Narrative Warfare with Dr. Ajit Maan

In this episode, we discuss the concept of narrative warfare and how it pertains to military providers with Dr. Ajit Maan. 

Ajit Maan, Ph.D. specializes in Narrative Warfare and Strategic Influence in large scale conflict.

She is currently:
-Professor of Practice, Master’s Program, Politics and Global Security, Arizona State University
- Faculty, Future Security Initiative, Arizona State University
- Adjunct Professor, Joint Special Operations University
- Founder, Narrative Strategies LLC
- President, Military Writers Guild
- Editorial Adviser, PRISM, Irregular Warfare Center, United States Department of War
- Chair, Narrative Strategies Vertical, Homeland Security Today

She is the author of five books:
1. Internarrative Identity
2. Internarrative Identity: Placing the Self
3. Counter-Terrorism: Narrative Strategies
4. Plato’s Fear
5. Narrative Warfare

And Editor of two books:
1. Soft Power on Hard Problems: Strategic Influence in Irregular Warfare
2. Dangerous Narratives: Warfare, Strategy, Statecraft

In addition to her books, Dr. Maan’s articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, Homeland Security Today, Special Operations Forces News, Real Clear Defense, The Strategy Bridge, Small Wars Journal, Defense and Intelligence Norway, Stars and Stripes, The Indian Defense Review, The Indian Military Review, Narrative and Conflict: Explorations in Theory and Practice, Philosophical Practice, and other academic and military strategy journals world-wide.

Awards:
2019 Most innovative Campaign to Forward Mission, Homeland Security Today
2025 Trailblazer Award, Homeland Security Today

Dr. Maan's Amazon page can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B001KH6DOY/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=4fb388cf-7fc4-4f99-9131-25ac1e0ed318&ref_

Transcript

Unknown: 1:02

Hello, I'm Captain Matthew Turner, and welcome to another episode of the GSA SEP podcast. In this episode, we will be interviewing Dr. Ajit Man. Ajit Man, PhD, specializes in narrative warfare and strategic influence in large-scale conflict. She is currently professor of practice at the Arizona State University, adjunct professor at the Joint Special Operations University, founder of Narrative Strategies LLC, President of the Military Writers Guild, editorial advisor for Prism with the Irregular Warfare Center at the United States Department of War, chair of Narrative Struggles Vertical Homeland Security Today, and the author of multiple books, including Narrative Warfare, Plato's Fear, Counterterrorism Narrative Strategies, Inter-Narrative Identity, and

Inter-Narrative Identity: 1:49

Placing the Self. She is also the editor of two books, Soft Power on Hard Problems: Strategic Influence and Irregular Warfare, as well as

Dangerous Narratives: 1:59

Warfare, Strategy, and Statecraft. In addition to her books, Dr. Mons. articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, Homeland Security Today, Special Operations Forces News, Real Clear Defense, The Strategy Bridge, The Small Wars Journal, Defense and Intelligence Norway, Stars and Stripes, The Indian Defense Review, The Indian Military Review, Narrative and Conflict Explorations in Theory and Practice, Philosophy and Practice, and many other academic and military strategic journals worldwide. She has also won the awards of 2019 Most Innovative Campaign to Forward Mission by Homeland Security Today, as well as the 2025 Trailblazer Award by Homeland Security today, most military leaders understand information warfare, but you've argued that narrative warfare goes deeper. So, what's the distinction? Information warfare is conflict over information, and narrative warfare is conflict over the meaning of the information, so we can have all the most accurate, reliable, up-to-date information we want to have, but if our adversaries get to decide what that information means, then our information doesn't do much good. Now I want to make a distinction between intelligence gathering, which is completely different. What we're talking about in terms of information warfare is IL, it's information operations, it's influence operations, and for that we need to control the meaning for an audience, and to do that we have to get to that audience first and frame for them what they're about to experience. If our adversaries get there first, then we can keep on giving an audience all the information we want to, but if our adversaries get to decide how they process that information, then we're losing, and I'm afraid that's what we've been doing. We are working now, or what we're calling the information advantage, and so we're trying to control information. We've done things like we've kinetically knocked off the head of propaganda of a terrorist group, for example, only to find out that it's not like cutting the head off a snake. Those groups are more like starfish. They will replace that person right away, you know. Their outputs need to fall on people that are already predetermined to understand the information they're getting in the way that our adversaries, you want them to understand it. It's not about controlling information, it's about controlling what it means for an audience, and that's what our adversaries are doing. And I mean, both great and small adversaries, great power competition adversaries, as well as just ragtag terrorist groups, they're fighting on the meaning level, and we're fighting on the trying to control information level. So, could you define the difference between story and narrative? Yes, that's that's an important distinction, and we tend to get confused, or you know, we use those terms interchangeably, and then we get conceptually confused, and then we don't know what's doing what. A narrative is a cultural product. It's a big thematic meta story. It comes chronologically before stories, so narratives, or are a way that a culture has historically understood its environment and its place in it. A story are all the things we're used to hearing and telling, and we're very receptive to stories, necessarily reflect their narrative environment. So, if I'm born into a certain environment a. Cultural environment, the narrative atmosphere was already running long before you and I or any of our listeners were born. We were socialized in that environment, and we got - we internalized what was external, meaning cognitive scientists call it cognitive schemes that we've inherited from our culture. Those cognitive schemes determine how we will process information, and we're not very conscious of it, because we were socialized, you know, pre-verbally. Language acquisition is only one example of socialization. It happened so early in our development that we didn't choose to be socialized in a certain way, nor did our next-door neighbor, nor did our adversary, so we're all sort of preconditioned by our culture to interpret information in a way that was culture we were culturally informed to do so, if we know what an adversary's cultural narrative is, we know how they're going to interpret information that's really important information to have, and we are all of us less than conscious of that, but we are highly conscious of the stories we tell. Our brains are very receptive to stories, you know, information incoming, and stories we retain information if it's in story form better than otherwise, and we're, we're conscious of it. So, stories come later, they're all the stories we, you know, the stories we tell, and we go listen to and read about, in order to be effective, they necessarily reflect the cultural narrative that they spring from. So stories are examples, you might say, of the larger cultural narrative. Cultural narrative, could you compare it to, like, the cultural zeitgeist that we're all in passively, without really even realizing it? Yes, yes, very much. People ask me, why don't I just use the term cultural myth or foundational myth, you know, like the hero's journey would be an example of that. The reason I don't use that term is because it's very.. I just want to be clear that it's in story form, it's not like bullet points, some, it's mythological, yes, in story form as recognized by that culture. So, when did you first realize that narratives aren't just communication tools, but can also be strategic weapons? Well, when I was an undergraduate, I was taught, as probably a lot of people were, that communication is linear, that you want to get a message from the sender to the receiver without interference, as though if we could hermenetically seal up a message and get it and dump it over into the mind of the receiver, then we did a good job, and we learn about all the kind of interference that can happen and what to do to mitigate that, but what we know now is that the audience aren't a bunch of people with empty heads, the audiences are not just passive receivers of information, they participate in the meaning of that information. So, just as we were just discussing, you know, audiences are pre-primed to interpret information in certain ways, but everything you do, including who the messenger is, how the message is delivered, the audiences, you know, not going to necessarily buy it. They're participating. You don't just get to go tell them what to think. Communication isn't really linear, it's participatory. And to get a message to your audience and have them accept it the way that you want to. You need to know what their internal sort of meaning map is. We talk about weaponized narratives. We're really, really, what it usually is is weaponized stories. There's stories that trigger identity, offer a preferred identity, stories that wedge space in between a person's daily experience and their cultural narrative, so that a weaponized story makes a distance, makes makes a sort of an alienation between what this a person is experiencing daily and how their culture has made sense of that in the past, because alienation is is a human phenomenon, it happens to everybody, but cultures handle it in certain ways, and recruiters, for example, you know, wedge a distance between lived experience and. Of traditional ways of dealing with that, so that's weaponized. Now that's a weaponized story. A weaponized narrative is a little more difficult. Weaponized stories are pretty easy to tell, but they take aim at that cultural narrative and erode it over time. I'm actually glad you mentioned recruitment, because that leads us into our very next question. In your work on terrorist recruitment, you've examined why some narratives are able to successfully attract followers. What makes these extremist narratives so effective? Yeah, you know, I looked at.. I wasn't looking at cases of physical coercion. I mean, we all understand why, if somebody had a gun to their head, they would might do something extreme. I'm looking at cases, hundreds of cases, actually. I analyzed terrorist recruitment narratives from all over the world throughout history, both ends of the political spectrum, and everything in between, and the commonality is grievance, heightening of grievance, identity triggers, controlling meaning. Nobody commits homicide because they were given information, you know, reliable, accurate information in information is not convincing, but stories are convincing, and stories about identity, your identity, are really convincing. It's pretty hard to reject a story that flatters you, so if you can tell a flattering story, get somebody to identify with a preferred way of thinking about themselves, even as they're doing something like homicide and suicide. Well, you know that's going to fly, that's going to fly a lot of times. It's a really fascinating subject, and not one that I've really thought so much about before, but just being able to prime your audience and sort of this weaponize the entire ecosystem of thought around them. It's, it's a fascinating subject, right? So, let me give you an example. I mean, you know, while we were fighting the war on terror, lot of the populations who support our troops needed thought of it as thought of what our actions as a war on Islam. They were effectively reframed, you know. So everything we did after that was understood in a certain way, as though we're fighting Islam. When there's no way to come back from that, like you'll never win the support of the population that way, right. And then you know people want to do counter narrative,

