U.S. government in the face of genocidal violence.

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