Tag: philosophy

Article 3: Influence Operations in South Africa – Identity, Grievance, and the Cognitive Battlespace

Given SHINGANGE

Article 1 of this series established influence operations as a defining feature of contemporary conflict, operating primarily in the cognitive domain rather than through force. Article 2 examined how digital platforms, algorithms, and fragmented media ecosystems enable these operations at scale. This third article addresses a more fundamental question: why such operations are increasingly effective in South Africa, even in the absence of clear attribution or coordinated campaigns.

Influence operations do not begin with messages or platforms; they begin with people. Specifically, they exploit how individuals understand identity, trust others, and interpret grievance. These elements constitute the cognitive battlespace. In South Africa, this battlespace has been shifting in measurable ways over the past decade, creating conditions that lower resistance to influence, polarisation, and narrative manipulation.

This article does not claim to identify or attribute specific influence operations targeting South Africa. Nor does it argue that changes in public attitudes are the direct result of coordinated campaigns. Instead, it examines the structural and psychological conditions that make influence more efficient once narratives are introduced. Influence operations rarely manufacture division; they succeed by activating and amplifying perceptions that already exist.

Identity Salience and Cognitive Fragmentation

Afrobarometer’s 2024/2025 survey data provides a credible empirical lens into South Africa’s cognitive terrain. The findings show a pronounced shift away from national identity towards ethnic identity. While most citizens still report balancing the two, one-quarter of South Africans now identify more strongly with their ethnic group than with being South African, and only a small minority prioritise national identity alone. This represents a sharp reversal from the early 2010s, when national identification peaked following the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

From an influence-operations perspective, this shift matters because national identity functions as a stabilising cognitive frame. When it weakens, audiences become more receptive to narratives that interpret politics, economics, and governance through group-based lenses. Identity does not need to be weaponised aggressively; its mere salience reduces the effort required to frame issues as exclusionary or zero-sum.

Afrobarometer data further shows that perceptions of ethnic discrimination by the state are widespread and cross-cutting. Nearly half of respondents believe their ethnic group is treated unfairly by government. In influence terms, the factual accuracy of this perception is secondary. What matters is that grievance frames already exist, are emotionally resonant, and can be activated without the introduction of false information.

Trust Erosion and the Weakening of Informal Resilience

Identity salience becomes operationally significant when combined with declining trust. Fewer than one-third of South Africans report trusting members of other ethnic groups. Low horizontal trust weakens informal social resilience mechanisms such as peer correction, cross-group dialogue, and social sanction against extreme narratives. It also increases reliance on in-group validation, which digital platforms are particularly effective at reinforcing.

At the same time, tolerance in everyday interactions remains relatively high. Most South Africans report that they would not mind living next to someone from a different ethnic group, and interethnic marriage remains broadly accepted. This apparent contradiction is critical. It suggests that the primary risk is not immediate social breakdown, but cognitive hardening: physical coexistence alongside psychological distancing. Contemporary influence operations are optimised for this condition, prioritising long-term attitudinal shifts over mobilisation or violence.

Synthesis: From Cognitive Conditions to Influence Effects

Taken together, the data points to a coherent influence-operations pathway. Rising identity salience provides the targeting variable; perceived grievance supplies emotional resonance; declining trust reduces social friction against polarising narratives; and digital platforms amplify emotionally charged content at scale. The result is not persuasion in the classical sense, but gradual normalisation of suspicion, disengagement, and interpretive closure. Influence succeeds not by convincing people of new ideas, but by narrowing how they interpret existing ones.

This synthesis is important because it clarifies that influence effectiveness in South Africa does not depend on sophisticated disinformation or foreign orchestration. It depends on the interaction between social fragmentation and an information ecosystem that rewards outrage, affirmation, and repetition.

Platforms, Amplification, and Narrative Stickiness

As discussed in Article 2, digital platforms privilege engagement over accuracy. In South Africa, media-monitoring and misinformation-reporting initiatives consistently show that polarising, identity-laden, and emotionally charged content outperforms corrective or contextual information. These dynamics do not require malicious intent. Political rhetoric, economic stress, historical grievance, and sensationalist media all feed into the same amplification loops.

