III-3. Strategic Communications at the Age of the Global Information Warfare: Afraasian Zone of Instability Issues

Convener: Konstantin A. Pantserev (St. Petersburg State University, Russia); e-mail: pantserev@yandex.ru

In the modern world when knowledge and information become an integral part of our everyday life, key instrument which can ensure the sustainable social and economic development of the nation, it becomes evident that information technologies also can play a destructive role. One can explain this situation by the radical change in the peoples’ life due to the active implementation of the Internet. Nowadays the Global Network is considered as a shopping, emolument, self-education, creativity and leisure. When one need information of any kind or has any question he doesn’t ask friends or specialists but goes to Internet and asks Google. It is very convenient. But for such convenience sometimes we need to pay very high price. Taking to the account this fact, nowadays it’s hardly to imagine the organization of effective operations without well determined and well thought strategic communications. It means that information technologies when used effectively can destroy a current world order and put an end to regimes which used to be rather stable and influential. As a result, the information has become the instrument of defense and offensive. The states build strategies to protect its national media and the Internet sphere from outside attacks, and, at the same time, to make its influence in other countries with the aid of propaganda, soft power strategies and public diplomacy. That’s why it is possible to conclude that the State when realizing its information policy should not only pay the attention to the development of its ICT-sector but also to think how to secure its interests at the informational field and ensure the security of the society, individual and the State. As an example we’d like to show protest movements which took place in North Africa and Middle East starting from the year 2011. Those movements are known as “Arab spring”. But they are also known as “Tweeter revolutions” which points the role of the information technologies and Western mass media in the organization of protests and the defamation of the heads of those States. Thus the mission of the panel is to analyze up-to-date trends in the ensuring of the information security both in global and regional levels and the organization of the comparative analyses of informational and psychological warfare issues in the countries which compose the Afraasian zone of instability.