Techniques answer the question “how?” – they describe the specific methods a colonizer uses to achieve its tactical goals. For example, the aggressor often resorts to the destruction of local knowledge systems and the installation of a new system of governance in order to consolidate its hold on the seized territory.
| ID | Name | Description | |
| T0053 | Abduction of People | Aggressors may carry out covert or overt violent abductions of political leaders, civic activists, journalists, and ordinary members of the Indigenous people. In the active phase of a conflict, this technique serves the operational neutralization of defenses by physically eliminating potential organizers of resistance. In the long term, enforced disappearances are used to consolidate the occupation regime, as they create an atmosphere of unpredictable terror and paralyze the society's will to mount systematic protest. | |
| T0146 | Administrative Corruption and Extortion | Aggressors may use their military-administrative apparatus and monopoly position in seized or colonized territories to create a system of shadow levies and systematic extortion. Representatives of the occupation administration artificially erect bureaucratic, logistical, and legal barriers, forcing the Indigenous population to pay unregulated bribes to exercise basic rights — to conduct trade, to move freely, or to keep their property. This practice is used for the direct extraction of benefits through the illegal enrichment of the metropole's apparatus at the expense of the local population's resources. At the same time, it serves as an instrument of institutional consolidation of control, as it turns arbitrariness into the norm and demonstrates to the colonized society its absolute lack of rights before the aggressor's officials. | |
| T0030 | Administrative-Territorial Division | Aggressors very often alter administrative boundaries within a captured region. In the course of implementing this technique, traditional systems of local governance are forcibly abolished, while the seized lands are fragmented and integrated into the colonizer's standard bureaucratic grid, which irreversibly destroys the historically formed social ties within the society. For example, many borders in Africa are the result of struggles between colonial powers. The borders of the union and autonomous republics of the USSR were established by Moscow for administrative convenience and were changed in accordance with the decisions of the Moscow leadership. | |
| 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. | |
| T0017 | Annexation of Territories | Aggressors may carry out the forcible and unilateral annexation of another state's territory. Such actions are accompanied by the complete abolition of the sovereignty of the captured entity and the final integration of its lands into the occupier's legal and economic space through the issuance of corresponding manifestos or the staging of sham electoral procedures. | |
| T0121 | Artificial Famine | Aggressors may artificially create conditions of mass famine through the forcible seizure of food, the destruction of agricultural infrastructure, and the blocking of escape routes. This form of indiscriminate terror physically exterminates the population, suppressing ongoing revolts, while simultaneously clearing the demographic landscape of the colonized territories. | |
| T0129 | Ban on National Names | Aggressors may use civil registration institutions and religious establishments to forcibly change, adapt, or prohibit the traditional given names and surnames of the local population. This technique serves the deep consolidation of assimilation processes. Imposing the metropole's anthroponymic standards at birth or upon the issuance of documents deprives a person of their primary national marker and accelerates the dissolution of the indigenous people in the colonizer's demographic mass. | |
| T0015 | Bribery of Elites | Aggressors may use systemic corruption and the distribution of privileges, titles, and large-scale financial resources to win over members of the target state's top leadership, intelligentsia, and military ranks. This technique permeates every stage of colonization: from preparation for seizure (recruiting agents of influence) to the seizure of governance (sabotage during defense) and institutional consolidation (buying the loyalty of a puppet government). By encouraging the personal ambitions of the elite at the expense of national interests, the colonizer destroys the local population's capacity for organized resistance. | |
| T0011 | Buying Up Media and Assets | Aggressors may covertly, or through front persons, acquire controlling stakes in key mass media outlets, strategic enterprises, and infrastructure facilities of the target region. Monopolizing the informational and economic space allows the colonizer to shape the desired public agenda, manipulate the opinion of the local population, and weaken the autonomy of the Indigenous people's institutions even before the start of open forcible intervention. | |
| T0101 | Censorship | Aggressors may impose strict control over all forms of public expression, book printing, and mass media. Banning the publication of literature without the sanction of appointed censors, filtering information, and repressing independent authors allow the colonizer to monopolize the information space. This prevents the spread of dissent and ensures that the aggressor's state ideology is imposed on the colonized society without alternative. | |
| T0039 | Collusion with a Third Party | Aggressors may conclude secret or open diplomatic agreements with other geopolitical players on the division of spheres of influence, completely ignoring the sovereignty and interests of the Indigenous people. This technique is used for diplomatic preparation for seizure and the subsequent seizure of governance. Deals made behind the back of the colonized society allow the aggressor to deprive it of potential international allies, legitimize the occupation at the foreign-policy level, and dismember the territories of the local population unimpeded. | |
| T0150 | Comprehensive Reconnaissance of Territories | Aggressors deliberately organize the collection of strategic, geographic, demographic, and economic data on target territories. Within this technique, the colonizer sends diplomats, merchants, explorers, or specialized expeditions to determine the population size of a potential object of colonization, assess its defensive capacity and infrastructure, and survey mineral deposits and natural resources. The information obtained is used by the metropole to plan a subsequent seizure by force, the establishment of control, or economic exploitation. The colonizer's emissaries often attempt to win over the population with gifts it values (for example, glass beads resembling objects used as money and perceived as foreign currency) or through mutually beneficial trade exchange. In some cases, people are drawn into participation in rituals that the colonizer later construes as a declaration of allegiance. Thus, for example, an exchange of gifts is constructed by the colonizer as the payment of tribute and an acknowledgment of subjecthood, while the people designated as the object of colonization are far from always aware of this. | |
| T0139 | Construction of Fortresses | Aggressors may build fortresses, ostrogs (stockaded forts), and chains of defensive lines (military lines) on the territories of Indigenous peoples. This infrastructure physically cuts the local population off from vital resources (for example, lowland pastures), blocks communications, and serves as a protected staging ground for the permanent stationing of occupation troops and the subsequent resettlement of colonists from the metropole. | |
| T0013 | Creation of Agents of Influence | Aggressors may deliberately recruit, bribe, or ideologically motivate ordinary members of the local population, marginalized groups, and criminal elements to create a covert network of loyal operatives in the target territory. Forming a controlled agent network, including provocateurs, street militants, informers, and saboteurs, allows the colonizer to organize artificial mass riots, exert physical pressure on civilian activists, gather intelligence, and destabilize the socio-political situation within the colonized society before the start of an open intervention. | |
| T0046 | Creation of Economic Dependence | Aggressors may deliberately destroy or isolate the self-sufficient sectors of the colonized society's economy, replacing them with subsidies or critical supplies from the metropole. Artificially turning the region into a subsidized periphery critically dependent on the colonizer's external financing, energy resources, or export markets deprives the local population of the material base for political independence and makes organized protest economically impossible. | |
| T0141 | Creation of Economic Hopelessness | Aggressors may deliberately create and maintain unbearable socio-economic conditions (acute land shortage, crushing obligations, destitution) in the historical territories of an Indigenous people. This is done to force the population to flee physical and social ruin. As a result, the people 'voluntarily-compulsorily' join the colonizer's militarized structures (for example, the Cossack host or the regular army) or migrate en masse to dangerous imperial frontiers to settle them. This technique allows the empire to accomplish its military and colonization objectives by proxy, disguising state coercion as the victims' own 'free economic choice.' | |
| T0051 | Creation of Hazardous Industries | Aggressors may site environmentally harmful enterprises, raw-material extraction facilities producing toxic waste, or landfills for the disposal of hazardous materials on seized territories. Shifting destructive industrial burdens onto the lands of the Indigenous people allows the colonizer to enrich the metropole and safeguard its own environment while cynically ignoring the catastrophic consequences for the health of the local population and the environment of the colonized region. | |
| 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. | |
| T0143 | Cultivation of an Imperial Diaspora | Cultivation of an imperial diaspora is a deliberate policy of the former metropole aimed at maintaining and reproducing a distinct identity among the descendants of colonists and settlers who remained in territories that have left its control. This policy is implemented through an infrastructure of linguistic, educational, and media reproduction: funding of schools and cultural centers, television broadcasting in the metropole's language, simplified granting of citizenship and 'compatriot' status, and state and quasi-state diaspora support funds . Alongside this institutional framework, the metropole cultivates an affective infrastructure: nostalgia for the imperial past, a narrative of cultural superiority, and, simultaneously, a narrative of the diaspora's victimization in the new state. This work aims to sustain identification with the metropole among the second, third, and subsequent generations, who have long had no personal experience of imperial life, and to prevent their social and political integration into the states in which they live. The ultimate goal of this activity is revanchist: the metropole regards the cultivated diaspora as a resource it can rely on at the moment it attempts to revise post-imperial borders, whether through the outright annexation of territories where the diaspora lives compactly, the instrumentalization of its protests as a casus belli, or the destabilization of the new states from within. Historical examples lay this mechanism bare: the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia, who served as the pretext for the 1938 Munich Agreement and the subsequent liquidation of Czechoslovak statehood; the Russian-speaking communities in Moldova and in Crimea, which became the rhetorical grounds for the Russian interventions of 1992 and 2014; and the Russian-speaking population in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania as an ongoing object of the same policy. | |
| T0115 | Cultural Assimilation | Aggressors may apply comprehensive measures to displace and replace the unique cultural codes of the Indigenous people with the standards and traditions of the metropole. The artificial dissolution of the local culture within the aggressor's dominant culture makes it possible to sever historical continuity, deprive the colonized society of its national identity, and ensure its irreversible mental merger with the colonizing state. | |
| .001 | Replacement of the Native Language's Alphabet | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may forcibly change the graphic basis (alphabet) of the local population's language. Converting the script of the Indigenous people to the metropole's alphabet artificially cuts new generations off from the body of previously published national literature, historical documents, and cultural heritage, while simultaneously facilitating linguistic unification and creating the false impression of illiteracy and the absence of a written tradition before the arrival of the colonizers. | |
| .002 | Folklorization of the Native Culture | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may deliberately reduce the rich and multifaceted culture of the Indigenous people to primitive, entertainment-oriented, or exclusively rural folklore. Pushing local traditions out of the academic, philosophical, and urban spheres into the category of archaic ethnography allows the colonizer to artificially secure for its own culture the status of the sole bearer of progress and civilization. | |
