Description
The concept of strategic narratives has enjoyed increasing popularity in the study of International Security, emphasizing that political leaders speak purposefully to justify, legitimate, and enact (contestable) security agendas. Strategic narratives are here understood as deliberate means to achieve specific ends. This paper, while drawing upon insights from recent scholarship, demonstrates that such an understanding of narrative agency excludes sensegiving processes that take place below the elite level and which nevertheless matter for how security narratives are told and disseminated. As the paper argues, the relegation of everyday political actors to the status of passive audiences becomes particularly problematic when considered in light of a media environment that has shifted beyond traditional one-directional communication platforms. Within the context of a modern hybrid media system, security narratives are increasingly co-authored and decentralized products, even when they are originally employed strategically by political agents. This transformation challenges the widespread presumption in the study of international politics generally, and securitization theory specifically, that narrative agency resides with speakers in positions of authority.
Keywords: strategic narratives; securitization; media hybridization.
