The concept of information warfare, its contents, spheres and ways it is conducted and the approaches of various authors to its analysis are shown in this article. Having analyzed the trends in the study of information warfare, the author divides them into two groups: information wars considered as essential element of military collisions, on the one hand, and information wars considered as forms of geopolitical confrontation, on the other hand. Moreover, it is especially noted that development of the Internet led to emergence of information wars in cyberspace and changed the methods of geopolitical struggle. When comparing the concepts of «information war» and «information antagonism», the author shows that some researchers have considered them interchangeable, while others have disagreed to that saying information war is waged more actively using the subversive operations and terrorist methods. According to the author’s opinion, information warfare is a complex of information and psychological techniques primarily aimed at creating the desired public opinion as well as individual and group behavioral patterns.