Talk: Shielding Democracies from Outside Interference

States have long tried to influence one another, at times through subversive means. Today, reports of hacking and leaking, “fake news” propagated by bots and false accounts, rumors of foreign funding to extremist parties, and other similar tactics have caused alarm in Western democracies.

These methods have elicited comparisons to Soviet “active measures”—or subversive operations—which appear to be back in business and benefitting from a technological upgrade. To gain a better understanding of subversive influencing tools and the challenge they pose to democracies today, Laura Daniels analyzed Soviet active measures during the Cold War in France and Germany and compared these with the methods currently in play.

We cordially invite you to this talk!

Picture: (c) Pixabay/TheDigitalArtist (CC0 1.0)

is a German Chancellor Fellow (Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung) at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin, where she studies Russian disinformation and “active measures” from the Cold War to today’s elections. She was also a guest fellow at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) in Paris during the French elections, where she wrote on Russian influence in the French elections for POLITICO.