Strategic stories: weaponized or worldmaking?

The deployment of strategic stories, that is, stories designed to prevail over adversaries, is at work in domestic politics as well diplomacy. In both cases, the strategy has two aims: create a division between ‘us’ and ‘them’, same time ascribe moral supremacy ‘our side’ while posing ‘their an existential threat. Strategic storytelling specialises discrimination foe creation, but nature actors involved changed digital era. Now, ‘we’ ‘they’ are organised into decentralised mediated classes based on common identities, enabling collective action planetary scale (e.g. climate activism, gender ethnic justice, far-right extremism). At time, media platforms news organisations part apparatus by which narratives weaponised for warfare. Thus, I argue, analysis needs understand ‘strategic turn’ storytelling, its states ‘non-state actors’ alike, this case, media. Alternative models worldmaking, popular culture acts pedagogic platform class formation enter ecology narrative already weapon war – where it’s aircraft carriers, all way down.