Introduction
Russian use of information – encompassing misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda – has become a central concern in policy and academic circles, often viewed as an embodiment of the problem of post-truth. It has become synonymous with illiberal currents in modern media and a major driver of conflict and war. For example, Russia has been accused of interfering in elections,Footnote 1 spreading disinformation and misinformation in a variety of countries,Footnote 2 and producing malicious propaganda,Footnote 3 including to shore up support for the war on Ukraine.Footnote 4 The Russian government has also undermined independent media domestically, preventing operation of independent journalists and outlets.Footnote 5
These developments have been interpreted as an element of the Kremlin’s ‘hybrid warfare’ in its fight against adversaries. According to some accounts, propaganda and disinformation, in the form of spreading false information, are part of this hybrid warfare toolkit that seeks to attack opponents in a way that keeps conflict localised.Footnote 6 Russia is said to use a combination of means, with cyber-attacks and disinformation playing a particularly prominent role in support of its military objectives.Footnote 7 Russian information techniques in the Ukraine war have been described as ‘force multipliers’ that support traditional military efforts.Footnote 8
Hybrid war, especially when used in relation to Russia, is understood as a combination of ‘multiple instruments of power and influence, with an emphasis on nonmilitary tools, to pursue its national interests outside its borders’.Footnote 9 Information operations and cyber operations, according to this view, constitute but some of the levers at the disposal of Moscow in their hybrid warfare operations.Footnote 10 The essence of hybrid warfare is the blending of various methods below the threshold of conventional war.Footnote 11
While there is value in interpreting recent developments in state and non-state deployments of information measures as tools of hybrid warfare, I suggest this stops short of recognising the full power of information manipulation. I emphasise the securitisation of the information field itself. The hybrid warfare literature offers a useful framework for understanding the changing landscape of warfare, by which military and non-military means are combined in state competition and conflict. Nevertheless, the concept has been noted for its ambiguity.Footnote 12 The ambiguity is instructive insofar as, rather than assuming that threats exist by virtue of hybrid warfare, it might be equally useful to examine the process of constructing said threats. Where hybrid war literature assumes that threats already exist, the work done in this study through securitisation theory helps to see the political discourse that goes into constructing threats. I claim that through the process of securitisation, Russian elites securitised the field of information itself, thereby elevating the issue of threat to citizens’ cognition in need of defence. This claim is supported through discourse analysis. Following the Copenhagen School, I treat securitisation as a discursive process by which an issue is constructed as an existential threat requiring extraordinary measures. I analyse authoritative texts from the Russian security field with two questions: how are media and ICTs named as existential threats? And what counter-measures are advocated? The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, I will discuss my theoretical framework for studying the governance of technology through the lens of securitisation. I then examine how Russian documents construct foreign information and technology as a threat to cognition. Finally, I analyse how strategic documents and elite utterances elevate this threat to the existential level, thereby securitising the field of information itself.
The reason I call this trend radical realpolitik of the new media environment is because there is an extension of traditional realpolitik logic into the sphere of cognition. Classical realpolitik concerns itself with material power and raison d’etat as the most important features of international politics. What we are seeing here is that this logic extends to the epistemic realm. The radicalness consists of the notion that the state is configured as the supreme authority in the epistemic realm, aiming to assert sovereignty over what its citizens can know. It means that controlling the epistemic field is as vital for the survival of the state as governing territory through military means. The Russian state did not merely add information tools to its strategic repertoire but also made it an issue of supreme importance. The process cannot be understood completely with the concept of hybrid war because the Russian state has redefined what the battle is waged for: securitising information resulted in the expansion of battlespace to the epistemic field.
In other words, by radical realpolitik of new media I mean a strategic posture by which the state comes to treat citizens’ cognitive environment as a core national security interest, equivalent to territorial defence. This extends classical realpolitikFootnote 13 into the epistemic domain, treating information control as an important security imperative. Recent scholarship has begun to apply the principles and test the assumptions of realism in light of the revolution in information technology.Footnote 14 Importantly, premises of the realist school have gained significantly more ground within discourses governing the cyber domain, deprioritising more liberal and utopian assumptions.Footnote 15 The Russian state, for instance, shifted some of its operations from kinetic to cyber operations in an effort to intensify its power projection.Footnote 16 This emergent logic shifts the perception of technology away from being seen as simply a tool over which the state exerts power and more towards a medium within which the state creates securitising logics to structure interaction.Footnote 17 The concept developed here captures the general process by which performative discourse of securitisation reframes information control as a practice existential to the state.
As new information technologies construct citizens’ perceptions of security, threat, and reality, states come to see technologies of information as potential tools to shore up their control and threats to this control from other states. I see evidence for this in two ways: as states employ information technologies for their own purposes and also when they perceive them as existential threats in the hands of others. The result is a kind of information paradox of epistemological security for states today. Epistemological security, in this article, refers to the sense of coherence in the perception of reality among the state’s citizens. While the quality has recently been attributed to liberal regimes and the liberal world order,Footnote 18 which are said to be more effective in providing ‘common-sense reality based on facts, learning, and experimentation’,Footnote 19 my argument suggests a different understanding of these dynamics, revealing that the pursuit of epistemological security is a broader phenomenon.
There is a growing body of scholarship that examines the emergence of ‘cognitive warfare’, by which states wage battles for human cognition and embed corresponding tactics and strategies in military planning.Footnote 20 One lens through which this cognitive warfare could be interpreted is securitisation, because the battle for cognition is a direct consequence of securitisation of the information sphere. Russia’s securitisation of this area could elucidate the logic of the political process that leads to cognitive warfare being recognised and seen as a legitimate method in warfare. In other words, it is a trend not only seen in Russia but also becoming increasingly apparent elsewhere.
I argue that securitisation of information happens in service of epistemological security. The Russian state and policymakers articulated ‘information security’ as a field requiring sovereign protection, which in turn serves a broader purpose of shoring up epistemological security. Epistemological security as a shared sense of orderliness in describing and understanding the world provides a coherent framework for action on the basis of expected outcomes. In this sense, in contrast to ontological security, which dictates the necessity to preserve a stable sense of self,Footnote 21 epistemological security seeks to control the production of truth-making and therefore meaning-making. In other words, information security is not just a domain of hybrid war but also a broader concern about truth in society.
