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Narrative Capture and the Struggle for Legitimacy
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 21 2026
Pages: 214
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.49 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In moments of political crisis, citizens are urged to trust the process, trust the institutions, and trust the story they are given. But increasingly, the greatest threat to democratic systems is not repression in the open. It is the capture of narrative itself.
Narrative Capture introduces a framework for understanding how modern institutions exercise power by controlling meaning rather than force. Drawing on contemporary cases and democratic theory, Zoë Roberts examines how procedure replaces accountability, how legitimacy is manufactured, and how confusion becomes a tool of governance.
This is not a book about ideology.
It is a book about mechanisms.
Roberts shows how democratic erosion often occurs without coups, without censorship, and without violence. Instead, it unfolds through narrative management, procedural theater, and the quiet displacement of truth by process. Citizens are not silenced. They are taught to doubt their own perception.
Written for readers concerned with democracy, law, media, and public trust, Narrative Capture offers a method for recognizing when institutions stop telling the truth and begin managing belief.
Because in democratic systems, the collapse of freedom rarely begins with force.
It begins when people can no longer tell what is real.
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