Deterrence, Resilience, and the Shooting Down of Flight MH17

Russian disinformation has thus far proven to be unconvincing for most Dutch target audiences. This is the conclusion of the present chapter. Information and disinformation have become effective weapons in international politics. This is part of a development where the weapons and concepts used in deterrence strategies have moved away from the military domain toward the political, economic, humanitarian, and communicative ones. In western literature, this is called hybrid warfare. In recent literature on hybrid warfare, resilience is often considered a key theme which may boost deterrence against hybrid activities and/or lower their impact. Most research on resilience and security is focused on infrastructure and resource planning. In this chapter, however, we attempt to ascertain how the existence of resilience in society can be observed. By looking at the case of the Dutch reaction to the shooting down of flight MH17, we hope to illustrate how resilience works in deterrence to hybrid warfare. We try to establish how subversive Russian activities were taking place and what measures were taken by the Netherlands government in order to counteract them. We monitored societal resilience by looking for the presence of trust, social capital, and credible narratives in reaction to disinformation activities after a disruptive event. All these elements appeared to be present in the MH17 case. Overall, we conclude, the handling of the MH17 case has reinforced deterrence.