Shifting the focus away from a hybrid war waged against the West towards the securitisation lens, I problematise the very process of transforming the question of information into the discursive field of a threat. Such securitising discourse allows and legitimates extraordinary actions with respect to information because human consciousness becomes the referent object of a securitising process. Various ‘post-truth’ techniques turn into extraordinary measures in the palette of sovereign acts aimed at protecting domestic citizens from ‘harmful’ influence and defending one’s interests abroad by influencing foreign citizens. In other words, the Russian state is preoccupied with the problem of epistemological security – the sense of orderliness that is the key to the regime’s stability – and it has developed a discourse of threat from the information sphere that it uses to justify the intrusion of the security-state onto the domestic population.
This has several implications. First, shifting the focus away from treating information as a hybrid warfare tool towards viewing it as an element in securitisation allows for a reconsideration of the role of threat perception in generating certain information policies. It is precisely via the process of threat manufacturing in the field of cognition that sovereign acts are discursively constructed as legitimate. This means that this process is not confined only to the Russian context and may be indeed present in any context where there is a potential to reconfigure interplay between information and cognition. Second, threat perception may be particularly robust in Russia because the levels of trust in society are already low, making the environment receptive to sovereign acts that provide ‘protection’ to its fearful citizens. Therefore, in contexts where trust is generally low, the drive towards achieving epistemological security, if left largely in the hands of the state, may lead towards the epistemic elevation of sovereign acts of exception.
I do not see that this necessarily characterises only authoritarian societies. As ICTs increasingly lead to an ‘epistemic crisis’ in democratic societies,Footnote 22 there is a real possibility that relying on the state to provide epistemological security may lead to more insecurity in this area. Moreover, as states adapt to the changing technological environment, the overall sense of grounding in a common reality may decrease as states adopt increasingly exceptional measures in regulating information. As other sources of epistemic authority, such as science, expertise, and the like, experience declining respect, the state might step in to provide epistemic authority, with various attendant consequences. The stability of societies may be severely tested as there is little common ground to structure human behaviour.
The article proceeds as follows. First, I explain why viewing the Russian approach to information is better through a securitisation lens rather than as an additive tool of hybrid war. I then explain how information security in Russia was transferred into the realm of sovereign control, thereby turning sovereignty into the central epistemic authority in regulating information. Next, I illustrate how the pursuit of epistemological security led to justifications of extraordinary means in the field of information. I conclude with some thoughts on the challenge posed by new communication technologies in the emergent crises in the world order, where states gradually come to view ICTs and information as threats.
From hybrid war to securitisation
The Russian approach to information has been seen as the epitome of its hybrid war doctrine in both academic and policy papers. First appearing in the policy world, the concept has become almost synonymous with the Russian way of war. A former senior political scientist at RAND, Christopher Chivvis, argued that Russia was ‘waging a far-reaching political warfare effort against US interests in Europe and elsewhere, an effort facilitated by the Internet, cyber tools, cable news, and especially social media’.Footnote 23 In his testimony to the Committee on Armed Services of the US House, he underlined that the new techniques in the sphere of information and cyberwar have grown considerably in light of the increasing interpenetration of societies around the world by various media and communication technologies.Footnote 24 For example, some drew attention to the Kremlin’s use of an array of disinformation techniques in its operations in Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine,Footnote 25 while others emphasised that Russia was aiming to undermine liberal democracy via its media strategy.Footnote 26 The Institute for the Study of War called upon the United States and its allies to ‘actively challenge Russian information campaigns’ given the importance assigned to information in Russian hybrid war discourse.Footnote 27
Nevertheless, there were already doubts about the applicability of the notion of hybrid warfare to Russia. With respect to Russia, it has been observed that Moscow mostly viewed hybrid warfare as a Western approach towards Russia itself.Footnote 28 ‘Hybrid war’ was labelled a conceptual ‘fashion’ that jumped into academic literature after it became widely used in Western security organisations such as NATO and the think-tank world.Footnote 29 Indeed, the concept of ‘hybrid war’ had undergone significant transformation in the Russian strategic and policy discourse, first representing an emerging Western approach to warfare that has the potential to undermine Russian statehood, and then slowly moving into the debates about the trajectory of domestic politics as it came to delineate the activities of ‘enemies of the people’ and boosted the role of the military in political matters.Footnote 30 Others noted that there was nothing particularly new in the Russian usage of a combination of various means in its military force projection per se, given that the country has a centuries-long tradition of doing just that.Footnote 31 Instead, ‘what is new is not so much the way of war as the world in which it is being fought, the political, military, technological, and social context’.Footnote 32
Shifting attention towards this changing context, it becomes apparent that Russian leaders understand contemporary changes in ICTs as introducing significant and novel challenges to military strategy and state capacity. The way that the Russian state tackles these perceived challenges can be seen as an attempt to shore up epistemological security. Contrary to some arguments, epistemological security may be articulated in different ways depending on the context in which it exists. In Russia, the fear of technological backwardness has long been a factor influencing the worldview of Russian elites, who then translated it into their policies throughout Russian history.Footnote 33 Given such fears, the securitisation of the issue of ICTs becomes more legible and underscores the problematic nature of discourse that seeks to influence cognition via various mechanisms of control.
Some important studies have looked at the problem of securitising new media in various geographic contexts: the securitisation of disinformation in Taiwan;Footnote 34 cyberspace in Singapore,Footnote 35 Japan,Footnote 36 and the United States;Footnote 37 deepfakes in the United States;Footnote 38 and the internet in Russia and Germany.Footnote 39 These studies have advanced our understanding of the ways in which the perception of threat from various media contributes to the securitisation of its various aspects. I go even deeper and analyse the implications of pushing securitisation into the domain of information, not delimited to one medium but broadly construed to encompass a wide range of mediums, sources, and forms. I show how securitisation of information is a broad process that becomes central to the definitions of threat to the state’s production of knowledge. A study by Chernobrov and BriantFootnote 40 noted that policy discourses of Russia and the United States mutually securitised each other’s propaganda as an existential threat, thus framing the issue as the province of the state and disempowering citizens in the process. My analysis notes a broader process at work in that it reveals the knowledge-constituting effects of securitising information as such.
