WAR NARRATIVE: DEFINITION AND STRUCTURE (IN THE CONTEXT OF MODERN ARMED CONFLICTS)

Abstract

Modern armed conflicts are characterized by their “hybrid” nature, which is manifested in the use of both conventional and non-conventional methods of warfare, which often include means of influencing the enemy. The implementation of this influence in the social networks, and media is aimed at affecting the cognitive or socio-cognitive dimension of target audiences, which in turn leads to a change in perception, attitude, and outlook on the conflict. One of the instruments of such influence is the “narrative”, a concept that in the context of hybrid warfare acquires a new meaning, going beyond the purely narrative discourse.The purpose of the study is to conceptualize the term “war narrative” and develop its preliminary level model. To achieve this goal, various approaches to the interpretation of narrative in the humanities, in particular in narratology and philosophy, are considered. Special attention is given to the role of narratives in the field of strategic communications and the concept of “strategic narrative”, which is most widely used in the context of military communication.The analysis has revealed that the concept of “war narrative” should integrate approaches to the term’s interpretation from different sciences while expanding its scope. With this in mind, we propose the following definition of the term “war narrative”: a special multimodal message about the war created to influence the target audience.We distinguish its three levels: macro-level (message level), meso-level (implementation level), and micro-level (level of the smallest component structures).The proposed definition and conceptual model can serve as a basis for several interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, including linguistics. Future research on the “narrative of war” may focus on further conceptualization and operationalization of the concept at its various levels, typology of war narratives of modern armed conflicts, in particular the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the use of discourse analysis methods, corpus technologies and approaches of pragmatics and cognitive pragmatics to analyze war narratives and their features.