Dealing With Weaponized Narratives And Story-Wars
Part VII — Strategic foresight exercises as a way to go?
I thought this would be my final post on this topic, to my relief. But then I came across a “strategic foresight exercise” for EU officials who were divided over how to deal with governments that colluded with criminal organizations. Theirs is not a roaring public story war, but it’s still about a battle between moral and strategic narratives behind closed doors. Plus, the designers’ approach is unusually insightful, with implications for consilience as well as story-war gaming. So this post focuses on that exercise, as prelude to my final post on consilience gaming. Moreover, I get to revisit an old point about corruption and collusion in light of TIMN theory.
But first, a few final observations and references from my efforts to propose story-war gaming. After all this roaming around, I still think it’s a good idea to explore. But I don’t see that methodologies will be easy to formulate. I’m not up to doing so on my own — I hope others can find a way.
This post, like others in this series, has lots of bibliographic references. I apologize for not providing formal citations and links liked I used to do. But I am leaving enough info to readily locate a reference online if you want to.
Still up in the air about a methodology for story-war gaming
In the only other instance where I’ve seen the term “story wars” used — an article titled “The Story Wars: The conflict between Red and Blue America is a clash of national mythologies” (2024) — cultural historian Richard Slotkin analyzed four mythologies that have been “central to the development of American national identity”: the Myths of the Frontier, the Founding, the Civil War, and the Good War. While their traditional versions should be uniting us as Americans, he writes, variations on them are enabling partisan storytellers to “use history as an instrument of political power.”
“Indeed, the MAGA movement has largely appropriated the myths and symbols that traditionally united Americans, turning them into the slogans and banners of a cultural civil war. … And that has given MAGA an advantage in what you might call the ‘story wars,’ because it invokes narratives already sanctified in traditional mythology.”
Slotkin urges Blue America to rethink its approach to narrative strategy and develop “a narrative that roots its ideology and vision of the future firmly in the American past.” But if he has recommendations for how to do so, they are not in this article.
In any case, I’m pleased he too uses the story-war concept and adds to my understanding of our troubled times. I want to give his article a nod before I wrap.
I also want to give a shout-out to Heidi Holz’s post on “China’s Global Public Opinion War with the United States and the West” (2024), particularly where she says that:
“The key to developing informed policy responses to Beijing’s global propaganda efforts — covert, overt, digital, and analog — is to study them in their totality and ground them in an informed understanding of the Chinese Communist Party. … At present, the United States does not have a single entity tasked and funded to perform this cross-cutting mission. To win the battle for the narrative, the United States should designate and fund an organization with the mission of informing whole-of-government U.S. strategic communications planning in ways that help Washington get ahead of Beijing’s influence operations. …
“To win the battle for the narrative, the United States should designate and adequately fund an entity to inform its strategic communications planning in ways that anticipate adversary messages and get ahead of them.”
I quite agree with her (not to mention other analysts with parallel ideas, like Matt Armstrong and Christopher Paul). Holz does not go so far as to say this new entity should engage in narrative wargaming, but I figure that will occur in due course if her proposed entity ever comes into being.
Meanwhile, numerous analysts and activists have given heavy attention to narrative-warfare topics for at least ten years. By now, I’ve come across lots of instructive handbooks, playbooks, how-to guides, toolkits, mapping and decoding methodologies, discussion platforms, training sessions, table-top exercises, thought exercises, etc. — everything but wargames — full of observations and advice for dealing with cultural, political, and other kinds of narrative battles and influence operations, in settings that range from family dinner tables, to think-tank conference, to the frontiers of civilization-states.
I’ve noted many in prior posts. I wish I could learn and convey more, but I better leave that to others now. For those who do go in that direction, I’d suggest looking further at three efforts I’ve not mentioned so far that have attracted traditional wargamers and might (but only might) help in thinking about story-war gaming too:
Efforts to develop “confrontation analysis” and “drama theory,” notably Nigel Howard’s original book on Confrontation Analysis: How to Win Operations Other Than War (1999); his associate John Koval’s white paper on An Evolution in Influence: The Playmaker Influence Decision System 2.0 (2012); and John Curry and Mike Young’s piece for crisis modelers and wargamers titled The Confrontation Analysis Handbook: How to Resolve Confrontations by Eliminating Dilemmas (July 2017).
Efforts to use Alan Kelly’s intriguing taxonomic approach to “influence analysis” — it looks like a periodic table, but with playing cards — as laid out in his The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, And Buzz (2006); the transcript for “Kelly on the Mapping and Decoding of Influence, Propaganda and Putin” (2023); Alan Kelly and Christopher Paul’s monograph for NATO on “Decoding Crimea: Pinpointing The Influence Strategies Of Modern Information Warfare (2020); and their article for peace-builders on “Influence Strategies: What is it and how can peacebuilders leverage it?” (2020).
