Democratic Resilience in an Age of Information Warfare
Democracy not only requires political rights and institutions such as free, general, and regular elections. It also requires a public conversation that enables citizens to form their own opinions. Building societal resilience against manipulation is therefore an urgent task for protecting democracy in an age of information warfare. This project critically examines prevalent assumptions about the meaning of democratic resilience and develops a new interpretation of the concept.
Details
- Period: 2024-01-01 – 2027-12-31
- Budget: 4,495,000 SEK
- Funder: Formas
Description
Recent years have seen several attempts to undermine democratic opinion-formation through disinformation. Against this background, many countries, including Sweden, have taken measures to enhance democratic resilience by educating citizens about fact-checking and source criticism. What these measures have in common is the assumption that disinformation threatens democracy by leading citizens to make decisions based on false information. The aim of this project is to develop a new interpretation based on a notion of the threat as existential more than epistemic. According to this interpretation, the danger is not primarily that citizens are fooled into believing that lies are facts, but resignation before the task of having to use one’s own judgment. Democratic resilience must thus be understood in terms of a capability of resisting such resignation.
The project has three parts. The first part maps out and critically examines the assumptions that undergird existing political measures for building resilience. The second part develops a new interpretation of the threat against the democratic opinion-formation and the meaning of democratic resilience. The third part extracts the implications of the existential perspective and articulates a set of recommendations for a stronger psychological defense.