The aggressor constructs ideological, historical, and legal justifications for its "right" to dispose of the fate of the colonized people. The techniques of this tactic operate before, during, and after the seizure: imposing an image of backwardness, appropriating history, and deploying religious and "civilizing" pretexts build a worldview in which domination appears natural and even beneficial. Successful legitimization reduces resistance – both from the people themselves and from outside observers.
| ID | Name | Description | |
| T0005 | Aggressor Claiming Victim Status | Aggressors may use propaganda instruments to invert roles, presenting their own offensive actions as a forced measure of self-defense. By claiming fictitious threats from the local population or external forces, the aggressor constructs a false narrative in which it acts solely as a defender of its own interests or security. This makes it possible to morally justify the invasion and shift the blame for the escalation of violence onto the colonized society. | |
| T0003 | Cultivation of a Logic of Superiority | Aggressors may conduct systematic ideological indoctrination of their own population, cultivating a cult of exceptionalism and messianism. Within this paradigm, the colonizer's culture is proclaimed superior and a bearer of progress, while the culture of the colonized peoples is deliberately marginalized and portrayed as backward, derivative, or altogether lacking the right to independent existence. This serves as the basic ideological justification for subsequent domination. | |
| T0006 | Dehumanization | Aggressors may use propaganda practices to strip members of the colonized people of their human features. The victim is deliberately marked with derogatory labels (e.g., "subhumans," "militants," "Nazis," "fascists," "terrorists"), which is intended to remove psychological and moral barriers among the occupation troops and to legitimize any atrocities in the eyes of the aggressor's society, leading to a complete loss of empathy. | |
| T0010 | Denial of a Distinct Identity | Aggressors may deliberately and systematically disseminate a narrative that an Indigenous people is not a distinct nation but merely a regional or wayward branch of the metropole's people. Constructing a false myth of a single common root allows the aggressor to declare the political independence of the colonized society a historical misunderstanding and to justify any violent actions as a natural process of "reunification." | |
| T0008 | Deprivation of Agency | Aggressors may deliberately deny an Indigenous people the right to independent political, legal, and historical existence. At the ideological level, this manifests in the dissemination of narratives about the colonized society's lack of agency, which serves the legitimization of domination. At the diplomatic and administrative level, the technique is implemented through the unilateral abolition of sovereignty, the annulment or rewriting of previously concluded international treaties, and the shift of relations from equal footing to a format of direct diktat, which ensures the institutional seizure of governance and the legal consolidation of the occupation. | |
| T0137 | Disinformation | Aggressors may carry out targeted manipulation of the information space and conduct malign influence operations (IO — Influence Operations, FIMI — Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference, FMI — Foreign Malign Influence). This technique is used for the coordinated injection of false narratives on the international stage, undermining trust in democratic institutions, and destabilizing the society of the victim state. Information interference is intended to distort the perception of reality, conceal the facts of aggression, and paralyze society's capacity for coordinated resistance. These techniques are covered in more detail in a specialized framework: DISARM Framework. | |
| T0157 | Forced Public Repentance | Aggressors may demand public repentance from the colonized — a ritual of self-abasement involving the renunciation of former loyalties, of the resistance and its leaders, of faith or oaths — as a condition for ending violence, for release, or for the very right to live on one's own land. Repentance is not a mere declaration: it carries consequences. A person's fate hangs on their confession — freedom, prison, or execution. One who has publicly repented is compromised in the eyes of their own people and bound to the aggressor by the public act itself. The aggressor holds up these "voluntary" repentances as proof of its own righteousness and as justification for the repressive character of colonization. Russian colonialism has practiced coerced repentance for centuries: the empire demanded that the highlanders of the Caucasus renounce the "pernicious teaching" of the resistance leader and swear an oath of allegiance to the Russian tsar; Soviet public confessions and denunciations of "enemies of the people" within one's own family, like today's forced video apologies in Chechnya, are a direct continuation of this practice. Since the seizure of Crimea, the practice of forced public repentance — filmed and circulated on social media — has been applied to those who remain loyal to Ukraine or criticize the occupation authorities. | |
| T0001 | Imposition of a Backwardness Narrative | Aggressors may systematically disseminate a narrative that the culture, way of life, and social organization of an Indigenous people are primitive and undeveloped. Constructing an image of backwardness serves the legitimization of domination, making it possible to justify occupation and repression with the fabricated necessity of bringing progress and "civilization." | |
| T0007 | Imposition of Its Own Picture of Reality | Aggressors may use propaganda and harsh censorship to replace objective facts with fabricated narratives. Instilling a distorted lens, in which acts of occupation are presented as salvation and the blame for suffering is shifted onto the local population itself, ensures the ideological legitimization of domination. | |
| T0024 | Justification Through Religion | Aggressors may use religious rhetoric and institutions to provide ideological justification for expansion. The seizure of territories is presented not as an act of armed aggression but as a sacred mission to protect co-religionists, restore canonical justice, or fulfill a divine destiny. Using such narratives allows the colonizer to morally justify the invasion in the eyes of its own society, mobilize it to support the conflict, and disguise political absorption as spiritual unification. | |
| T0166 | Manufacturing Criminals | Aggressors may manufacture "criminals" out of unwanted people: passing laws with offenses elastic enough to charge anyone ("counter-revolutionary activity", "extremism", "discreditation"), inventing conspiracies and underground organizations, forging "evidence", filling cases with people arrested by list, and keeping investigations and trials secret or turning them into public spectacle. Imprisonment becomes a matter of decision rather than fact, and every verdict retroactively "proves" the guilt of the colonized, justifying repression as a fight against "crime". | |
| T0004 | Rewriting of History | Aggressors may initiate the creation and mass dissemination of artificial historical concepts designed to substantiate their claim to foreign territories. Constructing a new historical canon, in which facts are distorted and the chronology of events is tailored to the interests of the metropole, allows the aggressor to retroactively legalize the occupation, convincing both its own population and the local one of the historical inevitability and legality of the absorption. | |
| T0160 | Sham Trials | Aggressors may give reprisal the form of justice by creating and using sham trials: the outcome is predetermined and the defense is absent or ornamental. The forms vary - extraordinary and field courts-martial with a day allotted to a case, closed quasi-judicial bodies passing sentences in absentia and by lists, and show trials staged for the public. Passing sentences without "a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees" is a war crime (Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions; Article 8(2)(c)(iv) of the Rome Statute, under which the International Criminal Court delivered its first conviction in 2024). | |
| T0158 | Territorial Marking with Imperial Symbols | Aggressors may consolidate the seizure of land with material signs of their own power: crosses and foundation stones at the moment of occupation, monuments to conquerors, memorial plaques and stelae, coats of arms, places of worship raised on the sites of other peoples' sanctuaries. Unlike the renaming of place names, which operates in speech and on the map, a sign occupies physical space and can be removed only by hand. It declares the seizure irreversible and dates the history of the place from the arrival of the metropole: the pedestal of the monument to Bohdan Khmelnytsky in Kyiv (1888) bore the inscription "To Bohdan Khmelnytsky, one and indivisible Russia", while the plaques on the monument to Muravyov-Amursky in Khabarovsk (1891) listed those "who took an active part in the annexation of the Amur region to Russia". | |