The Concept and Its Ambiguity
In the last two years, the term "cognitive warfare" has begun to appear with increasing frequency in Armenian policy discussions and expert debates, particularly in the context of Armenia's evolving security environment after the 2020 war, as well as on the eve of the 2026 parliamentary elections. Yet despite its growing use, the concept itself remains insufficiently defined.
Cognitive warfare is often conflated with narrower phenomena such as disinformation, information campaigns, or psychological operations, or subsumed under the broader category of hybrid threats -- without capturing the full spectrum of actors, methods, and mechanisms that define it. The conceptual precision matters: a phenomenon that is insufficiently defined cannot be adequately countered, because the countermeasures are calibrated to the conceptual understanding.
This conceptual ambiguity is not unique to Armenia. Across Euro-Atlantic policy circles, including within NATO and the European Union, the understanding of cognitive warfare -- and the corresponding need for cognitive security and cognitive resilience -- is still evolving. The distinguishing feature of cognitive warfare, relative to the narrower phenomena it is often conflated with: contemporary conflicts increasingly target not only territories, infrastructures, or institutions, but the cognitive domain itself -- the perception, reasoning, decision-making, and belief-formation processes of the targeted population.
Cognitive Warfare Versus Disinformation
The distinction between cognitive warfare and disinformation is structurally important. Disinformation is the deliberate spread of false information. Information campaigns are the coordinated dissemination of particular narratives. Psychological operations are the targeted influence of specific audiences' attitudes and behaviours. Cognitive warfare encompasses these but extends beyond them: it targets the cognitive domain at the level of the population's perception-and-reasoning processes themselves, seeking to degrade the targeted population's capacity for accurate perception, sound reasoning, and effective collective decision-making.
The cognitive-warfare framework treats the targeted population's cognition as the battlespace. The objective is not merely to spread a particular false claim (disinformation) or to promote a particular narrative (information campaign), but to degrade the population's overall cognitive capacity -- to produce confusion, distrust, polarisation, and decision-paralysis that weaken the targeted society's capacity to function coherently. This is why cognitive warfare requires a different countermeasure framework than disinformation: countering disinformation involves fact-checking and correction; countering cognitive warfare involves building the population's overall cognitive resilience.
OWL's separate investigations have documented the disinformation dimension of the 2026 cycle: the May 23 fact-check investigation (the false Pashinyan campaign-financing and pension-cut video, originated from foreign accounts, consistent with the SDA and "Dialog" operational architecture); the May 22 UK FCDO sanctions investigation (the designations of Russian information-warfare actors specifically citing Armenia-election-interference). These documented operations are the disinformation-and-information-campaign components of the broader cognitive-warfare environment the resilience-framework analysis addresses.
The Armenian Cognitive-Security Challenge
Armenia's post-2020 security environment presents a specific cognitive-security challenge. The 2020 war's outcome, the September 2023 Nagorno-Karabakh displacement, the post-2025 Washington Declaration framework, and the broader strategic-realignment trajectory have produced a society navigating a fundamental reorientation of its national-security-and-identity framework. The cognitive-warfare environment exploits this reorientation: the documented Russian-state information operations (the SDA and "Dialog" activities, the broader influence-campaign architecture) target the Armenian population's perception-and-reasoning processes during a period of maximum reorientation-induced uncertainty.
The 2026 electoral cycle intensifies the cognitive-security challenge. Elections are the principal collective-decision-making process of a democratic society; the cognitive-warfare environment specifically targets the electoral-decision-making process to degrade the population's capacity for the accurate-perception-and-sound-reasoning that effective electoral participation requires. The OSCE/ODIHR interim observation report's identification of the cycle's polarised environment (OWL's May 24-25 investigation) reflects the cognitive-domain consequences of this environment.
The Armenian cognitive-security challenge is compounded by the structural features of the small-state information environment: the relatively concentrated media ecosystem, the substantial social-media-platform dependence, the cross-border information flows (particularly the Russian-language information environment), and the limited institutional infrastructure for cognitive-security-and-resilience response. These structural features make the Armenian information environment more vulnerable to cognitive-warfare operations than larger states with more diversified information ecosystems.
Toward a Resilience Framework
The cognitive-resilience framework the analysis advocates would address the cognitive-warfare challenge at the population-capacity level rather than at the individual-false-claim level. The components of such a framework include: media-and-information literacy (building the population's capacity to critically evaluate information sources and claims); cognitive-security institutional infrastructure (the state-and-civil-society institutions capable of detecting, analysing, and responding to cognitive-warfare operations); the cross-platform content-moderation engagement (the relationship with the social-media platforms through which the cognitive-warfare operations are conducted); and the broader societal-trust-and-cohesion infrastructure (the social capital that makes a society resilient against the confusion-distrust-polarisation objectives of cognitive warfare).
The institutional dimension is the principal gap. OWL's May 23 fact-check investigation noted that the Armenian institutional response architecture for foreign-originated disinformation is limited: the Central Electoral Commission's remit covers domestic-actor conduct; the National Security Service's mandate covers more substantively-defined hostile activity; the intermediate category of foreign-account-originated disinformation operates in an institutional grey zone. A cognitive-resilience framework would require the development of the institutional infrastructure to fill this grey zone -- the dedicated cognitive-security capacity that the current institutional architecture lacks.
For the post-cycle institutional environment, the cognitive-resilience framework is one of the structural-policy domains the post-June-7 government will need to address. The cumulative documentation of the cycle's cognitive-warfare environment -- the disinformation operations, the foreign-influence designations, the polarised-environment characterisation -- provides the empirical basis for the resilience-framework development. Whether the post-cycle government produces the framework, or whether the cognitive-security grey zone persists, is the question the post-cycle period will answer.
What We Are Watching Next
Three indicators will define the cognitive-security trajectory. (1) Whether the post-cycle Armenian government produces dedicated cognitive-security institutional infrastructure to fill the documented grey zone. (2) Whether the media-and-information-literacy and societal-resilience dimensions receive sustained policy attention. (3) Whether the cross-platform content-moderation engagement produces effective response to the cognitive-warfare operations targeting the Armenian information environment.
The EVN Report cognitive-warfare analysis is one of the most conceptually-rigorous Armenian engagements with the cognitive-security challenge. The combination of the conceptual-framework clarification, the Armenian cognitive-security-challenge analysis, and the resilience-framework architecture places this analysis at the center of the cycle's information-security analytical dimension. OWL covers this content as part of our broader documentary scope of the Armenian information-and-cognitive-security environment.
Sources: EVN Report article "Cognitive Warfare: Toward a Resilience Framework for Armenia," May 2026, primary source for the cognitive-warfare conceptual framework, the disinformation-versus-cognitive-warfare distinction, the Armenian cognitive-security-challenge analysis, and the resilience-framework architecture. OWL companion investigations on the May 23 fact-check investigation (the false Pashinyan campaign-financing/pension-cut video, the SDA/"Dialog" operational architecture, the institutional grey zone), the May 22 UK FCDO sanctions investigation (Russian information-warfare-actor designations citing Armenia-election interference), the May 24-25 OSCE/ODIHR interim observation report (polarised-environment characterisation). NATO and EU cognitive-warfare/cognitive-security policy documentation. All factual claims sourced to the named EVN Report article and the public-record references; OWL editorial framings on the cognitive-warfare-versus-disinformation distinction, the Armenian cognitive-security-challenge analysis, the resilience-framework requirements, and the watch-list indicators are clearly identified as such.