Perception Management in Sudan’s April 2023 War: An Analysis of Political Propaganda and Digital Narratives

Abstract

This study examines political propaganda during the April 2023 war in Sudan by analyzing digital communication as part of a broader process of perception management in conflict settings. It focuses on how political marketing and media framing are employed to construct digital narratives that redefine the conflict, identify actors, and shape public perceptions.
The study adopts a qualitative approach based on multi-source digital content analysis, including social media materials, media outputs, and verified reports. It employs the semantic unit as the unit of analysis and classifies content across four communicative layers that reflect the hierarchical production and circulation of messages.
The findings indicate that perception management in the conflict operates through four key mechanisms: legitimacy marketing, engineering the image of the self and the opponent, narrative circulation, and control of information flow. These mechanisms interact to produce recurring patterns of discourse that contribute to stabilizing specific representations of the conflict within the digital public sphere.
The study proposes an analytical model that integrates political marketing, media framing, and digital narratives to explain how communication functions in armed conflicts, without claiming to measure direct behavioral effects. The model offers a transferable interpretive framework applicable to similar contexts in political communication research.