Political science as a discipline may not pay enough attention to communication technology, but the field of communication takes great interest in politics. In the tradition of Harold Innis’s The Bias of Communication (1953), Monroe Price sets out to explain how innovations in social media and marketing practices can constrain or enable free speech and democratic values, and further, how the new technologies provide new opportunities for various actors to shape or contest these effects.

Although occasioned by the social media revolution, Free Expression, Globalism and the New Strategic Communication is not exclusively or even primarily concerned with technology. Price operates under a constructivist premise that “A state is, in part, a collection of stories connected to power” (p. 41), implying that anything that changes those stories has the potential to change or reinforce power. He is thus interested in how “narratives of legitimacy” are produced by states and challenged by other state or nonstate actors via the increasingly complex communicative and economic relationships that globalization has produced. Because “[n]arrative is interpretive, not merely or even objective” (p. 45), the profusion of ways and means for expanding or reducing the gap between myth and reality becomes a strategic tool. Scholars who find discourse analysis compelling may find that Price’s synthetic focus on the means of communication, together with its content, offers some useful insights.

Price builds on an interesting premise that “the extraordinary phenomenon we call ‘free expression’ is not only a set of principles and practices but also a set of institutions” (p. 27). By institutions he means not only rules, norms, and governing arrangements in the sense familiar to positive political economists but also “the infrastructure of information flows” (p. 27) to include technical devices, software protocols, service providers, and so forth. The author argues that we cannot take freedom of expression for granted because its constitutive institutions are shaped by “strategic communication,” which he defines as “a set of speech practices undertaken to reinforce, subvert, undermine, overwhelm or replace a preexisting discourse on a subject significant to both the audience and the speaker” (p. 19). Globalization and the information revolution, in turn, make strategic communication at once more attractive, contested, and anxiety producing for powerful states, which gain new means for surveillance and control, and social movements, which gain new means for challenging them. Price emphasizes that these developments have an ambiguous “double impact” (p. 7) that simultaneously decentralizes and disintermediates discourse through social media and consolidates information and power relationships through strategic communication.

The author covers a lot of theoretical and case material (perhaps too much) across the book’s 12 chapters. The first half of the book attempts to triangulate the concepts in the book’s title. After highlighting the sociotechnical foundations of expressive practices, Price goes on to discuss strategies by which actors shape the means and content of expression. These include the use of “diagnostics” or marketing and analytical technologies that enable actors to characterize the information environment of their competitors in order to target their messaging; the exploitation of “asymmetric contexts” available differentially to weak or strong actors; and efforts to shape “strategic architectures” like the networks and protocols of the Internet to promote one vision of order over another, notably China’s Internet sovereignty challenge to the Western multistakeholder ideal.

The second half of the book turns to case studies of strategic communication, including the use of state propaganda for “soft war” in the U.S.–Iran relationship, the role of government support in the efforts of nongovernmental organizations to promote democracy, efforts to shape or hijack the narrative of China’s rise during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and the emergence of new satellite communications to literally go over national regulatory regimes and states’ responses All of this material contains interesting insights, but the threads that connect chapters (or even ideas within chapters) are often elusive.

This book may appeal to scholars who have already decided that contests of ideas and discourse are the central problem(s) of politics in the twenty-first century, shining a light on material strategies that advance ideological agendas. It will not likely persuade those who are more skeptical about the role of ideas or attracted to explanations that appeal more to material incentives. Some might argue that the rhetorical drama of contested strategic narratives is largely epiphenomenal to the balance of power. To take the example of propaganda deployed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both mentioned by Price, it is one thing to assume that ideological narratives shape the willingness of people to rebel or support the government; yet research by scholars of civil war, such as Roger Petersen, Stathis Kalyvas, and Paul Staniland, suggests that affiliative networks and individual calculations of opportunity and safety are far more important than the ideological grievances targeted by “information operations” efforts.

Price does recognize that “It is difficult to evaluate what disciplining power can be attributed to the narrative itself as compared to the power structures that underlie it” (pp. 58–59). This is probably an understatement. Yet if “[t]here is a fragility” (p. 58), Price also asserts that “strategic narrative can be destabilizing as well as stabilizing, reshaping as well as unifying. … If narratives have this power, then the continuing process of producing them becomes a matter of deep transnational concern” (p. 61). He makes little effort to systematically compare his cases within a rigorous explanatory framework that might enable him to consistently specify the conditions under which strategic narratives shape the balance of material power or vice versa. This is in part a matter of methodological or conceptual preference that might not bother readers who are more comfortable thinking in reciprocal hermeneutic terms.

Free Expression, Globalism and the New Strategic Communication seems like the subtitle for a book without a title. This is somehow fitting for a text that struggles to pin down a central argument. This book is an extremely ambitious effort to simultaneously consider how “states think about their strategic narratives and how these narratives are affected by internal and external modes of expression; the balance or distribution among strategic communicators within and without a society; our changing understanding of the meaning of self-determination and its relationship to information and deliberation; the shape and nature of information infrastructures and their design and, in particular, the rise of social media; our sense of the reliability of ‘law’ or of law as a guarantor of free expression; and, finally, the shifting perceptions of the society’s immunity to external or internal threat, invasion and catastrophe” (p. 40). This book has something for everyone. That is either its greatest strength or its tragic flaw.