PSYOPS, Legitimacy and International Political Culture
PSYOPS, Legitimacy and International Political Culture

Summary/Abstract: The current debates about hybrid wars revolve around identifying anddelineating the hard power components from the soft power ingredients ofinterventions, yet the difficult part seems to be understanding the politicalobjectives envisaged by the political actors and putting them in relation withthe methods employed to accomplish those targets. We may say that hybridwars are like equations with many unknowns, therefore difficult to solve, aswell as difficult to establish in time, in terms of the date the war started.In our article, we investigate the relation between legitimacy, internationalpolitical culture and psychological operations and demonstrate that therhetoric strategies employed in different contexts are in fact legitimisingdiscourses aiming at morally disarming the adversaries by presenting theirclaims or objectives as inadequate, incorrect or unjust and determining themto abandon the fight.

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