To understand this broader process of securitisation of the media in Russia, this article conceptually differentiates between ontological security and epistemological security. Ontological security, which was first developed by Giddens and later adopted by IR scholars, is about the need for a stable sense of identity with respect to others in the world.Footnote 41 The question that ontological security urges us to ask is: who are we? It answers it with relational procedures that solidify a stable sense of identity. I advance the concept of epistemological security because it helps to capture the importance of a shared framework of knowledge to orient in the world. It describes what one judges to be a legitimate, true, and real claim. When the state securitises information, and through that seeks to shore up epistemological security, as the Kremlin does with its concept of ‘information security’, it addresses the very cognition of its citizens to see what is real, true, and orderly.
Russia’s inclusion of ‘information’ in discourse on state sovereignty heightened the issue from normal life into a security threat. According to the Copenhagen School, an issue becomes a matter of security when it is designated as an existential threat, thereby gaining such saliency as to require its prioritisation over other issues and an implementation of extraordinary measures to address the security issue.Footnote 42 This helps to problematise the very fact of issues falling under the protection of the state by highlighting that they are not ‘naturally’ matters of security but are made so through a process that defines it as such.Footnote 43 Russian discourse has gradually lifted the issue of information into a matter of survival for the nation and the state, for its very sovereignty. As suggested by the Copenhagen School, ‘an issue is dramatized and presented as an issue of supreme priority’.Footnote 44 Military analysts, academics, and state officials have all securitised the issue as securitising actors by declaring various aspects of state stability as endangered by new communication technologies, propaganda techniques, and influence operations. Their referent object is ‘Russia’, which becomes synonymous with the Russian people, who are in turn seen as carrying cognitive capacities that are being affected in a multitude of ways in the modern environment of ubiquitous communication and media technologies. If ‘defining a menace is a normative political act’,Footnote 45 then defending human cognition became a priority for the Russian sovereign.
Securitisation theory has sometimes been accused of latently speaking in favour of and reifying the very objects of security that it seeks to examine. Shades of the Schmittian exception in securitisation theory have been of particular concern. Some have argued that this was because securitisation theory left under-theorised the political implications of having the ‘logic of exceptionalism and urgency’ enter discourse and influence democratic procedures.Footnote 46 But it is possible to speak of ‘security’ as a theoretical heuristic that allows for the analysis of how issues of security are constructed without proclaiming whether such constructions are welcome or not.Footnote 47 It is possible to speak about the relationship between normative claims and securitising claims, as well as the conditions that make securitising acts favourable or not.Footnote 48 By drawing attention to the Schmittian undercurrents in the securitisation of information in Russian discourse, I do just that.
It is precisely with the help of securitisation theory that this radical form of realpolitik can be exposed and deconstructed.Footnote 49 ‘[T]he specificity of “security” as a particular kind of speech act in the work of the Copenhagen School is underpinned by an understanding of the politics of enmity, decision, and emergency which has deep roots in Schmitt’s understanding of political order.’Footnote 50 An analysis of the securitising of information reveals the Schmittian forces at work in the delimitation of what is appropriate and what is not for citizens’ consciousness as constructed in Russian discourse. My attention to these Schmittian undercurrents of securitisation also relies more on the performative nature of securitisation moves, rather than the specificity of audiences who must buy into securitisation.
It has been pointed out that pinning down the relevant audience in a securitising act is quite difficult. There may be multiple audiences, some audiences may be convinced while others reject a securitising act, and there are vague criteria for understanding whether a particular audience has been convinced.Footnote 51 A full analysis of societal reception lies beyond the scope of this article, although the nature of the Russian state leads to a reasonable conjecture that the drive towards securitising information is largely a top-down process. Partly for this reason, but also for reasons of theoretical interest, my analysis of securitisation relies on its performative aspects, meaning that labelling something a security issue has the power to change political processes. This does not necessitate the analysis of the audience reaction to a securitisation act. As I will demonstrate, ‘the authority to speak is constituted by the performative power of the speech act itself which constitutes actors and their social relations retroactively’.Footnote 52 The success of securitisation can be judged by the acceptance of certain policies that veer off into the extraordinary. In the words of Balzacq, securitisation is a ‘politics of the extraordinary’ and ‘exceptionalism is the extreme sign of the measures adopted following a successful securitization’.Footnote 53 I illustrate how the field of allowable actions has expanded considerably as the process of securitisation went on.
My claim rests on the understanding that constructing an issue as a security threat discursively has the power to enable certain responses, such as extraordinary measures to monitor human access to information and their cognitive processes. For instance, in his work on the securitisation of migration into the EU, Jef Huysman observed how securitisation easily slips into Schmittian politics of friends and enemies because ‘the kernel of securitization is the manufacturing of an existential threat to a community’.Footnote 54 The fear of mass migrations from the ‘barbaric East’ was articulated as an existential threat to the integrity of the European Union and its member states.Footnote 55 The ‘problem’ of migration is a ‘socially manufactured problem’ that delimits the boundaries between those who belong and those who do not.Footnote 56 This and Huysman’s later expansion of the problem of securitising migration does not suggest that the question of security must be interpreted in Schmittian terms, but rather that the securitising practices adopted in the EU with respect to migrants rely on a Schmittian version of the political, leaving the possibility of articulating security in other terms.
