Disinformation and gendered boundarymaking: Nordic media audiences making sense of “Swedish decline”

Abstract

This article examines how Russian geostrategic communication is entangled in global gender politics. The aim is to understand the resonance of disinformation in relation to culturalized, ethnicized and racialized narratives of gender, or “gendered boundarymaking.” The analysis is based on focus group discussions with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian individuals, asked to share their impressions of news articles from the Russian media agency Sputnik, which all depicted Sweden as a warning example of multiculturalism and feminism gone “too far.” In the discussions, participants opposed a gender equal “self” to a patriarchal immigrant “other,” narrated Sweden as a country exceptionally concerned with gender, and tapped into competing temporalities of progress and decline. The article contributes to research on geostrategic communication by showing how disinformation efforts draw upon gendered national identities and debates about gender and immigration. More importantly, the article demonstrates that such gendered boundarymaking shapes audiences’ interpretations in crucial ways. Rather than viewing disinformation only from a state-centered lens of national security, in isolation from racism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and queerphobia within Western societies, research should acknowledge the interconnections between geostrategic communication and everyday boundarymaking. This will be pivotal to developing counterstrategies to disinformation, whether Russian or homegrown.

Cognitive and Emotional Responses to Russian State-Sponsored Media Narratives in International Audiences

“…Therefore, we omitted this information to more realistically capture how citizens may respond to the narrative content. These presentation decisions echo those of previous research on responses to Sputnik/RT media (e.g., Edenborg, 2021).…”

Ringing true? The persuasiveness of Russian strategic narratives

“…Nevertheless, these results can be related to Edenborg's (2021) recent study, which presented Sputnik news narratives to focus group participants in Norway, Denmark and Sweden. In all three countries, respondents in groups with men above 40 years tended to focus directly on the message, taking what was presented at face value.…”

“…7-8) Before discussing Fisher's paradigm further, we will briefly relate the article to research on persuasiveness in IR and media studies. The traditional notion of 'propaganda' is still in use (Bastos and Farkas, 2019;Benkler et al, 2018), yet current research on persuasion also adopts other labels, such as disinformation (Edenborg, 2021), fake news (Monsees, 2020) and antagonistic or malign information influence (Hoyle et al, 2021). Scholars tend to agree that such persuasion should not be understood as a oneway process, but as a complex acitivity taking place in a social media environment with audiences as potential co-producers of foreign messaging (Mejias and Vokuev, 2017).…”

“…Modern Russian strategy is very much about the cognitive dimension (Splidsboel Hansen, 2021) and Sweden has been systematically portrayed by Russian media as a particularly bad example of extreme liberalism, possibly because of its traditionally strong liberal policies in realms such as gender and multiculturalism. The aim is to incite right-wing, anti-liberal, anti-migrant sentiment, polarize Western audiences and promote Russian conservative world views at home and abroad (Colliver et al, 2018; Deverell et al, 2021; Edenborg, 2021). Yet, Sweden is also strategically significant to Russia in a traditional sense.…”

Logics of Othering: Sweden as Other in the time of COVID-19

“…While it has sometimes been difficult to distinguish narratives about Sweden from narratives about ‘Scandinavia’ or ‘the Nordic states’ (Andersson and Hilson, 2009: 220), Emil Edenborg’s focus group study demonstrates that many Norwegian and Danish respondents align – at least to some extent – with the Russian media outlet Sputnik’s reporting on Sweden as a state in decline, or a warning example of a place where feminism and multiculturalism have ‘gone too far’ (Edenborg, 2021: 2). Similarly, a recent report shows that Nordic citizens’ views of Sweden have deteriorated more than those of citizens in other European countries.…”