Lexicon

Lexicon

How to read this page

These are working definitions for this project. They draw on NATO ACT and strategic studies literature, as well as my own essays and postgraduate research from the MSc in Diplomacy and Security Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, including focused work on cognitive warfare and disinformation, and my master’s thesis, “An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Weaponisation of TikTok”. This is not a doctrine note. Where terms overlap, I indicate which layer each concept primarily targets.

  1. Statecraft and power (hard, soft, sharp, diplomacy)
  2. Strategic container (political warfare)
  3. Operational modes and effect layers
    1. Information warfare
    2. Psychological warfare
    3. Cognitive warfare
  4. Where the differences get unclear
  5. Meaning and delivery
    1. Narrative
    2. Propaganda (white/grey/black)
  6. Information disorder
    1. Disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, “fake news”
  7. Identity vectors
    1. Cultural influence, religious influence, cultural warfare, religious warfare, identity targeting, sectarianization
  8. Emerging mechanism (malinfluence, LLM poisoning)
  9. References

1. Statecraft and power

Hard power

Coercive leverage: using military force, economic pressure, or inducements to shape another actor’s behaviour.

Soft power

Attractive leverage: obtaining preferred outcomes through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment.

Sharp power

Manipulative leverage: influence that penetrates open societies through censorship, manipulation, and distortive information practices that sap institutional integrity.

Diplomacy

The management of international relations through negotiation, representation, signalling, and relationship building.

2. Strategic container

Political warfare

The coordinated use of the instruments of national power (diplomatic, informational, military, economic) to affect the political composition or decision-making within another state, typically below the threshold of open war.

Rule of thumb: political warfare answers the “why”.

3. Operational modes and effect layers

Information warfare

Actions to gain advantage by affecting, manipulating, disrupting, or defending information and information systems, including the human decision processes that rely on them.

Primary target layer: flows, systems, access, and integrity.

Psychological warfare

The deliberate use of messages and actions to influence emotions, morale, attitudes, and willingness to act or resist.

Primary target layer: mood, motivation, cohesion, will.

Cognitive warfare

Activities aimed at shaping how individuals and groups perceive reality, interpret information, and make decisions over time. NATO ACT frames this as contest over cognition, resilience, and decision advantage.

Primary target layer: trust, attention, sense-making, perceived options.

4. Where the differences get unclear

These terms overlap because they operate in the same strategic environment, but they do not target the same layer. This section is a quick guide to what each concept primarily points to in practice.

Cognitive warfare vs psychological warfare

Psychological warfare targets emotions, morale, and willingness to act or resist.
Cognitive warfare targets perception and reasoning over time: the frames people use, what they consider credible, normal, or true, and which options feel available.

In short:
Psychological warfare influences mood and motivation.
Cognitive warfare influences interpretation and judgment.

Information warfare vs narrative

Information warfare is about affecting information flows, systems, and the integrity and availability of information.
Narrative is about meaning: how facts, symbols, and emotion are organized into a story that shapes identity, legitimacy, and perceived stakes.

Information warfare can involve technical disruption, manipulation, leaks, amplification, and defence.
Narrative turns those elements into a coherent “who is right, who is wrong, and what has to happen next” frame that persists in public memory.

A narrative can exist without information warfare.
Information warfare often fails without an effective narrative to carry and justify it.

Narrative vs cognitive warfare

Narrative is a tool and delivery mechanism.
Cognitive warfare is the effect space.

Narratives are one of the main ways influence is delivered.
Cognitive warfare describes what changes in the target over time: shifts in trust, salience, sense-making, and perceived options.

Political warfare as the umbrella

Political warfare is best understood as the strategic container that organizes multiple instruments toward a political outcome below the threshold of open war.
Cognitive, psychological, and information warfare can be used inside it.

Political warfare answers the “why”.
Information, psychological, and cognitive warfare answer the “how”.

5. Meaning and delivery

Narrative

A meaning-making structure that organizes facts, symbols, and emotion into a story that shapes identity, legitimacy, and perceived stakes.

Where it sits: narrative is a carrier that can be used inside information, psychological, and political warfare, and can accumulate into cognitive effects.

Propaganda

Systematic communication intended to shape perceptions, emotions, and behaviour through selection, framing, and repetition, sometimes with deception.

White propaganda

Source is openly acknowledged and attributable to the real sponsor.

Grey propaganda

Source is ambiguous or obscured; plausible deniability is part of the design.

Black propaganda

Source is deliberately misattributed; the product is designed to look like it comes from someone else.

6. Information disorder

Disinformation

False or misleading content spread with the intention to deceive or secure political or economic gain, and likely to cause public harm.

Misinformation

False or misleading content shared without intent to cause harm, though the effects can still be harmful.

Malinformation

Genuine information shared to cause harm, often through context collapse (private to public), selective exposure, or weaponised framing. edoc.coe.int+1

“Fake news”

A popular label for fabricated or distorted news-like content that is also used as a political weapon to discredit accurate reporting. It is a contested term, and not a clean analytical category.

7. Identity vectors

These show up in headlines as “cultural warfare” or “religious warfare”. In this lexicon, they are treated as high-trust identity carriers that can be exploited across the layers above.

Cultural influence

The use of cultural products, norms, symbols, and institutions to shape identity, affiliation, and legitimacy. Culture can be organic soft power, or it can be instrumentalised as a vehicle for propaganda and narrative shaping.

Religious influence

The use of religious identity, authority structures, and moral language to mobilise groups, polarise societies, legitimise actions, or delegitimise opponents. Religion is not inherently a weapon, but it can become a high-trust carrier for influence.

Cultural warfare

Media shorthand for sustained contest over values, identity, and legitimacy fought through symbols, education, media, and institutions. In practice it usually maps to political warfare plus narrative and identity operations.

Religious warfare

Media shorthand for conflicts where religious identity or authority is the dominant mobilising frame. In modern political conflict, religion is often the carrier of mobilisation and legitimacy claims rather than the sole driver.

Identity targeting

Influence activity that activates group identity cues (nation, faith, ethnicity, ideology) to mobilise, polarise, or fracture cohesion.

Sectarianization

The process of turning communal or religious differences into political division through threat narratives and in-group versus out-group framing.

8. Emerging mechanism: poisoning and cognitive security

Malinfluence operations

Influence activity designed to degrade trust, distort narratives, and manipulate sentiment at scale through persistent shaping of the environment, not just single messages.

LLM data and model poisoning

Manipulating training, fine-tuning, or retrieval corpora so systems produce misleading outputs, degrade knowledge integrity, and erode organisational trust and decision-making. mipb.ikn.army.mil+1

9. References

NATO and cognitive warfare

Political warfare

Information operations framing

Information disorder terminology

Soft power, hard power and sharp power

Narrative manipulation and LLM poisoning