Readers in almost every country in the world have spent the past few decades following the same handful of wars, but the story they have been told depends a great deal on where they happen to be reading it. A single conflict can reach one country's news as an unprovoked invasion and another's as a response to provocation, and whichever version takes hold goes on to shape what the public there is willing to support, and what it expects its leaders to do.
Michal Parízek, Associate Professor at Charles University in Prague, wants to understand how far apart those stories drift, and why which version people believe matters. This autumn term, he is at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences as a Fernand Braudel Fellow through the EUI Widening Europe Programme, building a research agenda on how global conflicts, military and economic alike, are narrated in news media across the globe.
In an interview, we asked Professor Parízek what his research aims to uncover, and why these differences are important.
Could you please start by telling us a little about the research project you are developing during your fellowship at the EUI? What are you hoping to understand?
I work on narratives of global conflict in public debates across the world, by which I mean how major global conflicts are covered, particularly in the news media, in practically every country. There is already research under way on this with my colleagues at Charles University in Prague within my project GLOWIN, and I want to build on it and establish a broader research agenda. In my previous work, I developed a dataset with samples of news content from almost all the countries of the world, so we now have millions of potentially relevant articles about some of the major conflicts of our time. These include the war in Ukraine and the wars in the Middle East, but also non-military conflicts, such as the trade wars between the United States and the EU, Canada, China, and others. The idea is to use this material to learn how the same conflicts are narrated in radically different ways in different parts of the world.
Being here as a Fernand Braudel Fellow within the Widening Europe Programme gives me the chance to meet great scholars and to discuss some of the most challenging technical, methodological, and theoretical questions connected with my research, and I am very grateful for that opportunity.
A key idea in the project is that the same global conflict can be understood or discussed differently in different countries. What does this look like in practice, and what can these differences tell us about how people make sense of international conflicts?
If you think of the most contentious issues in world politics, political representatives and the public in different parts of the world often hold radically different interpretations of what caused a conflict. They disagree about who is to blame, who should pay the price, who should back down, and how a particular war, or a particular dispute over financial resources, ought to be settled. In practice, what we are trying to do is map the competing narratives that media across the world use to highlight different aspects of these conflicts: their causes, their current state, and what they mean for world politics.
Take the war in Ukraine, which many of us have been following for years now. There are two major competing narratives. One says that the war is an act of Russian imperial aggression against a sovereign nation, and that it is imposing massive human costs on the Ukrainian people. The implication is that if the war is to end, Russia needs to withdraw its troops and stop its aggression, and that it should pay a price for what it has done. This has serious consequences for the policies we adopt towards Russia, and supporting Ukraine in its defence follows directly from this interpretation.
The other interpretation says that the war is the fault of Western countries, which have been too eager to expand eastwards, too close to Russia's core sphere of influence. This is the argument promoted by Russia in particular, and what follows from it is radically different. The implication is that withdrawing support from Ukraine is the right way to go, and that appeasing Russian aggression would somehow bring the conflict to an end and lead to a new order. Unfortunately, in my view, some political leaders across the world are subscribing to it.
So, it matters which of these interpretations prevails, both in the countries directly concerned, such as the European countries that are heavily supporting Ukraine's defence, and in many countries in the Global South. It will have consequences for the war itself, but also in the long term.
You plan to use large language models to study news coverage across different countries. What does this approach make possible that would be difficult to do using more traditional research methods?
In one word, scale. Large language models allow us to carry out the kind of analysis that researchers have traditionally done by hand, reading news articles and classifying them one by one, which is known as content analysis. But as I mentioned, we are working with millions of texts. Human researchers can analyse hundreds, perhaps thousands, of texts, but they cannot analyse millions. Large language models let us trace the different narratives of these wars at that scale, and their results are comparable to those of trained human readers.
You are interested not only in how conflicts such as the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are discussed in the media, but also in which narratives people find credible. Why is it important to look at how audiences respond to these different narratives?
I would say there are two major reasons. The first is domestic politics. As conflicts become costly, whether they are military or economic, or conflicts over how to deal with climate change, they become part of political debate at home. It matters how the public understands their root causes and their implications, and whether it thinks they are worth the cost. Ultimately, through elections, that shapes how states act in foreign policy.
The second reason is the long-term implications for the international order. Which views of a conflict come to prevail, in individual parts of the world or even globally, matters for how the actions of those involved will be interpreted in the future. We know that the narratives of previous wars live on. Think of the Iraq war in 2003, whose narratives continue to shape international politics today. The sense of who was in the right in a particular conflict, and whether the actions of European states, for example, were legitimate or not, will have an impact on world politics for years and decades to come. So, we are not only researching what happens today, but also what world politics will look like in the future.
Michal Parízek visited the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences in September 2026, through the EUI Widening Europe Programme-funded Fernand Braudel Fellowship. He is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of International Relations at the Institute of Political Studies, Charles University. He has lead the Global Flows of Political Information (GLOWIN) project. His research on international organisations, global trade, and the flow of political information across borders has appeared in journals including International Studies Quarterly, the Review of International Organizations, and the Journal of European Public Policy. He is the author of Negotiations in the World Trade Organization: Design and Performance (Routledge, 2020).
The Fernand Braudel Fellowship special call for applications was launched in the framework of the EUI Widening Europe Programme, which is supported by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States. The programme is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in targeted Widening countries.