The International Communication Association (ICA) holds its annual conference later this week here in Phoenix 24-28 May, and the CSC is sponsoring two events focused on strategic communication.  If you’re interested in strategic communication and in town for ICA, please consider these events.

First, the CSC has put together a back-to-back panel series on strategic communication in the public sector.  The first panel addresses theoretical and ethical issues and the second focuses on case studies (detailed panel descriptions below.)  The panels are scheduled to begin at 9:00am, Monday May 28, in the Sheraton Downtown Phoenix, in Room Maryvale B.

Second, the CSC will host a networking reception 8pm, Sunday May 27 at the Compass Room (located in the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 122 North 2nd Street, Phoenix, AZ) for scholars and practitioners of strategic communication.

We look forward to seeing you at both events.

State- and Supra-State-Sponsored Strategic Communication I:  Theories, Foundations and Ethics (Monday, May 28, 9:00 in Maryvale B)

Strategic communication is deeply intertwined in many of the pressing government policy action problems of the present day.   Consider US Secretary of State Clinton acknowledging to Congress that the US is losing the ‘battle of the narrative’ in Afghanistan or the Japanese government’s struggle to assure its own citizens and the world of the expediency of their crisis response. Consider, too, the challenges the UN has in formulating crisis and post-crisis intervention polices, or the challenges NATO faces in articulating to its constituent citizens and leaders the future direction of the organization.  These examples illustrate that strategic communication should be an intrinsic part of policy development, public diplomacy and crisis response among a number of governmental and supra-governmental agency actions. However, only modest attention has been paid to strategic communication in the public sector.

What are the foundational concepts and theories that inform our understanding of strategic communication in government contexts? What ethical concerns are involved when governments attempt to inform, persuade, or influence their citizens or other populations?  How should these concerns be addressed?  This panel explores definitional issues, theoretical considerations, methodological approaches and ethical concerns to come to a richer understanding of strategic communication in a government context.

State- and Supra-State-Sponsored Strategic Communication II:  Case Studies in Success and Failure (Monday, May 28, 10:30 in Maryvale B)

This panel uses case studies to explore the factors that lead to success or failure in strategic communication from states to their citizens. These cases include the American government’s communication about cancer prevention and control, the “War on Terror,” and concerning the prosecution of polygamy. Two papers have an international perspective, examining “The Singapore Story” as a narrative about the city-state that attempts to support its corporatist system of governance, and a comparative view of Singaporean and Indonesian responses to Islamist terrorist threats. What are the factors that make government-to-population communication successful? How do states use new forms of media to get their messages across? How do populations respond? What causes them to accept or reject the message, or act to support or oppose the campaign?

Other ICA Panels of Interest to Strategic Communication Scholars and Practitioners

Friday, May 25:

Corporate & Strategic Public Relations (12:00 in Alhambra)

New Era of Strategic Communication: Data & Algorithms (3:00 in Valley of the Sun E)

Creating Community, Achieving Mission (3:00 in Paradise Valley)

Saturday, May 26:

CSR Communication in Social Media: Theory, Cases, Research (9:00 in Alhambra)

Safety, Risk & Crisis Communication (10:30 in Alhambra)

Building Community Through Public Sector Orgs (4:45 in Valley Sun B)

Sunday, May 27

State-Press Relationships and Diplomacy (9:00 in Maryvale A)

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I’ll admit that I slip sometimes in everyday conversation and use the word “story” as a synonym for “narrative.” A lot of people do it. But I should know better. There’s an important difference between the two. For the average conversation the difference doesn’t really matter much. However, when it comes to strategic communication and understanding the role of narrative in messaging strategies, it’s a distinction that has to be made.

Explaining the difference between a story and a narrative can easily get bogged down in academic jargon. Eyes will glaze over. There might be some dismissive comments about the “ivory tower.” I think I can avoid this with a good example that illustrates the differences.

First, I want to give you a definition of narrative. We have a detailed definition in our book Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). But since we’re avoiding academic language here, let’s abbreviate it by defining narrative simply as a “system of stories.” That means that narratives are composed of multiple stories that relate to one another.

