Social Media and Strategic Communications in UN Peace Missions

UN peace missions are increasingly becoming victims of deliberate disinformation campaigns. To counter these campaigns, the UN is engaging in strategic communications with the aim to build trust and public support for its peace missions. Digitization opens new possibilities for communication with local populations, and social media provides UN peace missions with new capabilities to share information with their local audiences and to gather public input. Through social media, the UN has been actively engaged in informing the public and influencing public perceptions of its legitimacy; however, little is known about the role social media can play in support of UN peace missions. To assess how social media influences practices of strategic communications of UN peace missions, this chapter draws on the broad theoretical discussion on discursive legitimation efforts by IOs and approaches relating to strategic communications and public diplomacy. The resulting framework is applied in an exploratory case study of social media communication patterns of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS). Qualitative content analysis is applied to determine how the peacekeeping mission engages with its audience, how it frames and legitimizes its engagement, and what broader topics and discourses are being addressed in the individual posts.