Propaganda, Organised Political Persuasion, Lying and International Politics

Mearsheimer’s (2010) recent work on international politics and lying raises important issues surrounding questions of deception and dishonesty in politics. The thesis, however, is significantly underdeveloped and pays little attention to the communicative structures that are integral to contemporary politics. This shortcoming is shared by the majority of scholarship which engages with communications and international politics. Drawing upon a range of research from the fields of political marketing, military perception management and propaganda studies, this paper presents a conceptual framework designed to analyse acts of government information and disinformation. In order to demonstrate its utility, this conceptual framework is applied to a recent UK communication campaign, the UK government’s 2002 dossier on Iraqi WMD. The analysis highlights how the dossier involved deception via omission and disortion. The analysis presented here has important implications. First, the logic of liberal accounts of the democratic peace is potentially short circuited by the influence of organised political persuasion activities. More generally, IR scholarship needs to engage more fully with the problematics thrown up by organised political persuasion and its consequences for war and peace and democratic control over foreign policy formulation. With respect to the Iraq War, the analysis here highlights the deceptive nature of Britain’s path to War in Iraq and challenges on- going claims by officials, and inquiry findings, that the path to war in Iraq involved sincere and honest conduct on the part of the UK government.