The aforementioned book also provides a nice academic definition of “story.” But again to keep things moving, I’ll abbreviate that too. Let’s define story simply as an “event unit.” It relates the ‘who, where, when and how’ of an event that occurred (or will occur if we’re talking about ‘prophecy,’ although prophecy is prefaced as something ‘revealed’ in the past). A narrative is made up of several of these interrelated “event units” that work together as a system. There’s no maximum number, but there is a minimum (at least two). And the system isn’t exclusive either. A narrative can have stories added, subtracted, and swapped out. Confused? Let’s get to that great example I told you about.

Talk to your average Christian at church on Sunday morning and ask him or her to tell you the “story” of Jesus (by which you actually mean “narrative”). The response is what we’ll call the “Jesus narrative.” Most readers probably already know the narrative. You’ve seen it depicted in a movie or two or three. It’ll start with Jesus being miraculously born to a virgin, Mary. The virgin birth (no, it’s not called the Immaculate Conception – that’s Mary’s birth, honest) is a story. It’s one story that operates within the system of stories that makeup the Jesus narrative.

Now if you open a Bible while you’re at church, you’ll find that the New Testament contains four different narratives about the life and mission of Jesus Christ. We call them the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. Each one of these Gospels contains similar but different narratives, which is why the Church fathers decided to include four Gospels instead of one. For example, the story (event unit) of the virgin birth is found in only two of the Gospels, namely Matthew and Luke. We won’t find it in the narratives of Mark or John. As you’ll recall, narratives aren’t exclusive. That means that when you ask someone at church to tell you about Jesus, the stories from all four Gospel narratives can come together to form a coherent system of stories, the Jesus narrative.

Let’s take another example. When I was a kid attending Risen Christ Lutheran Church in Rochester, New York, I was taught the Lord’s Prayer. It’s the one that starts, “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Jesus teaches this prayer to his disciples in the Jesus narrative. But again, if you pick up the Bible, you’re only going to find that story in the narratives of Matthew and Luke. You won’t find it in Mark and John. Additionally, the “Lord’s Prayer” I was taught, the one Christians use every week at Church, is only found in Matthew (6: 9-13).  It’s much shorter in Luke. This story unit from the Matthew narrative is freely incorporated with the stories of John, Luke, and Mark to form the system of stories we know as the Jesus narrative.

Seeing the distinctions between stories and narratives may sound like academic nit-picking. But it’s essential when it comes to organizing and making sense of narrative and the way people deploy or use them. Stories are pieces that can come and go, change, and morph, but the narrative remains.

When the narrative shows great resilience, we have “master narratives,” meaning narratives that have endured the test of time and become deeply embedded in culture. These are the most important narratives in strategic communication. People make use of them all the time. The American Revolution is a master narrative that we learn in grade school civics class, and it’s composed of a lot of stories like Paul Revere’s ride, Washington crossing the Delaware, the Boston Tea Party, and so on.  A modern political group calls itself the “Tea Party,” using revolutionary slogans, dressing up in period costumes, and so on.  They don’t do that for nothing:  Their aim is to invoke the values, thinking, and grievances of the American Revolution in the minds of people they hope to persuade.

When we look at the way extremists utilize master narratives, we can see the dynamics of the story system working. An extremist may invoke a master narrative as a whole while ignoring some stories it contains, to better serve his or her ideological goals.  For example, Islamist extremists like to call the U.S. and other Western countries Christian “crusaders” and liken themselves to the Muslim champion Saladin. However, Saladin was actually allied with Byzantine Christians against the Crusaders of the Holy Roman Church. It was hardly a cosmic clash of civilizations.

Recognizing these kinds of inconvenient stories allows us to subvert, refute, and disrupt extremists’ use of  narratives, perhaps by promoting a different variation of the story system that challenges their own.