Efforts by the Brennan Center’s The Democracy Futures Project to hold “five nonpartisan tabletop exercises premised on an authoritarian candidate winning the presidency to test the resilience of democratic institutions” — in other words, pro-democracy wargames — as written-up at Brennan’s own site and by participant-observers Elliot Ackerman (March 2024) and Barton Gellman (July 2024).
Finally, I claimed in my prior post that efforts to develop story-war gaming would not advance easily if they emphasized battles between weaponized narratives and counter-narratives. Test games, as I imagine them, seem bound to end in irreconcilable stand-offs, with no instructive lessons-learned that we don’t already know.
My view has evolved a bit since then. Weaponization aside, dichotomous face-offs between contending pro- and anti-narratives on any hot topic — for example, regarding immigration and refugee flows — don’t look like a good way to start either, at least not that I can see.
Thus, to start exploring the possibilities for story-war gaming, I currently see only one good way to experiment: Avoid scenarios that depict dichotomous story wars. Instead, start with designing a two-sided a game in which one side stands for a prominent existing narrative, weaponized or not, and the other side stands for a transcendent alternative narrative (a supra, meta-, or alter-narrative) that has yet to gain much traction but for which substantial evidence can be mustered.
I come to this latest view for three reasons: First, try as I might, I can’t imagine a game design proving productive if it pits polarized narratives against each other. Maybe you can — I hope you can — but I demur for now.
Second, in mulling over ideas for consilience gaming (see next post), I decided a while ago to pose a scenario where arguers from both sides of a divisive narrative war — say, capitalism’s arguers versus socialism’s in the context of U.S.-China relations — are grouped together as one side of the game, while the other side assembles proponents of a newly-argued frame-shifting narrative that, were it to prevail, would engulf and supersede both sides of the existing narrative war. In the scenario I will use, the aging capitalism/socialism side would be pitted against a side that favors newly arguing in terms of the crucial evolutionary importance of developing a model market system, above and beyond whether it may lean capitalist or socialist. You’ll see in my next post.
Third, I lately learned of a foresight exercise that speaks to all these points. What fortunate coincidence! The goddess Happenstance helps me again.
An instructive foresight exercise about a contentious narrative
Of all the exercises and games I’ve looked at, the most enticing is a 2020 “strategic foresight exercise” described in two papers: A Wicked Problem: How to cooperate with collusive states? (March 2021), and Strategic Foresight: A Warning from the Future (July 2021) — both by Roderick Parkes and Mark McQuay, then working at the Alfred von Oppenheim Center for European Policy Studies in Germany.
It’s the only exercise I’ve found whose aim was to assess a controversial policy narrative and propose altering it. While it does not provide a model for story-war gaming — in a way, it avoids doing so — I find it unusually helpful and insightful for my purposes, especially as a prelude to proposing consilience gaming.
The problem the authors puzzled over was government collusion with criminals. For moral and strategic reasons, European Union (EU) officials in Brussels had long decried cooperating with governments that had ties to criminal groups, yet these officials often ended up agreeing to economic programs that involved collusion anyway, notably in Eastern Europe and Africa. As this double-edged practice riled tensions within the EU, its officials split into camps of realists and idealists, debating interests versus principles. They began fighting a kind of polarizing story war with each other, arriving at an “impasse” over a “taboo” topic.
In the authors’ words (all quotes are from one or the other of their two papers):
“So what was the impasse and what was the taboo? It was about whether the EU should engage with governments that had criminal ties. The EU’s dilemma arose in the wake of the 2015 to 2016 Schengen crisis as it sought to tackle the networks of migrants, criminals, and terrorists that were edging ever closer to its borders. The taboo was that to successfully pursue its interests, the EU found it needed to work with governments that were actively colluding with these very same criminals.” …
“Things came to a head during the coronavirus crisis, when governments in the neighborhood pointed out that their criminal collusion was not always a bad thing. There was growing critique of Europeans for lecturing developing countries while relying on them to do the dirty work. Governments across the neighborhood found that they could only support their populations by resorting to criminal collusion — for instance, accepting the help of criminal groups to access or distribute vaccines. Some, following Russia’s lead, had begun to openly use links to criminal groups as a legitimate part of national strategy. How should the EU navigate this tricky field? This was fertile ground for a TTX.”
