Interim report of the CSS Working Group "A Pandemic Peace"

2 September 2021, by CSS

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This interim report presents the current progress of the working group “A Pandemic Peace” at the Center for Sustainable Society Research (CSS).

What are the goals of the working group?

The CSS Working Group “ A Pandemic Peace. Narrative Shift in Discursive Disarmament Strategies” investigates the way in which the peace movement perceives and uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a window of opportunity to seek public support to achieve its goals. To obtain a better understanding of a major strategy employed by the peace movement, the Working Group explores the narratives to determine how an external disruptive event can affect narratives within social movements. In this research, the members of the Working Group analyze the link that the peace movement has establisheding between the pandemic and questions of peace and disarmament. Methodologically, the Working Group uses content analysis to analyse documents related to the nexus of peace and health issued by social movements since the beginning of the pandemic. Future research build on these findings could potentially evaluate whether the shift of narratives led to a shift of respective disarmament policies.

The Working Group has three goals for the two-year project that have already been partly achieved. First, the Working Group has created a document database of documents issued by organizations within the peace movement that are constructing their narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic. This provides the Working Group with enough data to analyze the narratives within the peace movement and to identify whether there is a shift in narrative or not. Second, the Working Group has designed a codebook to systematically code the documents. By doing so, the Working Group is able to scientifically analyze the narratives within the documents. Third, once the data is analyzed, the Working Group will publish their findings on strategic narrative construction around major external disruptive events.

What does the work of the Working Group mean for research and for society as a whole in relation to the sustainable development of society?

With this research, the Working Group seeks to develop an approach to narrative shifts that bridges existing literature on strategic narratives, social movements and external disruptive events. By doing so, the Working Group aims at contributing to International Relations, social movement studies, narratives, peace studies, and health diplomacy. The Working Group therefore explores how the COVID-19 pandemic is perceived and used as a window of opportunity by the peace movement and how it reacts to it as a strategic respondent through narratives.

This project relates to questions of sustainable development of society in two different but interconnected ways. First, regarding the substance of sustainable development, it emphasizes a much broader understanding of peace that relies on linkages between disarmament, peace, health, and sustainability. Second, by focusing on the peace movement, the project also demonstrates how social movements, as key societal actors working towards the sustainable development, were able to cope with the challenging conditions of the pandemic that have been described as a critical juncture for civil society and social movements. The project highlights how social movements, characterized as strategic respondents, have been able to creatively deal with these challenging circumstances at the narrative level.

What has been achieved so far?

In light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the different problems that were either being worsened by it or deriving from it, particularly in areas afflicted by armed conflicts, the peace movement and other social movements issued an Open Letter on COVID-19 and Humanitarian Disarmament. By looking at narratives by the almost 300 organizations signing that letter, the Working Group is able to analyse a broad variety of contributions that all at the same time deliberately contributed to a global narrative on a pandemic peace by signing the open letter.

Given it provides access to a wide variety of actors that addressed disarmament and the global health crisis as joint issues, the Working Group looked into the letter as a starting point for their analysis. They collected documents from organizations that signed the Humanitarian Disarmament Open Letter. After doing so, the Working Groups was able to gather 220 documents from 53 organizations, creating therefore a comprehensive text corpus. Based on their theoretical and methodological premises, the Working Group designed a codebook that provides a systematic entry point to the documents.

The Open Letter gathered organizations working on a wide variety of policy areas who were now supporting a common cause: disarmament as a pathway to health. The Working Group was surprised that an issue such as disarmament, which usually is a niche topic for a small group of experts only, was able to motivate such a huge and diverse group of organizations to gather around one common mission. It was surprising to see the number of organizations connecting the COVID-19 pandemic with disarmament and arms control through narrative construction.

What are the next steps for the Working Group?

For their next steps, the Working Group aims at publishing a working paper within the Working Paper Series of the CSS in order to present their theoretical and analytical framework. At the same time, they will finish coding the documents in order to establish content categories, and then analyse the data by identifying framings and narratives constructed by the peace movement. After the analysis, the Working Group will be able to publish the results of the research in a scientific medium of international reach.