Description
The future of international studies depends upon taking seriously the interaction between media, meddling, and political processes. As one means for interrogating a state’s soft power initiatives, ‘strategic narratives’ have been theorized as ways in which political actors construct shared meanings of the past, present, and future of international politics to shape domestic and international actors’ behaviour, to pursue favourable long- and short-term goals (Miskimmon et al. 2013: 2,8). Russia’s international broadcaster, RT (formerly known as Russia Today), is often identified as a key player in Russia’s soft power strategies towards international audiences, which relies heavily on Russian political elites’ pronouncements. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the narratives that RT has produced around recent votes and elections domestically and internationally. In mediating the democratic process, and responding to, or pre-empting, allegations of Russian meddling in that process, how does RT represent the identities the key players and publics, the links between them, and the process of power transition? In what ways is a Russian perspective on these fundamental democratic turning points made relevant to, and resonant for, international audiences? The preliminary findings of the analysis indicate that RT’s coverage is built in populist terms around an ‘in-group’ of ordinary people, contrasted with morally dubious, but imprecisely defined, ‘elites’, situated within a fundamentally corrupt and flawed democratic process. Thus, without necessarily engaging in rational argumentation, RT’s strategic narratives nonetheless promote emotive scepticism both about the superiority of Western democratic institutions over their Russian counterparts, and about the plausibility of allegations levelled at the Russian state.
