Thammasat University students interested in political science, media and communications, education, sustainability, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 22 July Zoom webinar on Is this the Age of Disinformation or the Age of Strategic Communications?
The event, on Monday, 22 July 2024 at 12:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by Toyko College, the University of Tokyo, Japan.
According to the event website,
Dr Neville Bolt discusses two important concepts that governments around the world have embraced with enthusiasm in the early 21st century. These concepts are related but distinct. Yet all too often they are misunderstood and assumed to mean the same.
Program
Lecturer
Neville BOLT
(Tokyo College Professor; Founder & Director, Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications)
Commentator
AOI Chiyuki
(Director and Professor, Strategic Communications Education and Research Unit, Graduate School of Public Policy, the University of Tokyo)
Moderator
EMA Arisa
(Associate Professor, Tokyo College)
Speaker Profile
Dr Neville Bolt is the Founder and Director of Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications, and the Editor-in-Chief of NATO Defence Strategic Communications academic journal. He is Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo; Senior Fellow at SCERU, the University of Tokyo; and Visiting Scholar at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge. For twenty years he was Reader in Strategic Communications and Convenor of the Masters and Doctoral programmes in Strategic Communications in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
The TU Library collection includes research about different aspects of disinformation and strategic communications.
Students are invited to register for the event at this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_nYdkcca2RfyOgFDh1zbCZA#/registration
In 2021, Professor Bolt published a policy paper posted online by the European University Institute, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Global Governance Programme: Strategic Communications and Disinformation in the Early 21st Century.
Its abstract:
Abstract
Disinformation campaigns in recent times have encouraged a less than critical understanding of what many have come to believe is the currency of contemporary geopolitics. A tendency to view disinformation as a unique phenomenon, however, clouds the way it sits within broader dichotomies of truth- versus untruth-telling. And it disguises more nuanced, associated concepts of strategic ambiguity and strategic opportunism practiced by nation states such as China and Russia.
Failure to recognise such distinctions further undermines our understanding of the complexities of Strategic Communications in the 21st century
The paper begins:
Summary
- The problem: Disinformation is understood too narrowly as an operational tactic of hostile states. It forms part of a concept with greater reach.
- The truth ecology: Disinformation sits within a broader ecology of truth- versus untruth-telling; it is misunderstood as a campaign or operational tactic, yet is woven into the very fabric of how we perceive dissimulation, deception, distraction and ultimately disruption.
- The conceptual context: Strategic Communications is a holistic and overarching concept in which disinformation can, but need not, play a subsidiary role.
- Strategic Communications is rooted in values and interests; it seeks to shape and shift long-term discourses at the political and geopolitical levels. It sits in a truth versus untruth discourse.
- States are not uniform: All state- and non-state actors project Strategic Communications but in different ways – regardless of whether or how the term features in their national lexicons.
- Three threats: Russia, China and Islamic fundamentalists employ different conceptualisations of disinformation. A (mis)perception by outsiders merges them into a common understanding. Each actor does not necessarily see itself as engaged in ideological deception.
- Three approaches – strategic opportunism, ambiguity, certainty: in their foreign and security policies, Russia employs strategic opportunism, China projects strategic ambiguity and Islamic fundamentalists are characterised by strategic certainty.
- Failure to recognise such distinctions and nuances undermines our understanding of the complexities of Strategic Communications in the 21st century.
1 The Aim
The premise of this policy-framing brief is that countries vary significantly in the way they use Strategic Communications.
To assume a single modus operandi is to constrain our understanding. Equally, to view disinformation – a subsidiary form of political engagement – as a single dimensional mode of disruption is to obscure a more complex discussion.
Disinformation and the umbrella concept of Strategic Communications used in the world of politics and geopolitics should be framed within the dichotomy of truth versus untruth.
Consequently, disinformation should be viewed at a higher strategic level than simply the operational tactical level. At the latter level – the local – tactics may comprise erroneous information or lies, and raise the question of attributing or verifying the source of erroneous output.
But at the strategic level, disinformation plays into intent – at best elusive – and the desire for producers to cloud the waters of global politics while nevertheless seeking to achieve an effect on the perceptions of external observers.
Hence, disinformation quickly blurs into dissimulation and ambiguity.
This brief suggests how disinformation and Strategic Communications are connected, and how they offer a more nuanced picture of the threats democratic states face today. In so doing, it frees disinformation from the straitjacket of covert techniques of dirty tricks. Instead, it sees disinformation as one of many parts in a bigger concept employed at multiple levels of politics and geopolitics by different state and non-state actors. This invites a more nuanced approach to countering the many guises of disinformation.
Key to this is cutting the umbilical cord that attaches disinformation to information in a binary relationship. It is better to frame it within the literature on regimes of truth and the relationship between knowledge-creation, truth-telling power relations.
This discussion addresses three concepts: Russia’s strategic opportunism; China’s strategic ambiguity; and briefly the strategic certainty (or clarity) of al-Qaeda and ISIS/Daesh.
Both Russia and China will be the focus here. Passing reference, however, should be made to Islamic fundamentalist communications, which are extensively covered elsewhere. Save to reiterate that in contrast to theological debates between salafi jihadi groups around the world, the projection of the political struggle has remained a coherent and continuous discourse over many years.
Albeit not necessarily in any co-ordinated fashion at either the strategic or tactical levels, it proposes that Muslim and Arab peoples have been – particularly since the demise of the Ottoman empire following World War I – and continue to be oppressed by Western and particularly American imperial force, characterised by a Christian missionary zeal and willingness to occupy and wage war on Muslim peoples. Only by striking back through the use of force against non-Muslims and appealing to fellow Muslims through persuasive means can such injustice be requited. Indeed, only by evicting the Western presence from Muslim and Arab lands can a Western hegemony – the statist system enshrined in the international community of sovereign states – be overturned.
This consensus among fundamentalist exponents may be considered to be strategic certainty. […]
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)