Narratives of Ukraine on the Information Battlefields of Global Media

Abstract

AbstractContributing to the debate of how narratives organize and serve information to exert influence beyond national borders, we answer an urgent call for comparative narrative analysis in International Relations (IR). To explore the changing global narratives of Ukraine, we engage with commentators who argue a certain unity in sensemaking about Ukraine in the West (including the EU) vis-à-vis the non-Western world, and we also examine how Western narratives on Ukraine/war against Ukraine are divided. Empirically, we engage with the media narratives framing Ukraine in 2022–2023 in the selected countries of Europe, Global South and in China. These narratives are compared to the results of the representative public surveys in the respective locations and the overview of the knowledge-producing outputs (think tanks and academia) in the selected countries. We engage with the concept of “antagonistic narrative strategies” and dissect pro-Kremlin narratives directed towards diverse receivers around the world in general, and the EU in particular. Finally, we highlight six “takeaways” for the EU facing an uncertain world at this time of war against Ukraine. Building on our previous work, we argue the impact of the constructed image in the narrative can be reinforced by the interplay of two projection properties: (1) content accentuation and priming, through iterations and content contextualization and (2) historical and cultural resonance with the receivers.