This marks a departure from earlier models of information warfare. The threat is less about falsehood insertion and more about narrative dominance. Influence operations in this environment are often decentralised, opportunistic, and endogenous. Narratives are laundered across communities, reframed by local actors, and legitimised through repetition rather than authority.

Influence Without Attribution

A persistent weakness in South African discourse is the assumption that influence operations must be foreign, centralised, and provable. This assumption obscures more pervasive dynamics. As argued in Article 1, influence can be diffuse and politically ambiguous while still producing strategic effects. In South Africa, these effects may include declining confidence in democratic processes, normalisation of institutional distrust, and increased receptivity to simplistic explanations for complex governance challenges.

None of these outcomes require a single adversary. They require only a permissive cognitive environment and an information ecosystem optimised for emotional engagement.

Policy and Governance Implications

South Africa’s current security and governance frameworks are poorly aligned to these realities. Cybersecurity policy remains focused on technical infrastructure, cybercrime, and system integrity, with minimal engagement with cognitive or information-layer threats. The National Cybersecurity Policy Framework, in particular, offers little guidance on influence, narrative resilience, or societal trust as security variables.

This creates a structural blind spot. Without recognising the cognitive battlespace, responses default to reactive communication, content takedowns, or politicised blame. None address the underlying conditions identified here. Building resilience requires institutional coordination across cybersecurity, communications, education, and social policy—areas that currently operate in silos.

Conclusion

Article 1 established influence operations as a defining feature of modern conflict. Article 2 explained how digital platforms enable them. This article has shown why South Africa is particularly exposed: not primarily because of hostile actors, but because of measurable shifts in identity, trust, and grievance that weaken cognitive resilience.

The most serious influence challenge facing South Africa may therefore be internal rather than external, structural rather than tactical. Until influence is understood as a function of societal conditions rather than isolated campaigns, policy responses will remain misaligned. Influence operations succeed not when societies are divided, but when they lack the institutional and social capacity to recognise how division is being exploited.

Article 2: Why South Africa Is Structurally Vulnerable to Influence Operations

Given SHINGANGE

Influence operations do not succeed because societies are careless or uninformed. They succeed because societies are structurally exposed. South Africa is one such society, not because it is uniquely weak, but because its historical, social, and institutional conditions create fertile ground for cognitive manipulation.

This vulnerability is not primarily technological. It cannot be explained by social media alone, nor solved through platform regulation or content moderation. It is rooted in long-standing fractures, unresolved grievances, and declining trust in authority. Until these structural conditions are acknowledged explicitly, responses to influence operations will remain superficial, reactive, and misdirected.

Understanding structural vulnerability is uncomfortable because it forces inward reflection rather than outward blame. But without this honesty, resilience remains rhetorical.

Influence follows fractures, not platforms

A common analytical error is to treat influence operations as a product of digital platforms. Platforms matter, but they do not determine what resonates. Influence operations follow fractures, not technologies.

In South Africa, several fractures are persistent and deeply embedded. Economic inequality remains extreme and highly visible. Unemployment, particularly among young people, is chronic. Service delivery failures are experienced daily and locally. Corruption has shifted from scandal to expectation. Political promises frequently collapse into administrative incapacity.

These conditions generate frustration, resentment, and mistrust. Influence operations do not invent grievances. They identify where emotional pressure already exists and apply narrative force.

Focusing too narrowly on platforms obscures the real drivers of vulnerability. Platforms amplify what societies already feel; they do not create those feelings from nothing.

Lived experience as a narrative battleground

In South Africa, political narratives intersect directly with lived experience. This is a critical distinction.

When electricity fails, water is unreliable, housing is inadequate, or safety deteriorates, people do not experience these as abstract governance challenges. They experience them as personal neglect. Narratives that frame these failures as intentional, inevitable, or evidence of systemic betrayal resonate quickly because they align with daily reality.

Influence operations exploit this alignment. They do not contradict lived experience; they reinterpret it. They shift the question from “why is this failing?” to “who is responsible and why should they be trusted?”

