Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance

Political Narratology

How Stories Shape Power and Compliance

Arsen Avetisov

Translator Gregory Attaryan

© Arsen Avetisov, 2026

© Gregory Attaryan, translation, 2026

ISBN 978-5-0069-4613-2

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Political Narratology

How Stories Shape Power and Compliance

Acknowledgements

This book was written thanks to politicians and their ability to turn complex problems into simple stories, their skill in framing necessity as destiny, a mistake as a stage of progress, and the absence of a solution as a sign of responsibility. It was inspired by the realities of politics, rather than by mere theory.

Political actors rarely think of themselves as storytellers and don’t receive the recognition they truly deserve as being such. Yet they are the ones rewriting reality daily, lending weight to some words, casting suspicion on others, and granting a third category the right to remain unspoken. Through their pauses, their explanations, and their omissions, narratives are formed. Narratives in which decisions become permissible, constraints become necessary, power becomes perceived, and submission becomes meaningful. The main empirical material for this work has been the observation of how some stories become entrenched, others are marginalised, and a third category is declared unthinkable.

Foreword

Humans have always lived inside stories but have rarely stopped to ask who is telling them.

We like to think that politics is about numbers, programmes, economic calculations, and balances of power. In truth, politics begins much earlier – the moment someone first utters ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘it has always been this way’, ‘it must be this way’ or ‘there is no alternative’.

A society lives within narratives. Politics lives within myths. And freedom begins where we understand the difference.

This book is a logical continuation of my previous works. In Theory of Narratology, I wrote about narrative as the means by which a person connects disparate events into a meaningful reality. Stories are not reflections of the world, but the forms into which the world is packaged to become programmes for our actions and thinking. I wrote about how our identity is not a set of traits but a coherent story we tell about ourselves.

In Applied Narratology, I showed that these stories can be worked with: rewritten, refined, made conscious. That narrative is not an abstraction but a tool for living. We discussed how a person either constructs their own narrative or unwittingly lives inside someone else’s. And that applied narratology is far from theory; it is a profession for our times.

In the book The French Narrative, the focus shifted from the individual to culture, to a way of life. I showed how a society can maintain a delicate equilibrium between freedom and community, style and resistance, pleasure and responsibility, how narratives can sustain life and give it flavour and meaning.

This book takes the next step. It is about the moment when someone else’s story becomes mandatory. It is about what happens when a narrative ceases to be personal or cultural and becomes political. When a story begins to speak in the name of millions. When fear, hope, and the image of the future become instruments of power.

Political narratology is not the science of manipulation or the nature of dictatorships. It is the science of understanding why people submit, why they take to the streets, why they believe, why they hate, and why they sometimes give their lives for someone else’s words.

This book was not written to teach how to manage the masses or seize their consciousness. It was written to learn how not to lose oneself when a story becomes more persuasive than facts.

However, this book is not about intentions. It is about consequences. It presents politics as a space of interpretations: stories about the past, present, and future that we are invited to believe, stories in which people find themselves cast as characters before they have a chance to question their role in the plot.

This book does not aim to judge specific figures or expose motives. Its focus is on narratives, specifically those in which power ceases to feel like power and becomes perceived as reality. In this sense, the politics explored here serves not as a target for critique but as a source of knowledge.

If this book makes anyone uncomfortable, it means it is doing its job.

Introduction

Where Stories Become Power

Politics is a struggle for the right to explain what is happening.

Who gets to call a crisis a crisis, and who calls it a necessary stage? Who says ‘enemy’, and who says ‘threat’? Who promises a future, and who promises stability instead? Who turns fear into mobilisation and doubt into betrayal?

Facts exist in politics. Facts never live by themselves. A fact without a story is mute. A story without facts is dangerous. But it is stories that win.

A person cannot live in a bare set of data. A person needs meaning even if that meaning is destructive.

States do not collapse when they run out of resources but rather when the narrative that explains why these resources have any meaning in the first place stops working. Revolutions do not start with slogans and barricades but with the feeling that the official version of reality no longer describes lived experience. Power is held by force and laws, but first and foremost – by the right to the plot: the right to define what was, what is, and what must be.

This book on political narratology is an attempt to describe politics not as a set of institutions, procedures, and decisions, but as a space of competing stories. Stories about the past that legitimise the present. Stories about the future that justify today’s sacrifices. Stories about ‘us’ and ‘them’, about heroes and traitors, about salvation and catastrophe.

