Sectarian Framing in the Syrian Civil War

How do civilians respond to civil war narratives? Do they react to ethnic frames more strongly than to alternatives? Governments and rebels battle for hearts and minds as well as strategic terrain, and winning the narrative war can shift legitimacy, popular support, and material resources to the sympathetically framed side. We examine the effect of one‐sided and competing war discourses on ordinary people's understandings of the Syrian civil war—a conflict with multiple narratives, but which has become more communal over time. We conduct a framing experiment with a representative sample of Syrian refugees in Lebanon in which we vary the narrative that describes the reasons for the conflict. We find that sectarian explanations, framed in isolation, strongly increase the importance government supporters place on fighting. When counterframed against competing narratives, however, the rallying effect of sectarianism drops and vanishes.     

The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses,Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraq's undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.     

The War on Terrorism and the Administration of the American State

Conditions of war lead to a style of teleocratic governance and administration that is at odds with the idea of civil association reflected in the American constitutional state. As a result, war can put our traditional notions of humanity, pluralism, and limited government at risk. In order to defend the values of civil association, public administrators should understand and appreciate the principles undergirding our constitutional system of governance and administration.     

The Virtual War on Terror: Counterterrorism Narratives in Video Games

Over the past decade, a great deal of research has been done to analyze the ways in which popular media, especially movies and television shows, construct fictional terrorist threats. However, little attention has been given to the extremely popular genre of counterterrorism video games and how they fit into the War on Terror media narrative. Counterterrorism video games reflect many of the themes of other media about terrorism, such as the demonization of terrorist enemies and the exaggeration of terrorist threats. However, video games strengthen these themes to make the threat of terrorism appear more pervasive and imminent. Consequently, counterterrorism games display an intensified vision of the War on Terror narrative, in which the entire world is a war zone. This leads game narratives to simulate and justify more extreme state responses to terrorism.     

Relational Leadership,Storytelling, and Narratives: Practices of Local Government Chief Executives

This article examines the storytelling and narrative practices of an elite group of public administrators in the United Kingdom: local government chief executives. The authors do so through the lens of relationality, exploring the collective dimensions of leadership. The focus on leadership and stories embraces the narrative turn in public administration scholarship. It responds to calls for research examining the distinctive settings of everyday leadership action. The contribution to theory is a qualitative understanding of the relational ways in which stories and narratives are used in the practices of public administration leaders. The article analyzes four ways in which such leadership is accomplished: inviting an emotional connection and commitment to public service, making sense of organizational realities, provoking reflections on practices and assumptions, and managing relations with politicians. The authors offer an appreciation of how relational leadership influence can be generated by expressive narratives and storytelling rather than stemming from bureaucratic authority.     

Buffalo tales: interest group policy stories in Greater Yellowstone

Wicked policy problems—those that resist resolution and continuously cycle through different administrative jurisdictions—are time-consuming for the practitioner and expensive. In these wicked policy environs, interest group narratives contribute to this intractability through the continued construction of a policy loser’s tale. Central to our study is the analysis of group maturation with that of policy narrative elements. We explore whether there is a relationship between lobby tactics, financial resources, and professionalization of authorship of narratives and policy narrative elements. We content analyze the policy stories of the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) over a 10-year period (1999–2008), using the Yellowstone National Park bison and brucellosis controversy as case material and track how this new interest group’s fundamental policy story has changed over the course of its lifespan. As demonstrated through their choice of lobby tactics, the group does evolve from an unconventional to a conventional interest group, with two out of three of their constructed policy beliefs remaining unchanged and their political tactics consistently focusing on spinning the loser’s tale aimed at expanding the policy arena. Suggestions on the importance of this work to scientists, administrators, and academics are included.     

A Bridge in Flux: Narratives and the Policy Process in the Pacific Northwest

Policy narratives play an important role in the policy process. Often policy narratives originate from advocacy coalitions seeking increased support from the public for their policy stance. Although most Narrative Policy Framework studies have focused on national policy issues, this study examines a state and local economic development project by exploring the policy narratives from competing coalitions in favor and opposed to the project. Specifically, in the Portland–Vancouver area of Oregon and Washington, local policy discussions have been dominated by a proposal for a new mega bridge on Interstate‐5 connecting the two cities across the Columbia River. A new government agency (CRC—Columbia River Crossing) was formed for the implementation of this project. Upon approval of a proposal, CRC experienced heavy backlash from citizens, local businesses, community leaders, and other stakeholders leading to the formation of two competing coalitions in opposition and support of the bridge. This study, using content analysis of 370 public documents, finds that competing coalitions utilize policy narratives in strategic ways to characterize the opposing coalition, themselves, and other actors in the policy subsystem. This study also suggests that the strength and cohesion of a coalition's narrative contributes to its policy success and the winning/losing status of a coalition potentially determines the types of strategies they will use. Last, this study introduces and tests a new narrative strategy called the impotent shift testing a coalition's strategic use of the victim character.     

