DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS the Official Journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
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Volume 6 | Spring 2019 DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS The official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence How the global war on terror killed the prospect of justice for Kenyan victims of violence Analysing Strategic Communications through early modern theatre Strategic Communications as a tool for great power politics in Venezuela The beginning of warfare on the internet: Zapatista Strategic Communications Measuring the effect of Russian Internet Research Agency information operations in online conversations Reverse engineering Russian Internet Research Agency tactics through network analysis From swords to ploughshares: time for a CVE step-change? On finding the ethical in the age of digital battle spaces ISSN: 2500-9486 DOI: 10.30966/2018.RIGA.6 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 ISSN 2500-9478 1 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.6 Defence Strategic Communications Editor-in-Chief Dr. Neville Bolt Managing Editor Linda Curika Editor Anna Reynolds Editorial Board Professor Nancy Snow Professor Nicholas O’Shaughnessy Professor Mervyn Frost Professor Žaneta Ozoliņa Dr. Agu Uudelepp Dr. Nerijus Maliukevicius Thomas Elkjer Nissen, MA Matt Armstrong, MA Defence Strategic Communications is an international peer-reviewed journal. The journal is a project of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (NATO StratCom COE). It is produced for scholars, policy makers, and practitioners around the world. © All rights reserved by the NATO StratCom COE. The journal and articles may not be copied, reproduced, distributed or publicly displayed without reference to the NATO StratCom COE. The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of NATO StratCom COE. NATO StratCom COE does not take responsibility for the views of authors expressed in their articles. NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Riga, Kalnciema iela 11b, Latvia LV1048 www.stratcomcoe.org Ph.: 0037167335463 [email protected] Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 2 ISSN 2500-9478 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.6 Defence Strategic Communications Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 FOREWORD 3 Over the last three years this journal has sought to deepen the foundations of Strategic Communications as a field of academic inquiry. Uniquely, it has undertaken this task by encouraging a debate between not only scholars but policy makers, practitioners, and writers of military doctrine. And into this community we have welcomed the contributions of journalists schooled in the ways of governance, insurgency, and war. Ours is an emergent field of research; at least, under the nomenclature of Strategic Communications. Often that very label is misleading and we are tempted to interpret the themes and ideas to which it attaches in a way that barely scratches the surface of history. Forgetting that societies have for thousands of years engaged in communicating politically, we often neglect the point that persuasion and coercion, and the continual calibration between the two, sit at the heart of humanity’s exercise of power. Too little thinking is invested in the genealogy of this field. Strategic Communications’ origins have been myopically accredited to business affairs or geopolitics over the last two decades. NATO traces its public use of the term to the Bucharest Summit a decade ago in April 2008. But the story doesn’t start there. Nor indeed does it end there. NATO considers public diplomacy, public affairs, military public affairs, information operations, and psychological operations all to sit within the co-ordinated remit of its Strategic Communications. Some of these concepts, however, fail to align seamlessly with the definitions many states Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 4 apply within their national security cultures. Despite NATO’s investment in research, doctrine, and terminology, when trying to separate out these sometimes troublesome concepts, a host of others—that actually describe real jobs filled by real people in the world of political communications—are absent from this list. How should political marketing, advertising, corporate branding, nation branding, public relations, and most uncomfortably, propaganda be understood in the same roll call? Strategic Communications entails the long-term shaping and shifting of significant discourses in societies. It adopts a holistic approach to communication based on values and interests, that encompass everything an actor does to achieve objectives in a contested environment. This speaks more to process. To apply that to intention and attainment in the world of politics, it addresses the projection of foreign and security policies aimed at changing the attitudes and behaviour of targeted audiences to achieve strategic effects, using words, images, actions and non-actions in the national interest or the interest of a political community. Strategic Communications recognises that time is both its friend and its enemy. By contrast, crisis communications, and the more malleable public relations (read image management), focus on the immediate: they fix short-term crises in politics and set-backs at the corporate or personal image level. Strategic Communications is usually directed at foreign governments and their populations. But when digital information technologies perpetually breach sovereign borders and what was in the analogue era a national broadcast footprint, historic binaries of home and abroad rapidly dissolve; so too the binary of government and people. That makes it difficult, if not unwise, to conceive of it as some kind of hermetically sealed message projection directed at foreign states. Feedback and blowback operate in split-second dynamic loops. What makes Strategic Communications strategic is a recognition that one party cannot influence the thinking or behaviour of another party without first negotiating a path through a continually changing and noisy environment, having set out from a less than ideal starting place while moving towards an unstable end-point. By the same token, it has largely freed itself from the classical moorings that some thinkers still consider essential to setting its definitional limits. Namely, that its aims and activities must be associated with the pursuit or cessation of war, understood as kinetic engagement. Nevertheless, as much as a number of military-minded scholars might favour one interpretation yet other politically-centred thinkers decline these constraints, there is often consensus Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 around its operational components or processes of delivery: defining a message; 5 identifying a specific audience; intending to achieve not simply an effect but real, measurable change; while being judged by all that is seen and heard, intentionally or otherwise. Not so far, then, from the linear maxim of communications that held sway some 70 years ago: namely, Harold Lasswell’s ‘who says what in which channel to whom with what effect’. However, more nuanced concepts have crept into the way we discuss this field today where information flows can never be controlled, not even managed, but at best influenced. Today Strategic Communications is increasingly imagined as a holistic undertaking. When formulated by states we talk of cross-government or whole of government approaches, of fusion, and of different ways of treating information in the state’s armoury. DIME—Diplomatic, Information, Military, Economics, with its distinct preserves, is challenged increasingly in the instantaneous and digitally-connected 21st century, so that Information becomes subsumed into those other three pillars of state engagement, DME. Nevertheless, historians may argue it was ever thus. For thousands of years, states or administrative elites seeking to control populations and challenge foreign elites for resources and control of territory, have always mobilised the full array of assets at their disposal. In 1887 a unique cache of documents—the Amarna Letters—was unearthed at the ancient site of a pharaonic palace in Egypt. What this correspondence with Egypt revealed was an early record of a system of international relations (nearly 3,500 years ago) between great powers, independent powers, and vassal states where its leaders called themselves ‘Great King’ while conducting diplomacy, strategic affairs, marriage, and trade as part of a ‘brotherhood’. This system stretched across modern Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and the Levant. The intersection of symbolism and reality is a fine one. Images carved onto the walls of palaces built nearly 3,000 years ago in Assyrian Mesopotamia bear witness to the Strategic Communications of King Ashurbanipal. Military conquest of Egypt and Elam (southern Iran today) is depicted alongside raging conflicts across Babylonia; the forced movement of entire populations to create new agricultural economies to benefit his conquering state is celebrated with the same confidence as his library of 10,000 works that would enhance understandings of science, medicine, literature, magic, and statecraft. A blend of coercion and persuasion, these campaigns etched in stone for millennia attempt to influence elites and terrify populations in places like Nimrud, Nineveh, and Babylon. Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 6 | Spring 2019 6 They serve also to remind us of more recent messaging campaigns into those same centres in Iraq in the early