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	A new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’? by Peter Pomerantsev Guardian News   Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. A new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’?   The thing that Margo Gontar found easiest to comprehend were the dead children. They were all over her computer screens – on news sites and social media – next to headlines that blamed the deaths on Ukrainian fascist gangs trained by Nato. It was early 2014, Crimea had just been taken over by soldiers who seemed Russian and sounded Russian but who were wearing no national insignia, and who Vladimir Putin, with a little grin, had just told the whole world were not Russian at all. Now eastern Ukraine was being taken over by separatists. Gontar was trying to fight back.   She could usually locate the original images of the dead with a simple Google search. Some of the photographs were actually from other, older wars; some were from crime scenes that had nothing to with Ukraine; some even came from movies. Gontar posted her research on a myth-busting website called StopFake, which had been started in March by volunteers like her at the journalism school of Mohyla University in Kiev. It felt good being able to sort truth from lies, to feel some kind of certainty amid so much confusion.   But sometimes things could get more complicated. Russian state-television news began to fill up with plump, weeping women and elderly men who told tales of Ukrainian nationalists beating up Russian-speakers. These witnesses seemed genuine enough. But soon Gontar would see the same plump women and the same injured men appearing in different newscasts, identified as different people. In one report, a woman would be an “Odessa resident”, then next she would be a “soldier’s mother”, then a “Kharkiv resident” and then an “anti-Maidan activist”.   In July, after the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine, Gontar surveyed the internet, picking up shards of pro-Russian conspiracy theories. She came across the Twitter feed of an air-traffic controller who had spotted Ukrainian army jets following the plane, although she could find no evidence that the air-traffic controller actually existed. She found dozens of sites in Russian and English which, almost as one, suddenly argued that the US had shot down MH17 in a botched attempt to target Putin’s personal jet.   There were even claims, circulated by Russian separatist leaders in Ukraine, that the plane had been filled with corpses before it had taken off – a plotline lifted from the BBC TV series Sherlock. The stories were glaringly sloppy, as if their creators did not care about being caught and just wanted to distract from the evidence that Russian-backed militias had shot down the plane. Gontar began to wonder whether she was falling into the Kremlin’s trap by spending so much time trying to debunk its obviously fake stories.   Before long, she found herself, and StopFake, becoming part of the story. Russian media had begun to cite StopFake in their own reports – but would make it look like Gontar was presenting the falsified story as truth, rather than debunking it. It was like seeing herself reflected in a mirror upside down. She felt dizzy.   At times like this, she had always reached out to western media for a sense of something solid, but this was starting to slip too. Whenever somewhere like the BBC published a story, they felt obliged to present the Kremlin’s version of events – fascists, western conspiracy, etc – as the other side, for balance. Gontar began to wonder whether her search for certainty was futile: if the truth was constantly shifting before her eyes, and there was always another side to every story, was there anything solid left to hold on to?   After months working at StopFake, she began to doubt everything. Who was to say that “original” photo of a dead child she found was genuine? Maybe that, too, had been placed there? Reality felt malleable, spongy. Whatever the Russians were doing, it was not simply propaganda, which is intended to persuade and susceptible to debunking. This was something else entirely: not only could it not be disproven, it seemed to vaporise the very idea of proof.   Late last year, I came across a Russian manual called Information-Psychological War Operations: A Short Encyclopedia and Reference Guide (The 2011 edition, credited to Veprintsev et al, and published in Moscow by Hotline-Telecom, can be purchased online at the sale price of 348 roubles). The book is designed for “students, political technologists, state security services and civil servants” – a kind of user’s manual for junior information warriors. The deployment of information weapons, it suggests, “acts like an invisible radiation” upon its targets: “The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defence mechanisms.” If regular war is about actual guns and missiles, the encyclopedia continues, “information war is supple, you can never predict the angle or instruments of an attack”.   The 495-page encyclopedia contained an introduction to information-psychological war, a glossary of key terms and detailed flowcharts describing the methods and strategies of defensive and offensive operations, including “operational deception” (maskirovka), “programmatical-mathematical influence”, “disinformation”, “imitation”, and “TV and radio broadcasting”.   In “normal war” the encyclopedia explains, “victory is a case of yes or no; in information war it can be partial. Several rivals can fight over certain themes within a person’s consciousness.”   I had always imagined the phrase “information war” to refer to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right. But the encyclopedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations” and “control over the sources of strategic reserves”. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants.   But when I began to pore over recent Russian military theory – in history books and journals – the strange language of the encyclopedia began to make more sense. Since the end of the cold war, Russia had been preoccupied with the need to match the capabilities of the US and its allies. In 1999, Marshal Igor Sergeev, then minister of defence, admitted that Russia could not compete militarily with the west. Instead, he suggested, it needed to search for “revolutionary paths” and “asymmetrical directions”.   