Abstract
Scholars who write about contemporary Ukraine face the possibility that the country that they plan to write about at the start of a research project may look very different by the time their research is ready for publication; such is Ukraine’s record of dramatic transformations in recent decades. Bolin and Ståhlberg began their investigation into the management of meaning in Ukraine in early 2013, when their interest was drawn by Ukrainian nation-branding projects. They conducted fieldwork interviews in Kyiv through the unexpected turbulence of Euromaidan (the Revolution of Dignity) and the first eight years of Russia’s war against Ukraine, speaking to a wide range of individuals from across government, civil society and the public relations industry. Their book is now published at a time when Ukraine is at the centre of world attention, defending itself against a brutal full-scale invasion and Russia’s attempts to wipe it from the map. For Ukraine, the question of how to win a major European war is currently more pressing than the question of how to win tourists and investment via upbeat nation-branding campaigns. Yet Ukraine’s capacity as a nation-state to ‘make meaning’ and to shape the narratives that reach international audiences has never been more important. This book provides valuable insights into the multiplicity of actors and organizations that have contributed to this endeavour in Ukraine over the past decade. The book also challenges readers to reflect on the strengths, limitations and consequences of different conceptual lenses used to analyse meaning management, from propaganda and ‘information war’ to nation branding, public diplomacy and narratives.
The book opens with an introduction that explains how the authors first visited Kyiv to study a government-backed campaign to promote Ukraine as a tourist destination, only to see the government (the Yanukovych administration) ousted from power shortly thereafter and Ukraine’s information landscape transformed as a result. The authors turned their attention towards various efforts to shape international opinion which developed in Ukraine from 2014 onwards, at a time when defence against malign propaganda and Russian ‘information warfare’ was becoming a new national priority. This account of the background to the research is helpful for understanding the scope of the book, which includes meaning management around quite disparate events – the Euromaidan protests and the Eurovision Song Contest – as well as counter-propaganda activities. The authors say that their book is not about the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, or about ‘information war’ (the book indeed says little about Moscow’s efforts to impose meaning on Ukrainian events). Instead, they describe the focus of their work as ‘how agents engage in information management and strive to manage meaning in communication practice, the communicative tools they take advantage of, and the consequences this has for narrative construction’ (p. 11). Their central argument is that ‘information management and policy must be understood as stories or narratives told by a plurality of agents – journalists, PR professionals, political administrators, and many others’ (p. 13). The book describes how the construction of images and stories about Ukraine projected to international, English-speaking audiences occurred within a wide network, thus challenging the more state-centric view of strategic narrative formulation found in existing literature.
In chapter 1, the authors introduce some of the contentious theoretical and popular concepts that frame the process of meaning-making for international audiences. They correctly note that analysts ‘should avoid falling into the discursive trap of using the jargon of the object of analysis’ (p. 26), and should be conscious of the consequences of using concepts that are far from neutrally descriptive. The chapter explores the origins and usage of terms including ‘propaganda’, ‘public diplomacy’, ‘soft power’ and ‘nation-branding’, which are all loaded with normative assumptions one way or the other (the authors point out that propaganda has ‘toxic’ connotations, whereas the other words suggest phenomena that are ‘sweet’). Recognizing that such terms are problematic when used as analytical concepts (because they have become ‘stakes in a struggle for discursive dominance’, p. 44), the authors then build the conceptual framework for their own analysis around the ideas of narrative and media events – two concepts that have long histories in the media and communications literature – and also the management of meaning, defined by the authors as ‘an activity conducted by agents working with media technologies to construct narratives, discourses, and images’.
Chapter 2 identifies and maps relations between some of the agents involved in the management of meaning in Ukraine. The authors’ interviews with representatives from government ministries, PR agencies and civil society organizations show boundaries between these different spheres to be blurred, as certain key individuals occupied roles in both government and the corporate or non-profit sectors, and moved seamlessly from one to the other. The chapter describes how some efforts to communicate meaning about Ukraine were initiated by private individuals who approached state officials to launch their ideas. Overall, the chapter sketches a picture of the Ukrainian ‘informational state’ not as a monolithic entity, but as a network of agents interacting with the state authorities without clear coordination.
Chapters 3 and 4 then discuss, respectively, the tools and channels used to manage meaning in Ukraine, and some major media events that became the focus of meaning-management. Chapter 3 argues that images and fragments of meaning which underlie policy narratives are moulded via a range of technologies and presentational forms, and can circulate between media without (or before) necessarily becoming a stable story. The circulation of news images during Euromaidan, and the circulation of nation-branding symbols in PowerPoint presentations, are used as examples to illustrate how the mediation of signs and images can occur before narration. Chapter 4 considers whether the events of Euromaidan fit within the sequential structure proposed by media events theory, and concludes that the main departure is the absence of individual leaders driving events (Euromaidan was driven instead by the collective action of protesters). The chapter also gives a detailed account of attempts to use the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Kyiv to promote particular symbols and messages, highlighting ambiguity and humour in the tactics deployed by a variety of agents.
The fifth and final chapter of the book sums up the authors’ main conclusions and contributions. Conceptually, the chapter underlines the valid point that not all acts of communication form narratives (p. 119). The book shows that the making of meaning about a nation-state also involves the production and circulation of ‘snippets’, ‘textual fragments’ or ‘pre-forms’ of narratives by a loose network without hierarchy. Reflecting on their empirical observations, the authors suggest that Ukraine might represent ‘a new type of informational state’ in which ‘organization of information policy is decentred along network principles’ (p. 122). Based on these observations, they offer a critique of the existing literature on strategic narratives. They contend that ‘a view of narrative as part of an antagonistic discursive struggle seems too instrumental’ (p. 125) and pays insufficient attention to messier aspects of communicating a nation which they found in the Ukrainian case. Here, their argument seems heavily shaped by their sample of interviews, which appear to have little if any representation from the Presidential Administration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – two vital locations where the strategic goals of the state and of its international communication are formulated, and whose regular communications (via statements and press releases) tend to fit the strategic narrative model more closely. A noticeable omission throughout the analysis is that the resources and relative influence of communicative agents in the network are not scrutinized. Not all nodes in a network are equally powerful or well connected and not all nodes are mapped out here (the president and diplomats are neglected, for example). Nevertheless, the book provides a helpful conceptual distinction between narratives ‘as texts organized into sequences that have internal causal interrelations in which actors, contexts, and events are ordered in a meaningful way’, and textual fragments ‘that might point to the narrative but are not part of it’ (p. 127). The book should therefore appeal to scholars with a theoretical interest in how states communicate with international audiences, as well as regional specialists who study the relationship between state, civil society and the media in Ukraine.