| .003 | Cultural Chauvinism | As part of cultural assimilation, aggressors may systematically impose, through state institutions and media, the idea of the unconditional superiority of the metropole's culture over the culture of the colonized society. Cultivating a contemptuous attitude toward the art, traditions, and customs of the local population instills in it an inferiority complex, stimulating mass voluntary renunciation of one's own roots for the sake of successful integration into the aggressor's society. | |
| T0136 | Cyber Operations | Aggressors may conduct multi-stage attacks in the digital environment for espionage, data theft, destruction of critical infrastructure, and paralysis of state institutions. These operations span a wide range of tactics: from reconnaissance, gaining initial access (for example, through phishing, account compromise, or supply chain attacks), and establishing persistence in the system, to defense evasion, credential theft, and information exfiltration. The final stage is often a destructive effect (Impact), such as data destruction, disk wiping, or Denial of Service attacks. These techniques are covered in more detail in the specialized MITRE ATT&CK framework. | |
| 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. | |
| T0117 | Demographic Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately alter the demographic and ethnic composition of a seized region in order to dissolve the indigenous people in a mass of settlers. Artificial transformation of the population structure allows the colonizer to marginalize the colonized society on its own land, strip it of its status as the demographic majority, and suppress its potential for national revival in future generations. | |
| .001 | Migratory Replacement | As part of demographic assimilation, aggressors may carry out large-scale, state-sponsored resettlement of loyal citizens from the metropole to the territories of the colonized society, while simultaneously encouraging or coercing the local population to emigrate. Artificially populating the region with colonists changes the electoral, cultural, and linguistic balance, providing a reliable base of social support for the occupation regime. | |
| .002 | Encouragement of Mixed Marriages | As part of demographic assimilation, aggressors may use administrative, economic, and ideological incentives to encourage marital unions between members of the indigenous people and settlers from the metropole. Deliberate promotion of mixed marriages accelerates the erosion of the local population's national identity, since subsequent generations in such families are, as a rule, raised in the linguistic and cultural paradigm of the dominant colonizing state. | |
| 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." | |
| T0127 | Deportation | Aggressors may resort to the forcible mass expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their historical territories to remote regions. This practice physically neutralizes the potential for local guerrilla or political struggle and destroys the social structure of the people, freeing up lands for subsequent settlement by settlers loyal to the colonizer. | |
| 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. | |
| T0123 | Deprivation of Drinking Water | Aggressors may deliberately destroy water supply infrastructure (water utilities, pumping stations, dams) or physically block access to natural sources. Disabling this critical life-support system is used to create catastrophic sanitary and epidemiological conditions and to break the population's capacity for defense. | |
| T0124 | Deprivation of Electricity and Heating | Aggressors may systematically destroy energy infrastructure facilities, thermal power plants, and power transmission lines to create conditions incompatible with normal life. Mass deprivation of basic necessities serves as a form of collective punishment aimed at physically and psychologically breaking the society's will to resist. | |
| T0045 | Destruction of Historical Memory | Aggressors may deliberately destroy the physical and intellectual objects that shape national identity: archives, museums, architectural monuments, and cultural institutions. Erasing material evidence of the past, desecrating historical burial sites, and forcibly removing national symbols from public space allows the colonizer to create a cultural vacuum, which is subsequently filled, with no alternative, by the artificial narratives of the metropole. | |
| T0044 | Destruction of Local Knowledge Systems | Aggressors may deliberately destroy the educational, scientific, and theological institutions of an Indigenous people. Eliminating local academic schools, banning the publication of literature, and officially declaring the works of local thinkers heretical or extremist allows the colonizer to artificially sever intellectual continuity. This deprives the colonized society of its own cultural foundation and creates a vacuum that is immediately filled by the educational and ideological standards of the metropole. | |
| T0026 | Destruction of Local Media | Aggressors may carry out the physical destruction of editorial offices, the seizure or demolition of television and radio broadcasting centers, as well as targeted repression against independent journalists in occupied territories. Blocking channels of rapid public alert and eliminating objective sources of information prevents the colonized society from coordinating defensive actions and leaves it vulnerable to the colonizer's massive information-psychological operations. | |
| T0140 | Destruction of the Natural Landscape | Aggressors may deliberately alter or destroy the natural landscape of the target region (for example, by carrying out large-scale felling of centuries-old forests or destroying natural barriers). This is done to deprive the Indigenous people of natural cover, to prevent mobile guerrilla warfare, to seize resources needed for survival (firewood, building materials), and to completely destroy the traditional physical space. | |
| 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. | |
| T0108 | Economic Blockade | Aggressors may impose financial and trade restrictions, block bank transfers, and halt the operation of the Indigenous people's enterprises. This technique is used for preparation for seizure and neutralization of defenses. The artificial strangulation of the economy deprives the colonized society of the resources needed for self-sufficiency and defense, provoking an internal crisis and weakening institutions before the start of an open intervention or in the course of an active conflict. | |
