Ricerc@Sapienza

In the contemporary digital space, information and communication technologies gained increasing important role for international relations. The specific setting of online platforms is becoming alternately as a stage or as a engine for international conflicts and disputes while networks of interconnected devices and users, boosted by technologies, are turning in an additional center of power which state authorities have to deal with. The online platforms, as infrastructures and mediators allows the immediate distribution of content to potentially boundless audiences, contributing to alter the focus on international conflicts as it shifts from infrastructure issues to content battles. In this scenario, an increasing number of crises, frictions, medium- and long-term conflicts are increasingly using soft power models and tools, thinning the deployment of hard power. International public opinion becomes the first target of these forms of confrontation, as rigid diplomatic protocols are shifting to new forms of public diplomacy and digital diplomacy introducing new forms and languages. Global publics, in this condition, have become increasingly more important, also if they are still relatively unaware of the intricacy of the system of international relations and of the specific features of conflicts currently underway.
This research points to analyze the main issues affecting the development of international relations in the platform society, with the aim to identify and systematize contemporary trends, starting from the theoretical systems of sociology of international relations and sociology of communication and enacting an extensive empirical study on the so-called ¿strategic narratives¿ generated by States through a vast and heterogenous amount of texts, images and videos deposited on social media to bolster own public diplomacy during the period 2019-2021.