Nigeria is being fought over without knowing a contest is on, contends JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA
In Ankara this week, at the NATO Summit, a speaker who works at the intersection of intelligence and strategic communications said something that has refused to leave me since: “We are at war in the information domain.” He was speaking to a room whose instincts run east, to Russia, to Ukraine, to the frontiers of an alliance built for a different century. I sat there thinking about Nigeria and the continent it calls home.
That is the thing about the cognitive domain. It does not respect the agenda of the room. The war the speaker described is not a European war that Africa watches from the gallery. It is a global condition, and Nigeria is already inside it, mostly as territory rather than as combatant. We are being fought over without knowing a contest is on.
Cognitive warfare is the contest for how people think, what they believe, whom they trust and, ultimately, how they behave. As one line from the sessions put it, whoever controls the narrative controls the mood. All warfare, a psychologist reminded the room, is psychological. The tanks and the drones are downstream of the story. The story decides whether a population resists, surrenders, fractures or rallies.
