Recent scholarship claims that narratives and images of war have political effects, not simply because of their content and 'form', but because of their affective and emotional 'forces'. Yet, International Relations scholars rarely explore how audiences respond to narratives and images of war in their research. Addressing this gap, this paper combines discourse analysis of RT (formerly Russia Today) 'breaking news' YouTube videos of Russian military intervention in Syria with analysis of 750 comments and social media interactions on those videos. Our findings demonstrate how RT layers moral and legal justifications for Russian intervention in multiple audio-visual formats, within a visual narrative of the conflict that relies on affective representations of key actors/events. Viewers largely approve of the content, replicate its core narratives and express emotions coherent with RT's affective representation of the Syrian conflict. Audiences' responses to these narratives and images of war were shaped by their affective investments in the identities and events portrayed onscreen. These affective investments are therefore crucial in understanding the political significance of images of armed conflict.

If this document is identified as the Author Accepted Manuscript it is the version after peer review but before type setting, copy editing or publisher branding From Russia with lols: Humour, RT, and the legitimation of Russian foreign policyThe Russian state funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) is accused of pedalling misinformation, influencing foreign elections, and pursuing an agenda that claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. Whilst studies have so far analysed the content of RT's broadcast and social media output, they have yet to interrogate how Russian legitimation claims are often expressed on RT through a humorous form that blurs the lines between the genres of news reporting and comedy. This paper addresses this gap and places humour at the centre of analysis, arguing that humour, comedy and satire are fundamental to how RT claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. The article begins by introducing theories of legitimation to recent studies of comedy in global politics. It builds upon work that suggests that narrative and representation are key to contemporary legitimation processes, and highlights the important role that humour plays in such processes. We then examine RT's social media outputs and audience responses to those, and demonstrate how humour is central to how RT claims legitimacy for Russian foreign policy. From military intervention in Syria, to the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, humour shapes how RT's legitimation claims are interpreted by audiences.

Much has recently been written about how we now live in a global 'post-truth' era (Ball, 2017; d'Ancona, 2017; Davis, 2017) where 'lying is regarded as the norm, even in democracies' (d'Ancona, 2017: 26). Commentators have been quick to point the finger of blame for this era of 'post-truth' politics at postmodernism/poststructuralism. Philosopher Daniel Dennett charged that 'what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts' (Dennett quoted in Cadwalladr, 2017). Postmodernism also apparently represents a 'threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself' (Pluckrose, 2017), and academics and journalists alike have suggested that postmodernism laid the groundwork for 'post-truth' politics (Calcutt, 2016; Scruton, 2017). The LSE has even organised a roundtable discussion asking 'Is Post-Modernism to Blame for our Post-Truth World?' (LSE, 2017).

The 2018 Skripal poisonings prompted the heavy securitisation of UK-Russian relations. Despite the ensuing tight coordination between the Russian government and state-aligned television, this article argues that in today’s mediatised environment – in which social and political activities fuse inextricably with their own mediation – even non-democracies must cope with the shaping of global communications by media logics and related market imperatives. With a range of media actors responding to events, and to each other, on multiple digital platforms, no state could assert full narrative control over the Skripal incident. Counterintuitively, Russian journalists’ journalistic agency was enhanced by mediatisation processes: their state sponsors, seeking to instrumentalise reporting, delegated agency to journalists more attuned to such processes; yet commercial imperatives obliged them to perform independence and professional credibility. These competing forms of agency clashed with one another, and with that of the audiences engaging in real time with the journalists’ outputs, ultimately undermining the Russian state’s efforts to harness news coverage to its political and security goals. The article concludes that in today’s global communications environment, mediatisation substantially constrains the ability of non-democracies to micro-manage journalists’ treatment of major events relating to national security.

No abstract