ABSTRACT
The government of one country trying to infl uence the economic, military or other policies of another. Environmentalists trying to infl uence the practices of a corporation. A labor union trying to infl uence the behaviors of an employer. An insurgent movement trying to gain supporters by legitimizing itself. A company trying to gain an advantage over a competitor in the marketplace. An advocacy group trying to infl uence legislators to change public policy. In these and many other efforts, one of the most common forms of engagement is through the conduct of some form of information and infl uence campaign. For the moment, let us defi ne the information and infl uence campaign (IIC) as an effort by one party, through some combination of communication and action, to change the behavior of another party to its advantage. Such campaigns are commonplace these days-they are undertaken by, or targeted against, such diverse entities as governments, international organizations, labor unions, nongovernmental advocacy organizations, corporations, or even insurgent groups-and they have about them the feel of a distinctly contemporary phenomenon. But like all such complex and sophisticated patterns of human behavior, the campaigns we observe today are the products of evolution. They build on a history of innovation, trial and error, redesign, adaptation to events and new technologies, responses to changing expectations, and all the other factors that make politics so much fun, whether as a spectator sport or as a profession. Before turning our attention to the principal focus in this volume, the strategies and tactics that characterize contemporary IICs, then, let us pause to consider these points of origin. We’ll do that by looking at three examples that happen to fall at 100-year intervals.