Once that shift occurs, the space for institutional explanation narrows sharply. Technical responses sound evasive. Structural complexity sounds like excuse. Emotionally satisfying narratives outperform accurate ones.

Inequality and the politics of comparison

South Africa’s inequality does more than produce hardship. It produces constant comparison.

People compare themselves to neighbours, communities, municipalities, provinces, and imagined alternatives. Digital platforms intensify this by placing unequal realities side by side without context. The result is not only frustration, but moral interpretation. Inequality becomes evidence of injustice, exclusion, or deliberate neglect.

Influence operations leverage this interpretive layer. Narratives frame inequality not simply as a policy failure, but as proof that the system benefits some at the expense of others. This framing deepens resentment and accelerates polarisation.

Once inequality is moralised in this way, compromise becomes difficult. Governance challenges are recast as existential conflicts.

Racism as a latent identity fracture

Racism remains one of South Africa’s most enduring and emotionally charged fractures, not always visible in daily discourse, but never absent from collective memory. It functions less as a constant explicit conflict and more as a latent identity fault line that can be activated under conditions of stress.

Importantly, racism in this context is not only about overt prejudice or individual attitudes. It is embedded in historical experience, spatial inequality, economic exclusion, and perceived patterns of advantage and disadvantage. These experiences are carried forward through narrative, memory, and identity.

Influence operations exploit this latent quality. Racial framing does not need to be explicit to be effective. It can be implied through language, imagery, selective emphasis, or comparison. Narratives that suggest group-based blame, intentional exclusion, or inherited injustice resonate quickly because they connect present frustration to historical explanation.

This makes racial narratives particularly powerful during elections. They compress complex structural problems into emotionally legible stories and discourage nuance, because challenging the narrative can feel like denying lived experience.

The strategic risk is not that racism suddenly “returns” during elections. It is that unresolved racial identity tensions provide a ready-made emotional infrastructure for influence.

Language, identity, and segmented influence

South Africa’s linguistic and cultural diversity is often celebrated as a strength. Strategically, it also enables segmented influence.

Narratives can be tailored by language, region, generation, class, and political identity. The same issue can be framed differently for different audiences, each version optimised for emotional resonance rather than shared understanding.

This segmentation fragments the information environment. Communities mobilise around parallel narratives that do not fully overlap. Disagreement becomes not only factual, but interpretive. Institutions struggle to communicate coherently across these divides.

Fragmentation weakens collective sense-making and lowers the threshold for manipulation.

Literacy, information processing, and cognitive load

Another often overlooked source of structural vulnerability is uneven literacy, not only in basic reading and writing, but in media literacy, digital literacy, and civic literacy.

South Africa’s information environment assumes levels of fluency that are not evenly distributed. Many citizens navigate political information across multiple languages, informal channels, and low-trust environments. Under these conditions, complex explanations struggle to compete with simplified narratives that rely on emotion, repetition, and familiar framing.

Influence operations exploit this asymmetry. They reduce complexity, personalise blame, and rely on emotionally intuitive cues rather than detailed argument. This is not a reflection of intelligence or engagement, but of cognitive load. When people are overwhelmed, they gravitate toward messages that are easier to process and emotionally coherent.

Uneven literacy also increases reliance on social trust networks. Information is evaluated not only on content, but on who shared it and how it feels. This makes segmented influence more effective and correction more difficult.

The result is not uniform misinformation, but uneven vulnerability.

Declining institutional trust as a force multiplier

Influence operations accelerate where trust is low. In South Africa, confidence in political parties, local government, law enforcement, and public institutions has eroded steadily.

As trust declines, authority shifts. People rely more on peer networks, community figures, and emotionally resonant narratives. Credibility is anchored in perceived authenticity rather than institutional role.

This is a force multiplier for influence operations. Narratives no longer require institutional validation to spread. In some cases, institutional denial reinforces belief by appearing defensive or disconnected.

Once trust collapses, correction becomes difficult. Evidence is discounted. Motives are assumed.

Algorithmic amplification and outrage economics

Digital platforms reward reaction. Content that provokes anger, fear, certainty, or moral judgement travels faster than content that explains complexity.

