The Domains

Shifting Domains

What "domains" means on this site. A domain is a distinct arena where people, organisations, and states operate, compete, and build advantage. Each domain has its own signals, access points, constraints, and forms of leverage.

In modern competition, a single campaign can move across domains quickly. What begins as attention shaping in the information domain can become reputational pressure in the social domain, then legal pressure, then physical risk. Protection fails when risk is assessed in one domain while the threat is unfolding in another.

“Shifting domains” describes how influence and threat migrate across arenas faster than teams, policies, and institutions can keep up.

Domains are arenas, not “types of warfare”

A domain answers: where does activity occur, and what assets, rules, and signals define that arena?

“Warfare” describes how tools are applied and to what effect. For example:

  • Cyberspace is a domain
  • Cyber warfare is a mode of conflict conducted in that domain
  • Information warfare operates through information flows and systems
  • Cognitive warfare targets cognition as an effect space and is sometimes described as operating in a cognitive domain (act.nato.int)

On this site:

  • Domains are arenas you can map and monitor
  • Modes (information, psychological, cognitive) describe mechanisms and effects that can operate across domains

The Domains

Physical domain

Bodies, places, movement, proximity, access control, surveillance, and violence. This is where protection is most visible, but it is often not where campaigns begin.

Digital and technical domain

The engineered systems that mediate modern life: platforms, apps, device ecosystems, AI systems, data supply chains, ad tech, and surveillance tooling.

Cyber domain

A subdomain of digital and technical focused on networks, infrastructure, vulnerabilities, intrusion, disruption, persistence, and data theft. Cyber is the access layer and disruption layer inside the wider technical domain.

Information domain

Content, media ecosystems, channels, reach, amplification, and information integrity. This is where narratives propagate and where information disorder spreads at speed. (edoc.coe.int)

Cognitive domain

Perception, attention, trust, sense-making, and decision-making. NATO ACT frames cognitive warfare as a challenge tied to resilience and decision advantage. (act.nato.int)

Psychological domain

Emotions, morale, motivation, cohesion, fear, and willingness to act. Psychological effects often bridge between exposure (information) and behaviour (action).

Social and cultural domain

Identity, belonging, norms, reputation, status, community networks, informal power, and perceived legitimacy. This is a high-trust carrier domain: people outsource judgment to group cues.

Political and diplomatic domain

Institutions, alliances, political legitimacy, negotiation, signalling, and elite decision-making. This is where influence turns into policy outcomes and strategic alignment.

Lawfare, compliance pressure, investigations, litigation, sanctions regimes, and regulatory pressure. This domain can constrain, distract, delegitimise, or financially drain an opponent.

Economic and financial domain

Capital flows, markets, trade dependencies, supply chains, sponsorship, and incentives. Economic leverage often makes effects in other domains “stick”.

How domains shift in real life

A typical cross-domain sequence looks like this:

  1. A narrative is seeded in the information domain
  2. It becomes social proof in the social and cultural domain
  3. It produces psychological effects (fear, anger, grievance, certainty)
  4. It reshapes cognitive frames (trust, salience, what seems “true” or “inevitable”)
  5. It triggers legal, economic, or political moves
  6. It creates physical world constraints or risk

What this means for protection work

Protection is cross-domain, even if teams are not

Most structures are domain-bounded: physical security, cyber, comms, legal, intelligence. Modern threats are cross-domain. The job becomes tracking migration early enough to respond with the right tools in the right domain.

The platform layer is part of the threat surface

Platforms do not just distribute content. They shape salience, social proof, and perceived legitimacy at scale.

Narrative is an operating layer

Narrative is not decoration. It is a mechanism that makes facts feel like stakes and identity, which is why it is central to influence and escalation across domains.

References

Cognitive domain and cognitive warfare

Political warfare and strategy

Information disorder terminology

Project research