Knowledge and social and/or political
structure
If an open knowledge corpus and a controlled knowledge corpus exist
(Tuđman 2008), it is expected that both corpora will be the target. The
open knowledge corpus is more available than the controlled knowledge
corpus when viewed from the perspective of availability. However, in the
context of operation planning, open knowledge could be significantly
harder to influence in a substantial sense because in its essence, it
has a high level of general acceptance and rootedness in a particular
group which also includes accustomedness to certain knowledge.
Similar to the concept of national identity, there are various
theoretical meanings of the concept social structure. The best way
(Afrić 1987) to begin the explanation is to enumerate concepts that are
believed to be the opposite of a structure: chaos, amorphousness,
idiosyncratic human behavior without any regularity, etc. In contrast to
these concepts, typical characteristics of the social structure are
social order, social system, behavior pattern, organized unity,
relations organization, configuration of relations in which people
participate, relations between groups and individuals, weak balances of
multiple relation hierarchies, relation networks, interconnectedness of
different social structures. The social structure typologies differ
according to the characteristics of the elements and the nature of the
relation which connects the elements. The influence on the given
structure can be wide-ranging, barely visible or a strong, and often
more precise, blow. Given that over time a need to restructure society
arises, stemming naturally from the development process, influence is
carried out in a slow process that mimics the usual rearrangement in
order to maintain dynamics and follow trends. In other words, it mimics
the situation in which human beings produce and reproduce society
(Gurvitch 1965).
That kind of long-term planning and anticipation seems more acceptable
and in line with today’s times, so it is much easier to justify or cover
up.
Due to the nature of this knowledge, the attack on the controlled
knowledge corpus seems paradoxically easier to carry out with methods
that aren’t publicly known but could be imagined as actions that require
subtlety and have a long duration with the overall process that is more
stable and predictable. As political structure indicates structural,
formal and institutional dimensions of politics, it could be platform
for its performance.
The question of criteria
Phythian and Gill (2018:129), while discussing the limits of
Intelligence respectively mentioned US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
who ‘captured a central and inescapable fact: in a highly complex world,
uncertainties and insecurities abound, and intelligence, however well
funded and organized, cannot be omniscient.’ The authors furthermore
clearly differentiate between limits of intelligence, some of which are
related to the lack of information or cognitive constraints of the
personnel, while others are related to the process, including
difficulties in identifying goals, routine guidance caused by practical
or ideological reasons and directed towards known, common suspects,
bureaucratic reasons, and difficulties in sharing information due to the
concept of secrecy. However, they still find that numerous cases of
failure are due to analytics, which includes the influence of
ideological frameworks. In the context of this paper, it is interesting
to analyze the difference between the concept of an ideological
framework and the concept in which the intelligence system is
responsible for the political and social system and which is in this
paper thus referred to as regular politicization. Does the specific
difference lie in the reasons for action or in terminology? Or is the
key in terminology and certain words leave a better impression, so the
word ‘ideology’ is worse than the word ‘values’?
The fact is that the answer in this section is not unambiguous, and it
is especially not simple. It seems we do not know where to start, so we
do not touch upon problems such as difficult conditions for gathering
useful information, misinformation, the speed of information change,
etc. According to many sources, gathering information is no longer a
problem in today’s world. As per some estimates (Omand 2020) open
sources contain a high percentage of required information, indicating an
increased need to improve the decision-making process, mainly the
analysis process. However, regardless of the percentage ratio of
required information in open sources and the need for gathering
information in other ways, capacities should not be reduced just because
everything seems more accessible. That is, accessibility is precisely
what can present an obstacle to good work in terms of assessing the
relevance, purposefulness, and usefulness of information (Weissmann and
Nilsson 2024). But if we are not sure what we are looking for and why,
the capacities we are developing are very unlikely to fulfill their
function.
Simulation of the relation between national identity and social
structure generally and in the context of knowledge
It is not seemingly clear how to approach a situation in which the
social structure or its parts begin to question the element of national
identity, especially in the circumstances of today’s trends.
Furthermore, when discussing attacks or influence operations, it is
necessary to analyze whether the factors with a negative opinion on
national identity as a necessity for the development of the society are
actors of the influence operation and what exactly is necessary for an
action to be considered an influence operation. In a democratic
framework, society carries the opportunities for conversation and
exchange of opinions, lack of judgement for holding different opinions,
coexistence of opposing opinions and actions; however, discussions about
premises of communication and a necessity for setting boundaries are
becoming more prominent. It is difficult to determine what these
boundaries would be apart from the existing legal framework with an
emphasis on the criminal law and the increasing use of criminal law
mechanisms in the context of media freedoms, defamation of character,
etc., but this will not be discussed in this analysis.
The purpose of this preliminary communication is to reach different
insights into the relationship between system politicization and
influence operations in relation to its consitutent part and that is
concerned society.
If we return to the negative opinion on national identity as a
constitutive element of cohesion necessary for the development of
society and to those who hold that opinion we can find question
ejecting: To what extent is it possible to discuss this topic in a
democratic society and how does this conversation have to be held in
order not to pose a security threat?
Perhaps just thinking about redefining the concept would not
necessarily lead to bigger breaches in the cohesive fabric of society
if it were not followed by a complete negation of one or more content
elements of the concept. Therefore, we distinguish different levels
and think about the line of detection after which we should start
observing the phenomenon:
- organization into specific groups, associations etc. which act by
creating knowledge in
and outside of the state,
- when the created knowledge with its content significantly changes
ingrained (established) narratives in the society,
- when connections with other groups start, which in turn raise the
level of action,
- when the created knowledge enters the political sphere of action by
reaching a certain level and context of the connection.
We could perhaps conclude for the purposes of this analysis that ad 4)
represents belatedness because it is the moment in which observation or
acting in defense could be defined as antidemocratic.