As Europe and the Indo-Pacific confront an era of cyber conflict, cognitive warfare, and growing geopolitical pressure, Taiwan and Poland increasingly find themselves on parallel frontlines.
In this interview with Antoni Lukasik, Professor Aleksandra Gasztold of the University of Warsaw discusses what East Asia and Eastern Europe can learn from one another about democratic resilience, hybrid threats, AI-driven security, and the future of modern conflict.
Gasztold recently completed a research stay in Taiwan focused on cybersecurity, cognitive warfare, and crisis governance. She specializes in security studies, counterterrorism, radicalization, and cyber threats, and serves as editor-in-chief of the international journal Applied Cybersecurity & Internet Governance.
Taiwan is often described as one of the world’s most resilient democracies under growing external pressure. Arriving in Taipei as a security researcher from Poland, what struck you most immediately about the atmosphere here?
What struck me most in Taiwan was the remarkable sense of normality under constant pressure. Taiwan exists in what could almost be described as a permanent low-intensity siege. It is on the frontline of geopolitical competition in the Indo-Pacific region, yet everyday life continues with extraordinary resilience.
To put this into perspective, Taiwan experiences persistent and significant cyberattack attempts targeting government networks and critical infrastructure. While Taiwan recorded an average of 2.63 million cyberattack attempts per day in 2025, Poland’s national CSIRT teams handled roughly 273,000 cybersecurity incidents across the whole year. [Editor’s note: CSIRT (Computer Security Incident Response Team) refers to a national cybersecurity response unit.] The comparison illustrates both the scale of pressure faced by Taiwan and the difficulty of comparing cyber threat metrics. The scale is fundamentally different.
This adversarial activity also extends far beyond cyberspace. China regularly conducts gray-zone operations around Taiwan, including airspace incursions, naval intimidation, disinformation campaigns, and pressure on maritime infrastructure and undersea communication systems. Cyberattacks are often coordinated with military exercises or politically sensitive moments. The objective is not necessarily immediate military escalation, but the gradual normalization of psychological pressure and strategic uncertainty.
We can observe similar dynamics in NATO’s Eastern Flank in the context of Russian hybrid operations. These include cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, sabotage attempts, disinformation campaigns, manipulation of migration pressures on the border with Belarus, GPS signal interference in the Baltic region, and broader attempts to undermine public trust and social cohesion. Maritime infrastructure has also become increasingly important, particularly after incidents involving pipelines, undersea cables, and strategic energy infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
What Taiwan demonstrates very clearly is that democratic openness does not automatically produce vulnerability. In many Western societies, even limited crises quickly become politically polarized. Every pressing social issue can be politicized. Taiwan, by contrast, has developed strong forms of social coordination and civic resilience that allow society to function under continuous pressure. Resilience is embedded in civic culture.
For many international readers, Taiwan is still associated mainly with geopolitical tensions and semiconductors. Yet your research suggests a much broader story. Why has Taiwan become such an important place for understanding modern conflict and democratic resilience?
Taiwan is certainly one of the most important contemporary cases for understanding gray-zone conflict. However, I would avoid portraying it as unique. In my research, I see that modern conflict is becoming multidimensional across several regions simultaneously.
Ukraine is perhaps the clearest contemporary example of how conventional warfare now overlaps with cyber operations, strategic communication, disinformation campaigns, and attacks on civilian morale and critical infrastructure. The Russian invasion demonstrated that the battlefield today extends far beyond territory into digital networks, media ecosystems, and societal cohesion itself.
We observe similar dynamics elsewhere. In the Middle East, particularly in the confrontation involving Iran, Israel, Hezbollah, and Hamas, military operations are deeply intertwined with information warfare, proxy networks, psychological operations, and regional deterrence strategies. In parts of Africa, especially across the Sahel, hybrid forms of violence combine insurgency, foreign influence campaigns, mercenary networks, terrorism, and state fragility.
What connects these cases is that cognitive warfare, cyber pressure, disinformation, and economic coercion are no longer secondary instruments of conflict. They have become integral components of “grand strategy” pursued by state actors with regional and increasingly global ambitions. We are seeing a return to intense geopolitical rivalry, with states like Russia, China, and Iran competing for “cognitive dominance” over how people perceive reality. This challenges the old idea that the nation-state is declining in a globalized world. Instead, states are back at the center of politics, using cyber tools and economic measures alongside traditional military power.
Taiwan and Ukraine together provide two of the clearest contemporary examples of how democracies adapt to permanent strategic competition while attempting to preserve institutional legitimacy, civic trust, and social resilience.
The term “cognitive warfare” has become increasingly common in security debates. When we talk about cognitive warfare, what exactly do we mean? How does it differ from more traditional forms of propaganda or disinformation?
It is a significant evolution. Traditional propaganda tries to persuade individuals. Cognitive warfare seeks to reshape how people interpret and evaluate information. It targets the underlying psychological processes through which individuals interpret and perceive reality. The objective is not merely to disseminate falsehoods but to erode trust in institutions and weaken social unity by exploiting political polarization, economic anxiety, and related societal tensions. This reflects a broader transformation of political conflict itself.
Contemporary competition increasingly targets what Carl Schmitt described as the political sphere: the capacity of a community to preserve collective identity, cohesion, and legitimacy under conditions of antagonism. In this sense, cognitive warfare is directed not only at territory or infrastructure, but also at the social and political foundations that enable democratic societies to function effectively.
