Journal of Social and Political
Sciences
ISSN 2615-3718 (Online)
ISSN 2621-5675 (Print)
Published: 14 September 2020
The Biological Weapon as a Tool for Psychological Impact in the Context of Hybrid Warfare
Stoyan Denchev, Steliana Yordanova
University of Library Studies and Information Technologies
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10.31014/aior.1991.03.03.220
Pages: 875-882
Keywords: Hybrid War, Biological Weapon, Psychological Impact
Abstract
In the last decade, the world has begun to change, transforming from unipolar to multipolar. The new geopolitical battle, whose main goal is to preserve the dominance of the hegemonic country in the crumbling neoliberal and monopolistic world, has prompted world powers to redistribute the leading roles when establishing a new world order. In order to achieve these goals, stakeholders began to use all their available conventional and unconventional resources, including different methods of warfare - a combination of different weapons, terrorism and criminal behavior, unregulated strategies and tactics - from the oldest known to mankind to the newest warfare technologies, called hybrid war by the political and military strategists. In the case of hybrid warfare, the sphere of affirmation is no longer the pure military force. In fact, it affects all spheres of public life - political, economic, cultural. The construction of elaborately combined actions, bypassing the known boundaries of the traditional characteristics of threats and the use of organized violence, have a powerful psychological impact on the mass consciousness of society. It is a well-known fact that there have long been secret and open laboratories for the development of biological weapons, with a main purpose to gain a strategic or tactical advantage over the enemy, either by threats or by the actual deployment on "battle positions" as well as their actual use against enemy countries. Even more worrying is the fact that these weapons could be aimed both at the moral deactivation of the enemy's forces and at their actual physical destruction. In the present report, the authors aim to seek and provide an answer - is there a link between biological and hybrid wars in their virtual or real function as a tool to achieve certain political goals.
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