| T0038 | Economic Control | Aggressors may establish a complete monopoly over financial flows, taxes, and trade operations in the seized territories. Placing the region's economy under the colonizer's manual control allows it to redirect all collected funds into its own treasury, deprive the Indigenous people of economic independence, and rigidly tie their livelihood to the metropole. This phenomenon manifested most vividly in the USSR, where all aspects of the economy were subordinated to the state, and all legal economic activity, up until the last few years of Soviet rule, was planned and regulated by the USSR's Gosplan from Moscow. | |
| T0114 | Educational Assimilation | Aggressors may use the education system in seized territories as a fundamental instrument for reformatting the identity of children and youth. The deliberate replacement of the educational environment, curricular standards, and language of instruction allows the colonizer to raise the next generations of the Indigenous people in a paradigm of unconditional loyalty to the metropole. | |
| .001 | Imposition of Asymmetric Bilingualism and Optionality | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may create administrative conditions under which the study of the metropole's language becomes strictly mandatory, while the native language is relegated to the status of a secondary elective. The artificial creation of organizational barriers to studying the local language instills in young people a perception of their native speech as marginal and unprestigious, encouraging mass voluntary abandonment of its study. | |
| .002 | Financial Discrimination Against Teachers | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may establish unequal pay conditions, rewarding teachers who teach in the language of the metropole while artificially lowering the pay rates of, or withholding bonuses from, teachers of the local language. The creation of financial inequality squeezes national cadres out of the education system and economically coerces schools into adopting the colonizer's standards. | |
| .003 | Conversion of Schools to the Metropole's Language | As part of educational assimilation, aggressors may carry out a total, forced conversion of the teaching process in all educational institutions to the colonizer's language. Depriving the Indigenous people of the right to educate their children in their native language leads to a rapid rupture of cultural continuity and the complete integration of the local population into the aggressor's information space. | |
| T0043 | Erasure and Renaming of Place Names | Aggressors may carry out the deliberate replacement of the historical geographic names, street names, city names, and region names of the Indigenous people with toponyms tied to the culture, ideology, and history of the metropole. Erasing the original names allows the colonizer to visually and mentally integrate the seized lands into its state space, and to deprive the colonized society of the physical markers of its national identity and historical memory. | |
| T0052 | Expropriation of Resources | Aggressors may carry out large-scale and systematic confiscation of natural, financial, and material assets in the captured territory. In the course of implementing this technique, industrial equipment is removed, the treasury is seized, food is confiscated, and mineral resources are exploited without restraint, solely for the extraction of benefits and to meet the needs of the metropole. | |
| T0027 | Expulsion of Foreign Missions | Aggressors may forcibly remove independent international observers, human rights defenders, foreign diplomats, and journalists from the conflict territory. The expulsion of international missions makes it possible to create a dense information blockade, conceal the scale of crimes, and suppress any attempts at external oversight, depriving the victim of international protection. | |
| T0120 | Extermination Based on Identity | Aggressors may carry out the targeted physical extermination of people solely on the basis of their national, cultural, or political affiliation. Mass repressions, extrajudicial executions of the intelligentsia, and systematic terror pursue a dual goal: to immediately suppress active resistance and to preemptively eliminate the social base capable of preserving and transmitting the national code into the future. | |
| T0118 | Extermination on a Territorial Basis | Aggressors may carry out the physical extermination of a population not on the basis of the victims' political views or ethnicity, but totally — solely by virtue of their presence in a given territory. To wipe pockets of resistance off the face of the earth, carpet bombing of residential areas, deliberate mass shootings of residents, and other methods may be employed. | |
| T0028 | False Compromise / Entrapment | Aggressors may initiate sham peace negotiations, offer security guarantees, or declare humanitarian corridors solely for the purpose of deceiving the opponent. The use of diplomatic ruses and false promises allows the colonizer to lull the vigilance of the Indigenous people, compel them to lay down arms, abandon fortified positions, or move into open terrain, after which the agreements are treacherously violated and the resistance forces are subjected to destruction or capture. | |
| T0023 | Filtration Camp System | Aggressors may create a network of official or shadow temporary detention facilities for the mass screening, interrogation, and sorting of civilians. Isolating a significant part of the local population in closed zones not regulated by law allows the colonizer to identify and physically eliminate potential participants in resistance, as well as to carry out total psychological terror against the colonized society. | |
| T0130 | Financial Incentives for Assimilators | Aggressors may institute, at the state level, a system of special allowances, increased salaries, and bonuses for the military and bureaucratic apparatus for the successful implementation of denationalization policy in colonized regions. This technique is used to consolidate power. Direct economic bribery of its own officialdom allows the colonizer to motivate the lower-level apparatus toward a more aggressive and proactive displacement of the language, culture, and institutions of the indigenous people. | |
| T0049 | Forced Mobilization | Aggressors may forcibly conscript members of the Indigenous people into their own armed forces to take part in combat operations (including against their own compatriots). This technique is used to extract benefits by exploiting the local population as a free human resource. At the same time, it serves the purposes of neutralizing defenses: by sending men to distant fronts, the colonizer deliberately depletes the region's demographic and military potential, depriving the society of its capacity for self-defense. | |
