Strategic Narratives

Communication Power and the New World Order

Alister Miskimmon, Ben O'Loughlin, Laura Roselle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317975199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Communication is central to how we understand international affairs. Political leaders, diplomats, and citizens recognize that communication shapes global politics. This has only been amplified in a new media environment characterized by Internet access to information, social media, and the transformation of who can communicate and how. Soft power, public diplomacy 2.0, network power – scholars and policymakers are concerned with understanding what is happening.

This book is the first to develop a systematic framework to understand how political actors seek to shape order through narrative projection in this new environment. To explain the changing world order – the rise of the BRICS, the dilemmas of climate change, poverty and terrorism, the intractability of conflict – the authors explore how actors form and project narratives and how third parties interpret and interact with these narratives. The concept of strategic narrative draws together the most salient of international relations concepts, including the links between power and ideas; international and domestic; and state and non-state actors. The book is anchored around four themes: order, actors, uncertainty, and contestation. Through these, Strategic Narratives shows both the possibilities and the limits of communication and power, and makes an important contribution to theorizing and studying empirically contemporary international relations.

International Studies Association: International Communication Best Book Award

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315871264-1

Something interesting has been happening at the intersection of international relations and communication in the early twenty-first century, an ineffable sense that how international relations is done, by whom, and what it involves, are all being disrupted by new media ecologies. We argue in this book that narrative, how it is both formed and projected in a communication environment, helps explain the major dynamics in international affairs. Underlying this argument are three points. First, narratives are central to human relations; they shape our world and constrain behavior. Second, political actors attempt to use narratives strategically. Third, our communication environment fundamentally affects how narratives are communicated and flow, and with what effects. This book is about strategic narratives in the twenty-first-century media ecology.

International relations (IR) scholars have not fully incorporated the communication of narratives into broader theoretical arguments about structure, agency, and the construction of order in the international system. This work contributes to the remedy of this deficit by looking substantively, theoretically, and practically at strategic narratives. Driving this study is an attempt to understand the changing world in which we live. The end of global wars in 1918 and 1945 proved to be critical junctures, points in which actors wielded power to construct new international orders. The end of the Cold War appeared to be another juncture in which a new world order would be built. However, power has become more diffuse in the world and we propose that a changing communications environment makes it far more difficult for leading powers to justify and implement their strategic narrative so as to define the international system. Understanding dynamics of continuity and change in the world will depend on the degree of narrative alignment between powerful economic and political actors. Power transition has traditionally been understood to involve violence, replacing one order with another,¹ with new ideas triumphing over old.² Projecting an accepted strategic narrative of a new world order will be key to whether this current period of transition can remain largely peaceful.

In considering how the communication of narratives allows actors to manage this transition, an important starting point for our study has been Manuel Castells’ recent work Communication Power.³ Castells’ contribution is vital because he understands how power relationships work through communication. He investigates how the operation of power is being reconfigured by what he famously chronicled as “network society.”⁴ In network society, media technologies enable new networked patterns of relations in economic, social, and political life and new ways of relating to one another. By the 2000s, the chief change Castells identified was the emergence of “mass self-communication.”⁵ The Internet and social media meant the ability to broadcast and narrate to many was no longer the preserve of elites, but something anybody could potentially try. The implication of Castells’ analysis is that communication changes how power works. New networks of communication formed in the 2000s that seemed to upset previous flows that elites had learnt to manage. This allowed new forms of social and political organization, symbolized by waves of protest and uprisings in 2011,⁶ and created a sense of anxiety and vulnerability among the big powers of international relations,⁷ triggering a range of attempts to find ways to control global communication, some deft and some heavy-handed. Castells’ study of how political actors project narratives to achieve goals in international relations within network society is limited; he looks at the narrative used by the US administration before the 2003 Iraq War to legitimize its intervention⁸ and narratives of grievance in the Arab Spring,⁹ and his value lies in a single but profound theoretical move. Castells makes the connection between a changing communications environment and a change to how politics works. A focus on networks and communication does not imply we throw out the study of political institutions and material power. Instead, it points to the manner in which political institutions and material power are deeply enmeshed in networks and communication. Castells’ theory of communication power gets at that ineffable sense that international relations is being disrupted by changing media ecologies.

