Volume 4 | Spring 2018 DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS The official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence TV, Twitter, and Telegram: Al-Shabaab’s Attempts to Influence Mass Media. Soviet Economic Gaslighting of Latvia and the Baltic States. The role of historical narratives in extremist propaganda. Humour as a Communication Tool: the Case of New Year’s Eve Television in Russia. Russian Information Space, Russian Scholarship, and Kremlin Controls. Examining Strategic Integration of Social Media Platforms in Disinformation Campaign Coordination. When People Don’t Know What They Don’t Know: Brexit and the British Communication Breakdown. Data Rights and Population Control: Human, Consumer, or Comrade? Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 4 | Spring 2018 ISSN 2500-9478 1 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. It does not represent the opinions or policies of NATO or the NATO StratCom COE. The views presented in the following articles are those of the authors alone. © 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 4 | Spring 2018 2 ISSN 2500-9478 Defence Strategic Communications Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 4 | Spring 2018 FOREWORD 3 The Spring of 2018 has brought into sharp focus how differently states pursue strategic communications. One particular incident, more spy novel than grand politics, would have far reaching consequences beyond its original intent. In March a former Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned using the military-grade nerve agent Novichok, apparently smeared on the door handle of his home in Salisbury, England. Sergei Skripal, a retired colonel with Russian military intelligence, had previously been sentenced to prison in Moscow for 13 years as a British spy. Subsequently, he was exchanged in a spy swap. As dramatic as the murder attempt was, the aftermath would prove even more revealing. In a letter to NATO’s Jens Stoltenberg, the UK’s National Security Adviser, Sir Mark Sedwill concluded that it was ‘highly likely’ that Russia was responsible. Only they, he suggested, had the ‘technical means, operational experience and the motive’. Events had anyway already taken their rapid course. 23 Russian diplomats were expelled from Britain. Moscow responded in kind, expelling the same number of British representatives while closing Britain’s public diplomacy arm, the British Council. A further 20 Western nations, including European Union countries, expressed solidarity with Britain, expelling Russian diplomatic staff. The US alone sent 60 home, identifying them as intelligence agents. This diplomatic merry-go-round of signalling needs to be understood in the wider context of how states seek to shape the discursive environment Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 4 | Spring 2018 4 and influence international audiences. According to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, some 32 divergent accounts explaining the Skripal attack are in circulation, ranging from the bizarre to the bewildering. They can be traced to Russia’s information services, experts reveal. In earlier issues of Defence Strategic Communications, authors have discussed the strategies behind Russian disinformation campaigns. These are understood by many scholars and practitioners to aim at clouding the facts rather than direct rebuttal. Having been offered competing versions of the truth, wrapped in a post-modernist justification that argues no single truth can exist, audiences will presumably be wrong-footed in attributing cause to effect. At least, sufficient numbers of people could be misled to undermine the value of evidence-based reporting. Another event followed soon after the Skripal affair during the Spring of 2018. The government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out chemical attacks on its own citizens in Douma, a rebel-held town northeast of Damascus. Civil society observers noted two bombardments by the Syrian Air Force, and journalists interviewed survivors. Hundreds of victims were brought to medical facilities, suffering the apparent effects of chemical poisoning; some died. Video footage appeared to support the accusation. The following week the US, UK, and France responded by launching more than 100 missiles against sites in Syria thought to be chemical weapons facilities. This in turn drew condemnation from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, who characterised the strikes as an ‘act of aggression’, predicting they would have ‘a destructive effect on the entire system of international relations’. Some analysts suggested the timing and targeting of these strikes had been undertaken following consultation between US and Russian militaries, presumably with the intention of avoiding Russian casualties and limiting any geopolitical escalation. In short, performance politics. Meanwhile, the Syrian president, commenting on claims he had targeted his population, declared ‘It was a lie…This did not happen’. Apparently, the government had not bombed its own people with chemical weapons. And Moscow was swift to corroborate his statement. Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister claimed to have ‘irrefutable evidence’ of ‘yet another attack staged with the participation of special services of one state that is striving to be at the forefront of the Russophobic campaign.’ In late April, both Syrian and Russian diplomats presented in The Hague to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the body that scientifically verifies any use of chemical weapons. In a briefing that included as witnesses, citizens from Douma Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 4 | Spring 2018 and an 11 year-old boy who had been famously captured on camera while being 5 hosed down for chemical contamination, allegations of a chemical attack were refuted. What these episodes highlight for contributors and readers of this journal is the rapidly changing use of information, misinformation, and disinformation at the heart of contemporary politics. Indeed, connecting the local to the national to the geopolitical. Where once we focused on the message and the messenger, increasingly our attention should turn to where overlapping discursive environments are being contested. This development calls for more than separating truth from untruth. Rather it is about appreciating that the perception of truth determines what is believed—right or wrong—and the consequent relationship between governments’ hard won credibility and their legitimacy. In this era of mass-distributed consumer devices, ownership of smartphones will soon become universal. How global populations as producers and receivers of communications engage with governments then becomes critical. Political developments witnessed during the Spring of 2018 have been all too glibly labelled Information Wars. This is to misunderstand the complexity of what is unfolding before our eyes. A multi-tiered yet frequently organic positioning of ideas and values. Power in today’s world is multipolar. The national interest increasingly informs how states choose to exercise it. For too long strategic communications as a field of inquiry has been unduly concerned with tactics, techniques, even technologies. Yet it is the dynamic interplay between strategy and tactics—how to influence the bigger picture—and contiguous, multiple communications environments that today invites greater reflection from scholars, policy makers, and practitioners. This fourth issue of Defence Strategic Communications continues our mission to develop the field of strategic communications by digging more rigorous and critical foundations. Only then can we develop the richer thinking necessary to address those questions for which we are currently underprepared. In these pages we present an eclectic blend of original research. Between 2011 and 2017, the CNN journalist Robyn Kriel experienced at close quarters Somalia’s al- Shabaab communicators. Her insights into how the insurgent group uses Twitter, and more pointedly how it has shaped a forward-thinking approach to engage with journalists, only highlights how Somalia’s successive governments and intervention forces, like the UN-backed African Mission to Somalia (AMISOM), have failed to make similar gains in public support. The Kenyan military’s denial Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 4 | Spring 2018 6 of its casualties on the ground is frequently undermined by evidence recorded as part of al-Shabaab’s visualisation