Conflict is a genuinely narrative process. Narrative serves as a prism to re-evaluate processes of both escalation and de-escalation, both within and outside of storytelling. Narratives can fuel escalation by integrating conflicts into a set of presuppositions and, for some actors, by legitimising actions that amplify conflicts. They can simplify complex phenomena and popularise them by assuming a crisis or even rendering an event as such in the first place. The current self-perceptions of societies in the Baltic Sea Region are characterised by narratives of escalating tensions, conflicts, and crises. The pandemic triggered a narrative escalation on the balance of the conflict between personal freedoms and the state’s duty to protect citizens’ life and health. Severe climate-related natural disasters, coupled with the inertia of ecological transformation and a more radical protest culture, contribute to an escalation of debates about the future of agriculture, the manufacturing industry, and energy supply. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines led to a struggle between escalating narratives that overshadow each step of investigation. The instrumentalisation of new migration movements has escalated political debate about national identities and border policies. In digital environments, disinformation campaigns have become an increasing factor of conflict escalation.
However, narratives may also contribute to de-escalation: by questioning presuppositions, by de-centring perspectives, and by interrupting the flow of events. Strategies of de-escalation or mitigation of peripeties can even create their own narratives: through avoiding conflict lines, suggesting ongoing progress, or defusing conflicts by means of generalisation and abstraction. Escalation is generally understood as a gradual increase in conflict and conflict intensity. Different “degrees of escalation” can be provoked or accompanied by narratives, whereby “interrelations between narratological phenomena and escalation of the narrated conflicts” need to be studied. It can also be useful for analysing broader dynamics: the mutual alienation between antipodes in “memory wars” and their core narratives, for example, exacerbates anxiety, especially in societies confronted with traumatic resonances of their past. Likewise, the explicit reversal – or change to the opposite – of victim and perpetrator can be considered a rhetorical strategy to fuel cycles of escalation.
Cultural analysis and close reading methods help uncover hidden escalation narratives. Northern literary modernism has countered the move towards a clearly identifiable peripety with forms of storytelling that delay, obfuscate, or avoid clear plot points. Literature contributes to dissecting the afterlives of “unresolved” peripeties, e.g. in linguistic evocations of violent excesses in German (post-)Wende literature. Responses to terrorist attacks demonstrate how such escalating events resonate in and through literature, but also how literary responses are re-mediated and mobilized as part of other institutional contexts such as public memorials and even judicial trials.