Strategic narratives are a means for political actors to construct a shared meaning of the past, present, and future of international politics to shape the behavior of domestic and international actors. Strategic narratives are a tool for political actors to extend their influence, manage expectations, and change the discursive environment in which they operate. They are narratives about both states and the system itself, both about who we are and what kind of order we want. The point of strategic narratives is to influence the behavior of others. In the short term, Freedman writes, “Narratives are designed or nurtured with the intention of structuring the responses of others to developing events.”¹⁰ But in the long term, getting others at home and abroad to buy in to your strategic narrative can shape their interests, their identity, and their understanding of how international relations works and where it is heading. A recent influential publication written by two serving US servicemen called for a national strategic narrative to chart the uncertain future facing US foreign policy.¹¹ In the preface to the publication, Anne-Marie Slaughter argues¹²: Slaughter’s focus is on the need for an overarching national narrative. This links with Nye’s influential concept of soft power. Central to Nye’s initial formulation was a concern to forge a new US narrative of international affairs to give meaning to the post–Cold War era and help foreign policy makers navigate their way through this new order. Debate in the US centered on Nye’s contention that hard power was not enough to shape the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Nye called for greater strategic engagement by the US to address potential instability in the system and to ensure continued US dominance after the demise of the Soviet Union.¹⁴ Power, according to Nye, rests on attraction as well as coercion, a theme also present in Morgenthau’s work.¹⁵ This debate was mirrored in the European Union (EU). Leaders there tried to understand what defined the EU’s growing international standing, despite its lack of formal hard power capabilities. Manners’ concept of Normative Power Europe suggested that the emulation of the EU’s normative foundations was central to its international influence.¹⁶ There has also been much debate in Europe about how “to convince [non-Europeans] of the benefits of our model and values,” shifting attention to the EU’s agency to affect others.¹⁷ Kaldor and colleagues argue that the EU should employ a strategic narrative of human rights to forge influence with others and to legitimize EU foreign policy among EU citizens.¹⁸ However, the need to turn these values today into a narrative about the future has yet to be realized. Once, Europe offered a narrative about moving away from recurring, brutal internal war through ever-closer union and integration. For Europeans today born with no sense of connection to those wars, it is not clear that narrative has meaning. However, European leaders do not at present possess a future-oriented narrative about where Europe will be in a generation.

A narrative is a story. A national strategic narrative must be a story that all Americans can understand and identify with in their own lives…. We seek … to be the nation other nations listen to, rely on and emulate out of respect and admiration.¹³

The idea of strategic narrative has become prominent in the fields of war, security, and strategic communication.¹⁹ The United Kingdom Ministry of Defence has stated, for instance: This interest in strategic narrative has coincided with ideas about a new public diplomacy in the last decade. The arrival of social media offered the promise that ordinary people could interact with political and media organizations and with each other. The world’s great powers also invested in multilingual transnational television in remarkably similar ways. China’s CCTV, Al-Jazeera, the BBC, France TV, Russia Today, CNN, and Iran’s Press TV all seek to provide both channels to communicate to audiences around the world and online platforms for audiences to discuss content and events amongst themselves.²¹ This raised the question of whether it was now possible to engage publics at home and abroad to new degrees.²² If you are a political leader, could you use “public diplomacy 2.0” to expose publics to your strategic narrative, convince them of the validity of your narrative, and even get them to become vehicles and proponents of it? It appeared possible to put into practice, for the first time on a genuinely international basis, normative models of public spheres and cosmopolitan dialogue. More cynically, it seemed to be possible to put these models into practice in order to realize instrumental goals, for instance to influence overseas publics to get them to put pressure on their own governments to enact certain policies.

In the global information environment it is very easy for competing narratives to also be heard. Some may be deliberately combative—our adversaries for example, or perhaps hostile media. Where our narrative meets the competing narratives is referred to as the battle of the narratives, although the reality is that this is an enduring competition rather than a battle with winners and losers.²⁰

What has not been fully understood is how these processes of communication are affecting classic questions in international relations about power, cooperation, contestation, and order. The conceptions of strategic narrative present in contemporary debates in foreign policy and public diplomacy lack a framework to follow the process through the formation, projection, and reception of a narrative or account for the interactions that follow, both domestically and internationally. Our aim is therefore not only to engage in an academic debate about the nature of influence in international relations, but also to clarify an emerging strand of policy and practice that is ill-defined at present.

We argue that narratives about international actors structure expectations about behavior in the international system; however, there are also national or state narratives that focus attention on the state itself, rather than describing its place in the international system. Thus, national identities and roles are associated with actors as well. This relates to national narratives that include characterizations of the state as actor. Work on national character or role theory, for example, fits here.²³ So too does work on American exceptionalism,²⁴ and work on nationalist ideology as regenerationist myth.²⁵ But how are these collective actors constructed and how are they constrained by narratives? What is the process by which new actors, with accompanying narratives, come to be? We argue that the communication of narratives about the structure of the international system and its accompanying actors is created strategically, within a set of specific contextual constraints. Thus strategic narratives structure the international system and expected actor behavior. This focus on strategic narratives allows us to understand how leaders “filter identity discourses”²⁶ even as a new international order is created.

In addition, our discussion of the importance of narratives in defining and describing actors in international system narratives suggests that political actors may then use these narratives for strategic purposes in policy making and implementation under certain circumstances. In other words, actors can also construct policies “with public justifications which enact the identity and moral purpose of the state.”²⁷ Political actors have some (varying) level of ability to act to construct narratives even as they are constrained by them. Further, political actors do not have one ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Actors in Strategic Narratives
• 3 Strategic Narratives of International Order
• 4 Contestation
• 5 Information Infrastructure
• 6 Conclusions: Thinking Ahead
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index