The intensification of cognitive warfare in recent decades has transformed societal psychological security into one of the central challenges of contemporary governance. Despite the expansion of the literature on soft security and cognitive warfare, analyses of psychological security have largely remained at the individual or descriptive level, leaving a significant gap in explaining its position as a governance-related category and a structural necessity. This study addresses the question of how psychological security is conceptualized within the intellectual framework of the Supreme Leader in the context of cognitive warfare and what governance requirements are necessary to ensure and sustain it. The novelty of the research lies in conceptualizing psychological security not as a secondary outcome but as a strategic variable of governance, reconstructed through an evidence-based conceptual model.

The study aims to explicate the concept of psychological security from the perspective of the Supreme Leader and to extract the governance requirements necessary for its protection and reproduction under conditions of cognitive warfare. Adopting a qualitative approach, the research employs thematic analysis and strategic discourse analysis. A systematic corpus of the Supreme Leader’s statements from 1991 to 2024 constitutes the data set. The analytical process involves identifying the conceptual components of psychological security, formulating the mechanisms through which it is threatened in cognitive warfare, and inferring the corresponding governance requirements.

The findings indicate that psychological security in the Supreme Leader’s intellectual framework is a multidimensional and structural concept grounded in public trust, social hope, mental tranquility, semantic coherence, and perceptual resilience. Cognitive warfare, through narrative distortion, media operations, and black propaganda, directly targets these components. Accordingly, effective governance for ensuring psychological security requires a narrative-oriented, proactive, transparent, and persuasive approach that can be articulated as a conceptual model of psychological security governance.