Tara Almosawi, Thea Baines, & Taj Donville-Outerbridge under the supervision of Dr. David Zarnett, Lecturer at the University of Toronto.
UNPO collaborates with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy through its Justice Capstone Seminar on a student-led project on The Use of Narratives, (Mis)Information, and Media for Unrepresented Nations and Peoples in the 21st Century. The following article summarises the key findings and recommendations of that research.
Narratives and information are never politically neutral. For unrepresented nations and peoples, the struggle for self-determination is not only about autonomy or sovereignty, but also about meaning. The boundaries of what is considered reasonable, legitimate, and common sense are shaped by cultural hegemony. That said, narrative power can also be used to challenge dominant discourses—particularly for self-determination movements. In such contexts, narrative power becomes a form of political power: a resource for visibility, legitimacy, and self-representation. This topic becomes even more pressing in the current information ecosystem. Fake news has become a major global issue, and the rapid dissemination of information on social media platforms has altered the landscape of news production and consumption. These new media ecosystems and information disorders emerge at the intersection of economic incentives and a shifting world order, shaping how self-determination movements communicate, how they are perceived, and how they can resist dominant narratives.
This article draws on comparative research into three self-determination movements – Palestine, Western Sahara, and Somaliland – to examine how dominant narratives and information disorder shape political possibilities, and how movements can construct counternarratives to resist misrepresentation. Its findings are supplemented by a survey of UNPO members from across the globe. The full report, including a practical media toolkit, is available for those wishing to explore these questions in greater depth.
Framing, Information Disorder, and the Stakes of the Narrative
Framing theory helps explain why the language through which a conflict is described matters as much as the facts themselves. What is omitted from a story is as consequential as what is shown. For self-determination movements, narrative framing is the process by which historical grievance, cultural distinctiveness, and claims to sovereignty are made politically legible — translating lived experience into a form that demands recognition from the international community.
Information disorder shapes this terrain in specific ways. Misinformation refers to false information shared without malicious intent; disinformation to false information knowingly spread to cause harm; and malinformation to genuine information weaponised against its subjects — for instance, by moving private information into the public sphere. Together, these dynamics determine how movements are perceived and how effectively they can resist narratives imposed upon them by states, media institutions, and powerful political actors.
Palestine: Countering Dehumanisation with Human Rights and Citizen Journalism
The mainstream Western media has systematically prioritised Israeli perspectives over Palestinian ones, particularly following the October 2023 attacks and the ensuing Israeli bombardment of Gaza. A recurring pattern is the attachment of the “Hamas-run” qualifier to Palestinian institutions and casualty figures — a framing that delegitimises Gazan governance and implies collective culpability. The CBC ombudsman confirmed that this language contributes “to a belief that every single Gazan is somehow linked to an organisation that carried out the October 7th attacks.”
Reporting has also been deeply asymmetrical. BBC coverage prioritised Israeli deaths by a ratio of 33:1. Israelis were interviewed twice as often as Palestinians across 35,000 BBC news stories. Israeli military representatives appeared on major US networks 44 times in October 2023, while no Palestinian representatives were interviewed in the same period. Leaked editorial guidelines from the New York Times and CNN revealed directives against using terms such as “genocide,” “occupied territory,” and “refugee camps” — a form of censorship that shapes not only current understanding of the crisis but the longer-term possibility of transitional justice and accountability.
In response, the Palestinian movement has grounded its counternarrative in international law and human rights language, explicitly naming Israeli settler colonialism and contextualising Palestinian resistance within the UN Charter’s provisions on self-determination. Rather than sanitising or condemning resistance, Palestinian advocates have recalibrated the struggle against occupation as a fight for human rights. This reframing has contributed to a documented shift in public opinion: in 2026, for the first time, 41% of Americans sympathise with Palestine compared to 36% with Israel, and major Western governments have been pressured by their populations to formally recognise the Palestinian state.
The movement has also worked to diversify the stories it tells and the people telling them. Through TikTok, Instagram, and X, Palestinian citizen journalists have brought the texture of daily life — resilience, grief, and resistance — to global audiences in ways that bypass editorial gatekeeping. Despite ongoing censorship of Palestinian content on major platforms, this expansion of self-representation has measurably shifted how the conflict is understood, particularly among younger generations.
Somaliland: The Gap Between Internal Legitimacy and External Recognition
Somaliland presents a paradox at the heart of international recognition politics. Having declared the restoration of its pre-union borders in 1991 following the collapse of the Somali state, Somaliland has since built functioning democratic institutions, held credible multiparty elections, and maintained relative stability — all without international recognition or external support. In January 2026, Israel became the first state to formally recognise Somaliland.
Yet Somaliland’s claim has struggled to gain traction in international media and diplomatic circles. The dominant forms of information disorder in its case operate not through fabrication but through the uneven allocation of legitimacy. Routine media language — “breakaway region,” “self-declared,” “unrecognised” — embeds the territorial-integrity presumption into the vocabulary through which Somaliland’s claim reaches general audiences. Crucially, the 1988 Isaaq genocide — in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed by the Barre regime — is consistently absent from the first news cycle. When this context is missing, territorial-integrity framing fills the vacuum. The report identifies the under-deployment of this origin story as one of Somaliland’s most significant strategic vulnerabilities.