* Jeffry R. Halverson is an Islamic studies scholar and an Assistant Research Professor in the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. He is the author of Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2010), Searching for a King: Muslim Nonviolence and the Future of Islam (Potomac 2012), and co-author of Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism (Palgrave Macmillan 2011).

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CSC researchers Pauline Cheong and Jeff Halverson have just published a paper in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism that will be of interest to readers of this blog.  The paper examines al Qaeda texts from 1996-2009 to determine strategies used by the group to construct a pro-radical identity for young Muslims.  The paper abstract is reproduced below.  The full article is available here (subscription required).

This article examines the discursive strategies employed by violent Islamist extremists to build a persuasive collective youth identity in their messages. Our analysis draws from strategic communication, social movement, and membership categorization theories to analyze youth references made in texts disseminated by al-Qaeda from 1996 – 2009. In these texts, “youth” is constructed via three main discursive strategies.

The first involves ascriptions of allegiance to a common belief system whereby militant actions are directed toward establishing a new sociopolitical order. Extremists envision revolutionary violence as the principle mechanism for change and an integral part of religious salvation. They see Muslim youth as the vanguard necessary to bring about the new social reality. The second utilizes descriptions of pious youth as “true believers” apart from “apostate” state regimes. Every conflict against hypocrites, unbelievers, or apostates in the Muslim world is a shared responsibility amongst the Muslim ummah (as a single nation) and not exclusive to individuals of a particular “nationality” or holders of a particular passport. The good youth fulfills his obligations as a member of this ummah. The third is through references to hagiographies of extremist martyrs which serve as moral exemplars and the formation of a distinctly jihadist tradition. The idealization of these men as warrior-saints or heroes serves the need for alternative militant paradigms among the violent extremist ranks, especially youths.

The article concludes with research directions to facilitate counter-narrative interventions, such as utilizing stories from Islamic history and the life of the Prophet Muhammad to disrupt extremist claims.

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I ran across an interesting research article in the most recent issue of the Journal of Communication entitled “‘Carrying online participation offline’–Mobilization by radical online groups and politically dissimilar offline ties.”*

The study looks at neo-Nazis and radical environmentalists (NN/RE) in the West, but because it potentially sheds some light on similar practices by online Muslim extremists, some of the findings deserve comment here.

One notable thing about the study is that it is based on a survey of actual participants in NN/RE Internet forums. The author sampled 517 e-mail and PM addresses form participants in 19 forums, and got usable responses from about 62% of them. That’s a surprising response rate. I don’t know about you, but if I were a neo-Nazi or radical environmentalist I wouldn’t be too keen to answer surveys about my participation in activities supporting my movement.

One question the study addresses is whether participation in the online groups has any effect on support and promotion of the movement in question. Results suggest that the answer is yes because the participation factor was “significant” (science-speak for “greater than expected by chance”). However the effects were very small, with level of participation in the group accounting for 4% of the variation in support for the movement, and 3.4% of the variation in promotion of the movement.

A flaw of the study, in my view, is that all the respondents were participants in a online group. Without a non-participant group for comparison the study can’t conclusively answer the question of how much participation increases mobilization.

More interesting are the study’s findings about the influence of offline relationships on the participants’ engagement. Specifically it asks whether family and friends influence political engagement and/or moderate the mobilizing influence of the online groups. The study classified a participant’s “core ties” (people they are very close to, such as family member) into three categories, those having high, moderate, and low similarity to their own political views. For participants with either the high- and low-similarity core ties, movement support, movement participation and online participation were attenuated.

The author repeated this analysis for “significant ties” (people, such as friends, to whom participants are close but not as close as with core ties). Here there were similar but smaller effects for movement support and online participation, but not movement promotion.  So what we might call “lesser” ties do not have as much of an effect as core ties.

These findings suggest that lots of interpersonal communication with close others reduces the tendency to put radical ideas into practice, if the close others are either radical or anti-radical. If they are more of a mixed bag then they tend not to have this effect. This is interesting because we would normally assume that a radical whose network of close relationships is also radical would perhaps be the most dangerous.  But this seems not to be the case, at least in this samlple.

