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Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power
Abstract
Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to understand power and communication in international affairs. Analyses of soft power overwhelmingly focus on soft power ‘assets’ or capabilities and how to wield them, not how influence does or does not take place. It has become a catch-all term that has lost explanatory power, just as hard power once did. The authors argue that the concept of strategic narrative gives us intellectual purchase on the complexities of international politics today, especially in regard to how influence works in a new media environment. They believe that the study of media and war would benefit from more attention being paid to strategic narratives.
... In recent times, news dailies acted as gatekeepers against misinformation and disinformation during the COVID-19 outbreak [29]. Therefore, given the current upsurge of AMR, mass media can play a pivotal role in creating public awareness through disseminating tailored and targeted health information around AMR. Especially, in the current world of big pharmaceutical companies where they act as the "third dimension" of power [30] influencing the health system, the public, and the mass media, understanding the strategic narratives constructed by mass media is imperative [31,32]. However, the impact of these pharmaceutical companies on mass media is yet to be understood holistically. ...
Background
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global public health crisis and around the last decade, newspapers were one of the main sources of public dissemination of information for so. This study highlights how Bangladeshi mainstream newspapers represented AMR-related news and how they created the narrative of AMR in Bangladesh.
Methods
We conducted both quantitative and qualitative content analysis on 275 AMR-related news articles published in the twelve highest circulated dailies (January 2010 to September 2021). We divided the articles into report, opinion, and editorials and analyzed how their contents built the narrative of AMR in Bangladesh.
Results
Bangladeshi newspapers reported misuse of antibiotics by the consumers the most (32.2%), followed by selling without prescriptions (29%), and over-prescription by the health providers (26.1%). There were hardly any news reports describing the impact of pharmaceutical companies in prescribing and selling antibiotics. Around 45% of the news articles were event-oriented. Moreover, they suggested inadequate recommendations to battle AMR.
Conclusion
Valid, consistent, and reliable AMR news coverage can play a crucial role in creating mass awareness, making providers accountable, and supporting national action plan in mitigating AMR threat. The Bangladeshi journalists interested in reporting AMR-issues should focus on disseminating more Bangla articles with scientific information, and reporting causes and recommendations responsibly.
... In recent times, news dailies acted as gatekeepers against misinformation and disinformation during the COVID-19 outbreak [29]. Therefore, given the current upsurge of AMR, mass media can play a pivotal role in creating public awareness through disseminating tailored and targeted health information around AMR. Especially, in the current world of big pharmaceutical companies where they act as the "third dimension" of power [30] influencing the health system, the public, and the mass media, understanding the strategic narratives constructed by mass media is imperative [31,32]. However, the impact of these pharmaceutical companies on mass media is yet to be understood holistically. ...
Background
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a major global public health crisis and around the last decade, newspapers were one of the main sources of public dissemination of information for so. This study highlights how Bangladeshi mainstream newspapers represented AMR-related news and how they created the narrative of AMR in Bangladesh.
Methods
We conducted both quantitative and qualitative content analysis on 275 AMR-related news articles published in the twelve highest circulated dailies (January 2010 to September 2021). We divided the articles into report, opinion, and editorials and analyzed how their contents built the narrative of AMR in Bangladesh.
Results
Bangladeshi newspapers reported misuse of antibiotics by the consumers the most (32.2%), followed by selling without prescriptions (29%), and over-prescription by the health providers (26.1%). There were hardly any news reports describing the impact of pharmaceutical companies in prescribing and selling antibiotics. Around 45% of the news articles were event-oriented. Moreover, they suggested inadequate recommendations to battle AMR.
Conclusion
Valid, consistent, and reliable AMR news coverage can play a crucial role in creating mass awareness, making providers accountable, and supporting national action plan in mitigating AMR threat. The Bangladeshi journalists interested in reporting AMR-issues should focus on disseminating more Bangla articles with scientific information, and reporting causes and recommendations responsibly.
... After the Cold War, numerous nations, including Japan, began expanding their international influence by reinforcing their soft power. In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in soft power studies and have generated abundant findings (Nye, 1990;Nye, 2004;Roselle et al., 2014), enabling us to gain a more profound comprehension of the intrinsic nature of soft power and how it may be augmented from diverse perspectives. However, the role of language in the construction of soft power remains insufficiently explored (Hashimoto, 2018). ...
