Weaponizing the mind and instrumentalizing the Valdai Discussion Club: Russia’s cognitive warfare against the West

Abstract

This Master’s thesis’s aim is to study the Russian Federation’s use of cognitive warfare against the West by instrumentalizing a think tank. The Valdai Discussion Club, a think tank in Russia, is founded with the support of the government’s funding and is affiliated with the state through personal connections to this day. However, there is no empirical link to see whether the Russian government uses the think tank to construct, promote, or reproduce its official narratives about the West. Russia’s narratives about the West are important because the former uses the rhetoric and image construction of the West to justify the aggression in Ukraine. This is a question of security – which agents are instrumentalized by the state to reproduce and reinforce the state’s narratives, biases, and beliefs. Therefore, by using critical discourse analysis, this dissertation analyzes the narratives created about the West in the official foreign policy document, the Concept of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (2023), and the Valdai Discussion Club’s works, and compares them. The main findings indicate an evident link between the actors’ narrative construction of the West and, therefore, allow for a conclusion that the Russian government instrumentalizes the think tank for its narrative construction and cognitive warfare against the West.