The political sociology of war: disinformation and misinformation as old/new war strategies

Abstract

The political sociology of war remained for several decades in a kind of illusion that the current and future wars were related to short-range identity conflicts, territorially circumscribed, and thus lacking a global threatening potential. The Yugoslav wars, African conflicts, and even the ‘Arab spring’ revolutions and subsequent wars were considered far apart from the hard-earned Western sense of pacification, security, and territorial inviolability. The Cold War rhetoric returned to the global stage in 2014, with the events at Maidan Square in Kyiv and Putin’s annexation of Crimea. These events triggered a geopolitical overturn in the international relations, and the further weakening of the international organisations and institutions responsible for protecting human rights and liberties, such as the United Nations with its Security Council, which has progressively lost its legitimacy and authority in conflict prevention and resolution since 1999 onward. The new geopolitical (dis)order has destabilised the role of the European Union as a global player, reinforcing the importance of military alliances over political ones, particularly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022. New wars have been producing new innovative strategies, using high-tech information technologies while (still) combating in the field with conventional weapons as Leopard thanks, in a shadow of a nuclear war menace. The information environment, dominated by social media, has become a new battlefield in which misinformation and disinformation play a strategic role of new war devices. The panel encourages papers which analyse these phenomena from both theoretical and empirical perspectives including research on new methodologies able to grasp and untangle the interplay of cacophonic voices in an increasingly complex information environment.

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