This policy paper explores a significant, but understudied, component of irregular warfare, namely, narrative statecraft. It begins with an overview of the concept of the “state”, provides a definition of narrative, and then elaborates on the instrument of narrative statecraft in a special operations context. Is “the state” a real thing? Judging by standard military organization and doctrine, the answer is an uncomplicated “yes.” War occurs between states that have a range of Diplomatic, Informational, Military, and Economic (DIME) capabilities. In the event that the D-I-E elements of power fail, the M is a last resort to either deter or compel an adversary to comply with a state’s will. The exceptions to this general rule occur (a) when states use non-kinetic, often clandestine or covert means to influence a state’s political system, and (b) when “non-state” actors generate the elements of power and seek control over populations, resources, and territory. When non-state actors turn violent, the M is sometimes brought in to engage in what is often described as population-centric warfare. Both of these are typically subsumed under the term Irregular Warfare because regular or normal warfare involves the preponderance of military capability organized into divisions, fleets, and wings all moving along contested fronts. In Irregular Warfare, there often is no front per se, just competition over people and resource flows. As a critical component of a state’s government, it is natural for the military to adopt a state-centric perspective of the international system, but it is a highly problematic assumption, especially for Special Operations conducted mainly in the realm of Irregular Warfare.

In contrast, International Relations theorist Colin Wight convincingly demonstrates that “There is never a point when the state project is completed within a given territory and thereafter operates according to its own fixed and inevitable logic…For, no matter how often constitutions and international law declare and attest to the unity and sovereignty of the state as a juridical subject, there are always conflicting patterns of relationships within states.”[i] In other words, scholars recognize that, while there is a certain regularity or predictable replication of human patterns of behavior underlying the entities called “states,” they are merely social fictions that exist by virtue of individuals’ daily decisions to continuously engage in the “patterns of relationships.”[ii] States, in this formulation are ideational – they exist in the minds of individuals whose aggregate beliefs and behaviors give them solidity and the ability to project DIME power to varying degrees. This formulation also provides a glimpse as to why strategic competitors use activities like Hybrid Warfare or the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to achieve strategic, political influence without firing a shot: change how populations think they should pattern their behaviors and older state structures might fracture or adapt to a new, more politically beneficial normal along the way.

These competing understandings of the state require a mediating concept because both have validity from different vantage points. One way to resolve this paradox is to view the state from the lens of “narrative statecraft,” which accepts both the reality of the state as a social construct but also the daily recreation and evolution of its form and practices through discourse and socio-political negotiation. While there is a great deal of social science behind this formulation, this paper will highlight a few key elements. First, it offers a definition of narrative, which is a launch point for appreciating individuals’ cognitive and emotional attachment to social structures. Second, it explains the dual meaning of statecraft, which takes into account both its external, or foreign policy, aspect and its internal, social construction aspect. Finally, it relates narrative statecraft to Special Operations both in the strategic competition and Counter Violent Extremist Organization (CVEO) missions.

Narrative Defined

Depending on the academic discipline, the term narrative can be defined in somewhat varying ways. At a recent CANSOFCOM and USSOCOM Joint Special Operations University symposium, narrative was defined for Special Operations as a collection of ideas and concepts (stories) that codify (attach) meaning to events and behaviors. This formulation emphasizes a few key elements. First, a narrative contains within it a collective framing that resonates among people. That is, ideas rarely have a unique and novel logic; rather, to resonate they must be embedded in a pre-existing stock of collective memory and knowledge.[iii] Narratives are, therefore, social and are often idiosyncratic as a result; indeed, even within society, stratification leads to increasingly novel stocks of knowledge as one moves from the more abstract national to the more specific local arenas. The use of the term “stories” is instructive because stories make often abstract ideas tangible. They contain history; timelines; plots; protagonists, antagonists, and problems; and a beginning, middle, and end. Stories often link challenges in the current environment to ones overcome in the past, or they frame the challenges in ways that enable listeners to imagine pathways to brighter futures.[iv] In some circumstances, stories can take on religious qualities that order moral and immoral categories of people, organizations, and behaviors. When stories of good and evil enter the picture – as is often the case in conflict situations – narratives can tightly delineate the boundaries of in-groups from out-groups.[v]

Second, narratives are constructed, which means that an actor or actors must engage in a battle of ideas and symbolism that causes members of the collective to frame or order events in a particular way. To attach meaning to events – or code a response – with respect to collective memory, the idea or story must plausibly resonate with members of the target audience.[vi] Emotion is often the most effective mechanism for attaching meaning to events because emotions often rise instantly while cognition – critically evaluating information – takes time as a deliberate effort.

Third, narratives imply a behavioral response. The purpose of a narrative – or a story – is to evoke a culturally appropriate behavior, to generate a reaction that attracts more and more people to a perspective. Without the behavioral component, the narrative lies effectively inert and could become overwhelmed over time by alternatives that better energize members of the in-group. Narratives, then, are heavily laden symbols that motivate behavior by activating norms and values within collective memory.[vii] Operationalizing Narrative is, therefore, the act of attaching (coding) meaning to information (ideas), events, and artifacts to create, adapt, reinforce, or change a psycho-social reality in a target audience to affect behavior. If the state is not a finished entity, forever being reconstructed, then narrative contests among different political and social actors within a state are part and parcel of the power struggles every society experiences for control over the institutions – and power – of the state.

Statecraft Defined

Statecraft is almost always associated with diplomacy because its root concept orients on how states interact with others and use their elements of national power to shape the world to their best abilities. The traditional meaning of statecraft is the application of all elements of national power to achieve a strategic political effect.[viii] The orientation here is on how states deal with external relations be they with other states, international organizations, corporations, and other non-state actors. In most cases, statecraft employs a range of diplomatic, economic, legal, financial, cultural, and increasingly technological capabilities to assert influence among or over other actors in the international system. Historically, the military was a key element in asserting national will and prerogative, but interstate conflict waned as a general phenomenon during the Cold War and was instead replaced by intrastate conflict, especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991.[ix] Despite the decline in interstate war, Western militaries, especially the United States, engaged in peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations in the context of complex peacekeeping crises in the 1990s, and then were employed in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Philippines, Somalia, Libya, Eastern Syria, and across the Sahel during twenty years of counterterrorism operations. Special Operations, in particular, became a major element of national power given its principal responsibility for the Irregular Warfare, population-centric counterterrorism operations across these conflicts. Statecraft, consequently, shifted heavily toward the military element of national power, much at the expense of other elements.[x]

The second meaning of statecraft is, quite literally, the crafting of the state. This internal orientation draws upon the notion of the daily (re)construction of what is called “the imagined community.” Benedict Anderson dubbed states – most all political communities, for that matter – imagined communities because people feel a strong affiliation and connection with others whom they will likely never meet. The deep sense of shared history, destiny, and culture is reinforced by shared symbols, language, news, entertainment, commerce, and territorial boundaries.[xi] This interpretation of statecraft as the crafting of the state returns to Wight’s statement that the state is never a completed entity. To cohere individuals together as a recognizable political community, there must be narratives justifying the imagined community. Indeed, narratives work among imagined communities precisely because they already share affection, collective memories, and symbols. It is generally easier to appeal to existing ones than craft wholly new ones for this reason. But new patterns of interaction, and the experiences and narratives they generate, create the potential for new imagined communities to form over time.

Narrative statecraft, then, can have two meanings. The first – and most relevant for Special Operations and Irregular Warfare – is the use of narrative in the perpetual (re)crafting of the imagined communities that constitute a state or a competing political community. Although states tend to replicate themselves as social regularities or patterns of behavior, they constantly experience small changes in behavior at the margins that, over time, can transmute “normal” social behavior. The social regularities or patterns of relationships form what Complexity Theory scholars describe as a positive feedback loop; people choose to replicate them because they have a logic rooted in history, culture, and experience.[xii] For Complexity scholars, replication exists at “the edge of chaos,” which means that mutations in patterns and behaviors naturally occur, most of which are too discreet or novel to gain large scale social traction. But sometimes the mutations make more sense or “flow” better with popular needs resulting in alternative positive feedback loops.[xiii] How people experience, think about, and act upon changes at “the edge of chaos” will depend on the narratives they hear contextualizing their meanings, which in the aggregate impact state behavior.[xiv]

