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DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS the Official Journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS The official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Overwriting the City: Graffiti, Communication, and Urban Contestation in Athens Putting the Strategy Back into Strategic Communications Japanese Strategic Communication: Its Significance As a Political oolT ‘You Can Count On Us’: When Malian Diplomacy Stratcommed Uncle Sam Strategic Communications, Boko Haram, and Counter-Insurgency Fake News, Fake Wars, Fake Worlds Living Post-Truth Lives … But What Comes After? ‘We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us’ Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 1 ISSN 2500-9478 Defence Strategic Communications Editor-in-Chief Dr. Neville Bolt Managing Editor Linda Curika Editor Anna Reynolds Editorial Board Professor Mervyn Frost Professor Nicholas O’Shaughnessy Professor Žaneta Ozoliņa Professor J. Michael Waller Professor Natascha Zowislo-Grünewald Dr. Emma Louise Briant Dr. Nerijus Maliukevicius Dr. Agu Uudelepp Matt Armstrong Thomas Elkjer Nissen Defence Strategic Communications is an international peer-reviewed journal. The journal is a project of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE). It is produced for scholars, policy makers and practitioners around the world. It does not represent the opinions or policies of NATO or the NATO StratCom COE. The views presented in the following articles are those of the authors alone. © All rights reserved by the NATO StratCom COE. These articles may not be copied, reproduced, distributed or publicly displayed without reference to the NATO StratCom COE and the academic journal Defence Strategic Communications. NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Riga, Kalnciema iela 11b, Latvia LV1048 www.stratcomcoe.org Ph.: 0037167335463 [email protected] 2 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 ISSN 2500-9478 Defence Strategic Communications Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 3 FOREWORD Metaphors turn up where you least expect them. Netflix—the most prolific originator of quality television drama in the US—recently launched a cop series about serial killers. The clue is in the title Mindhunter. This whodunit is actually a howdunit. Or should that be whydunit? Episode by intriguing episode it explores the minds and motivations of murderers with a particular taste for exotic killing. And the protagonists of the drama rapidly become drawn into the operational processes of the police involved in tracking down these killers. Produced and directed in parts by David Fincher, this drama, however, has higher ambitions. Through the duo Holden and Tench—both special agents in the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit—Mindhunter challenges the mindset of policing in 1970s America where the series is set. These were the days when the mere mention of Son of Sam was enough to send a chill through the night air. Convinced of a need to break the impasse in solving serial killings, Holden, the younger of the two agents, agitates for the process to be opened up to more radical thinking from behavioural psychology. But his naivety is left pushing against a system that is entrenched, resistant, and suspicious. His boss at the Training Academy sends him packing. ‘You don’t want to trust academics’, he warns. Tench, more sensitive to establishment politics, initially resists too. When confronted with Holden’s plea: ‘What’s wrong with complicated?’, his partner replies ‘there’s complicated … and there’s too complicated.’ 1970s detective work may seem a long way from strategic communications in 2017. But metaphors have a habit of reducing the complicated in one’s life to something that 4 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 makes more sense. If ever there was a tension between academics with their theories and operators with their experiences, then the world of strategic communications invites a little sleuthing of its own. Mindhunter highlights the gap between detectives and experts, or practitioners and theorists in the uncontentious space of entertainment fiction. But it provides a metaphor for the contentious gap which this journal is attempting to bridge. The two-way endeavour to find a common space for scholars to develop concepts that speak to the real world, and for practitioners to step back from the tactical to appreciate what makes strategic communications truly strategic is long overdue. To this end, the third issue of Defence Strategic Communications brings together innovative writing partnerships to refresh our conventional thinking. The art historian Dr Anna Kim and communications professional Tara Flores collaborate in an attempt to capture the aesthetics of graffiti that both demarcate political terrain and render the anarchist suburbs of Athens so visually distinctive to any outsider. Here cultural symbols drawn from popular television programmes and commentaries on Greece’s economic crisis are blended in eye-catching imagery. They offer popular resistance to what is seen as the failure of the state at home and abroad. Kim and Flores go on to develop a case for including graffiti as a means through which Greek citizens can, and we might, understand contemporary politics. More than an artistic expression, graffiti, they propose, should be further acknowledged as a communicative space worthy of a place in international relations theorising. Consequently, they stretch the bounds of what has been traditionally embraced within the idea of communicating strategically. Where they finish, another academic-practitioner partnership begins. Professor David Betz and independent communications analyst Vaughan Phillips are keen to inject some clarity into what should or should not qualify as strategic communications. For Betz and Phillips, the further we draw away from stratos and its military origins recorded by classical Greek historians like Thucydides, the more definitional clarity becomes clouded and loses its utility. Without clarity, we run the danger of slipping into a generalised notion of communications in the political realm. They claim: ‘all communications may be purposeful but it is only their presence in the context of war in which violence is threatened or actual that renders them ‘strategic’.’ These are conversations to be nurtured by our readers and contributors in future editions. In another departure the journal offers its pages to three essayists who bring their journalistic weight to bear on topics that increasingly occupy the attention of communicators. David Loyn reviews the substantive research undertaken by Brett Boudreau into ISAF/NATO’s extended experience in Afghanistan. He tackles the degree to which Boudreau’s post mortem represents an accurate appraisal of the mission creep and message creep many observers feel is the single enduring legacy of those difficult years. Loyn, a former BBC specialist in Kabul, adds his own take on what went wrong and why. Another former senior BBC journalist, Kevin Marsh, tackles the thorny question of Fake News in this Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 3 | Autumn 2017 5 so-called Post-Truth era. As Marsh pointedly reminds us, most books that have tried to set the record straight on Fake News have issued from the pens of journalists with scant contribution from other sources. Amid the confusion surrounding the concept, Marsh goes in search of the truth and yearns for its long awaited return. Dr Charles Kriel, a former journalist, spotlights the growing attractions of big data analytics to politicians and marketers who seek the means to speak their truth to each one of us. Individually data profiled and digitally targeted, that is. With this in mind, he looks at the fortunes of Cambridge Analytica—one such firm that has ventured with mixed fortunes into the turbulent waters of politics. There is no shortage of scholarly contributions to this issue. Journalist-turned-academic Dr Abdullahi Tasiu draws on his own reporting of the Nigerian state’s pursuit of the insurgent movement Boko Haram. He concludes that a faltering combination of counterinsurgency tactics and less than transparent strategic communications encountered early setbacks against the militant organisation. Employing more factually verifiable communications, then engaging with audiences online, the militants made early gains. Only for the state to reappraise its own communications approaches, eventually redressing the balance and seizing the initiative. In line with our editorial remit to open up more neglected areas for investigation, Dr Pablo de Orellana takes an innovative approach to revealing how Western states can so easily misread conditions on the ground. Good intentions become easily diverted when outsiders tend to oversimplify complex local politics. Tracing forensically through the archive of diplomatic telegrams between 2002–2010, de Orellana weaves an account of how the Malian state framed its Saharan nomad groups as a threat to Washington and policymaking in the region, while drowning out the warnings of American diplomats on the ground. Further afield, Professor Chiyuki Aoi reviews the state of strategic communications awareness across Japanese government departments at a time of heightened sensitivities in East Asia and the South China Seas. Her research highlights the fascinating dilemma of how Japan, locked into its post-1945 national consensus of non-military engagement, should face up to the threat of Chinese agitation. But she raises the delicate question of how the country
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