RĂZBOIUL COGNITIV ȘI VULNERABILITATEA DEMOCRAȚIILOR: ATACUL ASUPRA INTEGRITĂȚII DELIBERATIVE
THE COGNITIVE WAR AND THE VULNERABILITY OF DEMOCRACIES: THE ATTACK ON THE INTEGRITY OF THE DELIBERATION

Summary/Abstract: This article examines cognitive warfare as an emergent form of strategic conflict that targets the very foundations of democratic sovereignty. Unlike conventional or hybrid warfare, cognitive warfare does not aim at territorial control or material destruction, but at capturing the epistemic and symbolic infrastructures through which societies distinguish truth from falsehood and sustain collective identity. The analysis shows how cognitive operations neutralise critical reasoning, erode social trust, and reconfigure individual and collective identities by displacing foundational narratives and implanting exogenous symbolic frameworks. Drawing on NATO doctrine, Russian theories of information confrontation, and American perception-management strategies, the study highlights the shift from controlling information flows to reshaping evaluative categories themselves. Cognitive warfare is therefore interpreted not merely as manipulation of opinion, but as a systemic design of the perceptual environment. Normatively, the article applies the framework of just war theory (justum bellum) to assess cognitive aggression. It argues that the concept of „force“ must be extended to include systematic mental coercion, since the integrity of deliberation is as vital to democratic autonomy as territorial integrity. Anchored in Habermas’s theory of communicative action and Rawls’s notion of “public reason“, the article introduces the concept of “deliberative integrity“ as a strategic good. Protecting electoral processes and collective reasoning from cognitive interference thus becomes central to a renewed architecture of democratic security.

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