The concept of soft power has engendered lively discourse within the international community. The development of a nation’s soft power frequently hinges on cultural communication and the promotion of language. This manuscript concentrates on Japan as a case study and undertakes an investigation of the methods it has employed to cultivate its soft power. To accomplish this objective, Japan’s strategies for cultural communication and the promotion of the Japanese language are comprehensively examined. From the perspective of language planning, prestige planning of language and culture constitutes a crucial mode of cultural communication, whereas language education planning (or acquisition planning) is the primary method of language promotion. Japan has adeptly disseminated its culture overseas through cultural communication and language promotion. On one hand, it fashions a “cool culture” embodied by anime and manga to augment cultural appeal and amplify national image. On the other hand, it advances the Japanese language abroad by establishing supportive institutions, dispatching experts and volunteers, and creating online teaching materials. Building on Japan, this paper establishes a theoretical framework for the construction of soft power, employing the aforementioned two approaches as valuable guides for research on soft power.
... We thus refer both to rational behavior in terms of negotiation strategies and to discourses as an element of bargaining. We argue that narratives and discourses can be utilized strategically (Miskimmon et al. 2013, Naurin 2010, Roselle et al. 2014, while discourse analysis is a useful tool for revealing actor strategies, verbal as well as behavioral. ...
In 2020, the European Parliament ( ep ) issued a resolution calling for all European Union (EU) Member States to adopt feminist foreign and security policies, and for a gender-transformative vision in the EU’s own external policy. Drawing on the literatures on negotiations and norm contestation, this article3 asks why the resolution was so progressive. It also asks how we can characterize and explain the nature of the negotiations leading to the resolution. The findings demonstrate a low level of contestation and negotiations mainly characterized by integrative strategies and solutions. The main opponents to the resolution, the populist radical right groups, were more or less absent from the negotiations but opposed by verbal contestation in plenum and through amendments to the text. We find that individual- and organizational level factors have high explanatory power: the gender equality-friendly institutional culture in the ep was further strengthened by the entrepreneurship of two committed rapporteurs.
This article scrutinizes Russian state-run TV narratives over critical junctures-before the 2013 Euromaidan protests, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the periods leading up to and following the 2022 invasion-to illuminate how political agendas, historical narratives, and public perception intersect. The authors reveal the Russian political elite's strategic shaping of narratives, influencing collective memory and swaying public opinion on the Ukraine crisis. The significance of the conflict narrative and Russia's position is underscored, as reflected in the evolving structure of news broadcasts. The image of Russian leaders as capable and reliable is amplified during conflicts, while Ukrainian counterparts are persistently portrayed negatively. The media constructs an identity narrative that elevates Russian leaders and disparages Western counterparts post-crisis, mirroring geopolitical tensions. The framing of Ukraine's narrative with WWII terminology is analyzed, highlighting attempts to deflect blame onto the West. This comprehensive study elucidates the subtle complexities of media narratives and their pivotal role in geopolitics and international relations.
This study aims to contribute to the understanding of strategic narrative theory and persuasive language techniques in the Middle Eastern context, particularly focusing on the utilization of these aspects in discussions related to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The research employs both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze how the JCPOA was depicted in news media from the US and Iran. The findings reveal that both nations positioned themselves as key proponents of the JCPOA, emphasizing their willingness to collaborate through a more conciliatory approach. Notably, these narratives were underpinned by divergent persuasive language techniques, reflecting the intricate and often conflict-prone dynamics of the Middle East.
This article explores the dynamic relationship between international news organisations and politics in the United Kingdom and Russia. Using the 2014–15 Ukraine conflict as its case study, this research argues that humanitarianism has been applied to set the news agenda by RT. The BBC, on the other hand, used relatively less human rights frames but depicted Russia and Russia-backed separatists as responsible for the conflict. Despite the concepts of manufacturing consent and indexing may not capture the arguments in journalistic practice comprehensively, they are useful in explaining and revealing broader insights into the market and politics-driven media industry and the illiberal tendency in the reporting of international war/conflict in that news framing constitutes a vital soft power tool. This also raises the question that where should we draw lines of distinction between the state-sponsored soft power media RT and the publicly funded BBC.
The article’s main purpose is to understand the differences in the perceptions of Russian narratives in post-communist European countries by examining the role of the local media after February 2022. The research question is: What factors determine the degree of official Russian narratives’ influence on media discourses about the Russian–Ukrainian war of 2022 in Central and South-Eastern Europe (the cases of Poland and Serbia)? The paper is based on a discourse analysis of articles in major Polish and Serbian quality national broadsheet daily newspapers and online news portals (Rzeczpospolita and Politika) for a six-month period (February 24–August 23, 2022). The article aims to show that the official Russian rhetoric is regularly spread by the local media and that it should be perceived as a tool of the Kremlin's task to change the public opinion in the region.
