The Emergence of Roles in British Foreign Policy: How the UK Interprets Russian Disinformation

Abstract

Russian disinformation is an important part of the UK’s narrative of its social life in international relations. From the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea to its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine since 2022, disinformation has shaped British foreign policy (FP). Whilst the response to disinformation in 2014 was ad hoc and reactive, the UK displayed a set of behaviours to counter Russian disinformation immediately before and during the full-scale invasion. These include efforts to debunk disinformation, the use of strategic communications, issuing financial and regulatory sanctions, and coalescing allied support for its measures. This thesis contends that between these two moments, there was a shift in how the UK made sense of and narratively positioned itself in relation to Russian disinformation. Utilising role theory to understand how the UK interpreted this issue in its FP, this thesis aims to conceptualise the process of role emergence. By tracing the UK’s FP narrative of Russian disinformation, it identifies and analyses an emergent provider of truth role that came to guide and shape its FP behaviour in this context.

This thesis asks as its primary research question: how have foreign policy roles emerged in the United Kingdom’s narrative of Russian disinformation? Utilising a narrative methodology, it examines how the UK state articulates its understanding of Russian disinformation and its expectations regarding how to behave in its FP towards it. This thesis seeks to make two substantive contributions to the literature on role theory and disinformation in Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). For role theory, it produces a step-by-step model of the mechanisms that explain how roles emerge, including the conditions required for this process to unfold. Empirically, the traced emergent provider of truth role explains UK FP behaviour within the narrow social context of Russian disinformation and the delimited changes in its FP narrative. Ultimately, by bridging role theory and disinformation, this thesis takes an interpretivist approach to explain how the social construction of disinformation shapes FP behaviour.

Date of Award	22 Apr 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bath
Supervisor	Leslie Wehner (Supervisor) & Andre Barrinha (Supervisor)