Description
The language we use to talk about trade conveys, disciplines, and cements expert knowledge about the possibilities of trade to work for goals such as sustainable development, gender equality, and global health. Increasingly, a complex network of international organizations (IOs) is operating in the trade landscape to assimilate, reproduce and, in some cases, challenge dominant forms of expert knowledge. This paper examines the dynamics and evolution of contemporary trade discourse through the use of social media by IOs to communicate about global trade. Using a computer assisted automated content analysis approach, we gather 12 years of social media data (2010 to 2022) from Non-Governmental Organizations’ (NGOs) and Inter-Governmental Organizations’ (IGOs) and explore the patterns with which these organizations use social media to promote trade-, equity-, development-, environment-, and health-related goals. We also use social network analysis to establish the strength of relationships between organizations and how these networks impact the discourses used across time and organizations. We will shed light on these dynamics by engaging the following questions:
- How do trade narratives gain traction and evolve through social media over time?
- How and when do IOs strategically leverage social media to drive, uphold, or challenge the global trade agenda?
- Where can we locate dynamic interactions between IOs and the cross-germination of trade narratives?
By using an innovative methodology, this paper will shed light on the relationship between social media, expert knowledge, and contemporary trade narratives, dynamics which have thus far been overlooked in the scholarly literature.
