Volume 9 | Autumn 2020 DEFENCE STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS The official journal of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence Islamic State and Jihadist Media Strategies in the Post-Soviet Region Selective Law Enforcement on the Runet as a Tool of Strategic Communications Capitalism, Communications, and the Corps: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and the Communications Economy ‘Climate Emergency’: How Emergency Framing Affects The United Kingdom’s Climate Governance The Long Decade of Disinformation The Rise of Atrocity Propaganda: Reflections on a Changing World ISSN: 2500-9486 DOI: 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 9 | Autumn 2020 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9. ISSN 2500-9486 1 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA. 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 Professor Malik Dahlan Dr. Ksenia Kirkham Dr. Nerijus Maliukevicius Dr. Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho, SFHEA Dr. Vera Michlin-Shapir Dr. Domitilla Sagramoso Mr. James Farwell 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 9 | Autumn 2020 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9. 2 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 9 | Autumn 2020 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9. FOREWORD 3 Freedom of speech is the keystone of liberal democracy. Without it, the fruit of pluralism that fortifies democratic governance shrivels on the vine. For many— not all—theorists and practitioners, Strategic Communications is intimately bound up with a democratic vision of the world: it pursues a path of persuasion through rational argument; it seeks out the moral high ground. Surprising then, that so little time is devoted to understanding what we mean by free speech when seen from the perspective of Strategic Communicators. After all, much effort is invested in exposing disinformation while processing it through a security lens. Yet this information-disinformation binary overshadows discussions of how freedom of speech is both the strength and inevitable weakness or vulnerability of democracies. As an academic field emerges, so it becomes more self-reflexive while attempting to grow its theoretical and conceptual base. This is no less true of Strategic Communications, a relative newcomer to the variety of ways of describing political communications. Barely more than a decade has elapsed since Barack Obama entered the White House, only to call for clarity surrounding a new term that had begun to find currency in more than one government’s lexicon. The President would conclude that Strategic Communications could best serve America’s national interest by closing the ‘say-do gap’ and recalled the old dictum that actions speak louder than words.1 1 Barack Obama, National Framework for Strategic Communication, 2009 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 9 | Autumn 2020 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9. 4 Magic bullets have a habit of appearing when other kinds of bullets have been found wanting. They are a fantasy conjured up to fill a conceptual gap. The failure of Western military might to overcome cultural ties and deeply rooted narrative understandings in Afghanistan and Iraq suggested there had to be another way of resolving the conundrum of persuading other populations that the liberal democratic way of the West was the optimum way to the good life, or at least to a better one. In an image-drenched media landscape, 9/11 demonstrated that simple semiotics were both effective and cheap when ranged against the price of tanks and fighter jets. Strategic Communications, which recognised that actions and events could be moments of shared meaning—symbols of crystallised grievance and unfulfilled desires—was subsequently placed in the hands of government communicators and media agencies. These experts drew on theories of change; they sought to prove their theories by refining marketing techniques that once had sold products to the commercial marketplace of goods but would now offer policies to the political marketplace of ideas. And so a practitioner-led field has continued to draw on theories and applied techniques from behavioural science, political communications, cultural anthropology, and marketing. Those charged with operationalising Strategic Communications draw on these fields as they cluster their work around government-to-government engagements, addressing social and economic grievances in populations, and countering political challenges from non-state actors that are frequently rooted in precisely such grievances. This leaves all too little time to focus on the overarching debates that are needed to locate practice in its intellectual home. Consequently, a nascent academic field is playing catch-up, busily attempting to reverse-engineer deep foundations under an expanding superstructure. Practice, tested daily in a dynamic world of politics and geopolitics, will inevitably outpace academic theorising. But what is the connection between liberal democracy and free speech–a connection valued by many Strategic Communicators? Western states today are characterised by their liberal democratic systems of governance. They are democratic in so far as majority power is constrained; it is not absolute. The power to govern (executive) and the power to enact laws (legislature) are institutionalised under an elected party leader, Prime Minister, or President who is subject to change. And the electorate in a representative system of democracy has the right to vote out their government through elections after a constitutionally designated period served in office.2 2 Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech, (London: Atlantic Books, 2017), Part 1 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 9 | Autumn 2020 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.9. They are liberal because each individual is given a ‘degree of intellectual, spiritual 5 and occupational freedom’.3 Freedom is a key concept in Western thought. In 1941, US President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of four freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want.4 Freedom of information and free speech are central to democratic behaviour because every citizen should have the opportunity to hear a variety of ideas and opinions to better inform their decisions over how they wish to lead their lives, and how they intend to vote to bring that about, even if some viewpoints they hear are not to their liking. Conflicting ideas are encouraged in the so-called marketplace of ideas where they can be tested, then argued against, adapted or adopted. This allows not only the freedom to express any opinion but also the freedom to hear the opinions of others, should one wish to do so.5 Some thinkers go further. For the philosopher Ronald Dworkin, ‘free speech is a condition of legitimate government’.6 There are different views on the centrality of this condition—as one would expect in any democracy. Nevertheless, four main strands sit within Western intellectual thought. One, free speech and free listening enrich individual existence. More formally, they are key components of what might be called individual sovereignty. Two, free speech serves the pursuit of truth. In 1919, one American Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, argued: ‘the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas […] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market’7 —the marketplace of ideas again. Three, good government requires freedom of speech. It has been called the lifeblood of democracy since it circulates ideas and replenishes the body politic with evidence and fact. But it does more than that. It offers checks and balances on government actions. The right to know and the right to question— with the intention of bringing into the open bad practice––are paramount. They underline too the value of a free press. And four, free speech teaches us tolerance and how to live with and overcome apparently irreconcilable differences from other people in our society and community. It suggests that we have to find a way of working out our differences constructively.8 3 Alan Ryan, On Politics (London: Allen Lane, 2012), p. 948. 4 Richard Stengel, Information Wars (London: Grove Press, 2019), p. 19. 5 See Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN, 1948; also First Amendment to the US Constitution. 6 Nigel Warburton, Free Speech (Oxford: OUP, 2009), p. 5. 7 See ’Abrams v United States’ dissenting opinion in Keith Werhan, Freedom of Speech: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution (Westport CONN: Praeger, 2004), p. 33. 8 Timothy Garton Ash, Free Speech (London: Atlantic Books, 2017) Defence Strategic