Seventeen Searchlights: An Original Conceptual Framework for Cognitive Warfare, Strategic Dramaturgy, and Manufactured Surrender

This paper introduces seventeen original analytical concepts developed at the intersection of performance theory, international relations scholarship, and political psychology. They were built across three empirical research projects, on the Taiwan Strait (2016–2026), on intra-state cognitive warfare in Pakistan (2022–2026), and on the cognitive war against Muslim belonging in India (2014–2026), and they are published together here as a unified conceptual framework for the first time. The five foundational concepts, strategic dramaturgy, narrative fatigue, cognitive surrender, dramaturgical resistance, and the dramaturgical fork, were developed to analyze sustained state performances directed at external or peripheral adversaries under conditions that prevent direct military force. The six concepts of the first extension, democratic maskirovka, weaponized hope, epistemic siege, somatic cognitive warfare, the betrayal performance, and institutional mimicry, were developed to address the specific theoretical problems that arise when a state turns these instruments inward, conducting cognitive warfare against its own political majority. The six concepts of the second extension, civilizational maskirovka, the permanent audition, the model minority cage, the sacred spectacle, historical unwriting, and demographic epistemic warfare, were developed for a third and more demanding analytical situation: a multi-generational campaign aimed not at the defeat of a political movement but at the reclassification of a civilization's claim to belong. The paper's intellectual foundation is Mieke Bal's (2002) theory of travelling concepts as searchlights, instruments that illuminate what they encounter while being changed by it. Each of the seventeen concepts introduced here was built not by theoretical derivation but by analytical necessity: existing vocabulary failed in front of a specific empirical phenomenon, and a new instrument had to be made. The paper documents that necessity for each concept, establishes its theoretical genealogy, and distinguishes it from the existing terms it most closely resembles. The final section argues that the seventeen concepts, taken together, constitute not a list but an architecture, a framework whose internal logic makes it more than the sum of its instruments.