This creates an economy of outrage. Extreme positions gain visibility. Moderation struggles. Nuance is crowded out.

Influence operations do not need to dominate the information space. They need only to shape its emotional tone.

Why local government elections magnify vulnerability

Local government elections sit at the intersection of these dynamics.

They are emotionally proximate, tied to daily life, embedded in community identity, and less consistently scrutinised. Narratives spread through informal channels where verification is weak and trust is relational.

Influence operations can operate below national radar while producing immediate effects: protests, delegitimised councillors, contested outcomes, and community instability.

Local disruption does not need to scale nationally to be strategically effective.

Structural vulnerability is not public failure

It is tempting to interpret vulnerability as public ignorance or irresponsibility. This is inaccurate and counterproductive.

Structural vulnerability reflects historical inequality, socio-economic stress, governance failure, and information overload. Citizens responding emotionally to these conditions are not failing democracy. Democracy is failing to protect them from manipulation in a high-pressure environment.

Recognising vulnerability is not an insult. It is preparation.

Toward resilience grounded in realism

The solution is not censorship, surveillance, or panic. It is realism.

Resilience begins with acknowledging that South Africa’s exposure is structural. It requires institutions to treat cognitive risk as part of electoral integrity, political actors to compete without weaponising fracture irresponsibly, and public discourse that recognises emotion without surrendering to it.

Without this realism, technical interventions will fail. With it, preparation becomes possible.

Article 1: Elections Are No Longer Just Political. They Are Cognitive

Given SHINGANGE

South Africa is moving toward the 2026 local government elections with an outdated understanding of how political power is contested. We still speak as if elections are mainly decided by party structures, policy promises, door-to-door campaigning, rallies, and media debates. Those tools still matter, but they no longer explain outcomes on their own, and in some cases, they are no longer decisive.

A modern election is also a contest over perception, emotion, identity, and trust. It is a contest over what people believe is happening, what they feel is at stake, who they blame, who they fear, and what they think is “obviously true”. This is the cognitive domain, where influence operations thrive.

If we continue to treat electoral manipulation as a problem of “fake news” alone, we will remain exposed. We will also respond in the wrong way, at the wrong time, and with the wrong tools. The result will not necessarily be a dramatic collapse. It will be gradual erosion, a slow weakening of public trust, social cohesion, and democratic legitimacy, often without a single headline moment that forces the country to wake up.

This article is the conceptual foundation for a series on influence operations and democratic resilience ahead of the 2026 local government elections. Before we can talk about policy responses, party readiness, or public resilience, we must first get the concepts right. If the concepts are wrong, everything built on them will be weak.

The problem with the “fake news” frame

South Africa’s public conversation about manipulation and elections is too often trapped in a narrow frame: fake news, misinformation, disinformation. This language is convenient because it suggests a simple problem with a simple fix: remove the lies, flag the posts, fact-check the claims, suspend the accounts. It also allows institutions to present the challenge as a content-moderation issue rather than a broader strategic threat.

But the fake news frame is incomplete and, in some cases, misleading.

The most effective influence operations do not depend on fabricated stories. Many rely on selective truth, edited context, emotional framing, strategic timing, repetition, and amplification through familiar voices. A true incident can be framed to provoke panic, rage, humiliation, or hatred. A genuine grievance can be escalated into a moral war. A real policy failure can be used to delegitimise the entire idea of governance, not simply a particular party or municipal leadership.

In other words, influence is often about impact, not accuracy.

This matters because if we keep looking only for lies, we will miss the more sophisticated operations that use truth as raw material. If we keep believing that fact-checking is the primary defence, we will discover too late that facts do not easily defeat identity threats, emotional narratives, or group belonging.

We must upgrade the frame.

What influence operations actually are

Influence operations are deliberate efforts to shape perception, attitudes, and behavior at scale. They are designed to steer how audiences interpret reality, what they feel about it, and what they choose to do next. They work best when the target audience does not realise they are being influenced, or when influence feels natural, inevitable, and self-generated.

