Graphic diplomacy : a visual armory for diplomatic resilience in the age of cognitive warfare

Abstract

This research emerges from the urgent recognition of NATO's cognitive warfare doctrine and its implications for human autonomy. NATO's commitment to deploying AI technology threatens to compromise the critical thinking capacity of adversarial sovereign nations, including their non-combatant populations. Critical thinking remains indispensable for civilizational advancement, so this research examines historical and contemporary defensive strategies. Diplomacy's traditional reliance on unspoken (non-dit) communication protocols, encompassing subtle signals, gestures, and implicit meanings, offers insights into human cognitive resilience. Contemporary research validates the effectiveness of visual argument mapping in critical thinking education and negotiation outcomes. The archaeological discovery of ideograms - non-verbal symbols - in paleolithic Europe reveals humanity's earliest cognitive tools, suggesting visual thinking's fundamental role in human intelligence. This study investigates how ideograms might augment critical thinking and whether their combination with visual mapping strengthens human reasoning capacities. Supporting evidence from the hemispheric hypothesis and dual coding principle in cognitive science reinforces these possibilities. The methodology is applied to analyze three contemporary cases: the US Office of National Intelligence, Harvard's Program on Negotiation, and the Ukrainian War. Through a visual thinking reimagination of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, this research demonstrates that while cognitive warfare methods are new, their underlying principles are not original. The study concludes that cultivating visual thinking offers a resilient shield against the Damoclean sword of cognitive warfare, potentially averting civilizational suicide through enhanced cognitive defense mechanisms.