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National media narratives often embody “strategic narratives” that embody national consensus on geopolitics. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was an event of intense international interest, both for its internal drama, but also for the policy positions of both of the major candidates. This paper presents a comparative analysis of how media in four key regions covered the U.S. presidential election and its immediate aftermath. Researchers utilized an innovative technology that allowed the teams to harvest media content, from almost seventy-five global news sources, in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian. This paper utilized the theoretical construct of strategic narratives to demonstrate how the U.S. election is incorporated into narrative constructions of global order. Theoretically, this project seeks to deepen our understanding, from a comparative methodology, of how “events,” such as the U.S. presidential election, provide the raw material for global contestations of the global order. The essay also provides a mechanism for analyzing and evaluating these narratives using Fisher’s narrative paradigm. Finally, the paper demonstrates an innovative methodological approach to comparative analysis from disparate cultural and news traditions, languages, and patterns of access to media.

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For most of the past two decades, the United States pursued a policy leveraging its traditional NATO partners to secure Afghanistan’s future against the Taliban with little lasting success. However, in a dramatic reversal of U.S. policy in July 2018, President Trump ordered the start of direct talks between the United States and Taliban with the goal of internationalizing Afghan security. We argue that this move in 2018 by the United States can be understood as an attempt toward forming a transnational community around Afghan security by allowing non-allied nations greater voice and agency in Afghanistan’s political future. However, current theories of transnational public sphere are unable to account for such processes. Thus, the primary aim of this study is development of a theory of transnational foreign policy sphere formation. Drawing upon Wessler et al.’s (2008) four-step process of transnational public sphere development, we conceptualize this process as one of strategic narrative (dis)alignment across and within foreign nations’ media reporting on a common issue of concern. We then use media narratives reporting on Afghanistan’s political future as an empirical case study to demonstrate our theory, by examining over 2000 news articles from 17 different Chinese, Russian, U.S., and Afghani media outlets from February 2017 to January 2020. Theoretically, our study advances research into the transnational public sphere by examining their (dis)formation over time as well as the limits and opportunities of transnational public sphere emergence outside of European contexts and on foreign policy issues among publics with very different sociopolitical interests and cultures.