Despite extensive scrutiny of how Russia has weaponized information, little work has been done on how it takes different audiences into account when designing its strategic narratives. Although scholars and practitioners agree on the importance of fitting narratives to audiences, the fact that Russia builds knowledge on audiences and that its practices are informed by a Soviet legacy of information warfare, little is known about the strategies Russia uses to adapt its strategic narratives to audiences. Through a comparative narrative study, the article investigates how Russian state media promote different narratives on Nord Stream 2 to German, Polish and English-speaking audiences. It shows how these are shaped by four adaptation strategies in which Russia amplifies, bridges, transforms and pushes back on the audiences’ pre-existing structures of meaning. This article contributes to the existing literature by deepening our knowledge of the relationship between the design of strategic narratives and their intended audience.
Media have been central to government efforts to reinforce sovereignty and define national identity, but globalization is fundamentally altering media practices, institutions, and content. More than the activities of large conglomerates, globalization entails competition among states as well as private entities to dominate the world's consciousness. Changes in formal and informal rules, in addition to technological innovation, affect the growth and survival or decline of governments.
In Media and Sovereignty, Monroe Price focuses on emerging foreign policies that govern media in a world where war has information as well as military fronts. Price asks how the state, in the face of institutional and technological change, controls the forms of information reaching its citizens. He also provides a framework for analyzing the techniques used by states to influence populations in other states. Price draws on an international array of examples of regulation of media for political ends, including "self-regulation," media regulation in conflict zones, the control of harmful and illegal content, and the use of foreign aid to alter media in target societies.
Just as politicians and diplomats are struggling to come to terms with the impact of the communications revolution in international politics, so too are the academic fields of International Relations and International Communications. Although it is a decade since the twin impacts of satellite television and the Internet began to attract serious attention, scholars are still struggling to understand how to locate innovations in communications within the practice of world politics. Very often discussions are anecdotal or simplistically generalized, reaching conclusions that either the communications revolution is sweeping away the states system or is largely unimportant or that it is having some impact but it is not quite clear what.1 There is a growing body of work that allows us to move beyond these generalizations but much of this is dispersed across relatively specialized debates on topics such as transnational advocacy networks, transparency, deliberation or information warfare and is only just beginning to find its way back into the mainstream theoretical debate.2 This chapter sets out to offer one way of making sense of the impact of the communications revolution in contemporary international politics.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO has progressively adapted itself to the new strategic environment. This has meant a shift from a defensive posture to a more proactive risk management strategy. A key component of this mandate is contributions to international peacemaking and peacebuilding operations. In both the Balkans and Afghanistan, NATO has worked to utilize its military assets to create and maintain peace so that civilian organizations can administer aid, development programs, and good governance projects. These multifaceted operations, however, are complex and rely on well-structured relationships between the different civilian-led international organizations on the ground and NATO. Sadly, as the case of Afghanistan illustrates, these organizations have proved woefully inadequate in terms of providing sustainable peacebuilding. The hypothesis is that international organizations do not play well on the ground in conflict or postconflict environments because they were meant to manage a balance of power, rather than an absence of power. These organizations are more worried about their bureaucratic turf than they are sustainable outcomes.
Published at a time when the U.S. government’s public diplomacy is in crisis, this book provides an exhaustive account of how it used to be done. The United States Information Agency was created in 1953 to "tell America’s story to the world" and, by engaging with the world through international information, broadcasting, culture and exchange programs, became an essential element of American foreign policy during the Cold War. Based on newly declassified archives and more than 100 interviews with veterans of public diplomacy, from the Truman administration to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nicholas J. Cull relates both the achievements and the endemic flaws of American public diplomacy in this period. Major topics include the process by which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations built a massive overseas propaganda operation; the struggle of the Voice of America radio to base its output on journalistic truth; the challenge of presenting Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, and Watergate to the world; and the climactic confrontation with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. This study offers remarkable and new insights into the Cold War era.
How do states sustain international order during crises? Drawing on the political philosophy of Lyotard and through an empirical examination of the Anglo-American international order during the 1956 Suez Crisis, Bially Mattern demonstrates that states can (and do) use representational force--a forceful but non-physical form of power exercised through language--to stabilize international identity and in turn international order.