In understanding securitisation, I focus on Schmitt’s conceptualisation of politics in terms of the opposition between friends and enemies and his explicit endorsement of political exceptionalism as a way of doing politics. To him, the substance of sovereign power expresses itself most powerfully in a ‘case of extreme peril’,Footnote 57 when it is called upon to make a decision on appropriate measures to address the danger.Footnote 58 The ‘extreme case’ proves the rule, according to Schmitt, by illustrating the real political power to define rules and exception to rules.Footnote 59 Schmitt also posits that the kernel of the political is the antagonism between friends and enemies: ‘[t]he political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend–enemy grouping’.Footnote 60 In this way, the extreme or exception is where sovereignty becomes evident and where at the same time the limits between friends and enemies are delineated. War, in this interpretation of politics, is an ‘extreme case’ that arrives together with the ‘decision’ that it has arrived.Footnote 61
Schmitt was invested in the question of technology and its role in politics. In his lesser-known essay – ‘The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations’ of 1929 – Schmitt wrote that perceiving technology as neutral and a domain where politics can be neutralised was erroneous since it was ‘always only an instrument and weapon’.Footnote 62 He added:
the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend–enemy groupings can develop on this new ground.Footnote 63
The prescription of realpolitik principles into the domain of information technology via securitisation may be viewed as an extension of this Schmittian paradigm. Thereby, the Schmittian elements enter into the question of epistemological security, with all the attendant consequences to the liberal world order and stability today. In other words, the pursuit of ‘orderliness’ through practices of knowledge production that mark ICTs in terms of threat, justifiably or not, bring the very question of common reality into a potentially uncomfortable field of sovereign control. Indeed, modern communication technologies can contribute to or produce securitising logics, where the multiplicity of various media has the potential to create securitising acts that go beyond utterances, but include also ‘image-rhetorics’.Footnote 64 However, when these observations were made, it was implicitly assumed that ‘communication institutions’ would remain largely independent from traditional security institutions, having different institutional logics.Footnote 65 But contemporary media challenge the epistemic grounding on which societies depend, thereby having profound social effects that do not go unnoticed by the apparatuses of state control. In such conditions, ICTs broadly speaking may become the field on which Schmittian logic is projected through the discourse of securitisation. The Russian case under examination may serve as an example of a broader trend as ICTs enter ever more areas of contemporary life.
Western ‘threat’ to citizens’ consciousness
Russian discourse on information security has a distinct Schmittian hue as it defines the danger to the state in terms of a growing threat to its survival from hostile countries. This transition has been gradual, beginning from being barely mentioned in the 1990s to becoming essential to the way that information security was defined by the late 2010s. The threat of Western influence has become embedded in the Russian discourse on ‘information security’. The term is used in a way that closely aligns it with sovereignty as such and the necessity to extend sovereignty into the domain of information to respond to a perceived threat of Western capabilities. It explicitly mentions the psychological and ideational repercussions of certain types of information on individuals and on society. The texts I examined convey a belief that dangers of ‘mind control’ are omnipresent and powerful – an understanding that feeds into the construction of the West as the enemy.
My analysis follows the precepts of the Copenhagen School’s theorising of securitisation as a discursive process by which issues are constructed as threats. Therefore, I analysed the archive with two particular questions in mind: when and how were information or media named as existential threats to a referent object? And what prescription for counter-measures followed? To answer these questions, I used critical discourse analysisFootnote 66 to excavate discourses of threat and the corresponding construction of extraordinary measures. Following Fairclough’s framework, my selection of texts was theory-driven, focusing on those discourses that occupied positions of authority in the Russian security field. I reviewed over eighty texts, from which I selected more than thirty for this study, including all the major state doctrines on national security and information security. I interpretively analysed key Russian policy documents, such as the military doctrines and the information security doctrines, as well as major speeches by President Vladimir Putin, Chief of General Staff Vladimir Gerasimov, and writings of strategic thinkers published in Voenno-Promyshlennyi Kuriyer magazine (Military-Industrial Courrier) and Voennaya Mysl’ (Military Thought) affiliated with the Russian military, as well as other adjacent academic and policy publications. Following Fairclough, the emphasis in this analysis is on moments where institutional authority used specific words and textual structures to depict a specific version of security, which in turn justified certain practices. I trace how Russian security and security-adjacent elites discursively constructed a world of menace in Western information and communication technologies, buttressing such notions with historical allusions to war, loss, and suspicion.
Immediately after the Soviet collapse, the first law on defence in post–Soviet Russia adopted in 1993 did not contain any clauses mentioning information as a field requiring defence.Footnote 67 Information as a topic of legal measures was first extensively covered in a 1995 law that focused primarily on the establishment of market relations in Russia and how information about citizens and information created by private companies should be regulated.Footnote 68 There are multiple mentions of private property in this law, with as many as thirty individual phrases containing the word ‘property’ as opposed to the question of security, which is barely mentioned.Footnote 69 In other words, the issue of epistemological security broadly speaking relates only to the establishment of the logic of the market in the country with regard to information technology.
In the 1990s, the image of the enemy had not yet been fully articulated and therefore had not yet reached the Schmittian level of the exceptional. Information was first declared a source of danger in the concept on national security in 1997.Footnote 70 The document spoke of technological backwardness in the face of ‘some nations’, which allegedly sought to dominate the emerging information sphere and to ‘supplant Russia from domestic and international market of information’.Footnote 71 Information security in this document encompassed the protection of citizen rights, protection of domestic infrastructure, and ‘countering the threat of unleashing confrontation in the information sphere’.Footnote 72 Hereby there is one of the first declarations that the orderliness of knowledge production in society might be threatened, although it is not clear exactly how.
The first comprehensive documents dealing with information security were the doctrine on information security of 2000Footnote 73 and the military doctrine of 2000.Footnote 74 The military doctrine mentioned potentially hostile information actions that might impinge on Russia’s interests.Footnote 75 It posited that ‘certain states’ used ‘information and other means (including non-traditional ones) and technologies in aggressive (expansionist) goals’.Footnote 76 Although the states were not named explicitly, a reasonable conjecture is that this refers to the United States and its allies at the time who participated in the Yugoslavia campaign, as the document later refers to the ‘entry of foreign troops in violation of the UN charter’ as among the main threats to Russian security.Footnote 77 This document also begins to close the gap between national security and epistemological security, arguing that modern wars would be fought with an ‘information combat, disorientation of public opinion’,Footnote 78 making essential that the Russian armed forces are dedicated to ‘ensuring information security’.Footnote 79
The more specialised document – the doctrine on information security of 2000 – detailed what constituted information security and how to ensure it. The definition that the document provided for it was ‘a state of being protected in its national interests in the information sphere, determined by a set of balanced interests of the individual, society and the state’.Footnote 80 The document insisted on the development of society within the framework of a strong state that promised the ‘spiritual rebirth of a multinational people of the Russian Federation’.Footnote 81 When discussing the major threats to Russian information security, the document highlighted the ‘erroneous perception of Russian policies’ due to disinformation and the absence of correct information enabled by propagandistic work that threatens the stability of the ‘constitutional order’.Footnote 82 In international affairs, the document communicated alarm at the potential of information weapons at the hands of more advanced nations and proposed a stop to their usage.Footnote 83 Declaring information security a crucial part of national security, this document marks the shift of epistemological security into the sovereign domain: by declaring that national security was determined by the president, the document defined information security as a prerogative of the sovereign.Footnote 84 This move meant that the sovereign/sovereignty became the central epistemic authority in regulating information and ICTs.
From early on, in contrast to the US approach to cybersecurity, the Russian approach to information security has come to encompass both physical infrastructure and the way that information is perceived by individuals. While Russian academics and military experts closely follow developments in Western thought and technologies in this area, their understanding of information security and the stakes are involved are broader. Referring to Western ideas of network-centric wars that take into account the integration of electronic command, control, and communication in a unified military framework, Chimarov called this approach too ‘technocratic’ and blind to cognitive aspects.Footnote 85 It is a matter of not only easing communication between various branches of the military but also shifting the field of war into human cognition by the whole field of mass media that is at stake.Footnote 86 From early on, the notion of information security has been constructed to involve the danger to ‘spiritual life’ from mass media monopolisation.Footnote 87 Put another way, epistemological security as a guarantee of stability of the state, whereby the nation shares in common values, norms, and cognitive mapping, has been an early concern of Russian discourse on ICTs. Concern about the development of ICTs and their perceived threat has gone hand in hand with the way that epistemological security has become merged with the securitising logic of the state. In state documents on national and information security, the assumption is that Western states have a lead in mastering techniques of information warfare, which they allegedly use to preserve their leadership in world affairs. In contrast, Russia is described as a challenger to this state of affairs.Footnote 88 The military doctrine of 2010, for example, argues that the existing structure of international security is not equally secure for all its members, with NATO threatening Russia by moving closer to its borders, destabilising countries, and expanding its military equipment and strategic missiles.Footnote 89 In point 13 of the doctrine, one finds the equation of dangers of epistemological security with dangers to national security, when the document warns of a potential for ‘preemptive implementation of measures of information combat to achieve political goals without using military force’.Footnote 90
A clear discursive hardening occurs after the 2014 Euromaidan and the subsequent events in Ukraine, which was interpreted by Russian officials as a case of Western cognitive warfare coming to its borders. One could look at this moment as the point at which epistemological security was fully subsumed under national security in Russia, thereby furthering the securitisation drive. In a 2014 speech to the Russian Security Council, Putin outlined the main directions for the development of a new information security doctrine.Footnote 91 Agreeing with opinions that the current age was dominated by transformations in information technology, he argued that they were used by ‘certain countries’ for political and military purposes in an effort to shore up their soft power.Footnote 92 Although noting that citizens had a right to access information from various media, Putin also said that the state had an obligation to protect its citizens from ‘risks’. This ‘protection’, he added, would extend in four directions: protection of domestic information resources and networks; protection of the Russian segment of the internet; development of domestic technology; and, finally, expansion of links with various organisations, including the UN.Footnote 93
This is echoed in the pronouncements of Russian General Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, who was credited with creating the hybrid war doctrine. Much of the Western conversation about hybrid war cites Gerasimov’s speech in 2013 as being the foundation for the new direction in Russian strategic thinking, even though he did not mention the term ‘hybrid war’ even a single time.Footnote 94 The speech was delivered to the Academy of Military Science on the topic of new methods and forms of military affairs and the necessity for science to keep pace with changes in warcraft. The speech called for a response to perceived advances in Western cognitive warfare. Singling out the United States as being the vanguard of strategic innovations, Gerasimov particularly pointed out ‘conducting of information warfare’ as the definitive field of future combat that would serve as a bridge between military and non-military means. Citing the 2011 Arab Spring as the epitome of a modern war, Gerasimov warned that ‘information warfare’ had been used to influence the population and undermine ‘enemy combat potential’. While not involving a direct confrontation with the adversary, this mode of combat was nevertheless a threat to the future of Russia. In other words, the speech that ostensibly ‘discovered’ hybrid war in fact announced a much larger transformation – the fusion of national security with epistemological security through the securitisation of information technologies.
After the 2014 revolution in Ukraine and the subsequent cooling of relations between the West and the Kremlin, Russian discourse increasingly used the term ‘hybrid war’ to describe the perceived aggression and threat from the West towards Russia.Footnote 95 According to Kovalev, the American goal of remaining the global hegemon drove NATO countries towards employing ‘tactics of “hybrid wars” to overturn regimes of other countries’, the end result of which for Russia would be the country’s total annihilation and appropriation of its resources.Footnote 96 Rodachin agreed with this position to argue that hybrid wars were ‘neo-imperial weapons’ directed against those who would stand against US hegemony, widely employed by the intelligence agencies of the West.Footnote 97 The United States and its allies then ‘baselessly accused’ its main target – Russia – of conducting hybrid wars to ‘disguise their actions’.Footnote 98 Sanctions against Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014 were but one example of the United States waging a hybrid war on Russia.Footnote 99
Tsygankov contended that ‘the discourse on the problem of hybrid war itself is used as an instrument of anti-Russian rhetoric’.Footnote 100 Arguing that hybrid wars are in large part based on the usage of information rather than brute force, he stated that they were mostly used by Western countries to overthrow regimes, ‘not hesitating to lie, falsify facts, disregarding human casualties and not thinking about the international political consequences’.Footnote 101 Other Russian scholars agreed with this assessment: the EU and the United States were using the term ‘hybrid war’ as a weapon in an ‘ideological battle’ with Russia.Footnote 102 The usual suspicions about the motivations of the United States were listed, which, according to the authors, created an ‘artificial reality’ in which Russia was presented as a villain on the basis of fakes, misleading information, and other manipulation of information.Footnote 103
The consolidation of the discursive map around the notions of Western threat and dangers of information would become obvious in the 2015 national security strategy, which was signed into law by Putin after the Ukrainian revolution. The Western strategy was targeting Russian ‘independent external and internal politics’.Footnote 104 The Schmittian enemies have capabilities that allow them to use ‘information and communication technologies to achieve their geopolitical goals, including by manipulation of mass consciousness and falsification of history’.Footnote 105
General Gerasimov’s speeches and writings would also crystallise around the notions of a Western threat and their use of various information methods. In December 2014, Gerasimov accused the United States and NATO of ‘trying to impose a zero-sum game on our country’, orchestrating the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, and using various information techniques to whitewash their actions and turn the tables on Russia.Footnote 106 For example, he labelled the alleged involvement of Russian troops as ‘primitive fakes posted on the Internet and social networks’. He later argued that the protests in Syria were conducted according to ‘well-established methods’ where ‘active information support’ was coming from abroad.Footnote 107
Notably, past events were also reinterpreted in terms of the failure of the Russian state to secure epistemological security within its borders. Gerasimov presented the domestic Chechen wars of the 1990s as the result of ‘several states practically waging an information war on Russia’.Footnote 108 The Chechens fighting against the central government were ‘terrorists’, fighting whom required a consolidation of ‘political, financial, ideological and information resources’.Footnote 109 In another instance, he blamed ICTs for revolutions and instability in a variety of countries:
Massive, targeted influence on the consciousness of the citizens of the states that are the objects of aggression through the global Internet network is of great importance. Information resources have become one of the most effective weapons. Their widespread use allows in a matter of days to upset the situation in a country from within.Footnote 110
Singling out ‘massive influence on people’s consciousness’ as a key factor in destabilising the state, Gerasimov placed the need to secure ‘correct’ ways of thinking in the domain of sovereignty. If fake news and various manipulations of the mass media were tools that could undermine the epistemological security of a nation, it would behove the state to respond in kind. The sovereign epistemic authority would have to be buttressed through measures that would counter any ‘negative influences on the population’s consciousness.’Footnote 111
Gerasimov would eventually directly accuse the West of waging a ‘fierce information war against Russia’ while creeping closer to the Russian border.Footnote 112 In this information warfare, NATO countries utilised methods of information warfare to ‘denigrate Russia’ and ‘downplay its role’ in resolving international problems.Footnote 113 At the same time, ‘an old propaganda cliché – the thesis of an Eastern threat – is being actively propagandized’.Footnote 114 The West was even trying to ‘rewrite history’ of Soviet contributions to victory in WWII.Footnote 115
Thus, Russian discourse on information security designated ICTs as a tool of Western warfare against domestic epistemological security. Amid such allegedly threatening circumstances, Russian strategic discourse thereby called for the development and adopting of appropriate measures in the fight as a sovereign prerogative, elevating sovereignty as the focal epistemic authority in the quest to preserve epistemological security. As argued by some scholars, the whole information sphere could be utilised to attack the population.Footnote 116 Such information attacks would target the ‘mental component and the system of social organization of the opponent’.Footnote 117 In this picture, the West had developed a whole range of technologies that can be used for ‘mass mind control’Footnote 118 and ‘information-psychological influence’.Footnote 119 The talk of democracy was merely a hypocritical cover to overthrow legitimate regimes, of which the Ukrainian revolution in 2014 was an example: ‘Not a single declared goals that were declared in favor [of the revolution], were implemented in three years.’Footnote 120 Given these conditions of danger and Western animosity, the Russian state would be required to fight in the information sphere as a new arena of war in a pre-emptive way: ‘The new reality of the wars of the future is among others in the transfer of combat into this sphere.’Footnote 121
‘Post-truth’ methods as extraordinary measures
In the early 2000s, state discourse mostly included the provision that it should seek to provide truthful information about its policies abroad, while supporting the development of industry and technology domestically, together with the protection of information resources and systems from breaches.Footnote 122 The necessity of new laws and regulations, incentives, and directions for state agencies to increase the capabilities of the state to deliver information to citizens and afford a smooth functioning of various spheres of society was proclaimed.Footnote 123 It was also mentioned that Russia needed to invest resources into various state agencies and organisations to counter disinformation, produce counter-propaganda, and deliver appropriate information.Footnote 124 Some counter-measures could include fostering patriotism in the young, supporting cultural institutions of Russia, and the ‘prevention of illegal informational and psychological influences on the mass consciousness of society’.Footnote 125
In contrast, fourteen years later, the military doctrine argued explicitly that information and communication technologies were threatening Russian sovereigntyFootnote 126 and therefore their counter-usage was required to prevent conflict. This included the creation of the information system to integrate various military bodies, improvement of ICTs, and ‘development of forces and means of information combat’.Footnote 127 Information technologies were thus one of the domains of actions of the military doctrine. It was also at this point that the sovereign – the president – was explicitly described as the main decider of the primary objectives of the military.Footnote 128
Russian changes in the articulation of information security reveal a broader shift. Constructing the West as the enemy in the struggle for information justifies extraordinary measures to counter the threat. The securitisation of information eventually leads to an increasingly expansive list of measures and goals to influence the very ‘souls’ of individuals. Sovereign authority thereby becomes synonymous with epistemic authority to dictate the spiritual and moral meaning surrounding ICTs and information.
Russian ideas about information security highlight the importance of not only equipment and infrastructure but also various ideological, psychological, and social factors.Footnote 129 Control over minds and cognition is a recurring theme in more contemporary Russian discourse on new wars, with nebulous references to ‘consciousness’, ‘spirit’, ‘mental states’, ‘psychology’, ‘will’, and ‘feelings’ mentioned in official documents, academic articles, and opinion pieces by officials and high-ranking military men. This was already alluded to in the first doctrine on information security in reference to ‘spiritual life’. In this, late Soviet-style ideas of ‘reflexive control’ have clearly played a role. The concept originated in the works of Soviet scholars, particularly Vladimir Lefebvre, who argued that individual decisions could be directly influenced by specially designed information inputs.Footnote 130 Thus, in post–Soviet Russia technological developments were viewed as enabling ‘various technologies to manipulate human consciousness’.Footnote 131 Others argue that ‘visuality wins over verbality, i.e. enhancing visuality affects the audience more than argumentation’ and people can be ‘literally zombified’ by propaganda.Footnote 132 Even though it is pointed out that psychological warfare had been a part of combat and wars since ancient times, it now acquired a form of a ‘special operation’ in which the main purpose was to deceive one’s opponent.Footnote 133
The latest doctrine on information security, from 2016, largely followed this logic. Apart from control over the technical infrastructure, much attention was paid specifically to the way that the new technologies affect individuals, be it psychological, informational, or propaganda methods. Here, the primacy of sovereignty is visible once again when the president is declared as the sole determinant of the ‘structure of the information security system’, which include various state bodies from the Security Council to local executive bodies.Footnote 134 Among the main objectives of government bodies to ensure information security is ‘strengthening the vertical management system and centralizing information security forces’.Footnote 135 Sovereignty is elevated as the central epistemic authority in determining appropriate content.
Quite forcefully, the national security strategy calls for policies that counter ‘destructive informational influence’.Footnote 136 The strategy also envisions a ‘special’ role to information security.Footnote 137 In addition, the section dedicated to cultural security now becomes enmeshed with questions of information, while the dangers of ‘external cultural and informational expansion’ are affirmed.Footnote 138 The document also asserts that the government needs to participate in the creation of media products, from movies to internet sources, to protect the ‘cultural sovereignty’ of Russia:Footnote 139
taking measures to protect Russian society from external ideological and value expansion and destructive information and psychological impact, exercising control in the information sphere and preventing the spread of products of extremist content, propaganda of violence, racial, religious and interethnic intolerance.Footnote 140
Therefore, the area of sovereign epistemic control becomes potentially quite wide. One Russian professor argued that since ICTs in a globalised age are likely to be used for sabotage and manipulation at any point, producing a state of ‘permanent’ threat,Footnote 141 this called for technological and psychological counter-measures by the state, including propaganda and ‘reanimation of patriotic feelings’.Footnote 142 At the same time, fighting for information dominance is ostensibly led in a ‘centralized [way] according to a single plan’.Footnote 143 In this hostile environment, the creation of Russia Today was a welcome development, which needed to be supplemented by a whole ‘system’ of efforts in the scientific community that design new approaches to fight ‘enemy propaganda’.Footnote 144
Scholars of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences echo this sentiment and claim that since war has progressively entered the areas of cognition, it was crucial to develop a strategy that included counteraction and offence in this area.Footnote 145 In the rather wide zone of human consciousness, the space of potential dangers was vast and may include: thinking of elites, mass public opinion, ‘anti-government and antiarmy feelings’, foreign norms and stereotype, anti-natalist sentiments, individualism and egoism, loss of identity, et cetera.Footnote 146 The stress on future wars as a set of ‘special and psychological operations’ that would target the enemy’s will to fightFootnote 147 displays Russian preparation to near total epistemological insecurity. Within this ominous vision, there are myriad methods of information combat, including physical destruction of enemy information infrastructure and methods targeting cognition through reflexive control.Footnote 148 Fighting against the West in the sphere of information would follow several principles, such as:
secrecy, ingenuity, systematicity, intensity, variety of techniques, plausibility, selectivity, knowledge of the enemy’s psychology, reflexive control of his behavior; preempting the enemy. The constituent elements of such a fight can be: information blockade, counterintelligence activities, electronic suppression of the enemy’s combat control systems; electronic-fire information-strike operation; combination of fire, radio-electronic and massive information-psychological impact on the enemy.Footnote 149
The perceived danger of ICTs in increasing epistemological insecurity and the concurrent necessity to elevate sovereignty to ‘defend’ against such threats would justify any means to counter such threats. Therefore, the desire to secure epistemological security via sovereign epistemic authority has a self-reinforcing logic of increasing epistemological insecurity as there is no limit to what methods could be used. One expected development is a ‘total introduction of information technologies’ into all branches of the armyFootnote 150 or, in other words, a common ‘information field’ in which the army operates.Footnote 151 The point of strategy in ‘network-centric’ combat is to acquire ‘information domination’ to create shock in the opponent and ‘subdue his will’.Footnote 152 War is now conducted in more insidious ways in which the prize is to subdue ‘spirit and soul’ of the opponent by means of ‘weapons of consciousness destruction’.Footnote 153 Asymmetric methods, including reflexive control, can allow a country like Russia to ‘successfully neutralize a more powerful opponent when preparing for and conducting cyber- and cognitive war’.Footnote 154
The latest national security strategy, from 2021, proposes to consolidate sovereignty together with the ‘defense of traditional spiritual and moral norms of Russian society’, defence and security, and freedom from outside interference. In this contest, propaganda, unreliable information, and manipulation of information are common tools of influence.Footnote 155 Information security, which has its own section in this document, lays out the major points that are ostensibly endangering Russia. Here, practically all media become suspect because they can be used to spread unreliable information and propaganda. Countering this threat requires a strengthening of sovereignty in the information sphere.Footnote 156 Measures proposed include controlling the flow, content, physical, and virtual conduits of information, as well as the creation of information that counters presumably dangerous information in both the present and potentially the future.Footnote 157 ‘Cultural sovereignty’ is also threatened with ‘psychological manipulation’ and ‘information influence’ that destroy morals, institutions, and values.Footnote 158 Among other measures, the state should step in and affect the ‘consciousness of the masses’ to instil appropriate values and counter destructive ones.Footnote 159 Finally, when faced with actions that threaten sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the country, Russia is declared ‘rightful to take symmetric and asymmetric measures’ that counter such actions.Footnote 160 For example, this might include support to Russian media in the global information sphere.Footnote 161
In this way, information security has become a field of securitisation, which prioritised the creation of measures of defence and counter-attack in the field of human cognition. Thus, human cognition is the referent object, while the threat is Western capabilities of mind control. Information security is, then, a concept of sovereign power that extends to human cognition, allowing various measures from propaganda to information operations abroad. Beginning as a mild concern about ICTs, the gradual transformation via securitisation towards a totalising vision of epistemological insecurity leads to a general suspicion about the way that new technologies can be used by those in power. The effects of various media on people’s opinions and feelings are perceived as dangerous to sovereignty itself and are therefore becoming part of the discursive justifications of increasing control over ‘human consciousness’. In other words, Russian discourse elevated sovereignty as the highest epistemic authority, simultaneously justifying increasing controls over ICTs and information domestically and various means of information manipulation and ‘post-truth’ internationally.
