Discourse and information warfare: A proposed theoretical framework for pragmatic analysis of Russian manipulative influence in political discourse

Truth is the first casualty of war.1 Russia has prioritized information warfare in its aggression toward Ukraine and the West, refining it for the digital age. The aim of information warfare is to manipulate an enemy’s psychic condition. Security analysts tend to apply semantics to the study of information warfare, attempting to combat lies with truth. Discourse analysts know that you’re supposed to fight manipulation with pragmatics. This makes discourse analysts uniquely qualified to combat the threat. This paper presents a pragmatic theoretical framework for discourse analysts to identify manipulation in political discourse as Russian information warfare. The framework is applied in a generic qualitative inquiry of current and historical political discourse. Results advance “false consciousness” as the most pragmatically plausible theory to widely discussed research questions about Trumpism and Russian influence in Western politics over alternative theories such as “nativism, authoritarianism and populism,” “ideological asymmetry,” and “lesser evilism.”