Modern political analysis often assumes that politics is a struggle of interests, resources, and rational strategies. In this logic, narratives are considered secondary: decoration, propaganda, or manipulation layered over the ‘real’ material foundation.

However, recent decades show the opposite. Facts have ceased to be self-sufficient. Data does not convince without interpretation. Rational arguments do not work unless they are embedded within a broader story that gives them meaning.

Political reality increasingly exists as a lived plot. People act because this plot fits their worldview, confirms a collective identity, and explains their anxiety and uncertainty.

This is precisely where the need for political narratology arises.

The Collective ‘We’ as Illusion and as Force

The strongest political character is not a leader or a party. It is the collective we. It never exists on its own. It is created through language, rituals, symbols, repetition. The collective ’we’ is always imagined, but it acts in very real ways.

In the name of we, people agree to things they would never agree to. In the name of ‘we’, violence, patience, silence, and sacrifices are justified. In the name of ‘we’, the ‘I’ disappears.

Political narratology begins with the recognition of a simple and unpleasant fact: the stronger the story, the less room there is for the individual.

Why This Book is More Dangerous Than the Previous Ones

The theory of narratology is relatively safe. It explains mechanisms. Applied narratology is riskier. It gives you tools.

Political narratology is dangerous by definition. Because it deals with the consciousness of the masses. And where there are masses, the temptation to control them always appears.

This book does not teach manipulative skills. But it shows how manipulation works. Knowledge is almost always ambiguous: you can use it to defend yourself, and you can abuse it.

This Book is Not About ‘Other Regimes’

The most convenient misconception is to think that political narratives exist ‘somewhere else’. In other countries. In dictatorships. In propaganda. In reality, they exist wherever there is fear of being rejected, a desire to belong, fatigue from uncertainty, and a thirst for simple answers to complex problems.

Democracy differs from authoritarianism not by the absence of narratives, but by the number of competing stories and the ability to challenge them.

When a story ceases to be a subject of discussion, it becomes an instrument of power.

The Refusal to Think as a Form of Submission

Modern people often say, ‘I am apolitical.’ It sounds like freedom. In practice, it is a form of capitulation.

Politics does not disappear when we stop thinking about it. It simply starts happening without us.

Refusing to understand is not neutrality. It is handing over the right of interpretation to others.

Why I Wrote This Book

I did not write it to expose, and certainly not to lecture. I wrote it because I see that we live in an era where stories spread faster than awareness, where emotions outpace thinking, where complexity is displaced by convenient simplicity.

The book arose from a feeling that people are increasingly living inside stories they did not choose, did not realise, and did not have time to verify. That their actions, fears, hopes, and even language are increasingly pre-prepared by someone else, for some other purpose, according to a logic that does not require consent, only participation.

Political narratology is an attempt to restore a person’s ability to see the form of a story, not just its content. This book does not offer another universal theory or instruction manual for power. It provides an optic, a way of seeing political reality as a narrative construct that is created, maintained, destroyed, and reassembled anew.

The Narratives Will Remain

Political systems crumble, leaders leave or are re-elected, borders change. But stories remain. They pass from era to era, changing words and faces but preserving their structure.

The question is not whether we can live without narratives. It is already obvious that we cannot.

The question is different: do we realise the story we are living inside, or is that story living through us?

The Aims of This Book

This book has several objectives:

1. To show that narrative is not a by-product of politics but its structural foundation.

2. To describe the architecture of resilient political narratives.

3. To understand how narratives survive crises and why they collapse.

4. To analyse the emergence of counter-narratives and their fate.

5. To consider how the digital environment is changing the production and competition of political stories.

How to Read This Book

This book does not require specialised training in any single discipline and does not offer the reader ready-made answers. It gives a way to look and to see. And if, after reading it, political events begin to be perceived not as a chaotic stream of news but as elements of competing stories, the book’s purpose will have been achieved.

Who This Book is For

This book is addressed to those working at the intersection of disciplines: political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, media researchers, cultural scholars, as well as anyone who feels that the familiar language for describing politics is no longer adequate for what is happening.

Epigraphs

The epigraphs have been carefully chosen to precisely anchor a new stage of the argument. Those marked as [paraphrased] are concise distillations of core ideas from the authors’ works rather than verbatim quotations.

Part I: The Foundations of Political Narratology

Introduction

All domination seeks to awaken and cultivate belief in its legitimacy.

Max Weber [paraphrased]

For a long time, humanity has been preoccupied with the same question: how can you unite and manage as many people as possible, make them loyal and engaged in achieving a common goal without resorting to significant resources or overt coercion?

One reason this is even possible is simple: a person rarely acts from a place of ‘pure rationality’. They act from interpretation.

In 2015, while studying how psychological and social factors influence behaviour, the World Bank commissioned the World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. Among other things, it identified a trio of factors that systematically influence people’s decisions.

Firstly, people often think automatically: the mind chooses not from scratch but from already available schemas and stories. Secondly, people think socially: identity, group norms, expectations, and the fear of exclusion are more influential than is commonly acknowledged. And thirdly, people use mental models: frameworks through which they ‘see’ the world and themselves in it. In other words, a narrative about the world becomes a kind of frame that colours the picture of every belief and opinion.

At the same time, a person rarely lives within a single, solitary narrative. Usually, they hold onto a system of interconnected stories, striving to preserve the integrity of their worldview and their own identity. This is directly linked to another important pattern extensively researched by Paul Slovic: large-scale representations of suffering often do not mobilise but paralyse. A big number can evoke not compassion but an internal shutdown – because the psyche struggles to withstand an abstract volume of pain.

The phrase attributed to Mother Teresa, ‘If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will,’ accurately captures this unsettling mechanism: it is easier for a person to respond to the fate of ‘the one’ than to the fate of ‘the many’. This is why communications that show a single figure are often more powerful than those that show statistics.

And here we arrive at politics. Politics is sustained not only by resources and institutions of power. It is sustained by emotionally effective stories that turn numbers into metaphors and chaos into a coherent worldview. A story can unite people who would otherwise remain fragmented, and it can also turn a disagreement into a war of identities. Most interestingly, the emotional impact on initiating decisions and actions becomes more important than conscious influence.

In his book Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action, Frederick Mayer describes numerous cases in which a story turned into the decisive element in collective action. If storytelling is the thread that binds groups together, then finding ways to work with this ‘technology’ becomes the first step towards uniting those in disagreement.

Today, the world is experiencing a crisis of disunity. Polarisation is growing, conflicts are intensifying, and shared frameworks of meaning are disintegrating. Millions are fleeing war, persecution, and climate threats, while other millions continue to act out old dramas of mutual blame. And as paradoxical as it may sound, without a common political narrative, the very idea of a shared goal – even the goal of civilisation’s survival – becomes difficult to imagine.

A common narrative does not guarantee harmony. But without it, a society either disintegrates or is held together only by coercion.

Chapter 1. What Is A Political Narrative

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

George Orwell

Whoever controls the interpretation doesn’t need to control the facts.

Modern formula of power

Politics Does Not Begin With Decisions

We are accustomed to thinking of politics as the sphere of decisions: passing a law, implementing a reform, changing a tax, declaring war, signing a treaty. It seems that politics is the realm of actions, not words. But this is an illusion.

No political action occurs in a vacuum. It is always preceded by a story that makes this action possible, permissible, necessary, or inevitable.

Before a law can be passed, it must be explained.

Before a war can be started, it must be justified.

Before freedoms can be restricted, a threat must be named.

Before a sacrifice can be demanded, a story must be told in which that sacrifice appears meaningful.

Politics does not begin with a decision. It begins with an interpretation. And it is this interpretation that we call a political narrative.

What We Call a Narrative and What It Is Not

In everyday speech, the word ‘narrative’ is often used carelessly. It is used to describe ideology, propaganda, slogans, the official version of events, ‘what the authorities say’. But a narrative is not all of these things. And not only these.

A political narrative is not a programme of action. A programme answers the question ‘What are we going to do?’ A narrative answers the question ‘What is even happening, and who are we in all this?’

A political narrative is not an ideology. Ideology is a system of ideas. A narrative is the story that these concepts are incorporated into to give them life.

A political narrative is not a slogan. A slogan is a compressed form. A narrative is the structure of meaning in which the slogan starts to work.

You can have an ideology without a narrative, and it will remain dead.

You can have a programme without a narrative, and it will not be accepted.

You can have facts without a narrative, and they will not be heard.

A political narrative is the frame within which facts gain significance, emotions find direction, and actions receive justification.

Story as a Form of Reality

It is important to understand one thing that usually slips by. A narrative is not a decoration of reality. It is the form in which reality becomes lived.

