Description
Recent escalation in the Middle East has shown how conflicts have unfolded not only through military confrontation but also through struggles over perception, information, and narrative. Focusing on the renewed war in Lebanon, this paper examines how the latest conflict has opened a discursive battlefield that remains underexplored in IR scholarship. While existing research has concentrated on Israel’s material infrastructures of domination, less attention has been given to “cognitive warfare” - the strategic use of perception management and knowledge production as tools of power. This gap is notable given growing scholarship on digital and psychological warfare, including analyses of the IDF’s “cognitive effort” doctrine (Siboni & Finkel, 2018) and perception management in the Israel-Hezbollah context (Siman-Tov et al., 2020). Drawing on relevant literature, the paper explores how contemporary warfare increasingly operates through digital and discursive infrastructures. It argues that Israel’s campaign in Lebanon seeks to reshape Lebanese public consciousness by framing resistance as futile and self-destructive. More broadly, it situates cognitive warfare within a wider hybrid strategy aimed at silencing resistance narratives, shaping international perceptions, and reconstructing the digital memory of violence and alleged war crimes. In doing so, it highlights how conflicts increasingly operate across both physical and cognitive domains and contributes to better understandings of contemporary conflicts in one of the world’s most significant conflict regions.