Over the course of the previous decade, Russian military and intelligence theorists began to elaborate more substantial ideas for non-physical warfare – claiming that Russia was already under attack, along similar lines, by western NGOs and media.   In 2013 the head of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, Valery Gerasimov, claimed that it was now possible to defeat enemies through a “combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns”. This was part of a vision of war which lay not in the realm of physical contact but in what Russian theorists described as the “psychosphere”. These wars of the future would be fought not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.   * Access the complete essay via the link below. Visit the related web page
	Bringing the Streets to Politics: Hip-Hop Promotes Openness in Senegal by Amanda Fortier   After floods swept through the suburbs of Dakar in 2006, a popular local rapper recruited youth to organize a fundraising concert for the newly homeless. The cohort morphed into Africulturban, a youth development organization using music, media, and educational programs to help engage some of Dakar’s most “at risk” young people—those living in poverty, lacking access to education, and often more susceptible to criminal activity. Hip-hop reaches these people and opens them to new experiences.   In March 2014, Africulturban launched YUMA (Youth Urban Media Academy). The initiative offers formerly incarcerated youths filmmaking and photography classes, among others. The YUMA project helps young men surmount the stigma that follows former prisoners.   It gives them an opportunity to tell their stories, and ultimately help reshape the narrative around young persons and urban life in Senegal. And it does this confidence-building work through a channel they can relate to: hip-hop.   Before hip-hop’s arrival, Senegalese culture had a long history of rhythmically arranging words to song—a tradition known as tassu—that helped educate the then mostly illiterate masses.   Mbalakh, the Senegalese national dance that fuses western rock music with jazz and soul, also held a prominent cornerstone as a musical genre sung in praise of successful businessmen and politicians. It is often referred to as “the Senegalese opium,” as it allowed people to forget their problems. Rap, by contrast, has sought to be a more radical and legitimate means of facing reality, and calling for change.   This boldness reflects how Senegalese youth have adopted hip-hop culture. When hip-hop culture first made its way from the United States and France to Senegal in the late 1980s, it quickly attracted young Senegalese for its anti-establishment ethos and its Western sensibility.   At the time Senegalese youth could be seen wearing Western clothes–acid-wash jeans, t-shirts, open jackets, and shoulder pads—but the distinctive hip hop style of dress with its baseball caps, neon jackets, and gold chains were not yet commonplace.   Soon, though, rap music in the gritty suburbs of Dakar took on a more localized identity replete with primarily Wolof lyrics about local issues. The art scene in the suburb communities of Pikine and Guediawaye had primarily focused around entertainment—live theatre, group dancing, and mbalakh.   Hip-hop’s arrival spoke to youth and provided a much-needed space for political and social expression to denounce patrimonialism and encourage more social justice and better governance.   Today there are several examples of prominent Senegalese hip-hop artists like Awadier, Duggy Tee, Matador, Thiat, Khalifa, Keyti, Xuman, and Fou Malade, who have made names for themselves as politically engaged artists. The prominent Y’en a marre (“I’ve had enough”) group, who were instrumental in keeping the former president from seeking constitutionally illegal re-elections in 2012, were made up mainly of hip-hop artists.   This brought disconnected youth into political life while democratizing the artistic scene and providing a platform for anyone to criticize Senegalese political, social, cultural, and even religious affairs.   Regardless of ethnicity, social class, or caste, a rap artist can be—and often is—from any segment of Senegalese society. It is generally inexpensive—as no instruments are required—and demands relatively low musical skills or access to start.   Traditionally, Senegal’s various ethnic groups have specifically allocated roles and responsibilities as it relates to the established social order. Everything from cooking and dancing to singing and farming to educating and running businesses is often predetermined by one’s ethnicity. But rapping is open to everyone.   Another key democratizing aspect of rap is in its content matter—there are hardly any taboo issues. Just about any topic can be broached in its lyrics, even the ones local Senegalese media tend to shy away from. Though rappers may still treat them with some degree of subtlety, it is not unusual to hear songs about corruption within the government or even among its leading religious figures (the latter whom play a monumental role in Senegalese society).   Of course, liberation runs into walls. In a country of 12 million where an estimated 300,000 call themselves “rappers,” censorship and cultural mores hold sway. Senegal is a 95-percent Muslim country where traditional practices, including carefully defined gender roles, marital expectations, and the like, are well-entrenched.   While many young Senegalese feel free to rap, and are fuelled by an initial desire “to be famous” or to simply “speak out” against their governments or what they feel is ailing in their society, few actually make it so far as to reach the masses.   This makes rap a vehicle for civic awareness, if not a rocket for policy change. As Amadou Fall Ba, 33, one of the founding members of Africulturban and a former rapper himself explains, “The force of hip-hop is about forming something from nothing.”   http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/bringing-streets-politics-hip-hop-promotes-openness-senegal
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