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:
  1. organization into specific groups, associations etc. which act by creating knowledge in and outside of the state,
  2. when the created knowledge with its content significantly changes ingrained (established) narratives in the society,
  3. when connections with other groups start, which in turn raise the level of action,
  4. 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.