Policymakers have a whole vernacular for talking about how place informs conflict, but no one actually lives on a balance sheet of ‘socio-cultural factors.’ For all its ‘undeniable beauty,’ even Stanley McChrystal’s ‘Afghanistan Stability’ PowerPoint couldn’t ‘link ideas or facts in any kind of human narrative.’ Of course, this doesn’t stop the veritable cottage industry of policy analysts and military strategists from talking about ‘controlling the narrative’ in ‘gray-zone conflicts’ and ‘Great Power competition.’ It’s become an idée fixe in policy circles. Western responses to the unfolding Ukraine crisis, for example, tend to treat almost all politically-inflected narratives as tactic or agitprop, pure rhetorical widgets for producing the expedient
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