Thus, at the EU’s request, and with its clever forbearance, the authors designed a table-top exercise (TTX) to “help both camps — realists and idealists — explore a way to come together to pursue both naked interests and higher values.” Accordingly,
“a sequence of six collaborative scenario exercises … [were] designed to help policymakers collectively consider one big taboo: the idea that, under certain conditions, state collusion with criminals can have positive outcomes for developing states and their societies, and so help the EU to structure and explain its engagement better.”
Each scenario depicted at length a different kind of future (2030) situation where EU officials would engage with partner governments that colluded with criminal organizations. To assure discussions were collaborative, the exercise was structured like a seminar — not a wargame. In wargames, opposing sides are pitted against each other, and the end results define winners and losers. Here the two designers opted to avoid such conflict by making the exercise one-sided — they put all participants from the EU’s opposing camps on the same side.
Then, with themselves acting like a kind of side, Parkes and McQuay ran seminar-like discussions about the participants’ collective reactions to the scenarios. For each scenario, the designers subjected the EU’s players to four rounds of discussion regarding whether and why the scenario made sense, what forces and factors would affect its unfolding, what EU actions could tip its course in one direction or another, and what lessons and conclusions the EU might draw from it.
That one-sided format is a key feature of this designer-led exercise. Another feature is that the designers used the scenarios and their facilitating roles to introduce a new state-centric framework about collusion, radically different from the economy-focused framework the EU had been using for decades:
“Taken together, the scenarios draw on an alternative model of state-building, one in which crime (rather than the market economy and development policy) is a driving force. And so they make a distinction between collusion (potentially beneficial to state-building) and corruption (a subcategory of collusion that instead weakens the state).”
At the time (still today?), EU officials operated primarily in terms of an economic-modernization model. It was based on ideas that “global progress involves [linear] step-by-step convergence around Western norms in general and the EU model in particular.” It emphasized using economic tools to end poverty and increase prosperity. It reflected the ways Europe had earlier succeeded at recovering from WWII — a short historical time span. And it was thought to be a “universally applicable” model that would “lead to better governance and the spread of liberal outcomes” everywhere.
Thus, the EU’s economy-building approach assumed “that what worked best in the EU, will work best abroad.” Which meant saying “no” to all forms of collusion with crime and corruption in partner countries. The EU feared that partner governments who had built up strong crime-fighting capacities would backslide if collusion with criminals were tolerated.
What did Parkes and McQuay do with this situation? Something brilliant: Instead of letting the EU’s economy-building narrative dominate the exercise the exercise, they challenged it. They proposed the EU switch frames. They wrote scenarios and used their roles as facilitators to present a new model that the EU had ignored for understanding collusion: a state-building model à la classic raison d’etat across the ages. Accordingly,
“If we recognise global liberal development as a product not of economic modernisation (as the classical liberal reading seems to) but instead as a product of state-building and raison d’état (as our own analysis suggests), this casts a new light on the phenomenon: states everywhere were built by means of crime and collusion …
“It is the long history of state-building in Europe, not Europe’s post-war economic modernization, that sets the precedent.”
They called this alternative a “government capacity model” or “governance capacity model,” and they drew on centuries of political, economic, cultural, and social evolution around the world to lay it out, in sharp contrast to the EU model’s reliance on just a few decades of European economic growth after WWII. Constructed from numerous sources, this state-building model showed that:
“Throughout history, states have advanced not by fighting crime but by tolerating or cooperating with criminals — even with those groups whose behaviour the state itself had proscribed. …
“According to this revisionist version of history, crime can potentially be progressive. Under very specific circumstances, it can make the central government not only stronger but also more responsive and inclusive. …
“Collusion not only helped them consolidate power, but also set them on a path to liberalism: once they had usurped the criminals’ capabilities, they outlawed their use by others and made the benefits freely available to all citizens.”
This evolutionary view — that it can make strategic sense for high-minded statesmen to collude with criminals and other dark actors under some kinds of conditions — was justified on factual historical grounds that:
“> Collusion did in fact play a positive role in Europe’s own historical path to liberalism;
“> Collusion can sometimes be more conducive to good public administration than crime-fighting;
“> More prosperous societies sometimes find collusion more acceptable than their poorer counterparts;
“> The global liberal framework sometimes pushes states towards crime.”
