Together with co-author Nina Bjørge I just published the article Cultures of anarchy: Images of Russia in the narrative of Norwegian mainstream news media during the Ukraine crisis 2014 in the brilliant Media, War and Conflict journal. If you are curious you can watch the video-trailer on YouTube, read the abstract and even browse through the original conference presentation of the paper. In other words, this post tells the story in reverse.
The video trailer
We put this video trailer together at the journal editors' request in late summer 2019. It was all filmed on my old Samsung phone and and edited on my antiquated work laptop. Of course, a further challenge was to stay within copyright law when adding visual and audio material. But judging from a recent tweet by the journal's editors, they were pleased with the result.
The abstract
This article examines the role of the news media through a case study of the narratives about the 2014 Ukraine crisis in three major Norwegian newspapers. The conflict also contained a ‘war’ between competing strategic narratives from the involved actors, with a potential for cross-national cascades into the Norwegian narrative.
The authors’ focus is on the framing of Russia during the most dramatic month of March 2014. They applied the images related to Wendt’s cultures of anarchy (see Social Theory of International Politics, 1999) to classify the framing of Russia.
The Norwegian media narrative was relatively consistent in framing Russia as choosing a path leading away from being a rival of Norway and the West, towards becoming their enemy. This was close to the narrative of the Norwegian government and in clear opposition to the Russian narrative. While this supports Hoskins and O’Loughlin’s ‘arrested war’ hypothesis (published in Information, Communication & Society, 2015), it also raises questions about professional media norms.
It could have been nerve shattering. Nina and I finalized the presentation minutes before we started and this was Nina's debut as presenter on an international conference. Furthermore, our presentation was the very first on the conference. To complicate matters, the conference computer just died as soon as we started the presentation. Luckily, we could borrow a laptop from the audience, set up and continue within a couple of minutes. It all went splendidly from there, apart from me talking too much and having to skip the research design section. The presentation is still available below. While the paper was further developed and edited after the conference, it contains illustrations referred to in the final article.
The conference presentation
Nina and I participated on Media, War and Conflict Journal's excellent 10th Anniversary Conference "War of Spaces" in Florence, late May 2018. We presented an early version of the paper, taking turns in front of an audience of specialist scholars.
It could have been nerve shattering. Nina and I finalized the presentation minutes before we started and this was Nina's debut as presenter on an international conference. Furthermore, our presentation was the very first on the conference. To complicate matters, the conference computer just died as soon as we started the presentation. Luckily, we could borrow a laptop from the audience, set up and continue within a couple of minutes. It all went splendidly from there, apart from me talking too much and having to skip the research design section. The presentation is still available below. While the paper was further developed and edited after the conference, it contains illustrations referred to in the final article.