Influence operations are not only external threats. They are not only foreign. They are not only malicious. They are methods, and methods are used by different actors for different reasons. States, political campaigns, activist networks, commercial actors, and opportunistic groups use them. This does not mean all actors are equivalent, or that intent does not matter. It means that if we want to understand the environment honestly, we must accept that influencing behaviour is part of modern political competition and social contestation.

A crucial point must be stated clearly: influence operations do not create divisions from nothing. They identify pre-existing fractures and apply pressure. They exploit what is already emotionally charged, socially sensitive, or institutionally fragile.

In a society with deep inequality, high unemployment, persistent service delivery failures, historical trauma, and declining trust in institutions, the terrain is already prepared. This is not a moral judgment about citizens. It is a strategic assessment of the operating environment.

Persuasion, propaganda, and influence are not the same thing.

To build conceptual clarity, it helps to distinguish between persuasion, propaganda, and influence operations. These terms are often used interchangeably in South African commentary, which creates confusion and poor decision-making.

Persuasion is open. It is explicit. It is the normal activity of democratic politics. A party or candidate presents ideas and asks voters to agree, support, or participate. The audience understands that it is being persuaded. There is no requirement for concealment. Persuasion can be honest or dishonest, but its defining feature is that it is visible and transactional.

Propaganda is more ideological and directive. It tends to push a worldview, demand loyalty, suppress alternatives, and simplify reality into rigid binaries. Propaganda often seeks dominance rather than debate. It is not always covert, but it typically aims to shape what is acceptable to think and say, and to marginalise competing frames.

Influence operations are different. They are adaptive, indirect, and often covert or deniable. They do not primarily tell people what to think. They guide people toward conclusions they feel they reached independently. They work by shaping the environment in which people think, through emotional cues, social proof, selective exposure, and identity framing.

This distinction matters because the defences differ. If you think the problem is persuasion, you focus on counter-messaging and debate. If you think the problem is propaganda, you focus on media plurality and civic education. If you understand the problem as influence operations, you must address the cognitive and social conditions that make manipulation effective, not only the content itself.

The cognitive domain is the decisive terrain.

Conflict has evolved. In earlier eras, the decisive battlefield was physical. Later, it expanded into the digital domain, networks, systems, and infrastructure. Today, one of the most decisive terrains is cognitive, the domain of perception, emotion, identity, and trust.

The cognitive domain includes beliefs, emotional triggers, moral frameworks, social identity, and sensemaking. It is where people decide what is real, what matters, who is legitimate, and what action feels necessary.

This is where influence operations aim, because if you can shape perception and trust, you do not always need to change material conditions. If you can make institutions appear incompetent, illegitimate, or hostile, you can weaken governance without direct confrontation. If you can make communities distrust each other, you can destabilise social cohesion. If you can make citizens believe that outcomes are rigged, regardless of the evidence, you can undermine elections without hacking a single system.

It is important to be disciplined here. Saying elections are cognitive contests does not mean every political message is manipulation, or that citizens are mind-controlled, or that there is always a hidden hand. It means that perception and emotion are strategic variables, and that modern actors treat them accordingly. If institutions and the public refuse to recognise this, they fight with blunt tools against refined methods.

Influence operations are not always about changing votes.

Many people assume influence operations exist to persuade voters to support a particular party or candidate. That can happen, but it is not always the primary objective, and focusing only on vote shifting can blind us to other goals.

Influence operations often aim to disrupt rather than persuade. They may seek to increase confusion, deepen polarisation, exhaust attention, erode trust in institutions, fracture communities, or delegitimise election outcomes. In some cases, the goal is to reduce participation, increase apathy, and drive voters out of democratic engagement.

This is one reason why simplistic responses fail. If the operation is designed to make people believe “nothing is trustworthy” or “everyone is corrupt” or “the system is rigged”, then fact-checking individual claims does not address the core effect. It can even worsen the situation by making institutions look defensive or selective.

A society that loses trust is easier to manipulate, because cynicism becomes the default. When citizens are cynical, they accept claims that confirm their despair, and they reject information that demands patience, nuance, or institutional confidence.

Why elections create ideal conditions for influence

Elections combine several conditions that make societies cognitively vulnerable.

