CSS Working Paper No.7 publishedConceptualizing Strategic NarrativesGabriel Mondragón Toledo, Holger Niemann, Jürgen Scheffran and Antje Wiener

29 September 2022, by CSS

Photo: CSS/unsplash

The seventh Working Paper in the CSS Working Paper Series has been published.

Conceptualizing strategic Narratives: The peace movement as a strategic respondent to Covid-19

Authors: Gabriel Mondragón Toledo, Holger Niemann, Jürgen Scheffran and Antje Wiener

Abstract: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the website ‘Humanitarian Disarmament’ issued an Open Letter calling for the reallocation of military spending to humanitarian causes. Soon, over 260 actors from a variety of policy areas collectively supported a common goal: peace and disarmament as a pathway to health. While disarmament has originally been a core issue of the peace movement, societal actors that do not necessarily belong to the peace movement have contributed to reframing the disarmament narrative as part of a broader and more inclusive concept of peace. We suggest that this move demonstrates an increasing awareness for the interdependencies and complexities of global environmental, socio-economic, political and military challenges as potential threats to peace. Furthermore, by analyzing the way the peace movement identifies and responds to the pandemic as a window of opportunity through a narrative shift, we zoom in on the connection between strategic narratives and social movements. This working paper is the first report from an interdisciplinary project at Universität Hamburg and it sets the conceptual grounds for a qualitative analysis of documents issued between 2020 and 2021 by the signatories of the Open Letter on COVID-19 and Humanitarian Disarmament. We set the methodological process that is used throughout the research where we focus on diagnostic and prognostic framing to identify how the international peace movement has strategically shifted its narrative in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19, pandemic, strategic narratives, trans-system social rupture, disarmament, peace movement, sustainable peace, social movements