Master thesis | Crisis and Security Management (MSc)
open access
Although strategic communication is a tool that can help in countering adversarial influencing campaigns whilst simultaneously increasing resilience against them, it also has the potential to work...Show moreAlthough strategic communication is a tool that can help in countering adversarial influencing campaigns whilst simultaneously increasing resilience against them, it also has the potential to work against the sender’s own goals. This research focuses on how the design of a message contributes to this phenomenon, referred to as ‘information fratricide’. Because the term ‘information fratricide’ is derived from the military and this research focuses on non-military strategic communications in the modern contested information environment, information fratricide is theoretically and conceptually (re)developed to be better suitable for the use in this research. This is done by breaking down Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding theory (1973) and Shannon and Weaver’s concept of ‘noise’ (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). In order to identify the role of message design in information fratricide, an analysis of information fratricide incidents was made. The analysis focused on the communication of U.S. officials about the Russian military build-up at Ukraine’s borders in 2022 and the information fratricidal effects on three receivers of this communication, and found that message design contributes to information fratricide through the ideas that codes add to a message. Furthermore, it was found that the effects of past information fratricide incidents work over time to potentially affect future friendly operations.Show less