If the study’s findings generalize, then radicals are perhaps most likely to mobilize as a result of online participation when they are in a social milieu that contains a lot of political diversity.  This would seem more likely if a radical is located in an urban environment. Could this help explain the tendency for radical Islamists to operate in large urban areas of Europe and the U.S.?

* by Magdalena Wojcieszak.  Journal of Communication, Vol. 59 (2009), pages 564-586.

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Worldpublicopinon.org has just released the results of a study of world opinion about who committed the 9/11 attacks.  On average, 46% think AQ did it, 15% think we did it to ourselves, 7% think Israel did it, 7% think someone else did it, and 25% don’t know.  Here is the complete breakdown graph from the study.

To be honest I am kind of surprised these numbers are as favorable to the U.S. as they are.  Nowhere do more people think we self-mutilated than think we were attacked.  The two places that come close are Turkey and Mexico, a NATO ally and a neighbor.  Both have about twice the number of conspiracy theorists as Egypt and Jorden.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!

The point made by the study’s authors is that there is no plurality judgment about who is responsible.  That is in itself kind of amazing, given that bin Laden has come out and said that he and his group did the deed.  Why people seem determined to search for a complex explanation in the face of a simple one is something I’ll never understand.

Speaking of which, I’m surprised the study did not include the United States, as we have a number of folks following the so-called 9/11 Truth Movement who think President Bush (or some conspiracy of which he’s a part)  blew up the Towers.  Matt Morris, a former student and COMOPS Journal contributor, just finished a thesis here studying this group.  His theory is that some people believe the U.S. Government is omnipotent, and they think something like 9/11 could not have happened if the government didn’t actively let it happen.  So strong is this belief that they select only those facts (and distort available facts) to fit this worldview.  It would be interesting to know if the same process is afoot in the international audience studied here.  I smell a dissertation topic here, Matt.

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Yesterday I participated in a Blogger’s Rountable discussion with Dr. Thomas Mahnken, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy, about the DoD’s Minerva program.  The audio from the roundtable was supposed to be up immediately after the event, but it’s not there  yet as I’m posting.  Perhaps it will be up by the time you read this.  The audio is now available here.

I wrote about the Minerva program following a previous roundtable discussion with Mahnken in May.   In the mean time the President of the American Anthropological Association complained about the program to OMB, asserting that the Pentagon has a “conflict of interest,” without explaining what that conflict is.  The letter said: “we believe it would be more efficient and more likely to produce authoritative results” if an agency like the NSF handled the review and awards. Now that’s a very interesting theory, that the agency handling the review and handing out the money–rather than the quality of the research itself–determines the authority of the results.

I think what’s really going on here is that that the anthropologists, who have an NSF division of their own, want to be sure they have control over the money (isn’t that a conflict of interest?).  Also many of their members are squeamish about taking money from the Big Bad DoD, and somehow the same money will be purified if it is routed through NSF.

In a press release yesterday, the AAA bragged that “the Pentagon was apparently listening” because they signed a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the NSF.  Well, not exactly.  The MOU is about future NSF programs.  The original Minerva program is going ahead as planned, with DoD organizing the reviews.

In the roundtable discussion, Mahnken bristled at the suggestion that DoD is automatically unqualified to manage this process.  He pointed out that there are lots of smart people in the DoD with PhDs in relevant  social science disciplines from impressive schools.  Pressed on who would be doing the reviews, he said that these folks, and possibly academics from outside who are willing to sign non-disclosure agreements, would be involved.

But he also said Minerva is about basic research, not applied research.  That was not what I had assumed, and in my view this tends to undermine his arguments about the qualifications of the DoD personnel to judge proposals.  They are academically trained practitioners, not professional researchers who keep up with the state of the art in science.  DoD wouldn’t consider academics who had completed coursework at the War College qualified to do war planning, would they?

