Russia's strategical alignment of disinformation narratives and Nord Stream 2

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

The EUI International Relations Working Group hosts a session with PhD researcher Christiern Santos Rasmussen.

How do Russian disinformation narratives influence audiences' perceptions and do they do so uniformly? Despite substantial attention given to Russia disinformation campaigns targeting Western liberal democracies, the scholars of International Relations and Security Studies have echoed the same theoretical insights on the weaponisation of information while failing to develop a conceptual mechanism for the manipulation of audiences.

This study addresses this issue by bridging the concept of strategic narratives, i.e. states’ attempt of pushing certain interpretations of reality to foreign audiences, with the one of strategic framing alignment, i.e. when such interpretations are adapted to the intended audiences’ cultural context in hope of maximizing resonance and salience amongst them. The paper argues that Russia’s disinformation campaigns strategically aligns their disinformation narratives to increase resonance among intended audiences and furthers Russia's strategic goals. This argument leads to a theoretical expectation of narrative differentiation between audiences with different cultural contexts. The paper presents a comparative content analyses, one using the EUvsDisinfo-database of Russian disinformation and one focusing on articles published by Kremlin's major disinformation platform Sputnik on Russia's Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The inquiry explores the different Russian disinformation narratives between English, German and Polish audiences.

Speaker bio:

Christiern Santos Rasmussen is a third-year SPS researcher interested in Russia's strategic disinformation campaigns and its implications for societal resilience. He works on topics related to information and disinformation, international relations, communication and media, and computational social sciences.