you know what they want to say: 13:51

no, no, no, no, we're not, we don't have anything against Islam, we just don't want to get blown up, you can't, as you just said, you can't fight meaning with information, so we can keep on throwing all kinds of accurate information, we can tell people the truth, but it's not going to matter if somebody else told them the meaning, and that's how they see it, so what I have done in that case, I generally am not a fan of counter narratives of coming back and countering with truth, but in that particular case, I've put out some messaging about Islam is under attack, but look who's doing the attacking, so the way to counter untruths dis disinformation, for example, is not to encounter it head on and butt heads with it and throw our truths out, but rather to tell a bigger story, a story that encompasses the bad guy's story, that makes that is just bigger, better, smarter, and more encompassing, that makes sense, even of their rhetoric, in the way that we frame our story. They reframe your story, but then you reframe what they're doing, so you're saying yes, Islam is under attack, but the people doing the true damage are the ones who are actually like doing the suicide bombings and the attacks. Okay, fascinating. Yeah, pivoting a bit. Obviously, we have a healthcare audience here. We've seen this sort of misinformation affect everything from vaccination campaigns to disaster response. Why are these health-related narratives often so powerful? Because they attach to people's identity, so some people think of, you know, childhood immunizations and the requirement to get them as a curtailing their freedom, masking, controlling their freedom, and the same ask in another. Group isn't viewed that way, it's, you know, understood as community health, or whatever. It's the way the information attaches to the person's identity. What role can military healthcare providers play in strengthening resilience against this sort of extremist influence, not just in vaccination, but also, you know, like radical Islam, terrorism, that sort of thing. Sure. Well, being able to identify it in the first place, I don't know how much time you have to interfere with it, but at least to be able to recognize it, I suspect that if somebody heard some radical Islamic rhetoric, they would recognize that, but we have in the United States groups whose rhetoric should be recognizable by people who are leaders. For example, we have the group 764 If your readership hasn't heard of them, those are guys you'd need. They're scary. They are a group that started in Texas, and now has exported itself all over Canada and Europe, and they target young children through gaming apps, and they're very clever. The bad stuff doesn't happen till you've played about 10 times, so parents can be watching what their kids are doing online, and once they, you know, they think, well, this game is okay, you know, watching anymore. Here comes that group. They target young kids, and they get those young kids to target even younger kids. It's a really scary group. If people just want to look them up, just Google them and look at the kind of rhetoric. Look at what they're saying, so that you can recognize it when you see it. Sovereign citizens are another, you know, homegrown group here in the United States. They have a very interesting type of rhetoric. They manipulate language, and so, for example, they don't think they're driving cars, they say that they're travelers, they're not, you know, the car is, it's an automobile, is not an automobile, it's a means of conveyance. Wait, really? Yeah, yeah, this kind of thing. I mean, police officers know it right away when they see it. They don't think they're, they need to have driver's licenses, they don't consider themselves citizens of the United States, but rather a citizen of whatever state they're in, so when you hear that kind of thing, when you hear somebody you know redefining what an automobile is, for example, that should set off some alarm bells, so just being aware of what we have here in the United States, even, and the way that that discourse sounds, what should ring alarm bells, would be really helpful, I guess. Just being able to know your audience precisely. Yeah. Well, ma'am, this has been absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for taking the time to be on our podcast. Thank you, Matthew. I'm really flattered, and thank you for asking me.