Image credit: Presidential Office of Ukraine
By Arta Moeini
IPD’s Research Director Arta Moeini authored a weekend essay for UnHerd on the need to avoid binary narratives when understanding the war in Ukraine as well as how these narratives obscure the West’s historical responsibility for the conflict.
The following are excerpts from the original piece published on March 5, 2022.
With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.
Arta Moeini (@ArtaMoeini) is the Research Director for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy. Dr. Moeini is also a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship in Washington D.C as well as an elected member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters.