The domestic production of strategic narratives: public diplomacy in culture and technology from the United Kingdom and beyond

Abstract Strategic narratives are streamlined stories with instrumental priorities that organizations and governments present about themselves. This article shows how strategic narratives emerge in public diplomacy through domestic contestations and collaboration among several agencies. The essay examines two public diplomacy narratives—in the realms of culture and technology—from the United Kingdom, but placed in the context of overlapping narratives from other countries. In both cases, the essay emphasizes text-based methodologies for empirical substantiation, including computational methods. For culture, the essay analyzes the record of fostering cultural relations through the British Council. The second realm, that of artificial intelligence policies in the United Kingdom, might seem to be something other than ‘public diplomacy’. Yet, as this essay shows, these policies have an external diplomatic dimension. Strategic narratives are an integral part of how states present their national stories to the world and to their domestic audience, but their cohesiveness rests on long-term contestations informed with historical values.