Abstract
With ongoing war in Ukraine, the cost-of-living crisis, looming climate emergency, breakthroughs in AI technology, and the return of great-power politics, the present and coming years will be a time of conceptual realignment, of finding new language to describe, understand, and operate in a ‘new world order’. I propose this process begins with metaphor. In a time of uncertainty, it may seem counterintuitive to focus on a linguistic device as inherently ambiguous as metaphor. But it is this ambiguity that allows metaphors to bridge policy pragmatism and strategic vision. Foregrounding the tension between the pull of old, familiar metaphors (‘new Cold War’) and the desire for new conceptual frameworks (‘polycrisis’), this article takes stock of the ‘state’ of geopolitical metaphors today. It interrogates the appeal of Cold War language in a time of geo-metaphorical vacuum. It also highlights simultaneous 102Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 12 | Spring 2023DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.12.6attempts to inject complexity theory into current discourse on geopolitics and asks what we may learn from the first ‘post-Cold War president’, Jimmy Carter. How can we formulate new geopolitical metaphors that harness the strategic ambiguity of metaphor and become storytellers of democracy once more?
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