| T0035 | Forced Passportization | Aggressors may mass-impose their citizenship and issue the metropole's state-standard documents to residents of occupied territories. Coercing the Indigenous people into obtaining new passports under threat of losing basic rights, medical care, or property allows the colonizer to artificially integrate the population into its legal framework, convert them into the status of its own subjects, and justify the continued retention of the region as the "protection of its citizens." | |
| T0147 | Forced Registration of Subjecthood | Aggressors force the leaders of colonized societies to formally codify their subordinate status in law. This process takes place under economic or military pressure, and the terms of the pre-drafted treaties are not open to negotiation. To ensure legitimacy in the eyes of the local population, the colonizer often demands that an oath of allegiance be sworn according to the religious customs of the subjugated peoples themselves. A historical example of this practice is the shert — an oath of allegiance whose legal codification was often accompanied by the surrender of hostages from among relatives or the local nobility. In some cases, citizenship of the metropole is a necessary condition for freedom of movement, for the ability to go to court, or for not being expelled on the grounds of illegal presence in territory annexed by the colonizer. | |
| T0125 | Forcible Removal of Children | Aggressors may carry out the forcible removal and mass transfer of children from the occupied group into the colonizer's cultural environment (boarding schools, adoption). Such actions may be classified as an act of genocide aimed solely at severing the bond between generations, forced assimilation, and the long-term demographic erasure of the colonized group. | |
| T0099 | Hostage-Taking | Aggressors may carry out the forcible capture and detention of civilians or non-combatants. These actions are used for the operational neutralization of defenses (blackmailing resistance forces, shielding troops). At the consolidation stage, this technique may become institutionalized as a system of taking members of the elites and high-ranking figures (the "amanat" system), whose detention serves as the state's guarantee of the local population's loyalty and of the prevention of anti-colonial revolts. | |
| T0041 | Implantation of Officials and Military Personnel | Aggressors may carry out the mass relocation of their administrative and military apparatus to colonized territories. Stationing regular military garrisons and appointing loyal officials from the metropole allows the colonizer to establish strict physical and bureaucratic oversight, preemptively suppress nascent resistance on the ground, and integrate the region into its own state system, displacing local institutions of self-governance. | |
| 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." | |
| T0151 | Imposition of Alien Governance | The occupation administration artificially deprives subordinated societies of the right to self-governance, appointing loyal representatives of foreign elites over them. Unlike the creation of puppet governments (T0037), this technique does not aim to simulate a civil conflict or to create the appearance of a legitimate local authority. The use of alien overseers is employed by the metropole for open domination, the destruction of the Indigenous people's traditional social ties, and the uninterrupted mobilization of resources. | |
| 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. | |
| T0132 | Infiltration of Legitimate Political Structures | The aggressor deliberately infiltrates its agents and loyalists into the victim's already existing, legitimate representative bodies, parties, or congresses. This makes it possible to hijack the governance of the structure from within, sabotage its work, or force it to make decisions in the aggressor's interests. | |
| T0025 | Information Isolation | Aggressors may block communication channels, independent media, and access to external sources of information. Creating an information vacuum ensures the neutralization of defenses by depriving the society of the ability to coordinate resistance, and also allows the aggressor to conceal the scale of the war crimes being committed. | |
| T0036 | Installation of a New System of Governance | Aggressors may forcibly replace legitimate bodies with their own bureaucratic and administrative structures. The introduction of the metropole's administrative standards allows the colonizer to fully integrate the seized region into its legal and political domain, depriving the local population of the right to self-governance. | |
| 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. | |
| T0057 | Labor Exploitation | Aggressors may forcibly conscript the local population into heavy, dangerous, or unpaid labor in the interests of the metropole. This technique serves the direct extraction of benefits through the use of free or extremely cheap labor for the implementation of the colonizer's state megaprojects and military or industrial needs. At the same time, this practice is used for the neutralization of defenses: the removal of the able-bodied population from the region's economy and labor under conditions associated with high mortality physically exhaust the society and reduce its demographic potential. | |
| T0032 | Legal Segregation of the Population | Aggressors may introduce discriminatory norms at the legislative level that restrict the basic rights of the Indigenous people compared with representatives of the metropole. This technique is used for the institutional consolidation of control. Creating artificial barriers in access to education, government positions, property ownership, or freedom of movement (including the creation of zones of artificial settlement) allows the colonizer to marginalize the local population and fix its subordinate status in the social hierarchy being constructed. | |
| T0113 | Linguistic Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately displace and marginalize the native language of the Indigenous people, replacing it with the language of the metropole. The systematic narrowing of the local language's sphere of use in public, cultural, and everyday life allows the colonizer to sever the bond between generations, deprive the colonized society of the most important marker of national identity, and accelerate the process of its cultural absorption. | |
| .001 | Legislative Ban on the Native Language | As part of linguistic assimilation, aggressors may prohibit, at the state level, the public use of the Indigenous people's language. The issuance of official decrees, the criminalization of book printing, and the banning of theatrical performances and public speeches in the native language deprive the local population of legal mechanisms for preserving, transmitting, and developing their culture. | |
