Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

Abstract

The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well as in diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: to create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and at the same time to ascribe moral supremacy to ‘our side’ while posing ‘their side’ as an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises in discrimination and foe creation, but the nature of the actors involved has changed in the digital era. Now, ‘we’ and ‘they’ are organised into decentralised and mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action at planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender and ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At the same time, media platforms and news organisations are part of the apparatus by which strategic narratives are weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, digital media analysis needs to understand the ‘strategic turn’ in storytelling, and its deployment by states and ‘non-state actors’ alike, in this case, news media. Alternative models of worldmaking, in which popular culture acts as a pedagogic platform for class formation and activism, enter an ecology in which narrative is already a weapon of war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all the way down.