Sabotage

function

Sabotage functions are explicitly destructive actions aimed at destabilizing, dividing, or degrading adversaries through tactics like corruption, disinformation, and covert acts, ultimately eroding social and institutional resilience from within.

Author

Affiliation

E. Rosalie Li

Information Epidemiology Lab

Published

February 17, 2026

Sabotage is the deliberate undermining of a society’s stability, systems, or cohesion to produce disruption, degrade decision-making, and erode trust. It operates across physical, digital, and informational domains, targeting infrastructure, institutions, and social relationships to create instability and weaken a society’s ability to function effectively.

Title	Description
Cognitive Attrition	Cognitive attrition is a deliberate strategy of overwhelming target populations with high-volume, contradictory information to exhaust their critical thinking capacity and disengage them from public discourse, benefiting authoritarian actors by undermining the informed citizenry that democracies require.
Covert Criminal Activity	States deploy criminal actors and illicit methods to achieve strategic objectives while maintaining plausible deniability for actions that would be diplomatically or politically costly if openly attributed.
Destructive Cyber Operations	State-sponsored destructive cyber operations use malware and digital sabotage to permanently disable critical infrastructure, destroy data, and impose measurable physical and economic damage as an instrument of geopolitical coercion.
Elevate Extremists	State actors amplify extremist movements through financial support, media funding, and coordinated messaging to deepen social divisions and destabilize adversary societies, exploiting existing grievances while maintaining plausible deniability.
Foment Violence	External actors deliberately incite and amplify violence within target societies through information operations that radicalize individuals and organize confrontations, creating internally-generated chaos that destabilizes democratic institutions while maintaining deniability.
Infrastructure Targeting	Infrastructure targeting is the deliberate disruption or destruction of critical infrastructure systems to undermine societal stability, create information vacuums exploitable by state narratives, and demonstrate coercive capability through cascading systemic failures.
Irregular Attacks	Irregular attacks are covert, deniable physical operations—including sabotage, arson, and infrastructure disruption—that inflict real-world damage and psychological impact below the threshold of conventional warfare to coerce populations and governments while avoiding military retaliation.
Malicious Software	Malicious software is state-sponsored malware deployed to sabotage critical infrastructure, steal intelligence, disrupt systems, and enable hybrid warfare while maintaining operational deniability through its versatility and difficulty of attribution.
Stoking Intergroup Conflict	State actors amplify pre-existing social divisions through targeted messaging that exacerbates polarization, exploits grievances, and prevents political compromise by platforming extreme voices while suppressing moderate ones.
Terrorism	State-sponsored terrorism operates as a sabotage mechanism by leveraging non-state actors to conduct politically motivated violence that generates psychological and informational effects vastly exceeding physical damage, thereby destabilizing target societies, eroding democratic institutions, and advancing sponsoring states’ strategic interests while maintaining plausible deniability.

FIMI Taxonomy by Information Epidemiology Lab.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{li2026,
  author = {Li, E. Rosalie},
  title = {Sabotage},
  date = {2026-02-17},
  url = {https://fimi.infoepi.org/function/sabotage.html},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Li, E. Rosalie. 2026. “Sabotage,” February. https://fimi.infoepi.org/function/sabotage.html.