From Article 5 to 360 Degrees: Expanding NATO’s Definition of Security over 75 Years—Part I
By Megan Gisclon, editor of Atlantica. Original publication dated December 2024; published by the Istanbul Policy Centre.
Preface
To commemorate NATO’s 75th anniversary, Istanbul Policy Center (IPC) hosted a one-day panel discussion on November 7, 2024, at IPC Karaköy as part of the project “From Article 5 to 360 Degrees: Expanding NATO’s Definition of Security over 75 Years.” Sponsored by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division, this event brought together policymakers, decision-makers, academia, civil society, students, and the public to reflect upon NATO’s remarkable history and explore its evolving role in the contemporary world order. It also served as a continuation of IPC’s growing focus on NATO and its role in addressing emerging global challenges.
The event first set out to trace the evolution of NATO’s definition of security over its 75-year history with a view toward better comprehending the challenges NATO faces today. Over the past 75 years, NATO has faced a myriad of conflicts and threats, from the Cold War to conflicts in the Balkans, from the War on Terror to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In today’s increasingly unstable world, threats to NATO stem not only from traditional conflicts but everyday life and practices, threatening not only governments and militaries but also societies and individuals. To effectively combat these threats, in 2016, NATO adopted a 360-degree security approach to take a comprehensive look at security from every direction—both literally and figuratively. This holistic approach has put hybrid, emerging, and human-centric threats at the center of NATO’s security strategy alongside its three core tasks and marked a massive expansion of NATO’s definition of security.
To better understand NATO’s evolving security approach, the panel discussions at IPC took up the topics of dis/misinformation, climate change, and the Women, Peace, and Security agenda as a lens from which to better understand NATO’s response to today’s security environment. As these topics are rarely viewed in Türkiye through a security lens, let alone as priorities for NATO, this event sought to encourage participants to think about NATO specifically and security more generally in a broader context in line with NATO’s 360-degree security approach. The breadth of the discussion ranged from NATO’s cooperative security approach to the spread of foreign information manipulation and interference from Russia and China, from climate and energy security in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean to women’s roles in the war in Ukraine, among many other issues.
The following report captures the key discussions and thematic issues raised during the event, complemented by additional research to provide deeper context and analysis. While the panelists offered valuable insights into NATO’s priorities, this report aims to further explore the topics discussed. Links to the panel recordings, available on IPC’s YouTube channel, can be found in the appendix.
Dis/Misinformation
Although disinformation operations against NATO have been around since the Alliance’s founding, the volume and proliferation of such threats against NATO in recent years has become a gargantuan task for allies to tackle as its citizens are increasingly interconnected. NATO has seen a huge uptick in the spread of disinformation operations since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea and the subsequent proliferation of Russian disinformation operations.¹⁸ While NATO has put an increased focus on this threat over the past decade, the 2022 Strategic Concept is the first Strategic Concept to identify disinformation as a threat from NATO’s adversaries, namely Russia and China. As the threat of disinformation continues to loom large in face of an ever-growing list of conflicts, NATO and its member states’ response is imperative for creating societies that are resilient to this threat.
NATO defines disinformation as “false or inaccurate information that a hostile actor uses deliberately to deceive people.”¹⁹ As highlighted during the panel discussion, disinformation can take form in a number of ways, including psyops, fake news, and foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), the last of which was frequently cited during the panel discussion. Related to disinformation, the proliferation of “misinformation,” or false information spread without any intent to harm, was also viewed as an equivalent threat within this discussion.
Disinformation is most rapidly spread through online channels, most notably social media. While foreign adversaries are often the creators of disinformation, many actors make the proliferation of dis/misinformation possible. To this end, it was put forth by one panelist within the discussion of foreign information operations that “without domestic support, FIMI doesn’t succeed.” Disinformation from foreign adversaries is intentionally designed with the local context in mind to target and influence an emotional response from local actors. As social media often elicits kneejerk reactions to such information, politicians, businesses, and citizens, among others, play a crucial role in spreading—whether intentionally or unintentionally—false information. Therefore, it is often everyday people rather than foreign adversaries who are guilty of actually spreading the false information that these bad actors create. Another panelist pointed out that even established newsrooms are sometimes guilty of spreading dis/misinformation as factchecking and other methods of verification are sometimes overlooked in order to keep pace with the rapid-fire news cycle.
Although more precise strategies to combatting disinformation vary among member states, NATO’s strategy against combatting disinformation is two-pronged: understand and engage.²⁰ Under the first prong—understand—NATO works to monitor and analyze the information space, identifying where disinformation stems from and how it is spread. Under the second prong—engage—NATO aims to connect with the public, member states, and partners through clear, effective communication, projects, events, and media. NATO’s engagement strategy also includes NATO’s “pre-bunking” efforts, which has proven to be an active deterrent to dispelling disinformation. In contrast to “debunking,” or using fact-checking to prove already proliferated narratives false, “pre-bunking” enables individuals to cultivate the knowledge and skills necessary to proactively identify disinformation.²¹ One example of pre-bunking in action is the Bad News game, which situates users within a fictional online environment to challenge participants to become the creators of bad news in order to better understand how disinformation is spread.²²
During the panel discussion, several strategies and projects for countering disinformation were put forth. First, the DE-CONSPIRATOR project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon project grant, was outlined as one example.²³ The project aims to investigate the psychological and cognitive drivers behind the spread of disinformation and, to this end, studies the actors creating FIMI, examines how FIMI is spread, identifies vulnerable groups, and creates a database of FIMI operations. While the project is limited to disinformation from Russia and China and its effects on EU and partner countries, the project aims to gain a better understanding of FIMI more broadly, which is applicable to the whole of the transatlantic alliance.
A second example that was mentioned is the StopFake campaign, which has focused on fact-checking disinformation on Ukraine following the annexation of Crimea in 2014.²⁴ The project is a collective of Ukrainian journalists who work to dispel fake news and images through creating a database of fakes that can be used to identify future disinformation operations. The group also provides media literacy and training for Ukrainian journalists.
While the challenges stemming from disinformation are only likely to increase in the age of rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI), which continues to produce enhanced image and video programs capable of creating dangerously accurate fakes, the more that media literacy needs to be a security priority. Moving forward, similar projects that not only debunk but also help pre-bunk fake news and teach media literacy skills, an idea that was put forth by one panelist, should be widespread and receive more attention on the international, national, and local levels. NATO should consider providing additional small grants to related projects and funding further research on combatting the spread of disinformation.
Notes
¹⁸ “NATO’s approach to countering disinformation,” NATO, last updated November 8, 2023, https://www.nato.int/cps/cs/natohq/topics_219728.htm.
¹⁹ Ibid.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ For more information on pre-bunking strategies, such as inoculation theory, see Rakoen Maertens, Jon Roozenbeek, Melisa Basol, and Sander van der Linden, “Long-Term Effectiveness of Inoculation Against Misinformation: Three Longitudinal Experiments,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 27, no. 1 (2021): 1–16.
²² M. Basol et al., “Good News about Bad News: Gamified Inoculation Boosts Confidence and Cognitive Immunity Against Fake News,” Journal of Cognition 3, no. 1 (2020): 1–9.
²³ DE-CONSPIRATOR Homepage, https://deconspirator.eu/.
²⁴ StopFake Homepage, https://www.stopfake.org/en/main/.