The second meaning of narrative statecraft is the act of asserting influence over foreign states and populations through the alignment and propagation of stories and physical activities. A story that is not rooted in some sense of physical reality will lose resonance over time while a physical activity that happens without anyone ever knowing about it cannot meaningfully influence aggregate behavior. It is often hard for the military to appreciate, based on years of experience, doctrine, and culture, that good narrative statecraft requires the cognitive or perceptual effect to be the objective with physical activities serving in a supporting role. Typically in the military, it is the physical effect that is supported by the cognitive or psychological element. Narrative statecraft flips the prioritization, and even suggests more broadly that the military might play here a mainly supporting role since a non-kinetic, cognitive effect is the objective.

Is Narrative Statecraft a Special Operation?

How Special Operations might contribute to narrative statecraft first depends on what we imagine constitutes a “special operation.” If Special Operations are conflated with Special Operations Forces (SOF), such that Special Operations are what SOF do, then they will largely be constrained in this area due the predominant elite warrior, operator-centric paradigm of SOF. If, however, Special Operations are defined as military operations outside the normal range of Conventional Forces (CF) competencies, then they can adapt and evolve as CF capabilities change, and they can involve both SOF and non-SOF personnel.[xv]

Whether or in what ways narrative statecraft requires a Special Operations element depends on the objective. Some initiatives might require shaping activities by clandestine or low visibility military forces for which SOF would be uniquely qualified or positioned. Other initiatives might be predominantly interagency, publicly messaged, and simply require organic military transportation or civil reconnaissance where SOF already operate. Still other activities might require specially trained, culturally attuned soldiers with an organic information capability living in austere conditions. The key is to determine the narrative effect first, and then determine the mix of SOF, CF, or non-military contributors that can underpin the effect with tangible activities. The more unique the mixture based on local conditions, the more likely the activity would fall under the rubric of a Special Operation.

The concept of narrative statecraft offered here indicates a strong overlap in the strategic competition and CVEO Irregular Warfare, or Gray Zone, challenges. Rather than a “countering” mindset, narrative statecraft has an overtly proactive, shaping connotation. Whether it is Russia’s Hybrid Warfare approach that first utilizes cognitive and social movement techniques to prepare the environment politically[xvi] or the Chinese Communist Party’s implementation of geoeconomic and strategic communication policies to prepare the environment politically,[xvii] the objective is the same – to change the perception of power through narrative supported by physical activities.[xviii] Changing the patterns of relationships at the margins can provide the networks and experiences to substantiate the proffered narratives. The only way to mitigate their effectiveness is to propagate alternatives with even greater utility to larger networks of people; that is, to engage in “nurture network” operations. A countering mindset cannot accomplish this political effect, and the fact that political effect is the objective, the task fits squarely within the context of Irregular Warfare.

This is similarly true with CVEO operations. Violent extremists are often effective because they can identify and exploit local grievances utilizing larger covering narratives. When governments are perceived to be weak, ineffective, corrupt, or even threatening, competing narratives and structural solutions become viable. Simply supporting such governments to excise “the terrorist threat” and extend its reach are insufficient because positive feedback loops initiated by the extremists tend to have taken root. Something else will fill the void. The narrative statecraft approach recognizes the need to adapt governance (as opposed to government) based on local history, conditions, and preferences to potentially improve the crafting of the state,[xix] and, therefore, a more resilient imagined community.

Narrative Statecraft-Capable Special Operations Forces

Competency in narrative statecraft would require specially assessed, selected, and educated personnel. Based on the exemplar citations in this primer, it is likely that narrative statecraft-capable SOF teams would need advanced training in several different social sciences. At a minimum teams would need to be comprised of personalities that enjoy ethnographic studies, sociology, history, political science, anthropology, linguistics, and/or ecology. If change occurs in societies at “the edge of chaos,” then sensitivity to local conditions becomes paramount. This requires SOF who as a natural disposition are able to read about and analyze cultures, social structures, and sociological patterns and then co-create with Joint, Interagency, Intergovernmental, Multilateral, and Civil Society partners interventions that validate the narrative statecraft effect. Many personnel within the Special Operations enterprise already have a natural predilection for such work, but their numbers are likely too limited given the potential need. Sensitivity to narrative statecraft requirements should play a part in future force generation discussions.

