Between a communicational approach to strategic narratives and narrative archaeology: thinking about civilizational narratives beyond their content
Title: Between a communicational approach to strategic narratives and narrative archaeology: thinking about civilizational narratives beyond their content
Guests: Mylène Hardy (Inalco, PLIDAM), Karoline Postel-Vinay (Sciences Po, CERI)
Abstract: For the past twenty years, the study of narratives in international relations and political science has largely been structured around the analysis of their content: worldviews, representations of the international order, narratives of modernity or decline. This approach has made it possible to identify competing discursive matrices and shed light on the conflicts of interpretation that run through globalization. The aim of this session is to shift and deepen this perspective in order to better understand the epistemological and methodological tools available to researchers in the study of civilizational narratives.
Mylène Hardy will begin by introducing the discussion by presenting what a communicational approach brings to the study of narratives. Drawing on perspectives from mediology, science and technology studies (STS), and cognitive and behavioral sciences, she will explain how messages are embedded in socio-technical systems that influence decision-making. In the more specific context of new cognitive and adaptive technologies, she will discuss “narrative engineering” and examine how the discursive and material architecture of narratives heard in their physical and symbolic environment is designed to structure and guide their reception by an audience whose perception and behavior are sometimes influenced by factors external to the content of the narratives.
Karoline Postel-Vinay will offer a short essay on narrative archaeology along these lines. By reflecting on geopolitical narratives over the long term, she will show that the emergence in the 21st century of civilizational narratives, particularly in authoritarian contexts—from Vladimir Putin to Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan—is less a “turning point” than a “return.” The presentation will focus on the very notion of “civilization” as it took shape within European imperial projects and became established in international discourse at the end of the 19th century. It will then demonstrate that while the appropriation of this concept by non-Western elites was originally perfectly compatible with the idea of universalism, we must now question its reinterpretation in a narrative that is generally exclusionary and antagonistic at the beginning of the 21st century.
Date, time: Friday, march 16, 2026, 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (Paris time)
Location, room: Maison de la recherche de l'Inalco (2, rue de Lille, 75007 Paris), Sacy room
Format : hybrid (Zoom link sent the day before)
Coordination of the Europe-Eurasia Axis (WP3): Delphine Allès (INALCO), Jean-Vincent Holeindre (Paris Panthéon Assas), Frédéric Ramel (Sciences Po). Avec Louise Beaumais, postdoctorante du programme DECRIPT.
Registration for the seminar is open until Friday, March 13th at 4:00 p.m. (Paris time).
The session will be held in French.