Abstract
Marked efforts to spread disinformation within Europe and NATO-allied nations has risen, not uncoincidentally, alongside a rise in totalitarian narratives and neo-imperial ambitions from the Russian Federation. Although Georgian political leaders and NATO have both worked independently to pushback against totalitarian narratives in the information space, the Substantial NATO-Georgia Package (SNGP) has not explicitly aimed to intertwine Georgian leadership, voices, and experience in resisting totalitarian narratives. The limited inclusion of Georgia in NATO-allied information space exercises or frameworks is a missed opportunity to create a larger joint-framework that resists anti-democratic narratives across NATO allies, and the larger democratic world as anti-democratic forces often align in spreading totalitarian messaging aimed at undermining democratic-institutional integrity. This paper presents a conceptual understanding of the totalitarian information space as totalitarian-institutions’ advances to undermine the vita activa of the democratic information space, analysing specifically the way totalitarian narratives undermine the free exchange of information; or, the sensus communis. Building off this conceptual understanding, this paper then analyses the SNGP regarding Georgia’s information space capacities and proposes a theoretical and practical model for including Georgia in combatting totalitarian information space advances. The theoretical model pursues identifying the typology of threats from a threat-analysis model, focusing on totalitarian narratives utilised. The practical model then assesses the SNGP and related training implemented since the document’s release against NATO’s 2022 capability framework for fighting disinformation to identify weaknesses and propose a triad-defence model which covers current gaps in the SNGP.
Author Information
Alexander MacDonald, National Dong Hwa University, Taiwan
Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2023
Stream: Political Science
This paper is part of the ECAH2023 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
MacDonald A. (2023) Georgia and NATO: A Democratic Framework for Responding to the Totalitarian Information Space ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2023: Official Conference Proceedings https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2023.14
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2023.14
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