Human Rights Violations,Weak States,and Civil War

This study examines the role of human rights violations as a harbinger of civil wars to come, as well as the links between repression, state weakness, and conflict. Human rights violations are both part of the escalating process that may end in civil war and can contribute to an escalation of conflict to civil war, particularly in weak states. The role of government repression and state weakness in leading to civil war is tested empirically. The results show that both closely correlate with civil war onset, especially if they are observed in combination. A two-stage model shows that, while low-level conflict leads to human rights violations, they increase the risk of an escalation to civil war in turn. Human rights violations are identified as an important aspect of understanding civil war onset as the result of an escalation over time and a clear early warning sign of wars to come.     

Policy Narratives across Two Languages: A Comparative Study using the Narrative Policy Framework

The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) focuses on the role of narratives, drawing from a rich scholarship in narrative, language, and culture. Despite the understanding that narratives are constructions of language and that narrative construction differs across languages, NPF studies have not focused on policy narratives in languages other than English. Language characteristics of narratives are important to assess the stability of policy narratives when there are multiple dominant languages in a political system. This study investigates the use of narrative elements in policy narratives in agricultural biotechnology policy in India across Hindi and English media coverage to examine the NPF assumption that narratives have generalizable narrative elements irrespective of variation in linguistic context and, specifically, tests the transportability of narrative elements. Findings validate the transportability of narrative elements in Hindi narratives, indicate variation in the use of narrative elements over time, and have implications for applying NPF across languages.     

Shadow peacebuilders and diplomatic counterinsurgencies: informal networks,knowledge production and the art of policy-shaping

ABSTRACT

This article explores the role of informal networks in producing strategic knowledge and influencing policy responses to the 2011 post-election crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The analytical focus is on networks of shadow peacebuilders, defined as actors who are often not visible to the public and who promote a mix of altruistic and personal interests of their broader network by generating strategic narratives and influencing peacebuilding policy. As this article shows, shadow peacebuilders engage in diplomatic counterinsurgencies waged by means of diplomacy, politics, public relations and legal means. Strategic narratives are instrumental in legitimizing diplomatic counterinsurgency, inducing internal cohesion within the network and delegitimizing alternative narratives and policy solutions. Yet the production of strategic knowledge by shadow peacebuilders has its limitations. When the gap between strategic narrative and actions becomes too big, the network risks fragmentation and defeat by other networks that promote alternative strategic narratives and paths of action in the battle over control of peacebuilding policy.     

Do We Understand What the Public Hears? Stakeholders’ Preferred Communication Choices for Discussing River Issues with the Public

Communication between stakeholders and the larger public is an increasingly important issue in today's policy world. This communication often takes the form of policy narratives; however, few studies have empirically examined what type of communication style stakeholders prefer for communication with the public. This study uses a survey of 87 river stakeholders to determine the preferred communication choices of stakeholders. The study finds that 39% of the stakeholders chose a duty‐based narrative, 28% choose a science statement, 23% choose an engaged citizen narrative, and 10% choose a do nothing statement. Some of these preferences were related to issues of trust, other policy preferences, and demographic background. Based on previous research, the findings demonstrate that stakeholders can make decisions about how to communicate with the public that are not necessarily reflective of the own values.     

Contested narratives of encounter from a bridge-building project in northern England

ABSTRACT

Recent years of community engagement under the war on terror in the UK have seen the co-option of bridge-building initiatives into wider narratives of securing communities. Through ethnographic insights into a peace building inter-faith initiative that made it onto the news as a ‘deradicalization’ workshop, I show how encounters in such projects are susceptible to being reframed into the very narrative in which encounters are sought after in the first place as a political settlement to growing inter-ethnic tension and conflict. This paper contributes to the growing geographies of encounter literature by making more explicit the narratives that shape how encounters function.     

Pedagogisation of nation identity through textbook narratives in China: 1902–1948

How to construct a national collective identity in a diversified population becomes a challenge for many nation states. Focusing on the tension between diversity, citizenship and national identity, this article adopts the lens of the pedagogical state to analyse national identity construction in Chinese political education textbooks published between 1902 and 1948. The purpose of this research was to explore the pedagogical mechanisms with which the textbook narratives accommodate the tensions of diversity in a culturally heterogeneous population and transmit a newly invented national identity (‘the Chinese nation’, Zhonghua minzu) to the masses. Two general rationales of persuasion are identified in the textbooks: narrative of origin and narrative of promise. Framing the analysis in China's citizenship project by the state, this study argues that the textbooks lead the general public into a citizenship identity contract on the grounds of the two rationales.     

