Influence Strategies: What is it and how can peacebuilders leverage it?
Research Title: Decoding Crimea. Pinpointing the Influence Strategies of Modern Information Warfare
Research Authors: Alan Kelly, Playmaker Systems, LLC; Dr. Christopher Paul, RAND Corporation
Research Publisher: NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence
Research Publication date: January 2020
What does this research tell us about influence strategies?
With the current uptick in mis- and disinformation and the rise in global violent conflict at a 30-year high, many within the peacebuilding field are trying to grasp the shifting modern realities to better prevent violent conflict. The conflict landscape, while staying familiar in some contexts, is drastically different in new emerging contexts, with no geographical boundaries confining the effects of conflict to one fixed area. From the brewing split between political bases in the U.S. as witnessed on January 6th to the current conflict in Ukraine, while some physical manifestations of these conflicts are familiar, there are some intangible elements that peacebuilders are trying to identify and better address. One key under-utilized area by the peacebuilding field is the online messaging space and the influence it holds.
Given the rise in technologies and multiple access points to information, information creators and readers are both spoilt for choice. For every thought, motive, action, and reaction, there are multiple tweets, official statements from governments, or a collection of headlines on multiple news platforms globally. Hidden behind each of these messages, whether intentional or unintentional, are perceptions and narratives that influence the readers’ opinions. Hence, these perceptions and narratives can be an extremely powerful tool in either further exacerbating a conflict or can assist in better addressing it. If we can systematically better understand and break down the intent behind messaging strategies in a given conflict, then we can better understand and address the conflict and to an extent predict motives and actions of conflicting parties.
This article presents a framework that aims to better understand and navigate the modern warfare landscape through a “Taxonomy of Influence Strategies” that acts as a comprehensive framework to identify, describe, and classify units of persuasion that are elemental to friendly and hostile actors. This taxonomy features 23 different strategies that were developed through observing a host of real-world applications in communications, defense, intelligence, marketing, media, military, politics, and sales. Overall, the taxonomy includes 3 main categories i.e. influence strategies employed to:
1. Condition
2. Control, and
3. Confront
Within each of these categories there are multiple sub-categories that differ from one another in terms of level of transparency and level of engagement of the messaging strategy.
Through this research, content analysis techniques were applied to information campaigns around Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea as demonstrated in RAND’s report Lessons from Russia’s Operations in Ukraine and Eastern Europe to determine the presence and purpose of observed influence strategies, measured against the Taxonomy. This framework not only assists with decoding influence strategies as executed by the relevant actors, but also looks to map out surrogates at play in the conflict referred to as partners, proxys, and plants and the influence their actions might garner. Using this framework, researchers were able to identify Russian strategies with respect to Crimea as being more overt than covert with a mixture of different plays that included Low Transparency Low Engagement and High Transparency High Engagement strategies which aimed to condition the environment instead of control or confront.
While the taxonomy can be used to better analyze modern conflict situations, on the flip side, there is immense potential for a similar framework to streamline our own messaging strategies. As this article rightly points out, the Taxonomy of Influence Strategies is
“…. the centerpiece of a decoding system and decision framework that makes tangible what has heretofore been intangible, and thus emerges as a potentially indispensable tool for winning what is hardest to win – hearts and minds.”
AfP Blog Author: Shaziya DeYoung - Researcher, Learning & Evidence