The recurring interest in the “nation” among media scholars is not least due to a slim book published in 1983, entitled Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The author, Benedict Anderson, argued that the media are not just tools for spreading the ideas of nationalism or representing national identity. In Anderson’s book, the connection is more fundamental: it is thanks to media forms and technologies that nations can be “thought” at all. The book is important in media studies, both because it explains the relationship between nationalism and media, and because it has opened our eyes to other types of “imagined communities”, based on different media technologies and shared patterns of communication.

An in-depth look at Ukraine's attempts to shape how it is perceived by the rest of the world.

During times of crisis, competing narratives are often advanced to define what is happening, and the stakes of information management by nations are high. In this timely book, Göran Bolin and Per Ståhlberg examine the fraught intersection of state politics, corporate business, and civil activism to understand the dynamics and importance of meaning management in Ukraine. Drawing on fieldwork inside the country, the authors discuss the forms, agents, and platforms within the complex political and communicative situation and how each articulated and acted upon perceptions of the propaganda threat.

Bolin and Ståhlberg focus their analysis on the period between 2013 and 2022, when political tensions, commercial dynamics, and new communication technologies bred novel forms of information management. As they show, entities from governments and governmental administration to commercial actors, entrepreneurs, and activists formed new alliances in order to claim a stake in information policy. Bolin and Ståhlberg also explore how the various agents engaged in information management and strove to manage meaning in communication practice; the communicative tools they took advantage of; and the subsequent consequences for narrative constructions.

This article re-evaluates some of the previous assumptions made related to the communication practices and information management in Ukraine since before the Euromaidan revolution in 2013. We highlight two points where previous knowledge about nation branding and nation building must be rethought in light of the latest developments Firstly, nation branding is no longer exclusively an activity that is directed to an audience of foreign investors and tourists, but also toward the international field of politics. Simultaneously, it is also clearly directed toward a domestic audience-the citizens of Ukraine. Secondly, this means that there may no longer be any sharp distinction between nation building and nation branding-at least not in times of an ongoing armed conflict.

In this article, I reflect on several instances of symbolic communication that has been taking place in the shadow of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine. The article should be read as some afterthoughts from a research project that was completed just before the Russian full-scale invasion. It builds mainly on material from intermittent fieldwork among PR consultants and government officials in Ukraine, with particular interest in meaning management. The theme that conjoins rather scattered examples is a concern with the colonial legacy in a country at war. 

Media events, Dayan and Katz argue, compose a narrative genre that follows specific structural principles and narrative tropes and that works toward societal integration. However, a specific subset of media events is labelled transformative, and these work towards societal change. In this article, we point to an unresolved tension between transformative events and what has subsequently been introduced as disruptive events. Our discussion builds on research on the developments in post-Soviet Ukraine, and we analyse, firstly, the transformative and disruptive relations related to the so-called Euromaidan Revolution, and secondly, how these events can be placed in a wider narrative of three Ukrainian revolutions. Our analysis concludes that narrative analysis can help explain the ways in which these events are understood by broader international audiences.

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.