| .002 | Exclusion of the Native Language from Official Use | As part of linguistic assimilation, aggressors may forcibly convert the operation of all state, judicial, and administrative institutions exclusively to the language of the metropole. Creating a language barrier between the bureaucratic apparatus and the Indigenous people artificially marginalizes the local population, restricts its access to public services, and forces it to switch to the colonizer's language for social and career survival. | |
| T0128 | Liquidation of National Civic Organizations | Aggressors may carry out the forced dissolution, prohibition, and criminalization of the activities of independent educational, cultural, scientific, and charitable societies of the indigenous people. In the acute phase, this technique is used to neutralize defenses, depriving society of legal structures for horizontal self-organization. In the long term, it serves to consolidate control, since the liquidation of national civic institutions makes the legal development of national culture and the formation of independent elites impossible. | |
| T0104 | Mass Killings of Civilians | Aggressors may carry out large-scale, targeted massacres of unarmed civilians. This form of radical terror is used to physically eliminate resistance (neutralization of defenses) and to achieve a rapid forcible seizure of governance over a territory by creating an atmosphere of total fear and paralyzing the will to defend. | |
| T0122 | Medical and Humanitarian Blockade | Aggressors may deliberately block civilians' access to medical services, medicines, and humanitarian aid, as well as attack hospitals and obstruct the work of rescue missions. This maximizes losses among civilians and the wounded, depleting the resources of the colonized society and suppressing its capacity for resistance. | |
| T0019 | Military Intervention | Aggressors may resort to the direct and open use of armed forces to invade the territory of another state or region. The deployment of the army is used to overthrow the legitimate government, change the political regime, or physically establish control over key infrastructure and administrative centers. | |
| T0021 | Neutralization of the Opposition | Aggressors may carry out the systematic physical or political elimination of leaders, intelligentsia, and members of local elites who oppose colonization. Through mass arrests, extrajudicial executions, exile, and fabricated criminal cases, the colonizer liquidates the political leadership of an Indigenous people, paralyzing its capacity for coordination, organized struggle, and systemic resistance. | |
| T0138 | Nuclear Blackmail | Aggressors use the threat of nuclear weapons or create risks of a radiation disaster (through the military seizure of nuclear power plants). This is done to intimidate the international community, deter external assistance, and coerce the victim state into capitulation. | |
| T0152 | Pitting Neighboring Peoples Against Each Other |
The metropole deliberately sows and sustains enmity between neighboring Indigenous peoples so that they weaken one another and do not unite against it. Instead of confronting a united resistance, the colonizer divides it: it sets one people against another, arms and rewards the loyal against the defiant, and converts the shared hostility toward the empire into mutual discord among those being subjugated. The mechanism relies on already existing or artificially inflamed differences — clan-based, territorial, confessional — and entrenches them as a permanent line of division, depriving Indigenous peoples of the ability to act together. The metropole meanwhile preserves its own troops, shifting part of the suppression onto the incited side and presenting itself as an arbiter. Thus, General Gudovich, commander-in-chief in the Caucasus, directly formulated the objective with regard to Kabardians and Chechens — "to set these two peoples at odds with each other and bring them into enmity against one another, thereby weakening them over time" (1807); General Tormasov armed loyal Ingush and directed them against Chechens, rewarding them for attacks on them and for handing over captives (1810). |
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| T0148 | Predatory Raids | Aggressors may organize armed attacks on the settlements of an Indigenous people for the purpose of looting, seizing material valuables, driving off livestock, and taking civilians captive. This practice depletes the demographic and economic potential of the colonized society, deprives people of the resources needed for survival, and creates a zone of constant physical threat around the metropole's installations. For example, fortifications built by the regular army often became 'a base of operations for their raids on... Chechen auls, for looting and taking the local population captive'. | |
| T0126 | Prevention of Births | Aggressors may deliberately block the biological reproduction of the colonized group in order to gradually reduce its demographic potential. The method consists of depriving people of the physical ability to conceive or carry a child. This is implemented through direct medical violence, such as involuntary sterilization, or through the systematic creation of an environment unsuitable for pregnancy and childbirth. The use of this technique makes it possible to weaken the community in the long term while avoiding the mass physical elimination of the current generation. | |
| T0018 | Proxy War | Aggressors may covertly initiate and wage combat operations on the territory of the target region through the hands of puppet armed formations, radical groups, or mercenaries. This technique is used for the forcible seizure of governance without a formal declaration of war. Sponsoring, arming, and coordinating illegal detachments allows the colonizer to artificially create the illusion of an internal civil conflict, destroy the state institutions of the local population, and establish military control over the territory while formally denying its direct involvement. | |
| T0077 | Punitive Expeditions | Aggressors may conduct targeted armed raids against the local population of settlements that offer resistance. During punitive expeditions, mass arrests, destruction of residential infrastructure, and demonstrative terror are carried out, which serves the immediate neutralization of defenses by physically suppressing pockets of resistance and intimidating the society. | |
| T0135 | Punitive Psychiatry | Aggressors may use the state psychiatric care system for political purposes to persecute, indefinitely isolate, and torture dissenters. Those who disagree with the regime (dissidents, human rights defenders, civic activists) have false diagnoses fabricated against them (for example, the nonexistent "sluggish schizophrenia"), after which they are forcibly confined to closed institutions. This technique allows the colonizer or a totalitarian system to neutralize resistance without formal judicial proceedings, subjecting victims to destructive medication regimes and stigmatizing opposition activity as a manifestation of insanity. | |
