Peace and security in the digital age can no longer be understood solely through military deterrence. Instead, the capacity to defend and actively contest aggression in cognitive and cyber domains has become a necessary condition for preventing escalation and sustaining peace – particularly for small and medium-sized states facing conventionally superior adversaries.
Gray Zone Operations and Cognitive Warfare in Taiwan
Contemporary security debates increasingly acknowledge that violence in international politics can no longer be confined to the battlefield as the boundaries of warfare increasingly extend into the cognitive domain. China’s gray zone doctrine exemplifies this shift by deliberately operating below the threshold of open armed conflict while continuously exerting coercive pressure on adversaries. Cognitive warfare is a core component of China’s unrestricted warfare strategy and is rooted in the “Three Warfares” doctrine, which was approved in 2003 and coordinates psychological warfare, overt and covert media manipulation, and legal warfare to manipulate the defense policies and perceptions of target audiences (Chen, 2025). In the case of Taiwan, these strategies materialize most prominently in systematic efforts to influence perceptions, emotions, and political judgments within society. Disinformation campaigns, psychological operations, cyber intrusions, and economic pressure are combined to undermine trust in democratic institutions, polarize public discourse, and normalize a permanent sense of insecurity (Chen, 2025). Rather than seeking immediate territorial conquest, Beijing aims to reshape Taiwan’s cognitive environment by fostering doubt about democratic governance and the credibility of external security guarantees. This persistent, low-intensity form of aggression blurs the distinction between war and peace and demonstrates that violence today often manifests as cumulative psychological and informational harm. Taiwan thus stands at the forefront of a conflict in which peace is contested through narratives, data, and digital infrastructures as much as through military deterrence.
Taiwan’s Countermeasures: Democratic Resilience as Security Strategy
Taiwan’s response to Beijing’s cognitive warfare reflects a strategic recalibration of what national defense entails under conditions of hybrid conflict. Recognizing its conventional military asymmetry vis-à-vis China, Taiwan has invested heavily in countering digital and cognitive threats as a core element of its security architecture. The focal point of these endeavors lies in the swift identification and dissemination of disinformation, a process that is enabled by the close collaboration of government agencies, independent fact-checkers, civil society organizations, and digital platforms (Sloss, 2020). Rather than relying primarily on coercive regulation, Taiwanese authorities emphasize transparency and public participation, thereby reducing the effectiveness of hostile narratives without undermining democratic norms (Aukia, 2023). In parallel, Taiwan has significantly strengthened its cyber defense capacities, treating attacks on governmental systems, electoral infrastructure, and media outlets as strategic threats rather than isolated technical incidents. Importantly, these measures are embedded in a broader governance model that seeks to enhance trust between state and society. Open-government initiatives, civic technology platforms, and media literacy programs are leveraged to cultivate societal resilience, making cognitive manipulation more costly and less effective for the aggressor. These initiatives increasingly coexist with cyber capabilities that blur the line between defense and offense. Taiwan has developed organizational structures and capacities enabling proactive cyber operations, including cyber espionage and active threat detection. Many practices commonly framed as defensive – such as active threat hunting, attribution, and real-time counter-disinformation – carry an inherently offensive logic because they rest on the ability to enter and monitor adversary networks over time and to project cyber capabilities outward, rather than merely shielding Taiwan’s own system (Weber, 2022). Crucially, these cyber operations are embedded in a broader democratic governance framework that prioritizes transparency, civilian oversight, and societal resilience. Taiwan thus illustrates how democracy itself can be mobilized as a strategic asset, transforming digital openness into a tool of deterrence by denial while simultaneously engaging in calibrated forms of non-kinetic force.
Rethinking Peace and Force in the Digital Age
The Taiwanese case highlights a fundamental limitation of purely militaristic conceptions of peace and security. If conflict prevention is understood exclusively in terms of armed deterrence, then gray zone aggression and cognitive warfare remain analytically marginalized despite their profound destabilizing effects. The increasing convergence of defensive and offensive cyber capabilities challenges traditional distinctions between aggression and protection, raising difficult normative and strategic questions. For small and medium-sized states in particular, digital armament has become a functional equivalent to traditional military preparedness: a necessary condition for preventing escalation by reducing vulnerability. Comparable dynamics can be observed in the Baltic states, where cyber defense and societal resilience have long been treated as integral components of national security, as well as in Ukraine, where digital mobilization and information defense have played a decisive role alongside conventional military resistance (Klyszc et al., 2025). These cases suggest that “si vis pacem, para bellum” must be reinterpreted for the digital age. Even under the assumption of this premise, an exclusively military perspective becomes inadequate. Thus, preparing for peace today also entails the capacity to act decisively in digital and informational domains where escalation often begins.
From a policy perspective, democracies exposed to hybrid threats should integrate cognitive and cyber defense as core elements of national and collective security while avoiding the replication of authoritarian information control practices. Enhanced cooperation between the EU, NATO, and Indo-Pacific partners – particularly in cyber defense, disinformation monitoring, and early warning – can strengthen collective resilience and reduce individual vulnerability. At the domestic level, governments should establish robust cross-sectoral coordination mechanisms linking national security institutions, independent fact-checking organizations, and technology platforms to enable rapid, transparent, and effective responses to cognitive and informational threats. Embedding media literacy, digital ethics, and cognitive resilience into national curricula and civic education can further transform citizens from passive targets of manipulation into active contributors to societal resilience, reinforcing democratic legitimacy and peace through deterrence by denial in the digital age.
About the Authors:
Witold Mucha (he/him), Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences at Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany
Sophia Heinen (she/her), Master’s Student in Peace and Security Studies at Hamburg University, Germany
Juli Weltle: (she/her), Master’s Student in Sociology at University of Potsdam, Germany
Franka Cremer (she/her), Bachelor’s Student in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany