Public Perception of International Crises
By Dmitry Chernobrov
How do people make sense of distant but disturbing international events, and why are some representations more appealing than others?
International crises are typically accompanied by a rush to provide an explanation that would reimagine uncertain events as familiar and predictable. The past several years alone have seen widespread references to a ‘new Cold War’, the ‘rise of populism’ in European and US politics, the appearance of ‘global terrorism’, and descriptions of the mass protests and uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East as an ‘Arab Spring’ or ‘awakening’. Events that underlie these labels are usually complex and dynamic; however, certain simple and seemingly final explanations become widely accepted and reproduced, with significant consequences for both society and policy. In the time of increased political participation, new and complex conflicts, global media, citizen journalism, and mass protest movements, public perception of international crises is particularly important.
“How do we explain popular interpretations of international crises through their relation to the societal self-definitions and identity processes?”
My book, Public Perception of Crises in International Politics, confronts one of the common assumptions in international relations, that perception describes the object. International representations, images of countries and communities, and political memories are almost exclusively questioned at the level of accuracy. In politics, perceptions can result in decision-making errors, over- or underestimations of threat, and even conflict. They seem to be poor descriptions of events and objects in question, but there is a common expectation that negative consequences could be at least partially rectified if only better or fuller information were available. For media, verification, the avoidance of bias and the pursuit of balance and accuracy are some of the key issues in international crisis reporting. At the societal level, inaccurate perceptions tend to be blamed as stereotypical or prejudiced — in other words, misrepresenting the true nature of the people they are describing. Or recent societal divisions over Brexit and Trump, for example, have been widely attributed to deception, lies, and manipulation — in other words, misleading descriptions of reality. But what would it mean for our understanding of popular attitudes if public perception of international events is based not so much on the information about them but on the anxieties, self-understandings, memories, and values that are important to the perceiver?
This book uses the case of the Western and Russian popular explanations of the Arab uprisings to rethink public perception of turbulent international events. The uprisings drew wide international attention and were initially viewed with strong sympathy by Western politicians, media, and publics, and with almost equal suspicion in Russia — a contrast with consequences for global politics, considering the on-going Syrian crisis. In 2011–2012, the rhetoric of hope, opportunity, and democracy was prevalent in British and American political and media representations of the Arab Spring. Meanwhile, Russia accused the West of dangerously destabilising the region. By the end of 2011, 67 per cent of Britons and only 31 per cent of Russians viewed the Arab Spring favourably (GlobeScan 2011). How did the societies behind these numbers understand, imagine, and remember these events? And was the difference in public attitudes simply the result of opposite national interests, political rhetoric, and media effect?
Public Perception of International Crises offers a new and widely applicable framework that explains popular interpretations of international crises through their relation to the societal self-definitions and identity processes. I argue that societies seek to maintain positive and continuous self-conceptions in their political imagining of distant others and use this imagining as a source of security and empowerment. In doing so, they may interpret international events in ways that depart significantly from complex reality. I compare the British and Russian public perception of the Arab uprisings and show how it was shaped by more than the events themselves. This book contends that both in and beyond this case, international public perceptions are unconsciously introverted and cannot break free of the perceiver’s own identity, presenting a psychosocial ‘unfreedom’ of how societies at large — or those we could consider the general public — understand international politics.
The ultimate aim of the book is therefore to lay bare the presence of a drawing self in the imagining of distant others by the general public and demonstrate the dependence between perception, identity security, and self-conceptions in a new and comprehensive way. Questioning the assumption that perception describes the object, this book explores the role and motivation of the subject in upholding certain visions of the international. To justify this approach, I provide an account of how identity interacts with the uncertainty of unexpected international events and the insecurities that accompany them.
I define crises as events that disrupt predictable and therefore controllable routines. They question what is normal and expected and, besides often presenting a physical threat, challenge our understandings of the world and ourselves in it. In other words, crises present situations of instability, uncertainty, and disempowerment as the inability to fully control one’s circumstances. I focus on crises that are international in two main aspects. First, these are crises that involve different states, communities or groups and their physical or symbolic boundaries. In international politics — which itself is an organising vision of the world that already defines some of its actors — these are often nations. However, the argument of this book stretches beyond perception of nations or by nations and allows for multi-layered, flexible, and constantly renegotiated understandings of selves and others in the space we call international. Second, international crises are those that are distant — they happen beyond the immediate vicinity of our geographical and cultural areas, social and political knowledge, or confidence of established practices. Because they are distant, these are crises that tend to be imagined rather than directly experienced by the general public. For analysts of public perception, this creates an expectation that media and political representations of distant events act as a principal source of information about them and, therefore, shape their popular interpretation. I see my task in questioning the presence and role of our own identity and self-conceptions in how we imagine unexpected and distant events. They are, in many respects, the unknown which is made known through relating distant events to familiar experiences. The book suggests that consequently, the perceiver’s self-conceptions are unconsciously but centrally present in judgements and perceptions of international others.
Ever since Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion (1922), the analysis of societal attitudes to political events has been a rich scholarly field. And yet, most studies have considered public opinion in the context of elections and particular policies or explained it by attributing its source to political or media framing and major demographic factors. There is now a breadth of knowledge about how event representations are constructed or how political and media framing is meant by its communicators. There is much less understanding beyond the faceless or generalised data of opinion trends of how these representations are actually heard by the crowd, or how the general public interprets international crises in its own, original ways. In this book, I observe how societies follow, reject, or rework dominant media and political representations and, most importantly, how they come up with self-informed explanations for the crises that make the distant other close and familiar.
Collective identities — or the communities of people united by the subjective sense of common belonging and inner imagining — are central to public perception of international events. Making sense of complex international crises is a process in which self and other identities are constructed, and multiple others become idealised, repelled, accepted, or rejected. Vast literature has illustrated how self-identity develops through contrast with otherness, making both self and other present in the representations of the international. Identities are an inherent part of describing international events and their agents, while news about these events is received in complex social contexts. Belonging involves constructing a narrative about the self, and societies and states alike pursue continuity of these narratives in clear preference for what some political studies have theorised as ontological security and routines. The unexpectedness and uncertainty of international crises have the power to disrupt, or at least to question these narratives. The stability and security of identity become dependent on the ability to ‘know’ the unknown — or, rather, to create an illusion of recognising the new events as familiar within our established systems of meaning — a process that this book proposes to call (mis)recognition.
“Public perception of international crises is a challenge of both relating to the actual event and affirming the continuous and positive narrative about the self.”
With few exceptions, identities tend to ground themselves in positive narratives, leading communities to defend idealised self-definitions when faced with alternative practices or uncertainty. A virtuous vision of the self is upheld through the selective remembering and forgetting of the past and through the construction of discourses about the present, where such positive self-conceptions enable empowerment. Notable examples of such discourses include Orientalism with its positive and modern identity of the Westerner (Said 1979), the discourse of international development that affirms the model of Western progress (Escobar 1995), and a multitude of cases when conflicts and crises have been selectively remembered to portray nations and other communities in the best possible light (Todorov 2003). Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1984) Distinction, I demonstrate how communities wish not only to appear positive, but also to inspire imitation while remaining unreachable. I argue that public perception of international crises, which happens in a collective identity context, is a challenge of both relating to the actual event and affirming the continuous and positive narrative about the self. The key contribution of this book is that societies imagine distant events as affirming and validating their self-concepts, instead of pursuing accuracy in event descriptions.
This argument draws on an interdisciplinary combination of international relations, social psychology, media and audience studies, and psychosocial approaches. Public Perception of International Crises is not alone in the application of a psychosocial lens to aspects of politics. Yet, it is original in its inclusion of psychosocial insights to argue the relational nature of international perceptions. The book applies psychosocial theory in two main aspects: to explain the role of anxiety in identity and perception, and to connect perceptions to memories and emotions.
