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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |