Rethinking Warfare in the 21st Century

Iulian Chifu is the State Counsellor of the Romanian Prime Minister for Foreign Relations, Security and Strategic Affairs. He was the Founder and President of the Conflict Prevention and Early Warning Centre Bucharest. Greg Simons is a Researcher at the Institute for Russian and Eurasian Studies (IRES) at Uppsala University in Sweden and a Lecturer at the Department of Communication Sciences at Turiba University in Riga, Latvia.

'Waging of war in the 21st century has become a highly politicised warfare, which means it is the main instrument for achieving political objectives. If it is fabricated, manipulated and justified for hearts and minds, that is facilitated by the new technological advances of our era and launched against global publics before the war takes place in regions away from the western hemisphere. This book illustrates the resulting cognitive dissonance induced by the mixture of politics and communication, such as the façade of humanitarian intervention and pre-emptive warfare in the post-cold war era that resulted in intertwined wars throughout the world, so we are really facing a different generation of warfare. As a result, this timely publication is very welcome and appreciated. Rethinking Warfare in the 21st Century unlocks the complexity of contemporary warfare through engaging with it on the levels of both theory and practice in the midst of an ongoing geopolitical power transition in international relations and global politics.' Davoud Gharayagh-Zandi, Department of Political Science, Faculty of Economics and Political Science, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran-Iran

• 1. Introduction: motivation, purpose and structure of the book; 2. Informational warfare: a theoretical approach; 3. Understanding political and intangible elements in modern wars; 4. The fourth generation of informational warfare; 5. The culture and language of contemporary armed conflict; 6. Different shades of information and communication in armed conflict: white, grey and black; 7. The effects of technological evolution and social media on the individual, society and politics; 8. Western hybrid warfare: crisis and subversion in regime change; 9. Geopolitics in the age of social media: the struggle for influence on Ukraine; 10. The Ukrainian and Syrian conflicts: civil wars or geopolitical Shatterbelts?; 11. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on man, society, politics and international relations: the role of social media and informational warfare; 12. Conclusions: summing up the knowledge and answering the questions.