In order to better understand how the world viewed the US 2016 presidential election, the issues that mattered around the world, and how nations made sense of how their media systems constructed presentations of the presidential election, Robert S. Hinck, Skye C. Cooley, and Randolph Kluver examine global news narratives during the campaign and immediately afterwards. Analyzing 1,578 news stories from 62 sources within three regional media ecologies in China, Russia, and the Middle East, Hinck, Cooley, and Kluver demonstrate how the US election was incorporated into narrative constructions of the global order. They establish that the narratives told about the US election through national and regional media provide insights into how foreign nations construct US democracy, and reflect local understandings regarding the issues, and impacts, of US policy towards those nations. Avoiding jargon-laden prose, Global Media and Strategic Narratives of Contested Democracy is as accessible as it is wide-ranging. Its empirical detail will expand readers’ understanding of soft power as narrative articulations of foreign nation’s policies, values, and beliefs within localized media systems. Communication/media studies students, as well as political scientists whose studies includes media and global politics, will welcome its publication.

With today’s social and geopolitical order in significant flux this project offers vital insight into the future global order by comparatively charting national media perceptions regarding the future of global competition, through the lens of Ontological Security (OS). The authors employ a mixed-method approach to analyze 620 news articles from 47 Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, and Iranian news sources over a five-year period (2014-2019), quantitatively comparing the drivers of their visions while providing in-depth qualitative case studies for each nation. Not only do these narratives reveal how these four nations understand the current global order, but also point to their (in)flexibility and agentic capacity for reflection in adapting, even shaping the future order, and their identity-roles within it, around an economic and diplomatic battleground. The authors argue these narratives create trajectories with inertial effects grounded in their OS needs, providing enduring insights into their behavior and interests moving into the future. The Future of Global Coopetition will help readers understand how influential nations typical aligned in opposition to the US, envision the drivers of global competition and the make-up of the future international system. Those engaged in the study of media, global politics, international relations, and communication will find this book to be a critical source.

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

This interdisciplinary Handbook provides an in-depth analysis of the complex security phenomenon of disinformation and offers a toolkit to counter such tactics. Disinformation used to propagate false, inexact or out of context information is today a frequently used tool of political manipulation and information warfare, both online and offline. This Handbook evidences a historical thread of continuing practices and modus operandi in overt state propaganda and covert information operations. Further, it attempts to unveil current methods used by propaganda actors, the inherent vulnerabilities they exploit in the fabric of democratic societies and, last but not least, to highlight current practices in countering disinformation and building resilient audiences. The Handbook is divided into six thematic sections. The first part provides a set of theoretical approaches to hostile influencing, disinformation and covert information operations. The second part looks at disinformation and propaganda in historical perspective offering case study analysis of disinformation, and the third focuses on providing understanding of the contemporary challenges posed by disinformation and hostile influencing. The fourth part examines information and communication practices used for countering disinformation and building resilience. The fifth part analyses specific regional experiences in countering and deterring disinformation, as well as international policy responses from transnational institutions and security practitioners. Finally, the sixth part offers a practical toolkit for practitioners to counter disinformation and hostile influencing. This handbook will be of much interest to students of national security, propaganda studies, media and communications studies, intelligence studies and International Relations in general.

This book demonstrates how infrastructure projects and the communications thereof are strategized by rising powers to envision progress, to enhance the actor’s international identity, and to substantiate and leverage the actor’s vision of international order. While the physical aspects of infrastructure are important, infrastructure communication in international relations demands more scholarly attention. Using a case-study approach, Carolijn van Noort examines how rising powers communicate about infrastructure internationally and discusses the significance of these communication practices. The four case studies include BRICS’s summit communications about infrastructure, Brazil’s infrastructure promises to Africa, China’s communication of the Belt and Road Initiative in East Africa, and Kazakhstan’s news media coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Van Noort highlights the fact that the link between infrastructure, identity, and order-making is arbitrary and thus contested in practice, with rising powers operationalizing infrastructure communication in international relations in varied ways. She argues that both communication organization and the visuality of strategic narratives on infrastructure influence the international communication of infrastructure vision and action plans, with different levels of success. Infrastructure Communication in International Relations is a welcome and timely book of interest to students and scholars in the fields of international relations, global communications, and the politics of infrastructure.

Seeing Red reveals the extent to which Russian disinformation, propaganda, and the Russian model of political communication have infiltrated not just the American media but been embraced by the American Right. From the 2020 elections to the Capitol Insurrection to the war in Ukraine, Sarah Oates and Gordon Neil Ramsay examine the penetration of Kremlin strategic narratives that attempt to project Russian power, blame NATO for Russian aggression, and attack democracy via the U.S. news. As Oates and Ramsay argue, the danger lies not in how foreign governments attempt to manipulate the media, but in how our media system has been compromised by domestic actors who follow an authoritarian playbook and promote anti-democratic narratives.

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign explores a wide range of communication elements, themes, and topics of the 2020 presidential election. The introduction provides a brief snapshot summarizing the role of more traditional elements of campaign communication as well as the newer elements of social media and journalistic practices that transformed the political landscape in 2020. Each chapter serves as a stand-alone study focusing on the role and function of communication within the context of the chapter topics and the 2020 election.