Somaliland has developed a deliberate counternarrative strategy, maintaining representative offices in nine countries and calibrating its arguments to different audiences: a democratic anti-China partner for US audiences, a port infrastructure opportunity for Gulf partners, and a colonial-era boundary restoration argument for African bodies. However, a central tension runs through this approach. When the self-determination claim is consistently framed in the language of strategic partnership, external actors engage on those terms while setting the recognition question aside. Visibility has, in some cases, come at the cost of progress on the core demand.
Internal political fractures have also created narrative vulnerabilities. The 2022–2023 conflict in Las Anod and repeated electoral delays provided material for counter-narratives that were difficult to rebut. However, the peaceful transfer of power following the November 2024 presidential election — one of only five successful opposition victories recorded across Africa that year — demonstrated the possibility of narrative recovery. The lesson the report draws is direct: governance and narrative are inseparable, and movements that act consistently with their stated values are more resilient to counter-narratives over time.
Western Sahara: Depoliticising Occupation Through Proceduralism
Western Sahara illustrates how information disorder can operate through the normalisation of stalemate rather than through outright fabrication. The central framing contest is between two incompatible narratives of legitimacy. On the Sahrawi side, the conflict is an unfinished process of decolonisation in which an Indigenous people has been denied the opportunity to exercise self-determination. Morocco frames Western Sahara as an integral part of the Moroccan nation, while casting the Polisario Front as an Algerian-backed proxy rather than a legitimate national liberation movement. This asymmetry is not merely rhetorical — it structures whose claims appear legally and politically intelligible in international forums.
The political effect of dominant media framing has been to depoliticise occupation by presenting it as a procedural issue. Describing the conflict as “frozen” or “in deadlock” makes the absence of resolution appear technical or administrative rather than the product of sustained political choices. Delay, the research argues, is not an unfortunate drift — it is politically productive for the occupying power, consolidating territorial control while the decolonisation question is indefinitely deferred. Contesting the stalemate frame therefore requires politicising time itself: naming postponement as an active mechanism rather than accepting it as a neutral description.
Effective Sahrawi counternarratives must reassert Western Sahara as a decolonisation case, restoring the legal significance of self-determination and resisting absorption into frameworks that treat Moroccan sovereignty as the practical baseline. The sustained existence of Sahrawi political institutions and collective identity — across decades of exile and constraint — is a form of argument in its own right, demonstrating that the movement’s claim is historical, ongoing, and grounded in a living political community.
Lessons from UNPO Members: Common Challenges, Shared Strategies
A survey of eight UNPO member movements – including East Turkestan, Catalonia, Khmer-Krom, Gilgit-Baltistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Brittany, Western Togoland and Hong Kong – confirmed that the patterns identified in the three case studies are widely shared. Common forms of misrepresentation include labels of “extremism” and “terrorism,” stereotypes, erasure, and the alignment of mainstream media narratives with occupying powers’ authority. The most prominent communication challenges are crafting effective narratives, countering mis- and disinformation, and developing social media strategy.
All eight movements surveyed use a human rights narrative framework, with the majority also employing democracy, security, and decolonisation frames. Diaspora communities, UN bodies, civil society, and other self-determination movements are identified as the most important stakeholders for transnational advocacy. Movements draw inspiration from the successful recognition trajectories of Timor-Leste, the Baltic States, and Ireland. Promising practices include linking local repression to international legal obligations, centring survivor testimony and credible evidence, connecting struggles to global supply chains, and building coalitions with journalists, researchers, and civil society organisations.
Recommendations: Building Narrative Power for Self-Determination
Across all three case studies and the broader survey findings, six strategic recommendations emerge for self-determination movements navigating hostile information environments. These recommendations directly informed the practical media toolkit developed alongside this report, which provides concrete, evidence-based guidance for movements seeking to communicate their goals and counter misrepresentation in practice.
In brief, movements must: own their frame before others claim it, anchoring their core claim in international legal norms before major news cycles or diplomatic events; name and disrupt depoliticising language by tracking and challenging terms that appear neutral but encode political judgments; diversify the stories they tell and the people telling them, platforming grassroots and diaspora voices alongside formal advocacy; tailor messages to different audiences without allowing the core self-determination claim to be absorbed into adjacent frameworks; protect internal credibility as a narrative asset, recognising that governance and narrative are inseparable; and build long-term narrative infrastructure — sustained, multilingual, multi-platform communication that maintains visibility between crisis moments, not only during them.
Conclusion: Narrative Power as Political Power
The cases of Palestine, Western Sahara, and Somaliland confirm that information is never politically neutral, and that the struggle over how a conflict is named, framed, and rendered legible is inseparable from the struggle itself. For self-determination movements operating in hostile information environments, narrative strategy is not a supplementary concern — it is a primary site of political contestation.
Information disorder in these contexts operates less through outright fabrication than through depoliticising frames, controlled visibility, source hierarchy, and the quiet normalisation of asymmetrical language. Contesting these conditions requires more than rebutting specific claims. It requires building the institutional, relational, and communicative infrastructure through which a movement can sustain its own narrative over time — and doing so proactively, before others define the terms of debate.
Narrative power, like political power, must be actively built, sustained, and protected. In hostile information environments, survival as a legible political community is itself an act of resistance.
