Larioncheva N. Information Warfare as an Instrument of Contemporary Politics

Contemporary politics in the twenty-first century operates under conditions of a radical transformation of the communicative environment, in which information ceases to be merely a resource or a channel of message transmission and acquires the status of a decisive factor in the organization of power, legitimation, and political governance. In the context of digitalization, global network interdependence, the platformization of the public sphere, the spread of algorithmically governed content-distribution systems, and the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies, political confrontation is increasingly less concentrated on controlling material resources or territories and increasingly focused on the ability to construct meanings, set interpretive frames of events, manage attention, and influence the cognitive and emotional orientations of society. Under these conditions, information warfare ceases to be a situational instrument of crisis response or an auxiliary component of armed conflict and emerges as a permanent, institutionalized, and long-term practice of political influence aimed at transforming trust, legitimacy, and audience behavioral models. This substantially актуalizes the need for a political-science understanding of information warfare as a systemic instrument of contemporary politics, capable of explaining both domestic mechanisms of competition and delegitimation and foreign-policy and international strategies of hybrid influence.