https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9638-2434
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines representations of the ongoing conflict in and around Ukraine by scholars and policy analysts in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, and Poland. Combining strategic narrative analysis and conceptual morphology, we deconstruct the main narratives of the conflict, identify the structural concepts of each narrative and analyze their use. We identify six key narratives of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict according to their presentation of what happened and their proposed way out of the conflict. In each country, the predominant approaches reflect a certain degree of coherence between political preferences and academic/analytical ideas.
Acknowledgments
Research for this article was funded by the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The authors would also like to thank the journal’s editor and two anonymous reviewers for their critical but encouraging comments on earlier drafts of the article.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.2009348
Notes
1. In France alone, we can find almost a dozen of such studies. See e.g. Demesmay (Citation2016); Hénin (Citation2016).
2. In his most recent article, Freeden (Citation2021) encouraged applying this instrument to other forms of political thinking in order to decode their meaning.
3. For a detailed country-by-country analysis of these publications and their interpretations of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, see Kulyk (Citation2020).
4. For an analysis of all texts in these journals dealing with the post-2014 developments in and around Ukraine, regardless of the author’s affiliation, see Kulyk (Citation2019).
5. Southeast European and Black Sea Studies can be considered a Greek journal in that it is affiliated with the major Greek think tank, ELIAMEP, publishes Greek authors, and is widely read inside the country. At the same time, it is well internationalized both by its editorial board and the geography of authors.
6. Our analysis did not include any machine processing of the textual corpus.