Building Social Resilience

While not the first option posited by national security practitioners, investing in ‘soft’ options such as education and self-help options for citizens is a low-cost mechanism to build social cyber resilience. This chapter accordingly explores the threat posed by interference operations and cyber threats, and the viability and models by which States can aim to grow social cyber resilience in order to resist these threats, without having to rely upon international or domestic legal frameworks. Through a case study of Cold War active measures, and consideration of the enhanced threat posed in an era of surveillance capitalism and cyber interconnectedness, this chapter demonstrates how with greater capacity to pinpoint engagement in a target population comes a more urgent need to build self-sufficiency and undertake education of the population to enhance its cyber resilience.