Conclusion
In this paper I illustrated how the Russian state constructed information security through a process of securitisation that assigned the tasks of defining security for society to the realm of sovereign care. Russian discourse of information security builds on the perception of technological backwardness in society to justify a narrative of friends and enemies and to sustain a sense of global struggle over information between the two. The discourse on information security involved the articulation of a Western threat, the designation of citizen consciousness as the referent object of this dangerous influence, and deliberation on various means to deal with such a threat. Through the process of securitisation of ICTs and information, the Russian state sought to preserve the epistemological security of its nation. The paradoxical consequence of such actions is that it may contribute to a growing sense of insecurity because there is no limit to the measures justified in the field of information due to there being only a single source of epistemic authority – sovereignty. Without any other epistemic sources of authority, sovereign acts of securitising ICTs and information lead to ever greater emergency actions both domestically and abroad.
Russian discourse posits that human cognition is a potential object of war, and therefore it is believed that one can manipulate another party by various information techniques (e.g., Vorobiyev and Kiselev).Footnote 162 Securitised speech around human cognition discursively legitimates actions that would weaponise ICTs to subvert and obtain power over one’s opponents. The ‘securityness’ of an issue is inherent not to what is designated as a threat but rather to the way that this issue is processually handled by securitising actors.Footnote 163 If the issue of information is handled as a threat, then the connection to sovereignty is made complete, justifying various types of controls of this sphere.
Having thereby established the relationship between Schmittian politics of friends and enemies through the securitisation of information in Russia, some aspects of the ‘post-truth’ moment can be seen as the result of radical realpolitik in the new media environment, when states vie to secure their domestic epistemological environments. Russian discourse on information security, sensing a danger from contemporary ICTs, relegates the issue into sovereign care, thereby placing information and ICTs as potential weapons that could be used to target human cognition. This discursive move allows a disaggregation of factuality characterising certain situations from any content of information, because information becomes a tool of sovereign power. Transferring human cognition into the field of contestation and battle leaves the mere politics of oppositional narratives between friends and enemies that are beyond factuality and coherence of what may be communicated. Facts may or may not be included in the narratives, propaganda, and information operations in the battle of sovereigns for the truth.
This should raise questions about the transfer of alternative viewpoints in society into the realm of security rather than public deliberation and debate. Currently, various information sources, media, and communication technologies are often interpreted in terms of state security. However justified these concerns are, designating these as threats may inadvertently exacerbate the issue of post-truth in society, since claims to sovereign security may not necessarily be driven by facts and truthfulness. This is not to say that societies have no genuine interests in protecting their epistemic sphere or that all societies cannot but follow the path of total securitisation. Nevertheless, the article diagnoses the tension between protecting the epistemic sphere and expanding sovereign power, illustrating that each society is likely to face it as ICTs continue to expand and reshape international relations. Relegating the concern of how to govern information exclusively to state security risks producing less security, as it may lead to repression and belligerence. What might be necessary is to engage with questions of good citizenship, good society, and good governance.
There is in our world today a widespread erosion of shared epistemic truths, which destabilises societal norms, institutional legitimacy, and established procedures. One could even posit that the changes in epistemological conditions have destabilised ontological security within various states, be they liberal or illiberal. In liberal societies the public sphere has fractured, leading to calls to foreclose epistemic rupture, including through regulation of platforms, content moderation, and fact-checking. Some have interpreted the post-truth phase shift as a consequence of actions by illiberal states and actors. Others argued against moves to regulate content as worrying examples of censorship. What is clear is that the epistemic uncertainty wrought by new technologies has upended social structures and brought forth the question of societal stability as it relates to the question of truth (not to mention other issues, like the spread of content depicting violent or other illicit content). The Russian example of radical realpolitik in the information sphere can help to explain how the process of securitisation by elites produces a paradoxical state of epistemological insecurity in the name of pursuing it.
Reassessing Russian techniques in the field of information through the lens of epistemological security and securitisation, in my view, undermines the view that the post-truth moment is a sui generis product of individual actors like Russia. According to such arguments, all that is necessary to restore truthfulness and a well-functioning society is to work diligently against such actors. But the argument in this article shows that the articulation of cognitive threats may also serve as a call to protect from ‘harmful’ effects of ICTs, which in turn legitimates the usage of ‘post-truth’ techniques. Examining the notion of ‘information security’ in Russia from the lens of securitisation illustrates that some features of what came to be known as the ‘post-truth moment’ may be seen as an effort to subjugate reality to sovereign will.
Dinara Urazova has recently obtained her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University. She studies the ways in which new media influence political power and how international actors deploy and navigate new communication technologies. She was a Global Impacts Fellow at the Buffett Center for International Affairs and, with support from Northwestern University’s Critical Theory Program, held a visiting fellowship at the École Normale Supérieure.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Dr Ian Hurd and Dr William Reno, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their invaluable comments on the manuscript. The author also thanks Laurie Georges, Dr Jakub Eberle, Dr Stefano Guzzini, and Dr Xymena Kurowska for comments on the paper during a September 2024 International Theory Colloquium organised by Dr Jennifer Mitzen and Dr Sebastian Rosato. A previous version of the paper was presented at the 2024 APSA conference.
Funding statement
This research was supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University.
Competing interests
The author declares no conflict of interest.
Ethical standards
It was not required for this research.
Data availability statement
All primary sources and referenced materials cited in this article are publicly accessible via the hyperlinks provided in the text and reference list, while the full analytical archive is available in its entirety upon written request to the corresponding author.
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