Framing the unframed: why strategic leadership needs a coherent understanding of cognitive warfare

As contemporary conflict gradually extends into the cognitive domain, strategic leaders encounter a dilemma: they are expected to respond to a phenomenon that, in many respects, is still undefined. Although the term cognitive warfare now circulates widely in policy documents and military scholarship, its boundaries remain unsettled. Given this conceptual fragmentation, the present article adopts an integrative conceptual review approach to identify convergences and offers a preliminary synthesis that situates cognitive warfare in relation to neighbouring constructs.