Арсен Аветисов – Political Narratology. How Stories Shape Power and Compliance (страница 1)

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.