I asked how the NSF program would be different from the program described in the current BAA.  Mahnken referred me to the NSF press release on the matter (which is pretty darn close to information-free) and also said it could include things like workshops.  I’m guessing that the specifics of the NSF program are still being worked out, and nobody knows for sure yet if and how it will be different from the current BAA.  Interestingly, he hinted that there could be other things to come besides the BAA and NSF program.

I asked if they were on-track to conclude the review and awards process for the current BAA before they turn into pumpkins in January.  He said yes, they have the schedule and capacity to get everything done by the end of the year.

I also asked if it was possible that an incoming administration could reel-back the awards.  Mahnken said he doubted they would do that, but when I pressed the question he couldn’t rule it out.  Call me a cynic, but I think there is a non-trivial chance that awards made in 2008 by the Bush Administration will be rescinded, cut back, or otherwise altered in 2009 by an Obama or McCain administration once the Driving Force of the program, Sec. Gates,  is (presumably) not there to push it.  Anyone getting an award will be wise to not count their chickens prematurely.

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I just got off a blogger’s roundtable teleconference with Thomas Mahnken, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning (hat-tip to Matt for the heads-up about it). He was discussing the Minerva program, outlined by Secretary Gates in a speech last month. Gates, a former university president, wants the social sciences more involved in helping fight the Bad Guys, so he is forming a program in the DoD that will fund consortia to do work in areas like:

• Chinese military and technology studies
• Iraqi terrorist perspectives
• Religious extremism and ideology studies
• Forming new disciplines (like “Kremlinology” during the Cold War)

My first reaction to the project is “Hooray! What took so long?” This seems to be part of a growing realization in the upper-reaches of the Department of Defense about the importance of soft power, which has been echoed by Gates, Joint Chiefs Chair Mullin, Deputy Under SecDef Michael Doran, and others.

But after hearing Mahnken describe the likely parameters of the program, I’m less optimistic that it will produce significant breakthroughs any time soon. He cited likely funding in the range of $2 million to $3 million for multi-year projects involving multiple universities. Once you take off the indirect costs charged by all major universities on funded research, divide by x years times y universities, and hire translators to deal with foreign language documents, you’re not going to be left with much to spend on researchers and grad assistants to do the actual research. And this isn’t even considering projects that might do innovative things involving computers, which are even more expensive.

So kudos to DoD for wanting to fund important social science research on terrorism and other national security matters. But if they want research that will break new ground in a timely manner, they need to kick up the funding levels a few notches. Social science research is economical compared to other DoD research efforts, but it would be a mistake to try to do it on the cheap. Even tripling the planned award amounts, the Minerva tab would be dwarfed by development costs for any of several weapons systems that were never even deployed.

UPDATE:

Sharon Weinberger over at Danger Room picked up my post. First, a clarification. Sharon said:

If universities are hoping for a big paycheck, they should think again.

To be clear, I did not write the post because I am hoping for a big paycheck. Rather I think DoD has identified an important area where work is needed whether I get any of the money or not. Any level of funding would be welcome compared with what is out there now. But I scoped out a possible multi-year, multi-university project at the award levels being suggested, and concluded that DoD could probably not achieve the results they want/need at those levels.

Second, I disagree with her conclusion that DoD should not be the body to fund this. As I noted in my post, the Pentagon brass seem to be the only ones in the government who publicly recognize the need for this kind of work, probably because they’re most directly suffering consequences of not having it. They also have the money, and the ability to act quickly.

Third, to answer a couple of her queries: Why doesn’t State do it? They don’t have money, as any number of people there have told me recently.

Why doesn’t NSF do it? Their mission is to fund basic research whereas this is applied research. Furthermore, their normal planning horizon is something like 3 years. They take a year holding workshops just to design a program, which then has to be approved, which then has to get into their normal submission cycle, which has RFPs out for 6 months, then they take another 6-9 months reviewing and making awards. So they could be a long term solution at best. Also, they would have to take money away from other programs they deem important to fund this. If they thought of this as an important problem they would have launched programs years ago.

So again, I am not complaining about DoD and I think they’re is doing a good thing. But their funding levels should be higher if they envision robust projects that can produce significant results in a timely manner.

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