8 Comments

1. 

   Nawal Mustafa on 22 April 2011 at 10.54 EDT

   Ben, thanks for bringing this up. The recent “Arab Spring” has led me to a similar conclusions about how IR theorists deal, broadly speaking, with phenomena like revolutions, social movements, or what Tilly, Tarrow et al labeled “episodes of contentious politics.” However, your post raises a few questions for me: first, how does your concept of strategic narrative differ from “collective action frames,” a notion prevalent in social movement theory and fleshed out by the likes of Sidney Tarrow, Benford and Snow, etc. Granted, comparativists mainly focused on social movements rather than the state, and this leaves me with the question as to whether IR theorists should engage both comparativists and sociologists more in order to address this dynamic relational and narrated understanding between state officials, dissident movements, and other actors involved.

   That said, foreign policy analysis (FPA) scholars who adopt a constructivist stance have also addressed narratives among domestic state elites to some extent (Valerie Hudson’s work stands out here). So, your post also begs the question as to whether the concept of “strategic narrative” truly is innovative, or merely an expansion on FPA literature as well. At the end of the day, I would agree IR theory is ill-equipped to deal with the phenomena we’re observing in the Middle East at present, but I would argue that has more to do with the fact that comparativists have been the ones to address phenomena like democratization, revolutions, and social movement mobilization at a greater scale. A greater synthesis between both fields probably should be in order and is long past due…

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     Ben O'Loughlin on 23 April 2011 at 10.32 EDT

     Thanks Nawal, I certainly agree we need to bring comparativists and IR/comms together if we’re to understand how narratives impact on particular countries and circumstances. Neither can do the job alone.

     I’m not familiar with the contentious politics and collective action frames literature, but from what I’ve seen of frame analysis broadly I would say there is a difference with narratives. Narratives create a structure of experience grounded in temporality and change: we move from one point to another, overcoming an obstacle along the way, to reach a welcome or tragic ending. Frames and framing seems to impose a more static temporality. X event is framed as Y type of event today. A frame does not impose a sense that the X event will unfold in a particular way. But maybe this distinction isn’t justified. Do you think it is worth checking back to see how the framing studies deal with constructing temporalities?

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       darkhorse on 23 April 2011 at 20.02 EDT

       Framing is done for different reasons. It can be an attempt to shape public opinion or done for more instrumental reasons, like drawing material support for a revolution from a superpower. In the first case, the shift in public opinion can be measured before and after, but it will be unclear whether the change is due to the ‘strategic narrative’. In the second case, it is entirely counterfactual and there is no way to definitively verify whether the strategic narrative was successful or not using the methods typically employed by political scientists.

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         Nawal Mustafa on 23 April 2011 at 20.54 EDT

         I’m still developing my thoughts here about the role of framing in causal explanations. For now, my very tentative, rough reply would be that I’m inclined to agree with Kurki (2006) when she called for a broader notion of causality that incorporates constitutive understanding, or at least problematizes popular conceptions about the causal-constitutive divide. In this respect, I would argue a narrative can not independently cause the effects you identify, but provides a lens by which a constituted understanding is developed, and thus, renders a causal relationship to be possible through interaction with other social factors. It’s a similar issue we run into regarding the role of culture in causal explanations…

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           darkhorse on 23 April 2011 at 22.39 EDT

           Kurki’s widening of causality doesn’t help identify which strategic narratives are most salient.

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           Nawal Mustafa on 24 April 2011 at 10.23 EDT

           At a methodological level, I can see where you’re coming from in that it would be difficult to pinpoint which narratives resonate more than others. One potential idea, once again drawing from social movement theory, is illustrated by Carrie Wickham’s (2004) study of Egypt’s Islamist networks. She analyzed which “frames” or even “narratives” resonated amongst potential supporters and led to further recruitment. Using Benford and Snow’s framework, she concluded the most “salient” collective action frames 1) were perceived to be a close fit with extant experiences of potential supporters; 2) were propagated by movement leaders who were perceived to be credible and effective in the community, and 3) the frames were reinforced through small group interactions successively. That said, I agree, it is still difficult methodologically to ascertain which frames resonate more than others, but the way she and other social movement theorists put it, we can partially observe this by comparing competing movements’ narratives with each other, and then assessing which group’s campaign or mobilization efforts achieved their strategic goals or similar results (e.g. why did the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt mobilize more supporters than the Communist Party for example?).

           I brought up Kurki given that it’s easy to see the above as merely a constitutive explanation. However, I would also argue we cannot provide effective causal explanations unless we also account for such constitutive processes I outline above, especially in regards to the question of mobilization.

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       Nawal Mustafa on 23 April 2011 at 20.46 EDT

       That is a great point Ben–didn’t think of that. In response to your last question, I think yes, it is worth checking, and especially ask if social movement theorists have successfully applied the concept of “framing” merely to state opponents, but not the state itself. Here’s where IR theorists could potentially assume a greater role.

       The one caveat is, as mentioned, sociologists and comparativists who developed the contentious politics literature called for elucidating how actors–be it dissidents, states, and neutral bystanders–interact in dynamic, contingent, and relational terms to produce intersubjective understandings of a situation. Thus, I imagine (but others can correct me here) that your concept of “strategic narrative” to a certain extent was implicitly there in their scholarship, but it was understood as produced among multifarious actors and not simply the state. It also begs the question if once again, IR theorists should be state-centered here, or if they should adopt the “relational” approach that was more popular among comparativists, namely comparative sociologists.

       The reason I brought it up is that it often seems like constructivists in both IR and CP speak of similar (if not the same) phenomena, yet often do so using quite different vocabularies. I think you are right in that the framing literature tends to focus on the events in question (or portraying actors, the circumstances, their own identity, etc. in very contemporaneous terms in response to sudden events). That being said, I don’t think this need be the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if folks like Tarrow, Benford and Snow, etc. implicitly recognize temporality in their application of collective action frames. At the end of the day, I don’t think either side is really speaking of dramatically different phenomena. That doesn’t mean of course critique shouldn’t be made of popular concepts within social movement theory, or even expanded a bit…Another potential area for growth is explicating the relationship between the power of actors and the discursive narratives they produce during contentious episodes–another area IR theorists might be able to add something.

2. 

   Lynette Nusbacher on 17 June 2011 at 00.01 EDT

   I’ve linked to this page in a blog post of mine:  https://nusbacher.com/nusblog/?p=177

   You give a good explanation of strategic narrative, and it’s a fascinating issue in the Libya conflict.