In Taiwan, these operations aim to produce what some analysts describe as “information trauma.” Through sustained exposure to uncertainty, manipulation, and informational disruption, an adversary may weaken a democracy without direct military confrontation. I discuss these dynamics in my recent co-authored book, “Humans in the Cyber Loop: Perspectives on Social Cybersecurity” (Domalewska & Gasztold & Wrońska, Brill 2025). The publication examines how digital ecosystems shape political behavior and increase societal vulnerability to such tactics.
Coming from Poland — a country shaped by the experience of Russian pressure and the war in Ukraine — did you notice parallels between the security concerns of Eastern Europe and those of East Asia?
The parallels are striking and, in many ways, deeply instructive. Both Poland and Taiwan operate under conditions of strategic asymmetry. Both must manage security against much larger neighbors without triggering a full-scale war. The methods are similar: Russia uses energy coercion and historical revisionism in Europe, while China uses economic pressure and “lawfare” in Asia.
What is particularly revealing is that both regions experience similar patterns of hybrid interference, although adapted to different geopolitical and cultural contexts. In Eastern Europe, Russia has employed energy coercion, historical revisionism, cyberattacks, proxy actors, and information warfare, particularly visible in the context of Ukraine. In East Asia, China increasingly relies on economic and diplomatic pressure, legal mechanisms, military signaling, and sophisticated cognitive operations directed at Taiwan and the broader Indo-Pacific region.
The instruments may differ, but the strategic logic is remarkably similar: to gradually shape the political environment and achieve strategic objectives, while remaining below the threshold likely to provoke a conventional military response.
The lesson from Ukraine and Taiwan is that modern war begins long before a border is crossed. It starts with the internal destabilization of society. One important element of this process is the promotion of isolationist narratives, particularly the claim that ‘the United States will abandon its allies.’ What is especially significant today is that such narratives no longer require external amplification alone. They are increasingly reinforced by domestic political rhetoric itself, including rhetoric associated with the current Trump administration.
In many parts of Asia, there is a strong emphasis on social stability and institutional coordination during crises. Did your time in Taiwan change how you think about the relationship between democracy, security, and effective governance?
Taiwan shows us that democratic openness is actually a strategic asset. There is a tendency in Western security discourse to assume that effective crisis response requires centralized control. Very often, discussions of emergencies involve the temporary suspension of democratic norms in the name of security or stability. Taiwan demonstrates the opposite: democratic openness can function as a strategic asset rather than a vulnerability.
What impressed me was Taiwan’s ability to maintain institutional coordination without sacrificing transparency. The government’s response to crises relies on extensive collaboration with civil society, independent media, and technical communities. This creates a kind of “distributed resilience”: multiple nodes of society capable of detecting, analyzing, and responding to threats without relying solely on state institutions. It is a model that suggests democracies do not need to choose between liberty and security. They can reinforce each other through inclusive, networked approaches to governance.
One of the central dilemmas facing democratic societies is how to remain open while also defending themselves against manipulation and hostile influence. Do you believe democracies have found the right balance yet?
I would say democracies are still searching for the right balance, though Taiwan offers important insights. The challenge is that traditional defensive approaches often struggle against adaptive cognitive operations that exploit the very openness that makes democracies valuable. What Taiwan has begun to demonstrate is that the solution lies not in restricting openness but in cultivating cognitive agility. The capacity of citizens to critically evaluate information, recognize manipulation attempts, and maintain trust in democratic institutions despite persistent influence campaigns. This requires investment in civic education, media literacy, and transparent communication from authorities.
It also means accepting that complete defense against cognitive warfare is impossible. The goal is resilience rather than immunity. Democracies that recognize this paradox and build societal capacity to navigate it will be better positioned than those that attempt to seal themselves off.
What can Taiwan and Poland learn from one another? Where do you see the greatest potential for mutual learning between the two societies?
The potential for mutual learning is enormous. Taiwan and Poland represent complementary strengths in the struggle against composite threats. Poland can learn from Taiwan’s “joint governance” model. How do they bridge the gap between state institutions and tech-savvy citizens to fight disinformation?. I am particularly interested in their use of “prebunking” to stop the swarming of lies and antidemocratic narratives.
Conversely, Taiwan can benefit from Poland’s hard-won experience in integrating counterterrorism frameworks with hybrid threat defense. This approach is not necessarily related to the scale of terrorist activity itself (which is low); rather, it reflects the fact that contemporary threats often operate through similar mechanisms, relying on proxies and concealed forms of influence. Poland’s approach to protecting critical infrastructure, along with its emphasis on societal resilience as a key element in countering hybrid threats, offers valuable lessons for Taiwan.
Both societies also share the challenge of maintaining democratic cohesion while confronting external attempts to exploit internal divisions. This is a challenge in which the exchange of best practices in civic education and social resilience could prove particularly valuable. It is arguably the case that the best investment in the future lies in critical thinking and education rather than in military capabilities.
Ultimately, what Taiwan and Poland demonstrate together is that democratic resilience is not a static condition but a continuous practice – one that requires learning, adaptation, and solidarity across the global community of democracies facing similar pressures. The dialogue between our two societies, situated on different frontlines of the same struggle, represents precisely the kind of trans-regional cooperation that hybrid adversaries most fear.