First, elections heighten emotion. People care about identity, belonging, and the future. Campaigns are built to trigger emotion because emotion drives attention and participation. That is not a flaw; it is politics. But it also creates an environment where manipulation can blend into normal campaigning and activism.

Second, elections compress time. People must make decisions quickly. Institutions must respond under pressure. Media cycles accelerate. There is less time for reflection, verification, and calm sensemaking. This is ideal for narratives that demand immediate reaction.

Third, elections create information overload. People are bombarded with claims, promises, scandals, and counterclaims. When information volume increases, attention becomes scarce. Under those conditions, people rely more on cognitive shortcuts, emotional cues, and group identity.

Fourth, elections intensify social comparison and status anxiety. People measure themselves against others, measure communities against other communities, and measure the country against imagined alternatives. This can trigger resentment, humiliation, and moral outrage, all of which are powerful drivers of mobilisation.

These conditions do not guarantee successful influence operations, but they increase the likelihood of success when influence actors exploit them.

Why local government elections are uniquely exposed

Local government elections are particularly vulnerable for reasons that are specific to South Africa’s lived reality.

Local governance is where citizens experience the state most directly. It is the level at which service delivery failures are felt in water, electricity, housing, sanitation, roads, refuse removal, safety, and local economic opportunity. When people feel neglected or disrespected, their anger is not abstract. It is personal.

Local politics is also closer to community identity. It is tied to neighbourhoods, wards, local leaders, and local disputes. This makes narratives more emotionally intense and more difficult to correct, because local information spreads through informal networks, community WhatsApp groups, and everyday social relationships where trust is relational rather than institutional.

Local elections also tend to have less comprehensive scrutiny than national elections. The information environment is more fragmented. Local media may be weaker. National attention is inconsistent. This creates gaps that can be exploited by actors seeking to seed and amplify narratives quickly.

Finally, local elections intersect with community-level mobilisation and protest dynamics. If trust collapses locally, the consequences can be immediate: protests, rejection of councillors, intimidation, violence, and paralysis of local governance. Influence operations do not need to produce a national crisis to be strategically effective. Local instability can be enough.

The uncomfortable truth about who conducts influence operations

Many South Africans are comfortable discussing “foreign interference” because it allows the country to imagine the threat as external and exceptional. Foreign actors can play a role, and it is reasonable to take that possibility seriously. But focusing only on foreign interference can become a form of denial.

Influence operations are also domestic. Political actors use influence techniques. Activist networks use influence techniques. Commercial interests use influence techniques. Opportunistic groups use influence techniques. Sometimes these actors coordinate. Often, they do not need to. Narratives can converge without central control, because different groups see benefit in amplifying the same emotional frames.

This is why influence operations are difficult to attribute and difficult to regulate. The behaviour often appears to be normal political engagement until its effects become destabilising. At that point, the response becomes politically sensitive because any intervention can be framed as suppression, bias, or censorship.

If South Africa wants resilience, it must accept that influence is not a rare anomaly. It is part of the modern environment. The question is how to preserve democratic participation and free expression while reducing vulnerability to manipulation and destabilisation.

Why “more information” is not a solution

A common assumption is that the solution to manipulation is better information. The logic goes like this: if citizens have more accurate information, they will make better decisions. That sounds reasonable, but it is incomplete.

People do not process information like machines. They process information through identity, emotion, trust, and social belonging. When a narrative threatens identity, facts can feel like an attack. When people are emotionally invested, correction can feel insulting. When trust is low, evidence is discounted because the source is assumed to be compromised.

This is why influence operations focus so heavily on trust. If you can undermine trust in institutions, media, and expertise, you can weaken the power of corrective information. If you can create the sense that “everyone lies”, then truth becomes just another weapon in a tribal conflict.

Therefore, resilience cannot be reduced to information supply. It must include cognitive resilience, emotional discipline, and institutional maturity.

The goal is not censorship. The goal is cognitive resilience.

Whenever influence operations are discussed, there is a legitimate fear that the conversation will be used to justify censorship, surveillance, or political control. In South Africa’s context, those concerns are real, and the solution must not become more damaging than the threat.

