Interviews | Security | East Asia

Taiwan and Poland on the Frontline of Hybrid Conflict

An interview with Aleksandra Gasztold on what Taiwan and Eastern Europe can learn from each other.

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........

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