How did the United States defeat the Soviet Union from its own backyard? How is China undermining freedom of the sea? Are these subversive activities new or do they reflect ancient wars? This book explores how state and non-state actors subvert one another. The core question is: why do strategies of subversion, whereby a weaker political entity undermines the dominant entity within a system to increase the weaker entity's relative power, appear to have so many commonalities across different situations and by both state and non-state actors? I theorize that underlying principles exist within all subversive strategies. This question is timely amid a rising China, aggressive Russia, rogue Iran, and a global Salafi-Jihadist insurgency. The current US National Security Strategy identifies these challenges as four of the five greatest threats to US national security. These challenges each involve entities subverting US dominance as a major component of adversary strategies. This new theory, the theory of strategic subversion, outlines fundamental principles regarding strategies of subversion to better enable policy makers and analysts to understand and respond to current security challenges. This book reviews existing literature on subversive strategies and synthesizes a new fundamental theory. The book then tests the theory of strategic subversion against four case studies: US support to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Rising Athens at the onset of the Peloponnesian Wars, China's current rise, and Russian subversion.

"In 2014, Russia launched a "Hybrid War" against Ukraine that, according to some, ushered in a revolution in conflict. The term is notoriously vague, referring to all measures short of war states use to attain strategic aims. States, of course, have long used measures in the "gray zone" between war and peace. Yet they did not always have the Internet."--

A penetrating analysis of weaponized information–one of the most pressing dangers to open societies Now more than ever, communities across the world are integrated into a complex, global information ecosystem that shapes the nature of social, political, and economic life. The ripple effects of actors trying to manipulate or disrupt this information ecosystem are far more severe than the primary effects that are merely being felt in the information space. In fact, the weaponization of narratives has already shown its potential to transform the character of conflict in the twenty-first century. Subversion examines how malicious state and nonstate actors take advantage of the information space to sow political chaos. Andreas Krieg reveals how the coordinated use of weaponized narratives can achieve strategic-level effects through a six-stage process. Preying on vulnerable states and communities to find the fault lines within societies, these campaigns begin in the information space with an ultimate goal of producing tangible results (such as changes to policy or voting behavior, or spurring political violence). Krieg closely examines recent subversion campaigns by two states in particular, focusing on Russia’s interference in Western public discourse and the United Arab Emirates’s demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. Subversion will provide scholars and policymakers with a comprehensive understanding of one of the most urgent threats in international politics along with recommendations on how vulnerable communities can become more resilient.

This book theorizes subversive action, a neglected mechanism in the new institutionalism literature. Subversive action is political in nature, secretly undermining some institutions to open up alternative ideas or to secure existing institutions by secretly undermining adversaries. An example is a politician who promises change in public, but does something else behind the scenes to preserve the status quo. The book addresses the nature and meaning of subversive action and the contexts that give rise to it, as well as how it can work as an important mechanism behind institutional change and continuity. The book will interest students and scholars of public policy, public administration and political science.

Agents of Subversion reconstructs the remarkable story of a botched mission into Manchuria, showing how it fit into a wider CIA campaign against Communist China and highlighting the intensity—and futility—of clandestine operations to overthrow Mao. In the winter of 1952, at the height of the Korean War, the CIA flew a covert mission into China to pick up an agent. Trained on a remote Pacific island, the agent belonged to an obscure anti-communist group known as the Third Force based out of Hong Kong. The exfiltration would fail disastrously, and one of the Americans on the mission, a recent Yale graduate named John T. Downey, ended up a prisoner of Mao Zedong's government for the next twenty years. Unraveling the truth behind decades of Cold War intrigue, John Delury documents the damage that this hidden foreign policy did to American political life. The US government kept the public in the dark about decades of covert activity directed against China, while Downey languished in a Beijing prison and his mother lobbied desperately for his release. Mining little-known Chinese sources, Delury sheds new light on Mao's campaigns to eliminate counterrevolutionaries and how the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party used captive spies in diplomacy with the West. Agents of Subversion is an innovative work of transnational history, and it demonstrates both how the Chinese Communist regime used the fear of special agents to tighten its grip on society and why intellectuals in Cold War America presciently worried that subversion abroad could lead to repression at home.

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, , language: English, abstract: Literature and irony are intimately associated with man’s predicament. Myth, epic, classical tragedy, "The Canterbury Tales", "Arabian Nights", "King Lear", Swift’s “Modest Proposal”, modern and post-modern literature such as Joyce’s "A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man", Orwell’s "Animal Farm", Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot", all of these devote a substantial part to irony. Whether it is Socratic, dramatic, tragic, “cosmic”, Romantic, structural, or rhetorical, irony signifies a gap that needs filling. The importance of an ironical relation lies in the absence of harmony between the parties and the misunderstanding caused by it. Irony proceeds from “Dissymmetry”, “Negation”, “Denial”, “Cancellation”, “Concealment”, “Parody”, “Reversal”, “Interchangeability”, “Playfulness”, “Witticism”, “Understatement”, etc. Commenting upon the superiority of “Metaphor”, Aristotle says that it takes a genius to “perceive similarity” between two distinct objects. Irony stems precisely from the reverse, i.e. the perception of dissimilarity, or from the deliberately perverting and obliterating denial of what is perceived as distinct. If the purpose of Metaphor is to assemble, that of Irony is to dissemble (in Greek comedy the eiron is a “dissembler”). In a sense, while Metaphor relates to metonymy, Irony is germane to oxymoron and paradox. Yet, the Aristotelian concept of “Peripeteia” (Irony of events or Reversal of Fortune), which determines the real fabric of a “complex” fable, seems to allow for circularity instead of dislocation: “It is the coming full circle of a wheel, which first carries a man up and then down...” (81).