From public relations to cognitive defense: Indonesian government digital communication as infrastructure in cognitive warfare

This study reconceptualizes Indonesian government public relations (PR) as cognitive defense infrastructure within the information environment. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory and Susanne Holmström’s reconstruction of PR as society’s evolutionary learning mechanism, it proposes that government digital communication can be interpreted as a systemic device for stabilizing meaning under informational entropy. Critical discourse analysis combined with systems-theoretical interpretation is applied to a purposively constructed corpus of 50 verified official digital communications produced by Indonesian state institutions between July 2019 and April 2026, coded using a formal codebook. The analysis suggests three principal discursive functions: threat construction, authority assertion and meaning stabilization. The paper engages International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and the Law of Armed Conflict, exploring how classifying civilian government PR as cognitive defense infrastructure raises unresolved questions of targetability, distinction and proportionality. Drawing on Holmström’s concept of polycontextural regulation, it outlines an exploratory normative framework for global norms in the cognitive domain that supplements existing IHL. The study extends cognitive warfare analysis beyond Western military contexts and offers a transferable theoretical bridge across communication studies, political sociology and security law, while acknowledging the interpretive and exploratory character of its empirical and legal claims.