| T0037 | Puppet Government | Aggressors may artificially create and install fully controlled organs of power in occupied territories. Forming a puppet government allows the aggressor to simulate an internal civil conflict for the initial seizure of governance, and then to rule the region by proxy for long-term institutional consolidation. | |
| T0116 | Religious Assimilation | Aggressors may deliberately destroy, substitute, or integrate the spiritual institutions and beliefs of an indigenous people into their own dominant religious system. Using religion as an instrument of unification allows the colonizer to establish a rigid ideological dictate, destroy the independent spiritual authorities of the local population, and impose submission upon it through the sacralization of the aggressor's power. | |
| .001 | Forced Conversion to the Metropole's Religion | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may apply physical, administrative, or economic coercion to convert members of the colonized society to the colonizer's confession. Depriving the local population of freedom of religion under threat of repression, deprivation of rights, or confiscation of property ensures the accelerated erasure of cultural and religious boundaries. | |
| .002 | Imposition of the Metropole's Holiday Calendar | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may forcibly replace the traditional spiritual, commemorative, or agricultural calendar of an indigenous people with the festive cycles of the metropole. Eradicating local commemorative dates and synchronizing time with the metropole allows the aggressor to completely reformat the everyday rhythm of the local population's life and embed it into its own state-ideological matrix. | |
| .003 | Ban on Worship in the Native Language | As part of religious assimilation, aggressors may categorically prohibit the use of the indigenous people's language in religious rites, sacred texts, and spiritual education. Displacing the local language from the sacred sphere cements its status as second-rate, severs the spiritual bond between generations, and accelerates the linguistic absorption of the colonized society. | |
| T0102 | Resource Exploitation | Aggressors may establish an uncontrolled and exhausting regime of exploitation of the natural riches, infrastructure facilities, and productive potential of the seized region. Pumping out mineral resources, illegal resource extraction, and using food reserves in the interests of the metropole deprives the Indigenous people of the economic base for independent existence and redirects all the region's wealth toward the enrichment of the colonizer. | |
| T0142 | Restriction of Settlement Geography | Colonial authorities often impose legal or administrative bans on settling in places of traditional residence or on resettlement. This practice is used to prevent the Indigenous population from accessing resources important to the colonizers, e.g., rivers; to force the Indigenous population into emigration due to the absence of economic and social prospects and the high cost of housing; to create conditions for the migration of groups preferred by the empire to the new territories; and, finally, to reduce the capacity for organized resistance. | |
| T0031 | Restriction of Sovereignty | Aggressors may impose terms that radically curtail the political rights and independence of a local government. Through a categorical ban on conducting an independent foreign policy, depriving an Indigenous people of the right to freely elect their leaders, and direct interference in domestic legislation, the aggressor methodically transforms a self-governing entity into a fully controlled, rightless province. | |
| 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. | |
| T0042 | Rewriting of School Curricula | Aggressors may carry out the systematic replacement of educational standards in occupied territories, forcibly introducing textbooks and teaching materials produced in the metropole. Imposing new curricula in history, literature, and language allows the colonizer to raise successive generations of the local population in a paradigm of unconditional loyalty to the aggressor state, erasing their national memory and forming an artificial identity. | |
| T0066 | Sale of Territory | Aggressors may conduct commercial transactions transferring seized lands, together with the Indigenous people living on them, to the control of third states in exchange for financial compensation. In carrying out such a diplomatic-economic operation, the colonizer treats the territory purely as a liquid asset for replenishing its own treasury, while the sovereignty, rights, and national interests of the local society are completely and demonstratively ignored. | |
| T0133 | Seizure of Power Through Election Manipulation | The aggressor uses the legitimate democratic mechanisms (elections, congresses, parliamentary procedures) of the victim state to seize power from within. Unlike the holding of fake referendums in already occupied territories, this technique is applied to still sovereign, independent institutions. Through the infiltration of agents, falsification of representation quotas, forgery of mandates, and bribery of delegates, the aggressor artificially forms a majority. The goal is to compel a legitimate body of power to vote, in a formally lawful manner, to renounce sovereignty or transfer powers to forces controlled by the metropole. | |
| T0100 | Seizure of Religious Institutions | Aggressors may establish direct forcible and administrative control over local religious institutions, depriving them of canonical independence and subordinating them to their own spiritual centers. The elimination of independent jurisdiction makes it possible to remove authoritative national institutions (seizure of governance) and to use the religious apparatus for the long-term imposition of loyalty and the ideological consolidation of the occupation. | |
| T0109 | Sham Expression of Popular Will | Aggressors may organize sham electoral procedures (referendums, elections) under conditions of occupation, absence of freedom of speech, and military pressure. The imitation of democratic processes allows the colonizer to formally legalize the regime or the annexation process, ensuring the legal and political consolidation of control over the territory in the eyes of its own society and the world community. | |
