Subversion

Contents Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 The Sociopsychology of Truth 2 Challenging the Gatekeepers of Truth 3 Subversion and the Contest of Wills 4 Digital Authoritarians and the Exploitation of Liberation Technology 5 Subversion and Russia’s Concept of War in the Twenty-First Century 6 Little Sparta’s Counterrevolution‚ or How the United Arab Emirates Weaponizes Narratives 7 Toward Information Resilience Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author Cover Title Page Introduction Cover Page i ii iii iv v vi vii viii ix x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 SUBVERSION Other Titles of Interest from Georgetown University Press From Quills to Tweets: How America Communicates about War and Revolution Andrea J. Dew, Marc A. Genest, and S. C. M. Paine, editors Russian Cyber Operations: Coding the Boundaries of Conflict Scott Jasper The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace Oscar Jonsson Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli © 2023 Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The publisher is not responsible for third-party websites or their content. URL links were active at time of publication. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krieg, Andreas, author. Title: Subversion: the strategic weaponization of narratives / Andreas Krieg. Description: Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022022616 (print) | LCCN 2022022617 (ebook) | ISBN 9781647123352 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781647123369 (paperback) | ISBN 9781647123376 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Information warfare. | Narration (Rhetoric) | Subversive activities. Classification: LCC U163.K75 2023 (print) | LCC U163 (ebook) | DDC 355.3/43—dc23/eng/20221221 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022616 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022022617 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 24 23 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 First printing Printed in the United States of America Cover design by Jeremy John Parker Interior design by BookComp, Inc. CONTENTS Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1 The Sociopsychology of Truth 2 Challenging the Gatekeepers of Truth 3 Subversion and the Contest of Wills 4 Digital Authoritarians and the Exploitation of Liberation Technology 5 Subversion and Russia’s Concept of War in the Twenty-First Century 6 Little Sparta’s Counterrevolution, or How the United Arab Emirates Weaponizes Narratives 7 Toward Information Resilience Conclusion Bibliography Index About the Author ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The beginnings of this book take me back to early 2018 as I was putting together an idea for an edited volume on the Gulf Crisis that had divided the region since June 2017. For the first time a political crisis between neighboring Arab Gulf state regimes had spilled into the public sphere, polarizing and mobilizing the people of the region and beyond. At a diplomatic stalemate in 2018, the crisis appeared to have moved entirely into the information environment, where weaponized narratives kept fanning the flames, with tangible effects both on regional civil-societal mobilization as well as academic and policymaking discourse in the West. The research on the origins, motivations, and solutions to the Gulf Crisis, which was only formally solved in 2021, opened my eyes to the potency of information and influence operations. I am ever so grateful for the often-polarizing academic debate on this issue. I would like to express a special thanks to the members and colleagues at the Royal College of Defence Studies, with whom I had the pleasure of testing my concepts and theories. Their practitioner’s input has been extremely important in shaping the direction of this book. Likewise, my gratitude goes to the reviewers of the book, whose comments and recommendations have been instrumental in sharpening the focus of this book, which transcends a variety of different academic disciplines. Pushing the boundaries outside conventional thinking about warfare and conflict is particularly hard when the crux of the argument is fundamentally about the perception of truth. A special thanks goes also to the Royal Automobile Club and Royal Airforce Club in London, whose libraries and business centers have provided me with refuges in which to read and write over the past three years. Above all, I would like to say thank you to my amazing family—my wife, Zohal; my daughter, Amalia; and my son, Issa—for their patience with me as I spent months with research and writing under the most difficult of circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. They provided the necessary balance