The book argues that perception, as the process of interpreting information in a meaningful fashion, involves dealing with varying levels of anxiety caused by uncertainty. Anxiety is also inherent to collective identity constructions as their boundaries and continuity in time are constantly questioned. In psychoanalysis, attaching anxiety to a specific object confines the threat to a situation that can then be controlled. In public perception of international crises, (mis)recognising uncertainty as something familiar and predictable preserves the stability and continuity of social and political meanings and enables action. Inaccurate, but self-affirming and familiar representations can present appealing sources of empowerment and security.
Psychoanalysis also suggests that the present is deeply rooted in the past. Remembering and working through past troubling experiences is the starting point of psychoanalytic inquiry. This does not only apply to individuals: communities also create narratives, preserve memories, and transmit traumas — that is, they share emotions of selective past interactions. Perception reflects how the object exists through the eyes of the subject and involves imagining or stressing some of its qualities over others. Perception distorts and reworks the object through our own selective and subjective experiences, where the past is inherently present in the anticipation of its reoccurrence. This book aims to provide an analysis of public perception centred on the drawing self, which by means of imagining others relates them to itself and to its own past-present.
Methodologically, this book builds on over 50 original semi-structured interviews with the communities in the UK and Russia about their understanding of the Arab uprisings. These interviews were conducted at the time of the crises and are further situated into the wider social and political narratives and public opinion trends in the two countries. I combine interview analysis with public comments to online news stories, survey data, and a variety of media materials and political statements. I also look beyond one crisis — to the public interpretations of disturbing international events both before and after the Arab uprisings. Public perception of these events and their agents were framed in the language and memories about the self. Interviewees focused on elements of the crisis that touched, imitated, or contradicted their own histories and identity choices, and these histories filled in any uncertain gaps in the other. (Mis)recognising the rebels as either prodemocracy fighters or terrorists destabilising the region with the support of the West reflected societal anxieties about particular experiences and offered familiar explanations of uncertain but troubling events. I explain the initial popular Western approval of the Arab Spring rebel and the opposite public opinion in Russia through the prism of how these societies related these largely unexpected events to their key identity narratives of democracy and stability and protected their continuous and positive self-conceptions.
Public Perception of International Crises offers detailed evidence of a drawing self behind its portraits of others. This approach is novel to theories of political and international perception. With few exceptions, the existing analysis of international perceptions tends to explain public understanding of crises through the qualities of the event itself and treats perception as the event’s description. I show political imagining to be shaped by the insecurities, anxieties, and histories of the perceiver’s own identity, rather than by the distant other and its qualities. The book argues that images and narratives about others cannot be understood by mere focusing on these others or treating the perceivers’ own identity as fixed: understanding the dynamic inner motivation of the drawing self in political imagining should be an inherent part of a comprehensive analysis of public perception.
This argument opens the way for a rethinking of public perception of international crises and international politics more broadly. The book sheds new light on the origins and appeal of particular narratives and the psychosocial dynamics of collective identity, with potential applications to international relations, political communication, campaigning, social reconciliation strategies, and combatting prejudice or conspiracies. Opportunities for anticipating or changing popular attitudes without taking into account the (un)conscious societal need for positive and continuous self-conceptions are severely limited. Narratives that fail to do so will either be rejected or will evolve away from the intended message to accommodate these motivations, as the book demonstrates on several examples. On the other hand, those representations of international events that help maintain positive and stable self-concepts may be particularly convincing, even if inaccurate or conspiratorial.
Public Perception of International Crises aims to open new debates about the forms and motivations of popular political imagining that would rethink perception as a relation rather than a description. Public opinion, nationalism, post-conflict societies, and broadly viewed international encounters can be understood more effectively if the societal need for continuous and positive self-definitions is recognised.
The preceding article was adapted from the introduction to Public Perception of International Crises: Identity, Ontological Security and Self-Affirmation winner of the Furniss Book Award in International Security Studies.
The book, written by Dr. Dmitry Chernobrov and published by Rowman & Littlefield, is now available in paperback.
Dr. Dmitry Chernobrov is Lecturer in Media and International Politics at the University of Sheffield. Find out more about Dmitry here or on his Twitter page.