“Progressive collusion” is the name they gave this strategy for co-opting, controlling, and exploiting warlords, criminals, smugglers, and other bad actors when it can ultimately help strengthen trends in favor of liberalism. And they recognized that it is conditional and difficult to assure:
“The EU should not engage with any and all forms of collusion. This leads to a second important consideration: can the EU work out which forms of collusion to fight, and which to treat with sympathy? More precisely, can the EU learn to recognise what might be termed ‘progressive’ forms of collusion, and distinguish them from the far more common instances of violent predation and corruption? …
“The answer lies in identifying the distinct phases of the state-building process. According to this new reading of the historical record, the would-be state initially colludes with criminals to harness their violent capabilities; next, it harnesses criminal methods to make money; and finally it uses criminals to bend norms. This is because the state’s first priority is to centralise the means of ‘coercion’, then ‘extraction’ and finally ‘transgression’: governments want to secure territory, exploit it and then gain domestic and international acceptance. The state can progress through each stage only if it cracks down on its criminal allies — and the EU ought to sanction states that fail to do so.”
According to Parkes and McQuay, “This model could help the EU to distinguish between collusive and corrupt states and to avoid ill-conceived policies of constraint with counterproductive effects” — e.g., like sanctions, embargoes. But apart from noting some general analytical criteria, they hesitated to identify specific policy recommendations that may follow from their thought exercise. Moreover, on the advice of EU officials who were pleased with the first five scenarios but averse to challenges raised in the planned sixth scenario, its running was cancelled (though it is included in one of these two papers).
Unfortunately for me, their papers provide little information about what transpired during the discussion periods about each scenario. The participants’ minds were reportedly stretched; and they got to voice matters that had long been on their minds, but that they had avoided openly discussing. I gather there was new agreement that the existing anti-collusion narrative needed revision. But very cautiously, lest Russia, China, and related actors exploit new openings to accuse the EU of moral relativism and hypocrisy.
My interest in and admiration for this strategic foresight exercise
As a model for story-war gaming, this foresight exercise falls short. The designers treated the clash over collusion policy as a “wicked problem” to be resolved behind private doors — not as a public story war. They structured the exercise like a seminar — not as wargame where sides are pitted against each other, and results define winners and losers. Indeed, they opted to limit confrontation by making the exercise one-sided — they put participants from the opposing camps on the same side, then acting as a facilitating side (control cell), they led structured discussions about the EU’s reactions to the scenarios.
Even so, I’m impressed. Their exercise offers a useful way to deal with rival moral and strategic narratives. I especially appreciate that they used the scenarios and discussion periods to introduce an entirely different frame for the problem at hand: a state-building as opposed to an economy-building frame for dealing with collusion. In working to change the frame, and thus the narrative, their exercise bends more toward being a consilience than a story-war game.
I marvel at the state-centric model that Parkes and McQuay introduced for rethinking the nature and role of collusion. Their write-up is peppered with citations, and they give it a name (“government capacity model”) as though it had status. But I can’t tell whether they or others are the original creative source. I’ve never heard of their model before. In any case, it is consistent with the model/framework I prefer about long-range social evolution (past, present, and future): namely, TIMN.
According to my sense of TIMN’s dynamics, most corruption reflects the persistent intrusion into government (+I) and business (+M) circles by actors operating in old T/tribal ways, stressing the T form’s dark as well as bright sides: e.g., families, clans, gangs, cronies, mafias, clubs, old-boy networks, etc. whose cultural and operating principles are so tribal that they not only engage in crime, corruption, and collusion but also believe they are right and honorable to do so. As I once wrote in a blog post — “What TIMN is good for — #3: explaining systemic corruption, cont. (Chayes on Trump),” August 25, 2017 — systemic corruption is likely to arise and endure in societies where the T/tribal form remains tenaciously, even improperly strong, and the TIMN realms (today, civil society + government + market economy + not-clear-yet) as a whole are not well separated and shielded from each other. The stronger that T-type forces and actors are, and the more they penetrate into the other TIMN forms and realms of activity, then the more prone that society will be to systemic corruption.
I’m not going to elaborate here, but an understanding of TIMN’s dynamics could help users of Parkes and McQuay’s model refine criteria for assessing whether, how, and why a particular instance of collusion may (or may not) have “progressive” effects for a society’s evolvability. I’m also not keen on how they discriminate between corruption (always negative) and collusion (sometimes positive). From a TIMN perspective, corruption and collusion go pretty much hand in hand.
Meanwhile, and somewhat apropos, Donald Trump won the presidential election last week. I suspect all sorts of collusion to increase long as he occupies the White House, along with all sorts of narrative acrobatics to justify whatever surfaces regarding corruption and collusion. I also suspect his administration will not provide a receptive or conducive environment for professionally figuring out how to game story wars. A discouraging thought, but not enough to stop me from doing one more post.
TO BE CONTINUED WITH THE FINAL POST IN THIS SERIES