A person cannot live in a chaos of events. They need sequences, causes, culprits, goals, and a sense of what is happening. A political narrative serves this function precisely: it connects disparate events into a coherent picture of the world, with a beginning, a threat, a hero, a path, and a promise.

This is why, in moments of crisis, the narrative becomes more important than decisions. When the world is cracking and ready to split apart, a person asks not ‘What should we do?’ first, but ‘What does all this mean?’

Why Is Politics Always Based on Stories?

Can we imagine politics without stories? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Even the most ‘technocratic’ forms of governance rely on stories: about progress, stability, security, rationality, necessity.

When the authorities say, ‘That’s how the market works’, ‘Those are the laws of economics’, or ‘The circumstances demand it’, they are telling a story in which responsibility dissolves into impersonal necessity.

When the opposition say, ‘We were deceived’, ‘They stole our future’, and ‘We are reclaiming the country’, they are also building a story with a victim, a culprit, and a promise of restoration.

Politics cannot help but narrate, because power needs justification, submission needs an explanation, and sacrifices need meaning.

Narrative as a Competition of Interpretations

It is important to immediately abandon the naive notion that there exists one true political narrative. In reality, politics is always a competition of stories.

The same event can be described as a crisis or an opportunity, a defeat or a regrouping, betrayal or necessity, repression or protection, failure or the beginning of a journey.

The facts remain the same. The narrative they are a part of is what shifts. The winner is not the side with ‘more truth’, but the one whose story is more emotionally convincing, simpler, more repeatable, who aligns with the audience’s expectations and reduces anxiety or channels it.

Why Is Narrative Stronger Than Argument?

A rational argument requires effort. A story requires engagement.

An argument appeals to logic. A narrative appeals to identity.

An argument can be refuted. A narrative must first be destroyed. And that is always a very painful process.

When a person accepts a political narrative, they are not accepting a position but a role: citizen, victim, fighter, defender, heir, saviour.

To argue with an argument is normal. To argue with the story you live inside is to risk your very identity.

This is precisely why facts so often lose out to stories. Not because people are foolish, but because the price of abandoning the story of one’s identity is too high.

Narrative as Invisible Power

The strongest form of power is the one that is not felt as power. A political narrative works exactly like this. It dictates which questions are considered reasonable, determines what can be discussed and what seems ‘ridiculous’, forms the boundaries of permissible doubt, and preemptively labels criticism as dangerous or irresponsible.

When a narrative is stable, power can hardly intervene. People themselves explain what is happening, justify limitations, reproduce the language, and punish deviations.

At this moment, politics ceases to be external. It becomes internal.

Why Is Understanding Political Narrative Necessary?

To study political narratives is not to become a cynic. It is to reclaim the ability to see the form. A person who cannot distinguish a story from reality becomes its function.

A person who sees the narrative gets a chance not to dissolve into the collective ‘we’, to maintain distance, to preserve an inner voice, and to recognise moments of manipulation.

Political narratology does not begin with exposing others, but with observing the story you yourself are in.

We will now proceed from this point on by defining the political narrative.

Chapter 2. Narrative Is Neither Programme Nor Ideology

History has no plot; it is guided by no single logic.

Isaiah Berlin [paraphrased]

The Mistake Almost Everyone Makes

When people talk about politics, they almost always confuse three distinct levels: narrative, ideology, and programme. This confusion may seem harmless, but it is precisely what makes a person vulnerable.

A programme answers the question ‘What do we do?’ An ideology answers the question ‘Why do we do it?’ A narrative answers the question ‘Who are we and what is happening to us?’ This is why political debates so often appear meaningless: people are arguing on different levels without realising it.

One person speaks the language of numbers. Another speaks the language of values. A third speaks the language of stories. And it is almost always the third who wins.

Programme: A Soulless List of Actions

A political programme is a set of promises and measures: lower taxes, increase benefits, reform the system, improve metrics, optimise processes.

It answers the question: ‘What are we going to do?’ It can be logical, well-considered, economically sound, even beneficial. But a programme, on its own, never mobilises people.

Because a programme does not answer the essential human questions: Who are we? Why is this happening to us? What does this mean for me personally? Which side am I on?

A programme is a technical document. A human being is not a technical entity.

Ideology: A System of Ideas Without a Body

Ideology is the next level. It is a set of values and principles, notions of right and wrong, and a model of a desirable society. Ideology answers the question: ‘What do we believe in?’ But here, too, there is a limit. Ideology is abstract. It requires translation into the language of life.