Description
This panel looks at citizens’ changing perceptions of international politics, including the impact of re-bordering processes and the fallout from the last few years, which have been rich in significant international events. The humanitarian crisis in 2015, the COVID-19 pandemic, social movements like Black Lives Matter, and the conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine—amongst many others—have important repercussions on domestic politics and foreign policy. They are also narrated differently by diverse governments, which all tell a different story about these events.
While much of the literature in international studies continues to adopt a top-down approach to the study of narratives, the papers in this panel adopt a novel approach by drawing on citizens’ voices and interrogating both citizens and media narratives that shape perceptions of political phenomena and entities at the international level.
The presenters in this panel contribute to the narrative and everyday turns in international studies by combining both strands of literature and examining ongoing political processes from a bottom-up perspective. We draw on citizens’ voices as well as news media from across diverse countries like Italy, Germany, Slovakia, the US, and the UK, to investigate crises including the European humanitarian crisis, Brexit, the economic crisis, and Black Lives Matter, to investigate these narratives. As such, this panel explores citizens changing perceptions of international politics and what this can mean for the future of democratic processes.
