Not the Droids You're Looking For: Bots and the Weaponization of Star Wars

By Dean Jackson It is a period of authoritarian resurgence. Russian agents, striking from a hidden base (or perhaps an unremarkable office building outside of St. Petersburg), are waging a campaign to subvert and divide democratic societies. New evidence suggests that their efforts may have reached ...

Responding to Authoritarian Interference: Leveraging the Democratic Toolkit

By Laura Rosenberger There is little debate today that authoritarian powers are using asymmetric tools to weaken democratic institutions in other countries. Extensive work has documented and exposed Russia’s efforts to interfere in and undermine democracies across the trans-Atlantic space, and the C ...

Authoritarian Anticorruption Campaigns: A Tool to Consolidate Power

By Clay R. Fuller Shakedowns at the Saudi Ritz. The creation of powerful anticorruption bodies in China. High-profile assassinations and arrests of activists amidst sweeping “anticorruption” reforms in Russia. False promises to clean up state-owned enterprises in Venezuela. In isolation, these may s ...

Cybersecurity for Political Campaigns in the Digital Age

By Amy Studdart In the weeks leading up to the Swedish general election on September 9, Sweden’s Social Democrat’s website was repeatedly flooded with fake traffic, causing it to slow down and ultimately crash for several hours. The majority of the traffic originated in Russia and North ...