| T0088 | Sham Treaty | Aggressors may use diplomatic agreements as an instrument of legal entrapment for an Indigenous people. When concluding a treaty of protectorate or alliance, the colonizer refuses from the outset to assume symmetrical obligations, using the text of the agreement solely to curtail the rights of the local population. This creates a legal basis for subsequent unilateral interference and the dismantling of independent institutions without a formal declaration of war. | |
| T0149 | Slave Trade | Aggressors, or the governors they appoint, may carry out the commercial sale of members of a forcibly subjugated Indigenous people into slavery. This practice is used both for the direct illegal enrichment of the occupation apparatus and for the physical depletion of the colonized society's demographic potential through the permanent removal and export of people beyond the lands of their historical residence. | |
| T0014 | Sponsoring Domestic Extremism and Radicals | Aggressors may covertly finance, train, arm, and provide informational support to marginal or radical groups within the colonized society. The artificial escalation of internal conflicts and the incitement of violence from outside weakens the law-enforcement system of the Indigenous people, destabilizes the region, and creates a convenient pretext for the colonizer's external intervention under the guise of a peacekeeping operation or the restoration of order. | |
| T0020 | Staging a Coup | Aggressors may initiate, sponsor, and covertly coordinate a violent change of power in the colonized society. By overthrowing the legitimate government using the forces of internal opposition, radical groups, or recruited military officers, the colonizer artificially creates a political crisis. This allows it to swiftly install a puppet regime without having to launch an open, full-scale military intervention. | |
| T0131 | Support for a Controlled Opposition | The aggressor covertly or overtly provides comprehensive support (financial, media, organizational, and political) to controlled political forces within the colonized society. The goal is to create a legal fifth column that will act in the interests of the metropole, disguising external interference as an internal political process. | |
| T0012 | Support for Separatism | Aggressors may covertly or openly finance, arm, and politically support radical groups advocating the secession of part of a sovereign state's territory. Artificially inflaming internal conflicts from the outside weakens state institutions, destabilizes the region, and creates a convenient pretext for the colonizer's subsequent open intervention under the guise of a peacekeeping operation or the protection of an allegedly oppressed minority. | |
| T0056 | Taxation | Aggressors may establish direct control over the fiscal system in seized territories, redirecting levies collected from the local population straight into their own treasury. Introducing new taxes, shifting the financial burden of imperial wars onto the shoulders of an Indigenous people, and artificially lowering the social status of local residents in order to subject them to maximum economic taxation allow the colonizer to systematically siphon off resources and exhaust the region's economy. | |
| T0022 | Terror | Aggressors may use systemic, demonstrative, and large-scale violence against the local population. This form of radical pressure is used to neutralize defenses in the active phase of a conflict and for the subsequent consolidation of the occupation regime. Carrying out mass extrajudicial executions, public reprisals, and torture is aimed at the total psychological breaking of the colonized society's will, the physical suppression of resistance, and coercion into unconditional submission. | |
| T0112 | Theft of Cultural Property | Aggressors may carry out the systematic looting, unlawful confiscation, and removal of historical artifacts, works of art, archives, and relics from seized territories. This technique is used for the direct extraction of benefits by enriching the metropole's collections while simultaneously depriving the colonized society of its material historical foundation. | |
| T0110 | Torture and Abuse | Aggressors may apply systematic physical and psychological violence against detained members of the local population, prisoners of war, and political activists. The use of brutal interrogations, beatings, and the creation of torturous conditions of detention serves not only the purposes of inquiry but also the total psychological breaking of the society's will, paralyzing its capacity for organized resistance. | |
| T0105 | Total Destruction of Infrastructure | Aggressors may carry out the deliberate, massive destruction of residential districts, industrial facilities, and life-support systems in the course of combat operations. The use of heavy weaponry to wipe entire settlements off the face of the earth deprives the Indigenous people of the ability to organize a defense and physically forces them to abandon or surrender the territory. | |
| T0107 | Transport Blockade | Aggressors may deliberately cut off air, rail, sea, and road connections with the target region. The physical isolation of the territory from the outside world allows the colonizer to paralyze the logistics of the Indigenous people, interrupt deliveries of vitally important goods, and deprive the society of the ability to receive external aid or coordinate its actions with allies. | |
| T0067 | Use as a Buffer Zone | Aggressors may deliberately use captured territories as a buffer between themselves and external threats. This technique serves the extraction of benefits by ensuring the long-term military and geopolitical security of the colonizer. Such a practice makes it possible to create a protective gray zone that absorbs external strikes and shifts the costs of any conflicts exclusively onto the colonized peoples, while shielding the aggressor's central regions. | |
| T0134 | Use as Cannon Fodder | Aggressors may use unarmed, untrained, or deliberately poorly equipped members of the colonized people (civilians or forcibly mobilized persons) for frontal assaults. This technique is used to directly and physically deplete the enemy's ammunition, reveal its concealed firing positions, and clear minefields with human bodies. Unlike the use of a "human shield" (T0111), where people serve as passive cover to protect the aggressor's troops, here the colonized population is actively used as free, single-use expendable material ("cannon fodder") to preserve the personnel reserve of the metropole's troops. | |
| T0111 | Use of People as “Human Shields” | Aggressors may forcibly use civilians, including women, children, and medical personnel, as physical cover for their military equipment and personnel. Placing unarmed members of the local population in front of advancing or retreating troops deprives the defending side of the ability to return fire due to the threat of mass death of its own fellow citizens, thereby paralyzing the resistance of the colonized society. | |