The Political Economy of Cognitive Occupation: A Dual-Level Analysis of Ivo Josipović’s Interview in Serbian Media through Media Capture and Hybrid Threat Models

Abstract: This paper investigates the mechanisms of contemporary hybrid warfare and the cognitive occupation of public space at the intersection of mass culture and high politics in the Republic of Croatia. Building upon the author’s previous research regarding the penetration of folk and cajka music of a regional Greater Serbian profile as tools for biopolitical and cognitive anesthesia “from below,” this study analyzes a higher level of hybrid operations executed “from above” within the geopolitical framework of the “Serbian World” (Srpski svet) project. Through a comprehensive case study and critical discourse analysis of the full transcript of former President Ivo Josipović’s interview for the Belgrade-based tabloid Kurir (August 2016), this paper applies the theoretical model of media capture, the concept of the “infrastructure of surrender,” and the doctrine of reflexive control. The analysis specifically deconstructs the role of Ivo Josipović’s post-Yugoslav technocratic profile, whose rigid legal formalism served as a form of useful idiocy for external actors, while examining the Serbian media landscape as an instrumentalized apparatus of state capital in the service of the Greater Serbian project. Empirical textual analysis proves that under conditions of captured foreign media monopolies, the personal intentions and legal acumen of domestic actors lose all relevance. Through editorial engineering consisting of a shameful, manufactured headline and the selective amputation of Josipović’s critiques regarding Serbia’s rehabilitation of Chetnik forces, the hybrid apparatus successfully instrumentalized the statesmanlike authority of the former Commander-in-Chief. This was executed to advance historical revisionism and impose collective guilt onto the Croatian cognitive space precisely on the eve of the anniversary of Operation Oluja. The paper conclusively links this phenomenon to the persistence of “Yugoslav vestigial structures” and the unexecuted lustration within Croatian political and legal elites, and calls for the urgent establishment of a national Doctrine of Cognitive Sovereignty.