Wars of influence: which narrative are we adhering to?

It is these questions that our guest was interested in in a vast study published yesterday by the Descartes Foundation. He explores how adherence to the narratives of foreign powers is built within the French population. Because beyond cyberattacks and the massive dissemination of false information, in times of war, whatever the veracity of the speeches made, each power defends a narrative to which populations adhere to varying degrees.

Laurent Cordonier defines the war story as the discourse of the protagonists of the various conflicts underway in the world. The objective of the story, he argues, is to try to legitimize actions, positions taken in a conflict. “We tell a story that can contain truth, falsehood, a mixture of both. It allows us to say why someone takes part in this story, why someone else fights against a certain actor.“. The method is based on a representative sample of 4,000 French people to whom the elements of the story are exposed.

Concerning the war in Ukraine, “the French are much more sensitive to the Ukrainian story, assures Laurent Cordonier. The Russian story takes little revenge.