Recently, awareness has been raised of possible Russian deception operations potentially threatening Swedish societal and national security. The terms ’propaganda’ and ’disinformation’ are commonly used in the media debate as well as in scientific research on cases abroad. The author has identified a lack of scientific explanation behind the terms in these forums.
Therefore, this paper intends to analyze two assumed cases of propaganda and disinformation in contemporary Sweden, seeking to compare their content to basic criteria of propaganda as laid out by a analytical framework by Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell. Furthermore, the paper seeks for correlation between each case and Soviet-Russian history, contemporary official doctrines, military theories and contemporary examples of propaganda and disinformation usage.
The paper finds that the first case corresponds satisfactorily to the criteria in the analytical framework and also can be linked to Russia as source, while the second he second case fails to give definitive answers regarding the identity of the propagandist. However, both cases correlate to content in Russian official doctrines and military theories, and resembles historical as well as contemporary Soviet-Russian usage of propaganda and disinformation.
Finally, having assessed the empirical evidence in both cases according to the criteria of propaganda classification, grey and black propaganda were shown to be present, though white propaganda could not positively be identified.