Responding to War on Capitol Hill: Battlefield Casualties,Congressional Response,and Public Support for the War in Iraq

Recent scholarship argues that how members of Congress respond to an ongoing war significantly influences the president's strategic calculations. However, the literature is comparably silent on the factors influencing the public positions members take during the course of a military venture. Accounting for both national and local electoral incentives, we develop a theory positing that partisanship conditions congressional responses to casualties in the aggregate, but that all members respond to casualties in their constituency by increasingly criticizing the war. Analyzing an original database of more than 7,500 content‐coded House floor speeches on the Iraq War, we find strong support for both hypotheses. We also find that Democrats from high‐casualty constituencies were significantly more likely to cast antiwar roll‐call votes than their peers. Finally, we show that this significant variation in congressional antiwar position taking strongly correlates with geographic differences in public support for war.     

They Come over Here … 300 Years of Xenophobic Propaganda in England

England's rulers, merchants, and organized labor in the early modern period (from the 16th to the 18th centuries) were all actively using what today we would call propaganda. Each group appreciated the need to get popular opinion on its side, or at the least to convince other groups it was in the public interest to act in a particular way. This study focuses on the use of xenophobic narratives by these actors in order to further their political, economic, or cultural objectives. The targets were economic rivals including the Dutch, but most particularly ethnic and religious outgroups, including Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Jews. Although there were public relations win-wins for anyone who was able successfully to demonize foreigners, racist and xenophobic propaganda was often more pernicious than the tellers realized, in many cases extending its influence over several generations. In addition, it is clear that many narratives failed to engage with public opinion, for reasons that were not always clear to the groups responsible for them.     

Social equity and LGBTQ populations in African public administration: A macro- and micro-approach

How do public administrators understand social equity toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals and communities? To better understand social equity, this study uses data on the views of public and nonprofit administrators in 33 countries in Africa on LGB people. Based on these responses, we gain a better understanding of homophobia in public administrators. Furthermore, this data helps public administrators to explore how social equity might look differently to public and nonprofit administrators in different countries. Building on this foundation, this study proposes understanding social equity from both a Micro (individual) and a Macro (cultural)-perspective. Bringing in this micro- and macro-perspective can help public administrators and researchers to discuss how individuals and organizations identify “vulnerable” populations and appropriate ways to support vulnerable groups.     

Voters' reasoning processes and media influences during the Persian Gulf War

Voters engage in complex reasoning processes in deriving their policy preferences. Such reasoning processes take place in the environment of media helping to construct the discourse of an issue. To demonstrate the reasoning processes and media influences on the processes, this study analyzes the panel data gathered from a national probability sample before and after the Persian Gulf War. The results show a process of forming one's support of the Bush administration's Gulf War policies that involved feelings toward Bush, patriotic feelings, and acceptance of the official statements of U.S. foreign policy goals. These positive contributors are all related to heavier exposure to television news. Respondents' level of public affairs information and exposure to newspaper public affairs functioned as a contingent factor in the reasoning processes: Those at the upper half of the scale showed a greater emphasis on ideology and negative emotional reactions to the destruction of the war in forming their support of the Bush administration's Gulf War policies. The importance of the homogeneity in the discourse of the issue is further demonstrated by the effects of the news media exposure on higher likelihood of dissent concerning the end of the war.     

Getting to Sweden,Part I: War and Malfeasance, 1720–1850

How and why some countries were able to make the historical transition from a patrimonial, nepotistic and corrupt bureaucracy to a clean, Weberian and professionalised one is still an under‐studied topic in the literature on corruption. This article presents original data on such a transition in the case of Sweden, drawing on court hearings of cases of malfeasance among public officials in the period 1720–1850. It is argued, theoretically, that an important explanation for why the Swedish bureaucracy was able to break out of the collective action trap of corruption relates to Charles Tilly's theory of the importance of war for state‐making. Rather than viewing war‐making in itself as a driver of change, however, this article pinpoints the importance of having lost a significant war – in the Swedish case, the war against Russia in 1808–9 – and the constitutional and regime changes this set in motion. Drawing on comparative data on malfeasance, the similarities in this regard between the Swedish and Danish cases are highlighted.     

Managing public affairs through storytelling

Storytelling has recently been discovered as an important tool for gaining the support of those external constituencies the organisation critically depends upon. This paper explores the narrative approach to public affairs by reporting an in‐depth case study of the storytelling practices of representatives of the global foods industry and environmental activist groups during the recent introduction of genetically modified food crops. The analysis reveals that these parties use competing versions of what are essentially the same narratives to gain the support of regulators and the public at large in the various market and non‐market arenas in which these groups compete. Copyright © 2002 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Postmodern War in the Age of Bush II

This study charts the genealogy and development of new trends in high-tech warfare that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on both the challenges and dangers. Attention is devoted to the Bush administration's military program and foreign policy moves, highlighting the ways Bush II intensifies the dangers of high-tech war while undermining efforts at collective security, environmental protection, and global peace. The argument here is that the volatile mixture of highly regressive, unilateralist, and militarist tendencies combined with high-tech weapons provides a clear and present danger of a protracted and frightening period of war. This mixture dramatically erupted in Bush's military response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and is currently intensifying dangers to world peace in the campaign some are labeling "World War III."