David C. Ellis is a Research Professor at the Joint Special Operations University (JSOU). Dr. Ellis’s research on democratization and development in identity conflict spans over two decades. He served as an intelligence analyst in the USSOCOM J2, deployed to Afghanistan in support of Special Operations Forces from 2010–2011, and joined JSOU in 2016. His current research focuses on the intersection of complexity, organizational learning within the special operations community, and integrated statecraft.

 End Notes

[i] Colin Wight, Agents, Structures, and International Relations: Politics as Ontology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 224-225.

[ii] On “regularities” in social science, see Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1995).

[iii] Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 41-45.

[iv] Karl E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), 127-131.

[v] Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 53-55.

[vi] See, for instance, Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001) and V.P. Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

[vii] Stuart J. Kaufman, “War as Symbolic Politics,” International Studies Quarterly 63 (2019), 614–625.

[viii] Charles W. Freeman, Jr., Arts of Power: Statecraft and Diplomacy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1997). Freeman states, “Statecraft translates national interests and concerns into national goals and strategies. It accumulates and applies the power of the state to other states and peoples to achieve these goals and strategies. Statecraft is the strategy of power” (page 3). He continues, “It is, however, not enough for statesmen merely to assess the balance of perceived power and of power itself. They must act to enhance both. They thereby expand their options for strategy” (page 21). Note here the inclusion of the idea of “perceived power,” which directly correlates to the necessity of narrative as a component of external statecraft.

[ix] T. David Mason, “Globalization, Democratization, and the Prospects for Civil War in the New Millennium,” International Studies Review 5, #4 (2003), 19-35. While incidents of interstate conflict declined during this period, others note that total battle deaths and severity of interstate, intrastate, and extra-state conflict remain historically elevated. See Meredith Reid Sarkees, Frank Whelon Wayman, and J. David Singer, “Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816-1997,” International Studies Quarterly 47, #1 (2003), 49-70.

[x] Robert D. Blackwell and Jennifer M. Harris, War by Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016).

[xi] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).

[xii] Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field offer excellent sociological explanations on this point. For a brief introduction, see Pierre Bourdieu, Habitus and Field: General Sociology, Volume 2, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-83 (Medford: Polity Press, 2020), 1-22.

[xiii] For an excellent review of Complexity Theory applied to International Relations, see John Urry, Global Complexity (Malden: Polity Press, 2003). On positive feedback loops, see pages 26-28 and 55-56.

[xiv] Evolutionary Governance Theory represents an academic approach to this concept of narrative statecraft. See Raoul Beunen, Kristof Van Assche, and Martijn Duineveld, eds., Evolutionary Governance Theory: Theory and Applications (New York: Springer, 2015).

[xv] Tom Searle, Outside the Box: A New General Theory of Special Operations (Tampa: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2017).

[xvi] Jānis Bērziņš, “Russia’s New Generation Warfare in Ukraine: Implications for Latvian Defense Policy,” Center for Security and Strategic Research, National Defence Academy of Latvia, Policy Paper #02 (April 2014). Available at https://www.sldinfo.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/New-Generation-Warfare.pdf

[xvii] David Scott, “China’s Public Diplomacy Rhetoric, 1990–2012: Pragmatic Image-Crafting,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 26 (2015), 250; Bonnie S. Glaser and Evan S. Medeiros, “The Changing Ecology of Foreign Policy-Making in China: The Ascension and Demise of the Theory of ‘Peaceful Rise’,” The China Quarterly 190 (June 2007), 294-295.

[xviii] For discussion on how to conceptualize relative power, see Michael Beckley, “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters,” International Security 43, #2 (2018), 7–44.

[xix] Margaret H. Ariotti and Kevin T. Fridy, Informal Governance as a Force Multiplier in Counterterrorism: Evidence for Burkina Faso (Tampa: Joint Special Operations University Press, 2020).

Published: Jan 12, 2022

"The views expressed in this publication are entirely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views, policy, or position of the United States Government, Department of Defense, United States Special Operations Command, or the Joint Special Operations University.”

more with David C. Ellis: