Information Warfare Technologies And Psychological Operations Within International Relations And World Politics

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the study of information warfare technologies in modern international relations and world politics. The author notes that in modern conditions the information warfare became a tradition for the surrounding reality. Each of us almost every day finds himself under the influence of any information attack causing terrible aggression aimed at both the society in general and the consciousness of each person separately. The information warfare technologies based on manipulative control of political consciousness and behavior of citizens are exclusively dangerous and are never directed to creation: their main task is to split and polarize the society, to tear it to pieces and fragments, to make these fragments truly hate each other thus causing confrontation with further fight for destruction, or to unite their aggression into a single flow against authorities in power. Thus, the main objective of the information warfare is to break the will of the opponent to resistance and to subject his consciousness to such will. Besides, the majority of the most dangerous operations of American information warfare are based on the same standard organizational scheme representing the sequence of information attacks divided by exposition periods (information silence) and coordinated by time, purposes, tasks and targets. The information warfare technologies are actively and widely applied not only in western countries (mainly the USA where the term “information warfare” is formally stipulated in the U.S. Army field manual Psychological Operations), but also by international terrorist organizations and groups.