Theorizing Strategic Narrative Disruption: Local Non-State Actors and India’s COVID-19 Narrative

Abstract

At times of global crises, political elites may attempt to (re)position states they represent as having particular roles at the global level. How might their efforts be disrupted? The idea of “disruption”, and how it relates to contestation, remains under-explored in the strategic narratives literature. In this article, I develop a preliminary theorization of strategic narrative “disruption,” through an empirically rich investigation of the counternarrative of the COVID-19-related domestic migrant crisis in India by local critical media actors. This counternarrative, I argue, constituted the migrant crisis in ways that served to disrupt the Indian government’s emergent global-level strategic narrative of India's role in the COVID-19 pandemic. Developing the idea of disruption as distinct from, and providing the discursive raw materials for, narrative contestation, I show how attempts by political actors to narratively (re)position the state around specific, identity-affirming roles in global politics may be disrupted by locally produced counternarratives that complicate or contradict key claims in the former. In new media ecologies where narratives gain resonance quickly and widely, such counternarratives become available to global audiences and give rise to new discursive framings that become available for use in future narrative contestation.