Abstract
The Kremlin, under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, has sponsored a resurgence of political warfare against Western targets. This analysis will focus on a particular aspect of Kremlin-sponsored political warfare: sexuality and gender-based narratives in Russian and pro-Russian disinformation campaigns targeting EU and aspiring members from 2015-2020. The potency of these narratives arises from the emotional and cognitive load that they elicit. Their significance is often overlooked in security, intelligence, and communication studies. In order to alleviate this gap, this article consists of a mixed-methods analysis in order to analyze the role and function of these narratives within the larger body of Russian disinformation. This research shows that sexuality and gender-based disinformation narratives are designed to target basic human emotions, such as fear, anger, hostility, confusion, and disgust, by exploiting existing cognitive biases within the targeted population. These narratives are a useful and effective political and propaganda tool meant to elicit support for a specific brand of traditional values that furthers the Kremlin’s geopolitical aim of creating an alternative to Western liberal hegemony.
Highlights
Policymakers and academics in the United States have focused almost exclusively on one factor of Kremlin-sponsored political warfare: Russian interference in the 2016 American Presidential Election
The second category is centered upon alleged sexual violence in European countries and the reactions of those states’ governments, media, police, judiciary, and citizens and contains three broad metanarratives shown in Table 1 (i.e. 5-7)
Our analysis has demonstrated that disinformation containing sexuality and gender-based narratives is an effective means of modifying cognition and behavior in a variety of segments of targeted populations
Summary
Policymakers and academics in the United States have focused almost exclusively on one factor of Kremlin-sponsored political warfare: Russian interference in the 2016 American Presidential Election. Europe, and in particular the European Union and its aspiring members, has been the perennial target for the Kremlin in the post-Soviet era (McCauley, 2016). This analysis will focus on a particular aspect of Kremlin-sponsored political warfare in Europe: Russian and pro-Russian sponsored disinformation campaigns targeting various European populations. Russian and pro-Russian disinformation has become a popular topic in the news and academia, and scholars have focused on several elements of disinformation ranging from the role of advertising, to the technology used to disseminate false stories, to the motivations of threat actors, to the narrative content of disinformation. This analysis will consist of a content analysis of sexuality and gender-based narratives in Russian disinformation from a set time period and database
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