Mapping the Mediascape in Motion: Emerging Trends and Persistent Research Gaps in International Communication Studies, 2000–2026: A Systematic Literature Review

International communication scholarship has undergone a paradigmatic reorientation since 2000, yet the field's conceptual repertoire has expanded more rapidly than it has been theoretically integrated. This systematic literature review interrogates that fragmentation by mapping the trajectory of the field across the period 2000–2026 and assessing the extent to which its proliferating frameworks—cultural imperialism, hybridization, network society, platform imperialism, data colonialism, computational propaganda, sharp power, and algorithmic governance—constitute cumulative theoretical advancement or analytically incommensurable parallel vocabularies. Following PRISMA 2020 procedures (Page et al., 2021) and a thematic synthesis design (Thomas & Harden, 2008), the review consolidates peer-reviewed scholarship across seven major communication databases into seven thematic clusters: cultural globalization and media flows; comparative journalism and cross-national media systems; de-Westernization and decolonial currents; phantomization, digital sovereignty, and media infrastructures; disinformation, computational propaganda, and information disorder; soft power, public diplomacy, and affective strategic communication; and the integration of generative artificial intelligence into transnational communication. Three theoretical findings emerge. First, the apparent succession of paradigms from broadcast-era to platform-era frameworks is better understood as conceptual layering, in which power-asymmetric models persist in modified form rather than being displaced by network-based alternatives. Second, the field's longstanding tension between structural and agentic accounts has been reconfigured—but not resolved—by the platform turn, with infrastructural analysis emerging as a potential synthesizing register (Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019). Third, the persistent disjuncture between the field's de-Westernization commitments and its bibliometric realities (Demeter, 2020) is theoretically consequential, indicating that epistemic asymmetries function not as residual artifacts but as constitutive features of contemporary international communication knowledge production. A seventh identified gap—the under-theorization of affective dimensions of international communication—extends the review's analytic horizon to include emergent comparative work on emotion, civilizational rhetoric, and cross-border public engagement (Çelik, 2025; Hameleers & Garnier Ortiz, 2024; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). The review proposes a future research agenda centered on epistemic pluralism, methodological diversification, infrastructural and material analysis, and sustained engagement with planetary-scale technological change.