That said, rejecting censorship does not mean ignoring influence operations. It means we need a better goal.

The correct goal is cognitive resilience, the ability of institutions, political parties, media, and citizens to recognise manipulation, manage emotion responsibly, preserve trust where it is deserved, and sustain democratic participation without drifting into paranoia or cynicism.

Cognitive resilience has several components.

It requires conceptual clarity, knowing what influence operations are, how they work, and what signs to watch for. It requires institutional awareness, recognising that the cognitive domain is part of national stability and electoral integrity. It requires political maturity, where parties compete hard but do not treat societal fractures as acceptable campaign tools. It requires public literacy, in which citizens learn to notice emotional triggers, moral-urgency tactics, and false binaries.

This is not about turning citizens into analysts or demanding perfection from people under stress. It is about building a culture of disciplined sensemaking.

A necessary shift in the questions we ask

As South Africa approaches the 2026 local government elections, the core questions should expand beyond party support and campaign slogans.

We should be asking:

  • Who is shaping the dominant narratives, and why are those narratives resonating now?
  • Who benefits from confusion, polarisation, and mistrust?
  • Which emotions are being amplified, and what behaviors do those emotions drive?
  • Where is institutional trust most fragile, and how is that being exploited?
  • How do communities move from frustration to mobilisation, and what narratives trigger escalation?

These are not academic questions. They are practical questions that determine stability, legitimacy, and the quality of democratic participation.

If we treat elections only as political contests, vulnerability is guaranteed. If we understand elections as cognitive contests as well, preparation becomes possible. That preparation does not require censorship. It requires seriousness.

Why this series exists

This article is the first in a series examining influence operations in the South African context, with a focus on elections and democratic resilience. The series will move from concepts to mechanisms, from vulnerabilities to actor ambiguity, and from risk analysis to practical resilience, for the state, political parties, and citizens.

The intention is not to inflame fear, or to accuse without evidence, or to turn every political disagreement into a security threat. The intention is to bring conceptual clarity to a domain that South Africa cannot afford to misunderstand.

The country has time to prepare for 2026, but that time must be used wisely. Influence operations thrive in denial, confusion, and late reaction. Resilience thrives in early clarity, calm discipline, and institutional maturity.

If South Africa wants elections that strengthen democracy rather than erode it, the cognitive domain cannot be treated as an afterthought. The contest is already underway. The only question is whether we will keep using outdated lenses to interpret it, or learn to s

Series: Influence Operations, Elections, and Cognitive Security

Editor’s Note

Given SHINGANGE

South Africa is approaching the 2026 local government elections amid heightened uncertainty, institutional strain, and social tension. At the same time, the nature of political contestation has changed in ways that are not yet fully understood or openly discussed in the public domain.

This series explores influence operations and cognitive risks affecting elections, governance, and the strength of democracy in South Africa, noting that the public often focuses on visible political contests while overlooking subtler factors that shape perceptions. According to DGAP, most misinformation in this context currently comes from traditional sources rather than AI-driven disinformation.motion, trust, and behaviour at scale.

The articles that follow do not assume malicious intent by default, nor do they seek to attribute blame prematurely. They do not argue for censorship, political control, or the restriction of legitimate dissent. Instead, they aim to clarify concepts, examine structural vulnerabilities, and explore how influence operates in real social conditions, particularly during electoral periods.

This series is written from an independent analytical perspective. It draws on security, risk, and cognitive domains of analysis rather than partisan or activist framings. Where examples are discussed, the focus is on patterns and mechanisms, not on endorsing or condemning specific actors.

The intention is to contribute to a more mature public conversation, one that recognises that democratic participation is shaped not only by policies and institutions, but also by emotion, identity, narrative, and trust. Understanding these dynamics is a prerequisite for strengthening resilience without undermining democratic values.

The 2026 local government elections are not treated here as an isolated event, but as part of a broader trajectory in which elections increasingly unfold in contested cognitive environments. Whether South Africa is prepared for that reality remains an open question.

This series is offered as a starting point for reflection, debate, and preparation.

This note introduces a series of articles examining influence operations and democratic resilience ahead of South Africa’s 2026 local government elections