Geopolitics – Emotional warfare permeates us all: we should learn to understand it
- 2024.22.02
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- What is the sixth war?
- How does all this work?
- What can be done?
In resume
Public opinion has always been one of the battlefields in power struggles. Now, though, thanks to a combination of geopolitical uncertainty and the "infobesity" (information overload) of what Joseph Nye called the Information Age, the role of public opinion is strategically more important. Who gets to decide who the enemy is? Governments or public opinion? The Global North or the Global South? Who will craft the new consensus in this in-between time when “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”? Who will define the issues that lead to clashes and division? Who will determine what constitutes an event and what does not?
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera intuited this time of ambiguity: post-modernity, he wrote, would be a time of "terminal paradoxes" in which many truths previously considered absolute could well come to be seen as relative. This contemporary ambiguity now permeates us all, creating a sense of unease. And this is what emotional warfare taps into: our difficulty in facing up to a reality that has become "systemic, hybrid, global, liquid or hazy".
Tania SOLLOGOUB, Economist